Murder Comes to Notchey Creek

by Liz S. Andrews

  STOP NOW OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES, it read.

  20

  Patrick’s Dilemma

  “They’ve been coming for a while.”

  Patrick Middleton took a sip of his wine and gazed into the fire crackling beside him, the whites of his eyes glowing like orbs from the flames. He appeared tired and stressed, but composed.

  There was a chill in the night air, and Patrick had given Harley his jacket, which she had since draped across her shoulders. The surrounding outdoor kitchen was fully lit, the bistro lights strung across a giant arbor covering the outdoor dining and living areas. Inside, the historical society members helped themselves to bowls of stew and biscuits in the kitchen. Low rumbles of conversation and intermittent bursts of laughter seeped through the cracks of the back door.

  “The notes,” Harley said, “like the one tonight?”

  He nodded. “They always say the same thing.”

  “Maybe it’s just the protesters sending them—about the new history museum.”

  “I only wish it were that.” He diverted his gaze to the night sky and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “I only wish.”

  He did not sound convinced, and Harley had the uncertain feeling he was holding something back. Patrick seemed haunted by something. Guilty. Then there was the argument he had with Beau Arson that afternoon and his mysterious connection to the man they had found in Briarwood Park.

  Harley turned to him. “I’m sure after the building’s constructed and the museum’s open, they’ll forget it over time. It’ll be yesterday’s news. The grudges will pass with time.”

  “Do you believe that? Do you believe all grudges pass with time? Or do they just fester, magnify, feed resentment?”

  Harley considered. “I guess it depends on the person who’s angry and what caused their anger to begin with. Some people tend to hold grudges, others don’t.”

  Patrick stared at her in earnest. “Emotions are powerful things, Harley. Don’t underestimate them. And over time those emotions are shaped by our memories of the perceived insult. They can mutate with each replay of the event until the memory carries no resemblance to the actual event. ‘The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history on.’”

  “Thomas Still?”

  He nodded. “Thomas Still.”

  Harley shifted her weight in the patio chair, trying to figure out the best way to approach the question she needed to ask. “Patrick, I need to ask you something, and I hope you won’t think I’m being too nosy.”

  “You, Harley? Never. What is it?”

  “Well, we found a man this morning in Briarwood Park. Tina and I did. He was in the ditch beside the creek—disoriented—and he was talking gibberish. We tried to help him, but he ran off in the woods.”

  Patrick sprung forward in his seat. “What’d he look like?”

  “Middle-aged. Dark hair, tattered clothes, lots of scars on his face. He had a pair of dog tags around his neck.”

  “And you say he was speaking gibberish?” Patrick’s voice grew desperate as his hands grasped the arms of his chair. “What’d he say? Could you understand any of it?”

  “Something about a boy. He said he needed to know what happened to ‘that boy.’ That the boy was ‘innocent.’”

  A perplexed expression crossed Patrick’s face. He shook his head and gazed down at the fire in thought. “Innocent? But whatever could he mean?”

  “I was hoping maybe you could tell me. He’d been looking for you, apparently—at Bud’s Pool Hall last night.”

  “Last night? But he must’ve gotten it wrong then. We were supposed to meet at Bud’s tonight, not last night.”

  He rose from his seat and threw the fleece blanket in his chair. “I’m sorry, Harley, but I have to go. I need to …”

  “But who is he?” Harley called after him.

  Patrick rushed inside the house, bypassing the others and heading straight for his office, where soon after, the lights came on.

  Harley sat back in her seat, pondering what had just occurred, trying to wrap her mind around the puzzle. A stranger arrived in town, a stranger no one seemed to have ever seen or known. The man had supper at the homeless shelter, then said he had a meeting with Patrick Middleton at Bud’s Pool Hall, a meeting Patrick hadn’t attended. So the man got directions to Patrick’s house instead and presumably went there. But he never made it, or at least Patrick never encountered him. Then she and Tina found the man in the ditch the next morning, delirious, speaking of a boy, a boy who was innocent. But the man’s mentioning of the boy, in and of itself, hadn’t seemed to surprise Patrick. It was the man’s assertion that the boy had been ‘innocent’ that surprised Patrick. Before Harley could ponder further, Tina appeared on the back porch, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “You about ready to head out? I’ve got another event in the mornin’.”

