Blood Knot: a small town murder mystery (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mysteries Book 3)

by S. W. Hubbard

  Since the patrol car was blocking exit from the driveway, Frank postponed dealing with Earl and Lorrie and headed for the Betzes’ front door. Len let him in and im­mediately started talking.

  “Everything’s okay now, Frank—we shouldn’t have bothered you. You can get on back to your real work.”

  “Back up a minute, Len. You did call, and now I have to file a report. Tell me what happened.” Frank looked over Len’s shoulder into the living room, where two school-age kids, pie-eyed with all the commotion, sat silently on the sofa. Peg appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “Go ahead and tell him, Len! Tell him what that bitch said!”

  "Watch your mouth, Peg!” He turned to Frank. "Don’t mind her—she’s all wound up.” With a glance toward the children, Len led Frank back onto the porch. “It was only a little disagreement over Lorrie’s visitation with the kids. See, the judge was real specific about who has them when, but now that Lorrie has this new job, it interferes with some of her regular times. Peg told her if she wanted the times changed she’d have to take it up with the judge, and Lorrie flew off the handle. She started calling Peg names, then Peg called you to make more trouble.” Len shook his head. “People say men are bad, but I tell you, women are spiteful. Purely spiteful.” Len glanced over at Lorrie's car. “Earl, he did a real good job. He got Lorrie calmed down and out of the house. That’s all we needed.” He looked at Frank with mournful eyes. “Please don’t file any kind of official report that will go on Lorrie’s record, Frank. We got enough trouble as it is. This'll make things worse.”

  Frank eyed the other man for a moment. Certainly he wasn’t hurt, and Peg hadn’t shown any signs of injury, either. “It was simply a verbal argument?” he clarified. “Anything physical?”

  “No, no—nothing like that. We’re all okay, honest.” Len took off his orange hunting hat and ran his hand over his thinning gray hair. “I’m too old for this. I wanted to start spending the winters in South Carolina, but now Chuck’s got us dragged into the middle of his mess.”

  “All right, I'm going to bend the rules for you this time, Len. But I won’t do it twice, understand? And I’ll tell Lorrie the same thing.”

  “That’s fine, Frank. I appreciate it. I really do.”

  Frank strode across the yard and yanked open the door of Lorrie’s car. “Get back to the office, Earl. I’ll talk to you later.”

  One look at Frank’s face and Earl knew better than to argue. He left without a word.

  Lorrie hung her head so her blond hair covered her high-cheekboned face. “Oh, God! Now I've got my cousin in trouble, too!”

  “Earl’s your cousin?” He hadn’t known this but it didn’t surprise him. Earl was like the Queen of England—related to everybody who was anybody.

  Lorrie nodded. “He was trying to help me out. You won’t fire him, will you?”

  “Don’t worry about Earl. You tell me what happened.”

  Lorrie repeated virtually the same story Len had related, except in her version it was Peg who had instigated the name-calling. After issuing her the same warning he’d given to Len, Frank backed out of the driveway and waited to make sure Lorrie drove home. Then he returned to the office.

  “I can explain,” Earl said before Frank even had his jacket off.

  Frank turned on him. “No, Earl, you cannot explain. There’s no good explanation for an unarmed civilian to put himself in the middle of a domestic disturbance call.”

  “It wasn’t a domestic disturbance call. It was a family argument. My family’s business.”

  “So you decided to ignore proper procedure?”

  Earl shot him a look that said blood was thicker than water, and always would be.

  Frank dropped into his chair. “I didn’t know Lorrie was your cousin.”

  “Second cousin, actually. Her mom and my dad are cousins.”

  “So, tell me the whole story. Because I’m warning you, if we get another call from them, I’m writing it up.” Earl began spinning a tale of woe that sounded like the lyrics to a Tammy Wynette song. Lorrie and Chuck had been high school sweethearts, Lorrie got pregnant and they got married young, and Peg had blamed Lorrie for ruining her son's life. After a second baby came along, Lorrie suspected Chuck of seeing another woman. One night she followed him when he went out, and when he was about to pull into the other woman’s driveway, Lorrie cut him off, causing a crash that injured them both. After that, divorce was inevitable.

