Frank came around the corner in time to see Bob pull ten bucks from his pocket.
“If they need help, all they have to do is ask. This is stealing, plain and simple.”
“Problem?” Frank asked.
Myrna and Bob froze. “Nothing we need police help with, thank you anyway, Frank. Myrna’s being called to do God’s work.”
Myrna took the cash and stalked out the door.
“Seems to be a little static interfering with His signal.”
Bob smiled. “If everyone could hear the message loud and clear, I’d be out of a job. Now, tell me what you want to do about this traffic problem I’ve created.”
They walked to the front door of the church as a tour bus from Albany pulled up to the green, disgorging fifty camera-toting senior citizens.
Frank had watched in amazement the week before as Bucky Reinholz and three burly men wrangled the well-wrapped pieces of the Nativity off a flat-bed truck borrowed from the lumberyard. Each statue was as big as the men who carried it, and by the time they had them all unloaded the crew was red-faced and sweating even in the brisk November air.
Frank had helped cut away the paper and padding protecting the figures and as each cover fell away, he grew more amazed. Chainsaw art cropped up all over the Adirondacks, in little souvenir shops, craft fairs, or set up on front lawns with hand-painted “for sale” signs. Mostly totem poles or bears sitting on their haunches—if you’d seen one, you’d seen them all.
Frank fell squarely into the “I don’t know much, but I know what I like” school of art criticism, but even to his unschooled eye, Bucky Reinholz’s chainsaw Nativity qualified as a masterpiece. The kneeling Mary radiated a tender joy; the shepherd looked curious and a little fearful; one of the three kings glanced skyward as if he wasn’t sure that star could be trusted. The infant Jesus in his manger had been carved from an enormous stump, the baby emerging as if the tree itself had given birth.
Frank had wandered from statue to statue, entranced. Up close, the rough cuts of the chainsaw seemed to obliterate the figures’ features, but when you took a few steps back you saw that the grooves themselves were what created their astonishingly lifelike expressions. The effect was magical, and Frank couldn’t stop examining them.
“You did all this with a chainsaw?”
“A five horsepower Husqvarna, mostly,” Bucky said.
“How long did it take?”
“Umm, close on to three years, I guess. Had a little trouble with the first baby Jesus. Wood wasn’t fully dried, and after I had it all carved, I came out to the shop one morning and found it cracked right down the middle.” Bucky grinned, revealing the large strong incisors that had given him his nickname.
Frank thought he seemed awfully good-natured about his setback. “Didn’t it bother you to lose something you’d worked so hard on?” He’d built a pretty mahogany end table once, and a wild little friend of his daughter’s had knocked it over and taken a big chunk out of it. He still bore that kid a grudge, twenty years later.
“Oh, no use to complain. Besides, the second one turned out even better.”
“Are you going to move all this back to your shop after Christmas?”
Bucky slapped his thigh. “Hell, no. This is my gift to Trout Run. Pastor Bob and Ardyth Munger have some crazy notion it’ll be a tourist attraction to raise money for the church.”
And the crazy notion had proved true. Which brought them to today’s problem. The chainsaw Nativity was attracting so many sightseers that traffic in the one-stoplight town was totally balled up. “Earl spends his whole day out here directing traffic,” Frank complained to Pastor Bob. “The kid hasn’t had a day off since the Nativity went on display.”
“You’re not suggesting we take it down, I hope?” Bob asked. “All the businesses in town are benefiting.”
“No, no—I really like it, too. But could you organize some guys from the church to help with traffic control?”
“No problem. I’ll pitch in myself if you think Earl will let me wear that orange reflective vest.”
They strolled onto the green, wandering among the statues. This time, Frank took particular notice of the Joseph. Bucky had carved him sitting, gazing at his wife and the child. He looked stunned, as if he couldn’t absorb what had happened to him. Frank remembered feeling that way himself in the delivery room, staring at Estelle and the wrinkled little bundle that was their daughter, Caroline.
“I think of all the statues, Joseph is my favorite.”
