“In here,” he rasped.
Once they were inside the room, Sebastian forced Clipper and Janice to sit in deep arm-chairs while he stood over them triumphantly.
“You couldn’t just let it be, could you?” he said to Janice. “Couldn’t just mind your own business.”
Janice looked at him in disgust. His hair was wildly disheveled and a five day growth of gray bread sprouted unevenly from his face. His clothes were wrinkled and greasy, and Janice could smell a damp, feral odor surrounding him like a cloud. “You killed your own mother,” she hissed, contempt and revulsion dripping from every word. “Did you kill Annie, too?”
“I did what was necessary,” thundered Sebastian. “She was common. My father was a great man, a man of destiny, and she was a common fishwife.”
“We found your sword,” Clipper said quietly. “The story’s out. People know, but it was forty years ago and you were a juvenile. Why don’t you put the gun down, and let’s deal with it?”
Eyes feverish, Sebastian shook his head and began pacing, sweat standing out on his flushed face. “We’ll deal with it,” he muttered. “I have a destiny, too. The people need me, and I can’t let you stand in the way of that.” He whirled and brought his pistol to bear on Clipper’s face.
“This is bigger than you,” he screamed, spittle spraying. “I’m bigger than you.”
Facing madness, Clipper was tensing himself to try a futile leap out of the soft chair, when Sebastian abruptly stepped back.
“Oh, no,” he admonished. “We need to think this out.” He glanced down at the .45 he still held in his left hand, and giggled grotesquely. “I think the great detective is about to snap, and kill his pushy girlfriend.”
Sebastian began pacing again. “It’s only right,” he said to Clipper, voice turned reasonable. “She got you into this. You should be angry.” He whirled on Janice. “And I told you,” he screamed, “I told you to leave the past alone, you bitch.”
In one motion, Sebastian thrust his little .22 into his belt and shifted the .45 into his right hand, pushing it into Janice’s face. Clipper had been carrying the .45 cocked and locked, a round in the chamber with the hammer back and the safety on, but Sebastian was unfamiliar with the big automatic. His finger strained against the trigger as Janice flinched away and Clipper struggled out of his chair. Clipper was almost to his feet when the shot thundered in the small room.
Sebastian’s body hunched convulsively inward as the heavy Colt drew his stiff arm down. He staggered, and the second shot drove him to the floor. Clipper and Janice looked on in horror as his body jerked to the impact of seven more evenly-spaced, deliberate shots. In the ear-ringing silence that followed the final shot, the uniformed figure in the doorway stepped forward and tossed his pistol onto Sebastian’s corpse.
“Hello, Chester,” Clipper said.
The man looked up. “Name’s Archer,” he said. “Larry Archer. Chester died when that bastard killed his own mother.”
Later, at the station, Larry Archer told his story. “I came home from school that day,” he said, “and Sebastian was there. He was all hopped up…dragged me upstairs and showed me his mother. She was dead on the floor in her bedroom, and he had a sword.” Archer licked his lips. “I had a driver’s license, so he made me help him. We carried her and her suitcases down to the car, and took her out to the old lumber camp. We put her under the floor of the bunkhouse.” Archer’s voice grew strained with his memories. “I thought he was going to kill me too, but he told me that I was a part of it, an accomplice ’cause I helped, and later he made me take some money.” Archer’s eyes dropped and his voice caught and rose in pitch. “I didn’t dare to say anything.”
“What about your mother, Larry?” Clipper asked gently.
Archer looked up with tears in his eyes. “She knew,” he said. “I don’t know how, but she knew Eleanor didn’t just run away.” His voice got higher and softer, and Clipper felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. “I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t.” Archer’s tense face relaxed. “Eleanor wouldn’t leave us,” he said in a quiet, decidedly feminine voice. “She loved us, and I couldn’t make them believe she was murdered.”
Chapter 36
“We’ve got her.”
