The Hotspur Affair: A Richard & Morgana MacKenzie Mystery

by Jack Flanagan

  Then the muffled buzz of an incoming call on a cell phone invaded the kitchen. Joe gazed in my direction.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said, giving Joe a stare back.

  “It’s not my phone,” responded Joe.

  “It’s me . . . my phone,” said Kyle assuredly as he balanced himself on the chair’s back legs and attempted to straighten out to get his cellphone from his front pants pocket without standing up. And as Morgana foresaw, Kyle’s chair acrobatics were to have consequences.

  There was a loud crunch.

  To my dismay, my mother’s youngest son, the sunshine of her life, rapidly “set” behind the landscape of the table. His sudden disappearance was followed by a hard thud that shook the floor and rattled every dish in the kitchen.

  “Kyle, are you okay?” asked Joe as he rushed to Kyle’s assistance.

  “I’m okay, not to worry,” said my brother as he laid splayed on the kitchen floor as he continued to struggle in getting his hand out of his pocket. I could not stop mentally comparing my brother to a sea tortoise on its back.

  “You may be,” I said, “but Morgana’s chair has been transformed into kindling wood. We are both dead meat.”

  “It’s your chair too,” protested Kyle as his cell continued to buzz.

  “Kyle,” said Joe, “with married couples, as a general rule, when referring to items that make a home, especially those things that the wife had picked out, those items are customarily are assigned to the wife’s purview. Therefore, it is her sofa, vase, or in this case, her chair. Things in a house that are for amusement or extraneous, according to said wife, are customarily assigned to the husband, such as his video game system or his leg lamp.”

  “Well, put, Joe, very well put,” I said.

  “Thank you. Being a priest, one does learn a thing or two, you know.”

  “Hello . . . Peterson . . . What is it?” growled Kyle into his phone as he lay on the floor.

  “How did that happen?” asked Kyle and listened intently to his deputy’s response. “Anything else disturbed? . . . What were the troopers doing when this was going down? . . . Is Detective Thomas there? . . . Oh, that’s good news. . . He’s in Montpelier attending a meeting, eh . . . Isn’t that just dandy? . . . Okay, I’ll be coming straight over.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Not learning his lesson, my brother returned his phone to the troublesome pants pocket. “Somebody has paid a visit to Uncle Raymond’s in the wee hours of the morning.” Declining to accept Joe’s and my assistance, Kyle began to roll from side to side to get enough momentum to flip himself onto his belly. Once he did that, he followed his usual procedure in righting himself; he got all fours, crawled to the nearest surviving chair, which was mine, and used it to pull and push himself up to his feet.

  “Okay then,” said Kyle as he slapped his uniform free from any stray crumbs or dust particles that may have escaped Morgana’s vigilant eye this morning. “Is anyone in for a tour of a crime scene?”

  “Uncle Raymond’s?” I said, already knowing the answer.

  “Ayup, and, Father Joe, you can come along too.”

  “Well, I don’t know—”

  “Hey, I thought you Jesuits knew everything. Come along. It’s not like you aren’t connected to this affair.”

  “I’ll have to call Peter; he’s on his way here to take me back to the abbey.”

  “Call him. Tell him that Richard, or my deputy, or I will drive you back to the abbey. I could really use your input, Joe.”

  “I’m at your command,” said Joe. “I’ll tell father Peter not to pick me up.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” I said with sincerity. “You being around makes me feel a little better.”

  “No problem, Rich. I’m glad that I can be of some help.”

  “With that settled, we should be on our way,” concluded my brother, heading for the door.

  “Hey, before anyone goes anywhere,” I said, seeing the wooden debris on the floor and the remnants of breakfast on the table, “we need to clean up a bit. And Kyle, you do something about the chair.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said my brother as he handed a dirty plate to Joe. “There you go, Father.”

  “Kyle, you knew me before I became a priest. You don’t have to call me father all the time.”

  “Well, . . . I thought, to be fair, that if I call you Father, that you will call me—”

  “Sheriff?” I interjected with disdain. “Yes, Kyle, you’re the sheriff. We get it. But we’re not addressing you as such every time that we want you to pass the butter or something.”

