by J. B. Hawker
Max was beginning to feel like a detective. He supposed the police had asked these same things.
Had the police interviewed Mr. Thomas?
Max asked him.
“No one’s asked me nothin’. I don’t suppose they figure there’s anything I could tell them Ruth couldn’t. I’m just Win’s uncle. Or was.”
For the first time during the interview, Mr. Thomas seemed to feel a touch of sadness for his murdered relative.
“Did your nephew have any favorite places to go, or any place he had worked, at all?” Max inquired.
“He worked for the pizza place, doing deliveries, for a while, a year or so ago, but it didn’t last. I think he still hung out there sometimes, though. Once in a while he brought me some leftover pizza when he’d been down there.”
Elmer looked as though he just realized there would not be any more free snacks. He seemed to feel his loss more keenly than before.
Driving back to Clark’s Hallow, Max thought about what he had learned about this man whose murdered corpse hung on display as a Halloween decoration.
What could have prompted someone to hate him so violently?
Banks listened to country music on the car radio as he drove.
The songs were about emotions common to all men. Where was an emotion which could explain the killer’s contempt for life?
The most intense feelings now being sung in a nasal twang were of love and jealousy.
Could the answer to these horrible crimes be in such basic emotions? Could it be that simple?
Banks shook his head. There was nothing simple, basic or normal at work here. Insanity was the only explanation he could imagine.
He went almost mad from love and jealousy once, himself. It was terrible to remember.
Nevertheless, even in his most irrational moments, he could never have committed such cold-blooded crimes. Banks thought there were few people who could have done so, no matter what the provocation.
He wondered if the authorities were any closer than he was to figuring it all out.
The door of the newspaper office opened.
Bunny looked up from her work and saw Walter Bjorglund standing in the doorway, looking around.
“Why, Walter, what brings you here?” Bunny inquired.
“Do you want to place an ad in the classified section?”
“What? Oh, no...no. I was just passing by and I saw you through the window. I wanted to see where you have to work now,” Walter replied.
“Well, that’s nice. As you can see, I work here at the newspaper. I type things up and answer the phones and all that sort of thing. It’s quite pleasant.”
Bunny felt she needed to ease Walter’s mind about this. She wasn’t sure why it felt necessary to reassure him.
“Good. I was wondering...See you!”
He turned and rushed out, leaving Bunny shaking her head.
“I wonder how much longer that man will be able to live on his own. He gets stranger by the day.”
Putting him out of her mind, she returned to the classified ad on her screen.
Walter scurried down the sidewalk, quickly distancing himself from the newspaper office. He felt like he shouldn’t have gone inside, but when he spied Mrs. Elder through the big window, he just went in without thinking.
It was strange to see her working in that office.
He often saw her working in the church office, typing the weekly bulletins and running off the newsletter.
That was where a pastor’s wife belonged, not in a newspaper office. Of course, Mrs. Elder wasn’t a pastor’s wife, anymore, not since Pastor Elder died, but it still didn’t seem right.
Walter had never stopped to think what might happen to her with the pastor gone. It worried him, now, as he hurried off in the direction of the church, and he mumbled to himself as he shuffled along.
Bunny tried to concentrate on her work. She was having difficulty because her mind kept drifting to Max and his coolness to her that morning. It bothered her more than she had expected. The fact that it bothered her as much as it did surprised and worried her.
Bunny had been susceptible to Max’s charm since they were children.
She hoped middle age would provide her with more resistance. In one way, she supposed it had.
Bunny could look at herself and Max with unclouded vision. She saw the flaws and failings in both of them very clearly.
In spite of her new intellectual detachment, her emotions seemed to be operating on a teenage level.
While it was thrilling to experience long-dormant emotional and physical reactions, it just was not prudent or wise.
Age was supposed to bring wisdom. Apparently, self-control was not included in the package.
Perhaps it would be the wisest thing for Bunny to start looking for a different job.
It was fun being with Max, again, but she was afraid it would hurt to be around him, now he was distancing himself from her.
She had wanted them just to be friends, or even friendly acquaintances, when she took the job.
She needed to be honest, now, and face it; she’d allowed herself to begin to care about Max more than she should.
Looking at the fantasies and hopes creeping into her thoughts, she felt ashamed. She knew better!
“Oh, Bunny,” she remonstrated with herself, “How could you set yourself up again?”
Her years with Eustace were a sort of penance for Bunny; a payment for giving herself so completely in her relationship with Max.
Married to Eustace, she could remain emotionally detached and in control.
He never moved her to despair, nor caused her to lose her self-respect by begging him to love her.
Eustace never moved her, at all, after the first days of their union, but that had seemed suitable and safe, somehow.
Before he abruptly discarded her, Max consumed Bunny’s life. He was her obsession.
She pulled herself together with difficulty after the divorce and vowed to never let any man mean so much to her, ever again.
Max’s abandonment left parts of her anesthetized., but those numbed areas were beginning to awaken.
