by Jaime Maddox
“My grandfather saved those people in 1920.”
“Yes, I know that. My cousin tells me you’re quite the historian, Mr. Burns. One day I’d like to take you to the archives at the Parker Company and let you look through the documents we have there. There’s quite a bit of information about your grandfather.”
Robbie grudgingly agreed. “That’d be nice, but what do you want with my watch?”
Danny pointed back to the paper. “The next three watches were made a little differently. They had gold faces, like yours. They had a diamond chip at the twelve o’clock position. I believe the gold content is also higher. You can see from the receipt that these watches cost a hundred and thirty dollars back then. They were given to Cowboy, Dale, and Daniel Parker V.”
Robbie was studying the face of his watch, verifying what Danny had just told him. The face was in fact gold, and the diamond chip was glinting in the sunlight. When he didn’t reply, Danny said, “The last watch—the one that cost a hundred and fifty dollars—was similar to the other three, with one huge exception. Just like your watch, the winding stem was set on the left at the nine o’clock position.”
“This doesn’t prove anything!” Robbie was trembling as he stood. Clearly he understood the point Danny was trying to make.
“Of all those fifty-two watches made, Mr. Burns, there was only one left-handed watch. It was made for David Parker, Sandy’s grandfather, and stolen from their home on Canal Street during the Agnes flood.”
“Get out! I will not have you accuse me of theft! My grandfather was a hero and this is his watch, not your grandfather’s,” he said, nodding and pointing at Sandy. Gone was the gentle soul Sandy had once known, replaced by an angry man she didn’t recognize and suddenly feared. Perhaps she had been unwise to come here and challenge him in this way. She should have done this with her lawyer.
As they stood to leave, a sound behind them startled them. An ATV bearing a man in full camouflage pulled into the garage and stopped just a few feet from them. A rifle was strapped across his back. When he stood and removed his helmet, both Sandy and Danny took a step back toward the desk.
The man appeared rabid, with wild unkempt hair and a beard that grew down to his chest, a grimace on his face and fire in his eyes.
Sandy and Danny stared at the gravedigger, surveying his camouflage boots and pants and coordinating green long-sleeve T-shirt. Sandy had seen many hunters similarly dressed, so it wasn’t his appearance that frightened her. It was the look of evil in his eyes that caused her heart to pound faster.
“Don’t you believe a word they told you, Robbie. They’re lying.” The man spat his tobacco juice onto the floor and it splattered, nearly hitting Sandy’s sneaker.
Danny had quickly recovered. “How would you know what we’re discussing, Mr…?”
Robbie took the cue from Danny and introduced his older brother, Billy. Sandy wouldn’t have recognized him if Robbie hadn’t made the introduction. He had been an average-looking young man in his early twenties at the time of the flood, putting him in his early sixties now. He looked much older, with a chilling resemblance to the Unabomber. Seeing him now, she remembered him then. A bit odd. Never very friendly. He hadn’t spent much time at the Parkers’, but on the night of the flood, when every pair of hands was needed, he’d been there. He was the one who’d stolen the watch!
The gun across his back suddenly made Sandy very nervous. They needed to get out of the deserted cemetery, fast.
“We were just discussing your brother’s watch, Mr. Burns.” Apparently Danny felt none of the anxiety that was building within Sandy. Like a lawyer on cross-examination, he seemed to be just getting started with his questions.
“Maybe we should go,” Sandy suggested, fighting the rising panic surging like bile in her gut.
The quick turn of his head forecast an argument, but he must have recognized the fear in her eyes, because after looking at her for a moment, he nodded. “We’ll speak another time, Mr. Parker. Take good care of that watch.” As they turned to go, they found themselves staring down the barrel of Billy’s rifle. He stood a dozen feet away, his legs spread wide for balance and the gun pointed directly at the two feet of space between them.
“You’re not going anywhere! Sit down!” Billy screamed. The gun waved in his dancing arms as he gestured to them, causing Sandy and Danny to jump back into their seats. Sandy didn’t dare take her eyes off the gun to look at Danny, but she could suddenly hear his breathing.
