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CHAPTER 6: SOMETHING WICKED IN THE WIND

(READ Ch5, P.2 here)

The next morning Detective Litani awoke to find that Rebecca was nowhere to be found. The doorbell rang while he was in the shower. He thought about not answering it but the prospect of possibly finding Rebecca standing there, returning to greet him, propelled him to do so. He could still remember her chilling words to him last night as he had entered her. The idea that Childress had come anywhere near her, in that way, made him despise the man even further. It made him officially consider Childress as a predator. He cut the shower short, and wrapped a towel around his waist on his way to the door.

“My, my, nothing’s sexier than a man dripping wet in a towel,” said the effervescent teenager.

The white corduroy upper thigh length mini-skirt she wore hugged her body perfectly, too perfect. Her hair was pulled up away from her face the way she liked to wear it most times, with the length of the ponytail dangling over a tight backless red blouse. The entire package screamed jailbait.

The smile on his face disappeared quickly.

“What are you doing here Tina?”

“Oh now, Ray, don’t get mad. My bike broke down. I need a ride, don’t want to be late. The group’s organizing a really cool film festival on American New Wave cinema. Today’s the board meeting with all the big shots and muckety-mucks.”

“What group would that be, Tina?

“The people I work for silly, over at Filmspace. It’s gonna be great. Before Filmspace came along this town had zilch in the arts department. Unless you count the Historical Society’s bingo games, I know I don’t. Hey Ray, I just love the movies, don’t you?”

Showing only mild appreciation, he shrugged and ran off into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.

While left to her own devices, she poured a glass of milk and leaned up against the kitchen counter, contemplating. No doubt, it amused her that Detective Litani scarcely paid her any attention. Yet, it only made her want to invest more in their relationship. And they did have one — a relationship — whether he knew it or not. She was sure of that. She felt at ease talking to him, even when it seemed like he wasn’t listening.

“Oh I almost forgot. Cheryl and Grant want to invite you to my eighteenth birthday party,” she called out.

“Cheryl and Grant? Who are these people?!” he yelled back, while stepping into a pair of cream colored boxer short with an image of the Tasmanian devil imprinted on them.

“Cheryl and Grant Sycamore — my parents. Duh.”

He came back into the kitchen a couple of minutes later dressed in a pair of black slacks, and a white T-shirt that seemed to cling to his upper body, outlining every sinewy muscle. He felt good, thoughts of last night’s marathon session with Rebecca Jamison still fresh in his mind.

“You call your mother and father by their first names?”

“Most of the time,” she said. “It’s just easier that way.”

“But, they’re you’re parents . . .”

“They know who they are.”

She took a long swallow of milk that left a mustache, and then rather seductively licked the milk ring from around her mouth in slow motion.

“Cut it out, Tina. Enough is enough,” he insisted for the millionth time.

She followed him into the living room as he sat down on the couch to finish lacing up his sneakers. It was weird having her stare at him the way she did, and even weirder realizing that he was the only one embarrassed about the whole thing.

“–Heard about Lizzie French?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Yesterday, at the Founder’s Day celebration, she passed this thing around for signatures. Her new thing. Every time you turn around that old battle axe’s got a new thing. Some kind of resolution on righteousness, is what some of the folks are calling it. And, guess what? She wants everybody in town to sign, so she can send it to the state Capital. That’s what I hear anyway. That’s something, huh?”

“No Tina, that’s something else.”

“Yep, old Lizzie’s our pride and joy! That crazy ringding can call on the Lord God Almighty like nobody’s business! She makes our Reverend Kernapple look like a wimp. Yep, somebody should have locked that ringding up years ago. But then again, every town needs a comedian.”

“I’d really love to hang around and shoot the breeze with you Tina, but I’m late for work.”

“Oh please, nobody cares what time you get to the Sheriff’s Office. Especially Sheriff Daniel, he’s still on bed rest.”

“I care, Tina. Is that good enough for you?”

“Whatever.”

He adjusted his belt buckle. “Wow, teenagers really know how to turn a phrase.”

His first chore of the morning – keep Tina Sycamore at bay. It proved itself to be a hard one, but he was still in confidence mode, after last night’s romantic bliss. He closed his eyes for a moment, and pictured Rebecca’s naked breast against his lips. He could still taste the sweetness of her body lotion on his tongue; the apple blossom scent lingering long after the deed had been done. Two years she’d said, since the last time she’d made love. Theoretically, it had been almost like being with a virgin. He had been honored that she’d chosen him to break her celibacy. Honored. Pleased. Thrilled, and just plain ridiculously optimistic. He had felt proud bringing her to climax, not because of ego but because he’d felt a true connection for the first time in a long time.

“Ray, snap out of it! What’s wrong with you?”

When he opened his eyes he found Tina on the floor at his knee repeatedly tugging at his pants leg. He immediately jumped up.

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? Why are you on the floor?”

She stood up, and pulled her mini-skirt down. He had a good mind to toss her right out the door, no explanation.

“I was trying to get your attention. You dozed off or something.”

It had been more like a wet daydream.

“And this action required you to get down on the floor, and grab the leg of my pants?”

“Look at it this way, I could have grabbed something else.”

She smiled invitingly.

“Not funny Tina.”

“Don’t get all crazy, Ray. My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Wainwright used to do the same thing to wake us up after nap time.”

“Don’t tell me you can recall your kindergarten years?” he asked, thinking she was full of it.

Tina put her hands on her hips, and pouted, “Didn’t we already go through this? I told you already. I have an unbelievable memory, just ask around. It’s what you call photographic. I was tested and everything. That’s why I know I can help you with the case, if you let me. I still have some of Patty Lowell’s life tucked away in my mind.”

He took her by the shoulders and guided her towards the door.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll gladly give you a ride to work Tina, but you should wait out in the car.”

“Why?”

“No reason,” he said, and pushed her out the door.

As the police car pulled out of the driveway, Tina’s attention was soon diverted to the backseat near the driver’s side, to the exquisite ornamental box that presented itself like a mystery of which she was more than fond of. The more she looked over her shoulder at the box the faster the wad of pink Bubblelicious gum circled around in her mouth. He was careful not to say anything to her about it but he knew she could barely withstand the intrigue.

“So, Ray, I hear Victor Salley’s sister won’t let Doc Westminster autopsy Victor’s body because they’re Jewish, and you know, it’s a sin.”

She was in full snoop form.

