by A W Hartoin
“She was brought here.”
“Yes, she was.”
“Who do you think killed her?” he asked. “There must be a pretty good reason that you ended in our dry lake bed.”
There was no way I was going to tell him how that happened. It defied explanation and I’d done my best to forget it ever happened.
“Mercy?”
“It’s unsolved and I have no earthly idea who did it,” I said. “I’m here about Sister Maggie.”
“Oh, I know and that’s interesting.”
“Is it?”
“In St. Seb, interesting things happen,” he said. “I like interesting.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
He had a point and I wasn’t crazy about it. St. Seb was known for a lot of things, being charming, proximity to the Katy Trail and the wineries on the other side of the river. It was also known for having a high number of odd occurrences. Miss Elizabeth wasn’t the only ghost in town. The gas station had a ghoul that liked to overflow gas tanks and turn on people’s wipers. Regular sightings of a body hanging from a tree in the small park across from the hospital were so common that nobody got excited about it. A steamboat called the Arabian Queen had been sighted gliding down the river every June tenth for 150 years. That was the day its boiler blew, killing everyone onboard. It wasn’t unusual to have a see-through cop directing traffic on Fifth Street or have every single alarm clock in town go off at four o’clock in the morning for no apparent reason.
“I could go on,” said Tank.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You know about Miss Elizabeth?”
“She’s been mentioned,” I said.
“Did Irene tell you the rules?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Get the rules. You want the rules.”
I sipped my tea. Why did I decide to come here? This was not a good idea.
“So about the school?”
“Do you want to know?” he asked.
I didn’t, but it was necessary. Ten years ago the local Catholic Church bought a plot of land on the edge of town, intending to build a new high school. They started building eight years ago. The building site had a tremendous amount of problems, everything from a termite infestation to steel headers bending with no weight on them. The school council tried to keep it quiet, but that wasn’t possible and Tank did report the odd occurrences, reluctantly. The stories were tame by national news standards and he didn’t sensationalize it. I appreciated that, since pretty much everything about me got sensationalized. But there was no way to explain why a two-year building project went through twelve construction companies and took seven years.
“It’s done now?” I asked.
“It’s done. The school opened in August.” He handed me another paper. “Possible Vandals at St. Seb Catholic” was the headline.
“Not vandals?” I asked.
There had been vandalism. The principal would open the doors and every locker would be open and the contents strewn everywhere. The water fountains went on during lunch and caused a flood. Toilets overflowed. Doors locked and unlocked. The school nurse’s office kept getting switched with the football coach’s and when that happened the amount of supplies doubled. One time a sofa showed up, brand new, and a brand new set of Grey’s Anatomy books were on the bookshelf. The football coach lost his desk and his cushy reclining chair turned into a stool.
Students reported feeling a presence, particularly when they were upset. Sometimes their backs were rubbed or they felt like someone hugged them. A boy, who was a known bully, had ice water thrown in his face twice when he’d cornered a kid from the Science Olympiad. A group of girls were in the bathroom when the words ‘You are what comes out of your mouth’ appeared on the mirror in red lipstick. The school chapel smelled like honeysuckle and it wasn’t unusual to get a tap on the shoulder when you weren’t paying attention to the morning prayer.
I want to go home.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “If it’s to freak me out, then mission accomplished.”
Tank crossed his arms. “The plot of land the school council bought belonged to the Snider family and they made a pretty penny off that sale. People weren’t happy about it.”
“So?” I asked slowly.
“That’s where your nun’s body was found. People around here thought those woods were sort of sacred.”
“And haunted?”
“Obviously, but not in a bad way.”
“There’s a good way to be haunted?” I asked.
“The woods were exceptionally lovely. Flowers like you’ve never seen. Birds, squirrels. The wildlife loved it.”
“Did you go there?”
“Sure. It’s kind of a thing in high school to go there at midnight to see if you can spot her.”
“Maggie?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you?”
Tank laughed. “No. Kids claimed to have seen her, but I think it’s BS. The most I ever experienced was calmness.”
“Is that really something to get excited about?” I asked.
“I’m not a calm person. Never have been. The first time I felt it, I literally didn’t know what it was.”
I looked through Tank’s papers again and found that, although Sister Maggie’s name was mentioned, there was nearly nothing about the nun herself or her murder.
“So what do you know about Maggie’s death?” I asked.
A look of consternation came over Tank’s narrow features. “Not much honestly. I was looking into it at the time the first construction company up and quit.”
“You were? What happened?”
“I haven’t thought about that…since it happened.”
I waited. You have to let people go to certain places in their own time and Tank did go. Slowly, because he felt guilty. The first construction company left in a hurry, citing vandalism, and it certainly looked like it. The cops had investigated thoroughly. Sugar in gas tanks. Wires cut. Tires slashed. The site manager would come into the project trailer and switch on the lights and every bulb would blow. His laptop with all the project plans and timetable burst into flames. There was a picture of a smoking laptop on Tank’s front page.