“Yes, I like him too,” Bob agreed. “Joseph is so underrated. Just think—his fiancée comes to him with this extraordinary story that she’s pregnant, but still a virgin, and the child she’s carrying is the son of God. And instead of casting her out to be stoned to death for adultery, he agrees to protect her and marry her and raise the child as his own.” Bob touched the puzzled but trusting wooden brow of Joseph. “He believes Mary.”
Frank continued to stare at the statue. Trust. Maybe that was what made the Joseph so unusual. Trust wasn’t an expression you saw much on the face of a grown man. And Bucky had somehow captured that with his chainsaw. Go figure.
CRIME IN TROUT RUN peaked each week between 4PM on Friday afternoon when the men at Stevenson’s Lumberyard received their paychecks, and 2AM on Saturday when they had drunk them half away at the Mountainside Tavern. Frank made a point of stopping by the Mountainside late every Friday night.
Tonight’s crowd wasn’t rowdy, but a certain edginess hung in the air. A group of men in hunters’ camo sat at the bar complaining.
“Greg Haney’s had my rifle for close on two weeks and he still don’t have it fixed. What am I supposed to do, with buck season starting in three more days?”
“I don’t care if he is a cripple—that just ain’t right.”
“I heard he kept Herb’s shotgun for nearly a month.”
“And what’s more, when you call up to ask about it, he won’t talk to you. Make’s his girl say he can’t come to the phone. Hides out behind his kids ‘cause he knows I won’t swear at them.”
“I have half a mind to go out there and collect my gun. I don’t care if it’s in a million little pieces.”
“Greg’s a helluva gunsmith, but it seems like he can’t keep up with the work since the accident.”
The grousing continued, but since everyone agreed about Greg Haney’s poor service, and the object of their complaint wasn’t present, Frank left them to it. He checked out the action in the game room, where Ray Stulke was trying to hustle a pool game from two young men clearly marked as tourists by the lift tickets stuck to the zippers of their expensive ski jackets. They might as well have worn signs reading Fleece Me. Frank sat down, estimating ten minutes for Ray to lure them into a double-or-nothing bet, three for him to sink every ball on the table, and thirty seconds for the fight to break out.
But the tourists were both better gamblers and better pool players than Frank gave them credit for, and Ray had to work hard to win. The game ended in laughter and back-slapping and offers to buy the next round. Frank rose to leave as the jukebox began to play “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” He’d judged the atmosphere at the Mountainside all wrong. Maybe, just for the Christmas season, he should take a page from Joseph’s book and be a little more trusting. The sound of the crowd joining in on the refrain followed him into the parking lot, and hung in the still, cold air:
“Oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.”
As Frank drove past the green on his way home, the floodlights illuminating the Nativity snapped off. In the split second before the brilliance evaporated, Frank thought he noticed something off-kilter. He drove around slowly, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the soft reflection of moonlight on snow. The wooden shepherd offered genuine concern for his shivering lambs. The three kings still marched toward their goal. The donkey’s big eyes studied the store and the diner.
When Frank reached the third side of the square, he realized what was wrong.
UNABLE TO SLEEP MOST of the night, Frank had rousted Earl out of bed at daybreak and the two of them stood surveying the scene of the Joseph kidnapping. “Bucky made something beautiful for the town and now some idiot has to come along and ruin it.” Frank kicked up a cloud of soft snow. “It pisses me off.”
“You got any ideas on who coulda done it?”
Frank scowled and shrugged. His favorite usual suspect, Ray Stulke, was both strong enough and stupid enough for the job, but he had the best alibi in town. At the time of the crime, he’d been under Frank’s watchful eye at the Mountainside.
“That statue had to weigh 200 pounds,” Earl said. “It must’ve taken them quite a while to haul it out of here.”
“They dragged it.” Frank looked at the deep parallel gouges the base of the statue had left in the snow. He could only pick out a few intact bootprints; the trampled snow looked as if the thieves had barely lifted their feet as they staggered along with their heavy load. A few deep depressions marked where the thieves had plopped the statue down to take a rest. The trail led to the darkest, least traveled side of the green, where Etta Noakes’s house stood in solitary decay.
