LOONIES
By
Gregory Bastianelli
JournalStone
San Francisco
Copyright © 2015 by Gregory Bastianelli
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-942712-17-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-942712-18-3 (ebook)
JournalStone rev. date: March 20, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015932365
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Art & Design: Wayne Miller
Edited by: Dr. Michael R. Collings
To my parents,
for their faith in me
LOONIES
Chapter 1
THE TRUNK IN THE ATTIC
Smokey Hollow had the appearance of a quiet and quaint New England town, until the day the trunk in the attic was opened.
Brian Keays left his downtown newspaper office at the end of the day to stroll over to the police station when he got the call from his wife. Darcie had been poking around in the attic of the house they had just settled into when she discovered an old steamer trunk. He didn’t like the idea of her going up the drop-down ladder that led to the attic space. She was four months pregnant, and the thought of her missing a step and falling backwards onto the floor unnerved him.
She was curious, she told him, and excited about exploring their new home. When he asked what was in the trunk, she informed him it was locked. There was a small keyhole, and she had been thinking about jamming a screwdriver in it to try to open the trunk. He told her not to, to wait until he got home. Those old steamer trunks were valuable to antique dealers if they were in good shape. He didn’t want her damaging it trying to open it. She wasn’t happy about waiting, but she ended up being glad she did. If she had opened it by herself, she might have gone insane.
Brian liked the location of his newspaper office, on the corner of Main Street and Hemlock Avenue, not only because it looked out on the business district of Smokey Hollow, but also because it was across the street from Cully’s Pub, where he liked to imbibe a cold draught beer after his day was done, and diagonally across from the police station where he was headed now.
Not that the police station was a hotbed of activity. Not in Smokey Hollow. At least not before the trunk was opened.
The New Hampshire town lay in a valley. Often on early summer mornings, mist would settle there, bathing the town in a smoky haze, giving the community of about seven thousand the origin of its name. The town’s forefathers misspelled the word smoky, but it was never corrected.
Smokey Hollow had a minimal staff at its police station. The chief, Noah Treece, was new and young, late twenties, about the same age as Brian. There were only two other full-time officers, both named Alvin by some odd coincidence. One worked day shift and one worked night shift. Chief Treece floated between the two shifts but always said he was never really off duty. There were several part-time officers, a couple of part-time administrative people, and a dispatcher, though most of the emergency calls went through the county office.
Brian walked through the front door of the station, no metal detector or security buzzer to worry about. This was Smokey Hollow, not the precinct stations in Boston, where just a few short months ago Brian Keays was working the crime beat for one of the city papers. Now that was a time when walking into a police station was like opening Pandora’s box, with any type of depraved crime of passion, greed, or lust just waiting for him at the sergeant’s desk. He still remembered the flutter in his chest every time he approached a grizzled police veteran for the nightly report. It was the same flutter in his chest he had when he fell in love with Darcie.
Walking into the Smokey Hollow police station spawned no flutter in Brian Keays’ heart. Nothing happened in this town. This wasn’t Boston or any of its bustling burbs. This was a town whose highlight was the annual Dump Festival. The only major crime in the past several decades was the unsolved disappearance of four-year-old Timmy Birtch twenty-four years ago, a case that the outgoing police chief had pledged to solve before retirement. That never happened.
Chief Noah Treece had a glass office and always seemed happy to see Brian whenever he walked into the station, which Brian could never figure out because neither of them had any information to share to help their stagnant careers. Brian sometimes thought Noah was just glad to see a friendly face to talk to that would help break up the mundane pace of his job.
Brian greeted Wanda, the dispatcher/receptionist/secretary/not-sure-what-other-functions-she-had, and she half-heartedly nodded as if disturbed he was interrupting her boredom. Noah flung open his door and waved him in. Brian settled in one of the hard wooden chairs across from the chief’s desk. He looked at Noah’s smile—such a handsome, even pretty face on a man young enough to only be a patrolman in Boston, but here he was at the top spot in this town’s Police Department, a job that didn’t apparently require a lot of experience.
Brian liked Noah, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was about the young chief that drew him. Maybe it was the fact they both had jobs that could be exciting in a different setting than Smokey Hollow, but their career paths had unceremoniously dumped them into their current positions and they were stuck with their lot in life. The only major difference Brian saw was that Noah seemed content, happy overseeing a community where the major scofflaws were people breaking pooper-scooper laws or the occasional peeping tom.
Give me something! Brian wanted to shout. Tell me something happened that will make my heart flutter. Make me be in love with my job again. Would that be so hard?
“How are you, Brian,” the smiling face said. “How’s your day going?”
“About the same as most days.”
“How is Darcie?”
