Sunset pink washed the wedge of sky between the steep hilltops. Deep in the hollows, where the road ran, night had already fallen. Allison studied her map under the Wagoneer’s dome light. Josh squinted into the gloom. A shotgun-peppered road sign appeared in the headlights.
“Betheltown,” Allison read. “Take a right.”
Josh turned onto a gravel road which tracked a rocky creek. “I’ve never been to Betheltown,” he said.
“No reason since it doesn’t exist anymore. It never was much—a gas station, a grocery store, a few houses. Everyone had to move out when the plant bought the land. People still live on the road leading to the old place.”
Josh rolled down the window. The chirping of tree frogs and the high buzz of cicadas flooded the car.
The road narrowed, the walls of the hollow growing steeper and the lights of civilization less frequent—a bare yellow bulb on the porch of a shack halfway up the hillside, the gray glow of a black and white television from a trailer shoe-horned onto a flat spot beside the creek.
Jaw-jarring potholes jounced Allison out of her seat. She cinched her seatbelt tighter. “Should be just ahead,” she said.
The hollow widened into a compound illuminated by a pair of blue-tinted security lamps on utility poles. A brown and white mobile home with a green awning and plywood porch on the left; in the middle, a Jim Walter prefab home; on the right, an open-front double-bay garage, more properly a lean-to, constructed of trimmed cedar logs and corrugated aluminum. A utility light burned inside one bay where an engine hung from a hoist and a rusted steel drum overflowed with used oil filters. The other bay held what Josh recognized as a restored yellow ’85 Corvette and a candy apple red Ford pickup supported by monster tires. Two tractors and a backhoe rested in patches of overgrown grass in the front yard. A state-of-the-art bass boat and two personal watercrafts lolled proudly on trailers.
Allison pointed to a mailbox.
“Dunn,” Josh read. He parked in the shadows.
Allison reached for her doctor’s bag. “Let’s hope Darryl understands we’re here to help.”
Josh’s heart skipped. He’d been so intent on finding Dunn that he hadn’t contemplated what might happen when Allison confronted him.
Light bounced through the woods, the beams of another car traveling the same way they had. “This may be him,” Josh said.
The car turned into the compound. The headlights blinked off. A figure emerged and knocked on the door of the prefab.
“Whoever it is doesn’t live here,” Allison observed.
When another attempt produced no response, the figure shouldered the door open and barged in. A series of thuds came from inside, followed by a prolonged crash.
“There goes the dishware,” Allison whispered. She could sense Josh’s skepticism. “Believe me, I know the sound of crashing place settings.”
The door of the prefab opened. Light fell across the car that had parked in the compound—a green Subaru. “Spike,” Allison said.
The Subaru’s trunk opened and slammed shut. Spike headed for the garage. Allison reached for the car door.
Josh stopped her again. “He’s got a gun.”
“I think it’s a bat.”
What followed was ten minutes of mayhem that held Josh and Allison riveted by the violent choreography playing out on the stage of the two-bay garage.
The bat flew from Spike’s bandaged fingers when he took aim at the Corvette so he stomped through the fiberglass hood and trunk in a dozen jagged places. For good measure, he karate-kicked in each of the Corvette’s windows.
He abandoned the car for an acetylene torch in the adjoining bay. Allison held her breath. Spike ignited the torch from the pilot light of a nearby gas water heater, adjusted the valve controlling flame with his teeth and went to work on the candy-apple pickup, starting with the chrome pipes. The light of the torch reflected in the safety goggles made Spike look even more other-worldly, Josh thought. A different description occurred to Allison: demon-possessed.
With the Corvette and Ford trashed, Spike bee-lined for the bass boat. But something else caught his attention—a small metal safe stationed under a work bench. He used his legs to shove it off the shelf and onto a tool cart which he wheeled out to his Subaru. After a struggle, he loaded the safe into the car and drove off.
Josh and Allison watched in slack-jawed silence.