  Harley nodded, then glanced at her watch. It was getting late. She rose from the chair and folded the blanket before placing it neatly on the arm. Inside, the historical society members were gathered around the table, and Tina was in the process of packing up.

  “I’m just about ready,” she said.

  Harley and Tina said farewell to everyone and traveled down the long entryway. As Harley moved to open the front door, she caught sight of someone in the front yard, the figure coming forth from the shadows with the porch light.

  A young man, about thirty, and tall and slender, with neatly styled blond hair stood beneath the oak trees, his boyish face reddened with anger. He wore a burgundy cashmere sweater and dark jeans, with a plaid scarf wrapped loosely about his neck, a Rolex watch glittering in the streetlights. Harley recognized him, but not from ever having met him. Over the years she had read about him in the society pages, from his fabled boyhood to his adolescence, and now his early adulthood. Orphaned as a child and then raised on a trust fund by Arthur and Pearl Johnson, his legal guardians, who had subsequently sent him away to the world’s most elite boarding schools.

  Michael Sutcliffe. Heir to the Sutcliffe timber and real estate fortune. When he had come into his inheritance five years prior, he had visited Notchey Creek on occasion, checking in at Briarcliffe, the Sutcliffe’s ancestral mansion. But he only started living there recently, since he became engaged to Savannah Swanson.

  Harley watched as Michael’s gaze traveled from one lit window in Patrick’s house to the next, his teeth biting into his lower lip. When he caught sight of her, he disappeared into the shadows once more.

  “Tina, did you see that?”

  “See what?” Tina said, peering over a stack of Tupperware containers.

  Footsteps sounded behind them, and Harley turned to see Arthur and Pearl Johnson walking in their direction, their coats draped over their forearms.

  “What is it Harley?” Pearl asked, looking at her with concern. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “Somebody was out there just now. Standing underneath the trees.”

  Arthur hurried past them and pushed open the door. He stood on the porch, his eyes darting about the front yard. “Well, there’s no one out here now.”

  “It looked like …”

  “Who?” Pearl asked.

  “Oh, nobody,” she said, deciding not to mention Michael Sutcliffe’s name. “I probably just imagined it.”

  “Well,” Pearl said, “why don’t you let us walk you to your truck?”

  “Please do,” Tina said with a sigh of relief. “That’d be great.”

  21

  Bootleg Boulevard

  Harley pulled into the gravel driveway of the home her grandfather had purchased for her at the age of eighteen. Known as “The Sunshine” of 1920s home models, the buttercup-colored cottage had a small, slumped porch with two white rocking chairs and an accompanying swing stationed before large double-paned windows. Several old oak trees lined the yard, canopying the house with their branches.

  Uncle Tater called the home her bootleggin’ house because it,
and the identical homes lining the street, were constructed during the Prohibition Era, a time when many Notchey Creek residences had makeshift stills in their cellars, the liquor an economic necessity for broke families during the Great Depression, a secret trade hidden in the quiet folds of a small southern town.

  By Uncle Tater’s calculations, Harley’s house would have been the perfect hideaway spot for Al Capone, as no one would have thought to look for him in Notchey Creek. And as with all areas of Notchey Creek with an illustrious history, Poplar Street became known as Bootleg Boulevard. She climbed the rickety porch steps, the sound of dead leaves crunching beneath her feet as she crossed the porch and unlocked the deadbolts, securing the door behind her with double clicks. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet as she made her way through the dark house, tossing her keys on the antique table.

  When the windows and doors were all locked, she made a fire in the stone hearth and collapsed into her wingback chair by the fire. Flames popped and sputtered in the fireplace, casting shadows on the living room’s dimly lit walls. She heard a snort come from the floor, followed by a wet tickle on her big toe, then Matilda plopped down at her feet in front of the fireplace.

