Fact or Fiction_A Sam Prichard Mystery

by David Archer

  Sure enough, there were the two chairs. The one on the left still bore the obvious darkenings of bloodstains. There were blotches across the top of the back of the chair, and it was obvious that blood had run down inside the wings on either side. The back corners of the seat cushion were also dark.

  Sam glanced at the chair beside it and saw that there were only a few dark spots there. When he looked a little more closely, he could tell that there were spots from blood splattering. They were all over the back of the chair and the side of it that was closest to its mate, but there was also one bloodied handprint on the right arm of the chair. Sam was sure that it was probably from Ross, after he had touched his mother and determined that she was dead. He must have leaned on the arm of the chair as he sat down, leaving the handprint.

  A sudden clunk to his right made Sam jump, and he spun and shined his light in that direction. A large metal can, the kind that coffee comes in, was rolling across the floor toward him. Sam raised the light and aimed it toward where the can was coming from but saw nothing. The only thing in that direction was a blank wall.

  8

  The hairs on the back of his neck were not only standing up, they were dancing a jig. Sam swallowed hard and forced himself to take a couple of steps toward that wall, and then he swallowed again when the can suddenly came to a stop a foot in front of him. He was honestly debating with himself about whether he should just leave the house immediately when a mouse suddenly ran out of the can and disappeared under a tall old bookcase.

  The sigh of relief that came out of him sounded almost like laughter, but Sam wasn’t in a humorous mood. He glanced around and saw Marie still standing by his truck and glared at her. She had primed him by telling him that the house was haunted, and even his determination not to believe it wasn’t enough to keep him from feeling near panic when something unexplained happened. If he had run out the door before seeing the mouse, he probably would have gone to his grave thinking that he had honestly been in a haunted house.

  “Sam Prichard ain’t afraid of no ghost,” he mumbled to himself. He shined the light ahead again and spotted a doorway that looked like it led into a bedroom. He walked over and looked inside, half-afraid he was going to see something wearing a bedsheet come flying at him.

  Nothing happened. There was a bed in the room, but it had no sheets, blankets, or pillows. The mattress was also gone, and Sam suspected that it had ended up on Debbie’s bed. He stepped into the room and shined the light around, but other than an empty wardrobe there was nothing else to see. He left the room and stepped into a short hallway.

  To his right was a bathroom, and it took only a few seconds for his light to show him that there was nothing inside but the sink, toilet, and tub. To his left was a closet, and he opened the door cautiously, but nothing leapt out at him. That only left straight ahead, where another hall intersected this one on the left, but a door on the right led into what must have been Ross’s room.

  Sam opened the door and shined the light in, and then his heart almost stopped. Leaning against the wall on the far side of the room was a man, and Sam took an instinctive step backward when the light hit his face.

  With his back against the opposite wall, Sam stared at the figure in the bedroom. It took him several seconds to realize that he was not looking at a living person, but at what appeared to be a manikin wearing bib overalls, a T-shirt, and a straw hat.

  A minute later, when he had regained some semblance of his composure, Sam walked into Ross’s room and examined the manikin more carefully. Nothing he knew about Ross gave him any inkling into the manikin’s purpose, but the more he looked at it, the less sinister it appeared. It was leaning against the wall as if it had been posed that way, as if whoever it was supposed to be was simply relaxing there. Its face was turned toward the bed, and Sam imagined Ross lying there, looking up at the manikin and…

  And what? No matter how he tried, Sam could not come up with a valid reason for the manikin to be there. Still, he really did feel that there was nothing sinister about it, so he decided to give Debbie a call later and ask her for an explanation.

  Looking around the room a bit more thoroughly, he noticed several model cars and airplanes and a number of intricate little buildings made of Lego bricks. He had read somewhere that many autistic children were quite adept at assembling puzzles and models, and wondered if his parents bought them for him as some kind of therapy. Maybe they were just intended as something to keep him busy, something to occupy his mind at times.

  Sam left that bedroom and walked along the intersecting hallway. A moment later, he found himself in the kitchen. A brief look around told him that this was one of the rooms where most of the contents had been left as they were. There were dishes in the dish strainer beside the sink and a couple of pans sitting on the stove, and a pair of coffee cups were still on the table. He imagined Ross and Millie sitting there that last fateful morning, perhaps even talking and laughing as they drank their morning brew.

  That’s when it happened, as he was standing there just staring at those coffee cups. The door of the cabinet over one end of the counter swung slowly open, and Sam’s eyes were drawn up to it as those hairs on his neck switched from a jig to the Charleston. He kept waiting for the mouse to jump out of the cabinet, but it didn’t, and the door slowly swung wider and wider.

  He shined his light into the cabinet, and then he gasped. For a brief second, he would have sworn he was looking directly into an old man’s face, complete with a handlebar mustache and goatee, but then that image vanished. Behind it, now clearly illuminated by the LED light from his phone, was what looked like a leather bag, and Sam might have simply dismissed it as just a bag if he had not seen the feather attached to it.