“We need to make sure he didn’t kill someone,” Josh said.
“Wait.” Allison commanded. She outfitted them both with sterile hospital gloves.
Josh pushed the front door open with his foot. “Anyone home?” he yelled.
“Mr. Dunn?” Allison yelled. No response.
Josh reached into the hallway and turned on the light.
The place was a shambles. Spike had flipped over furniture and pulled clothes from closets. The remnants of a 72-inch TV, a stereo and a computer lay in shards in the living room. A snowfall of papers blanketed the den.
The kitchen was even worse. The pantry and cabinets had been stripped. The floor was ankle-deep in crockery shards and dented cans of food.
Allison became aware of an unmistakable smell and spotted its source. She realized what she had first taken for the random scrawling of a child was a barely legible note written on the counter in human feces. “Darryl,” it read. “Don’t shit in your own bed!”
She held her breath as she approached the bedroom. Spike wouldn’t have hung around trashing the garage if he’d killed someone in the house, she reasoned, still . . . she was relieved to find nothing except more damage. She checked the rest of the house with the same result.
“The answering machine has been played back,” Josh yelled from the living room. “Dunn obviously got our messages.”
Allison found a small box containing a tongue stud in the bedroom. She almost laughed. Tongue stud. Darryl. Trucker. Abusive boyfriend. How could she have missed the connection?
“Candi Cloninger lives here,” she called. “She’s Dunn’s girlfriend.”
Josh joined her in the bedroom. “I don’t want to be here when they show up. This is matter for the police.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Josh awoke Wednesday morning and pulled his fur trapper outfit from the closet. The coonskin cap still fit, as did the buckskin shirt. A year ago, Katie had claimed that the leggings made him look like an aging punk rocker in Spandex. This year, they seemed even tighter. But he seldom wore anything that didn’t acutely embarrass his teenager one way or another and decided the leggings would do.
Shortly before noon, he set off in costume for Old Fashioned River Days pageant rehearsal where, in addition to practicing for his role, he knew he’d find the chief of Winston’s police, J. P. Holt.
Most weeks of the year, a grown man dressed like Davey Crockett driving a Volvo down the streets of Winston would have attracted attention. But as he neared the pageant site at Riverfront Park, Josh passed a British redcoat on Harrison Street, a riverboat gambler at Fifth and Main and what seemed like several divisions of Civil War soldiers (Union and Rebel) lined up out the door of the Java Joynt. He recognized most of them as employees at the plant.
By the time Josh parked at the Sternwheeler, the grand home of a turn-of-the century bank president which had been converted to an inn, the trickle of costumed characters on their way to or from rehearsal for their respective segments of the Old Fashioned River Days pageant had swelled into an historically confused flood. Revolutionary War soldiers mingled with paddle wheel boat captains. Indians chatted up dance hall girls. Josh counted at least three versions of George Washington—General George Washington (as in Crossing the Delaware); President George Washington (as in Gilbert Stuart), and the young, entrepreneurial surveyor George Washington, the George Washington who actually had the most to do with the history of Winston.
He climbed the stairs to
the pageant stage and scanned for Holt, searching without success until it dawned on him that he shouldn’t be looking for a police uniform or for the camouflage jacket and Cincinnati Red’s cap that the chief wore during his frequent visits to the shooting range. No, he remembered, Holt was a fur trapper, just like himself. In seconds, he had zeroed in on him. With his buck teeth and round, brown eyes made even bigger by his steel-frame glasses, Josh thought Holt looked like a fat beaver, especially wearing his furry cap.
Josh scrambled from the stage and pushed through the growing throng—townspeople involved, he deduced from their costumes, in the skit depicting the bloody battle between the Indian confederacy led by Chief Cornstalk and the colonists led by General Andrew Lewis. The skit was a long-time favorite for two reasons—its depiction of carnage (140 colonials killed, 300 Indians) and because its finale included a stirring tribute to America’s Manifest Destiny capped by a medley of “America, The Beautiful” and the National Anthem by the Winston High School Band.
