“They’d come up from Augusta by night, one or two with a map,” Sarge said with a far-away look in his eyes. “There’d be a tap on my door, and I’d sneak ‘em down here and hide ‘em ‘til the next night and then send ‘em on their way with another map.” He and Lester were in the cellar of the mortuary where Lester had been assigned to sweep and clean. The cellar was a cavernous space divided into a warren of smaller rooms and alcoves surrounding a large central area used for building rough pine coffins.
“Look here.” Sarge stepped to one wall and squeezed behind a rack of lumber. There was a scraping sound and Sarge’s voice became muffled. “This leads to the old powder bunker.”
Lester followed Sarge to find an arched brick tunnel cut into the wall behind the rack. It ran about thirty feet and ended at three steps that led up to an iron-banded wooden door… and it was empty! Lester strode down the length of the tunnel only to find the door at the end firmly locked. He spun around at a soft noise behind him and stared, open mouthed, at a grinning Sarge.
While Lester gaped speechlessly, Sarge reached out a hand to push on a section of wall, which silently pivoted open revealing a small room containing a crude wooden bed. “I built this little hidey hole in 1865,” he said, “and you’re the first white man, besides me, ever to see it.”
The hidden room would remain a secret, known only to the two of them, for the rest of their lives.
Chapter 1.7
September 15, 1937
Carl Atherton stood six feet five and tipped the scales at 295 pounds of hard bone and angry muscle. At age forty, he had spent the last seventeen years in Bangor State Hospital after killing and dismembering a flock of sheep, and their seventy-four year old owner, when they strayed onto his pastureland. He had done the killings at the urging of his mother, a woman who had died giving him birth, leaving him to the tender mercies of a brutish father. Carl could not remember a time when his mother’s voice was not a constant whisper in his mind. In a highly debated ruling, the court had agreed with the clinical finding of ‘Dementia Praecox’, a condition the world would come to know as schizophrenia, but although the court had found him insane, most locals just described him as ‘just plain mean’. Committed to the Bangor State Hospital, he spent his first five or six years securely locked in a small cell; let out only for the infrequent cleaning and fumigation of the room and his regular barbiturate-induced coma therapy sessions which were conducted in a laboratory area. Advances in the treatment of schizophrenia found him enduring insulin shock therapy and the extreme cardio and respiratory stimulation of Cardiazol therapy in later years. On each of those happy occasions, the hospital’s burliest orderlies more than earned their pay.
Over the years though, the various coma and convulsion inducing treatments, and a gargantuan diet of opiates, had ground the rough edges off Carl to the point that he was now allowed to work in the hospital’s farm gardens during the day and enjoyed the relative freedom of a locked ward at night. Or so it was thought.
His huge frame, fearsome reputation and a demeanor obviously bereft of the slightest drop of the milk of human kindness easily concealed Carl’s innate intelligence. He had long ago fashioned a key for the ward door from a broken garden-rake tine which he kept hidden behind a loose tile on the window sill by his bed. Having achieved a fine balance between immunity and addiction to his daily drug fix, Carl spent many a content late night hour contentedly wandering the hospital halls, a monstrous wraith listening calmly to his Mother who still whispered, albeit not as loudly, in his head.
On this night, he listened impassively as she explained the wrongness he had sensed emanating like a foul excretion from the man in the bed before him. When the sleeping man woke, alerted by some primal sense to the imminent danger, Carl quietly and efficiently corrected the wrongness.
Abel Edgewink tipped his cap and gave a salacious wink to Heidi Hopewell as he strode past her house on his way to work. She was sitting on her front porch, in much the same position as he had left her the night before, ‘except,’ he thought, grinning, ‘her clothes are a little neater.’ He laughed out loud at her sudden blush and impulsively turned into the yard.
Abel was surprised by his feelings for the slender redhead who jumped down from the porch to meet him. Several times over the last few days, he had thought of her and caught himself wondering if she would come with him when he and Lester made their break. He forced that thought down once again as he grabbed her hands and swung her around. “Good morning,” he smiled. “Sleep well?”