“Who told you that?”

“I heard it that’s all. I have a knack for communication.”

“Really? Now all you need is the gift of silence,” he said. “Besides, you got it all wrong.”

“Oh, then there is gonna be an autopsy?”

He looked over at her without saying a word. His keenest impression of Tina was that she had a gentle enough nature, but was a bit of an instigator, who quite possibly had a hidden mean streak reserved for special occasions .

“Listen, Tina, maybe you should stop calling me by my first name. It’s a little, uh, . . . ”

“A little what? It’s your name, right? Or do you want me to call you by the full Christian name Raymond instead?”

“What I’m trying to say is Ray, or Raymond – they’re a little too familiar. Our relationship should be one of a strictly professional nature, and something more age appropriate. I just don’t think you know me that well to call me by my first name.”

The sweat from his palms made the steering wheel glisten as he turned the corner, past the library, and on to Congressional Lane. Maybe he was overdoing it by coming at her this way but he wasn’t completely clueless. A blind man could see that young Tina Sycamore clearly had designs on him, and he clearly did not want to appear to have assisted her along that path with any provocation.

“Really? Interesting,” she said.

“I just think it’s more professional that way . . . you being who you are, and I being who I am, that you should stick with Detective Litani, or even Mr. Litani.”

“You trying to convince me – or yourself? Besides, it’s a little self-righteous of you Ray, don’t you think?”

“How so Tina?”

“Well, if I was five, I could maybe see where you were coming from. But I’m not. I’m seventeen going on eighteen and . . .”

“That’s another thing, I really would appreciate it if you stopped repeatedly telling me how close to eighteen you are. I realize turning eighteen is a big day in your life, however, it is irrelevant as far as you and me are concerned. If you don’t remember anything else, please remember that.”

“But you call me Tina, not Miss. Sycamore. And I don’t mind.”

“I’ll gladly refer to you as Miss. Sycamore, or Ms. Sycamore from now on, whichever you prefer.”

“I prefer Tina,” she said, “I was just making a point.”

He sighed, in despair. She was one tough cookie, this precocious townie.

“Do you call Sheriff Daniel by his first name?”

“No, I call him Sheriff Daniel, or sometimes just Sheriff.”

His face beamed. He had her, or so he thought.

“You’ve just proven my point young lady. Oh, I’d also accept just plain old “Detective” as a greeting. It would do just fine.”

“You’re comparing apples and oranges Ray – it’s not the same with you as it is with the Sheriff. Even though I’ve known the Sheriff my whole life, I feel . . . closer to you.”

He didn’t bother to continue or even look over at her after the fact. Fending off Tina was one thing but he was having an ever harder problem getting Rebecca Jamison out of his head. He couldn’t help but wonder if her revelation to him about Childress had had something to do with her early departure from his bed this morning. Although, he couldn’t completely rule out the fact of there being ten kids waiting for her back at the orphanage as a contributing factor.

“You hear anything from Victor’s wife yet? She’s missing, right?”

“You don’t know that Tina.” He did know that.

“She’s missing all right. She stayed with him all the time when he was a drunken numskull. Now he’s dead. If anything, she should be walking on cloud nine, dancing in the streets. Maybe she knows something. Maybe she had to skip town quick. I don’t think she killed him though, that’s too easy. You know what I think?”

“Not even on a good day,” he said.

“I think Mrs. Peabody should hire a private detective to go looking for her sister-in-law. I know I would be concerned if my brother’s wife and children went missing like that, after he was murdered. I don’t think I’d wait around for the cops to figure it out either, no offense.”

“None taken,” he said. “I always like to know that the public’s thinking, even if the public is an overzealous teenager with a tendency to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

He looked over at her. He could almost see the wheels turning. In reality, If things weren’t the way they were he would have seriously considered taking someone like Tina under his wings, to provide a kind of mentor relationship for a career in the criminal sciences like his good friend Sargent Ludlow had done for him, if that’s what she’d wanted.

“So– what do you think, huh? Think somebody murdered them too, the same as Victor? I think it’s a fifty-fifty.”

Detective Litani slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. He cut the engine off, and leaned over closer to the passenger’s side. Tina Sycamore pursed her lips and closed her eyes. Her heart beat faster. She had been waiting for this moment since the first day of his arrival in town. This was her moment, and she was ready for him.

“Number one – nobody’s saying Victor was murdered. A suspected drowning is one of those things that has to be examined further before it can be called as such. It means that we have to eliminate the possibility of homicide. Number two – referring to your fifty-fifty chance scenario, I don’t think you understand how probability works. I admire your inquisitiveness in wanting to understand how all the pieces fit together. Really, I do. It’s like a puzzle to you, and you like to tinker and see how things come together. You’re young. Young people like puzzles, I get it. But, do me a favor? Please promise me you won’t go spreading misinformation around town. Oh, and you can open your eyes now.”

Disappointed at having not received the proper kiss she’d prepared for, she pulled the rubber band from her hair, and popped him with it.

“You are a cruel one, mister. Just plain cruel.”

Back on the road she was silent. Part of him considered this a triumph, especially since their earlier conversation about calling him by his title hadn’t been officially settled. Her silence meant no more worrying about dreaded questions, flamboyant suppositions, or even worse – relentless come-ons. Still, another part secretly relished the visceral reaction of her pushing back.

“So tell me Tina, how does it feel to be a high school graduate with your entire life ahead of you?”

She blew a bubble and peeled the bubble gum from her lips. It was done in such a way that he shook his head in disbelief. Practically every action she undertook was either delivered for effect or meant to entice. He was beginning to think Tina Sycamore was in her own little alternate reality, appearing live in Technicolor while everyone around her watched, amazed at the heights of her performance from day to day. Or, it had also occurred to him that this just might be her way of pushing back.

“Well Ray, I still wake up wanting to eat corn flakes so things haven’t changed that much.”

“Ah, but you’re a girl with ambition. I’m sure you’ve got some kind of plans for the future. Maybe leaving this town and making it big?”

“Yeah, sure, except I’m not done here yet. Just like you, some things need to be followed up on first.”

“What things?”

“Why should I tell you? You don’t respect me. You treat me like a kid.”

“You are a kid.”

“I’ll be eighteen in a matter of days, so there.”

Again with the reminder of her official leap into womanhood. He suspected she had the big day circled in red ink on her calendar since it had already been tattooed on her brain. It was difficult enough trying to manage her now at her present age; he feared the feat would prove nearly impossible the moment she became legally emancipated, so to speak.