Robbie, who was still standing, began to creep out from behind his desk, moving toward his brother. Or perhaps moving out of the line of fire? “Hold on, Billy! This is stupid. You don’t want to hurt these people over a watch!”
Billy shook his head. “Stay still, brother. Don’t you see? This isn’t about that damn watch!”
Sandy had a difficult time pulling her eyes off the gun, so she couldn’t see Robbie’s expression. Yet she could hear the confusion in his voice. “What’s going on, Billy? Why do you want to hurt these people?”
She shifted in her seat, causing Billy to point the gun directly at her chest. “You keep still, Ms. Parker. I might have missed you from two hundred yards, but I won’t miss from five feet.”
Sandy recoiled at his words. He’d robbed the Parker house on Canal Street and tried to kill her, and now he was going to try again. Suddenly the fears and frustrations of the past two weeks boiled over. “You? You shot me? And you robbed my family? You bastard! What did my family ever do to you? What did I ever do to you?” She rose in her seat to confront the gunman.
“You shut up!” Billy screamed, pulling the rifle up to his eye to sight the target at Sandy. “And sit back down!”
As her good sense returned, she sat down, as Robbie began to plead. “Billy!” He tried to calm his brother. “Who cares about the watch? It’s no big deal. I’ll give it back. It’s not worth killing someone for!”
“It’s not about the damn watch,” Billy repeated, sounding calmer than he had during the entire episode. Shaking his head, he let out a sigh. “Robbie, where do you think Daddy got all that money after the flood? Do you really think he was that great a contractor that we were suddenly rich?”
Robbie shook his head no, denying what his brother was telling him. “No, don’t say that! Dad worked hard!”
“Daddy was a drunk! He robbed the Parkers on the night of the flood, and he killed the man who drove the boat to their house. He took their money, their paintings, their statues, their china! He took it all, Robbie! Then he killed the man who wanted to buy the artwork. And I was there! I saw him kill two men so you could have a decent life and a stupid watch. And for all these years I’ve been sweating it out, hoping no one ever learned the truth, because I was an accessory to those murders. And I do not intend to go to jail. If she hadn’t come back here, I wouldn’t have to do this. But I don’t have a choice, Robbie. It’s her or me.”
Robbie’s jaw dropped. All three of their jaws dropped. They were going to die, ironically, in the cemetery.
Why had Sandy had the idea to come here? Why hadn’t she met Robbie at Stookey’s or the Wyoming Valley Mall, or someplace crowded with pedestrians where a madman with a rifle wouldn’t have followed them?
“This is Pop’s watch!” Robbie exclaimed, giving his brother the same argument he’d given just a few minutes earlier to Sandy and Danny.
“Pop was poor, Robbie. That watch cost more than he made in a month. Why the hell didn’t the Parkers just give him money for being a hero? He didn’t need that stupid watch! He sold it to buy food for his family and to pay the rent. When Dad found Dr. Parker’s watch on the night of the flood, he kept it. That was his only souvenir of the robbery. He always thought Pop regretted selling the watch, and he took it for him.” Robbie shook his head, laughing. “He thought it was untraceable. He couldn’t even get that right, the bastard.”
“You can’t do this,” Sandy interjected, her voice soft, pleading. “No one cares about all that stuff that h
appened so long ago. But they will care about what happens today. If you kill us, you’ll be found. My family knows I’m here.” She tipped her head toward Danny. “His family knows he’s here. They’ll come looking here, and you and your brother will go to jail.”
Billy laughed. “I’ll take my chances. Now both of you, stand up.”
Danny had been silently watching and listening to the events unfold, cursing his vanity. He’d wanted to be the hotshot lawyer and break the case, solve the puzzle about the stolen watch and look like a hero to his father. He’d wanted to prove his father wasn’t a murderer. Well, in that, at least, he was successful. If he’d told Sandy what he knew about the stolen art, though, she would have figured out there was more involved in this than the watch. She probably wouldn’t have rushed over here like this, and they wouldn’t be facing their executioner right now.
