The Pendant (The Angela Feetwood Paranormal Mystery Series Book 1)

by Lawton Paul

  An hour later she’s in the Jacksonville Police Department downtown branch holding box two of Bo’s muffins. It’s crowded like a train station: shoeless drug addicts with pants so dirty she can’t tell what color they used to be, handcuffed to rings on the floor, prostitutes in tight cotton shirts with no bras giving her the evil eye—blue uniforms everywhere, all in a hurry, no one giving her the time of day. She’s like a girl scout selling cookies and all of the adults are busy.

  Her plan is simple: see Johnny and try to get some info on the Ford. But standing in the center of this chaos, where glaze-eyed, bored, state employees process lost lives—fill this out, stand in line, move along, get out of the way, go to jail, die somewhere else—the little black-hole-of-hopelessness thing starts to come again.

  A little kid just old enough to walk, naked except for a wet, sagging diaper, is bumped by a drunk in a wrinkled suit, then picked up by a prostitute momma, black under her eyes like a football player. Angela wants to take the little kid away from there. She’s got a metallic taste in her mouth like she’s been licking a can and the dark hole gets bigger.

  The deep hole comes on like a freight train, opens under her feet, and there’s nothing she can do to help Johnny, and this is where he is. And no flaunt-your-ass pant suit, hair done just so, flimsy white box of muffins can stop it.

  And she’s off looking for some dumb old car that has nothing to do with anything and her breath gets faster and the box of muffins starts to get heavy, the end drooping towards the floor. And I took my meds, dammit! Move, move! So she starts walking, but its like she’s in quicksand. This is where Johnny is. And I can’t help.

  She stumbles outside to feel the sun on her face. The edges of her vision go black and for a second she’s staring down a hole into the brightness. There’s a handrail down the steps to the parking lot and she clings to it like the world has tilted—so she doesn’t spin off. She’s still clutching the muffin box but a few pop out and roll down the stairs. A blue uniform walks past. “Muffins on deck!” someone says. “If you’re gonna puke, do it in the fuckin’ grass!” says another.

  And then a calm, measured voice breaks through: “Ma’am, how much have you had to drink?” Angela’s still looking down and black shoes and blue pants come into focus as the ground tilts back to its normal, flat position.

  “Nothing to drink,” says a voice coming out of Angela, but it is distant and weak. Sheer force of will moves her mouth.

  “Are you on any drugs, ma’am?”

  “No, Officer. Panic attack,” she says, straightening up a bit.

  “Well, let’s get you to a bench,” the officer says, and leads Angela by the arm to a bench in the grass.

  Angela recovers enough to offer her a muffin. “No thanks. Where were you going?”

  “I wanted to find the owner of an old car. It’s a ‘71 Ford, probably from Chickasaw.”

  “Ma’am, they’re not going to tell you that. You should talk to the Chickasaw Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Sheriff Jackson and I aren’t on the best of terms,” says Angela.

  “You mean, Andy Jackson? He was here until a few years ago then got sick. Had to retire.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m also here to see Johnny Rosencrantz. A prisoner.”

  “Well that I can help with. If you’re okay to walk I can take you there.”

  After a few minutes for Angela to recover, the officer takes her to the holding facility. “Well, you’ve restored my faith in humanity,” says Angela. “What’s your name?”

  “Grace Chandler, ma’am. Still a cadet, but I’ll be a full officer when I’m 21.”

  “Grace is a fitting name for you. Thanks again.”

  “If you need me I’m always out front,” she says and heads back to her post.

  Johnny’s sitting at a table in a room that looks surprisingly like a high school cafeteria, except there’s armed guards and no exits. Angela wonders if she can keep it together, but feels okay after meeting Grace.

  “You look fantastic in orange,” she says. She gives him a hug. He’s too thin, she thinks. He’s got dark bags under his eyes and his hair is messy. “You wanna muffin?” she says.

  “No.” He attempts a smile and then just looks down at the table. “My lawyer thinks I’m screwed. Well, he doesn’t come out and say it but I can tell. Body language.”