Heidi pouted prettily. “No. I…”
“You stayed up ‘til all hours of the night with this scoundrel!” interrupted Doctor Hopewell from the front doorway. The smile on the doctor’s face belied the angry tone of his voice as he ambled across the porch and held out his hand to Abel. “I was going to call you in to the office today,” he said. “You’re done very good work as an orderly in the past two months, but I think we might be better served with you in the position of administrative assistant to my office.”
It took Abel a moment to realize that he’d just been promoted, but when he did, just for a moment, a swell of pride and self-congratulation pushed aside the constant mission of Lester’s escape. By the time he had somberly shaken Doctor Hopewell outstretched hand and impulsively hugged a squealing Heidi however, he was already calculating how this turn of events could improve his ability to help his brother.
In stolen moments over the past month, Lester and Abel had met and formulated a loose plan of action. When they left, they would head north into New Brunswick, and then west, and eventually south, back down to their native Iowa. Abel had already mapped out a route in a new atlas he’d purchased, and although he saw no problem in just slipping away in the night, Lester was enjoying the feeling of beating the system and was more inclined to think things through and wait for the right moment. He also wanted as much time as possible for the stolen jewels to cool down before he tried to convert them to cash. He worried continually about the bag of treasure concealed in his room though, and was now spending hours working in the cemetery and roaming the hospital grounds, getting people used to seeing him and disregarding him as harmless, looking for the ideal hiding place. In their last meeting, two days before, he had told Abel that he had found the perfect spot, but further discussion was curtailed as the large shadow of Carl Atherton fell across the doorway, followed by the orderly who was leading him back to his ward and then the floor nurse who had Lester’s daily dose of barbiturates (which he expertly palmed).
As they walked toward the hospital, Dr. Hopewell explained to Abel that he found himself too involved with the day-to-day administration of the hospital to explore and implement the progressive changes he envisioned for the non-clinical aspects of the facility. Abel’s new job would entail a combination of freeing up some of Dr. Hopewell’s time by helping with current administrative details and searching out areas that could benefit from changes to newer methods and procedures. Abel was a bright man, and even though he knew he wouldn’t be there much longer, he found it easy to chat about changes in the laundry procedures, using patients to clean up the overgrown hospital cemetery and better organization for the town volunteers because he had already considered these matters.
When they got to Doctor Hopewell’s office they were greeted at the door by his secretary, normally a bubbly personality, now ominously subdued. She grabbed the doctor’s sleeve and pulled him to the side to whisper in his ear. “I called your house, but you’d already left,” she said breathlessly. “We’ve had a murder! It’s that criminal, Edgewink. The nurse found him dead in his room this morning.”
Five minutes later, Abel stood in stunned silence beside Doctor Hopewell and a staff psychiatrist looking down at Lester’s body. As he fought to maintain his composure, he was vaguely aware of a high pitched ringing in his ears and a shadow of encroaching darkness at the edges of his vision. The room was neat with no sign of a struggle, and Abel barely resisted the urge to stare at
the apparently undisturbed floor vent. Lester lay on his back with the covers drawn up to his chin and his hands crossed neatly on his stomach. He might have been asleep were it not for the unnatural stillness of his chest, the greenish-gray skin and the fact that his head was turned nearly one hundred and eighty degrees into the pillow.
At Doctor Hopewell’s request, Abel went back to the office and called the police. Thinking hard, fighting his grief, he stumbled outside to wait for them and when a car with a uniformed officer and an older man in a brown suit arrived, he led them up to Lester’s room. The man in the brown suit looked over Lester’s body and then ushered everyone out of the room and posted the uniformed man as a guard awaiting the photographer and fingerprint man. He got a list of all of the hospital staff who had access to the floor from Doctor Hopewell, and another list of all the patients, and started doing interviews in an unused room.
