by W.H. Harrod
After a minute or two during which his recently discovered inclination for harboring paranoid thoughts ran wild, Terrance started to regain his composure. “Okay, okay, I think the point has been made. Now what? Are there legal ramifications here? Should I go immediately to the police and tell them I know where they can find their long missing leading suspect? Maybe I should pack up now and get home as quickly as possible and file the story. Think now. What should I do?”
Terrance paced back and forth in front of the library entrance trying to figure out his next move. Several ideas crossed his mind as his thinking became less chaotic. First and foremost, he admitted he didn’t know if his guy committed the murder. Secondly, there probably are additional facts concerning this case awaiting his perusal of future articles that will shed more light on this whole affair. Lastly, the most important thing for him to do now is to calm down, go back inside, and gather all the pertinent information that’s available. Only then, could he make an intelligent decision as to what must be done.
A quick stop by the restroom followed by the hurried consumption of a can of cola out of a machine, and he headed back inside ready to get at it again. The caffeine should help, he reasoned. He reentered the archive room to find everything exactly as he left it. The matronly librarian sat in the same place behind the counter and barely bothered to glance at him as he passed. Likewise, all the papers he left spread around on top of the large table appeared the same. Satisfied things were in order, he hurriedly sat down and started back to work.
Stories about Howard Douglas monopolized the papers for the next week. All the background information Terrance might ever want appeared before him: Howard Douglas’s birthplace, his birth date, and information telling of his tragic boyhood including the deaths of his parents that forced him to go live with his relatives on a small farm a few miles outside of town. The stories told about a good, hardworking kid determined to get ahead, who worked multiple jobs all through high school and college while still managing to make the honor roll every year, and how he came to be so well liked by everyone who got to know him. This went on and on until Terrance tired of reading about it. At a point where he thought of skipping ahead to see if anything new developed, the story changed.
The local police admitted to withholding information that, now released, added about ten degrees of heat to this ever-expanding murder mystery. According to a police report mysteriously made public—Howard Douglas disappeared into thin air. Upon inspection of his condo, the police found everything Howard owned, except his car, still present and accounted for. His wallet, identification, credit cards, and cash were still there. His clothing, suitcases, jewelry, golf clubs, photography equipment, and even his house keys were there, also. Stranger yet, the lights and TV were on, and the condo sat unlocked with the patio door open. All his financial information, including safety deposit box keys, savings bonds, bearer bonds, and stock certificates lay untouched in file drawers. If the guy intended to make a run for it, you’d expect him to remember to take some money. But according to his bank, not a single large withdrawal occurred in the last year. Not the kind of evidence one expected to find in the house of a missing murder suspect.
Terrance sat back to consider this new information. Whoa! Did this guy know how to disappear, or what? But why did he just walk away like that if he didn’t kill Whiting? And why did he turn up in Lawrence, Kansas, as Joseph Right only a month later? He couldn’t have gotten all that accomplished in one short month while on the run from the law and with no known means of support. He had to have planned this ahead of time. That’s probably where southern Missouri comes in—he must have gone there well before to get established.
Terrance continued on in an attempt to resolve this dilemma. Okay, here’s the way the story lays out based on the evidence available. Howard Douglas, a fine and upstanding young man in this community for his entire life, one day decides to brutally murder his friend and benefactor, Richard Whiting, for no apparent reason. In preparation for this act of insanity, he travels to a community several hundred miles away where he proceeds to steal the identification of a deceased nine-year-old boy, and subsequently, builds himself an elaborate new identification. After he completes this criminal act, he returns to Harmony, Illinois, where he proceeds to shoot his boss and friend, Richard Whiting, in the head so many times that it’s next to impossible to identify him but for his fingerprints. Then to top off this wild scheme he travels, not back to southern Missouri, but all the way to Lawrence, Kansas, where he spends the latter years of his life making soup for homeless people.