“We could ask Miss Noakes if she saw anything,” Earl suggested. But even as they trudged over to the sagging Victorian, they knew it was hopeless. Miss Noakes was either ninety or ninety-two, depending on how cantankerous she was feeling at the moment you asked her. She opened the door, peering at them through cataract-scarred eyes, and answered their question with the tart reminder that, unlike some people in this town, she did not spend all her time gawping out the window, keeping track of folks coming and going.
She shouted out to them as they left. “It’s not someone from town. Bucky Reinholz doesn’t have an enemy on this planet. People in Trout Run are damn proud of that Nativity.”
Frank hunched his shoulders against the cold, not bothering to acknowledge Etta’s remarks. She had a point, but who did that leave? Tourists stashing a 200-pound souvenir in the back of their minivan? Jealous rivals from a town with a mere plaster Nativity? Atheist extremists? Each idea seemed more absurd than the next.
“Maybe it’s kids playing a joke,” Earl offered hopefully. “Like when the senior class moved the bear from the taxidermy shop to the pulpit of the church.”
“That was funny. This...” Frank shook his head. This might be destroying something because the perfection of it cried out for disruption—the freshly painted wall scrawled with graffiti, the windows broken in a row of parked cars. He’d arrested a kid once for shooting out every streetlight on a block and when he’d asked him why he did it the answer came, “Because I like it dark.”
“You want me to drive around and look at places they might’ve taken it?” Earl asked. “Like maybe the covered bridge, or the cliffs by the river.”
Franked snorted. If the statue had been left anywhere obvious they’d have received a dozen calls by now. But Earl was only trying to be helpful. Frank tossed him the patrol car keys. “Yeah, cruise around. See what you turn up.” He watched Earl drive off, more worried the kid would find the statue—tossed in a ditch, its head chopped off, or covered in spray paint—than that he wouldn’t. He clenched his fists. This was the kind of dread cops felt when a child went missing, when solving the case was often worse than not solving it.
Ridiculous—Joseph was a statue, just a block of wood. A block of wood.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AND Joseph still hadn’t been spotted. The prank theory looked less and less likely—stunts were only fun if everyone could see how clever you’d been. Frank had ended up in the church office on his rounds—futile so far—of looking for a motive for this crime.
“I don’t see why you’re spending so much time worrying about it,” Myrna said. “Since that TV station in Plattsburgh put the theft on the news, more people than ever are coming to see the Nativity.”
“Yes, but they’re coming for the wrong reason.” Bob rolled the new issue of Presbyterian Life into a tight cone as he looked out the window at the crowd on the green. “Bucky carved those statues to tell the Christmas story. But the whole story’s not there. Now people are coming to see what happened, like rubber-neckers at a car wreck.”
“Right reason, wrong reason,” Myrna muttered, slapping stamps on the outgoing mail. “Can’t you just move one of the shepherds into the manger and call him Joseph?”
Bob spun around behind Myrna’s back with the magazine raised high, and for a spilt second Frank felt sure the pastor was going to whack her.
“Sure, put a tricorn hat on Michelangelo’s David and call him George Washington.” Bob flung his magazine into Myrna’s trashcan, which rocked with the force of his shot after the pastor was halfway down the hall.
“Well, look who’s off his high horse, now that something that matters to him has been stolen. No more of that ‘turn the other cheek, what would Jesus do’ stuff.” Myrna tossed her envelopes in the outgoing mail basket. “Now you don’t hear him saying, ‘If they stole it, they must really need it.” Myrna delivered a cruelly accurate mimicry of Bob’s often otherworldly tone. “Nobody really needs a chainsaw Joseph, do they?”
“DO YOU KNOW THERE’S not a single Christmas carol that mentions Joseph?”
Earl looked up from typing a report and frowned at his boss.
“Every figure in the Nativity gets sung about—Mary and Jesus, of course, but the wise men, the shepherds, even the damn cow gets a mention in “Away in a Manger”. But not Joseph. No one sings about Joseph.”
