A Plunder by Pilgrims
A short story featuring Garrison Gage
Scott William Carter
writing as Jack Nolte
Includes an extended preview of
The Gray and Guilty Sea,
the first mystery novel featuring
Garrison Gage.
Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jack Nolte. Republished May 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Scott William Carter.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.
A Plunder by Pilgrims
IT WAS A KID, sixteen or seventeen by the looks of him, painfully thin and soaked to the bone. His short-cropped brown hair, made nearly black by the rain, was plastered against his forehead. His Stanford sweatshirt and acid wash jeans clung to his bony frame. The skin on his neck was cratered like a moonscape, the survival scars of a nasty bout with acne.
The pounding rain made tiny white explosions on the gravel driveway, and crackled on the overgrown ferns surrounding his house. "Well?" Gage said. "Candy bars for the track team? A subscription to Good Housekeeping so the band can go to Disneyland?"
"No, sir," the kid said.
"You look familiar."
"I'm your neighbor, sir. Marty Kleppington. I live — um, just on the other side of that hedge."
That explained it. The kid had just been a runt when Gage moved in five years earlier, hardly recognizable in the young man before him, but he remembered a few terse exchanges when the kid's basketball bounced through the arbor vitae. "Well, congratulations," Gage said. "Now if you'll excuse me—"
"I'd like to hire you, sir."
It was such a wholly unexpected thing to say that Gage actually froze — door cracked open, frigid air snaking past him into the house. "I think you're confused," Gage said.
He didn't open the door. He couldn't see the kid's face, but there was a long pause.
"I know what you do, sir," the kid said. "I know—I know you were once a great detective. Garrison Gage. That's you."
Gage bowed his head. "Go home, son. The person you're looking for doesn't live here anymore."
"It's my girlfriend," the kid said, sounding desperate. "Tammy. Tammy Levin. She's missing. Been almost two days. I—I need your help."
"Go to the police."
"I have. They—"
"Goodbye, son."
He closed the door. Gage was walking away, but the kid had saved the best for last. Even muffled by the door, Gage clearly heard him.
"I can pay you, sir," he said. "I have five thousand dollars saved for college, and I can pay you every penny."
* * * * *
He gave Marty a towel, his own mug of coffee, and seated him at the kitchen table. The kid's wet hair dribbled on Gage's crossword. The blooming watermarks smeared the black ink with the blue, ruining the morning's efforts. Above them, the pounding rain sounded like somebody dropping buckets of marbles on the roof.
"How did you know about me?" Gage asked.
Instead of looking at Gage, Marty stared straight ahead. His eyes were the same color as his coffee — a deep brown, nearly black. "A couple years back, I was hiding in the hedge. Heard you talking to that FBI agent."
Gage's shoulders sagged. He'd known that helping Alex from time to time with some of his more difficult problems had been a bad idea. "I really am retired," he said.
Marty looked down into his coffee. Tendrils of steam inched past his face like long nimble fingers. Gage sighed.
"Tell you what," he said, "why don't you tell me what happened. Maybe I'll have suggestions. That's all I do with my friend, by the way. Just listen and give suggestions."
The kid dug into his front pocket. "Should I pay now or—"
"Talk."
Marty nodded. He took a long, slow breath, then said, "I'm not sure how much I can tell you. I talked to her on Friday at school. We—we were going to go out on Saturday night to the movies. Then a little before six on Friday night, Tammy's Mom called and wanted to know if Tammy was with me. Her mom said she'd run to the store to pick up some stuff for dinner and she hadn't come home. We've scoured the entire town, all of us. We haven't found her car or anything."
"It hasn't been very long — not even a day."
Marty looked at him, and his eyes were much older than his years. "If you knew Tammy, you wouldn't think so. She's very responsible. She puts everything in her day timer — dates with me, the tutoring she does, study times, even down to exactly when she brushes her teeth at night. People make fun of her, but she doesn't care. She's planning on going to Stanford. I am too. I mean, if I get in. I'm not as smart as her."
"Did she act at all differently lately?"
"What do you mean?'
"I mean, did you notice anything out of the ordinary? Things she said? The way she acted?"
Marty hesitated.
"Look, kid, if you don't level with me, I can't—"
"I don't know," Marty said. "She was a bit moody.
"Her parents go to the police?"
"Yeah," Marty said. "Because she's already 18, they said they can't put out an Amber Alert, but they filed a missing persons report. They told Tammy's parents they could file the vehicle as stolen, which might help, but they didn't want her to get into trouble. I guess the police are real busy, though. They got the parade on Thursday."
Gage grimaced. The Barnacle Bluffs Thanksgiving Day Parade was a big deal on the Oregon coast, but to Gage it just meant thousands of tourists clogging up Highway 101. "How old are you?" he asked.
"Seventeen. Well, almost eighteen. I'll be eighteen on Saturday."
"How'd you two get a long?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, did you fight much?"
"No. We didn't fight at all."
