Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “Ben, I need your help,” I said, propping him up with his back against the pillowed headboard.

  His head lolled forward, but he tried to focus his eyes. I pulled out the golden ball I had cut off the end of the braided rope from my breast pocket and held it up to him.

  “Do you know what this is, Ben?”

  He had taught the military etiquette class in the ROTC program.

  “Sword . . . knot,” he said.

  “Ever seen one that looks exactly like this before?” I asked next.

  He continued to examine it through bleary eyes.

  “Genrals,” he said, slurring the word.

  “Generals?” I repeated.

  “Genral’s . . . acorn . . . other officers . . . tassels,” he said, exhaling the sour odor of stale whiskey.

  “How did you get home last night, Ben?”

  He thought about it for ten seconds before finally saying, “Can’t remember, Jake.”

  “Kelly said you were talking to someone for a long time last night. Can you remember who it was?”

  His confused eyes were still focused on the acorn knot in my hand.

  “Five . . . oh . . . deuce,” he muttered.

  “You’re not making sense, Ben.”

  “Five . . . oh . . . deuce,” he slurred again. “One oh . . . fist.”

  “The 101st?”

  His bloodshot eyes started to close and then briefly fluttered open again.

  “You got a drink on ya, Jake?” he asked.

  I shook my head no. A few seconds later, his chin dropped to his chest and he began to snore.

  19

  The flood in the streets of Groton had risen to more than two feet. As I headed back across town, it began sloshing into the cab of my pickup through the spaces around the brake, clutch, and gas pedals.

  A silver-and-gold Humvee with vanity plates lay abandoned in the middle of Buffalo Street. They don’t make trucks the way they used to. I navigated past it like an ocean tug.

  Based on the depth of the floodwaters, I knew that the lake level must have reached the first floor of my cabin. That wouldn’t frighten Bug. Nothing would frighten her.

  A torrent of muddy water was coursing down the steep grade of Campus Hill, carrying the detritus of the storm along with it. Where it met the standing water at the intersection of Seneca Street, the cataract created a maelstrom more than three feet deep. The water in the cab rose to my ankles as the pickup plowed through it in first gear.

  I checked my watch. It was almost eight o’clock. Taking the radio from my belt, I reached Captain Morgo through one of the office dispatchers. She was back at the campus security building, running the emergency rescue operation. Incredibly, her personality transplant appeared to be holding.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded.

  “I’m fine,” I said and asked if the sheriff’s investigative team had found anything important at the murder scene. They hadn’t reported back to her yet, but she promised to let me know if anything new was discovered.

  Hoyt Palmer was still missing. She had sent an officer to check out the Tau Epsilon Rho house in case he might be hiding there from the killer. Palmer’s wife was riding out the storm at the fraternity with Evelyn Wheatley. The officer reported that both of them appeared reasonably calm.

  “What year did Dennis Wheatley graduate?” I asked.

  “Wait a second,” she said. The radio went dead for almost a minute.

  “1986,” she came back.

  “I want you to call the St. Andrews Sun and tell them I’m coming right over there.”

  “They don’t publish the student paper on Sunday,” she said. “There won’t be anyone in the office.”

  I remembered the card that Lauren Kenniston had given me. I fished it out and called the cell number printed under her name. She answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Officer Cantrell, I presume,” came her voice. “I thought you would be calling me at some point.”

  “I need your help,” I said. “Can you meet me at the Groton Journal office?”

  “I’m here now,” she said. “We have emergency power from our backup generator.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  The Groton Journal was located in a stone building on high ground near the foot of Campus Hill. The old Chevy chugged back across town, and I found a place to park on the street in front of the building.

  The front door was unlocked. I stepped inside and closed it against the wind. There were lights on over a reception desk.

  “‘Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,’” said a mellow voice beyond the counter. “‘Send these, the tempest-tossed to me.’”

  She was standing next to one of the computer terminals in the small news room.

  “I might have a lead to identify the man who carried out those hangings,” I said.

  “Do I get an exclusive?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, “if it leads anyplace.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” I said.

  “How can I help?”

  “I need to look for a story in one of the back issues of the paper.”

  “Easy. We have every issue cross-indexed in our computer files.”

  “Going how far back?”

  “To 1995, I believe.”

  “Not far enough,” I said. “What about 1986?”

  “In the morgue,” she said, pointing to the head of an iron staircase. “The hard copies are stored down there.”

  She led me down the steps and along a dark corridor. Below ground, the sound of the wind was reduced to a moaning growl. When she turned on an overhead fluorescent light, there were two inches of standing water on the basement floor.

  Cardboard folders containing past issues of the tabloid-sized newspaper lined long rows of built-in wooden shelving. Despite a large humming dehumidifier, they gave off an odor of mildew and decay.

  Bending almost double to avoid the cobwebs, Lauren disappeared behind the second row of shelves, reemerging thirty seconds later with a thick cardboard-bound folder in each hand.

  “These cover January 1986,” she said, laying the two collections on a big metal table under the fluorescent fixture.

  As I opened the first one, she went back to the shelves and returned a minute later with two more.