“The board meeting at Filmspace I was telling you about . . . Childress will be there,” she said, hoping to reengage his interest.

“Really?”

“Yep, he’s the leader of the pack after all. He’ll probably smile at me the way he does, and put his hand on my shoulder and say, “Miss. Tina Sycamore, how are you today?”

“I thought we crossed this subject on Founder’s Day at the diner. Don’t go playing games with a man like that. He’s a wolf.”

“Then does that make me Little Red Riding Hood?”

He shook his head in amazement, “ You really are a glutton for punishment.”

He pulled up next to the Gothic designed building with its pointed arches and ribbed vaults. Filmspace, and a few other modern buildings scattered about, seemed completely out of place in a town with civic architecture largely comprised of early Christian basilica structures and colonial homes.

She got out the car and bent down near the window.

“I’m not gonna ask why you didn’t say anything about the strange box with the designs in the back seat. My senses tell me it probably has something to do with the investigation somehow. You know, I could really help you put things together. We could make a great team, but all I get from you is a big goose egg, and speeches on how not to call you “Ray.”

She cast a look of disapproval in his direction. He rolled his eyes.

“And by the way,” she said, slowly backing away from the vehicle, “I’d give anything to find out about all the juicy stuff you whispered to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms about the case last night while you fucked her. I bet she calls you Ray,” she surmised. “Don’t forget to give the bitch my warm regards,” she said, and then strolled off.

He had no idea how she knew.

The first thing Detective Litani did when he reached the Sheriff’s Office was take out his wallet, and look for the sliver of note paper taken from his motel room in Infinity City. He’d written the number on it that served as his only means of contacting Leilani, the young woman who said she was the dead Hawaiian’s sister.

He dialed the number and waited. After three rings someone picked up.

“Hello, may I speak to Leilani? Detective Litani, calling.”

“Leilani?” asked the voice on the other end.

“Yes, is she available?” he asked, wanting to move things along.

“Police?” asked the voice.

“Yes, Detective Raymond Litani. I’m sorry but it’s rather urgent. Can you please put Leilani on the phone if she’s there?”

On the other end, the phone was slammed down on a hard surface, causing him to flinch. A few minutes later it was retrieved by another listener. This time the voice was older, more mature.

“Hello, FBI? Kaminsky?”

“No, Detective Raymond Litani. Pardon me, but is Leilani available? It’s really important.”

There was a moment of silence, and he could hear the other party on the end of the phone breathing heavily.

“Leilani,” the voice repeated, “My daughter Leilani’s at the General Hospital.”

“Hospital? What happened?”

“Evil keeps visiting my family. First my son, now my sweet daughter. Something wicked. This evil, it travels through the wind.”

From what he could gather something dreadful had happened to the fierce and willful woman he’d met back in Infinity City. His thoughts went immediately to the fake Denny’s Restaurant that served as some kind of criminal underground, operating in broad daylight. He held the practical knowledge of a seasoned street officer and even he could not wrap his mind around it. He went over the elements in his head. One – Leilani had sent him to the restaurant for a reason. That something had more than likely to do with her dead, presumably murdered brother. Two – Victor Salley had left the recording on his voicemail prompting him to go to Infinity City, in search of the Hawaiian. Three – If the Hawaiian killed Victor, who killed the Hawaiian? It would have been easier if he could have accepted Victor Salley’s death as a simple drowning.

Clearly Leilani had figured her brother to be operating as some kind of mercenary, – that’s what his introduction to the Restaurant was all about. He hoped her revelations to him hadn’t been the catalyst for whatever had happened to her. Before he could continue the conversation further, Deputy Carlisle entered carrying a cardboard box full of cigarette cartons. He dropped the box down, and made a beeline for Detective Litani’s back end office.

“Well, well, well, look who decided to skedaddle back to town! How was your little trip to Infinity City?! Get any tail?!”

He yelled this while positioning himself in the doorway, hunched over like a tired vulture, after a gratuitous meal of scavenging and pillaging.

“Hello? Listen, I apologize but I have to get off the phone now but I promise to call back later and pick up where we left off. Is that alright with you?”

“Yes,” said the voice on the other end, “Peace be with you.”

Detective Litani hung up the phone and directed his attention to Randy Carlisle. There was a reason why he’d never made Chief Deputy. To put it bluntly, he was an idiot. Everyone knew it, especially Sheriff Daniel. It had appeared to Detective Litani since he’d arrived in Trinity’s Land End almost three weeks to today, that unfortunately, Sheriff Daniel seemed to count on it. He treated the young deputy like a mama bear would if she’d discovered one of her cubs was a little slow, or “touched in the head”. As long as Randy Carlisle remained safely under Sheriff Daniel’s wing, he would always be comfortable being an idiot.

“Hey there foreign boy. You speak Spanish or that Islam?”

“Well – let’s see, Islam is not a language. Farsi is a language. And as for the other – my parents were of Argentine and Lebanese roots but I speak the same language you do Deputy Carlisle. Is that good enough for you?”

Deputy Carlisle gave Detective Litani a half-grin and went on about his business, unloading the box of cigarette cartons.

The job of Chief Deputy required reporting to the Sheriff. The position was akin to a direct supervisor of department heads. Furthermore, in the event of the Sheriff’s temporary absence, responsibilities included the wherewithal to manage the entire Sheriff’s department until the Sheriff returned to duty. Last year, Chief Deputy Bannister, had resigned from the position and left for Las Vegas to be the lead security detail for a major casino. It had been a calculated move in which he had been guaranteed a salary twice what he’d earned working under Sheriff Daniel. With the position of Chief Deputy now void, and Sheriff Daniel still in the hospital, the Sheriff’s Office consisted of Deputy Carlisle, Deputy Hawthorne, who was on vacation, two part-time records clerks, and himself. It was a shoestring operation if there ever was one. And even though the words were sometimes used interchangeably – it was definitely more of a Sheriff’s Office than Sheriff’s Department.

“You know, that Tina Sycamore dropped by here to see you when you were over in Infinity City. Said she had something to talk to you about!” he yelled heartily across the room as if they were in the Roman Coliseum.

“Thank you Deputy for that message but I’ve seen Tina already.”

“Oh you did? I tell you that girl’s just itching to give it away, maybe you’re the lucky fella, huh? Shit, maybe even me. Age of consent is 16 here in our great state, and that Tina’s plus one.”