  Slowly, Sam forced his feet to move toward the cabinets, but he kept looking around the room as he did so. It’d been a long time since Sam had felt anything close to terror, but he was quite sure he was on the verge of it at that moment. When he reached the cabinets, he steeled himself and shined the light in on the item that had caught his attention.

  It was a hat, all right. It looked like a black leather version of a military garrison cap, and it definitely had a feather on it. Sam debated on whether to simply reach out and pick it up, but his training in handling evidence forced him not to do so. Instead, he used his phone to take a couple of photographs of it, then glanced around the room and spotted what looked like a stack of once-clean dish towels. He reached out to them, flipped the top one off because it would naturally be the dustiest of them all, then picked up the second and shook it out. A small amount of dust flew out from it, and then he used it to reach into the cabinet and pick up the hat.

  There was mud on the hat, mud that had dried much darker than he would expect. He took a couple more photos of it with his phone, turning it over to be sure he got every angle. While Sam could not imagine how the hat had gotten into that cabinet, there was no doubt in his mind that he was looking at the same one Ross had seen the day his mother was killed. Was it possible he had actually picked up the hat and brought it home with him? No, that wouldn’t make sense. He would have remembered, and surely, Sam told himself, he would have shown the hat to the deputies, wouldn’t he?

  Then again, would he have gotten the chance? From the stories Sam had heard, Ross had been arrested and hustled out to the squad car within minutes after the deputies arrived.

  Sam looked around again, trying to find something to put the hat in. He opened a few other cabinets, then thought to look under the kitchen sink. Sure enough, there was a box of trash bags there. There was only a couple left, but Sam only needed one. He pulled it out and shook it open, slipped the hat and the dishrag inside, then carefully closed it up. He looked up at the cabinet he had taken it from, instinctively planning to shut the door, and suddenly realized that it was already closed.

  “Okay,” Sam said to himself, “that’s enough.” Another door led directly back to the living room, and he wasted no time in getting to the f
ront door and out into the sunlight again. He pulled the door shut behind him and locked it, then turned to go back to Marie.

  There was no one standing beside the truck. He looked around, but there was no sign of the short, chubby lady who had given him the keys. Sam swallowed hard, dropped the keys into his pocket, and slipped quickly behind the wheel of the Ridgeline. He slid the trash bag with the hat inside up under his seat and then started up the truck.

  Jason Garrity lived with his mother, only a block away on Fourth Street, but there was no cross street that connected the two anywhere near the north end. Sam had to go all the way back to Division Street, turn left, and then left again to get to the house.

  A glance at his phone told him that it was just hitting eight thirty in the morning, and he hoped that would be a good time to catch Jason at home on a Saturday. He went to the front door of the house and knocked, and it was open a moment later by a pleasant-looking woman.

  “Good morning,” Sam said. “Would Jason happen to be here?”

  The woman smiled and chuckled. “He’s here,” she said. “Now, whether we can get him out of bed or not, that’s another whole question. Won’t you come inside?” She held the door open, and Sam thanked her as he followed her into her living room. “You just have a seat, I’ll go wake him up.”

  Sam looked around the living room, taking in the décor that he could only describe as “rustic contemporary.” There were two different styles of sofa in the room, four different end tables that didn’t match at all, and a coffee table that didn’t look like it was even remotely related to anything else in the room. Still, none of it looked like junk; each piece was in rather good condition, especially when he considered that some of them were undoubtedly antiques. Considering that the house was probably eighty or a hundred years old, many of these pieces could easily have been originals when it was built.

  Mrs. Garrity came back a moment later and told him that Jason would be right out, and then Sam heard a toilet flushing somewhere toward the back of the house. A minute later, a short, stocky young man with hair that looked like a badger had tried to nest in it came stumbling down the hall.

  Sam stood. “Jason?” He produced his ID when the young man nodded. “My name is Sam Prichard. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by the family of Ross Cameron to try to find out what really happened the day his mother was killed, and I’m told that you might actually have been a witness.”

  Jason had stopped rubbing his eyes when Sam mentioned Ross, and they got very wide in his round face when Sam used the word “witness.” He shook his head a couple of times as if to clear it, then looked Sam in the eye.

  “Are you for real? I talked to a bunch of people over the years, and some of them even wrote books about that poor lady, but nobody ever took me seriously. I know good and well Ross didn’t do it, because I saw the person who did. I tried to tell the cops and they didn’t believe me, and nobody else has taken me seriously since then. I’ve just about got to the point I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.”

  Sam waited until his little tirade was finished and then shook his ID. “Like I said, I’m a private investigator. That means I’m out to find the truth, not just try to make a buck off the story. I want to know what you saw that day, because it just might help me find out what really happened. Are you willing to talk to me about this? You might actually be saving Ross’s life. I went to see him in prison day before yesterday, and that’s not a very safe place for a guy like him to be.”

  Jason frowned, but then he sat down on the couch beside Sam. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everybody else,” he said. “I was cutting through the trees between here and there, headed over to ask Ms. Cameron if she wanted me to mow her grass that week. It hadn’t rained a lot, so it wasn’t growing very fast; sometimes when it was dry like that she let it go an extra week between mowings. She gave me a few dollars each week to mow because—well, because when Ross tried to mow, he always ended up missing a bunch of spots. He could take the mower apart and put it back together perfectly, but he couldn’t tell the difference between grass that was already mowed and grass that wasn’t. It was kind of a joke around here.”