Danny didn’t want to die. His life was just beginning. He was about to graduate college and was going to law school. He had so much to look forward to.
Assessing the situation, he thought he might be able to take down the gunman. Although Billy was tall, Danny was muscular and younger, and all he needed was a split-second advantage and the element of surprise to subdue the guy. When they were ordered to stand, he’d begun to formulate a plan. He hadn’t quite worked out the details when Billy told them to begin walking and he prayed that wouldn’t matter.
Sandy was already in front of him, and he fell in behind her as Billy pointed the way out the open garage door and toward the woods behind the cemetery. They began their death march with the brothers behind them, arguing. Robbie’s frantic pleas to his brother might be all the distraction Danny needed.
He slowed his stride a bit as the hill behind the garage steepened, narrowing the gap between him and his would-be assassin. Sensing Billy was close enough to him, Danny suddenly stopped, leaned forward, then sent a ferocious back kick into the man’s abdomen. He spun and, as Billy faltered, Danny blasted him with another kick and a sequence of punches to the gut and then finally a knee to the face that knocked him to his knees. Danny kicked the rifle away and Sandy, alerted by their scuffle, grabbed it, pointing it at the man who lay moaning on the ground. His nose was broken, blood poured from both nostrils, and his ragged breathing indicated a few ribs were probably injured as well.
Robbie stood helplessly, staring first at his brother on the ground and then at Sandy holding a powerful gun in her hands. Not sure she could trust Robbie, Sandy ordered him down beside his brother.
She glanced at Danny, who was catching his breath after the sequence of kicks and punches he’d thrown. He caught her eye and she nodded her approval. “Nice work,” she commented. “And I thought kickboxing was just for exercise.”
Danny rubbed the knuckles on his right hand. “So did I.”
When the police arrived ten minutes later, the Burns brothers were still sitting there, side by side on the hill behind the cemetery. What had started at Riverview with Nellie’s funeral just three weeks earlier was finished there as well.
Sandy thought she might just give it another forty years before she came back again.
Chapter Eighteen
A Smooth-Talking Lawyer
Sandy sipped her coffee as she read the complimentary copy of USA Today offered at the East Mountain Inn. Located at the foothills of Bear Creek Mountain, this hotel was in an area that had been entirely wooded when she lived here as a young girl, an area like nearby Mountaintop that had exploded with development in the wake of Agnes. The flood that reached this area would have to cover 95 percent of the planet with water.
She had arrived early for this meeting—she always felt it gave her the upper hand—and was killing time as she waited for the two other members of the Parker family to arrive with their attorney. This morning she was conferencing with Danny and his father, the cousin she hadn’t liked as a child and who she now knew was a thief. It was likely not him but rather his grandfather, Danny’s great-grandfather, who purchased her family’s art from Bill Burns, but she was certain her cousin knew where it had come from. The pieces were too unique, and famous within their family, to put their ownership in doubt. Likewise, he might not have orchestrated the opening of the Anthracite Landfill on her land, but for the last three decades he’d been running it, and to keep his fraud from discovery he’d been paying the tax bill sent to her dead grandfather. He’d been reaping the profits as well.
For a reason probably known only to them, her grandfather and his brother had never been close. Their children weren’t either. Their parents hadn’t encouraged the cousins to form a bond, and without that push, they just didn’t have enough in common to develop a lasting relationship. That was one reason Nellie and Sandy had been able to walk away after Agnes. With David dead, and then Jeannie, neither of them had a tie to the Wyoming Valley to keep them there. Nellie’s relationship with her own family was by far the better one, making the move to Mount Pocono the right choice for her.