But there was a slight pause there — barely a pause at all, really, just a slight hitch between the words didn't and fight. "Not even a little?" he pressed.
"We got along great," Marty insisted. The dull monotone was gone, his voice taking on a defensive edge. "I mean, we've been—we've been dating forever. Since fourth grade practically."
"But I take it her parents don't know you've proposed to her?"
The kid looked surprised. "Proposed? I haven't — I mean, we haven't . . . haven't decided—"
"Look, kid, if you're not completely honest with me, there's only so much I can do."
Marty swallowed. "Okay, I did propose. It was during Homecoming, and she said yes. Her parents wouldn't be happy if they knew — they think we're too young. But we didn't want to wait. We love each other, Mister Gage. There's nobody else I love more than her."
"All right, all right."
"How'd you know?"
Gage pointed at the kid's hands, currently clasped together on top of the now unsalvageable New York Times crossword. "Your ring finger. You've got a very slight indentation in it. Since you're not wearing it, I take it you only wear it when you're pretty sure Mr. and Mrs. Levin aren't around."
Marty nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a nondescript gold band, the kind he could have gotten at any pawn shop for twenty bucks. "We got promise rings. I wanted to get her a real engagement ring, but she said I should save my money for college. She was always like that. Practical."
He looked like he was going to tear up. There w
ere few things more off-putting to Gage than the naked display of emotion. He would have rather watched a dozen nail technicians test out the sound qualities of every known brand of chalkboard.
"How about her parents?" he said quickly. "She get along with them all right?"
"Oh yeah," Marty said. "They're the best. They have a big family — five kids, and they're always doing stuff. You should see them right now. You think I'm bad, they're practically going crazy with worry."
"And you didn't notice anything different about her, did you? She didn't act differently?"
"What do you mean?"
Gage hesitated, because he knew the kid wouldn't like this line of questioning, but there was no getting around it. "She didn't seem depressed at all? She didn't ever talk about . . . suicide?"
"What? She was a student counselor! She counseled other kids who were depressed." Marty shook his head. "In fact, the last few days she was the most happy and positive I'd ever seen her — and that's saying something. Most of the time, she's so positive it annoys people."
"But you said she was a bit moody lately."
"Well, yeah, but that's not saying she's suicidal. She was up and down a bit the last few weeks. I'm saying she just wasn't quite as perky as usual. Killing herself . . ." He shook his head. "That's just crazy.
Gage knew that was no guarantee that the girl didn't commit suicide. It was still the second leading cause of death among teenagers in Barnacle Bluffs—auto accidents being the first. The fact that she'd been more cheerful than usual actually was a bad sign. People who committed suicide often had that one last hurrah of happiness.
"And you don't know of anybody who had ill feelings toward her?" Gage said.
"No. She may have been a bit too perky for some people, but she didn't have any enemies."
"What do you think happened? You think she was abducted, I take it?"
"I don't know what else it could be."
Gage went on quizzing the kid for a while, probing, trying to find out more about the girl's life that could shed some light on the situation. But after a half hour of questioning, he was no closer to solving the mystery. The kid showed none of the signs of lying or evasion — the dilating pupils, nervous tics, conflicting details.
When he felt there was little more to be gained just questioning the kid, Gage took his coffee cup and limped to the sink, cleaned it with a bit of dish soap and a rag, and placed it on a drying rack. He leaned against the counter with both hands and peered out through the rain-streaked window at the gray skies and rhododendrons swaying in the wind.
"Anything you could tell me would really help, sir," Marty said.
Gage sighed. "I'm afraid I don't have anything to tell. "
"Oh."
The disappointment ringing in that one word was palpable. It irritated Gage. "Why don't you leave your phone number," he said. "If something occurs to me, I'll call you, okay?"
* * * * *
When the kid was gone, Gage's first intention was to put the whole thing out of his mind.
The wind picked up, the faint whistling against the window turning into a low moan. His furnace rumbled to life. A faucet in the bathroom dripped. Despite his best efforts, Gage's attention kept drifting to the phone number the kid had scrawled in the corner of the newspaper.
He ambled to the fridge, favoring his right leg. The limp was a vivid reminder of what happened when he got involved — a three-hundred pound Iranian ex-strong man in the circus smashes up your knee with a baseball bat, that's what, messes it up so bad you can't even walk for six months and even now can't go anywhere without a cane. Oh, and the kicker: the love of his life dead, drowned in Gage's own bathroom tub.
No, he was fine looking over a few case files for Alex, but getting involved personally? Out of the question.
He was happy with his quiet life. He didn't like dealing with people unless it was absolutely necessary. The most conversation he'd had lately involved saying "Paper" to the cashier at the supermarket.
And yet, it was just a local case. He could keep a low profile . . .
The internal wrangling went on for a good hour, until suddenly it came to Gage. He thought he knew the answer. It was the best feeling in the world, when a solution came to him out of the blue, as addictive as any drug. It was only a possibility, but of course now he had to know.