Feeling like a whole woman again was delightful, but there were just too many complications.
While Bunny was wrestling with these thoughts, Max opened the door and quickly crossed the room to her desk and tossed his voice recorder onto her tray of papers.
“Bunny, would you type up this interview before you go to lunch? I can work on the story while you are out and have it ready for you to paste up when you get back.”
Max turned and walked into the back room.
Picking up the recorder, Bunny decided she would definitely have to start job-hunting again. Drat!
She switched on the recorder and began to listen, the words seeming muffled by a fog of loss.
Sally Trainor spoke irritably to her husband, who as sitting at the dining room table reading.
“Yance, this is the last year we do all this ridiculous Halloween decorating! I’ve had it with the work and mess and inconvenience. This room is the only in the house with enough natural light to read a newspaper.”
“Now, Sally,” Yance spoke soothingly, “I thought you had as much fun playing ‘dress-up-the-house’ as I do.”
“Well, I don’t. I think it is stupid, especially with these murders. I can’t wait until the judging, so we can have our nice home back. This place is beginning to give me the creeps, the way we’ve fixed it up.”
“I tell you what, Sugar. Let’s you and me take a little break. We can go to San Francisco for a day or two and maybe see a show or drop in on Ben and Rachel in Sausalito.”
“Oh, Yance! Could we? I’d love that. But, what about the contest?”
“Everything will be all right for a day or so without us, and we will be back in plenty of time for the judging. Why not call Rachel, right now, and see if they are going to be
home?”
As Sally made her call, Yance looked up the phone number of their favorite hotel in the city.
He was beginning to get excited about going, too. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?
He was getting tired of the gloominess, as well. He just had not wanted to admit it. Sally was right. They were getting a little too old for such foolishness.
After they won the contest this year, they would retire from the house decorating game.
In a musty, windowless basement room across town, a more sinister game played out.
There were rusty-looking tools lying on an old metal chest near the door.
In the center of the room was a decrepit wooden picnic table, its slatted top askew, threatening to allow its unwholesome burden to slither to the floor.
A small, wiry, middle-aged man, with sparse salt and pepper hair, bent over the table using a drill and humming the theme music from The Munsters TV show.
At the Sheriff’s Office that afternoon, Lieutenant Fuchs was conducting an interview.
They had located the person who was with the Shasta Lake victim, Winston Thomas, on the night he disappeared.
A pale, flaccid-looking, painfully thin man in his middle-twenties, with greasy dark blond hair and a bad complexion, sat across from Lieutenant Fuchs in the small interview room.
The man kneaded a soggy paper cup, turning it this way and that, nervously. Sweat soaked his tee shirt making the area surrounding the skull design stand out against the darker background.
“Your name is Kelvin Johnson, is that right?” Lieutenant Fuchs asked him.
Johnson twitched, as though shocked by the innocuous question.
“Y-y-yeah, so what?” he stammered
Fuchs thought this pathetic attempt at bravado was almost humorous.
“So you were a friend of Winston Thomas, right?”
“We hung out sometimes. No law against it.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Johnson, not yet. So why don’t you try being a little more cooperative here?”
“What do you want to know? I didn’t kill him,” he spat out belligerently, growing even whiter.
Lieutenant Fuchs thought if these things were decided on guilty looks, alone, this guy was their man. Unfortunately, they would need proof.
“Thomas’s mother says you came by for her son the night he disappeared. He left with you and she never saw him alive again. So where did you and Winston go? Suppose you tell us everything you two did and when and where you left him, okay?”
Lieutenant Fuchs felt like they were beginning to get somewhere in the investigation.
“I want to see a lawyer. I don’t have to say nothing without a lawyer. I know my rights.”
Johnson looked even more frightened.
“Does this mean you refuse to cooperate, Mr. Johnson? The right to an attorney is for people charged with a crime, you know. You haven’t been arrested, yet. We are just trying to trace the movements of your friend, Thomas, on the days leading to his death. Now, why would you need a lawyer to tell us what you two did and where you went?” Fuchs asked.
There was a new edge to the detective’s voice as he spoke.
Johnson was not a candidate for Mensa, but he recognized his problem. He could insist on a lawyer and probably be arrested for murder, or he could cooperate and get arrested, anyway, on other charges, and maybe be accused of the murder, too.
“Oh man, this sucks!” he whined. “Look, if I tell you what I know about Winnie, will you not bother with other stuff that doesn’t concern the murder?”
“You look, Johnson. Right now, my interest is this murder case. However, I cannot promise to ignore other crimes. I will say, if you cooperate it will be noted and taken into consideration in any case which might be brought against you. You must know now we’ve got your scent, we’ll track down whatever you’ve been up to, anyway. Help yourself, by helping us. That’s your best bet.”
Fuchs was very persuasive.
“Oh man...okay, it’s like this...”
Johnson told them everything he and Thomas did the night they met up. He insisted Thomas was alive when he left him the next evening.