  She wants to cry, but she can’t. Not here, now. She hands him a muffin.

  “Hey, take a look at this,” she says, sliding the note she found in Mrs. Kaufman’s flower pot across the table. “Was that for you? Was she gonna have you cut the bushes back?”

  “This wasn’t for me, Angie,” he says. “That’s her handwriting though. She used to leave notes for me on the steps. You know, stuff like, Don’t mow over the bog garden near the river, like that. I don’t know who was coming or what was being cut down.”

  “Okay, thanks. Listen, Kid. You are going to come home,” she says. He reaches for the muffin and his hand is shaking. He takes a deep breath.

  “Look at me, she says. I’m going to find out who did it. She held both of his hands. I’m going to find the bastard.”

  “Hurry,” he says.

  Angela goes to the truck, holds onto Dog and cries. Dog howls like a wolf. On the way home she stops for gas in a small station between Jacksonville and Chickasaw. On a whim she asks the old guy there if he knows of a ‘71 Ford Torino.

  “Well, if you say you wanna find a Honda Civic I figure you could just throw a rock and hit one they’s so many of ‘em. But a 71 Ford, Torino, that’s another story entirely. I figure if that car is around here there’s one old boy who might know. His name’s Peacock—funny name ain’t it? We call ‘im somethin’ else but I cain’t right repeat it to a proper lady such as yourself. Anyhoo, old Peacock gotta a shop right next to the water tower ‘cross the street from one o’ them new grocery stores.” She gives him a muffin and heads down the road.

  Five miles later she’s in front of Peacock Automotive. “Four door? Yeah, I had one in not too long ago,” he says. “It was green, not blue. Tuned it up, changed the plugs. Minor stuff. Oh yeah, put a new exhaust in.”

  “Did it have a dual exhaust system?”

  “You mean, duals?” He laughed. “Yeah, it had ‘em. The car sounded real tough. Not those dumbass glasspacks the kids used to go with back in the day, but a standard set of duals.”

  “Do you know the owner?”

  “Well, that was an off-the-books, cash deal so didn’t get a name. Big fella, didn’t say much. Looked like he knew how to handle himself if you know what I mean. Like you wouldn’t want to cross him. He was local, though, not one of them transplant types,” he says, spitting in the direction of the parking lot across the street. “No offense, ma’am.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Ain’t got the number but I’ll tell ya where it is. He lives out off of 17 and Hopper Rd. Take 17, then right on Hopper and it’s down about a mile on your right. I drove the car back to his house after I got it running and he paid cash. It’s a nice ride. Got a good engine.”

  “I’ve got a few homemade muffins left, would you like them? You’ve been the most helpful person I’ve seen all day. Thank you.”

  The Assistant

  On the way to Hopper Rd., Walt’s assistant, Larry, calls. “Ah, you talked to Dr. Crenshaw,” he says. “That old fart. Good man, but his brain is going to mush. I think he may have fallen on his head once too often during the war.”

  “Can you tell me what you and Walt were working on?”

  “Sure. We were doing a study on the effectiveness of certain antibiotics in Europe and Germany in the 1940s. We were supposed to track a few of the early antibiotics from then until they lost effectiveness.”

  “That’s pretty much what Dr. Crenshaw said.”

  “He didn’t say anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Can we talk in person?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m emailing you
an encrypted message. If you can meet at that time and place, just reply with a Yes. Nothing more. Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and you’ll need a password. Which obviously I can’t give you over the phone or in an email in clear text.”

  “How about Walt’s middle name?”

  “Weak, but it’ll do.” Angela pulls off to the side of the county road and a few seconds later she has an email with no message, just a link. She taps the link and it takes her to a blank webpage with a text field. She types in Henry and hits the Go button. The words iHop on I-95 and 228 pop up and then disappear. Nerds, Angela thinks. Why all the intrigue?

  She calls Bo, tells her she’ll be late, then walks into the iHop and realizes she has no idea what Larry looks like. She doesn’t even know his last name. It’s almost dark when she arrives, the warm, sweet smell of pancakes and coffee intoxicating.