  “Where do Peg and Len come into it?” Frank asked. “Didn’t Lorrie get custody of the kids?

  Earl squirmed in his seat. "This is the bad part. Can you keep a secret?”

  Frank didn’t deign to answer.

  “Lorrie hurt her back real bad in the car crash. The doctor gave her these pain pills, and, well—”

  “She got addicted.”

  Earl nodded. “One day Peg came to Lorrie’s place and found her all spaced out, the kids running around half naked, and gas pouring out of the oven. She’d turned it on and never noticed it didn’t light. Chuck got full custody by agreeing to live with his parents so they can watch the kids after school, and Lorrie only has visitation. It’s really not fair. Lorrie’s okay now, but she can’t get the kids back because she hasn’t had a good enough job to support them.”

  “Now she does—this job at the academy pays well, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s just it,” Earl explained. "Lorrie’s been so excited about the job, she’s been telling everyone she’s going to get her kids back. Peg’s not happy about it, so she’s being real mean about the exact time when Lorrie can pick the kids up and drop them off. When Peg called about this so-called fight, I knew she was trying to make more trouble for Lorrie. That’s why I went out there to calm things down.”

  “I see. But listen, Earl—Peg called the police, and she expected a response from the police. She didn’t ask for Lorrie’s cousin to come act as referee. If you’re going to work for me, you have to learn to keep your job separate from your family loyalties, understand?”

  Earl looked down and bobbed his head.

  Frank considered continuing the lecture, but Earl seemed contrite. “Len said you did a good job. He doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings against Lorrie.”

  “Nah, Len’s okay. I think he wants out of the middle of this. That’s why I told Lorrie to humor Peg for little while longer. Once Lorrie works her job for a few months and saves up some money, she can go back to the judge and ask for joint custody. Then all her problems will be over."

  On Saturdays Frank took an extended dinner break, then came back on duty to keep an eye on the town on the biggest social night of the week. At ten it was still too early for trouble at the Mountainside Tavern, so he figured he might as well cruise by the spot where the trespassers had entered the North Country Academy property and check for any new activity.

  When he’d left the school grounds yesterday, Frank had easily spotted their path. Whoever it was made no effort at concealment: tire tracks on the shoulder of the road marked where their vehicle pulled off, and a fairly well beaten path led through the trees to the big flat rock beside the creek. Payne had posted a large no trespassing sign at the spot, obviously to no avail. The road curved right past this spot so Frank parked there, out of sight, to see if anyone would show tonight.

  It was a nice night to build a little fire and hang out with your friends—crisp, and the sky ablaze with stars. He’d never known the night sky contained so many stars until he’d moved to Trout Run. He got out of the car and craned his head back, seeing how many of the constellations he remembered from his Boy Scout days. He never got tired of looking at them, although he supposed if he were seventeen, he might want a more exciting way to spend the evening. Eventually the cold urged him back into the car. An hour passed and only one car had gone by.

  He checked his watch. Eleven-fifteen now, and no one had shown. He’d give it another half hour—kids wouldn’t be out much later than that. The allotted time crawled by in absolute stil
lness, then he drove off to the last task in a long day.

  Ten past midnight: the witching hour at the Mountainside Tavern.

  The first lesson Frank had learned as police chief of Trout Run was how to read the mood in the town’s only serious watering hole. Sure, the Trail’s End served booze, too, but no one ever got ugly-drunk on amber ale and Celtic ballads. The Mountainside didn’t encourage patronage from tree huggers and tourists. Working men went there to unwind, but on some Saturday nights, the winding turned back in the other direction. The tipping point came just after midnight, and Frank could usually tell as soon as he opened the door whether the crowd was building toward a fight or dissolving into booze-induced slumber.

  Tonight, the difference between the sharp, clear night air and the smoky haze of the barroom smacked Frank in the face. A quiet, low-grade tension simmered, punctuated by harsh barks of victory from the pool table and dartboard, and occasional jeers at the wrestling match on TV. George, the bartender, greeted Frank with an uneasy smile.