  “Why not tell me what we’re looking for.”

  “I’m not sure, but it will likely be a story involving a traumatic incident at St. Andrews, possibly a death, and may involve one of three students.”

  I gave her the names of Dennis Wheatley, Robin Massey, and Hoyt Palmer, and she jotted them down on an index card before opening the folder in front of her.

  My folder started in the first week of January. After scrolling carefully through each paper, I realized why they called these places morgues. Major news stories I had largely forgotten were uncovered page by page as if fresh and new, interspersed with stories of local or campus interest.

  A man named Bernard Goetz was on trial for murder after shooting four young men in a New York subway train. A fire in one of the St. Andrews dormitories forced three students to find new lodging. UCLA beat Iowa 45–28 in the Rose Bowl. The cost of the student dining plan went up 4 percent. Two Sikhs remained on trial in India for murdering President Indira Gandhi. The girls’ basketball team lost to Marist. Street riots against “Baby Doc” Duvalier broke out in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A campus protest drew forty-two students in opposition to President Reagan’s Star Wars program.

  After fifteen minutes, I still wasn’t through the last week of January.

  “I think we should just stick to the front pages,” I said. “If it was an important story, we should find it there.”

  She nodded at me and turned a page as another peal of thunder cracked in the world above us. The lights flickered and went off.

  “‘Trees uptorn, darkness and worms and shrouds and sepulchers,’” came her voice across the table, utterly calm. �
��John Keats,” she added.

  “Very comforting,” I said.

  “At Princeton I majored in English literature.”

  I switched on the flashlight I was carrying in the side pocket of my waterproof jacket. “Let’s take the other sets upstairs.”

  Up on the first floor, the morning sky was still dark. The backup generator had apparently broken down, and one of the reporters went off to try to find someone who knew how to operate it. We carried the folders over to an oak library table that was positioned under one of the windows.

  I checked my watch. It was quarter to nine. After another five minutes of roaming the headlines, my addled brain began to shut down, and I lost my ability to concentrate on the job at hand. I stopped to rub my exhausted eyes. The whole thing looked impossible, and I was about to throw in the towel when Lauren Kenniston said, “I think I might have found something.”

  She turned the thick folder toward me, and I read the headline and news story.

  Student Is Apparent Suicide

  The identity of a St. Andrews student whose body was discovered at the bottom of the Fall Creek Gorge yesterday afternoon was officially released today by the Groton Police Department. According to a police spokesman, Jill Watkins, a second-year student majoring in astronomy, left a note taped to the railing of the bridge before taking her life. Although the contents of the note were not publicly released, a police spokesman declared that Watkins was despondent over the death of her parents in December.

  “I don’t think so,” I said wearily. “The circumstances don’t match up.”

  We went back to the February folders.

  OPEC set the price of crude oil at fifteen dollars a barrel. “Baby Doc” Duvalier had fled from Haiti. A St. Bernard gave birth to seven puppies in the rock garden behind Duffield Hall. Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, fled the Philippines for Hawaii. Anatoly Sharansky was freed by President Gorbachev after eight years in a Soviet labor camp. Students protested a proposed increase in yearly tuition costs to three thousand dollars.

  “I’ve found another one,” she said from across the table.

  She turned the book around and faced me again.

  Second Apparent Suicide Rocks Campus

  Groton police sergeant Robert Fabbricatore announced today that a St. Andrews student apparently took his life yesterday morning at the Fall Creek suspension bridge. The death occurred less than two weeks after the suicide of sophomore Jill Watkins at the same bridge.

  The dead student was identified as Creighton Taylor, a freshman from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. An applied economics major, he was a recent pledge of the Tau Epsilon Rho fraternity. Sergeant Fabbricatore did not rule out the possibility that the two deaths were related.

  “You might have found it,” I said.

  Creighton Taylor had been a new member of Wheatley’s fraternity. And there was another possible connection. The boy was from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The 101st Airborne Division was based at Fort Campbell. I remembered Ben making the drunken reference to it before he passed out.

  “There doesn’t appear to be a follow-up story,” said Lauren, who was still combing the newspapers.

  “We already have enough to check further,” I said.

  Grabbing the transceiver radio from my belt, I called Captain Morgo.

  “I’ve found a possible connection to the murders,” I said. “It’s important to find out everything you can in regard to the death of a student at the suspension footbridge on February twelfth, 1986. His name was Creighton Taylor, and he was from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. His death was apparently ruled a suicide at the time. Try to find out if his parents are still living. Call me as soon as you learn anything.”

  “Will do,” she said, signing off.

  I had been watching Lauren Kenniston as I related the information. It struck me that she was a very attractive woman as I stood up from the library table.

  “Now you know everything I do,” I said. “When this is over, I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “You might want to take a rest, Jake,” she said to my retreating back. “I don’t think you’ll get much farther.”

  “I’m half Irish,” I said, turning to grin at her. “If you want to see real exhaustion, just visit me on a typical Sunday morning.”

  “This is Sunday morning,” she said.