Pleading illness, Abel left the hospital and walked down the hill to the trolley stop. He went home where he sat, benumbed, in his room until late afternoon shadows swept the light from the corners and then pulled a suitcase from beneath the bed and started to pack his few belongings.
Chapter 1.8
September 16, 1937
Penn Sloater got the call from his superior, the New England Regional Director, Peter Ross, just after noon.
“Dead?” he protested. “What happened? How…”
“That doesn’t matter,” interrupted Ross. “What matters is that he was the last link to the Edgewink gang’s loot, and now he’s gone and we’re left with our ass in our hand. I want you to get up there and take that town apart.” His voice rose threateningly. “And stay there ‘til you get some answers!”
Sloater hung up and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. After two months of searching, they had not caught so much as a sniff of Abel Edgewink or the loot, and now Lester was gone and with him Sloater’s chance of redemption. He groaned softly as he realized that his once promising career might well come to an end in Bangor, Maine.
Abel peered up and down the darkened hallway. He had returned to work this morning to find Lester’s body gone and his room empty. He worked stolidly through the day, shock and sadness replaced by grim resolve, and then remained at his desk as the office emptied in the late afternoon.
“I want to catch up on some of yesterday’s stuff,” he said when Doctor Hopewell suggested he come home with him for supper. “I feel a little guilty about leaving yesterday, but I’d sure like a rain check.” Sensing the shock the brutal murder had caused his young protégé, Doctor Hopewell patted him gently on the shoulder and left him in the empty office.
Once he was alone, Abel sat and thought while he waited for darkness. His meager belongings were already packed in his car, and he had some money and a note with his key ready to drop in the landlord’s mailbox. He had also written a note for Doctor Hopewell, explaining that a death in his family required him to leave. After he retrieved Lester’s loot, he’d be ready to start a new life, but he thought about the possibility of Heidi in his future and wondered if he was moving too fast.
When nightfall found him alone in the deserted hallway, Abel slipped into Lester’s room and went directly to the floor vent and pried it up, only to find the joist cavity empty.
No, not quite empty.
‘There’s someone watching me. I don’t know who, but I can feel it at night. I moved the bag to the mortuary tunnel. Behind the bricks on the left side. Look for my mark’.
The note was signed with Lester’s familiar wink monogram. Able sat for a moment on Lester’s stripped bed and glanced around uneasily, imagining glittering eyes peering out of the shadows of the dimly lit hallway.
Making up his mind, Abel shoved the note into his pocket and left Lester’s room. He made his furtive way off the floor, down to the cellar and through the cavernous laundry with its long lines of belt-driven washers, driers and presses. In a far corner of the room, past the cluster of laboratory rooms, a locked door opened onto stairs that led down into a dungeon-like sub-cellar, through which he could gain entry to the tunnel leading to the old mortuary. Abel descended the masonry stairs, slipping on the smooth treads, slick with condensed moisture.
Using a key from his ring, he opened the heavy, iron-banded door in the cellar wall near the base of the stairs and stepped into the tunnel behind. When he turned the wall switch just inside the door, a line of single electric bulbs running down the center of the domed seven foot ceiling blinked to life, pooling weakly at intervals that extended, glinting off small puddles of standing water, to a distant vanishing point. The air was thick, the brick walls damp to the touch. Although Abel had never walked this tunnel, he knew the mortuary was about four hundred feet from the back of the hospital building. Wishing he had thought to stop for a flashlight, Abel closed the door softly behind himself and started down the tunnel. Walking slowly in the dim light, he scanned the bricks of the left hand wall looking for Lester’s mark. Ten minutes later, having found nothing, he arrived at the door to the mortuary. Resisting the urge to panic, Abel turned and walked back, slowly scanning both side of the tunnel from floor to ceiling. At the end of two hours, sweating heavily in the humid dampness, Abel admitted defeat. There was no mark. There were no loose bricks. There was no future.
