by Kris Ashton
The cell gave Brolin’s words an echoey reverberation—they could almost have come from a public address system.
“Shut up in there, Brolin.”
“I’m just asking, is all. How many missing persons cases have you filed this year? One? None? In fact, when was the last time someone went missing in Bald Eagle?”
“How should I know?” Bert asked, although he remembered well enough—back in ’67 the Fraser kid and gone missing and turned up at the bottom of a dam. Half the town had turned out for the funeral.
“I bet you and Deputy Benson have taken as many missing person reports today as you have in your whole careers. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Bert slammed his fists down on his desk, stood up and stormed into the cell room. “My daughter is one of those missing persons you smelly little son of a bitch, and you’re the reason she’s missing. You want to make guesses? Okay, here’s my guess: I think that when I get to the bottom of this, it’s going to lead back to you. I don’t know what you’ve done to my town, but when I find out—”
“You’re blind with prejudice and hate,” Brolin said. “I wish you could see that.”
“Oh, screw you and your liberal yibber-yabber! The only thing I can’t see yet is exactly how you’re responsible for all this.”
“What, I sent out orders from my cell? I haven’t spoken to anyone but you, Martha and Hank in nearly 48 hours.”
“You set things in motion before that. I saw the look in your eye that morning. You looked like a kid who’d got his dad’s car started and didn’t know how to stop it.”
“I wish you could hear yourself.”
“Yeah? Well I can tell you this: I’m done listening to you. I’ve a good mind to shut this door and—”
“Sheriff?” Martha said.
Bert swung around, ready to breathe fire into her face…but the expression he saw extinguished the flames.
“Mary Chilvers found a little boy crying and walking the streets by himself. She took him back home but his parents weren’t there.”
Bert, Martha and Brolin handed out glances to one another. Hard silence knitted the air.
“How much longer?” Brolin said eventually.
Sunday, August 9, 1969
Bert had fallen into two or three hours’ sleep out of sheer exhaustion, but come three a.m. his mind rose again, writhing and spitting like a cobra trapped under a wheel. He tried to ignore it and will himself back to slumber-land, but there might as well have been flashing strobe lights fixed to all four corners of the ceiling.
He got up and forced down some toast and coffee, staring glumly at the center of the table as if it was a crystal ball that could show him a solution to the big mess that had sprung up around him. What would Dana have made of this?
You brought it on yourself, Bert Grayson. You tried to interfere in your adult daughter’s doings and it’s come to no good.
The no good, of course, being Derek Brolin—who had apparently taken fright at Bert’s presence and set off some psychotic chain of events that probably made perfect sense in his own warped brain. Trouble was, Brolin’s brain didn’t seem warped. He seemed as rational and level-headed as any thirty-year-old Bert had ever met. The same feelers that alerted Bert when things were awry also worked as a reasonable lie detector…and Brolin believed the things he had said. Together with his stable disposition, it led to only one logical conclusion.
Don’t let pride cloud your judgment.
As usual, Dana was right. Throughout their marriage she had been his sounding board and the one who could find equilibrium, no matter how topsy-turvy the situation. Things would not have gone so far out of hand, had she still been around.
“God, I miss you, Dana,” he whispered.
He moved like a phantom through the cold dawn light, shaving, showering, putting on his uniform. He had to iron that uniform himself now, and could never quite get the collar right.
Moping isn’t going to solve anything.
Again, Dana’s voice was right. He had been moping and sulking—not great attributes for a sheriff—ever since the day at the reactor. The time had come to get the job done like the dependable character he was supposed to be.
Outside, it was light enough to see without headlights, but he put them on anyway for safety’s sake. He drove through the town center under a procession of sodium arc lights—a recent council ‘initiative’ instituted after months of pressure from The Bald Truth. The lines of shops and markets were closed up, sleeping creatures of trade.
