Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  “Did you find one?”

  “I worked here at the Boat Locker for the summer. Now I’m thinking about heading west.”

  “What about Angela? Was she seeing anyone else?”

  “I think she had a couple of dates with Johnny Brooks, but it wasn’t anything serious.”

  “Brooks?” Just then I couldn’t remember why the name seemed familiar. “Was he in your class, too?”

  “Sure, we all graduated in June. I’ve been up here all summer, though. I haven’t heard a word from Angela.”

  “Your parents didn’t call to tell you she was missing?”

  He shook his head. “We have the phone turned off after Labor Day. No one comes up here in the fall.”

  “You don’t have any idea how or why she disappeared, then?”

  “None. Is her bike gone, too?”

  “No, they found her bike in the middle of the road. There was just no sign of her.”

  “Weird.”

  “If you think of anything that might help, give Sheriff Lens or me a call, will you?”

  “Glad to.” I gave him our phone numbers. He took them, put them into his shirt pocket, and went back to his job with the shutters as I returned to the car.

  It wasn’t until I was driving back toward Northmont that I thought about the name Johnny Brooks. I didn’t know the Brooks family, but I wondered if he might be an older brother of Terry Brooks, the young friend of Angela’s sister Ruthie, who’d been the seventh member of their ill-fated bike ride.

  As I pulled into the driveway of my house I saw Henry Rinaldi standing by his garage with Angela’s blue bicycle. I walked across the street to join him. “Any word yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They brought this back today. It’s all that’s left of her.”

  “I’m sure she’ll turn up, Henry.”

  Rinaldi ran his hands lovingly over the bicycle, over the worn leather seat and the cracked rubber handgrips, the bald tires, and the paint-chipped metal body. He gazed at the little bell on the left handlebar. “I used to help her when anything went wrong with this bike. I know it as well as I know Angela. Look—she even scratched her initials on the seat post so she’d know it was hers.”

  I bent down and saw the tiny AR scratched in the metal. “Did she go out with Johnny Brooks?” I asked casually as I straightened up.

  “Brooks? You mean Terry’s brother? I guess a few times. Why do you ask?”

  “Someone she knew might have had a hand in her disappearance. I’m trying to talk with everyone who knew her.”

  Henry’s face was suddenly grave. “Tell me the truth, Dr. Hawthorne. The police think she’s dead, don’t they?”

  “They don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  I left him before the tears appeared in his eyes. I didn’t want to see him cry, yet I knew nothing that might hold back his tears.

  A while later I phoned Sheriff Lens. They’d searched all day without finding a clue.

  “Are you going to give up?” I asked.

  “The State Police want to search for another day before calling it off. They’re bringing in dogs tomorrow.”

  “What are they looking for? A grave?”

  “What do you think, Doc?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I’ve discovered she did go out with a couple of boys. I talked with Phil Gilbert this afternoon and tonight I’m going to search out Johnny Brooks.”

  “I can tell you where to search. He’s the soda jerk at the Star Drug. Works most nights.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff,” I said.

  Angela’s disappearance was big news among the teenagers who hung out at the Star Drug soda fountain. I saw Laura Fine in one of the booths in animated conversation with two boys and another girl. All along the counter there was a hum of conversation. I sat on one of the stools and waited for the fresh-faced youth behind the counter to get around to waiting on me.

  “What’ll you have?” he asked at last.

  “Just a cherry Coke. Are you Johnny Brooks?”

  “That’s me.” He picked up a Coke glass and squirted some syrup into it.

  “I understand you went out with Angela Rinaldi a few times.”

  “Twice. My sister told me what happened last night. I can’t believe it.”

  “Did you see her during the summer?”

  “We went swimming once, that was all. I called her but she was always busy.”

  “A popular girl? Lots of boy friends?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “What about Phil Gilbert? He took her to the senior prom, didn’t he?”