  George and Frank had a long-running disagreement over precisely how drunk a patron should be before he was cut off. Frank’s arrival meant several customers' tabs would have to be tallied prematurely. On the other hand, George, too, could sense a fight brewing, and he preferred Frank to be on hand before glass started breaking.

  The customers propped around the U-shaped bar all seemed mellow enough, so Frank forged his way through deeper clouds of smoke to the game area. There, Ray Stulke held court, talking loudly to a crowd of men as he lobbed darts at the board. He wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves hacked off, revealing biceps the size of Easter hams.

  Frank leaned against an out-of-order pinball machine in a shadowy corner to keep watch.

  “I just got back from Long Island this afternoon,” Ray said as he landed a perfect bull’s-eye. “You shoulda seen this spread. Freakin’ garage was twice as big as my house. We backed the van right in there, and the kid’s old lady let us in."

  Frank listened with half an ear. Couldn’t be talking about burglary if the homeowner had let him in. Ray’s barroom tales were three-quarters fantasy, anyway.

  Another dart flew from Ray’s huge paw and hit the cork board. “We crossed over this shiny floor made outta the same stuff as gravestones, and went up a big curvin’ staircase like in the movies. Go into the kid’s room, haul his ass outta bed, and hog-tied him. His mom watched us carry him out of there like he was a sofa she didn't want no more.”

  A skinny guy with greasy hair took his turn at the dart board, but Ray continued talking. Frank was listening closely now. Who had he tied up? Did this have something to do with the traveling Ray claimed to do on his new job at the academy?

  “Man, that was some trip home, though.” Ray swigged from his beer and let out a colossal belch. “Traffic was so screwed up, took us nearly eight hours. And for the first three, the fuckin’ kid never shut up. Drove me nuts.”

  "So whatd’ya do—put a gag on him?” someone on the sidelines asked.

  “Nah, we’re not allowed to do that. Once a guy stuffed a sock in some screaming kid’s mouth, and he ended up chokin’ on his own puke. We don’t get paid if we deliver ’em dead.” Ray brayed at his own wit.

  Was this how kids arrived at the North Country Academy—bound and gagged? The tipping scale on which Frank measured MacArthur Payne crashed down again.

  “Here’s what I did.” Ray lumbered over to the skinny darts player and put one massive hand around his neck, then lifted him a foot off the ground. The guy’s face turned red and his legs kicked ineffectually as Ray held him off to one side. “I squeezed his neck like this ’til he turned a little blue, then I let him go.” Ray dropped his darts opponent like a discarded toy. "That shut him up.” The skinny man staggered backward, gasping, as two of his friends made ready to take on a grinning Ray.

  “I think we’ve had enough fun for one night.” Frank stepped forward and laid a restraining hand on one of the men. “Ray, I think you owe this gentleman an apology.”

  “The hell I do."

  “Maybe you’d rather apologize to MacArthur Payne for demonstrating the abduction techniques you use in public,” Frank said.

  Ray glanced around nervously, as if realizing for the first time that he was playing to a full house. “I, I didn’t mean nothin' by it. Just havin' some fun, tellin’ some crazy stories, that’s all.”

  “Apologize to the man, Ray.”

  “I, uh, I’m sorry.” Ray spoke like a tourist reading from a foreign-language phrase book.

  “You can leave, now, Ray,” Frank said. “It’s past your bedtime.”

  As he stood in the parking lot of the Mountainside, watching until the troublemaker’s taillights disappeared over the horizon, Frank had to wonder about the reliability of any man who would hire Ray Stulke to work with children.

  Chapter 8

  Bear mania gripped Trout Run.

  The bear on Corkscrew had apparently had his fill of bacon grease, because the trap the DEC set for him came up empty. With the rogue still on the loose, everyone who had ever hunted bear, chased bears out of their garbage, or just seen a bear minding its own business had developed a theory about what had prompted the attack. More worrisome, everyone seemed to have a defense plan involving heavy-duty firepower should the bear show its face on their property.

