by Carol Coffey
“Was he right?” Locklear asked.
“Turns out he wasn’t.”
“Seems harsh,” Mendoza mused.
“Now here’s the thing … Grant, on the other hand, had a problem about going home because he was wanted for shooting his captain on the same day he was captured by the Confederates in battle.”
“Ah! The ‘reasons’ at last,” Locklear said.
“Yes. Some say he deliberately got himself caught by the Confederates to avoid the firing squad. And that wasn’t all. Hennessy’s book included a copy of an old newspaper clipping from New York which said Grant had already been to prison for horse theft and multiple charges of relieving people of their savings to invest in fictitious business ventures. So he needed a place to hide. He knew it had to be somewhere remote, somewhere he could stay unnoticed in the South until he came up with a plan.”
“So that’s where the remote Fehr farm came into it,” Mendoza said.
“Exactly.”
“So how does Eli Shank fit into all this?” Locklear asked.
“The book said he only travelled with them for about three nights before a row broke out between him and Grant – they had to walk at night to avoid detection of course. Remember all four were dressed in Union uniform with the badly wounded Joshua on the horse. Grant said in the book that Shank accused him of stealing from him. Said Shank beat him to a pulp.”
“Money?”
“No, something Shank had brought with him from home in a metal box. Something that was not of great value but was of huge importance to his people. That’s what Shank told Grant when he pleaded for its return. Grant, headed for Dayton and desperate for leverage, denied taking it. The Fehrs sided with Grant. Of course Daniel needed Grant’s horse to carry his injured brother. But they did believe Grant. He must have been very convincing. So Eli accused them of bringing shame on him.”
“A box! What was in it?” Locklear asked. The box was important. He could feel it.
“Don’t know, sarge. He didn’t say.”
“Do you believe Grant?”
Carter shook his head. “Nope.”
“What happened next?”
“Grant said the Fehrs hid him in an old cabin on the farm. When Shank arrived back in Dayton his father, who was the local pastor, disowned him and said he was shunned until he returned the item treasured by the Shank family.”
“So after enduring war and seeing God knows what, Shank is out on his own and desperate to retrieve what Grant stole from him?” Locklear said.
“That’s right, sarge.”
“So when he hears that the Fehrs are hiding Grant on their farm, he goes there and threatens to kill Grant. Only Grant won’t give up the prize and tells Shank he buried it on the farm.”
“Which explains the digging,” Locklear said.
Carter nodded.
Locklear pondered this. For exactly one hundred and fifty years the Fehrs were trying to return whatever it was that Grant had taken from Eli Shank.
“Grant said that Shank went crazy and for days he held a rifle on them while Grant and Daniel and Adam Fehr dug up the farm. First chance he got Grant escaped, leaving the Fehr brothers at the mercy of Shank. Grant did make it home but he was captured and imprisoned five months later.”
Carter paused.
“He always knew that at some stage he’d probably face consequences for killing his captain … but he was surprised to be also charged with the hanging of Adam Fehr.”
Locklear sat upright. “Hanging?”
“Yes.”
“So that’s how it all started,” Mendoza said. “The first hanging of many more to come.”
“Yes.”
“Joshua would have died from his war wound by then so that just leaves Daniel Fehr alone on the farm after that,” Mendoza added.
“There’s more,” Carter said. “I checked the local newspapers and an article from Harrisonburg reported the death of the eldest Fehr brother and said that mysterious holes had appeared on the farm and that when the sheriff recovered his body there were about fifty shallow holes dug all around the barn. It was fascinating to read.”
“Will you fascinate me by finishing the story, Carter?” Locklear asked as he rubbed his throbbing foot.
“Grant admitted to shooting his captain but throughout the trial he continued to plead his innocence of the murder of Adam Fehr.”
“So then it was Shank?” Mendoza said.
“Must have been. He must have hoped Daniel Fehr knew where the item was buried and if he threatened to hang Adam Fehr, he’d confess.”
“But Daniel didn’t know.”
Carter shook his head. “Grant was shot by firing squad a month later.”
Locklear leaned forward and rubbed his hands over his craggy, unshaven face. Something still didn’t add up. Schumer had said that greed was behind the Shanks’ misdeeds but this didn’t sound like greed to him. It sounded like revenge killing.
Locklear visualised the case in his mind. Gone from its centre were Andrew and Luke Fehr – the brothers were merely pawns in a row that had begun one hundred and fifty years ago. Instead the centre was occupied by Eli Shank, Grant and the two boy soldiers. It all started with them and until he found out what was in the metal box Shank tried so hard to find, he would never stop the Shanks from killing the Fehrs or from Luke Fehr digging for something that was probably never actually there.
Slowly, the conversation died and the group settled down to work.