“Maybe you need to read the General Laws of Massachusetts again Deputy Carlisle, as I have, Chapter 272, Section 4, which sets a second age of consent provision at 18 if a person of “chaste life” is thought to be seduced by a perpetrator and put in harms way. You’re what? About 28? More than the law allows. And an authority figure in a position of power. Do you really want to risk getting caught up?”

Deputy Carlisle growled at him under his breath.

“What the fuck? You mean to tell me, a man’s in town less than a month, and he’s got nothing better to do than spend his time reading every inch of the fucking General Laws of Massachusetts? Why don’t you go down to the roadhouse and solicit for some pussy, if you’re that bored. Jeez Louise, that’s pitiful. And you’re fucking crazy if you think Tina Sycamore’s led a chaste fucking life. She went out out with this college boy over in Infinity City a while back, for Christsakes.”

It wasn’t before long that Rita Mason came by looking as spectacular as ever in a vintage pin-striped pants suit, and a pair of patent leather shoes. She was the closet thing to a fashionista in Trinity’s Land End. She reminded him of a black Marilyn Monroe in the way she glided over surfaces, hips in full swagger. It was hard to take your eyes off of her.

Deputy Carlisle sprang to attention to greet the visitor, complete with bulging eyes and irregular heartbeat. He wasn’t one for subtlety, especially when the fairer sex was in close proximity.

“Hey there Rita Mae, how you doing? Anything wrong with Mama Loas?”

“No Randy, I just dropped by to speak to Detective Litani over there, that’s all.”

“Oh, well, he ain’t doing nothing important so I guess you can go on in.”

“Thank you,” she said, “By the way, grandmama said she was gonna send me over to bring you some of that chili you like so much.”

A wide grin came across his face, and he lit up like a Christmas tree at the mere thought of being given anything by a woman he’d dreamed about banging for years. Of course, Rita Mason shouldn’t have felt special in this regard because Randy Carlisle had kept a mental list of all the women he’d fantasized about screwing since he was fifteen. Currently, there were three hundred and five names on the roster.

Once inside Detective Litani’s office Rita Mason closed the door behind her, sat down in the chair across from his desk, and crossed her legs.

“Nice to see you again, Miss. Mason.”

“It’s Ms.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I never get that right.”

“Oh that’s alright, I’m not one of those women who believes every word in the English language has to be refashioned to fit gender etiquette. I just like the sound of Ms. better. It sounds, dignified.”

“Do you worry about such a thing – not being seen as dignified?”

“I’m a black woman in a town that’s nearly ninety five percent white. Contrary to what you may think or have been told, we do not live in a post-racial society.”

“What’s on your mind Ms. Mason? Or did you just stop by to give me a political science lesson?”

She uncrossed her legs, and he could see that the crease in her pants leg was perfectly starched.

“You’ve been asking questions around town about Childress. You even upset my grandmama by the mere mention of his name.”

He could of asked her about her own family member’s connection to Patty Lowell but he’d save that discussion for some other time.

“Actually, she brought him up first,” he corrected, “Just to keep it all straight.”

“By all means let’s keep it all straight, Detective. Anyway, I think that you think he may have had something to do with that poor woman’s murder. You’ve no doubt heard about his proclivities for young blood, and I’m sure the townsfolk have provided you with many stories about Patty’s teenage years. It was a simple deduction to make. It’s what I do.”

“Right, you’re a psychologist. That’s what you do,” he said, with little conviction.

He ended up sounding a lot more hostile than he had intended. Perhaps it had something to do with his thoughts of Leilani lying in a hospital bed in Infinity City. Even more troublesome was the likelihood that the nefarious incident somehow related to the continuing murder saga back in Trinity’s Land End. Rita Mason was here to tell him something, and a voice deep inside told him it would be wise to listen.

“I’m sorry Ms. Mason, go ahead.”

She got up from her seat, and leaned against the chair.

“Maybe I should come back when you have more time?”

“No, please, sit down, you’re doing just fine. I’m just a bit preoccupied, that’s all. Sit down, please?”

Rita thought about it, and then pulled the chair halfway back.

“Whatever you do, it’s best you be careful when dealing with Childress. You see, he presents things to the outside world that may or may not be true. He’s like a chameleon in that way,” she continued, and sat back down.

“Okay, can you be more specific?”

“I thought I was,” she said. “Childress has a maniacal attention to detail. The man’s skilled at taking your weaknesses, and using them against you ”

“Now, would this be a bit of inside knowledge? Or is it just a general psychological overview of a certain type?”

She knew exactly what he was asking. It was only natural, considering the subject of conversation.

“Are you familiar with the way a vulture circles its prey? Let me put it to you this way – Childress has an unforgiving code of masculine behavior, and he likes to test the limits as often as he can. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I think I do. But Ms. Mason, I’m not looking for some kind of Alpha male battle. My only compulsion is to solve an open investigation. And right now the Childress name keeps popping up. It may be nothing, but one has to wonder about these things. And that’s what they pay me for, to wonder.”

She got up again.

“I just wanted to prepare you. Think of it as a professional courtesy. All you have to remember is you’re dealing with a man who essentially lies for a living. You may not be looking for a battle, but with Childress you’ll get one by default. And don’t expect much assistance from townsfolk here either. Many of these people have put their faith in Childress. They’re part of the misguided servants who see Childress as a patrician figure who’ll take care of them if they offer their unfettered loyalty,” she said, “Thank you for your hospitality. Oh, and before I forget, my grandmama would like to have you over for dinner sometime. She says you remind her of somebody she knew long ago,” “In a past life,” she added.

After Rita Mason had gone Deputy Carlisle came into Detective Litani’s office with a carton of cigarettes. It was one of the cartons from the several he’d brought into the station that day.

“Here, happy birthday”, he said.

He tossed the carton of cigarettes in Detective Litani’s direction.

“It’s not my birthday, and I don’t smoke,” said Detective Litani. “Where did you get these?”

He opened the carton and examined a box of Newport 100’s. The pack bore a Rhode Island tax stamp.

“I see, contraband,” said Detective Litani, “Well now, the state’s Department of Revenue really is going to love you.”

“Shit, seized fourteen cartons, hidden under a bush down by the Janus River. I ain’t fucking lying. All out-of-state, all illegal. Man, ‘been trying to get a fix on this operation for a while. Nobody knows how the shipments come in but the Janus River is one of the drop points. I got a call last week from my snitch, said to look for a new drop Founder’s Day, and sure enough . . .”