Janice sighed and gripped Clipper’s hand tighter at the quiet announcement from the State Police forensic specialist. They were standing with Carol Murphy, two other State Police investigators and a couple of uniformed troopers just outside the perimeter of the mossy ruins of an old wooden shack about two miles into the woods off Route 9 in Eddington. It had taken the best part of an afternoon of searching at the County Registry of Deeds to pinpoint the location of the old logging camp, and it took Clipper and a State Police detective another two hours of tramping through the woods to find the actual site. They had identified the cook shack by the rusted remains of an ancient stove, and assumed the other mound of debris was the bunkhouse.
They had returned with the entire crew early the following morning, and everyone had pitched in to help remove the collapsed building materials until they got down to the remnants of the old plank floor. Then the technicians took over, carefully lifting and recording the debris, working slowly until they uncovered the bare ground beneath. The technicians had staked out a roughly ten-by-ten foot square and began scraping the fine dirt surface with short-handled spades. When, moments later, they’d uncovered the rotting remains of a leather valise, one of them had stopped shoveling and set up a mesh-bottomed box on short legs, and began screening the excavated material. It was late afternoon by the time they were satisfied that they had all the grave-site had to offer.
Carol Murphy had been quiet all day. “What will happen to Chester White?” she asked Clipper as they walked out of the woods.
Clipper shrugged. I don’t imagine there will be any prosecution,” he said. “There’s no evidence to disprove his claim that Sebastian forced him to help, and he did eventually lead us to the truth.” Clipper hesitated. “Actually, he came back to Bangor to do just that. Years ago, when he got out of the Army, he took the name Larry Archer and dropped out of sight. Doc Wheeler says he was trying to deny his past, but finally his guilt got the best of him and he came back here and joined Dautry’s group as a cover. For whatever reason, he picked Janice as a contact and started writing his letters.”
“So he’s a terrorist too?”
Clipper grunted. “Not really. He’s the one who gave us the tip about Dautry’s weapon shipment.” Clipper was silent for a moment. “And,” he said finally, “There’s some question as to his mental condition. Apparently, he’s so obsessed with telling his mother’s story that sometimes he gets confused about who he really is.”
Murphy was angry. “So, that’s it?” she demanded as they got back to Clipper’s truck. “Two families destroyed, people killed and all you can do is just close the case, and that bastard never gets exposed for what he was?”
“You’re the reporter,” Janice said, jumping to Clipper’s defense. “If Clip tried to expose anyone, he’d end up being sued. That’s not his job…but you could tell Eleanor’s story.”
Clipper laughed. “If I know the two of you,” he said, “the story will get told, and told very well.”
The End
Epilogue
Eleanor Gaylord was finally laid to rest on a sunny afternoon in the waning days of summer. She was placed beside her husband amidst the weathered ancestral stones of the family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery. The gleaming white marble tombstone unveiled during the simple memorial ceremony was inscribed:
Eleanor Duffy Gaylord
September 3, 1942 – October 31, 1975
Wife of Montgomery, faithful unto death
Loved eternally by Annie
When the ceremony was over, Clipper went back to work and Janice and Carol Murphy drove off together to continue their labors on what would become next year’s best-selling book, ‘Eleanor’s Story.’
From Past Master, the third
book in
The Thomas Clipper Mystery series
Chapter 1
It was one of those late fall days in Maine when the wind is still and the thin sunlight lends a surprising warmth to air perfumed with the scent of burning leaves and drying corn stalks. Desiccated leaves, random patches of hoarfrost and soil puffed and pregnant with ice crystals crunched underfoot as the two men walked slowly down the faint vestiges of the ancient logging road. On later occasions, they would drive to their destination but, for this first trip of the year they always walked, shrugging off the town’s cloying ways, scouting the condition of the trail and enjoying the quiet and solitude of the deep woods.
It was the next to the last Saturday in October, nine days before the November 2nd opening day of deer season, and the two were engaged in the first act of a ritual they had practiced for an unbroken string of forty-four years; the annual opening of hunting camp.
In the lead, Galen Woodman walked with the straight ahead, no-nonsense gait of the pre-eminent heart surgeon he had once been. Above-average in height with heavy shoulders, and thick, muscular torso, Woodman resembled a determined black bear headed for a honey tree. Retired now, at age 89 he still maintained a heavy consultation schedule and was blessed with the energy and constitution of a man thirty years younger.