  20

  Back in the truck, I checked my watch. It was 10:35. I figured it would take Captain Morgo at least thirty minutes to track down the information I requested. There was time enough for me to go back to the cabin and check on Bug.

  As I drove home, I wondered what had happened to all the St. Andrews alumni who had descended on the campus for homecoming weekend, wanting nothing more than being able to enjoy a football game in the crescent, meet some old friends in familiar haunts, and check out the old girlfriend from freshman year. Now they were probably holed up in their rooms, praying that the hurricane would finally let up so they could go back to their real lives.

  Remembering the depth of the floodwater at the bottom of Campus Hill, I decided to drive home the long way around LaFeber Point. It coursed along the hills overlooking the west end of town and brought me back to the lake road about a half mile past the cabin.

  Driving along the bluff, the only lights I could see came from the hospital, which like the college and the Groton Police Department, had its own backup generating system in case of a power failure. The rain was still coming hard. Several cars were abandoned along the lake road, the last less than fifty feet from my driveway.

  Pulling in, I saw that another white spruce had toppled over. It was leaning precariously against one of the oaks that flanked my cabin, its long green branches almost covering the path to the back door. I parked well away from it.

  In the shadowy gloom, I could see that the lake had risen to the level of the front porch. It was too dim too see exactly how far. I pushed aside several large spruce boughs to reach the cabin door.

  I remembered having locked it when I left. Switching on the flashlight, I inserted my key, unlocked the dead bolt, and shoved it open. There was an inch of lake water on the cabin floor.

  I stopped short. Instinctively, I knew that if Bug was able to walk, she would have been there in front of me. I threw the flashlight inside the open doorway and dove to the left.

  As I hit the ground, my right side lit up on fire. The shot had come from the kitchen. Whoever had fired it was using a silencer. If I hadn’t thrown the flashlight away from me in the dark, the bullet would probably have taken me in the chest. Bent over, I scrabbled toward the far corner of the cabin.

  I wondered if two men had been sent to do the job. No. If there had been more than one, the second killer would have been positioned outside and finished me right away.

  I knelt in the wet grass and tried to assess how bad the wound was. I didn’t feel faint or dizzy. I could still move. The white heat in my right side was replaced by a steady throbbing ache.

  Probing the warm wetness with my fingertips, I realized how lucky I had been. The bullet had passed through the fleshy area above my right hip, managing to miss both the pelvic bone and the lower rib cage before it tore through flesh and muscle and exited out my back.

  Cold rain was running down the back of my neck, and it felt soothing somehow. An image of my uncle Bob hurtled into my brain. He was sitting near the fire in our hunting camp with a pint of Wild Turkey in his lap. Rain was hammering the roof of our tent.

  “Never try to go hunting in the rain, son,” he had said. “You can’t hear a goddamn thing.”

  I pulled out the .45 and cocked it. Staying close to the cabin wall, I crept around the back corner. Lake water was lapping against the stone foundation a few feet away. Floating at its edge was a foot-long square of cedar shake that the wind had ripped away from someone’s cottage. After retrieving it, I crawled back to the first of the two living room windows. I slowly raised my eyes to peer over the sill. It was dark inside the room.

  Fitting the ed
ge of the shingle into the base of the window frame, I shoved hard from below, and the windowpane groaned upward several inches. A moment later, two holes starred the glass, quickly followed by a third.

  From the size of the holes, I knew it had to be a small-caliber gun, maybe a .25, no larger than a .32. I scrabbled quickly along the cabin wall to the smaller living room window next to the fireplace. The lake water was over my boots as I knelt below it and shoved upward again with the shingle.

  With a sharp tinkle, two more holes appeared in one of the glass panes. I waited a couple seconds, thrust the muzzle of the Colt over the sill, and squeezed off two rounds into the room.

  I didn’t expect to hit him, and I wasn’t trying to make him expend his ammunition. Unless he was an idiot, I had to assume he would have spare magazines, just as I did. But unlike me, he wasn’t bleeding, and I needed to stop him quickly.

  I wanted him unsure of where I would come from next. Reversing direction, I staggered back to the first window I had forced open, extended the muzzle through the opening, and fired two more rounds.

  It was now or never. I took off around the corner with long strides, lurching for the still open back door. Reaching it, I launched myself headfirst into the kitchen, coming up hard against the side of the refrigerator. Dropping to my belly, I pointed the .45 at the dark passageway to the living room.

  The dark blur of him came tearing through the passageway a moment later. He was firing as he came, the bullets going Phut . . . phut . . . phut. One of them ricocheted off an iron skillet hanging on a peg over my head. I fired three times into the dark blur. It skidded across the kitchen floor, stopping when it hit the edge of the stove.

  I kept a spare flashlight on one of the kitchen shelves. Standing up, I shined it across the room. The man’s arms were flung forward over his head. Although his back was to me, I knew who it was as soon as I saw the splint that had been used to bind his dislocated elbow.

  A small automatic was still clutched in his right hand. I crawled over and took it away from him. It was a .25 Beretta with a three-inch silencer screwed into the barrel. The original James Bond gun. No stopping power, but good enough for an execution.