The cops never found a single fingerprint. Surveillance cameras covered the area completely and they didn’t show anything. They didn’t glitch or go out at a critical time. Nothing happened. Nothing visible anyway. A vehicle would be driven up and parked at the end of a shift. A camera would be trained on the area for the next twelve hours and the next morning there was sugar in the tank.
“That’s it?” I asked, looking at the paper covering that incident. “What were you supposed to do? That stuff’s hardly your fault. You covered it.”
“Not that,” said Tank. “People were getting pretty worked up with everything that was happening. They were questioning why the chief and Stratton couldn’t find anything.”
“They thought it was Maggie?”
“Of course. This is St. Seb. Once you see a Confederate regiment marching through the hospital, you suspend your disbelief pretty quick.”
“That’s weird,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with Maggie?”
“Nothing. People were talking about what to do. You know, should we abandon the site and build somewhere else. But nobody was going to take that land off the church’s hands after everything that was happening and they couldn’t afford to buy another parcel. So I started wondering about the nun. What happened and how it happened. Nobody talked about that. My mother would not speak about it and I found that to be prevalent in all the locals who were here at the time. Even people who moved away wouldn’t talk.”
“Did someone threaten them?”
“Not that I could tell. I’d say it was a shared horror about the incident that kept them quiet.”
“Fear that it was someone local?” I asked.
Tank shrugged. “No one ever said that, but I think it must be. Whenever I ment
ioned the murder, that priest, the one in St. Louis, was quickly named as the killer. Almost like a talisman against the fear.”
“Were you threatened?”
“I didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, maybe.”
Tank told me about how he investigated the murder. He started with the locals that he knew and was stonewalled by everyone. Next, he went to the cops and they wouldn’t give him the files, citing the same stuff Stratton told me without the flooding story. Then Tank started calling out-of-towners and combing through his microfiche.
He handed me a paper. Not his. The headline read “Arson at the St. Seb Sentinel investigated.”
“Someone set you on fire?” I asked, looking around.
“Yep. There’d been a couple of fires around town at the time and at the school job site. Somebody kicked down our delivery door and threw in some Molotov cocktails. If Merv Whitman hadn’t been out walking his Rottweiler, we’d have burned to the ground.”
I had a feeling. It was so strong I was glad I was sitting and the peppermint tea didn’t hurt either. “When did that happen? What time?”
“Two in the morning. Merv has insomnia something fierce, lucky for me.”
“Cops never found who did it?”
“Nope. I didn’t have surveillance cameras. Never thought I needed to. We cover traffic accidents, weddings, and the fair. I’m not running the New York Times here.”
“And that’s the incident?” I asked.
“That was the first incident,” said Tank. “Because of the other fires, everyone, including the cops, thought this was some kids messing around. Nobody got hurt. The sites seemed to be picked because they were empty. A gazebo in the park. Places like that.”
“You didn’t connect it to you personally?”
“God, no, but I installed cameras everywhere and got the destroyed area rebuilt.”
The feeling was getting stronger. Something was so not right.
“I bet that distracted you from the high school story and Maggie’s murder,” I said.
Tank grimaced. “You know your stuff. Yes, it did. I had shit to do. Insurance to deal with. My own contractors, the lazy bastards, and to top it off my electrical work wasn’t up to code and had to be completely redone.”
“How long?”
“Nearly a year to get back to normal. In the meantime, two more contractors at the high school project quit, but I wasn’t paying attention until we were back to full speed.”
“Then you got back to Maggie?” I asked.
He looked away. “I did. Started following up on the out-of-towners first. Nothing exciting. I was kind of worn out and the community was over the whole thing by then and had decided it was the church’s fault for buying that land.”
“And?”
“My house burned down.”
There are a lot of things that cause incredible stress in life. Divorce, moving, losing a job, but I’m going to say having your house burn down with your two dogs inside beats those hands down. Tank and his family had gone to Disney in Florida, leaving their dogs at home for the first time ever. They usually put them in the kennel, but Tank got tired of paying the high price and the dogs hated it. They lost weight and their fur would start falling out, so he decided to leave them at home and have a neighbor’s kid look after them. Emma did a great job, by all accounts, and her mother happened to be with her on that last day, checking on the plants. The dogs were walked, fed, watered, and locked in for the night.
Sometime after they left, the air-conditioner malfunctioned. Because it had been installed too close to the exterior wall, the house caught fire. The Tancredis lost everything.
“It wasn’t arson?” I asked.
“Ruled an accident.”
“But…”
“But you came in here asking questions and I’m thinking about why I stopped looking at the murder and the school.”
“You never went back to it?”
“No. I don’t think I even thought about it until the school opened this fall and everything started happening,” he said, his voice tight with guilt. “My kids were traumatized. My wife would barely speak to me for six months. She couldn’t see a dog without crying. We had to rebuild and buy new land because the family didn’t want to go back. It was a mess.”