  “How many times have I heard you pushing folks to call you ‘Dr. MacKenzie,’ as if you were an MD or something,” countered my brother.

  “I don’t. But since you brought the topic up, PhDs are doctors, just like MDs.”

  “MDs and sheriffs protect and save people’s lives,” replied Kyle with pride.

  “I earned my right to be called ‘Doctor.’ For seven years I worked—”

  “I won two elections. I earned the right to use a title next to my name!”

  “Hey guys, hate to interrupt your very odd name-calling spat,” said Joe, who was calmly standing by the kitchen counter with a handful of dirty dishes. “But where do these go, sink or dishwasher?”

  “Dishwasher,” readily answered Kyle.

  “Joe,” I said, struck with sudden embarrassment, “you’re the guest; leave the dishes alone.”

  “What? I can help to clear the table. No big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah, Rich, don’t make a big deal out of everything,” added my brother.

  “Kyle, don’t start!” No doubt that the events of the past twelve hours were making me somewhat testy. I mentally counted to ten before I continued. “I promised Morgana that when she came home, the kitchen would be in no worse condition than how it was this morning, before breakfast.”

  “Sounds fair,” said Kyle apologetically. With some effort, he bent down and gathered up the wreckage of the broken chair. “I can drop this off at Bernie’s Cabinetry on the way to Uncle Raymond’s. She’ll fix the chair before Morgana even notices that it’s missing.”

  I doubted that would happen, but I let it go. In any event, Joe, Kyle, and I quickly policed the kitchen. We cleaned until our breakfast gather had become a memory. Its only traces were an overstuffed garbage bag and a broken chair.

  “I don’t want to spoil Morgana,“ I announced, “otherwise she’ll only have you guys over for breakfast just to have us clean her kitchen.”

  With domestic chores completed, the three of us were on our way to Uncle Raymond’s, and of course, taking a needed detour to Bernice’s Cabinetry.

  #

  CHAPTER 7

  “This is for you, Bernie.” Kyle loudly announced to the middle-aged woman who was operating a lathe in the back of the shop. As my brother put the three pieces that were once my kitchen chair onto the counter, he added, “Once again, we need you to do your woodworking magic.”

  “What the sheriff means,” I said, “is that the sheriff broke another one of my kitchen chairs.”

  Bernice Boxer switched off her machine and looked up. “Are all the pieces here?”

  “Ayup,” answered my brother.

  The shop owner, dressed in close-fitting jeans and a red plaid shirt, sauntered up to the ruined chair and gave the damaged sections a look over. She flipped with ease one wooden piece around after another and gave her appraisal.

  “You’re lucky, Sheriff; it doesn’t look too bad—a clean break in the right spots, ” said Bernice as she unceremoniously collected the parts into a pile.

  “Well, that’s good,” said Kyle, who was, I am sure, seeing dollar signs flashing in his mind’s eye.

  “So, I gather that you’ve gained some weight again, eh Sheriff,” said Bernice as she began to search about her shop for a container big enough for my chair.

  “Now, Bernie, that is none of your beeswax.”

/>   “Hey, Sheriff, I don’t care if you lose a pound or gained a ton. Just keep breaking chairs. You’re great for business. Hum, let me see.” Bernie then ducked behind the counter.

  Now Ms. Boxer was one of the more thought-provoking personages of our town. Besides being easy on the eyes, she was fit, intelligent, brutally honest, and into sports but not into men. Her woodworking skills were unparalleled, which were reflected by the certificates and awards displayed in her shop.

  “Ah, this will do.” Bernie stood up with a large cardboard carton in hand and removed a wad of crumpled newspapers from it. Then with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, Bernice jokingly asked, “How many chairs does this one make for you this year, Sheriff?”

  “Three,” I brusquely said.

  “Five,” sheepishly admitted Kyle, correcting me.

  “Five?” I said in disbelief. “Whose kitchen chairs have you been busting up other than mine?”

  “Taylor Whitmore’s.”