Eighty-seven year old Douglas Holland glided silently in Woodman’s wake. Although much slighter in stature, and slender almost to the point of emaciation, he kept up the larger man’s pace with no apparent effort. Each man wore old leather boots, corduroy pants and red and black checked woolen hunting shirts with small packs high on their shoulders. Holland’s shirt bulged slightly over the holstered Smith & Wesson Model 19 combat magnum at his waist.
Both Maine natives, the two men had first met on February nineteenth, 1944 in a bloody aid- station on Corregidor Island’s Black Beach. Holland a seventeen year-old infantryman with the 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team, and a survivor of the banzai attack that had overrun his position during the night, and Woodman, an exhausted medic with the 34th Infantry Regiment who had been patching up an endless tide of wounded American soldiers for nearly forty straight hours.
In the imaginary shade of a tattered scrap of canvas, Woodman had torn the filthy field dressing off Holland’s upper chest and left shoulder, and mechanically dusted the ragged wound beneath with fresh sulfa powder before applying a new bandage. He was turning to call for a stretcher team when he spotted the brown wooden handle of a type 30 Japanese bayonet protruding from under the soldier’s leg. “Sorry soldier,” he’d muttered wearily, reaching for the knife, and already looking for the next casualty. “No souvenirs.”
The hand that grabbed and held his wrist was like iron. “Bullshit. I earned this thing, and it’s going home with me.”
Jolted out of his exhausted routine by the man’s vehemence, Woodman sat back on his heels and eyed the smaller soldier. “And where’s that,” he said distractedly, unconsciously prolonging the tiny moment of rest. The last thing he expected to hear was the name of the town next to his.
“Look,” he’d said after they’d exchanged names, “they’ll just take it away from you on the ship. Let me have it, and I’ll get it back to you. I promise.” Holland made his decision and closed his eyes. “I’ll see you at the Bangor House when this thing’s over,” he’d said as the stretcher bearers moved in to take him away. “Don’t get killed.”
Galen Woodman made good on his promise on September thirtieth, 1945, and in the years that followed, the two men had forged an enduring friendship, and now, seventy years later as they came to the clearing at the end of the road, they both privately wondered how many hunting seasons they had left.
To the casual eye, the hunting camp may have been no more than a curious collection of trees and debris, crouched amid stunted cedars beneath a stand of towering pines. Its once square log walls, still bearing strips of fibrous bark, had slumped tiredly back to nature’s design, and the lines of its low shed roof were blurred with moss and small tree branches reaching like dead fingers into the sky with a rusty stovepipe protruded drunkenly from a back corner.
A slightly more critical eye might have noticed the stout wooded shutters, apparently covering two windows, one to either side of the solid front door, as well as the expensive padlock securing said door to its massive frame.
Doug Holland’s eyes, more critical than most, narrowed as he spotted the slight skew to the left hand shutter, and his right hand slipped beneath his shirt to the worn grips of his revolver. “Hold on, Gale,” he said quietly. “Someone’s been in there.”
With a familiarity bred of decades as hunting partners, the two men circled the small building noiselessly, checking it and the soft ground nearby until they were sure that they were alone. Only then, did Hollings pull the damaged shutter off the building and peer over his drawn pistol through the broken window behind. “Nobody there now,” he said after a moment.
Woodman keyed the lock and pulled the door open. They were a couple of steps inside the twelve by sixteen foot single room when the smell hit them.
Hunting camps have a smell all their own; wood smoke and wet wool, bacon grease and stale sweat all underlayed with the fragrance of hoppe’s number nine and the subliminal aromas of testosterone and adrenalin. Pre-conditioned as they were to expect the familiar redolence of the camp, it took both men a second to change gears… but only a second. Suddenly, they were both back in the charnel house that had been Corregidor, struggling not to retch at the stench of rotting flesh.
About the Author
Richard Stockford is a retired Police Chief living in Bangor, Maine with Cindy, Sampson, and Cleo, one of whom has been his constant companion for 47 years.
He is a maker of custom knives who is inspired to write by his grandchildren.
If you enjoyed this book, please consider submitting a review and your comments at amazon.com/author/richardstockford. You are also invited to visit http://yankeeknifemaker.blogspot.com/.
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