The Mournful Teddy

by John J. Lamb

  “I agree that he’s covering something up. I just find it impossible to believe he could murder anybody.”

  “And I respect that because you’re an excellent judge of character. Still, he’s the closest thing we have to a suspect so far.”

  “What are you going to do? Are you going to talk to him?”

  “I don’t know. The problem is that once I do, it probably won’t be much more than five minutes before Holcombe knows what I’m up to.”

  “How so?”

  “That monthly stolen goods carnival couldn’t exist without the tacit approval of the sheriff—who is undoubtedly getting a cut from the action.”

  Ash closed her eyes and rubbed her temple. “Okay then . . . so, it’s in the sheriff ’s best interest to make sure there isn’t a murder investigation, otherwise Pastor Marc would tell a grand jury about the graft he’s been paying to Holcombe.”

  “Precisely. Remember that old acronym from the cold war, MAD—‘Mutual Assured Destruction’? That’s what we have here. It explains why the sheriff never looked under the blanket, because the faster the death is ruled accidental and the guy is shoved into some pauper’s grave, the better for the spiritual and legal leaders of Remmelkemp Mill.”

  I went into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I returned a couple of minutes later, Ash was still sitting up in bed. “Just for the sake of argument, couldn’t Sheriff Holcombe have killed the man?”

  “I’m always ready to believe the worst about him. Tell me more,” I said, climbing into bed.

  “Well, what if the double-cross that Pastor Marc was talking about was directed at the sheriff? Remember earlier today, when you were talking about how whoever was providing the stolen property to the flea market would never do a day in jail because he’d roll over on Poole and Holcombe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe the dead guy was arrested someplace, bailed out, and came back to blackmail them. They pay him off or he tells everything he knows to a prosecutor.”

  “It’s a plausible scenario except for one thing: Holcombe is an intelligent and experienced cop, so if he was going to kill someone, he wouldn’t just throw the body into the river and hope for the best. Either he’d bury the victim somewhere in the Alleghenies or . . .” I hesitated because I didn’t want to frighten her.

  But we’d been together too many years and Ash had already guessed my thoughts. “Or he’d kill them, ostensibly in the line of duty, and claim he was acting in self-defense.”

  “Yeah, and make sure there was a stolen throw-down gun next to the victim when the other cops arrived.”

  “I see what you mean about the sheriff, but what about Trent? He isn’t that smart, is he?”

  “No, but then again, if he killed the guy, I’d have expected to see trauma from a beating. Trent impresses me as the sort of vicious cretin that’d get off on pounding someone until they begged for mercy. Still . . .”

  “This is beginning to get scary.”

  “Beginning?” I hesitated before continuing. “Would you be more comfortable if we just dropped this entire investigation idea?”

  “And let somebody get away with murder?” She doesn’t do it often, but Ash has a way of lowering her head, staring, and opening her mouth in surprise that never fails to make me feel as if I’ve said something irredeemably foolish.

  “I’m not thrilled with the notion either, but it’s an option. After all, I’m not a homicide inspector anymore, so it isn’t my duty to right the wrongs of Massanutten County—especially if there’s the chance that I’d be putting you in danger.”

  “Honey, how long have we been married?”

  “Twenty-six years.”

  “And how long were you a cop?”

  “The same amount of time.”

  “And did I ever once wimp out while you were working a murder?”

  “No.”

  “So, what makes you think I’m going to start now?”

  “Maybe I’m the one that wants to wimp out.”

  “Brad, you are so full of it, your eyes are brown. Don’t worry about me, we’ll get through this together, just like we always have.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart. Well, I guess it’s time we got some sleep.” I turned the bedside lamp off and leaned over, intending to give Ash an innocent goodnight kiss, but discovered that she was interested in much more than a chaste peck on the cheek. This may sound unbelievable, but when Ash kisses me, the effect is exactly the same as the very first time we kissed twenty-six years ago—total sensory overload.

