by George Wier
“That’s just what Burt needs.”
“And you?” she asked. “What is it you need?”
“The eldest Bristow child—who is he? And where is he now?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ronnie Bristow. Every town has one. Their lives are lived in the shadows of ours. They may traverse the same streets, they see the same sights, but the difference between their lives and ours is that gray realm between sensation and sociability. Between what is seen and felt and what is communicated from one person to the next.
Communication was the real issue. Ronnie Bristow was born a mute. His eyes, however, glittered with an intelligence, a hidden and impenetrable knowledge of the world as seen from his singular and unique viewpoint. And it was that viewpoint that gave everyone around him a case of the willies.
Edgar Bristow had been certain he was cursed when his first-born child was determined to be mute and possibly imbecilic by every specialist he could get his hands on. The last doctor to examine the young toddler got a flurry of fists to his head when he made the mistake of referring to Ronnie as “special”. It was the last doctor the child would ever see.
“I don’t know if that helps,” Dr. Armstrong said.
“It’s good enough,” I said. “With what you’ve told me, I think I’ve already seen him. I think I can find him on my own. You should go see to Burt now.”
We stood outside her office, in the same spot where I had waited for Denise my first day in town. It was getting on toward midnight. I was tired, hungry again, and itching to get things wrapped up.
Felix Bruce waited in silence, leaning against the Crown Vic thirty feet away. A light flared into existence there. Felix had lit a cigarette. What I wouldn’t have done for one myself at that moment.
“No,” she said. “Burt will be fine. I want to finish this once and for all. I’ve been waiting almost forty years. Ever since—”
“That first night. I understand,” I said.
She nodded to me.
“Come on, then, Dr. Armstrong.”
“Call me Isabel,” she said.
The image of her gun swinging toward me came unbidden into my mind. If she could put it in a drawer and shut it out of existence, maybe I could as well.
“Fine, Isabel,” I said. “But I don’t relish going back there in the dead of night. Especially not with you in tow.”
“Fiddlesticks,” she said.
*****
“You sure about this, Bill?” Felix asked.
“As sure as I am about anything,” I replied. I turned to the back seat and regarded Isabel Armstrong. “Sorry for talking about you while you’re sitting right there,” I said.
“It’s okay. It balances up a little for all the time I’ve talked about my patients while they were sitting right in front of me.”
“Yeah,” Felix said, “but they couldn’t hear you.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I’m not so sure about that.”
“Spooky lady,” Felix said, making no effort to keep her from hearing.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Felix drove us back to the site of the former Bristow Lumber Company. This time he took the long way around and came in through the narrow space where Burt had cut the barbed wire to enter the place.
“I hate this place,” Isabel said. “I’ve always hated it. They should have burned it to the ground.”
“Metal doesn’t burn so easily,” Felix whispered.
“I guess it’s cheaper just to leave it standing than to bulldoze it,” I said. “And I suppose old Edgar Bristow never wasted anything. Except for maybe a nazi or two.”
“I don’t think that’s how it went,” Isabel said as the car jounced over the rough terrain. “He could have leased the place or sold it a hundred times over. I suppose it’s that just don’t sell home. That’s what Ed called it once: home.”
After a minute of wheel-twisting and alternations between gas and brake, we were back at the spot outside the warehouse where Felix had shot Burt.
“I guess it’s three of us this time,” Felix said.
“No,” Isabel said.
Felix turned around in his seat. He opened his door so that the dome light came on. “What do you mean ‘no’?” he asked her.
“I don’t know who shot my son, but I doubt it was Bill. There’s no one else in this whole town, for that matter, that would have shot Burt. That leaves you. We’re not going in there with you.”
“Your son might have killed Bill if I hadn’t,” Felix said.
“Somehow I seriously doubt that,” she said.
“I can’t let you two go in there without protection,” Felix said.
“That’s the difference between you and people like Bill,” she said. “Bill thinks with his head instead of his gonads.”
Felix rolled his eyes at me.
“Go ahead then,” he said. “I’ll wait. But if you’re longer than twenty minutes, I’m coming in, my gun loaded and the safety off.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“He’ll be in his safe place,” she said as we stepped into the pitch blackness.
The headlights of Felix’s car threw a shaft of light and cast shadows from our bodies that traversed the space and melded with the distant blackness.
I thumbed on my flashlight and Isabel clutched my arm.
“Are you afraid?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Listen. Can’t you hear it?”
I listened, but all I could hear was the Crown Vic engine idling and my own thumping heartbeat.
“Let’s go in further. You’ll hear it then.”
We walked thirty or so paces into the gloom and paused.
I strained to hear. At first I thought it was the wind, howling in a low keening under the eaves and over the ventilator fans on the roof. But after a few moments I could hear something else. Was that humming?
“What did you mean by ‘safe place’?” I asked.
“Shhh,” she hushed me.
I waited.
“He used to do that, you know. Hum for days on end. It’s his own world.”