  “I guess.” He stirred up the cherry Coke and set it in front of me. I put down a quarter and told him to keep the change. That made him a bit more talkative, but not much. “I think a truckload of Gypsies probably picked up Angela and kidnaped her.”

  “Really? I haven’t seen any around these parts in a few years. Did your kid sister happen to see a truck last evening?”

  “Naw, she didn’t see anything. But she’s only thirteen.”

  On my way out of the drugstore, Laura stopped me. “I saw you talking with Johnny Brooks.”

  “He went out with Angela a couple of times. I’ve been talking to Phil Gilbert, too.”

  “Have you seen Judy? Judy Irving? I’m still looking for her.”

  “Not yet. I probably should talk to everyone who was in the group last night. One of you must have seen something, even if you didn’t realize it.”

  “I didn’t see a thing—other than what we told you.”

  “How were Angela’s relations with her father? Did they get along?”

  “Oh, you know how fathers are. He wanted to be her pal but she had to be with her own friends.”

  “Was she anxious to get away to college?”

  Laura looked hard at me. “You’re speaking of her in the past, like she’s dead.”

  “We have to consider that possibility. She’s been missing for over twenty-four hours.”

  “She’ll turn up somewhere.”

  “What about college?”

  Laura shrugged. “She didn’t talk about it much, but I think she felt bad about leaving her friends behind.”

  One of the other girls called to her and Laura went back to the booth. I strolled outside and stood for a moment looking up at the night sky.

  In the morning, I was at my office in the physicians’ wing of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. Mary Best saw my pensive expression and asked, “Nothing on the Rinaldi girl yet?”

  “Not a thing. The sheriff’s still searching the fields. I talked to her father and some of her friends yesterday, but I didn’t learn a thing.”

  “Do you think her father might be involved?”

  “I don’t see how. I was sitting on my porch from the time Angela left until you phoned me that evening. Neither of her parents left the house so far as I know. Their car was in the garage all evening.”

  “There are some patients at the hospital you should look in on.”

  I nodded. “I’ll see them. Then maybe I’ll take a ride out to the Milkin farm again. This might be the last day of the search if they don’t find anything.”

  I got out there a little before noon. The State Police dogs were far out in one of the hay fields, barking like mad. I saw Sheriff Lens standing in the center of the road with Fred Milkin. One of the troopers had run up and was talking frantically. I parked and got quickly out of my car. The sheriff and Milkin were already starting across the field.

  “Sheriff!” I called out.

  He glanced in my direction and called back, “You’re just in time, Doc—I think the dogs found her!”

  My stomach felt like it might heave, but I started across the field to intersect their route. A half dozen State Police officers and four floppy-eared bloodhounds had converged on a spot near the edge of the woods. “Did they pick up her scent?” I asked.

  One of the troopers with a barking dog on a leash said, “We didn’t find anything near the
road where her bike was, so we just let them roam the field at will. They sniffed out this.”

  The sheriff crouched to examine the newly turned soil. “It’s recent, and about the size of a grave. Get some shovels in here.”

  She wasn’t buried deep. The troopers’ shovels struck the body less than a foot down. They brushed the last of the dirt from her by hand and turned her over.

  It wasn’t Angela Rinaldi. It was her friend, Judy Irving.

  By afternoon we had established that the cause of death was a blow to the left temple with some sort of blunt but slender object. It had penetrated far enough to be instantly fatal. “Ever see anything like it?” Sheriff Lens asked me.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “The city papers are onto this now, Doc. They say we got a homicidal maniac loose. The troopers have the dogs searchin’ the area for another grave.”

  “Why didn’t Judy’s parents report her missing?”

  “They did, this morning. I think they were afraid to call last night because they thought she might be spendin’ the night with some boy.”

  “Had she ever done that before?”

  “I guess she didn’t come home after the senior prom.”

  “Who was her date?”

  “Johnny Brooks. I’m on my way over to see him now, if you want to come along. What does the autopsy show about the time of death?”