Sandy often thought the gods must move the chess pieces on the board of life. Losing her home in Agnes had been the worst thing that ever happened to her—other than the death of the women she loved, of course—but it had shaped her life in a wonderful way. With Nellie in Mount Pocono it had been so much easier for Sandy to leave for New York. Just an hour away by bus, she was comfortable knowing she could easily return if her grandmother needed her. And she knew Nellie wasn’t alone, for her siblings and their families always welcomed her grandmother as their own.
As she sipped her coffee, Sandy hoped this meeting would go better than the last meeting with their branch of the family tree. That was the day that Dale, Danny’s great-grandfather, had been sent packing when he tried to convince Nellie to sell him her shares of the company and her real-estate interests. Dale must have developed an ulcer when Nellie refused to sell him the land he’d already used to open his landfill.
After the events at the cemetery a week earlier, she and Danny had both been quite shaken. When they had finished their statements to the police and were excused, Danny had silently climbed into Sandy’s car for the ride to Wilkes-Barre, where he’d left his own vehicle the day before when he’d boarded the bus for New York. Once at the bus terminal, instead of climbing out of her car, Danny unbuckled his seat belt and turned toward her. He then began a confession that sent Sandy’s head spinning yet once again.
When he finished telling her his story—about all the pieces of stolen art he knew were at his father’s house, about his reasons for not telling her earlier, and about his speculations about how it must have come into his great-grandfather’s possession—Danny apologized profusely for not informing her earlier. He blamed himself that they were nearly killed.
Sandy didn’t necessarily agree with him. She already knew that someone had robbed her house on Canal Street and suspected they had taken much more than the watch, whose discovery had seemingly set the wheels of this drama in motion. Having known that her great-uncle’s family possessed the art probably wouldn’t have altered her decision to meet Robbie at the cemetery that day. She couldn’t have anticipated the actions of a madman, which Billy Burns seemed to be.
Over the course of the week since his arrest, information had poured forth from many sources, describing the strange behavior and volatile personality of the man who’d attempted to murder her. The police told her he’d been in and out of trouble his entire adult life, not for serious crimes, but for the types that would indicate an underlying mental illness that periodically flared up, causing dramatic behaviors that drew the attention of the law. He opened packages of food in the grocery store, sitting in the middle of the aisle and eating as other shoppers navigated around him. When he finished his meal he’d leave, not bothering to clean up his mess or pay for what he’d eaten. He shoplifted. He displayed road rage. He caused fights at sporting events.
When his misdeeds happened close to home, usually someone around who knew him steered him back on track and on his way home. If he ventured too
far away, though, he usually found himself in police custody until his brother Robbie could bail him out.
The police had found four Buster Brown shoe boxes in his house, fitting the description of the boxes of cash stashed in the attic of the house at One Canal Street. The boxes contained more than a hundred thousand dollars, mostly in bills dated from the 1950s. They described the house as meticulously clean and equipped with high-tech computer equipment and the most modern television on the market. On the bookshelves they found volumes of classic literature ranging from Shakespeare to Mark Twain, all of the books stolen from local libraries. They also discovered all manner of mechanical devices, including engines and generators, fans, and radios, all built from parts of other machines that this rather remarkable man had disassembled and reconfigured.
Obstinate in the first days of his incarceration, Billy had finally decided to cooperate with the police when they offered him the simple exchange of a book of Robert Frost’s poetry. He confessed to aiding his father on the night of the Agnes flood when the elder Bill Burns hired an acquaintance with a motorboat to drive them to the Parker house. He described the difficulty of keeping the boat stabilized in the swift current of the river, of the boat’s owner threatening to abandon Billy and his father as they entered the house one last time for the Remington statue. They had gone in through the rear, climbing up onto Sandy’s balcony to gain entry, and had made a dozen trips in and out of the house, hauling out boxes of money and other valuables. The boat had been tied to a rail, but the current was knocking it against the balcony, and the owner became anxious. He decided they had collected enough and commanded Billy and his father to return to the boat. Billy’s father had almost killed him then, but knew he needed him to navigate the boat in the rapidly rising Susquehanna. Later, after the boat was emptied of its treasures, his father had drowned the man.