The two men shared expensive habits and a chronic lack of money, as neither one could hold down a steady job.
Together they had come up with a way to get large amounts of cash for a minimum of effort.
Every few weeks the two would head to a large town or city where they prostituted themselves, until they had earned enough money for the drugs and video games they craved.
They would spend a few hours together afterward, indulging themselves according to their whims, and would then part until the next time.
They were particularly successful this last trip and Thomas wasn’t through partying by the next evening when Johnson was ready to go home.
It was Johnson’s claim that they had argued until Thomas had stormed off, saying if Kelvin didn’t want to play, he’d find someone who did.
Johnson claimed that was the last he ever saw of Thomas.
Fuchs did not know if he believed that part of the story. Unfortunately, the rest of it was all too believable.
Johnson vowed the prostitution was, “strickly business,” and he was not gay.
He commented, “Winnie maybe enjoyed it a little too much,” but said Thomas claimed to be straight, as well.
Back at his desk, Fuchs reviewed Johnson’s statement, noting the places and people he had mentioned who might be able to corroborate any of his story.
They would have to follow every lead, even though Foxy didn’t like what they were stepping into in the process.
Walking into the church sanctuary that evening for choir practice, Bunny heard a murmur of voices.
Several choir members were milling about, collecting their music, greeting one another and settling into their places.
Bunny picked up her music folder from the top of the piano and overheard one of the men speaking.
“Apparently the house looked as though no one had been there for days. The police got involved when he failed to turn up at work and never called in. It just isn’t like Bob Miller to miss work, let alone fail to call.”
Bunny stepped over and asked Mark Costa, the baritone who was speaking, “Has something happened to Bob?”
“Oh, hi, Bunny. Haven’t you heard? Ol’ Bob is missing. No one seems to know where he is.”
“What do you mean, missing? He’s an adult. Surely he can take a day off work if he wants to,” Bunny offered.
As things were with Max just now, she would not mind taking a few days off herself.
“Well, sure,” Mark replied, “But, the thing is, when his boss went to check on him, Bob’s place looked sort of abandoned, with newspapers and mail piling up outside. So, he called the cops and when they went inside, it didn’t seem to them like Bob had packed up for a trip or anything. He just wasn’t there. They are on the lookout for his car.”
“We all better pray for Bob, then, that he is alright and he will turn up soon. I wonder where he could be.”
Bunny sat down as Carol, their director, began the rehearsal. She soon forgot about Bob and concentrated on the singing.
When she remembered about him later, Bunny was not too concerned. She was sure he would turn up, and he would probably be annoyed at all the fuss.
“This is silly,” Max grumbled to himself as he sat in his car in the church parking lot. He wasn’t sure what made him give in to the impulse to come by and offer Bunny a ride home.
This stupid church crap had caused the awkwardness between them.
Max asked himself what the big deal was. So, she had become a Bible thumper, so what? She hadn’t tried to convert him, had she? So, why had he gotten so uptight?
Banks had been enjoying his time with Bunny. He was lonely since returning to Northern California. For some reason he hadn’t felt like getting mixed u
p with another woman. He supposed he’d been gun shy.
With Bunny he didn’t feel like that. Plus, there wasn’t all the preliminary mating dance garbage to go through. They already knew each other just about as well as one person can know another, warts and all. It took a heavy load off the relationship, since they weren’t trying to impress one another.
He admitted to himself he’d acted like an ass over the choir business and nearly wrecked everything.
He was here to try to patch things up.
He just hoped he wasn’t being an even bigger ass, now. He didn’t even know if Bunny needed a ride home tonight. Maybe she already had plans.
Just as Max had convinced himself he was making a mistake, people started coming out of the church.
He saw Bunny walking with two tall, thin women who resembled a mother and daughter.
Before he could leave, Bunny saw him.
She said something to her companions and walked toward his car. The other women waved and continued across the parking lot.
Bunny climbed into the SUV and shut the door.
Uncharacteristically, she sat there without saying anything.
Without speaking, either, Max started up the car and pulled away from the church.
Even in his uneasiness, he had to smile to himself as he thought about Bunny’s silence, and wondered how long she could keep it up, if he remained quiet, as well. Should he say something or put her to the test?
He turned to say, “I’m sorry about today,” at the exact moment Bunny turned and said, “Thank you for coming to pick me up.”
Neither of them understood the other and they had to repeat themselves. It took a couple of more tries before they got the timing right and by then they were laughing and the tension was gone.
Max pulled into Bunny’s driveway and turned off the engine.
“That’s quite a pile of leaves you’ve got there, Bunny. What do you plan to do with them?”
Max asked about the mound of leaves Bunny had raked up onto the corner of her yard nearest the road, beside the driveway.
“I was going to burn them, but it’s been too windy, so I just keep piling them up, and now I’m afraid I have too many. The fire could get out of control,” Bunny explained. “I hope to make a couple of smaller stacks and do it this weekend.”