Detective Litani’s reaction was mixed. The thought of an illegal cigarette smuggling operation in one of Massachusetts beacons of small town living was both fascinating and perplexing.

“ Who’d be stupid enough to sell from their local store here?”

“All undercover, foreign boy. Down at the roadhouse at the end of town, Milo the barkeep has a whole fucking system of distribution to his customers. Shit, it’s like he thinks he’s some big time crack dealer or something, with his clucks on the lookout for buyers. Motherfucker’s never even been arrested, only his clucks, and they don’t say a word, just do the time to protect the operation. One time, Sheriff Daniel confiscated three cartons from Lizzie French’s nephew Luke’s trailer that came from South Carolina. South Carolina! Shit, they got the lowest tax on cigarettes in the nation. Our great state of Massachusetts stands to lose a shitload of dollars if South Carolina imports make it big her, goddammit.”

“I imagine the Sheriff’s Office is working with the state police on this.”

“Don’t even mention those freeloading shitbirds to me! Sheriff’s Office does all the leg work but those assholes get all the credit, and press. It ain’t fair. I talked to Sheriff Daniel this morning about it.”

“You did? How is he?”

“ Restless. Itching to get back to work. Says he’ll be in tomorrow. Anyway, I got the rest of the cartons locked away in the safe. They’re sending somebody from the division of taxation or something like that, to come over and pick’em up.”

“Add this carton to your contraband.”

Detective Litani shoved the opened box of Newport 100’s back into the carton, and returned the whole thing to Deputy Carlisle.

“Oh and Randy, you might want to consider the extra carton you took out for yourself.”

“Fuck you Litani, I called in fourteen cartons!”

“Well, how many did you really find?”

“Didn’t you hear me the first time? Fourteen cartons, alright?”

“Well, Randy, if you called in fourteen but leave these two out, they’re going to know you’re holding out. If it was your intention to be slick, you should’ have called in–”

“– Twelve! Aw shit, I screwed up.”

Randy Carlisle scratched his head and sighed, the way a less fortunate rascal would after realizing the inadequate implementation of his brilliant plan to walk away with a free carton of smokes, courtesy of the taxpayers.

“You can’t win’em all,” said Detective Litani.

“Yeah, yeah. Look here, foreign boy, what was that all about with Rita Mae Mason? She in some kind of trouble?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What did she want with you, then?”

“ Oh nothing much, she just came down to tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“That Childress is the bogeyman. A Faustian mischief.”

A dumbfounded look came over Deputy Carlisle. He hated it when people said complicated things to him. He wasn’t good with irony or sarcasm, or any type of figurative analogy. He understood criminal lingo just fine, but language steeped in fancy literary metaphors drove him crazy. To make matters worse, he often appeared even more baffled than usual when attempting to decipher said language.

“What? She thinks he has some kind of powers or something? Mama Loas swears she’s got some. Calls herself some kind of hoodoo priestess. They say she put a curse on a man one time for calling her blackie.”

It’s often said that, “Ignorance can be cured but stupid is for life.” The more time Detective Litani spent in the presence of Deputy Carlisle, the more he was sure his less than mentally gifted colleague resembled that remark.

“No, I simply mean she thinks he’s bad news.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put much stock in rumors. He’s done a lot for this town. I know that. He’s always been here when we needed him. Last year he bought all new police cars with GPS and everything! And he’s the largest independent contributor to the policeman’s retirement fund. In a way he’s kind of like the town’s Santa Clause,” said Deputy Carlisle.

“You still believe in Santa Claus, Deputy Carlisle? Anyway, I’m sure he’s a powerful man. And I’m sure he’s got his share of enemies,” said Detective Litani, “You ever hear anything about him, and the murdered Lowell woman?”

“All I know is she used to work some kind of summer job for him at his corporate headquarters in Infinity City, back when she was a young girl. He runs these summer business programs for kids. You know, to try and teach the little fuckers business stuff. I don’t know why he would pick her though, everybody knew that girl only had one thing on her mind back then, and it didn’t have nothing to do with business.”

Rather than get into a tortured conversation with his colleague about Patty Lowell, he, instead patted Deputy Carlisle softly on the shoulder – the way you would a dog who’s just spent the last hour chasing his tail – and headed out the door.

“Where you off to, foreign boy?” asked Deputy Carlisle.

He didn’t bother to answer.

It was public knowledge that a Childress one night stand could last for days, weeks, or even months. He was nakedly and unashamedly self-promoting and required any woman he took to bed to fully understand she was at his mercy, to be called upon to do his bidding whenever he so desired. He saw it as a kind of contract between them in which the female party in question was expected to give up any preconceived notions of rights and feelings, and to submit wholeheartedly to the idea of furthering his interests in perpetuity wherever they may lie.

Rebecca Jamison was Childress’s most prized possession. A one-night stand that had lasted the span of twenty years. Since the age of seventeen she had been completely and utterly his in every way, and he had taken great pleasure all those years in debasing her at every turn. It had given him great pleasure then, and even more so now, to know that this very sensitive caretaker of the town’s orphanage had spent her entire life trying to please him for reasons only he was privy to.

Childress sat across from his concubine, his cold steel eyes devouring her. He wanted her to fully appreciate the fact that she was on display. They sat there in silence, his stare forbidding her to say anything before he was ready for her to speak. There was no room for negotiation, only subjugation. The strong and independent Rebecca Jamison that everyone in town thought they knew had been replaced by an obedient masterful creation of the town’s chief architect of misdirection.

“That feeling you’re feeling this instance my dear . . . it has a name, it’s called arousal. You could no more fight it then you could a charging locomotive. It owns you. I own you. Always have. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Rebecca.

That was all she said. She knew that he did not want her to say more. As she looked longingly into those eyes – those harsh soulless, empty eyes devoid of true human kindness – she felt disgusted. Inside she seethed with venom at the charges he hurled at her.

“That little scene in the diner on Founder’s Day, it was unbecoming. You would be wise to control your female emotions, unless I’m the orchestrator of them, of course. There’s absolutely no room in this arrangement for you improvising.”

“Yes,” she said, “But that young girl with you–?

“Not your concern,” he interrupted, and grabbed her by the arm from across the table. “On to more important matters. Did you accomplish your mission, my dear?”