“Good. Thanks.”
Not long after Brian had met him, Noah had stopped by their house to welcome them to the town. Darcie had thought the chief charming.
“Finally settling in to her new home?”
“A little too much,” Brian said. “She keeps digging through the place. Now she’s discovered some trunk in the attic and got all excited about it.”
“Oh, nice. What did she find in it?”
Brian sighed. “That’s the problem. She can’t open it. It’s locked. So her curiosity is raging, and she can’t wait to see what’s inside.”
“Locked?” Noah’s smile weakened slightly. “No key?”
“I don’t know if she’s tried looking around for one. She only called me a few minutes ago.”
Noah leaned back in his chair, his smile fading as he dropped into a deep contemplative state. Brian studied him, wondering what the chief was thinking.
Noah held up a finger before reaching down and opening one of the bottom drawers of his desk. He dug through it, trying to get to something at the bottom, his smile returning when he pulled an old coffee mug out of the drawer and set it on the desk.
“Let me tell you an interesting story.”
Noah began to tel
l him about former Police Chief Pfefferkorn, now retired and living in Florida. He had run the quiet town for many years but felt his career was tarnished by his inability to solve the Timmy Birtch disappearance. Sure, the State Police took charge of the case, as they did with major crimes in small towns, but it happened on his watch, and he was the one who had to look the townspeople in the eyes every day and feel like he failed them.
Timmy Birtch had been four years old when he went missing. One summer night, he was snatched from his bedroom while he slept. His mother, asleep in the next room, didn’t hear a sound. There were no clues as to what happened to him, no evidence. Not a trace.
About sixteen years after the disappearance, and a few years before retiring, Chief Pfefferkorn had made a seemingly innocuous discovery. He had left the station around midnight and was walking along Main Street and some of the side streets around downtown when he happened upon something: a key.
Pfefferkorn had kept it in his front shirt pocket and for most of his last few years on the job had wondered about it, had become obsessed with finding the lock the key opened. He had told Noah how he tried every lock he came upon, usually late at night while walking the streets, hoping he’d get lucky and find the lock the key fit. But it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Noah said the chief told him that he needed to find the lock it fit. Somehow, he had gotten it into his head that the key opened something important, that he had been destined to find it, that he couldn’t retire until he found the lock. It had become a compulsion.
The chief had told him he never stopped trying until the day he retired. Noah said he could see the sadness in the chief’s eyes on the day of his retirement. Not sadness that he was leaving his position, but that he never found the lock that key went to.
“I think,” Noah said to Brian, “that his inability to solve the Birtch case sent him over the edge with frustration, and that the key became some tangible object that he could resolve if only he found the lock it went to.”
Noah picked up the coffee mug.
“And when he retired,” Noah said, “he left this with me.”
Noah turned the coffee mug over and a key clattered onto the desktop.
Brian looked at the small black key. It didn’t look like the kind of key that would fit a door lock. It was old and looked more like it would open the lock of an antique roll-top desk, suitcase, maybe …
“And you think this key might go to the steamer trunk in my attic?”
“I have no idea, but why not try it?” Noah said, smiling. “And the interesting thing was, Pfefferkorn told me where the key was found. It was near your house.”
Brian and Darcie Keays lived on Ash Street, a U-shaped residential street off the main drag, with both ends connecting to Main Street. It was dotted with Victorian and Colonial houses, some of the oldest in town. They bought the house because of its convenience to downtown. Darcie wanted to be able to walk to the shops on Main Street. She especially liked going to the flower shop and the public library. The elementary school was at the end of Main Street, and Darcie was hoping to do some substitute teaching in the fall, just until the baby came. Eventually she hoped to get back into teaching full time, and having the school close would be convenient.
Noah followed Brian home and Darcie showed them where she had found the trunk. The three of them stood in the attic of the Keays’ house. It was hot and stuffy, the air stagnant. Brian’s sweat-drenched shirt clung to his back. The floorboards were covered in a layer of dust, stirred up a bit by three sets of footprints.
Darcie had pulled the trunk to the middle of the floor, beneath one of the dim light bulbs. Brian wasn’t happy she had done that, but she assured him it wasn’t heavy.
“It didn’t even feel like there is anything in there.”
“Still,” Brian said, frustrated she wasn’t seeing his point, “you need to be more careful.”
“I will,” was her curt answer.
Noah stood by quietly till the couple finished, rubbing the key in his right hand. Brian looked at the smile on his face and thought the chief looked excited. It was the most animated he had ever seen the young chief. It made him actually look like a policeman. But what were the odds the key actually went to this trunk?
“Here goes nothing,” Noah said, getting on his knees before the trunk. Brian and Darcie leaned over his shoulders.
