Stone Groove

by Erik Carter

  Dale pointed to his busted lip. “The blood’s barely dried from the last job.”

  Taft slapped a manila folder on the table.

  Dale grabbed the folder but hesitated before opening it. He’d worked for three weeks straight without a break on the Willard Ledford case, and he was tired.

  He leaned past Taft again and looked at Julia. She had a nice caboose.

  “Open the damn folder, Conley.”

  “You’re testy today, sir. Need a smoke?”

  Taft grumbled. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small bag. He dumped some pistachios into his hand and cracked one open.

  “Peggy?” Dale said.

  Taft’s wife Peggy was always trying to get him to stop smoking with alternative habits. She’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get him hooked on lollipops, cheese crackers, and one silly notion of celery sticks.

  “Open!” Taft said and tossed a pistachio into his mouth.

  Dale grinned and opened the folder. There was the usual single-page memo on DOJ stationary. He read for a moment—and the grin quickly dropped from his face.

  The message was brief.

  Dale’s mouth hung wide open by the time he’d read the short message.

  “Mass disappearance,” Taft said, his voice quivering with the rage he always had toward faceless scumbags. “Discovered last night.”

  Dale kept looking at the numbers. One hundred forty-seven people. Twenty-eight of them children. He’d never heard of so many people disappearing at once. Could anyone possibly abduct that many folks? Were they still alive?

  “These people. They’re just … gone?”

  “One day they’re there. By a couple days later, they’re all gone. Every last one of them.” Taft squeezed a pistachio shell between his fingers.

  “But how?”

  “That’s what you’re gonna find out, pretty boy.”

  Dale hated when Taft called him “pretty boy.” He wasn’t going to argue about being good-looking, but he thought of himself as more of a Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen type.

  He scanned the note again. “What does this have to do with the BEI?”

  “Agent Wilson will fill you in on the way.”

  Each BEI case began with a “liaison” agent from another federal agency. NSA, DEA, the Marshalls—but most often the FBI. Until the BEI agent determined that the case was appropriate for the Bureau, the liaison was in charge.

  Dale had worked with FBI Special Agent Cody Wilson once before, his very first assignment. And it hadn’t been peachy keen.

  “So I’ll be headed to Staunton, Virginia, sir?” Dale said.

  “That’s right. None of your usual antics with this one, Conley. You hear me? And try shaving, for Christ’s sake. You’re a federal agent.”

  Dale ran a hand over his stubble. “I thought it looked cool.”

  In the same way that mathematicians working in the DOD were given slack with their eccentricities, so too were BEI agents. This leniency bothered Taft to no end. Even though Dale was by far one of the most normal agents, Taft still hated his T-shirt-and-jeans approach to life. And Dale enjoyed pushing the man’s buttons.

  Dale slid his ticket toward Taft. “Since you blew it for me with Miss Julia there, you could at least pick up the bill.”

  Taft growled again. “Fine,” he said and snatched the ticket. “But the moment Wilson gets here, I want your ass out that door and on your way to Staunton.”

  “And when will he be arriving?”

  The bell on the front door jingled again. Dale turned around.

  Agent Wilson stood in the doorway. “Let’s roll, Conley.”

  Chapter 3

  Dale sat in the passenger seat of an Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser as he and Wilson barreled south down I-81.

  “Jesus, Wilson,” Dale said and ran a hand over the vinyl of the door panel. “Don’t you have to be married with kids to buy a station wagon?”

  “It suits me. Lots of storage.”

  That was an understatement. It was a nineteen-foot, 5,000-pound beast with a 127-inch wheelbase. Ahead of and behind them were the blaring sirens and flashing lights of a Virginia State Police escort, four cars in all.

  “How old are you anyway?” Dale said.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “You’re only three years older than me, man.” Dale shook his head. Wilson would have walked right past Olds 442s at the dealership to buy this hunk of metal.