When the sodium arcs handed illumination duties on to dawn, Bert had not passed a single car. Farther along, a farmhouse light glowed here and there as the men of the land got up to start their long, arduous days. Not as many as Bert has seen on other morning patrols…but then it was Sunday.
As he rounded a bend, something flashed in his headlights. It could have been a cat’s eye road reflector—except that the roads in this part of town did not have reflectors. He geared down, so as not to go into a skid, and then braked. He guided his cruiser onto the soft soil of the shoulder and put on the flashers.
He estimated he had overshot whatever it was by about a hundred feet. He walked back in that direction with quick, purposeful steps, then slowed as he got closer and made a studious inspection of the road’s edge. With no headlights to reflect, the thing had all but vanished. Bert nearly trod on it before he sighted it.
He knew right away what it was—it could be mistaken for nothing else. It was the egg he had seen nestled in the grass up at the commune.
Either that…or it was another egg.
“Goddamn,” Bert said, drawing the word out across his tongue. In his mind, he went over Brolin’s wacky story again, testing his opinion of it in this new light.
His fingers were mere inches from the egg when Brolin’s warning reiterated itself: I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, Sheriff.
Advice from a crack-head, perhaps…but Bert’s hand retreated and he stood up, his mind kneading at the questions this discovery posed. Could the eggs be somehow intoxicating? Did they deliver a hit of bad LSD through the pores of the skin or something? Had all the members of the Peace Out commune ‘used’ an egg and fried their brains? That sounded plausible in a mad doctor sort of way, but what possible reason could Brolin and his followers have had for storing a narcotic in such a form?
Not sure how else to proceed, Bert kicked the egg off the road and into the buffer of underbrush that mediated between nature and human progress.
He got back in his cruiser. As he made his way up to Bald Eagle Hill he kept a sharp eye out for another telltale glint, but saw nothing. He bumped and jounced up the track and parked the car in front of the gaudy sign—with its happy colors it almost struck Bert as insane, the creation of a madman (or madwoman). He took his flashlight from the glove compartment and made a zig-zagging sweep of the spot where he had first confronted Brolin.
The egg flashed like a single deer’s eye captured in headlights.
Two eggs. Definitely two.
Bert’s brain returned to the problem again. If the hippies had created these eggs, how had they done it? They had no metalworking or smelting facilities—not so much as a blacksmith’s bellows.
You’re trying to think straight ahead when the truth lies around a corner.
For the first time, he approached Brolin’s account as something other than a tall story. It was hard to do, like stuffing his left foot into his right shoe, but he did it. The mental compass that he so often relied on in his job pointed to true north. Illogical had become the new logical.
“Eggs,” Bert said, starting back to his cruiser.
He arrived at his office just before seven o’clock. Martha always got in at seven-thirty even though she was not due in until eight and Bert could not remember the last time he had entered an empty station. Except it wasn’t empty, was it?
“That you Martha?” called Brolin.
“Not unless she’s undergone some dramatic changes,”
Bert said, walking into the cell room.
“Oh,” Brolin said. He looked miserable with his unwashed hair and only a toilet and a sink for company, but Bert could not work up any guilt. He doubted he ever would be able to.
“On my way here I found another one of those eggs on the road,” Bert said. “How about you tell me this egg story of yours again? Starting from the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
“Why would I tell it to you again? You didn’t listen the first time.”
Bert swallowed his anger, knowing it would not help to vent it. “If you play nice, I plan to let you out of your cell. If not, you can just sit there until Hank Woods chases down some shady lawyer for you. So what’s it going to be?”
Brolin ran a hand through his hair. “Fine. Listen up, then.”
Bert leaned against the wall as Brolin told his tale—as graphic and detailed a confession as he had heard in all his years policing Bald Eagle County. Brolin had got to the part where he found all the commune members in the yard, when the phone rang in Bert’s office.
“Hang on a minute—remember where you’re up to,” Bert said.