“Where is his safe place?” I asked.
“Purple Section,”
“Of course,” I said. “Lead on.”
We went between the seemingly endless rows of lumber racks, across the open shop floor and towards the office complex. I walked to the open door there and she paused.
“This way,” she whispered.
I followed her around the office and residential area and into the shop on the other side.
She startled me when she called his name in a sing-song voice: “Ron-nie!”
I heard a grunt of surprise somewhere ahead. We moved past rows of old equipment going to wrack and ruin.
“Ron-nie! It’s Iz-zy!”
My flashlight beam picked out a broom leaning against one last rack filled with old chains. Just past that broom the floor was perfect. Not a blemish. Not a mote of dust.
I shivered.
As if in reply to her calling, a disturbing bull-fiddle sound filled the empty air. A voice, trying desperately to make a sound that could be recognizable by someone else.
We tracked dust across the floor. I shined my light upwards and could make out the chains there from the ceiling. Hundreds of them. This was the shipping and receiving area of the plant. And those chains up there were for the loading and unloading of timbers.
I shined my light toward the front of the building and found the closed bay doors. Those doors, like the rest of the room were a deep violet blue.
The atmosphere here was different.
How does one know when he’s trespassed into an area that is someone’s home? Aside from the fact that there are usually tell-tale signs that a place is inhabited, there is another thing altogether, no less real and palpable than either the orderly or even haphazard placement of belongings—there is the feel of a place itself. It is possibly this instinct alone that is responsible for man having survived as long as he has on this planet. Fee
lings, impressions, sensations mean something. And one ignores them to his detriment.
Ronnie came to greet us there in the dark in the center of his safe place, on his clean floor, with his myriad stalctite chains suspended overhead.
And I understood something fundamental in the moment that the big, late middle-aged galoot came forward and embraced Isabel and hugged her tightly.
If this was his safe place, then, in his own feeble way, he had attempted to make all the other places where murder had been done or would be done, safe as well.
Which also meant something else as well.
“Ronnie, this is Bill Travis,” she said.
He looked at me and grinned, a knowing mischievous grin.
“We’ve met,” I said, “though at a little distance.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I knew it the instant he shook my hand and hugged me. Ronnie Bristow was no killer.
His world was simple. It contained none of the essential elements that the rest of us take for granted: that a person had to strive to survive, that money had to be procured and the bills paid, that by the sweat of our brow do we live. That the whims of strangers we had never met set the economic and social tempos of our lives.
Ronnie Bristow’s world had none of these things, these hidden influences, these dark traitors.
His world was made up of summer storms and early morning spider webs, of cold, sweet cokes obtained out of the beneficence of mini-skirted girls on roller-skates, of dreams and childhood songs and the memories of the faces of people long dead.
I knew he had never killed a soul, and I gloried in that simple truth.
Ronnie lead us to where he slept, a simple cot with covers, surrounded by a number of toys, mainly dolls minus their clothing. I shined my light around the periphery and picked up dozens of other objects, larger, some utilitarian, such as a chair and large fan. Electrical cables snaked across the floor.
“Do you have light, Ronnie?” I asked him.
The fellow became very excited, and guttural sounds escaped into the darkness. He reached to the floor at the foot of his cot and connected two plug wires together.
The ceiling came alight with a thousand stars. Christmas lights running the lengths of the chains overhead. The display cast enough overhead light to see by, and I turned off my flashlight.
“Ronnie,” I said. “Can you help us?”
“I’m not sure he can understand, Bill,” Isabel said.
“I think he understands everything,” I said. “Far too well.”
Ronnie grinned and shook his head up and down, emphasizing his unexpressed “yes”.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Isabel said.
“Ronnie, you painted Lydia’s room, didn’t you?” I asked.
He shook his head up and down, a very eager “yes”.
“You had to make her safe, didn’t you?” I asked.
Again, yes.
“And you painted Mollie’s room by the swimming pool?” I asked
Again with the eager nod.
“Four of them, just this week, right?”
A wide, florid and proud smile spread across his face.
“You were making it right, weren’t you Ronnie?”
Slow nod.
“My God,” Isabel said, “I’m so glad, Ronnie. You did something right.”
I laughed and both of them smiled quizzically.
“What?” Isabel asked. “Tell us.”
“It wasn’t about invisibility, or if it was, it was about a different kind of invisibility. Those purple rooms were about this place, about making things safe and right, just like they are right here in the shipping and receiving department of the Bristow Lumber Company.”
I began to sober up from my fit of laughter.
“The bad person, Ronnie,” I said. “I need to find the bad person.”
The smile slowly faded from his face.
“But Ronnie knows,” I told him. “He knows all too well.”
Slow, mournful nod: yes.
He thrust his hands into the air. He made a high-pitched mewling sound and rotated his hands counter to each other over his head, describing fast circles.
“Police?” I asked.
He continued the pantomime.