  Dale had begged Taft to let them take his glorious car, Arancia, but his wailing was ineffective. Wilson was told to drive, and Dale was to spend the two-and-a-half-hour trip reviewing the information that had been gathered as of the previous night. Dale had taken a cab to follow Willard Ledford to the Jefferson Memorial, which meant that Arancia was still parked safely in the BEI garage. This gave him some solace.

  A folder of photographs was on Dale’s lap.

  “The owner of the local farmer’s market discovered the disappearance,” Wilson said. “He stopped by on Monday, and everything was fine. When he went by to pick up their crops on Wednesday, they were all gone.”

  Wilson sat tall and straight, both hands on the wheel. He was a large man with an athletic build and round, pinkish, Midwestern cheeks that belied his polished image. There was an afterthought of a mustache on his upper lip, small and well groomed. He wore a dark suit and sunglasses—the government-approved, uniform-compatible type. Dale’s shades, which were folded up on his lap next to the folder, were wireframes and had been bent out of and back into shape several dozen times.

  The photos in the folder were black-and-white 8.5x11s. The picture on top showed a small village, antiquated, looking straight out of the eighteenth century.

  “Tell me more about the group,” Dale said

  “The Marshall Village. Utopian community led by Camden Marshall. In the country outside Staunton, between there and Dayton.”

  “Dayton?” Dale said as he studied the village in the photograph. “So they’re Mennonites?” Having lived in the Shenandoah Valley for much of his life, he knew that there was a large Mennonite population in the area near Dayton and Harrisonburg.

  “No. They adopted some of the Mennonite lifestyle, but the Marshallites—that’s what they call themselves—they’re not a religious group.”

  “Philosophically-based,” Dale said. “A traditional utopian community.” There was probably a copy of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward on every Marshallite’s nightstand.

  Dale flipped through the photos. A young girl sitting on the front steps of a wooden home. A smiling couple standing next to a mound of corncobs. All the people had old-fashioned, rural-type clothes. The women wore dresses and bonnets. The men wore buttoned shirts and trousers with suspenders.

  There was a yellowed newspaper article stuck between the photos. Dale unfolded it. Its headline read:

  THE CURIOUS MARSHALL VILLAGE:

  AN EXERCISE IN TEMPERANCE

  The photograph at the top of the article showed two young girls with a wheelbarrow in front of the village. Dale skimmed over the article’s content. … believes in a complete absence of monetary gain … all revenue is immediately liquidated into physical goods for the village … Camden Marshall first taught his concept of a resource-based economy at Virginia Tech University …

  “And now they’re all gone,” Dale said.

  “Every man, woman, and child.”

  Dale scrutinized one of the photos, this one of a man tending to a plow in a field surrounded by rolling, wooded hills. He didn’t know what to make of this whole thing. A lot of times these fringe communities practiced utopian socialism wherein the participants shared community resources equally. This certainly seemed to be the case with the Marshall Village, but it also had the added element of the antiquated buildings, clothes, and tools. What was the point of all this? Was it some sort of ideological aim, a belief that “times were better” a couple hundred years ago?

  Dale looked back at the newspaper article again. … Marshall
believes that his village can serve as an inspiration for small town government …

  “The leader, Camden Marshall,” Dale said. “What’s his story?”

  “Keep flipping. You’ll find a picture of him.”

  Dale turned over a couple more pictures of people in rural clothing and found a color, head-and-shoulders shot of a man in a contemporary suit and tie. Mid-fifties. His dark hair had streaks of gray, and his face was wide and handsome. But it was the expression that gave it away—narrowed eyes and a grim line of a mouth with just a hint of a smug, self-assured smile.

  The man was an academic. Dale just knew it. He cringed. “Is this guy a—”

  “Professor?” Wilson said. “Sure is.” Wilson was already well aware of Dale’s thoughts on modern academia. “He taught at Virginia Tech until he started the village. Economics. One of those ’60s radicals. Remember that student protest over national tuition rates? He was one of the leaders. Teaches a resource-based economy.”

  “Resource-based economy? Me no gets. Please to be explaining.”