  “The preliminary results indicate she’d been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found. That would mean she died yesterday morning, though not in that field. You were searching it then.”

  Sheriff Lens nodded. “The killer thought it would be a safe place to bury her because we’d already searched there. He didn’t know we’d be bringing in the dogs.”

  I accompanied him to Johnny Brooks’ house. The young man from the drugstore was seated on his front porch with a tearful Laura Fine. “My two best friends in the world!” She wiped her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

  Sheriff Lens tried to comfort her. “We haven’t found Angela yet. She could still be alive.”

  Johnny’s kid sister Terry came out to join us, sitting silently by her brother. I took the opportunity to ask a question. “What about you, Terry? You were around the older girls a lot. You’re a friend of Ruthie Rinaldi. Did they ever talk about running away from home together—Angela and Judy?”

  Terry shook her head. “Angela was going to college.”

  “I’d have heard any talk like that,” Laura spoke up.

  “You were looking for Judy yesterday. You couldn’t find her.”

  “Judy always wanted to play detective. She went off somewhere on her own.”

  “Did she have a car?”

  She nodded. “Her dad gave her a used Ford for graduation.”

  “Then Angela was the only one of you three who didn’t drive.”

  “Her folks are pretty strict. They wouldn’t let her do much of anything till she turned eighteen.”

  I asked the sheriff, “Any sign of Judy’s car?”

  “Not yet.”

  But we’d come to question Johnny Brooks, and presently Sheriff Lens sent the girls inside so we could talk to him privately. The sheriff asked him about the dates he’d had with the dead girl.

  “I took her to the senior prom,” he admitted nervously.

  “And stayed out all night?”

  Brooks moistened his dry lips. “That’s just something a lot of the kids do. It’s harmless.”

  “Did Angela stay out all night with Phil Gilbert?” I asked.

  He gave a little laugh. “Her parents would have killed her.” He must have realized how that sounded and he corrected himself. “They wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill Judy Irving?” the sheriff asked him.

  “No. Certainly not me!”

  “What would you say if I told you the autopsy showed she was pregnant?”

  It was a bluff and it didn’t work. Brooks looked the sheriff in the eye and answered, “I’d say you were lying.”

  “Knew her pretty well, did you?”

  “Well enough to know she didn’t sleep with guys.”

  “Did you see her at all yesterday?”

  “No. I hadn’t been out with her lately.”

  “But you went out with Angela Rinaldi.”

  The youth shook his head in frustration. “You’re making too much of this whole thing with their boy friends. You’re gonna find they were both killed by some tramp out in the woods.”

  “But what were they doing in the woods?” I asked. “And how did Angela vanish from her bicycle?”

  “I don’t know, but I didn’t have a thing to do with it,” he said.

  Sheriff Lens offered to drop me at my office. On the way back, something kept bothering me.

  “We didn’t learn much there,” the sheriff said.

  “On the contrary. We learned something very important.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Laura and Judy both drove cars.”

  “What does that have to do with anything, Doc? Angela was riding a bicycle when she disappeared, and so were the other two.”

  “Humor me, Sheriff. Drive me out to Silver Lake to see Phil Gilbert again.”

  “What for?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “All right,” he said. “I know your hunches.”

  A half hour later, as we approached the steep road down to the Gilberts’ lakeside cottage, I asked him to stop the car. “Give me five minutes and then follow me in.”

  “What in hell are you up to, Doc?”

  “We’ll see.”

  I went down the road on foot, trying not to attract attention. Phil Gilbert had finished boarding up the cottage windows for the winter, but the door on the side facing the lake was standing open. I opened the screen door and walked in.

  Angela Rinaldi jumped to her feet. “Who are you?” she almost screamed.

  It was the closest I’d ever been to her. She wasn’t across the street in her yard or bicycling down the road, she was right there facing me, a few feet away. “I’m your neighbor across the street,” I told her. “My name is Sam Hawthorne.”

