Chase Baker and the Lincoln Curse: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 4)

by Vincent Zandri

  Once, when I seem to have forgotten my manners, I lock eyes on him as the skin-tagged eyelids slowly descend and sleep begins to overwhelm him, his chin coming within a hair’s length of his sternum. But just before chin connects with chest, his internal alarm awakens him like the loudest of roosters.

  His eyes pop open wide.

  I almost want to laugh aloud, but dare not. But then something happens that sends a start into my heart. He connects with my gaze as if he knew I was eyeing him the whole time. Almost as if he was putting on a show for me far more interesting than the one currently playing on the stage below.

  The truth: I feel the embarrassment well up on my face in the form of blood. The President is a strong man but a kind man, too. And he issues me the gentlest of the smiles as if to say, “It’s okay, young man. I don’t blame you for eavesdropping.”

  Quickly turning my head then, I try to concentrate on the play. But such affairs fill me with the utmost disinterest if not dread. Like a household chore that must be accomplished whether I like it or not. Oh, the things we must do for those we love the most.

  The one I love most…I shift my eyes towards her. My Clara. I’m seated in my chair like a proper gentleman, but if only we were all alone in this box. It might be possible for me to wrap my arms around her, caress the soft skin on her face, run my hands through her thick hair, kiss her tender lips. Oh, how I am counting the days until we wed, when it will be possible to lie ourselves down together in our marriage bed, without the burden of our clothing, our naked bodies pressed together, tightly, sweetly, lovingly.

  The box door opens slowly.

  So slowly, the movement of wood slab on well-oiled hinges barely registers. Which means I hardly take notice. Initially, I’m of the opinion that one of Lincoln’s sleepy guards is delivering a message to him as can happen from time to time, even during performances such as this one that are dear to Mrs. Lincoln.

  Yet, the man entering quietly, but somehow deliberately, into the box is no blue-uniformed guard. He is, instead, a tall, mustached, dark-haired man who bears the handsome face of an actor. I have seen this face before. Both on poster advertisements and in the newspapers. His name, however, escapes me as he raises up his right hand to reveal something inside it.

  It’s a pistol.

  A small pistol that I recognize right away. A Derringer or what’s known as a pocket cannon. When he aims the barrel of the weapon at the back of the President’s skull, I know precisely what is about to follow. Yet, for some reason, the reality of the situation begins to escape me. It’s as if this man’s actions…this actor…were playing a part in a separate play altogether or perhaps acting out a scene which is meant to distract from the main scene being revealed on the stage. How inventive and yet odd that the President has chosen to portray himself in a stage play so soon after the war against Southern aggression has ceased.

  A comedic line is delivered on stage. It causes the audience to erupt in laughter. Even Mr. Lincoln goes wide-eyed while issuing a heartfelt series of giggles.

  Then the shot.

  The explosive concussion reverberates throughout the playhouse and all manner of make-believe is wiped away in the instant it takes for Lincoln’s cerebral blood to spatter over both Mary’s and Clara’s dresses, the latter of which is pearl white. Lincoln’s head thrusts forward, chin against sternum, not unlike his bouts of fatigue. But this time, the bobbing is violent and severe. I raise my left arm, reaching out for the killer with open hands, as the President slumps into his own lap. But I can’t possibly reach him, separated as I am from him by two grown women.

  Clara turns, looks on in horror, while Mary continues to gaze upon the play like the surreal moment is having trouble registering in her brain. The collective gasp of the crowd fills the deadly silence when I make a desperate lunge for the man as if attacking an entrenched enemy Rebel.

  Clara screams. Mary wails and takes hold of her husband, setting her left hand on the back of his head as if trying to put the shattered egg of a skull back together again.

  I manage to grab the killer’s sleeve on his shooting arm. From there, I regain my balance and shift my grip to his forearm. I am just about to physically subdue him with the utmost strength in my body, when his left hand comes up revealing a dagger. He is quick with the weapon, slicing my left arm from elbow to shoulder. The cut is so swiftly and expertly applied that the pain is minimal if non-existent. All that registers is the immediate loss of blood, a dizziness in my brain, and a sickness in my stomach. I go down on my knees and wretch an ugly mixture of sputum and bile while Clara comes to my aid, grabbing my collar.

  “I have done it! I have avenged the Confederacy!” shouts the booming, stage-trained voice of the killer after pulling himself away from me and leaping out of the box onto the stage. “Sic Semper Tyrannus!”

  “My husband!” Mary Lincoln shrieks. “Someone help my husband!”

  But all I can think about as the world around me fades to darkness, is Clara’s dress.

  “You’re ruining your dress, my love,” I whisper. “It’s covered in blood and it’s all my fault.”

  12

  When I come to, I’m chained and shackled inside a dark, dank, colorless hell hole that smells like mold, must, and cat piss. Shaking the webs out of my pounding head, I realize I’m sitting inside the stone-walled basement of this old home. A basement that resembles—in my battered brain anyway—a dungeon or, more accurately, a Civil War-era prison.

  Between the bizarre dream where I assumed the role of Major Henry Rathbone and this dark, dank place, I feel as if I’ve been transported back in time.

  The place0is half-lit with kerosene lamps positioned on wood tables. A couple of wall-mounted wood torches are also burning, giving off a red-orange glow. I’m still fully clothed, my bush jacket still draping my torso. That’s a good sign. If my wrists weren’t shackled, I’d dig into my pocket for my Swiss Army Knife. My mind begins to run through ways to free myself. I scan the area around me for anything that might help. That’s when I realize something…

  I’m not alone.

  As my eyes regain their focus, I can make out the figure of a man standing on the opposite side of the square space. His face is shadowed, but he’s wearing a suit with a long coat over a white shirt, an ascot, straight trousers, and riding boots. He sees I’m awake and approaches me. As he comes closer, I can tell that the man is Balkis but he’s pretending to be somebody else. If I had to guess, he’s playing the role of John Wilkes Booth. His manner of dress taken together with his long black wavy hair and overly thick handlebar mustache are dead giveaways.

  “I knew you were an asshole from the moment I met you, Balkis,” I say, the words feeling as if they’re peeling themselves away from the back of my throat. “But I didn’t know you were this much of a pathological asshole.”

  He slowly bends at the knees, backhands me across the mouth. My head spins and I taste the iron of my blood on my now split upper lip. When I get a hold of this lunatic—and I will get ahold of him if it’s the last thing I do—I’m gonna break his nose.

  “Silence, Yankee scum,” he barks. “I will do the talking.”

  “Maybe you should put some duct tape over my mouth.”

  “What, pray tell, is this duct tape you speak of?”

  Who exactly is this lunatic and how did I end up inside this place?

  “Cut the shit, Balkis—”

  “Stop!” He raises his right hand in a dramatic, actor-like fashion. “Who is this Balkis?”

  “It’s you, dummy. The madman who cold-cocked me upstairs.”

  “I am not that man. You know me as John Wilkes Booth.”

  I’m sure I’m smiling. Because I can feel the muscles in my face tightening, contracting.

  Me laughing aloud.

  He bitch slaps me again.

  I yank on the shackles, the sound of metal slapping against the stone wall filling the square space. To no avail.

  “Okay, Balkis…ummm, exc
use me…Mr. Booth. What’s this all about? You kill the Girvins and bury them somewhere? Did you do it so you could somehow lay claim to their house and the dress that might be hidden inside it? There a deed somewhere with your name newly printed on it? What did you promise the Girvins to convince them to sign the joint over to you? Did you tell them that you and you alone represented the university? Fool them into believing it? And once that was done and they realized they’d been duped, you killed them in your rather, ummm, dramatic fashion using the same weapons the real Booth used to kill Lincoln?”

  His eyes go wide. “I know nothing of which you speak, Yankee.”

  Another slap. This one hard enough to make my eyes water. “What fucking planet are you from?”

  The hand raised again.

  “Wait…wait…wait, Mr. Booth. I apologize. I’m really, really sorry about how things turned out in the war and I think you had every right to shoot Lincoln in the head.”

  He slowly lowers his hand, relaxes his grip. “That meddling man did not only destroy the Southern union, he destroyed a way of life, and an entire people.”

  “This isn’t about slavery, is it?”

  “Of course not. Man has a right to own slaves if he wishes. This is more about one man believing he is above the law and the Constitution of the United States of America. That was your Mr. Lincoln.”

  “So, what exactly do you want of me?”

  “You, Mr. Baker, are going to dig up Clara’s dress for me.”

  “Why do you want it, Mr. Booth? It contains the spilled blood of Lincoln and Henry Rathbone. Won’t it repulse you to be in the possession of something so closely linked with the men you must abhor the most on this flat earth?”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Baker, that dress is no longer of this earth. It is a direct link to Lincoln and his spirit. If I possess the dress, I possess the ability to reverse the curse and haunt the man’s spirit for all eternity. But first, you must find it for me.”

  Reverse the curse…

  Okay, stop the damn train because I wanna get off. What I mean is, I’ve run into a few lunatics over the course of my career, but this guy takes the cake and the platter it was served on, too. Call in the white coats!

  “The dress doesn’t exist. Clara’s son burned it, remember?”

  “A wives’ tale to be sure. The dress was too important. Too haunted. Too powerful to be burned. Had her boy attempted to put a lit match to it, he would have been exposed to the curse and suffered a great injury. Something fatal and ugly. As it is, he lived a long, healthy life which means he went nowhere near the cursed dress.”

  Upstairs in Clara’s bedroom closet…The brick wall…It’s still there…But Balkis/Booth doesn’t know about the hole in the bedroom floor.

  I think it over for a minute. Clearly this man is out of his gourd. Nuts. Beyond nuts. On the way to the looney bin crazy. But I’m shackled to a stone wall. And if I ever expect to be unshackled, I should probably play along with his ridiculous game of partnering up with John Wilkes Booth to find Clara’s ancient dress.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay what, Mr. Baker?”

  “Okay, I’ll help you, Mr. Booth.”

  He pauses a moment, grows a crafty grin.

  “I see now,” he says, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  “See what, whack job?”

  The backhand that wallops the left side of my face doesn’t hurt anymore. It just pisses me off further.

  “How long shall we keep this up, Mr. Baker? Until I break your jaw? Or perhaps knock out a tooth?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “As you were saying…Mr. Booth?”

  “I said, I see. As in, I see what you are up to. You wish to work with me in order that I unshackle you, and once that’s done, you will do your best to bring physical harm to my person. And that, I’m afraid, I cannot allow.”

  Okay, so he’s on to me. He might be a total looney, but he’s not as dumb as I thought. Still, he needs to unshackle me if I’m to help him out.

  “So what are your suggestions?” I say. “I help you out by using mental telepathy?”

  “Not at all.” He smiles. Then, “On your knees.”

  Staring into his big brown eyes. “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “Sic Semper Tyrannus,” I whisper.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Oh,” I say. “I, uhh, can’t wait to see what your sick plan is, Mr. Booth.”

  Shifting onto my knees carefully without breaking my wrists against the shackles, he backsteps into the darker recesses of the basement-slash-dungeon, messes with something laid out on a table, carries it back over to me. What I see takes me by complete surprise, considering this man is supposed to be caught up in some sort of bizarre Twilight Zone time warp. It’s a belt loaded with plastic explosive.

  “Allow me, please,” he says, wrapping the belt around my waist, buckling it tightly against my lower spine.

  Well, I’ll be a dumb son of a bitch. Balkis might not be dealing with reality, but he certainly knows how to raise the stakes. He pulls a good old-fashioned skeleton key from the pocket of his trousers and unlocks each of my wrists.

  As I stand, he holds out something that looks like a smartphone. That’s because it is a smartphone. How odd it appears in the hand of some reenactment aficionado flashback from 1865. And to think he pretended to never hear of duct tape.

  “One false move,” he explains. “One single attempt at running away, or to do me physical harm, and I will punch the single digit that will blow you straight to the kingdom of hell along with Mr. Lincoln. Do I make myself clear?”

  He could be bluffing, of course. The stuff wrapped around my waist might be Play Dough for all I know. But I feel the weight of the belt against my torso, and I have no reason not to believe it’s the real deal. C-4, which, if detonated, would not simply cut me in two. It would pretty much evaporate me.

  “Very clear, Mr. Booth,” I say.

  “We shall commence our work together,” he says. “Now tell me, Mr. Baker, what exactly were you doing in Clara Harris’s bedroom prior to my walking in on you?”

  13

  I ponder the question for a moment.

  Why not just be honest with him, Baker, and admit you found the brick wall?

  Taking a careful, non-threatening step forward, I say, “I found it, Booth. I found the wall.”

  His face lights up like a lamp.

  “But let me ask you something first,” I go on. “In all the years the Girvin’s lived here, before their unfortunate…ummm…disappearance, didn’t they search the joint for the dress?”

  What I really want to ask Balkis is if he chained them up down in the basement, put a gun to their heads and tried to make them talk. But I’m in no position to start lobbing accusations with enough explosive wrapped around my mid-section to force doctors to ID me by my teeth should I piss him off sufficiently.

  “Alas,” he says, raising his eyes up to the dark, rough wood ceiling, as if looking through the timbers to heaven, “it’s possible the Girvins searched their entire lives and in the end, decided to believe in the legend. That Henry Riggs Rathbone Jr. did indeed break down the brick wall you speak of, take possession of the dress, and burn it.” His lit face burns even brighter. Then, “Clearly my instincts have served me right in selecting you to find Clara’s relic. It would be a shame to have to blow you up.”

  “I’ll do my best to serve the cause,” I say. “Besides, who needs all that mess?”

  14

  We trudge our way back up two flights of stairs.

  Me and all the death wrapped around my waist, and Balkis aka John Wilkes Booth with his smartphone stuffed in his trouser pocket and a five pound mash hammer gripped in his right hand. Heart beating in my throat, I take the lead while Balkis remains a good five or six steps behind me. Makes me think that if the time comes to blow me to smithereens, he’ll be able to place as much distance between “me and thee” as possible in as brief a
mount of time as possible.

  At the top of the stairs I head into a short corridor and hook a left into Clara’s bedroom where, not too long ago, Balkis knocked me cold. Why Balkis felt compelled to drag me down into that dungeon in the first place is anybody’s guess. But I’m sure dramatics had something to do with it. He is the civil war reenactor after all. Together, we push the bed out of the way, stand before the hole in the floor.

  Meantime, I await his direction.

  He hands me the mash hammer. At the same time, he pulls out his smartphone, positions his thumb on the particular nasty digit.

  “I’m going to assume you’re smarter than that,” he says, shooting a glance at the weighty mash hammer.

  Out the corner of my eye, I see the butcher knife on the floor. Again, he’s nuts, but he’s sharper than I thought because he sees me eyeing the knife.

  He bursts out laughing.

  “Don’t even think about it, Baker,” he says, shifting himself over to the spot where the knife sits on the floor. He bends at the knees, picks the blade up, walks it over to the window where he pulls back the curtain. Breaking one of the panes with the blade, he then tosses it out the opening.

  Crap. No more knife…

  The heart pulsing in my throat is now accompanied by a dry mouth and beads of sweat on my brow.

  “Down the stairs please,” he says.

  Turning back to Booth/Balkis.

  “I need a light,” I say, remembering my small LED light that’s now AWOL. “A flashlight.”

  At first, he shoots a look over his shoulder at the kerosene lamp. Then he issues an aggravated exhale while punching a couple of commands into the smartphone which initiates an LED flashlight app.

  I hold my breath while a shot of ice cold chill shoots up and down my spine.

  Christ almighty, what if he mistakenly hits the wrong digit?

  Of course, I wouldn’t know what hit me should that happen. Or so I can only hope.