  I awakened to the sound of the shower running and the rich aroma of the cinnamon bun-scented soap Ash was currently using. One of the things I love about her is the fact that she always smells so good. She always uses lotions and bath products that smell warm and soft. Most guys don’t pay any attention to that, but it’s important to me.

  Rolling from the bed, I went over to the window and checked the river. The water looked relatively calm and the level had gone down another foot or so overnight. It was a beautiful morning with clear blue skies, a gentle and balmy breeze blowing out of the southwest, and excellent prospects for another unseasonably warm day. Although autumn was officially over a week old, we’d yet to see anything approaching cool weather, but Ash assured me that it was coming.

  We had breakfast and afterwards, while waiting for Ash’s dad to arrive, I took Kitchener outside to play. I’ve been trying to teach him to chase a tennis ball, but he’s real vague on the concept of retrieving. Every time I throw the ball and yell for him to chase it, he cocks his head and looks at me in a puzzled and slightly offended manner as if I’ve asked him to do something completely unreasonable, such as name the capital of Mauritania. I haven’t given up hope yet, but I’m starting to believe there’s a greater likelihood that someday he’ll say, “Hey, just in case you didn’t know, Nouakchott is the capital of Mauritania” before he brings that tennis ball back to me.

  Shortly after 9 a.m., Lolly Remmelkemp arrived. His actual Christian name is Laurence, but nobody in the area has called him that since before Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his fourth term as president. The nickname originated with his younger brother, who couldn’t pronounce “Laurence” as a toddler. Lolly was driving his battered blue Dodge pickup and towing a trailer with an aluminum rowboat on it.

  I really like Ash’s parents. Her mom’s name is Irene and with her milky complexion, silvery hair, and buxom figure, she looks like a slightly older version of her daughter. She is also a wonderful cook and her pan-fried chicken and mashed potatoes with cream gravy are famous throughout the region.

  Besides being a sweet and genteel lady, Irene knows her Bible like a personal injury attorney knows the back-end of an ambulance. She lives by Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek and forgive your enemies . . . except when it comes to offenses against her family. I learned this the first time Ash brought me home to introduce me to her parents. Irene waited until we were alone and then tranquilly told me that if I ever hurt her daughter she’d hunt me down and skin me. We were in the kitchen when she made this announcement and pointed out the large wooden-handled carving knife she’d use. Of course, regarding the emotional protection of my own daughter, I have a far more progressive attitude. I never once considered threatening Heather’s first serious boyfriend with an old-fashioned edged weapon if he didn’t treat her with perfect respect—I would’ve used a semi-automatic handgun with a laser sight.

  Lolly doesn’t look sixty-eight years old. He’s got a barrel chest, a full head of white hair, and a round, cheerful face highlighted by blue eyes that glint with the sheer joy of being alive. And not surprisingly, his behavior isn’t that of a senior citizen. He’s a full-time farmer, manages a herd of Texas longhorn cattle, goes hunting for bear and deer with a single-shot black powder musket, and when the ladies aren’t around, tells some of the most extraordinarily dirty jokes I’ve ever heard—jokes that you’d never expect a lay church dea
con would even be aware of, much less tell with consummate skill.

  Lolly also owns every power tool known to the human race and can fix absolutely anything. If he’d been one of the astronauts on Apollo 13, he’d have repaired the damage and the mission would have been a success. As an added bonus, the expression “Houston, we have a problem” would never have made its way into popular language, to be used by a generation of dullards who know more about the Olsen twins than they do about the amazing program that put human beings on the moon.

  I limped over to the truck as he climbed from the cab. “Good morning, Lolly. Thanks for letting us borrow your boat.”

  “Anytime, son. Hey, I heard about that BS Trent Holcombe pulled yesterday afternoon. Anything you want me to do about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know Mike Cribbs, the traffic-ticket magistrate. If I asked, he’d dismiss the ticket.”

  “Thanks, but let’s hold off on that for now. If what I’m working on pans out, bogus traffic cites will be the least of Trent’s concerns.”

  “Well, there must be something I can do.”