  Phil Gilbert heard our voices and came quickly out of the kitchen, holding a beer bottle. Angela kept talking. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  “I came to take you back to your parents.”

  She went over to stand near Gilbert. “I’m never going back! Phil and I are driving to California tomorrow. There’s nothing you can say that would change my mind.”

  “Angela,” I told her, “your friend Judy Irving is dead. Phil here killed her with a tack hammer.”

  As my words sunk in, her face seemed to come apart and she started screaming. It was the most terrible sound I’d ever heard.

  Sheriff Lens came into the room and took the beer bottle from Phil Gilbert’s hand. I’d gotten Angela to sit down and was trying to comfort her. “You’d better cuff him,” I told the sheriff. “He’s your man.”

  “This is Angela Rinaldi?” he asked. “Alive?”

  “Very much alive. Let’s get them back to town and I’ll explain everything.”

  We drove directly to the sheriff’s office. He phoned Angela’s parents to tell them she was alive, and while we waited for them to arrive I told him what he needed to know. “Start with Angela’s disappearance,” he said. “Explain that first.”

  “I should have tumbled to that a lot sooner than I did. You see, Angela and Phil Gilbert have been in love since the night of the senior prom, I imagine. Instead of going to college, she planned to run away with him. We’ve heard how strict her parents are. There was no chance they’d ever give their blessing to such a thing, so she decided to stage her own disappearance, with Phil’s help.”

  “How?”

  “She figured everyone would be looking around here for her and they could be halfway across the country before anyone realized they’d run off together. They’d kept their rel
ationship a secret all summer.”

  “Doc—”

  I smiled at him. “All right, Sheriff. How’d she do it? I watched her ride out Tuesday night with the other kids following. I saw her ride through a puddle at the edge of the road and yesterday morning her tire tracks were still there, imprinted in the mud. I could see the diamond pattern of the tread. But later in the day I spoke with her father as he showed me her blue bike that you found in the center of the road. I saw the place where she’d scratched her initials. And I saw the bicycle’s bald tires.”

  “What?”

  “The blue bike you found in the road, Angela’s bike without question, wasn’t the blue bike she was riding when she left home that night.”

  “How is that possible, Doc?”

  “There’s only one possible explanation. Gilbert supplied her with a second blue bicycle, identical to her own, though a bit newer. He took hers out there in his car and left it in the road a minute or two before they approached. Angela, riding ahead of the others as she often did, rounded the curve, out of sight for a moment, and rode off the road into that field of tall cornstalks. The girls and the younger children rode right past where she hid, seeing only the abandoned blue bicycle a hundred yards down the road. After they went to Milkin’s farm to phone home, she rode back to where Gilbert was waiting with his car.”

  “How did you know it was Gilbert?”

  “Her father wasn’t involved, because he was home at the time it happened. Angela herself had to be a party to the disappearance because she’d have realized the bike wasn’t hers even if no one else did. A boy friend seemed most likely. There were only two mentioned—Phil Gilbert and Johnny Brooks. When I called on Gilbert at the lake yesterday, I told him only that Angela had disappeared while out riding with her girl friends. Though the cottage phone was disconnected and he claimed to know nothing about the occurrence, he asked me a while later if her bike had disappeared, too. How did he know she was on a bike ride and not a car ride? Both of her girl friends drove cars. He drove a car himself. A ride would have suggested a car ride before a bike ride, to any innocent person.”

  Sheriff Lens nodded. “And Judy Irving?”

  “I think she came searching for Angela up at the cottage. She must have had her own clue that they might be hiding there. When I arrived, Gilbert was nailing the shutters closed with a tack hammer. I remembered that thin, blunt head when I saw the wound in Judy Irving’s temple. I think he lashed out and hit her with it when she threatened to tell everyone where Angela was hiding. Then he waited until dark and drove her body back to the Milkin farm, figuring, as you pointed out yourself, that the police wouldn’t search it again.”