Terrance pondered this scenario for sometime and came to the conclusion that if his assessment came anywhere close to describing what actually happened, and why it happened, then Howard Douglas aka Joseph Right had to be one of the stupidest people to ever set foot upon this planet. That caused him a problem because based on all that he’d learned about Howard Douglas of Harmony, Illinois, and Joseph Right of Lawrence, Kansas, neither of them fit the description of a stupid person. There had to be something else. Terrance turned back to the newspapers again, looking for more.
This time it required him reading only a couple more copies of the October editions of the paper before he found his next nugget. According to an ambitious local reporter who more than likely wearied of writing about the same things over and over every day and had the gumption to find some new sources of information, Howard had experienced a personal tragedy months earlier. The story went that Howard’s fiancée mysteriously left town for whereabouts unknown two and a half years earlier, and try as he might, he could never learn from anyone, including her family, where she went or why. Since they appeared inseparable, her unexpected leaving made no sense to anyone that knew them, and according to close friends, this devastated Howard. He never gave up hoping that one day she would return. As it turned out, she did return, in a casket. She committed suicide while living in Dallas, Texas. Reportedly, this almost destroyed Howard and still no one came forth with any answers as to why any of this happened.
Now this might be something, thought Terrance. Now he had a case where two educated, intelligent young people, all of a sudden, did something completely out of character. “What was her name again?” he asked as he looked back through the article. Whitney Ann McClain, age at time of death, twenty-six; time and place of death, May 11, 1981, Dallas, Texas; Birthplace, Harmony, Illinois, August 21, 1954.
Terrance saw immediately they both had experienced hardships in Dallas. Looks like she went there to die, and I was sent away from there because someone didn’t want me. I want to see your official obituary. I want to know more about you. What did Howard see in you? And, I would especially like to know why you gave up on life. Something tells me the answer to that question might very well have a lot to do with this whole story. Am I right?
This information and more appeared in the next several editions of the paper. Absent anything new, the local reporters rehashed all the information uncovered up to this point. Namely: A prominent businessman was brutally murdered. The vice president of the company owned by the murdered businessman had vanished without a trace. The estranged fiancée of this same vice president committed suicide only a few months before. While very possibly these events were completely separate and not related, they still made for strange coincidences.
The additional background information he learned about Whitney further piqued his curiosity. Like Howard, she attended the local high school and went on to college receiving her degree in sociology the year after she and Howard met. Following graduation, she began to work in the field of family counseling at a local office of a state agency. Along with this, she volunteered at the local animal shelter, the homeless shelter, and kept active in a number of inner city youth groups. She liked being physically active through running, biking, and swimming and competed in local triathlons. Unlike Howard, her parents were alive and resided near the community. Pretty much the résumé of the All American Girl as far as Terrance could determine.
The photograph of Whitney printed in a subsequent edition along with Howard’s, and Richard Whiting’s, commanded Terrance’s full attention. Even a black and white newspaper photograph couldn’t conceal Whitney’s attractive features. Peering at the photo displaying her straight long blond hair accentuating a thin face encompassing the classical features of beautiful women written about throughout the centuries, Terrance became mesmerized. A single feature dominated his attention—her eyes. They exuded a sense of warmth and self-confidence. Where had Terrance seen these eyes before? They seemed so familiar.
Terrance, after staring intently at her picture, scanned the text accompanying the photograph. Whitney lived in Dallas for the entire two and a half years after she left Harmony. One last piece of information accompanied Whitney’s photograph. A correction relating to information reported about Whitney’s participation in various civic organizations. Previous articles failed to acknowledge Whitney as one of the founding members of the Midwest Chapter of the Heterchromia Iridium Society.
Terrance stared at the paper as all manner of scatterbrained thoughts floated around in his brain. His subconscious mind, on the other hand, busily expanded its own list of odd coincidences. Whitney, too, had different colored eyes, and if she resided in Dallas for two and a half years, then she lived there at the same time he was born. Plus her straight blond hair and classically attractive facial features bore an uncanny resemblance to his.
“I need to take another walk,” said Terrance as he headed outside for more fresh air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO