Absentee List_An Old Horse Mystery

by Elskan Triumph

  They told him to stop it, but he hadn’t. Now, here stood Amanda Tomlinson one month in and in a panic as to what to do. She was looking for a life ring. In her car were her backpack and winter coat and boots, but she had dressed with nice shoes and a decent outfit because this was important. ‘I am filled with rage,’ he thinks.

  Idiot!

  “I don’t have kids,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “You know why?”

  “Why?” she asked, anger showing in her voice, knowing his answer wouldn’t help her. None of this had helped, only brought it all back to her.

  “Because they don’t know anything. I don’t mind that they don’t know anything, but then you have to do everything for them.”

  “Then why did you become a teacher?”

  “Because by the end of the year they know what I care about, and don’t need me. Anyway, I’m a facilitator. If you think about everything we did, all I did was help you see what you knew.”

  “That’s true.” For six months she had been angry in Horse’s class, but the last three she had felt like this—wondering what Horse’s enigmas and koans and puzzles had to do with her. She got up and stood by the desk, not knowing what to do with her hands.

  “So, you know what to do. Now you have the information. Make a decision. Talk to your father. Or not. Thanks for the visit. Let’s go back to some awkward conversation about how you’re doing before you go off and lead your life.”

  Amanda nearly ran into the state trooper as she left.

  “I was wondering when you’d come,” Horse said fatefully, looking at the uniform in the doorway. Then he laughed at his own joke, but didn’t get out of his chair to greet the man. “I’m only surprised it’s so soon.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” the trooper asked calmly.

  He was trim and over six feet tall. Standing in the door, clad in the standard dull green uniform, he did not fill it, but did not shrink in it, either. Entering, he held his campaign hat with both hands. Had he worn it, the door’s lintel would have knocked it off, but he habitually took it off when entering a building. It was part of the training.

  “Of course, I’m always happy to help our men in green.”

  “Am I going to get an honest answer?” the trooper asked. He was joking, but without a trace of humor. It wasn’t only the tone of authority a state trooper might usually take; this trooper had once been a student of Horse’s. That was years ago, and he doubted the old teacher would remember him. But he was an adult now, a man of authority and power. The trooper knew that Horse needed a stern warning shot for the interview to have any value.

  “Of course.”

  This answer did not inspire confidence, nor was it supposed to. Horse looked down at the correcting that wasn’t getting done, and then glanced at the clock. In his refridgerator sat two cold beers. But his curiosity was piqued; the trooper might have information about Peter.

  “Not a lie by omission,” the trooper said. “Or a clever answer that is technically the truth but, later, it turns out you’re just jerking me around?”

  Horse’s eyes narrowed, and then a smirk crossed his face.

  “I’m not a leprechaun or genie for an old story,” he replied, “only a good citizen.”

  “One of those good citizens that refuses to answer just to prove you have the right.”

  “If I lie, arrest me.”

  “Just the same,” the trooper warned. He had not moved completely into the room, yet. In order to establish the roles, he barred the door with his body, as if to say, you can only leave through me. It was empty posturing. Being in his old room, standing before his old teacher, something subtle flinched. Part of him was that twelve-year-old boy.

  Only a small part, but Horse saw it.

  “I know you.”

  Horse leaned forward and squinted, mostly for effect. He wore glasses, which did not fully fix his vision problems, but he knew the boy.

  “Daniel Danielson,” the trooper said, cutting short Horse’s memory search. “I was your student.”

  Looking him up and down, Horse said, “That must have been quite a while ago.”

  “I was thinking about it on the drive over. Eighteen years.”

  “I can’t remember…”

  “My son is in first grade here,” the man added.

  To Horse, younger pupils meant little. It was his habit to not learn anything about the students until they were sitting in the seats in front of him. Tabula rasa, he claimed. Clean slate. Mostly, he couldn’t be bothered.

  “I’ll look for him,” he lied.

  The trooper stepped forward and pulled out a seat; the same one Amanda had just left.

  “Were you at the Johnson house last night?” he asked.

  “Dan’s?” Horse replied in a familiar tone.

  “Yes. Daniel Johnson and Peter Johnson’s home,” the trooper confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “I went to the neighbor to see if the boy was okay. The kid, Peter, looked pretty shaken up sitting in the office.”

  “Is he your student?”

  “No,” Horse responded. “But I think you already know that.”

  Trooper Danielson ignored this.

  “So, you spoke with Mr. Bissonette?”

  “It wasn’t much of a conversation.”

  “Why did you go to the house?”

  “Did I go to the house?”

  “We know a lot,” the trooper replied.

  His tone was one of a friendly warning. Their relationship had not changed; Horse, the teacher, sat judging little Daniel as he sat in his little seat. That he was a trooper, had legal authority, and carried a gun did not matter. The worst part was that Daniel knew that Horse was doing nothing but being Horse. Still, he had to say the lines.

  “Right now, I could take you in for questioning. Charge you for trespassing and knowingly contaminating a crime scene.”

  They rang hollow as they left his throat.

  “That seems excessive.”

  “Isn’t excessive how you get results?”

  Horse looked at him again, hard. But said nothing.

  Finally, Daniel. It clicked, who this child is.

  Daniel Danielson.

  Horse added a qualifier—the only thing he remembered about the boy, whose face he could half recall, in the eyes and the meaty brow.

  “The pyromaniac,” he said.

  This time, it was Trooper Danielson who said nothing.

  “Your science fair was interesting,” Horse said.

  He recalled the experiment and chuckled.

  “Do you still have the scar?”

  There was a moment. For anyone other than these two, they would not have known what had passed: an understanding.

  “Yes.”

  “Still play with matches?”

  “Not since that day.”

  Neither betrayed an emotion.

  Satisfied, Horse answered fully. “I was in the Johnson home. And I went to the Bissonette house to see if Peter was okay. But I went to the Johnson home out of curiosity.”

  “What did you expect to see?”

  “I don’t know. A corpse?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I didn’t really expect to, either.”

  “So, what did you find?”

  “Dan’s been gone a while.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “One toothbrush. But look at the food; it’s all something a twelve-year-old would buy.”

  “I would have bought candy,” the trooper replied.

  “You weren’t a responsible twelve-year-old.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He bought a new toothbrush. In health class we teach the kids to change their toothbrush every three months, but we basically rely on parents to do it.”

  “That would indicate that Dan’s around to do it.”

  “Except, Dan’s toothbrush is gone.”

  “Or Dan took it wi
th him when he packed for the job.”

  “I checked. There’s a travel toiletry bag in the bathroom closet. Inside were two cases for toothbrushes.”

  “He got a new case,” Danielson countered.

  “Or he pocketed it into his Carharts.”

  “Or….”

  “Or Peter changed his toothbrush at the three month interval, and when he did it he tossed Dan’s as well…”

  “… because he knows he’s not coming back.”

  “And the food is somewhat nutritious. No candy. But it shows the uncreative binge nature of a twelve-year-old. Why buy one box of Pop Tarts when you can buy a case? I’m guessing every meal is the same.”

  Horse looked out the window, wondering to himself who his next visitor would be. The stack of correcting had less importance than it did ten minutes before. ‘A good pint might hit the spot,’ he thought. Better a poured pint with a friend than a cold bottle alone. In his mind, he pictured a calendar; Wells did not have any meetings he could think of. ‘A pint it is.’

  “Anything else?” the trooper asked.

  “The boy didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t say he did.”

  But I thought it.

  That Horse vouches for the boy carried a lot of weight with Danielson, which sent his mind further towards other possibilities.

  “But that’s the thinking. Why else would he stay quiet? No?”

  “Why else would he stay quiet?” Danielson said, curious what theories Horse might come up with.

  “If he killed his father, he’d have gotten rid of the photos. Patricide is the act of an angry kid, even if it’s a crime of passion. The family room was filled with photos of him and his dad. An angry kid would have destroyed them. Or he’d be in denial and not want to face them.”

  “Perhaps it was an accident.”

  “Maybe.”

  For the moment, they had said all either wanted to say. The trooper looked around the classroom. ‘Same projects,’ he thought, looking at a poster showing the three brances of government.Only the president’s picture in the executive branch had changed. On the bookshelves were a host of new titles and colorful covers, but he noted that Horse had kept the old classics front-and-center.

  “Trial by Fire,” Horse said, breaking the silence.

  “What?” the trooper asked, startled. Then he smiled. “Yes, that was the name of my science fair project.”

  “It was a good one,” Horse admitted. “You took it all the way to state.”

  “And lost,” the trooper reminded him.

  “And got a silver medal and a $50 prize.”

  “And a nice scar.”

  “You never seemed that bright until then,” Horse said, rising from his chair. He stretched—too much time sitting and listening. Walking around his own desk, he now stood above the sitting boy. Dressed in his uniform, Danielson had a presence that was missing eighteen years ago. “Silver was quite an accomplishment; you had zero academic skills. And you don’t play with matches anymore.”

  “No,” he said, looking down at where the scar lay, under his uniform.

  “Do you still have the medal?”

  The trooper did. In fact, he had built a case for such things. On the wall in a room off of his living room hung his diploma from UVM and the certificate making him a Vermont State Trooper. Under it was his hand built case. The case held the real prizes. His wife had several, from high school debate team to a solid finish in the Vermont City Marathon. There was a project his son made in kindergarten—a type of useless unbalanced clay pot the boy was especially proud of. Under glass, they were all valued and shown with pride. Visitors often commented how nice it was that the whole family displayed its accomplishments. In the corner, not asking for attention, was a silver medal on a blue ribbon. When Daniel looked at the case, that was what he saw first.

  His wife didn’t know—he’s never told her—that the case itself was part of the prize. She met him in college, after he had decided to go into law enforcement. To her, he had always been straight, with a short haircut and solid features. But, earlier, he had burned a few things. It was something that went further than most kids’ experiments with fire. His science fair had been centered around fire; an excuse to fool around.

  It had all gone wrong.