  “There is—vote for Tina Barron next month. Trent’s just a symptom of a much bigger problem. We need a new county sheriff.”

  “Already a step ahead of you. Check this out.” Lolly led me to the rear of his pickup truck where a rectangular piece of plywood was wired to the tailgate. It bore a message in bright red spray-paint: Barron 4 SHERIFF.

  “Very nice, but when Trent sees that he’s going to go into low-earth orbit.”

  “Let him. That boy had no call to behave that way.” There was an uncomfortable pause. “Son, Ash told me what you’re up to and I have to ask you a question.”

  “Am I going to keep your daughter safe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power, but she insisted on coming and you know what happens when she sets her mind to do something.”

  “Don’t I just.” Lolly chuckled.

  “And all we’re going to do is take a little cruise upriver, so please don’t worry.”

  “Okay, I won’t. So, where is Ash?”

  “Upstairs, I think.”

  “Good. You’ll love this one.” Lolly leaned closer and continued in a conspiratorial tone, “This fella wearing a clown suit goes into this proctologist’s office and says—”

  “Good morning, Daddy!” Ash emerged from the front door carrying my cane and a lightweight knapsack.

  Without missing a beat, Lolly turned and said, “Hi, honey. Brad and I were just talking about your trip.”

  “I love the sign on your truck,” said Ash, giving her dad a hug.

  “Hey, congratulations! We saw you on the television last night and I expect you’ll be in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “Thank you. How’s Momma?”

  “Just fine. She’s getting ready for church, which I should be too. I’ll get the boat off the trailer and into the water.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Ash handed me the cane. “Sweetheart, you’re going to need this.”

  I sighed in what was now conditioned disgust. “My cane. Can’t leave home without it. God, I’m a gimp—like Lionel Barrymore in Key Largo.”

  “He was in a wheelchair and you are not a gimp.” She kissed me on the cheek and gave me the knapsack.

  I looked inside. “Camera, spare batteries for the camera, binoculars, Massanutten County map, notepad, two bottles of water—don’t drink from mine because I don’t want girl cooties—”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “Ibuprofen and pens. Great, honey. Looks like we have everything we need.”

  “Not everything.” Ash pulled something from her pants pocket and pushed it into my hand. “I think you might want this.”

  It was my black leather case that contained the SFPD retiree badge and ID card I received when the city showed me the door. Since that day, I hadn’t so much as looked at the badge; I’d hidden it away in a box because the last thing I needed was something to remind me of how much I missed being a homicide detective. Unfolding the case, I gazed down at the gold seven-pointed star with the word “Inspector” inscribed on it in royal blue letters. I was surprised to find there was a lump in my throat. Without looking up, I asked, “Where did you find it?”

  “I’ve always known where it was.” She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “And I figured that as long as you’re back in the investigations business, even if it’s only temporarily, you’d better have your badge.”

  “Thank you, my love,” I said, slipping the badge case into my back pants pocket.

  A few minutes later, the boat was bobbing in the river, secured to a sycamore tree with a rope. As Lolly began to give Ash a quick refresher course on operating the Evinrude outboard motor, I took Kitch inside the house and secured him in his crate. It wasn’t necessary for me to know the intricacies of the motor because the job of piloting the small craft belonged solely to my wife. She’d grown up along the banks of the Shenandoah and was learning to steer a boat on the river when I was still riding a bike with training wheels. My assignment was to be the JAFO, which in the police helicopter service stands for “Just A Freaking Observer” . . . except cops use a slightly more colorful term than “freaking.”

  I put the knapsack on, clambered into the boat, and sat down on an aluminum bench near the bow. Ash gave her dad a hug and then got into the boat and took a seat on the bench at the rear near the outboard motor. She gave the engine some gas and we began to slowly churn our way upriver. We both waved to Lolly and a few seconds later he was invisible behind an emerald wall of trees and foliage.