Carter returned to the desk under the far window and settled down to read the rest of Sara Fehr’s letters to Maria Whieler. Mendoza, charged with finding the three missing Mennonite families, logged onto the station’s system and started with the first name: Eric Stoll.
Locklear was the only one who did not appear to be working. He stood and slowly negotiated his way over to the window on the crutches. He stood there, gazing out unseeingly.
He had set his team tasks which he hoped would uncover smaller pieces of the Dayton puzzle but felt it remained to him to figure out what was happening in the town on a broader scale. In his mind he visualised Helena Wyss, Pastor Plett, Esther Fehr, Abigail, Maria Whieler, Anabel Schumer – they had all helped him in their own ways but there were too many missing pieces for him to make sense of any of it. He needed the book Luke Fehr had and he needed it badly.
The low tone of voices began to drift down the hallway to the incident room, slow at first, then urgent, several voices at once and then only one. The volume of that one voice increased more and more until Mendoza left her seat to see what the commotion was. Carter and Locklear followed.
In front of the desk, a cop was trying to calm a middle-aged man down while struggling to stop him from charging down the corridor. Two younger men were also trying to hold the man back. One of them shoved the cop away.
“You did this! My daughter, my daughter!”
The man buckled over and cried openly. His two young companions, with tear-filled eyes, tried to hold him upright.
“That’s Albert Schumer. He’s Anabel Schumer’s father and they’re her brothers,” Carter whispered.
Another cop, the woman who was usually sitting just inside the front door, tried to get Schumer to sit down but the man would not be calmed.
Locklear moved forward and stood in front of the group.
“What’s going on?”
“His daughter’s missing. She never turned up at her relatives,” the woman cop said.
“I told her to take the bus – I told her it’d be safer!” He pointed a shaking finger. “You did this! You did this!”
Locklear followed Schumer’s eyes to the group behind him. Standing there were Maguire, a new cop he didn’t know, Mendoza and Carter. Locklear turned again to Schumer to check who the man was accusing. He was not looking at Maguire or the new guy and he was not looking at Mendoza. Neither was he looking at Locklear. Schumer was looking at Lee Carter.
Chapter 16
Lee Carter sweated in the i
ncident room across from Locklear.
“Do you really think I had anything to do with Anabel’s disappearance?”
Locklear did not reply. He was studying the fresh-faced trooper’s facial expressions. Tiny lip quivers, nose twitches, minute mouth movements all told him if a person was lying or not. There were other tells, too many to mention, and he knew them all. The training had served him well in the course of his career.
“Did you see Anabel since you were attacked?” Locklear asked.
Carter blushed, preparing to lie. He shrugged, purchasing time. “She came to see me in the hospital.” He knew there would be no point in lying about this. Every visitor had to sign in and the hospital was full of security cameras.
“Did she tell you she was leaving town?”
Carter’s shoulders visibly rose. His mouth turned downward. He blinked three times while formulating his response.
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
Carter stared hard at his boss. “She said she was leaving town.”
“That’s not what I asked you, Lee.”
Carter looked out of the window. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“Do you want one?” Locklear asked.
Carter said nothing.
“She could have told loads of people where she was going,” he finally replied.
“But she didn’t,” Locklear replied. “She told me. I’ve already made my statement to that effect. Her family knew but according to her father no one else knew. He said Anabel has been hiding out in her parents’ home for the past few days and that she saw no one in that time and made no phone calls.”
Locklear had interviewed Maguire who had also been at the bus station that morning and the man definitely did not know where the girl had been going.
“Carter, you better tell me what you know and you better do it now. Otherwise you’ll leave me with no option but to think you had something to do with her disappearance.”
Carter’s eyes opened wide. His mouth dropped simultaneously. Locklear was getting somewhere.
“She was upset. She told me Beth Stoll came to see her and threatened her, made me promise not to say a word to anyone.”
“Did she mean me?” Locklear asked.
“Yes, she mentioned you specifically, but I got the impression she really meant everyone. She came across real paranoid. Looked like she’d lost weight in the few days since I’d seen her. She looked awful.”
“What else did she say?”
Carter took a deep breath. “She said that her dad was forcing her leave town and had arranged for her to stay with relatives in Minnesota.”
“And she told you when she was going?”
Carter nodded. A look of fear spread over his face. Something had just dawned on the innocuous trooper.
“It wasn’t me, sarge, you must know that.”
Locklear offered the man no reassurance. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.
“Who did you tell that Anabel was leaving?”
Carter swallowed. His lips parted slightly but no sound came out.
Locklear leaned back to the table top and banged his fist off the table. Carter flinched.
“Who did you tell?” Locklear repeated.
“My dad,” Carter finally whispered.
“No one else?”
Carter shook his head.