  ‘Horse must have known it would, ‘ Danielson had always thought. After the incident, no one had said a word—not Horse, or his father, and especially not him. No words were needed. Thinking about it later, he had felt shame, even as he knew that kid was far gone.

  The screaming chickens cured him.

  There were eight, and three lived. For their lives, Daniel had gotten burns on his arms and back as he ran into the blaze he himself had set and grabbed them in an inefficient wildness only a panicked twelve-year-old could manage. His father hit him, which he’d never done before—not even a spanking. Looking at the burns on his son and the smoldering coop and scarred survivors and burned dead, his father walked up to him and hit him across the face. For that moment, and the few that followed, the screech of the chickens abated.

  Then, his father had cried.

  When the fire was finally out, Daniel took some of the salvageable lumber and the glass from the window that had somehow survived and made a case. At the time, he didn’t know what he would build; when it was done he thought he might donate it to the school.

  Penance.

  Atonement.

  An apology to his dad… everyone. And then he had won the science fair—won a silver medal—and he knew what to put in it. Inside, he put his new life, rebuilt from the ashes of his old one.

  “Yes,” he said to Horse. “I still have the medal.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was cold and dark and snow fell in the beams of the halogen lights atop thin aluminum poles that stood guard around the driveway perimeter. They illuminated a group of about twenty middle-aged men, most wearing insulated sienna coveralls and holding coffee cups in worn, bear hands, all waiting for direction. Someone laughed, and other voices rose above the moan of the generator that powered the lights; the power had not yet been restored at Dan’s house.

  Around the mouth of the driveway were several trucks with Laporte Contracting logos painted on the side. They poured out and down the side of the road. Laporte used a simple logo—Laporte Contracting—in simple four-inch-high white Helvetica type neatly painted on the door of every vehicle, each of which was painted a royal blue. Mixed in were a few other trucks belonging to contractors—Grace Haven Electrical, Bronson Masonry, and a couple of roofers. There were a few unmarked, but they were clearly subcontractors; Horse noted the tools of a sheetrocker in one. Another dozen cars in varying stages of rust and decay were also scattered about. Standing at the top of the drive, waiting, Horse saw that several of the men had a familiarity that goes with years of working on the same jobsite; contractors and subcontractors and workers moving from job to job, place to place, but their connection to each other moved with them. One of Laporte’s men had brought enough coffee for the entire crew—he had parked a truck near the house, outfitted with a large, beaten, brown, ten-gallon plastic dispenser that sat on the tailgate. Laporte Contracting was stenciled on the side, barely visible under a host of scratches.. Most of those standing around held steaming paper cups in their hands, although a few had royal blue travel mugs.

  Beside the coffee truck were two state trooper vehicles and yet another Laporte Contracting truck, this one with a plow on the front. Horse concluded the police were not yet looking at this as a murder investigation as the plow would have destroyed possible evidence—a pile of snow had been dumped where Peter, Mr. Bissonette, and Horse had trampled between the door and the barn.

  “Still, if foul play is not being considered, why isn’t the search being pursued with a bit more urgency,” Horse thought.

  “You aren’t Peter’s teacher?” the man next to Horse asked.

  “No,” Horse replied. He looked at the man—one of Laporte’s men,
he figured from the conversation he had overheard earlier about digging a foundation in the frost—and then wondered if he had once had one of his kids.

  “Too bad,” the man said. “That kid needs someone to kick him in the ass.”

  Horse said nothing.

  “You don’t remember me.”

  “Did I have your kid?”

  “You had me!” the man shouted, adding a short laugh.

  Horse looked at him. ‘He’s smiling,’ he thought. That’s a good sign.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty.”

  Horse did the math in his head. He felt old and rubbed his beard, feeling the gray hairs through his gloves.

  “Eighteen years ago,” Horse muttered.

  “About,” the man said. “I have a daughter in sixth grade.”

  ‘Which means you got someone knocked up six years after you left my classroom.’ Horse thought about what the mother must be like.Shifting his feet, which had become numb, Horse didn’t know where to put his eyes. He hated conversations like this. If it continued, he’d find himself scolding this man for choices Horse thought unwise. It happened too often, Wells said. It isn’t why I’m here,’ Horse thought.

  Looking down, he saw that the man had a travel mug with a big handle on the side. ‘Why do they put handles on travel mugs,’ he thought to himself. Every year, parents gave him various travel mugs. Those with handles never fit the cup holder in his car, and got tossed. Useless. Looking around, he noticed that the three people with similar travel mugs held the base and ignored the handle.

  “What are you thinking?” his former student asked him.

  “I was wondering why your coffee mug has a handle.” Horse nodded down at it. “You grab the base.”

  “Dunno,” the man replied. “I’ve never thought about it.” It was clear from his expression that he hadn’t. Then he added, “Laporte gave them to us at Christmas.” Horse noted that Laporte Contracting was printed on the side. He looked at the other men and noted that they, too, held Laporte Contracting mugs.

  “Quite a holiday bonus,” Horse muttered.

  “Well, each had a hundred bucks inside.” The man chuckled.