  At first, there wasn’t much to see. The west side of the river was hemmed right down to the water’s edge with forest while a low bluff blocked our view to the east. Peering into the shallow water, I caught a glimpse of a largish fish that might have been a trout, and a few moments after that I saw a very chubby raccoon scramble along a fallen log and disappear into the underbrush. It all seemed so pristine and idyllic, yet I knew the South Fork of the Shenandoah is still badly polluted with toxic chemicals such as mercury, even though the factory waste was dumped into the river decades ago. Ordinarily, I’m not a proponent of capital punishment, but if we could ever find some of those scumbag industrialists who fouled this river because it meant a bigger profit margin . . . well, lethal injection is way too good for them, if you ask me.

  Ash scanned the west bank. “So, honey, what exactly are we looking for?”

  “A miracle.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was hoping we’d find some signs of a struggle that would tell us the actual place our victim was thrown into the river, but now that we’re out here, I can see that may not have been a realistic goal.”

  “Be patient. We’ve just started.”

  After about a half-mile, we came to “the island,” which was actually an overgrown sandbar, slightly more than a half-acre in size and shaped like an inverted teardrop, studded with maybe a couple of dozen morose-looking cedar trees. In the summer, you can leap across the meandering western channel to the island, and even in the wake of a hurricane, the water wasn’t much wider than a residential driveway.

  Keeping to the eastern channel, Ash soon pointed to a crumbling stone foundation that was overgrown with brush and vines and said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engine, “The mill.”

  I’d heard about the place but never seen it. Invisible and all but forgotten, this quadrangle of stones was all that remained of the original Remmelkemp Mill—the building rescued from Yankee arson by brave Southern soldiers. The ironic postscript to the story, which isn’t mentioned on the peculiar-looking monument, is that about a week after the heroic episode, sparks from a Confederate sentry’s campfire set the mill’s wooden shingles ablaze and the building burned to the ground.

  A moment later, we motored past the south end of the island and then under the Coggins Spring Road overpass. The river ahead looped
lazily to the right and widened slightly. About a mile ahead, on the east side of the river, I saw Caisson Hill jutting just above the tree line. It’s a small and sparsely wooded knoll that got its name because it was an overnight home for one of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s artillery batteries just before the Battle of Port Republic in 1862.

  That tiny geographic fact illustrates something amazing about life in the Shenandoah Valley. It’s so permeated with the past that it’s like taking up residence in an American history book. The roads are full of historical markers and they don’t merely record episodes from the Civil War. Just a few miles to the east is Swift Run Gap, the place where English settlers first entered the Shenandoah Valley in 1716. Go north to Winchester and you can visit George Washington’s office during the French and Indian Wars or travel south and you’ll find Cyrus McCormick’s farm where the mechanical harvester that changed agriculture forever was invented. The sheer volume of history is just mind-boggling.

  The river continued to loop to the west for about 200 yards and then gradually curved back toward the east. For the first time, I noticed a sturdy diamond-mesh galvanized steel fence running along the water’s edge to our left. The barrier was six-feet tall, topped with rusted strands of barbed wire, and every few feet bore a rectangular metal placard that read no TRESPASSING in red letters. I wasn’t surprised to see many of the warning signs were pitted and dented as a consequence of being used for target practice. The vandalism was forgivable—perhaps even admirable—because there was something very arrogant and intrinsically wrong about this prison fence standing next to a waterway so beautiful that the original Native American inhabitants christened it Shenandoah—Daughter of the Stars.

  I hooked a thumb at the east shore. “Whose land is that?”

  “Liz Ewell’s. She put that fence up shortly after she stole the land from us. I wonder if it’s still electric.”

  “The more I hear about this woman, the more I want to meet her.”

  “Better you than me, if I see her I’m liable to slap her.”

  As we rounded the bend, Ash leaned closer to me and pointed to a rolling grassy meadow behind the fence and at the base of Caisson Hill. The field looked as if it’d once been cultivated but was long since given over to the weeds. In an icy tone, Ash said, “That’s the piece of land Liz Ewell stole from us.”