  She spots Larry almost instantly—a messy-haired, bearded nerd alone with a black laptop like Walt used to use. She walks up to the table and stands there for a moment. She wants him to recognize her, to say her name so she knows it’s him. He looks up at her, adjusts his glasses, motions for her to sit.

  “What’s my name?” she says.

  “Good move,” he says. “Your name is Angela and your husband was Walt, my mentor and friend.” He sticks out his hand to shake. His skin is pale and soft to the touch. The anti-Carl. No social life. No girl. Probably spends all day at the computer.

  “Nice to meet you, Larry. Now why all the Mission Impossible bull?”

  “I don’t trust phones any more.” The waitress comes and refills his cup and Angela orders pancakes. He waits until she leaves and starts up again.

  “First I should tell you what I know. The stuff I couldn’t speak of on the phone. What I think Walt and I were really working on.

  Initially we were searching for old strains of antibiotic that we’d built a resistance to that could potentially be brought back. After x number of years, maybe the resistance would be gone and the drug could be effective again for a time.

  We started in Europe and Walt wanted to focus on Germany because they generally kept better records, but secretly I think he wanted to begin there for some other reason.” He took a sip of coffee. “You know he spoke German quite well. One old German lady even said he had an accent. A specific accent to a certain region.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Oppenheim.” He studies her reaction.

  “Yeah, Crenshaw mentioned his German was good.”

  “No. Not just good, Walt was fluent.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you did.” The picture of the boy who might be Walt and the woman who looked like Kaufman flashes in Angela’s mind, but she keeps silent.

  “I’m gonna tell you what Crenshaw didn’t know and what Walt obviously didn’t tell you.” The waitress walks by again with the coffee pot and Larry stops for a second. “Okay. Walt made a discovery. And like most great discoveries, it came by accident. Or at least, I think it was an accident. You know Walt was mining a large data set, his data set, on disease in Europe in the mid to late ‘40s during and just after the war. It took three years and fourteen grad students, led by me, to compile the numbers. Some came from archives online, some via hard copy after days on the phone, and some we’d collected ‘by hand’ during multiple trips to Germany and France.

  Once we got a complete set and got back to the States Walt couldn’t wait to dive into the numbers. A good data set is like crack to an economist. I was rushing to get the data into a proper database and then build a backend so Walt could query the data and find an old drug we could reintroduce.

  Around this time you got sick so most nights Walt slept in his office or the hospital. His mind never left the work, though. I still didn’t have the front end up yet, so he’d send me these little text messages: ‘Give me everything you’ve got between January and February ‘45 in the Reinhold region,’ he’d say, for example. So I’d query the database from the command line, then dump the data into a spreadsheet so he could view it.

  One time he texted me around 1am on a Sunday morning and I was with my then-girlfriend, Clarice. And boy, she hated Walt. No offense, he was just a real pain in the ass sometimes when he got something stuck in his mind that he couldn’t let go of. He drove me like a pack mule 24/7.

  Anyway, so I run to the computer, pull the data and shoot back a quicky CSV file, and to hell with him, he can load it into a spreadsheet by himself. So I get back to Clarice, and just when we get settled into bed again, BAM, another text from Walt. Clarice is yelling at me and I check it anyway and he’s bitching because I screwed up the query. I only pulled one day of data, not the whole year, and there was no incidents of disease in one city, Oppenheim. So I rerun the query, send him the corrected data, and all’s well. Oppenheim pops up as showing disease during that time frame, but about ten percent less than the other cities.

  I go back to the room and Clarice is gone. So I drink the last of the red and went to bed a little, uh, frustrated. So you can imagine I wasn’t too happy when the doorbell starts ringing the next morning at 5:30. It’s Walt. He looks like shit. I can tell he’s probably slept in his car and he’s there at my door with his laptop and two cups of coffee. For all I know he’d been there all night just waiting until it was, in his mind, officially morning, and he could wake me up.

  “Oppenheim!” he yells over and over like I know what the frack he’s talking about. He hands me a coffee, orders me to drink it, then we sit down at my computer and hit the data all day, starting in Oppenheim.