He reached for his phone.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, the kid was back sitting at Gage's kitchen table, his cheeks pink from the cold. He'd changed from the wet sweatshirt and blue jeans he wore earlier to a purple sweater and black pants. There were green bits of arbor vitae stuck to his shoulders.
"Were you guys fighting about sex?" Gage asked, without preamble.
Marty's cheeks turned even pinker. "What?"
"You wanted to have sex, but she wanted to wait until after you were married."
"Who—who told you that?"
"Answer the question."
Marty swallowed hard. "We—we weren't fighting about it. Not really . . ."
"Look, I don't want to talk about this either, kid. But only a virgin would have blushed as much as you just did."
"What does this have to do with anything?"
"Were you fighting about it?"
Marty looked at Gage a moment, then sunk his head. "Yeah, I guess."
"Don't beat yourself up too much. You're no different than millions of other teenage boys."
"She—she wanted it to be special."
"Which is no different than millions of other teenage girls. That also brings me to my second question." Gage shifted in his seat. What was he, Doctor Phil? "Let's say she decided to have sex with you, okay? Let's say she decided she was going to do it on your birthday — because, you know, you'd both be 18. Let's say she went to check out this place on Friday night. It would be someplace not too far from the store, because she had only a few minutes. Any ideas?"
Marty eyes widened, and he looked at Gage suddenly. "The Granger cabin!"
"What?"
"It's—it's this tiny two-room cabin up in the woods near Hair Trigger Creek," Marty said excitedly. He stood abruptly, turning first right, then left, as if he wanted to run but wasn't sure which direction. "We saw it when we went hiking this summer. It's not too far off the highway. When we were walking by, this old guy came out, and we thought, oh no, he's going to come after us for trespassing, but he was real nice. He said he and his wife used it all the time during the summer, but she'd just passed away so he was boxing up stuff. He said he couldn't bear to keep it, because all the memories. I even joked to Tammy as we were walking away that we should ask him if he'd let us use it as a honeymoon suite."
"What did Tammy think?"
"Oh, she blushed bright red like she always does when I even come close to talking about — well, you know."
"Yes, even a recluse like me knows."
Marty looked aghast. "That's not—that's not what I—"
"Save it," Gage said, reaching for his cane. "Let's go for a drive."
* * * * *
They rode in silence along Highway 101, the tires whispering over wet asphalt. It had stopped raining. The turn-off would have been easy to miss in broad daylight, and in the murky soup that passed for night, the kid passed it twice before finally turning his Toyota Tercel onto the dirt into the woods. They passed one little house surrounded by trees, then another, the trees encroaching, the road getting bumpier, the mist on the windshield thickening until Marty finally turned on the windshield wipers.
When they were a quarter mile from the house — according to Marty's best guess — Gage had him pull the car to the side. Anybody passing would see it, but it couldn't be avoided. He didn't know what he was expecting to find out there — maybe the girl had just taken a bad spill — but experience had taught him to be careful. Marty had wanted to call the police, but there was still a good chance this was a wild good chase, and then he would have blown his anonymity for nothing.
When Marty
killed the ignition, they were sitting in utter darkness. It was silent except for the ticking of the engine.
"You sure you want to walk?" Marty said.
"What, because I'm a cripple?" Gage said.
"No, that's not—"
"You got that flashlight?"
"Yeah."
Gage adjusted his fedora and stepped into the moist darkness. Marty clicked on his flashlight. It was a feeble thing, a penlight he'd fished out of his glove compartment. The darkness pressed in on all sides. There were no crickets or hooting owls — just the sound of the day's rain pattering on leaves, limbs, and pine needles. He felt the faint brush of a few droplets on his cheek.
"How's the cell phone?" Gage said.
Marty pulled it out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open, the bluish light illuminating his face. "One bar," he said.
"It'll have to do."
There was a slight incline he hadn't noticed when they were driving but was immediately aware of when they were on foot. His knees ached after only a few steps. It was slow going, the ground dappled with shadows that were sometimes holes and sometimes just shadows. More than once he stumbled and would have fallen if the kid hadn't grabbed his arm. Maybe he was a cripple, for god's sake.
"It's just around this next bend," Marty said.
"Okay, turn the light off."
"But we won't be able to see!"
"Do it."
They crept up the road like two blind turtles. Gage stumbled again and kid grabbed his arm and kept it there. A yellow light blinked at them through the trees. They stopped at the last Douglas fir before the open dirt area around the house and peered around it.
The cabin was hardly bigger than the outhouse next to it — log siding, a sagging, metal roof, pine needles blanketing everything. There were two windows, one with the shades drawn, rimmed with light; the other was open and revealed two men playing cards at a folding table. One was big and bulky, the other as thin as Marty. Both were dressed in black leather jackets, though the thin one was bald and had a thick, handlebar mustache where the fat one was clean-shaven and wore a red baseball cap. The kerosene lantern between them provided a soft bubble of light. There were cardboard boxes stacked up on the wall behind them.
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