On Friday morning, Able stood beside Doctor Hopewell as Lester’s body was lowered into his grave in the hospital cemetery. He would return to the mortuary tunnel the next night, and many nights thereafter, with stronger lights and renewed hopes, but in the end, he unpacked his belongings, tore up the notes that were to have explained his absence, and settled in for a long search.
Sloater arrived in Bangor at four pm on Friday. He had called ahead, and Raymond Libby, the Bangor police inspector who was handling Lester’s murder, was waiting for him. Libby was a stocky, gray-haired twenty-four year police veteran who had earned his chops as a patrolman in the gin mills and dancehalls of Hancock Street and the bawdy Bangor riverfront.
“Not much to it,” He said in an amicable drawl as they settled into chairs in his cramped office. “A nurse was the last person to see him, about 10:00 Tuesday night, and he was found by another nurse at 7:30 the next morning with his head half twisted off.” The inspector frowned at the recollection. “Neither one of those nurses are strong enough to do that to him. I think he prob’bly got on the wrong side of Carl Atherton, but it’s no great loss in any event.”
“Who’s Carl Atherton?” asked Sloater brusquely, already tired of Libby’s laconic, hayseed demeanor.
“Carl Atherton is about twice your size, mean as a snake, and strong enough to take people apart with his bare hands,” Libby intoned. “Which he has done before,” he added with a nasty smile. "They tell me he’s much less violent than he used to be and, supposedly, he was locked in a ward on the same floor as Edgewink’s room all night, but I still think he did it. He’s the only one with this kind of strength.” Leaning forward, Libby passed a slim stack of photographs to Sloater, who gulped audibly when he glanced at the top one and realized what he was looking at.
“I…I’ll need to talk to the hospital staff, the patients…” he stammered, unable to look away from the grrotesque picture.
“Already did that,” said Libby passing over a folder of typewritten statements, “but you’re welcome to try. I even tried talking to Atherton, for all the good it did me. He just smiled and nodded at everything I said. They buried Lester this morning and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it.”
“Well,” Penn said, gathering himself and glancing at his watch. “I’m going to go get a room and some supper. Can you call the hospital and arrange for someone in authority to meet me there tomorrow morning?” Libby agreed, and at nine o’clock the next morning, Penn arrived at the Bangor State Hospital where he was met at the front entrance by a dignified looking man in his late forties.
“Agent Sloater? I’m Doctor Brenden Hopewell, Hospital Director. We’re completely at your disposal.”
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“I wish we could have managed this kind of cooperation when Edgewink was alive, Doctor.” said Sloater glumly. “I need to see everyplace he had access to and interview anyone he got close to. Lester Edgewink was the only person who knew the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands in stolen cash and jewelry and, while I couldn’t make him talk while he was alive, I’m hoping he left a trail or confided in someone.”
“Well, er, I trust you understand,” murmured Doctor Hopewell, “our responsibility is to the live patient and their chance for an eventual recovery. Had Mr. Edgewink lived, I’m sure we would have brought him to the point of discussing his secrets with you.”
Sloater grimaced. “Right,” he said acidly. “Well, let’s get started.”
Sloater spent Saturday and Sunday interviewing all of the hospital’s clinical staff, and all of the employees who might have come into contact with Edgewink. He listened carefully for any references to the hidden Edgewink gang loot, but heard nothing to make him believe anyone there knew about it. And like Inspector Libby before him, he uncovered no suspects for Lester’s murder. Sloater roamed the buildings and grounds and pored over Edgewink’s medical records, paying particular attention to his work assignments. He ascertained that Edgewink had no visitors during his stay at the hospital; in fact other than his competency hearing, he had no contact with the outside world at all. He stood for a long time in deep thought at Lester’s fresh grave in the hospital cemetery.
On Monday, Sloater returned to the motor court the Edgewink gang had stayed at the night before the shootout. Even though it had all been done before, he searched in and around the small cabin they had used, and spent the afternoon fruitlessly tramping the surrounding woods and fields.
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