He waved to Woody Conroy who played the role of General Lewis. Several of his deaf press operators from the News were made up in war paint. He signed a greeting to them. He always found it ironic that the pageant warriors did not include Jimmy Mayes, an actual Indian. Despite grousing from pageant officials, Mayes had consistently declined to participate and spent the festival period racking up overtime covering for colleagues who had pageant duty.
He spotted Furbee, reprising her role as pioneer wife abducted by Indians, holding hands with boyfriend Charles Angerson, whose job in finance at the plant made him the ideal choice to portray the founder of Winston’s first bank.
The bullhorn-toting pageant director took the stage accompanied by fife and drum music that began to surge from the stage’s speakers. Josh found Chief Holt among the crowd.
The chief was delighted to see him. “Hey, thanks for getting the shooting range picture in. I owe you.”
Josh took him by the elbow. “Big news,” he said. “Let’s go where we can talk.”
Holt looked at his watch. He’d been called in unexpectedly to moonlight and was due at the job soon. He hoped the big news didn’t take long to hear about and that it didn’t require anything of him.
They settled at one of the park’s weather-beaten picnic tables away from the flow of rehearsal traffic. In their buckskin clothes and fur-covered caps, Josh thought they could have passed for two eighteenth century trappers swapping stories or working out a trade. “JP—” he began.
A cell phone chirped from Holt’s pocket. Holt squirmed to retrieve it, squeezed a button to stop the noise and looked at the screen.
Josh ignored the interruption. The chief’s obsession with baseball scores was well known. “JP,” Josh repeated, “There’s a problem you have to look into.” He started with Allison’s patients and her worries about sources of infection.
“Jesus, what women will do for fashion,” Holt cut in.
“The nipple ring was on a guy.”
Holt was appalled. He had heard of such things, but in Winston? “Doesn’t sound like anybody from here.”
Josh recounted their dealings with Spike at Lil’ Bob’s, and how Spike had led them to Darryl Dunn, the apparent source of the metal in Spike’s jewelry.
Holt was skeptical as Josh recounted Spike’s rampage at Darryl’s home off Betheltown Road. He hadn’t received any reports mentioning anything like that and said so.
“I doubt Darryl’s eager to involve the police in his activities,” Josh replied.
Holt needed to wrap this up. “We’ll look into it but unless Darryl complains about his stuff getting trashed, or someone complains they were defrauded by Spike, I’m hard-pressed to see this as a crime. I’ve seen upset wives do a lot worse.”
“How about shutting Spike down?”
“On what basis?” It was the question he always asked the preachers who wanted to close the carnival’s Green Door.
Josh thought about it. The chief was right. So far, Allison only suspected Spike’s jewelry was the problem. Until the lab tests came back, there was no proof. “Well, at least check him out. Maybe he doesn’t have a business license . . .”
Holt started a slow burn. A business license infraction! The editor was becoming worse than the preachers! “Josh, we have tens of thousands of tourists getting ready to invade this town—not to mention vendors, all sorts of traffic and let’s not forget a damn 10k run and Congressman Dorn. I’ve got the same undersized department I do every other week of the year when Winston is a nice little place of mostly peaceable people.”
“It’s a matter of public health.” Josh watched sweat pop out on the chief’s forehead, matting strands of fur to his red face.
“You got what? Four or five cases? Maybe?” He pointed to an ice cream vendor who’d shown up to take advantage of the rehearsal crowd. “There’s more people gonna get sick from that ice cream than will ever get sick because of some nipple ring.”