“And your point is—?”
“My point is, if you were going to steal a statue from a Nativity scene to make some sort of statement, why would you pick that one?” Frank couldn’t quite let go of the idea that the Joseph statue had been stolen for a reason. “Why not take Jesus?”
“Too heavy. The baby and the manger are all one piece, carved from that elm stump.”
“All right, why not Mary, or a wise man?”
Earl shrugged and answered the ringing phone, leaving Frank to pace the office.
After a few disinterested “all right, okay, uhm-hmms,” Earl hung up. “That was Rod Fortney out at the Round Top Mountain Cabins. Says he’s got a customer who owes him money. Wants us to go out there.”
“What are we, a collection agency? Tell him to buy a vacuum cleaner and some Comet and people might be willing to settle up.”
“You want me to go?” Earl asked.
“No,” Frank grumbled. “I’ll do it. Take my mind off this damn statue.”
ANY WOMAN WHO MISTAKENLY crossed the threshold of these cabins took one look at the rust-stained sinks and gray sheets and turned tail, leaving the Round Top as the exclusive domain of young men for whom skiing or fishing or ice-climbing was a flimsy excuse for a weekend of non-stop drinking. Frank was sure he’d find a group of hungover frat boys turning their pockets inside out in a futile search for cash after being informed that the American Express card wasn’t welcome here.
But when he arrived the parking lot was empty and Rod stood outside the office, practically hopping up and down.
“Guys skipped out on you?” Frank asked.
“No, they paid for their room. Slipped a check under the door early this morning. Then they sped outta here in that big SUV before I could do my inspection. C’mere.” Rod sunk his bony fingers into Frank’s arm and pulled him toward the cabins. “See what they done to this room.”
The door to cabin seven stood open, allowing the fetid smell of spilled beer, unwashed socks and vomit to waft out. The cramped, four-bed room was certainly filthy, but Frank suspected it hadn’t been all that much cleaner when the party checked in.
“I’m goin’ to hafta hire the girl to come in and help me clean this. And lookit that big scratch on the paneling.” Rod nudged him through the doorway and pointed out a fresh mar in the well-seasoned knotty pine. “And, they stole one of the quilts. There was a matched set in here.”
That must make cabin seve
n the Presidential Suite. Amidst the tangled and strewn bedding there seemed to be only three revolting green and gold quilted bedspreads. So, the charges were really stacking up against these guys: theft of services for precipitating the need for a cleaning lady, plus burglary for one stolen Vietnam War-era bedcover.
“I’ll see what I can do, Rod. Can you describe the guys?”
“Big guys, all of ‘em. Early twenties. Short hair, and neat clothes, but one of ‘em had a big tattoo on his arm. Some kinda snake or lizard or somethin’.”
Frank stepped back outside, glad of the crisp air. A patch of color in the black and white landscape caught his eye: a ragged square of green and gold fabric caught on the bare branches of a bush. Beside it were two parallel marks in the snow, as if something had been dragged into the trees behind the cabin. Frank followed the trail until it ended in a small clump of woods. There was a wide depression in the snow, where something heavy and long had clearly been dropped.
“That cloth’s from my bedspread.” Rod said. “Why’d they bring it out here in the snow?”
Frank continued to stare at the drag marks. “They wrapped something in it. They left it out here over night—there wasn’t enough room for it in the cabin. Then they put it in their SUV and drove off with it.”
“What was it? Why?”
“I’m pretty sure what, but I can’t imagine why.”
FRANK PULLED UP IN front of 120 Center Street, Glens Falls, the address printed on the check presented by one Russell Begley to pay for cabin seven. Stupid crooks made police work so much easier. And there was the black Ford Expedition, meaning Mr. Begley was home. Frank peered into the back of the huge SUV to see if the Joseph statue was still there, but his luck wasn’t running quite that good. The cargo area was empty.
Frank leaned on the bell and the door was soon opened by a tall, well-built young man with an affable face. Was that a shadow of unease when he saw a uniformed cop on his doorstep? If so, he rebounded quickly.
Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Box Set Page 54