  “An alternative to a monetary economy. It advocates sharing all the world’s resources equally.”

  “Socialism.”

  “Kind of,” Wilson said. “You could say it’s the ultimate product of socialism. Marx’s endgame. Resource-based economy calls for the complete elimination of money. Machines would do the bulk of the manual labor, and people would be free to think and innovate.”

  Dale and Wilson exchanged a look.

  “Camden Marshall’s giving the general population way too much credit,” Dale said. “If they were free from work and money, people wouldn’t be writing symphonies and creating new technologies. They’d be getting drunk and having day-long porn marathons.” Dale shook his head. Resource-based economy. Damn hippies.

  “Of course, he’s our prime suspect now,” Wilson said, “since he led all these people out into the middle of the woods in the first place.”

  The thought had already crossed Dale’s mind. When a woman turns up dead, the first person who goes under the magnifying glass is the husband. This assumption is often wrong, but it’s often right too. The same thing held true for Camden Marshall. The man could have been abducted right along with the rest of them, it’s true, but for now he was Dale’s primary person of interest.

  “How did Marshall convince a hundred and fifty people to follow him?” Dale said.

  “Charisma. Persuasion. Sheer force of personality, it would seem.”

  Dale nodded. As much as society liked to celebrate the power of the individual, especially these days, people had an unsettling tendency to follow the leader. Folks with a bit more charm, a few more brain cells, and, most importantly, the ability to see through the world’s bullcrap could easily persuade the swarms of dull-minded stooges surrounding them to do just about anything they wanted. Dale had seen it before. This was another reason to suspect Camden Marshall.

  He flipped the photo of Marshall over. The next photo was a wide shot showing the whole village, which was composed of little white houses, all one-story in height and very plain.

  “It’s an odd case, no doubt,” Dale said, looking at the pastoral scene before him, “but I don’t understand why you’ve called the BEI.”

  “There’s one more detail. They found a stone in the back of the village. It had a word carved into it. Roanoke.”

  Dale whipped around. “Roanoke. The Lost Colony …”

  Wilson nodded. “Now you see why you guys were brought in?”

  Dale’s brain began firing at a mile a minute. Roanoke. America’s greatest mystery. It was England’s first attempt to colonize the New World. Four hundred years ago. Before Jamestown. Before the Pilgrims.

  And it ended when all 117 of the colonists vanished.

  Dale stammered. “Whatever happened to the Marshallites … Whoever did this … They’re trying to make a connection to the Lost Colony.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the stone.”

  Wilson turned to him for a moment before quickly returning his attention to the road. “What about the stone?”

  “It’s sort of like the Dare Stones.”

  “The what?”

  “The Dare Stones. They were found back in the ’30s. A bunch of stones with messages carved in them, supposedly a record of what actually happened to the Lost Colonists.”

  A hiker stumbled upon the first Dare Stone in the summer of 1937. In the following months, dozens more stones showed up from North Carolina to Georgia, outlining the fate of the people who disappeared from Roanoke Island. Most experts had since concluded that the stones were forgeries.

  “What are you saying, Conley? That the rock from the Marshall Village is one of those stones?”

  “No,” Dale said. “But whoever carved Roanoke on that stone dang well knew about the Dare Stones. It’s yet another copycat.”

  The BEI recruited Dale for his talents with history and puzzles. As such, he was handed a lot of copycat cases. When these whackos couldn’t find enough adventure in their modern lives, they emulated the calamities of the past. For three dark weeks last year he’d chased down a man who worshipped Jack the Ripper. Just a month ago he’d caught a guy who wanted to be a modern-day cattle rustler. Dale found him behind a pile of manure deep in Texas cattle country.

  Dale rubbed his hands together in anticipation and watched the thick woods of the Shenandoah Valley fly past as they continued to zoom along. “How much longer?”

  “Another hour. Just hold tight.” Wilson shook his head. “It’s fun to watch you BEI guys work. There’s quite a brain in that head of yours. Ought to work on your bearing, though. You could at least shave.”