“Stuff kept happening at the school though?” I asked.
“It did, but I gave the job to Milo. He’s a solid guy and he covered it appropriately.”
“No interest in Maggie I take it.”
“Milo isn’t a deep thinker, a just-the-facts kind of reporter and the other things that happen in St. Seb, he ignores it.”
“Does he believe it?”
“I couldn’t say. We’ve never discussed it.”
“You never discussed Confederates in the hospital?” I asked.
Tank’s face cleared slightly and he chuckled. “What’s to discuss? Things happen in St. Seb.”
“But that’s why you question how I happened to find Janet Lee Fine’s body?”
“It is.” He smiled. “Care to go on the record?”
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not my story to tell.”
“You have me intrigued.”
“And you’ll be staying that way.”
Tank snapped his fingers dramatically. “I figured. Are you ready for the joy of microfiche?”
“First, tell me what you know. You were researching the murder when your house conveniently burned down,” I said.
“Honestly, I don’t remember much. I don’t even know what I did with my notes. That period was so miserable. I almost got divorced.”
“Anything will help.”
“She was found in the woods by some locals.” He took his ponytail out and ran his fingers through his hair. It hurt him to remember that time period. “The names are on the tip of my tongue.”
“Were they suspects?” I asked.
“I doubt it.”
Lefty knocked and walked in, looking like he’d taken a severe tongue-lashing. “So that was a nightmare. I have agreed to build Caden a princess treehouse and a pirate stronghold.” He looked back and forth between us. “What happened in here?”
Tank swallowed. “I was telling her about the fire.”
“Which one?”
“The one here and my house.”
“Ah, crap,” said Lefty. “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Maybe nothing,” I said.
“I should’ve known something was up. I thought it was an accident,” said Tank.
“Maybe it was.”
“The house?” asked Lefty. “It was, wasn’t it?”
I took a long drink of tea, grateful for the calming effect on my stomach. “I think it may have something to do with an investigation Tank was doing at the time. Sister Margaret Mullanphy’s murder.”
“The nun? That was a priest in St. Louis.”
“That’s not a sure thing,” I said.
“You’re looking into that murder?” asked Lefty. “Why? Because of the school?”
I gave him the bare bones. A family friend asked me to and that there was zero evidence that the priest did it, other than he ended up going off the Eades Bridge.
Lefty made himself a tea and poured a little whiskey in from a small flask he had hidden in his coat pocket. “Well, if you think that priest didn’t do it, then you should look at Bertram Stott.”
“He’s new in town,” said Tank.
“And a convicted murderer,” said Lefty. “Google him.”
I did google him. No microfiche necessary. Bertram Stott was convicted of murder in 1975. He stalked a woman in Tennessee and murdered her. He served twenty-three years and was released for good behavior. He managed to avoid the death penalty because stalking wasn’t so much a crime then and his lawyers were able to shift blame to the victim, saying she incited him to lust and caused him to strangle her with her teasing ways. The prosecutor wasn’t allowed to bring in evidence that Stott had haras
sed other women mainly because he was a clean-cut kid of only twenty-six with no other arrests. Since his release in 1998, he’d been clean as far as I could tell.
“See,” said Lefty.
“There’s no connection,” said Tank. “He didn’t live here. He’s from Tennessee.”
“I heard he was connected and that’s why he moved here when he retired.”
Tank got on his computer and started typing in a way that reminded me of Uncle Morty. “Well, he did strangle that woman. Where’d you hear that rumor, Lefty?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some ladies in church back when he joined the congregation.”
“That guy goes to church?” I asked.
“He shows up occasionally. Keeps himself to himself though. We’re used to him now.”
“So he hasn’t done anything weird?”
Lefty sipped his spiked tea and thought for a minute. “Well, he’s odd and creepy, I suppose. But he hasn’t bothered anyone that I know of. The ladies kept a pretty close eye on him for a long time, but he’s not such a fast mover now.”
“What happened?” asked Tank.
“Congestive heart failure. He was in the hospital for a while and now he lives at Shady Glen, the retirement home, uses a wheelchair, so I guess they don’t think he’s much of a threat anymore.”
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Last year, I guess. He’s not a spring chicken but young for Shady Glen.”
“He’d have been seventeen or eighteen back in ’65,” said Tank. “That seems a little young for murdering nuns.”
“Hold on.” I texted Uncle Morty about Bertram and he sent me, “On it.”
“What was that about?” asked Tank.
“I know a guy.”
“A guy that can give you everything on Stott?”
“Maybe.”
Tank went quiet and I got the feeling he was cooking up a plan, but I wasn’t worried. The newspaperman was on my side. He’d help me, even if it was only to assuage his guilt for letting his investigation drop, not that I blamed him. If something happened to Skanky and I thought it was my fault, I don’t think I’d care about anything for a long, long time.
“You want to go over to Shady Glen now?” asked Lefty hopefully.