  “Hey, there, Matilda,” she said, petting the pig’s head. “How’s my girl tonight?” A few minutes passed and Matilda grew restless, her eyes looking toward the kitchen in search of supper.

  “Come on,” Harley said, rising from her chair. “Let’s see if you’ve eaten all of your food.” Following Matilda into the kitchen, she opened a container of slop from the farm and poured it into Matilda’s bowl.

  “Now, what should I have for supper?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.

  She unwrapped a bowl of Tina’s bourbon beef stew, and while the stew reheated on the stovetop, she made a Manhattan on the rocks with Tennessee whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters. Moments later, she was nestled back in her chair, the stew and Manhattan resting on the table beside her. She savored each bite of stew, the aroma of browned sirloin, bourbon, and bacon heavenly.

  After she finished, she rested the bowl on the side table and opened the book she had been reading for Halloween, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But even Washington Irving’s atmospheric story of two men vying for the same woman couldn’t free her mind of the day’s events.

  She found her curiosity nagging at her, so she drew her laptop from her bag and rested it across her thighs. After opening it, she typed Beau Arson into the search engine. The webpage exploded with hundreds of hits, her eyes assaulted by a barrage of photos of the famous rock musician, performing during concerts, on album covers, and alongside countless Grammy awards and platinum records.

  Beau wasn’t one to smile for the camera, and from Harley’s brief encounter with him at the store, he seemed to be one who never smiled at all. He had a brooding expression, and his dark-blue eyes, with their depth of feeling, suggested layers of character far beyond what his public persona relayed. His wavy dark hair, styled in various fashions over the years, had remained long, with a tendency to pull it into ponytails down his back. He never dressed up, not even for the Grammy awards, wearing his typical outfits of old t-shirts, ripped jeans, and boots.

  Harley scrolled down the page, then paused at another photo, one entirely different from the rest.

  There he was on the screen, in his crashed 1970 Dodge Challenger, his long hair falling over his face, not entirely hiding the cut above his right eye. He wore a Black Sabbath t-shirt and gray flannel pajama bottoms, and no shoes, as if he had sleepwalked from his bed to his car.

  That image of him, bruised and bloody and disoriented, had appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Beau Arson, trying to deflect the camera flashes with his helpless hands, his face gripped in despair, a moment of private anguish publicized for the world to see.

  According to the tabloids, he had gone for a midnight joyride, and helped by a cocktail of drugs, prescription and otherwise, he had crashed his car into a guardrail in east Los Angeles, nearly costing him his life.

  It was as if Beau Arson, musical prodigy and front man for the hard rock band, Assault, had been asking for death, praying for a release from his life. He was the man who had been given everything, they said, yet seemed to care for nothing in it.

  There were rumors of a nervous breakdown, panic attacks, and aberrant behavior. There were references to the Greek mythological character, Icarus, the boy who had fashioned himself a pair of waxen wings, hoping to reach the heavens, only to fly too close to the sun, his wings melting, his beautiful body plummeting back to earth, to his death. Beau Arson’s life of excess had finally caught up with him, they theorized. He had flown too high this time, his wings melting as fast as they had carried him to the heavens, to stardom.

  Weeks later, authorities dropped any substance abuse charges, finding Beau had been sober during the accident and had merely been trying to escape the paparazzi. The press frenzy subsided, the rumor mill stopped circulating, and Beau Arson disappeared.

  There had been gasps in the media when he left his band, Assault, packed up all of his things, left Los Angeles, and moved to Tennessee, to the place where he was born, where he now lived in an undisclosed location near the Smoky Mountains.

  And here he is, Harley thought. But why?

  She closed the laptop and returned it to her bag. It was midnight, and her mind and body were exhausted. Removing her glasses, she rubbed her tired eyes and prepared for bed. It was then she realized she still wore Patrick Middleton’s jacket. She slid her arms from the sleeves, and as she went to fold it up, something fell from the pocket.