  Cripes. Two demands to shave in less than an hour.

  “A little stubble never hurt anyone,” Dale said. “Though your mother complains that it’s scratchy.”

  “My mother? Real mature, Agent Conley.”

  Dale grinned.

  Chapter 4

  Dale always thought it a shame that people didn’t know their history—and this wasn’t just because it had been his major back in college. Everyone needed a solid understanding. If people didn’t know where they came from, how would they know where they were going?

  It was no surprise that the Marshall Village disappearance was imitating the Lost Colony. Death, war, disappearances—the story had it all. The colony was cursed from the very beginning when the initial founder of the operation, Humphrey Gilbert, drowned. His half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, gained the charter, and, after failed initial attempts, another group of colonists ventured to the New World under the leadership of Raleigh’s friend, John White. Very soon this group also fell into despair.

  White returned to England to seek aid. The Atlantic was treacherous, and he barely made it alive. When he arrived, he was greeted with even more grim news. The Spanish Armada, the invincible naval force, was bearing down on England. All able ships, including White’s, were commandeered for the fight. He was marooned in his homeland, leaving his family and the rest of the colonists stranded halfway across the world.

  It was three long years before White was able to return to Roanoke Island. When he did, there was not a soul in the village. The colonists had simply vanished. And they were never heard from again. That is, until the first Dare Stone was found in 1937, allegedly left by Roanoke survivors.

  Dale thought about this now as he stared out into the empty Marshall Village. Someone had been very familiar with the details of the Lost Colony and the Dare Stones to choose to carve Roanoke in the wake of the Marshallites’ disappearance.

  He was standing with Wilson, a rotund sheriff, and half a dozen deputies at the edge of the village. It was a group of about thirty homes and barns surrounding an open area in the center. The wooden buildings were rustic and sat in mottled shade from the tall trees looming above on all sides. In the immediate center was a stone well. Yellow police tape circled the village.

  Dale had seen villages similar to this befor
e. Amish and Mennonite communities. Living history villages. But nothing quite like this. The village was deep in the woods, a good mile or two from the nearest home. The houses were arranged in a circle. There were no paths, no sidewalks, just the large grassy area in the center worn down by footsteps. The gravel road that led to the village was a hundred feet away from the buildings, and the area between—where they’d just parked—was simply a cleared section of the woods with a pair of tire ruts.

  Dale had left his jacket in the Custom Cruiser. The sun was so hot he wished he’d left his shirt too. He took a step ahead of the other men and dropped his sunglasses to the end of his nose. He shaded his eyes with his hand and scanned the village.

  Aside from the flapping of the yellow police tape barrier and the movement of branches in the slight breeze, it was completely still. A ghost town. The only sound was the noisy droning of the cicadas in the trees.

  Dale wiped the sweat from his brow and pushed his sunglasses back up. He turned around to the other men.

  The sheriff’s arms were crossed and resting on his gut. Carl Brown was a bowl of a man. He stood about six feet tall with a big, jowly face and mitts full of thick fingers. Augusta County was small and rural, but Dale thought about how much larger Brown’s responsibility would have been in the 1700s. At one time, Augusta was an enormous swath of land covering nearly all of modern-day Virginia as well as Kentucky and the Great Lakes states. The western edge went all the way to the Mississippi River.

  When Dale and Wilson first arrived, Brown shook both their hands vigorously despite the sideways look he gave Dale. Brown looked ready to detonate when Dale requested a few minutes alone with the village, but Wilson quickly stepped in to quell any anger, assuring the sheriff that this good-lookin’ dude in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans was indeed a federal agent.

  Wilson was good at giving these local types a look that said Don’t worry about this guy—he’s with me. He’d used that look on more than one occasion two years ago on Dale’s first assignment. By now Dale figured Wilson wouldn’t talk about him to fellow law enforcers like he was his goofy kid brother. After all, that first assignment was a major success for Dale, despite Wilson’s persistent belief that Dale had been reckless.