  The fear surprised Frank. After all, these were Adirondackers, not suburbanites freaked out by a raccoon rummaging in their trash. But the general population didn’t know about the bacon grease yet, so to them, the bear had violated all the normal rules of human-ursine engagement. Releasing the information about the bacon grease might calm people’s fear of the bear, but it would start a second round of speculation about how the grease had gotten there. Until they were ready to say definitively either that the death was accidental or sabotage, Frank and Rusty had agreed to keep quiet about the grease.

  Frank had slept in on Sunday and arrived at Malone’s for breakfast as church was letting out. Caught in the confluence of the early breakfasters leaving and the late breakfasters arriving, he answered more questions about the bear than he would have if he’d been at work. His eggs grew cold as he counseled Vivian Mays not to buy a hunting rifle if she didn’t know how to shoot, and Dee-Dee Peele not to organize a team of armed parents to sit outside the grade school, even though bears had occasionally been sighted in the woods near there.

  During a lull, he propped a book up in front of him to ward off further bear theorists. So far Jane Eyre had driven off Augie Enright, Jack Harvey, and Bernice Mays, and Malone’s had settled into silence. As he turned the page to read about the young Jane’s arrival at Lowood School, a blast of cold air on his back and the sound of girlish squealing made him look up. A pack of teenagers had tumbled through the door and were now getting themselves seated in the largest booth.

  “I’m not sitting next to Bra-ad, not after what he did to me on Friday.”

  “Lay off, Alison—you deserved it.”

  They piped down once the waitress went to take their order, and Frank returned to reading. But before long, the giggling and teasing escalated again. Frank glanced up and observed them in the mirror above the counter. Brad Fister, Rollie’s grandson, sat in the middle of the crowd, with Alison Munro, despite her protests, right beside him. Rachel Portman, Matthew’s older sister, sat on the other side, hemmed in by two boys whom Frank recognized but couldn’t name. Across the table were Jessica Powers, and Kelly Davis, another cousin of Earl’s. They were nice-looking, happy kids—not a tattoo or pierced eyebrow in sight. They must be sixteen or seventeen—the same age as many of the kids at the North Country Academy—but they seemed younger than the students Frank had met on that hike. Probably it was their innocence. The academy kids had all been around the block a few times, and it showed.

  Gales of laughter rang out when Jessica dropped a French fry into Brad's Coke. It didn’t take much to keep this group amused. Frank went back to reading and didn’t look up again unti
l Marge brought him his check. As he reached for his wallet, he heard Alison say, “No way, I’m not going back there again. Not with this bear on the loose.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” one of the boys answered. “The bear was on Corkscrew—that’s nowhere near our spot.”

  “I don’t care. I won’t be able to relax. It won’t be fun, like last week. Jessica doesn’t want to go either, do you, Jess?”

  Jessica gave an uncertain shrug. Frank smiled. He had a feeling that his opportunity to be ambassador for the North Country Academy had just presented itself. He left a five on the counter and paused by the kids’ table on his way toward the door.

  “Hi, guys.”

  They all greeted him politely, then silence descended on the table.

  “I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. I think Alison is right. Better stay indoors at night while this rogue bear is on the loose.” He smiled at them benevolently. “Where does everyone like to hang out these days?”

  Everyone looked at Brad as if he were the only one qualified to answer. He rolled his shoulders in an elaborate shrug. “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know?” Frank chuckled. “That must make it kind of hard to meet up.”

  “Sometimes down by the old covered bridge,” one of the other boys volunteered.

  “Oh, I haven’t seen you kids down there since the middle of the summer. You must have a new haunt.” Brad and the other boy exchanged glances.

  “You ever go out to High Meadow Lane, near the North Country Academy?”

  “No, huh-uh,” Rachel and Alison said, too quickly.

  “Listen, guys—do me a favor.” Frank zipped his coat. “Stay away from the woods near the academy. The headmaster, Dr. Payne, doesn’t appreciate your presence there.”