Noah slipped the key in with a little bit of a struggle. He was trying to force it, Brian thought, to make it fit. But then there was a click, and Brian felt a well of amazement swell up in him as the lock popped open.
“Oh, my, would you look at that,” Noah said, looking back at them with a wide grin. He raised the lid of the trunk, standing in the process.
The top of the lid shielded some of the light from the bulb overhead, shadowing the contents somewhat, so all Brian could see were yellowed newspapers wrapped around some objects.
Noah reached in and grabbed one bundle, lifting it out with care.
“Very light, whatever it is,” he said in a whisper, as if afraid to let anyone else hear.
He set the parcel on the floor.
“I wonder what it could be,” Darcie said, leaning closer.
Brian said nothing, curious but not excited. What could they expect, old pottery maybe?
The chief lifted some of the newspaper, which cracked and tore in his fingers. It was like peeling the layers of an onion. He tried to be gentle in case there was something breakable underneath.
The three sets of eyes gazed down as page after page of old newspapers revealed shoe-store ads, high-school baseball game results, obituaries, and comic strips. Brian peered closer as Noah folded back the last layer.
At first it looked like a bundle of dusty gray sticks. But shapes emerged in the dim lighting: thin bony arms, frail femur and tibia drawn up in a fetal position, cracked ribs, and a small skull, tatters of decomposed skin clinging to it, empty eye sockets staring at them.
It was a human baby skeleton.
The three of them were silent, too shocked to talk, eyes taking in the tiny bones.
Then Darcie uttered a sound, a sort of cry that came halfway up her throat but then caught, which was a good thing, because if it had escaped her mouth it would have come out as a scream.
“Jesus,” said Noah, no longer smiling. “What the hell have we found?”
Brian stared, a dozen thoughts running through his head: What had they uncovered? What else was in this trunk? Where did this come from? What did this mean? And most of all, who was this baby?
“That’s certainly not the remains of Timmy Birtch,” Brian said.
“No,” Noah agreed. “I don’t know what we’ve stumbled upon here. This is bizarre.”
Brian didn’t realize his wife was about to faint. In fact, he had forgotten she was standing right beside him. She staggered sideways and put a hand out on his shoulder to steady herself. He looked up and, even in the dimness, saw the look on her pale face.
“Honey,” he said, grabbing onto her arm.
She was turning her head away from the thing on the floor. She tried to say something but could not.
“Let me get you downstairs,” he said, not needing to say anything to Noah, who was still mesmerized by their discovery.
Brian guided his wife toward the trap door. He descended the ladder first, not trusting her to go ahead of him, and then helped her down. He led her to their bedroom, helping her lay on the bed covers, and then, even though it was summer, he drew a throw blanket over her. She pulled it tight and clung to it, shivering.
“Just rest,” he said, turning to go.
“Don’t leave.”
He looked at her, torn by the urge to sit beside her to comfort her and his eagerness to get back up to the attic. He didn’t want to wait, he needed to see more.
“I’ll be close by.”
Her eyes stared at him, glassy and dazed, but also with a hint of—what?—anger, or maybe disappointment.
�
�Just call out if you need anything,” he said, trying to break away from that gaze. His heart was thumping, like it used to in Boston. He wanted to get out of this room and back up those steps into that dusty, dark attic with the curious trunk filled with unimaginable mystery.
She closed her eyes, and a puff of air passed through her lips.
He stroked her left shoulder reassuringly and then left the room, looking back only once. When he was in the hall, he moved rapidly to the attic ladder, almost stumbling as he climbed into the darkness. Once through the opening at the top, he saw that Noah had more newspaper bundles spread out on the floor around him.
As Brian approached, the chief turned to face him, his smile wiped off, the color washed out of his face, his eyes round.
“There are five of them,” the chief whispered, almost as if afraid to wake the babies laid out on the floor before him like a naptime nightmare at some daycare from hell.
Brian looked at the skeletons, all about the same size, all intact. What he thought might be the remnants of clothing on some he realized were gray flakes of withered skin. He wondered if they had died straight out of the womb. He glanced at another set of bones and saw that it had a small fist up to its mouth, as if it had been sucking its thumb in its last moments. God, he thought, had they been alive?
“This is unbelievable,” was all he could think to say.
“Look at the newspapers,” Noah said, his voice excited.
Brian knelt and grabbed one of the pages from the floor, holding it up to the light. He looked at the date, and then glanced at Noah.
“This is almost thirty years old.”
“Yes,” Noah said. “The newspapers are all from around the same time.” He gestured to the bundles. “They span a period of about eight years. The newest I found is a little over twenty years ago.”
Loonies Page 1