“Yes,” she said again.

“So our policeman friend is completely, shall we say, turned on?”

“Yes, completely.”

“I have many plans for you, and your new toy.”

The Maitre-D returned with a bottle of Dom Perignon.

“Sir, the manager sends his gratitude for your presence at this establishment. He would like to offer you this bottle, as gratis. Have a terrific day, sir.”

“Thank you young man, I would, but I’ve made other plans.”

Four glasses later and Rebecca found herself back at one of Childress’s secret lair hideaways in Infinity City. There she hung handcuffed, in a leather harness that protruded from the wall, in front of a massive large scale mirror. Naked, her body lathered with peanut oil, she cringed slightly as the slippery leather strap between her legs seared into her flesh with each movement .

She closed her eyes, and tried to picture Detective Litani’s gentle face. In her mind he was still inside of her, and she was on the brink of exploding all over his cock. She turned her head to the side and breathed heavily in measured gasps as she felt her lower half repeatedly penetrated. Then she opened her eyes to the familiar shock of Childress on the other end. There was no mistaking the sheer malice in his face.

“Some people think, for some odd reason, that being in love is the only available emotion,” he said, “I’ve always found it a rather pedestrian assumption.”

“Yes,” she said, fighting tears.

“I’m glad you agree my dear,” he said, and extended his free hand to tug at her glistening breasts. “I have many emotional needs as you know, and love doesn’t even make my top ten.”

When he relieved himself inside of her, she too felt relieved that it was over and she could go home now, still knowing full well she’d crave his inhuman touch again sooner or later. She’d sought treatment before from a psychiatrist in Boston about her condition. The whole thing had lasted a week. The psychiatrist had referred to the kind of sex-and- human-misery relationship she shared with Childress as a form of Stockholm syndrome. Whatever it was, her best friend Patty Lowell had threatened to expose it to the entire town, before her brutal murder.

. . .THIS CONCLUDES CHAPTER 6: SOMETHING WICKED IN THE WIND  OF WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END: TOWN OF MURDER & DECEIT. STAY TUNED FOR MORE CHAPTERS COMING YOUR WAY . . .

Welcome to Trinity’s Land End:Town of Murder & Deceit by
La-Tonia Denise Willis is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

_____________________________________________________

CHAPTER 5: FOUNDER’S DAY (P.2)

(READ Ch5, P.1 here)

Later that evening Detective Litani arrived at the Community Pavilion just as Mama Loas and her group were about to leave. He found the group tearing down the streamers, and packing away the remainder of the the pamphlets detailing the role Indians and blacks played in settling the territories along the Massachusetts Bay, until the next Founder’s Day. He picked up one leaflet that had blown to the ground. It was about the grave site of the first child born to the early colonists in Trinity’s Land End. The author of the leaflet claimed that the first birth was that of a mulatto child named Elsie. Elsie’s parents were purported to be a white blacksmith named Alden and a run-away slave named Mariah.

The centenarian caught him reading the flyer and welcomed him inside. He was met almost immediately with a plate of barbecue ribs and cold slaw. He wondered where he’d put it after his stint at Charlene’s Smack‘N Mack.

Mama Loas thought of herself as the critical voice of the town’s history. In addition to being the only living ex-slave in Trinity’s Land End, she was also the solitary official griot, or African storyteller, in all of New England who often held oral history lessons at her home. At present her family was the only black family in town. There had been others but the years had found them uprooting and moving closer to the city.

“Most people scared of me, how come you ain’t?”

“You don’t seem that scary to me. I’m from Baltimore and I’ve seen my share of really scary people Mama Loas and next to them you look like Snow White.”

“You don’t believe I got the power? The hoodoo? Like Tituba, the black witch of Salem?”

“No, now I’m not questioning your spiritualism or nothing like that but to be honest I don’t believe in that kind of stuff. I’m a man of logic.”

“You think logic alone gonna solve your case for you? I got news for you mister, there’s more in heaven and earth than we mortals dream of. I got that from Shakespeare,” she said, breaking into laughter, marveling at her own wit.

For a woman reported to be long over one hundred years old Mama Loas’ display of verve and rambunctiousness often took her opponents and admirers alike by surprise.

A curvaceous brown skinned woman wearing a Christian Lacroix dress and a pair of three inch heels interrupted and presented Mama Loas with a cup of water and two pills.

“This here’s my grand daughter Rita Mason. She helps me with the spoken word I give here at the Community Pavilion. Child likes to dress up in fine things nobody else in the family can afford but believe it or not, she’s also one of them head doctors.”

“The term is psychologist grandmama. I’m not a medical doctor. Please to meet you.”

He acknowledged the woman before turning his attention back to Mama Loas.

“Now what do you remember about Patty Lowell?”

Mama Loas swallowed her pills and took a long sip of water. She leaned back with one elbow on the picnic table. That’s when he saw the deep scar on her forearm. It went from the base of her arm all the way to her wrist.

“Pat Lowell’s mama was a Gypsy woman you know – part of them carnival shows that come to town. She used to sell potions and such and claim they had magic. I told her one day she won’t no conjure woman and them potions were fake. Still, the woman had to make a livin’. We all gotta make a livin’. Now I don’t grudge nobody that.”

“Mama Loas you seem to know a lot about people in this town, probably some things they wished you didn’t know as well. As I said before I’m not a superstitious person but I do believe in intuition and I’ve got this strange feeling that you know more than you’re telling me.”

“What you talkin’ ’bout? Pat Lowell didn’t have no special connection to me. Nobody knew who her father was or how he got her Gypsy mother to lay down with him. Word came down from the carnival the woman was pregnant. Baby came into the world premature, almost died too. Then one day came and something bad happened. I don’t know what but the rest of the Gypsies got that woman outta town quick. The best thing it was too ‘cause some white folks started harassin’ her pretty bad. Rebecca Jamison’s mama swept the child up and took her to the orphanage.”

“And that’s it? That’s the extent of your knowledge?”

“Ain’t that enough? Maybe if you find the white daddy who father’d her you’d be closer to the truth than I can get you.”

She held her arm out for him to get a better look at the scar.

“This thing here. I got it from a fire some years ago. Lloyd McNally’s fireman’s son Skip rescued me. The McNallys used to run the fire house before Lloyd got tangled up with Childress and made all that money. Sometimes I wonder.”

“About what?”