Locklear stood and walked back to the incident room on his crutches, leaving Carter sweating in the tiny interview room. Something was scratching at his brain, something he had read in one of Mendoza’s lengthy reports. He riffled through his desk. He scanned one or two documents until he found what he was looking for. It was Mendoza’s report on Sara Fehr’s accident and her interview with the cop who came on the scene. Locklear flicked the pages until he came to the third paragraph on second last page. He read the line again.
“Sarge said to take it out ... so we did.”
Why had he not realised what that had meant at the time? He left the room and hobbled back without his crutches to reception where Ricci was sitting at his desk, eating. Locklear placed the report onto the desk in front of him and leant into Ricci’s face. The cop put his burger down and looked at the line Locklear was pointing at and waited.
“You said this to Mendoza?”
Ricci nodded. “Yeah.”
“Who was your sergeant at the time?”
Ricci looked over his shoulder and then scanned the desks round him. There was no one around except Locklear and Williams who was busy hiding his increasing deafness from his superiors to avoid forced retirement.
“Sergeant Carter.”
“Lee’s father?”
“Yeah.”
Locklear stood upright and lifted his throbbing foot from the floor. That’s what Anabel Schumer meant – look back a bit further than Carter. She meant back a generation – she meant Carter Senior. He wondered for how many years Lee’s father had been feeding Shank with information on people Shank had a grudge against.
“Ricci – keep Carter here and do not let him make any calls.”
“Is he under arrest?”
“No, but just stall him.”
“Mendoza!” Locklear called.
“Sarge?”
He threw her the keys to Carter’s patrol car.
“You’re driving.”
Jeb Carter’s house didn’t look like a house occupied by a long-time widower. The front garden was trimmed with rows of multicoloured flowers and the lawn was thick and neatly cut. A small leafed hedge grew a foot over the white picket fence and was so neat it looked like Jeb Carter had trimmed it with a scissors. This was not the kind of house Locklear was expecting a retired single cop to live in. He was also not expecting Carter Senior to open the door and walk back down the hallway, leaving it wide open.
“He thinks we’re Lee. He saw the bonnet numbers,” Mendoza said.
When they reached the front door, Mendoza pulled her firearm and stood to one side. Locklear grinned. “You really think there’s any need for that?”
Mendoza put her pistol away and shrugged.
“You first then!” she said, stepping back to one side to allow her boss room to manoeuvre his ill-fitting crutches down the hall.
When they reached the end of the passage, Locklear stood at a door which led into a dark kitchen where Jeb Carter sat beside an empty fireplace.
“Who are you?” the man asked, alarmed by the stranger in front of him.
Locklear moved slowly and painfully forward and introduced himself and Mendoza who waved weakly from the kitchen doorway.
Locklear glanced quickly around. The blinds on the two large windows in the room were closed and the kitchen was in almost complete darkness.
“Mind if I pull these?” Mendoza asked.
Locklear was on the same page. A darkened room meant that they would not be able to see if Carter Senior had a gun pointed at them.
Jeb Carter did not answer which Mendoza took as a yes. She pulled the cords and the room lit up like a Christmas tree.
Locklear took a seat facing Carter and noted that he was not unlike his son. Locklear had often wondered if there were people in his country who looked like him – relatives that shared the same DNA, had the same hair, eyes, traits, as him. He would never know this because the short search he undertook after the death of his mother led to a dead end and it did not occur to him to keep looking. He didn’t care that much.
Jeb and Lee Carter had the same foppish thick hair and piercing blue eyes. They also had the same complexion, being lightly tanned and big toothed in that all-American way. But there was one exception. Jeb Carter had two black eyes and a swollen jaw.
“You’re the Indian Lee’s working with.”
Locklear did not answer. He could see Mendoza staring at him on the periphery as though she was seeing him for the first time.
“Palest Indian I ever saw,” Carter quipped.
Locklear did not bite. “Who beat you up?”
Carter swallowed but not in fear. Drool flowed uncontrollably from his mouth. His jaw was broken. Locklear noticed the top of a long, angry, narrow scar on his chest. Carter had obviously had recent enough heart surgery.
“You better get that jaw seen to.”
“I knew you’d figure things out sooner rather than later. I told Lee not to come here for a few days. I said I had a virus – that Seth and the girl might catch it.”
Locklear noticed Carter did not use his daughter-in-law’s name and wondered if the old man had not approved of the interracial marriage.
“You didn’t approve of Lee’s choice of wife?” he asked.
“Damn right I didn’t.”
“Would you have preferred if he’d married Sara Fehr?”
Carter’s face darkened, answering Locklear’s question.
“So, then,” Locklear said, “what you wanted was a nice white, Baptist, wholesome, Virginian girl?”
Mendoza grinned.