  “Taylor Whitmore’s?”

  “She’s a lady friend of mine—”

  “I know Taylor Whitmore,” I said. “She has a part-time job at the post office. You’ve been seeing her on and off for over a year.”

  “She’s your girlfriend?” said Bernice with an approving smile. “Well, good for you, Sheriff.”

  “Thank, you Bernie,” said Kyle with subdued pride and a slight blush in his cheeks. “Anyway, they weren’t kitchen chairs; they were from her dining room.”

  “That’s right,” interjected Bernice as she wrote some notes about my chair. “Your brother, the Sheriff here, broke two dining room chairs at the same time. No small feat if you ask me.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Well, I was helping Taylor to put up curtains, so I used two dining room chairs to stand on; I was afraid that if I stood on one . . . Well, to make a long story short, her cat attacked me. I lost my balance—”

  “ —And he snapped a leg off from each chair when he fell,” concluded Bernice. “I can have your new victim here fixed and ready to go in about two weeks. It will cost one of you guys $185.”

  “Hey, why is this repair job cheaper than of the previous four,” said Kyle.

  “What can I say; those are the breaks,” said Bernice ending in a brief chuckle.

  “But this is almost $20 cheaper than the last chair I brought in.”

  “Store policy . . . Have four chairs fixed at full price; get the fifth one fixed at a discount,” replied Bernice. “But in fact, the chair that you brought in today, the wood fractured in the best possible spot for easy repair and will be easy to stain.”

  “Not sooner than two weeks?” I asked.

  “ Sorry. Normally, I could fix it within a week, but I’m taking a few days off. You guys are lucky that you caught me in the shop. I’m only doing a half-day today.”

  “What’s the occasion?” asked my brother.

  “Now, who is getting personal, Sheriff? An old friend of mine called me the other day saying that she was coming to town on business—some project at the college. So, I invited her to stay at my place for a couple of days . . . She can mix business with pleasure if you know what I mean.”

  “Ayup,” replied Kyle, blushing a bit.

  “She’s asked me to some dinner at the college tonight, and I would like to show her around . . . maybe go to Bennington . . . visit the shops and the old pottery. Maybe we’ll go over Hogback and see Brattleboro. It’s a beautiful drive this time of year with the foliage and all . . . We’ll see. We will do what her schedule will allow. In any case, it will be good to see her again.”

  I could unmistakably detect elements of excitement and anticipation, maybe even warmth, in Bernice’s husky low alto voice as she talked about her friend’s arrival. Whatever it was that I sensed, it was alien to my previous assessment of Bernice Boxer. I knew her for high-quality craftsmanship, her low opinion of men in general, her well maintained . . . physicality, her vegetarianism, and her dry sense of humor, but not for anything that could be taken for warmth or affection. Yet there it was.

  Bernice handed each of us a receipt. “Both of you get a ticket, so whoever is in the neighborhood can pick up the chair.”

  “Good idea,” said Kyle pushing the paper into his pants pocket.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about your Uncle’s death. He was a good man. I don’t know if you two were aware, but a few years back, for various reasons, my business went south, I almost had to close shop. Your Uncle Raymond drummed up enough work for me around his house to get me through. He got me through some hard times. I owe him a great debt.”

  This factoid was news to my brother and me.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Kyle.

  “Nor I,” I said. “My uncle was one of a kind.”

  “He definitely was,” agreed Bernice just as the bell on the entrance door signaled that someone new was coming into the shop.

  “Cell phone reception is a little sketchy around here. I finally got to Peter,” said Joe as he was fingering his cell phone. “There’s nothing happening at the abbey for the next few days. You can return me there . . . whenever.”

  “Great . . . Kyle will get you back to the abbey,” I said.

  “We’ll get you back to the abbey in one piece, don’t worry,” said my brother with confidence.

  “And you, Father,” asked Bernice, “Are you somehow associated with our town’s furniture abuser?”

  “Ah, not really. I’m just the visiting chaplain to the MacKenzie clan this week, so to speak,” said Joe presenting his hand to Bernice. “I’m Joe Savina.”