“Whether people are born bad or they just pick it up from being around other bad eggs. ”

“Nature vs. nurture,” he concluded, “It keeps the analysts guessing, but speaking of Childress, what’s your say on the subject?”

“I don’t care to speak on it, that’s what.”

“But you’re the one who brought him up, and his association with Lloyd McNally. Don’t go soft on me now Mama Loas, it wouldn’t be right.”

“I’m just a poor old woman tryin’ to get by on her last days. People in this town don’t care what I think no way but I’m gonna keep on thinking it.”

It wasn’t exactly an answer to his question, in fact, it could be said that it was more of a general foreshadowing of a question that had yet to be asked.

A dark skinned man with a slim build in either his late twenties or early thirties interrupted, and brought Mama Loas some pills and a glass of water.

“This here’s my grand baby. He’s down from Boston. Smart as a whip, got himself into a fine law school, tell him baby.”

“Granny’s right. However, the only thing she forgot is all the loan payments that are going to haunt me until my death after I get out of that fine law school.”

Detective Litani extended his hand, “I’m Detective Ray Litani and you are?”

“Please to meet you. I’m Byron Tyson.”

“Hello Mr. Tyson, I was just talking to Mama Loas about Patty Lowell. She was murdered a couple of days ago. Did you know her?”

The young man hesitated, looked over at Mama Loas, and then back at Detective Litani in a manner that seemed to indicate the nature of the question he was being asked carried with it an uncomfortable complexity.

“I used to spend summers here when I was a teenager. Pat was a couple of years older than me,” he said.

When the two men shook hands it was pure serendipity. He felt it, and the way Mama Loas’s smile slowly disappeared the longer he held on to her grandson’s hand meant that on some level she knew it too. Byron Tyson had referred to Patty Lowell as “Pat”, a more mature reference that perhaps belied a more mature connection between the two at one time.

If Tina Sycamore was to be believed concerning a missing diary and its contents, he figured he’d just found the mysterious B.T. of the item’s claim to fame.

Detective Litani found Rebecca Jamison waiting on his doorstep when he returned home that night. He was more than glad to see her. Their rather impromptu meeting at Charlene’s Smack n’ Mack had remained with him throughout the day.

Katarina had once told him that marriage had nothing to do with whether two people were supposed to be together or not. She believed that humans craved intimate relations devoid of formal institutions. He wondered if Rebecca Jamison had ever entertained the thought of marriage. In all her years as a provider of care to parentless children could she quite possibly long for the day to come around when someone was there to take care of her as well?

Rebecca smiled and threw her arms around him. Against the small of his back he could feel the mysterious box she held poking at him. They retreated to the kitchen. He offered to make her a sandwich but she assured him she wasn’t hungry or thirsty.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but since the diner, I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.”

“What did I do to deserve that?

“Well, for starters, you’re the one person who actually gives a damn about what happened to Patty and I want to do everything in my power to help you catch her killer. That’s why I brought this gift to you.”

It was a medium-sized red, custom-made ornamental box with fancy

lace embroidery. The beautiful cloth exterior had suffered somewhat from wear and tear through the years, but it still bore a remarkable testament to its original worth. A tear crept down the side of her face and she turned away in embarrassment. He guided her face back in his direction and kissed her gently on the lips from across the kitchen table. She sniffled and cleared her throat.

“I wanted to give it to her the day she reappeared in town but she wouldn’t give me the time of day. I was devastated. Why didn’t she want to confide in me, like when we were growing up? That’s what I kept asking myself?

She paused, waiting for him to jump in but he didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t hate her for it though. I could never hate her. We shared so much together. Out of all the other kids my mother raised here at the orphanage, she was like the sister I never never had.”

“I think Patty may have had demons even you wouldn’t have understood.”

It was his most astute offering.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right. One thing I have to ask though, who’s paying for this private autopsy you’ve arranged? I mean, as a member of Patty’s extended family I am in favor of it but you never asked me anything about fees. These things don’t pay for themselves. I’ve saved up some money just for the expense.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, it’s all covered.”

“But how, where’s the money coming from?”

“It’s coming from the County, a judgment was issued and everything. Special circumstances.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. They sent me down here to work on special cases. So, I figure the bosses can foot the bill for my special case’s special independent autopsy,” he joked.

“’Big city policeman lands job in small town. Big city policeman stumbles on to murder mystery.’” “Yep,” she said, “I can see the headlines now.”

She gave him the box.

“Inside you’ll find some of Patty’s trinkets and stuff. It might help you to get to know her better. I used to see her putting things inside. I’ve never even opened it believe it or not. It was all that was left behind when she ran away, and I kept it all those years.”

He moved the ornamental box aside, and got up from the table. He pulled Rebecca up into his arms. She felt good, and he had every intention to keep her there.

“Are you going to finally tell me what Childress said to you at the diner?”

“Ray, I realize I shouldn’t have gotten so angry with him and exploded like that but sometimes–” she stopped, “Anyway, look, I don’t want to discuss that now, okay?”

He couldn’t stop now.

“Listen Rebecca, was Patty ever involved in an intimate relationship with Childress?”

She looked at him with fire in her eyes, “ Teenage girls don’t have intimate relationships with men more than twice their age. They have mistakes with these men. Mistakes in which they are taken advantage of.”

She moved away from him but he pulled her back. And then he grabbed her hand, and kissed it gently. He couldn’t give a name to what was happening between them. The only thing he knew is that he wanted it to happen, and he wished like hell that she did too.

“You looked lovely in that white dress today. Like a goddess.”

“Really?” she asked. “Which Goddess?”

“Take your pick,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. He could tell that she was a little apprehensive about the possibility of events that might follow.

“I heard about poor Victor Salley. Drowned,” she said emphatically and shook her head. “We’re not used to this kind of back to back mayhem in this town.”

“It hasn’t been officially ruled as a drowning. An autopsy is scheduled.”

“Wait? An autopsy? Wasn’t he Jewish?”

“It’s a long story but I”m in the process of arrangements between the medical examiner’s office and Victor’s sister, Mrs. Peabody. A rabbi’s involved, and that’s really all I can say about it. I’m more concerned about his missing wife, Gretchen. A woman stays with a husband who is a drunk her whole life and all of a sudden leaves now, after her problem has been taken care of, so to speak.”

“You find it suspicious? You think maybe she’s the one who took care of the problem?”

“I don’t know,really. Nobody knows anything. It’s been said that small towns like these carry huge burdens.”