He strode into his office, wondering who would be calling at such an hour. The phone was still set to the night switch, which meant it had rung six or seven times at his home before diverting to his desk phone.
“Hello, this is Sheriff Grayson.”
A trembling voice said, “Sheriff…I’ve done something. It was self-defense, but…”
Bert sat in his seat and picked up a pen. “Who is this?”
“Oh, it’s Marcus Barkley. At the power plant. The nuclear plant. I didn’t know whether to call you—I mean, I didn’t have any choice, it was self-defense, but still, she’s…dead.”
Dread leaked into Bert’s blood like poison. “Who’s dead?”
“Maybe it’s best that you come and see for yourself. I won’t touch anything until you get here.”
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
“Oh, sh…she’s dead, all right. No doubt about that. You’d better just come.”
Bert breathed deeply through his nose. He felt like a man trying to put out a forest fire with a watering can. “Okay, where are you?”
“I’m in my office at the plant. I only just got here. She was waiting for me, you see and—”
“Are you out of danger now?”
“I-I think so.”
“All right, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Lock your office door and don’t touch anything.”
“Thank you, Sheriff. Please hurr—”
Bert hung up and went back to Brolin’s cell. “I have to attend a crime scene. Martha will be in soon with breakfast. When I get back you can finish your story and I’ll see about setting you free.”
The phone in Bert’s office rang again. He and Brolin both glanced in that direction.
“I think you’re going to have a busy day, Sheriff.”
“You just cool your heels until I get back.”
For safety Bert sped through town with his flashers on but did not bother with the siren since traffic—human and vehicle—was Sunday-morning light. Blue, gold and green had replaced the grim pre-dawn greys as the sun floated above the tree-line, but Bert found it hard to appreciate his town’s beauty. He slowed a touch as he crossed into the town center but it was as deserted as he had ever seen it. Farther along he saw close to a dozen children, none of them more than seven or eight, climbing on a bench seat and a small tree that grew out of the sidewalk beside it. His eyes lingered on them for some time, and when he looked frontward again a man had stepped out onto the road, no more than a hundred feet ahead. Bert’s fists hardened around the steering wheel and he jiggered his foot on the brake pedal. When the car had lost some of its speed he applied more pressure to the brake and eased down to a stop with no more than a few feet to spare. Red Jakes continued to amble across the street, seemingly unaware how close he had come to being a statistic.
“Jesus Christ, Red!” Bert shouted. “What the hell are you thinking?”
Red either ignored him or could not hear him through the window glass. Bert wanted to get out and yell some road safety advice at him, but decided Bald Eagle’s first murder in thirty-three years should take precedence.
He drove off again, opening up the old Plymouth’s carburetors as far as he dared. All of a sudden he did not want to be away from his town—not even at its outskirts. When he passed Fletch Carter’s gas station he pushed the accelerator until it almost touched the floor and the needle crept up to an even one hundred miles an hour. He took the turnoff to the nuclear plant with tires squalling and kept the hammer down.
Even with the unscheduled stop for Red Jakes, Bert made his fifteen-minute deadline with a couple to spare. He was not surprised to see Marcus Barkley’s pinched face standing apprehensively at the office window where he had first seen him three days ago.
He got out and drew his nightstick, just to feel armed, to feel in control again. The gatehouse was unmanned and the gates were open a fraction, enough to allow a person through. Bert took this invitation, his eyes seeking out corners and potential areas of ambush, but the place appeared to be deserted except for himself and Barkley (who followed Bert’s progress like a birdwatcher in a hide).
Bert made his way across to the fire stairs and opened the door, leading the way with his nightstick. The stairwell also proved clear and he took the steps two at a time, lamenting how much easier stair-climbing had been back in 1950. A second fire door at the top of the stairs opened into the office area. On his right, in a sectioned-off room with half-closed blinds, Barkley waved to him. Bert tried to let himself in but the door was locked.
“Can I open it now?” Barkley asked through the door.