  Sam nodded. “Okay, I’m with you. Go on.”

  “Yeah, so anyway, it was about two thirty when I went over there, and like I told you, I took a shortcut through the woods between here and there. To do that, you have to go kind of north a little bit, so you actually come out a little below her house, know what I mean? Well, anyway, when I come out on her street, I seen somebody in her backyard. Now, at first, I thought it was Ross, but then I saw that they were too short and a little bit fatter than he was, y’know? So I stopped and I kind of leaned over so I could see a little bit better, and that’s when I knew for sure it wasn’t him. See, there’s two things that told me that, okay? First off, Ross don’t ever wear a hat, and this person had a hat on. And second…”

  Sam cut him off. “Could you see the hat? Could you describe it?”

  Jason looked confused for a second, then shrugged and shook his head. “It looked black—that’s all I could really tell from that far away. Is it important?”

  “It might be,” Sam said. “Anyway, go on. What was the second thing?”

  Jason grinned. “Simple. I knew it wasn’t Ross because the person who was running across the backyard was a woman.”

  Sam’s eyebrows shot upward. “A woman? Are you certain?”

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’,” Jason said. “See, I was in drama club in high school, right? That year, just not long before Ms. Cameron got killed, we did this play called The Sneaky Old Lady, about this burglar who never got caught. Well, the reason he never got caught is because he was always disguised as an old lady, and I got the title role. My drama teacher, Ms. Berkowitz, she told me that if I really wanted to play it right, I had to study the difference between how men and women walk, right? So I did. See, in the play, I had to do two parts. I had to be James, who everybody thought was a great guy, and I had to be old Ms. Lydia, who nobody would ever suspect of being able to climb the side of the building and slip the lock on the window, right?” He grinned and rubbed his hands together. “I studied makeup and all kinds of stuff, and I did such a good job that a lot of people refused to believe it was me dressed up as the old lady. And the reason I did it so well was because of what Ms. Berkowitz said—I studied how women walk. Men walk mostly with their legs and arms, but women put their whole body into it. I saw that, and then I walked that way when I was in that costume. That’s how I know the person I saw was a woman. Because men and women walk differently, and that person walked the way a woman walks.”

  Sam sat there and looked at the young man for a moment, then cocked his head to one side. “Now, wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve read some bits and pieces out of the books that were written about the murder, and the authors mentioned that they talked to you. Nowhere in any of that stuff did it ever say that you thought the person you saw was a woman.”

  Jason looked smug. “That’s right,” he said, “and you wanna know why? Because everybody else who’s asked me about this didn’t give a rat’s ass about Ross, but you do. I can tell because of what you said. You said that place isn’t a good place for Ross to be, and you wouldn’t have said that if you didn’t care about him.”

  Sam looked at Jason and grinned. “You seem a lot sharper than your reputation would lead one to believe,” he said. “I’m gonna play a hunch, here. Jason, tell me what else you think you figured out about this case.”

  Jason glanced at his mother, who was smiling proudly at him, then turned back to Sam. “Well, there’s a couple of things,” he said. “I drove myself kind of nuts for a while, trying to figure out why anybody would want to kill that sweet old lady, but I couldn’t even come up with a guess. Nobody around here ever had anything bad to say about her, I can tell you that. So I started thinking about the reasons people usually commit murder, you know, like over money or jealousy or that kind o
f thing? None of that seemed like it could fit, either, because she didn’t have any money to speak of and I couldn’t imagine anyone being jealous over her, so none of that added up. So what does that leave? You’re the private investigator, you tell me.”

  Sam chewed the inside of his cheek gently. “Well,” he said, “while there are many different things that are considered motives for murder, such as domestic violence, self-defense, vengeance, to collect life insurance, that whole endless list, when you investigate murders as often as I’ve had to do, you realize there are actually only three motives for anything. Those are greed, survival, or revenge. A greed motive would be if you wanted to collect life insurance or an inheritance; a survival motive would be like the abused woman who kills her husband because she can’t escape him, or somebody who kills a person who knows something that would hurt them; and the revenge motive would be like the person who kills the one their spouse left them for. Am I warm?”

  Jason shrugged. “Could be. Want to try one more time before you give up?”

  “Well, as you said, she didn’t have any money and I already know that her life insurance was barely enough to pay for her funeral, so that rules out greed. Nobody stood to gain anything financially or materialistically from her death.”

  “Right,” Jason said. “She didn’t even own her house at the time; her son-in-law did. He bought it and fixed it up for her after he married Debbie, but they never wanted to rent it out or sell it or anything after she died. No, I don’t think there was any kind of greed involved.”

  Sam nodded. “All right, let’s look at survival. From what little I know of her, and part of that is based on what you’ve told me today, it’s highly doubtful that she was any kind of threat to anyone. I don’t think anybody was suffering under her control, so there was no reason to kill her to get free of her.”