  See, at first we thought our dataset was bad. Why would Oppenheim have no instance of any sort of disease we were tracking on that day? But then Walt started thinking what if the dataset was correct? So we went back a few weeks and ahead a few weeks and found that Oppenheim has around 27 days of no illness. Nothing. It’s just like time stopped and God said, Okay, people, I’m giving you guys a little break. Then just like that, the normal bad stuff: the flu to typhoid to cholera, just started ticking right back up and within a few weeks it was back to normal. So then we started digging for other days where there were no illnesses in other cities and BOOM, we get a hit in a neighboring town to the south not twenty miles from Oppenheim. Same pattern except this one is about one month after the first one. Then we find another city a few months after that, and it kept going.

  Walt called these little holes of no illnesses ‘corridors’. We followed it all the way into France and then it quit. And for awhile we were stumped. But then Walt figured it out. It was simple. The corridor had left Europe. It popped up again in New York just after the war, in 1948, then slowly moved South. And that’s when Walt left. I don’t know if the corridor kept heading South, or what.” He stops, looks around the restaurant, motions to the skinny waitress with his cup.

  Angela starts to speak, but he holds his hand up for her to stop. She started again once the waitress had filled their cups and was out of range. “Why didn’t you just continue the research and follow the trail on your own?”

  “Well, the morning he came I was just about done with the front end so he could make queries with a few clicks instead of having to type in techy MYSQL database commands that he didn’t know. So we moved the whole thing onto his laptop. He made me remove the database from my computer. He said it was for security or some other bullshit. How could I say no? He was the great economist, Dr. Walter Fleetwood, the King, with a dying wife no less, and I was a shit-ass grad student. So I did what he said.

  Then he shut me out. He left. We were supposed to publish. I was supposed to be somebody. That hurt worse than losing Clarice.”

  “I’m sorry he left,” says Angela. “But I think he did it to save me.”

  “So he found the last corridor?” says Larry, the tired look gone. He sits up in his seat and leans in all alert and happy like Dog right before he gets a treat.

  “We came to C
hickasaw, you know it? Tiny town just north of Jax. He drove me there one night against the wishes of the doctors at Shands. I think I was about to go and Walt was desperate.”

  “He told me and Crenshaw he was headed to St. Pete. That he knew someone there,” he says.

  “Well, the next day in Chickasaw, I could sit up in bed and look out the window. The day after I was walking around the room. And why’d he tell you he was going to St. Pete?” says Angela.

  “His moves were calculated. He probably told us St. Pete because didn’t want anyone to know where he was going.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was scared, maybe? Scared someone would find the last corridor before he did?”

  “Is that why you had to send our meeting place info via an encrypted file?”

  “I think someone is monitoring me. I mentioned in a blog post the possibility of a power source that prevented illness in Oppenheim in 1946. Most laughed and said data error. Go away little boy. But then about two days after the post went up the server took it down. They took down the whole site.”

  “Can you put it up somewhere else?”

  Larry leans in close and whispers, “Not many have the power to tell a big web hosting company to take a site down. That call came from somewhere way the frack up. Since then I’ve gone analog. Do you know how hard it is to just shut down all internet-based communication when that’s been my whole life? I surf the net via a TOR router that hides where I’ve gone, but no more social media. No iPhone. I’ve been reduced to cheap burner phones you can buy at the 7-11, and books. I mean physical, paper books. Totally outdated by the time they go to print. How fracking 20th century is that?”

  “Why are you telling me all of this?” says Angela.

  “I was hoping you could fill in some of the holes. I’d heard of Walt’s death, of course, but didn’t know you were still alive until Crenshaw called saying you had some questions. I need some answers, too. You know, once I got a little distance on this whole thing I started to realize something: I don’t think Walt ever gave a shit about finding some drug to reintroduce. I just think he used that as an excuse to get grant money. Far easier to sell saving the world via some old drug than trying to sell finding inexplicable moments in time when specific German towns were free of illness.”