  Bernice shook his hand, remarking, “I’m Bernice Boxer. And by the look of you, it appears that you had a recent tussle with the devil himself, Father.”

  “Ah, I guess I did. I had a little mishap yesterday . . . nothing serious.”

  Bernie began to give Joe a curious look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look vaguely familiar. Have we met?”

  “We may have many, many years ago. I believe that I dated your older sister, Joan, back in college.”

  “Well, I’ll be a drunk skunk. You’re Joe from the Halloween party; you were Jack The Ripper! That was a damn good costume. I’ll never forget it. You looked so . . . sinister, so evil.”

  “As you can see, I’ve changed professions. How is Joan?”

  “She’s happily married, living in New Hampshire. She has two kids—a boy and a girl, and, as of last week, is now a grandmother.”

  “That’s good to hear. Please, give your sister my best—”

  “I hate to break up this reunion,” interrupted Kyle, “but we all must be on our way.”

  Joe and I concurred, and the three of us took our leave. As we were getting into my brother’s patrol car, Kyle quipped, “So, Father, you dated Bernie Boxer’s sister, Joan, back in the day. What was that like?”

  “It was an experience that is both cherished and personal,” said Joe, “And it is best to be left in the reliquaries of memory of those who were involved. Much like the embarrassing circumstances of your chair destruction, it was something that happened, and it is best to leave it in the past.”

  “Amen to that,” exclaimed Kyle. No one pursued either matter any further. There were more important things that required our time and efforts—who murdered Uncle Raymond, and what was I going to tell Morgana about her chair?

  #

  CHAPTER 8

  As we pulled into my uncle’s driveway, I mused on how different things were from the night before. The crowd of cars that a few hours earlier had encircled my uncle’s home had been reduced to a single state police vehicle and Deputy Peterson’s prowler. The hordes of people that buzzed about the place were nowhere to be seen. A half-score of muddy ruts in uncle’s manicured lawn, a single white plastic foam coffee cup rolling across the driveway, and an overturned donut box beneath some bushes just hinted of the commotion that was here the night before.

  Kyle grunted with annoyance as he pointed to th
e severed yellow caution tape. Strung up between the two lions during the night, its bound ends now hung around each statue like a neck-tie that flapped defiantly in the morning breeze.

  “We have to purchase stronger tape,” muttered my brother, stopping the car. “Now, let’s see what the hubbub is about.”

  As Joe and I followed Kyle out of the car and up the steps, I became aware of a growing feeling of sadness, or maybe it was a sense of alienation. Whatever it was, it was disturbing. As I physically walked up the front stairs, I emotionally felt like I was descending into some type of black hole of despair. It was a psychological journey that I wasn’t prepared to make nor cared to do at the moment. But I hadn’t any choice, it appeared. My ticket had been purchased, regardless of my readiness or opinion.

  As the three of us reached the top of the stairs, the front door opened.

  “Sheriff, you’re finally here,” hailed Peterson, wasting no time in telling us what he knew as he ushered us into the house. “I got here early this morning, just like you told me, to check on the residence and, well, at first, I saw no one about the place, not that I expected anyone to be here because I thought that most of the heavy lifting was completed by the state guys last night . . . ”

  Peterson has a penchant for rambling on when he gets excited, and this occasion proved to be no exception. As the four of us walked through the house, Kyle and I patiently tried to follow the young deputy’s meandering account, which at the time evaded any conclusion. When we got to my uncle’s library, I found that its door was untraditionally and unexpectantly shut.

  “. . . And so when we came into this room,” concluded Peterson, “I found—”

  The deputy swung open the door to reveal Trooper Cobourne standing in the middle of the library holding a chocolate-covered donut and a coffee.

  “Morning Sheriff,” uttered the trooper.

  What took my breath away was not the munching state trooper but what surrounded him. Cobourne was standing amid a mess of books, papers, and turned-over furniture. The contents of every low shelf and open cabinet in the room had been scattered onto the floor. But the items on the high shelves of the built-in bookcases were left unscathed.