“No, I was just testing my wrist. Of course you can open it.”
The scene revealed did not need much explanation—not from an assailant/victim perspective, anyway. A girl lay face down on the carpeted floor, her blouse still on but her slacks in a wrinkled puddle close by. Half a blood-halo stained the carpet around her head and her hair had a cowlick where no healthy person should have one. A polished-rock paperweight the size of a grapefruit sat a few inches away from the victim. Bert’s eyes sought and found some other spatters of blood on Barkley’s desk.
“It was self-defense,” Barkley said, his voice rising as if Bert had already accused him.
“Just calm down and tell me what happened,” Bert said, closing the office door. They were most likely alone, but he saw no reason to chance it. “Start from the beginning. Take your time.”
Barkley drew a shaky breath. “Can I sit down?”
Bert shrugged. “If you want to.”
Barkley wanted to. He dropped into his high-backed chair with a gasp of relief or desperation or both. “Okay.” He took another watery breath. “Well, this girl’s name is Carrie Hunter. She has been my secretary since before the plant was operational. Bright girl. She can…well, she could…type like the wind. Good on the phone too. Nice voice and all that. Sometimes people would ring up to complain and she’d just defuse the situation like a darling—”
“I have a lot of things to do this morning, Mr Barkley. Just give me the short version.”
“Sorry, I’m rambling, aren’t I? Oh, God, what a mess. I mean…okay, well I came in early this morning to make a call to an overseas supplier—you know, the time difference and all that. Seven a.m. here, five in the afternoon there. Something like that. I’d just finished talking to them when I heard the elevator ding. I thought maybe it was Terry, the old guy on gatehouse security, come to ask me something. But it was Carrie.”
Barkley began to speak quicker and quicker, as if trying to reach some verbal orgasm. “She walked right up to me and exposed herself. Just unbuttoned her blouse as if she was getting changed at home in her own bedroom.”
“And what did you do?” Bert asked.
“I asked her what she was doing and I told her to stop.”
Bert folded his arm
s. “Would you say Carrie was an attractive girl?”
“I…I suppose so. I mean, she’s not what you’d call a classical beauty but she does have a sort of Judy Garland cuteness about her.”
“And yet you told her to stop undressing.”
“Of course I did,” Barkley said, rising up and trying to look indignant. “This is a workplace, not a brothel.”
“So what happened next?”
“Carrie forced herself on me. I know how ridiculous that must sound—a girl trying to force herself on a man—but that’s what happened. She pushed me up against the window here”—Barkley got out of his chair to demonstrate—“and began, uh, grabbing at me.”
“Grabbing at your crotch, you mean?”
“Right.”
“And so you brained her with a paperweight?”
“No! No, that’s not what happened at all. Oh, God, why did this have to happen to me? I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I wanted to do the right thing, but—”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, Mr Barkley. Just keep going.”
“Well, I pushed her off me you see. I tried to do it gently at first, but she was like an octopus—she seemed to have eight arms, all of them grabbing at me. So I shoved her away and she went into a great rage and started screaming and growling at me. I think she must have been high on something, you know?
“So I’m getting ready to defend myself and the next thing I know she’s pulling down her pants—”
Bert held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, spare the grisly details for an official interview. Long story short, you raped this girl, right? You raped and killed her?”
“No!” Barkley cried (in fact, he looked about ready to cry). “Oh, shit, why me?”
“She led you on and then backed off, so you decided to take what was yours by force, is that right?”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong, Sheriff. That’s not how it happened. Please, you have to listen.”
Bert propped his hands on his hips. “Just answer me this one thing, Mr Barkley. How can an unmarried man”—he gestured to Barkley’s naked ring finger—“be so virtuous? Pardon me for saying so, but I don’t guess you’re a killer with the ladies. And yet Carrie throws herself at you—a girl you’ve admitted you find attractive—and you just say no thanks? You must be the only man in America who would have. So explain that to me.”