Holt had to get going. He swung his arm around to encompass the entire Old Fashioned River Days tableau—the stage in the riverfront park, the dozens of milling actors, the rental tables soon to be piled with merchandise (much of it off-size or outdated) from downtown stores on sale at “old-fashioned prices,” the quaint alley where potters and painters would display their wares for the juried art fair, the sidewalks where concessionaires would be setting up lemonade, ice cream and hot dog stands. The fringe on the sleeve of his buckskin jacket trailed like streamers. Josh thought he looked like an early settler surveying the western horizon
“We’ll check into this Darryl situation, but you need to relax,” Holt said. “I’m no reporter but I do know something about facts and you have damn few of them.”
“You know me better than that.”
“You’ve been wrong before.”
Josh felt his ears burn. There was nothing to say.
Josh walked back to the stage and spotted Coretha Hall talking with a woman in a white peasant blouse and puffy sleeves—Allison in costume as an 1812 War-era tavern wench. His eyes roamed across her bare shoulders and lingered on her neckline.
Perhaps it was the accumulation of things—the flirting at the diner, the sexual tension of the tattoo parlor, and now this—but he felt desire for the first time in years, green shoots of renewal springing up in a long-barren field. The feeling surprised him, pleased him. And made him uneasy.
He realized he’d been staring. He was thankful that Allison didn’t seem to have noticed. He filled her in on his meeting with the chief.
“What about Spike and his jewelry?”
“He says there’s nothing to do. And if you get right down to it, there really isn’t much to go on.”
Josh could sense Allison’s disappointment. “I could check at the Winston Jewelers on the way back to the office and see if they’ve heard of any problems,” he offered. “At least they’d be on alert.”
“Thanks. MediScan should have the first lab results back tomorrow. That should tell us a lot. And maybe the chief will turn up something that will help us find Cloninger and Dunn.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Following rehearsal, Josh arrived at the office focused on content for the all-important River Days section. The day-by-day schedule of events would take up the bulk of the space. The photos of the River Days Queen and her court would chew up some more and he had a file full of other possibilities—a profile of the pageant director, a map showing the location of the street vendors, a list of the merchants who had contributed to make the festival possible.
The difficult part would be freshening the annual piece that recounted Winston’s history from its initial surveying by George Washington to the settlers’ battle with Chief Cornstalk to the riverboat era to modern times. History hadn’t changed. His challenge was to find a story behind the story, to reveal a facet of Winston’s past that previously had been hidden.
The Friends of Chief Cornstalk ad, while its content was unknown, reminded him that there was a perspective on Chief Cornstalk and the Indian battles that was very different from the version taught to school children and celebrated in the River Days historical pageant.
In the early 1740s, George Washington surveyed the Ohio River valley and, as was the custom, claimed a portion of the vast acreage as a fee. Frontiersman and white settlers who followed were dismayed to find that the land was the home of a number of Indian tribes, notably the Shawnee. In the 1760s, war parties, led by the young tribal chieftain Cornstalk, attacked the white settlements. Washington and the other landowners responded by raising a militia to fend off the attacks and protect the value of their land.
By the 1770s Cornstalk had become chief of all Shawnee and head of a confederacy of northern Indian tribes including the Cayugas, Delawares, Mingoes, Shawnees and Wyandottes.
On October 10, 1774, less than two years before the beginning of the American Revolution, Cornstalk’s band of twelve hundred braves prepared to attack a white settlement near the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers near Winston. The colonial militia responded with an equal number of fighters. Contemporary accounts paint a picture of ferocious fighting. One hundred forty colonials and more than twice that number of Cornstalk’s men, outgunned by the white man’s muskets, died in the bloodiest Indian battle in American colonial history. Cornstalk and the survivors retreated to the far side of the Ohio River. So ended Indian hegemony in the east.
For the white settlers, the victory was another step in the westward march of Manifest Destiny, further confirmation of divine favor and of Christian superiority over the heathen.
There were even those who made the direct connection between the success of the local militia against Cornstalk and George Washington’s realization that such a militia might be transformed from merely protecting the interests of land owners, such as himself, to the task of winning independence from the British. It was, after all, only twenty months until July 4, 1776. So went the story celebrated in the River Days pageant.
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