  A photograph.

  Yellowed and faded from age.

  And pictured was a woman, with shoulder-length flaxen hair, her skin glowing from a summer tan, her cheeks burned at the apples.

  She was beautiful.

  Based on the woman’s hairstyle and clothing, Harley guessed the photo was at least thirty to forty years old. Who was this woman? And why had Patrick had her photo in his pocket? The woman was too young to be Vivian Middleton, Patrick’s late wife. And Vivian Middleton had been a brunette.

  Another thought crossed Harley’s mind.

  “Your little blonde,” Hazel had said to Patrick earlier that evening. But was this the blonde Hazel had been referring to? Hazel had been jealous of this person, of that Harley was certain, and Hazel had said Patrick stared at this woman’s photo night after night.

  This must be her, she thought. Patrick had said he would love her until the day he died. Was he talking about his late wife or this woman? Perhaps she had been Patrick’s secret lover or an unrequited love. After all, Patrick had been a widower for over thirty years, and it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for him to have found someone else. But what had happened to this woman? Where was she now? And better yet, was she even still alive?

  Harley’s mind fluttered with assumptions. Deciding to give it a rest for the evening, she tucked the blond girl’s photo back inside Patrick’s jacket pocket. There were so many secrets just beyond her grasp, and she intended to find them out. She would visit Patrick first thing in the morning.

  22

  From the Mouths of Jack-o’-Lanterns

  The next day came early for Harley Henrickson. She rose at five, delivered Matilda to the festival grounds at six, and dropped off Tina at her bake shop at seven. By the time she headed to Patrick Middleton’s house at seven-thirty, she had only managed to take a few sips of coffee from her travel mug, hoping to clear the fogginess from her mind.

  The previous night had been a restless one. The rain, beginning as a relaxing drizzle at ten, had advanced to a torrential downpour by midnight, pelting the tin roof like bullets. And as the rain beat against the roof, so too did Harley’s mind beat with unanswered questions, as she twisted and turned in her bed.

  When she reached Patrick’s three-story brick mansion, she parked her truck in the driveway and sat idle before the carriage house, finding the engine’s vibrations and the
cabin’s warmth comforting.

  Bags of leaves were stacked in front of Patrick’s carriage house, while new leaves littered the paved driveway, waiting to be collected by Angus Pruitt, the gardener who had tended Briarwood properties for more than fifty years. Angus had recently planted a fresh bed of colorful chrysanthemums in the front yard, their colors gleaming in the bright autumn light. And above them, on the front porch, the series of jack-o’-lanterns still scowled and smiled and booed at Harley. The bags of leaves and the sagging jack-o’-lanterns were the only things detracting from the home’s magazine perfect image, a flawless image Patrick Middleton, too, had maintained during his years spent in Notchey Creek.

  Harley opened the truck’s driver’s side door, shivering as a swell of crisp autumn air sent a chill up her arms.

  Just then Patrick’s front door flew open, and his housekeeper, Ira Jenkins, ran from the house, nearly falling down the porch steps.

  “Oh, Harley!”

  “What is it, Ira?” Harley said, jumping out of her truck. “What’s happened?”

  Ira threw herself into Harley’s arms, her weight nearly knocking the younger woman to the ground. “It’s Patrick!” she said. “He’s … he’s …”

  Harley pulled away from Ira and cupped the housekeeper’s elbows with her hands, searching her face. “He’s what?”

  But Ira stuttered so severely, shook so terribly, she couldn’t form the words. She clamped her hand to her throbbing chest and pointed to the back of the house. “The creek! Harley, the creek!”

  Trying to control her own emotions, Harley guided Ira back to the truck and grabbed a quilt from the cabin, wrapping it about Ira’s shoulders. “Why don’t you just wait here,” she said. “I’ll go take a look around back and then call the police. But I need you stay here and stay calm, okay? Can you do that for me?”