“Ambulance?” Isabel asked, and I knew she hoped he didn’t nod “yes”. The pantomime went on, more urgent.
“Hospital,” I said, not as a question. I knew the answer already.
His hands dropped. His eyes looked into mine. He smiled sweetly, innocently.
“Come with us, Ronnie,” Isabel said.
“Eth,” he grunted.
*****
Ronnie sat beside me in the back seat of the Crown Vic. Isabel rode up front with Felix. The rain that had been threatening for days had finally arrived and Felix’ windshield wipers were going full tilt.
I suspected that Ronnie Bristow weighed in at three hundred pounds. He had a layer of fat over a structure of hard muscle, gristle and bone. Also, oddly enough given his living conditions, he did not carry a bad smell. I have met few people who lived where there was no available electric lights and running water who were not to some degree... malodorous. To give the fellow credit, he knew how to take care of himself. His clothes were clean and I wondered whether or not he had some local launderer who regularly kept them pressed for him.
I recalled there was a World War II veteran that got himself shot down over the Pacific and spent a few weeks floating on his airplane wing before he was rescued. When interviewed the guy said that if a fellow had plenty of water, food, and a roof over his head, he hadn’t a damned thing in the world to complain about.
I had forgotten what day it was. I had forgotten that I needed to get back home to my family and my work. I needed to return to life. What the hell was I doing riding along with an aging FBI agent, a Medical Examiner who suspected her son of being a serial killer, and a very overgrown, late middle-aged child who was potentially heir to a very large fortune? I suppose I was being Bill. It’s what I do best.
“Where are we going, folks?” Felix asked.
“To the hospital, eventually,” I said. “Somewhere else, though, first.”
“Where?” Isabel turned back to me.
“The airport,” I said. “We’re going back where it all began. Is that okay, Ronnie?”
Far less excited now, perhaps resigned, the graying middle-aged child nodded.
“Why there?” Isabel asked.
“I want to see the purple room that isn’t there,” I said.
*****
I believe that every person has a secret place. Whether real, in the past, or solely in their imaginations, they have at least one place where they can seek safe haven. A certain camping spot in the Lost Pines State Park is where I like to go, although I’ve only been there twice ever. Somehow, it seemed to me that Edgar Bristow’s place must have been his airport hangar. It was where he had spent the last years of his life, possibly because his ranch house held too many memories. I had wanted to see the inside of that hanger since that first moment Burt had wheeled his lifeless body out of it and across the tarmac. Though only a few days past, it felt like so many years.
Felix turned into the airport as the clock ticked around to 1:00., as in a.m. Which day? The days and nights were taking on that blurring effect, becoming one continuous thing.
As we went down the long one-lane black-top road toward the quonset hut airport office buildings and larger quonset hut-style hangars, I mulled over what I had to add together thus far.
One, Edgar Bristow had been bludgeoned to death by a tire iron. Two, the tire iron had belonged to Sheriff Buster LeRoy, and bore his fingerprints. My own tire-iron, locked safely in the truck of my ancient Mercedes underneath my spare tire back in Austin, probably had both mine and Julie’s prints on it. For some reason, my Julie is a girl who likes to change tires. Three, Burt Sanderson, half-brother to Ronnie Bristow, had been protecting Ronnie. And he had been there at a tender age when the f
irst Bristow daughter had been killed back in ‘69. What was left? The knowledge contained in the head of a man who could only communicate in pantomime. Five people were dead. Four Bristow women, and one Bristow male, the patriarch of a fading empire.
I stopped directly in front of the hangar door. Yellow police crime-scene tape, no longer secure, snaked across the tarmac. Someone had crossed it. Or possibly no one. Despite its message, and the potential penalties for parting it, a good stiff wind could have easily severed it.
“What could be in there?” Isabel asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Which is why we’re here.”
Isabel and Ronnie opened their doors and got out.
“Felix,” I said, “you coming?”
He sighed, raised his eyebrows and regarded me.
“Nope. I’ve already looked. There’s not much to see. But go satisfy yourself on that. There may be a little something, though, for him,” he jerked his thumb at Ronnie, who had stopped to wait for us, his hands dug down into his blue jeans pockets.
“Come on, Ronnie,” I said.
Isabel took his hand and they followed me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It wasn’t the main hangar door, but a side door that we stepped through into the gloom. I clicked on Felix's flashlight and found a bank of lights next to the doorway. I flipped one of them and a dim bulb came on above the paper-strewn desk in the small office. A large Jeppeson-Sanderson air navigation chart was tacked to the wall behind the desk. There was an open door ten feet away that led into the blackness of the open hangar space.
“That way,” I said. “The door. I think maybe I should lead. You know, just in case.”
“Go ahead,” Isabel said.
The light led me and I followed.
In the hangar space I picked out two planes: a Piper Cub close at hand and a large twin-engine Beechcraft, polished and looking ready to fly, not a speck of dust to be seen on its massive frame.