He couldn’t tell her about Victor Salley’s last phone call to him and the startling message about “the Hawaiian” that had eventually led him to Infinity City. He definitely couldn’t tell her about the peculiar and ambiguous “killer for hire” establishment masquerading as a Denny’s Restaurant. He absolutely could not tell anyone, not even the Sheriff about these bizarre connections, until he’d figured out what it all meant in relation to Patty Lowell’s murder.

“Small towns? You mean in the way of secrets and lies?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what I do mean. Trinity’s Land End spent years and years cultivating its image as a typical American small town with a wholesome appeal. Yet, I have this gut feeling there’s a layer of rot just inching its way towards the surface, and every time someone tries to cover it up, the stench, it just magnifies.”

It was a symbolic speech and partially pompous but he had never been one to shy away from controversy. Yet, In this case, his intended audience seemed a million miles away.

“So, what do you think?”

“Ray, it might surprise you to know but I love this town. The Lizzie Frenches of the world aside, I still love this town. My folks loved it enough to make their home here. That stench you talk about. It scares me. It scares me for so many reasons I can’t even begin to explain,” she said.

This time she was able to break away from his grip. With her back to him, she held her head down. She had no intention of crying, she just needed a moment to herself.

Detective Litani tried not to view the moment as an impasse. He liked Rebecca Jamison, a lot. From the moment he’d met her he knew that he’d felt a spark. Still, deep down he found himself questioning his motives. Did his interest in her have to do with the fact that he was by himself amidst uncomfortable surroundings? Would it be morally wrong for him to pursue a woman who adored the town he secretly despised?

“Did your parents like it here?”

She was putting him on the spot, and she knew it.

“My mother, until the day she died, could never get this place out of her system. That’s what brought me back here in the first place. She’s buried in the cemetery up on Oak Ridge road.”

Rebecca then turned around to face him squarely, jaw to jaw.

“It’s what brought you here but not what’s keeping you.”

“Are you asking me, or telling me”, he said

He didn’t want to say anything else. He simply wanted to feel something. He placed his hands around Rebecca’s waist, and laid a passionate kiss on her that had all the signs of wanting more.

She seemed startled.

“What’s wrong? Am I moving too fast?”

“It’s just that, well, it’s been a long time, Ray. Two years to be exact, since I’ve been, you know, intimate with a man.”

“Oh, I see. Well, if it makes you feel any better, nothing’s changed. It’s still done the same way you remember it, even after two long years.”

Just then something happened. He didn’t know how it happened so quickly but before he’d realized it, apparently the formal request had already been issued.

“What did you say?” she asked.

He didn’t actually remember saying anything.

“I’m sorry, what?”
“Well, Mr. Detective Raymond Litani, it sounded like you asked me to stay the night.”

A big golf ball like that hanging out there could either break or make a man. He was hoping like crazy for the latter. He swallowed, and gazed into her eyes. What if she told him to go to hell?

“Hell yes, I was thinking it but I don’t quite remember saying it,” he replied, “ I feel like an idiot but I can’t deny that I want it very much. For you to stay that is.”

Without saying a word she kissed, but just when he was about to unbutton her blouse she pulled away, again.

“What’s the matter, now?”

”I can’t. I have to get back to the kids. I left Mandy in charge and she has some strange ideas about being an authority figure.”

“No, what’s really the matter?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed her again, and kissed her hard. The next thing she knew she was being lifted in his arms, and escorted to the bedroom.

He put her down gently on the bed and got on top of her. Her body was warm and soft, and she smelled good. It was a triple threat.

“They’re trying to take my land and the orphanage.”

“They?”

“The zealots who run this town. Those sanctimonious clowns want to get rid of the kids and me. They’re trying to force the mortgage company to foreclose on the property. Mr. McNally was a business partner of Childress. We named the orphanage after him when he sold the land to my mother but Childress has always wanted that land back in his possession. They’re spreading vicious lies at the town meetings about the orphanage being a haven for child criminals.”

He opened her blouse and ran his tongue along her cleavage. She cooed underneath him.

“That tickles,” she said. “Do you think I should try and get a hold of Lloyd McNally? I need somebody in my corner. Maybe he could plead with Childress to stop the smear campaign?”

“I bet Lizzie French is involved,” he said, and bit her gently on the neck.

“Ooh Ray, that feels so good. So good . . .”

He unzipped her blue jeans and guided them, and her panties off her body. When he bent down to kiss her between her legs she shivered.

“Yes, right there,” she whispered.

He enjoyed this part. It was his specialty. He had known some men, some liars who pretended it was something they had no use for or that somehow it wasted time as a precursor to the penultimate act. He knew this to be bullshit and usually just an excuse for a sloppy lover to get his way. Besides, how could you ask to receive if you refused to give?

“That’s really good,” she said, and pushed his face in deeper.

“You like?” he flirted, briefly coming up for air.

She responded by wrapping her legs firmly around his head and writhing with pleasure. His tongue continued to lash out exploring all of her woman-ness.

“You do have, er . . ., some protection, right?” she asked rather shyly.

“Of course,” he said, “You’re in good hands.”

Later on he took her hand and placed it on the growing bulge in his pants. No doubt about it, his cock was ready.

“Ray, if I lose the orphanage I don’t know what I’ll do. It would be an insult to my mother’s memory.”

“Not going to happen, just relax.”

“But if I do–”

Later, when they were completely naked, he pushed her legs as far back against the bed board as they would go, and bent down to plant her face with kisses.

“I could look into it, find out the details.”

“You’d do that for me?”

He began to lavish her nipples with praise. They soon came to immediate attention under the heat of his hungry mouth. He sucked long and hard on each one while she tried to maintain the spread-eagled, bent upwards position that tested her flexibility to the maximum. Oh what interesting lives gymnasts must have in the sexual department, she thought. At least they’re better prepared, with excellent bodies conditioned for distorting in ways civilians can only dream of.

He saw that she was having some trouble and relaxed the pressure on her legs just enough to make her breath a sigh of relief.

“Too much?” he asked.

“For Nadia Comăneci, no. For me, however . . .”

He smiled. He admired wit in a woman. He reached down below to caress her clitoris. This little joy button, often imbued with a mystique beyond male or female comprehension, began to swell and retract under his constant stimulation.

Rebecca closed her eyes and imagined they were on a beach, like the one in From Here to Eternity, nestled in each other’s arms, blissfully atop one another. She, his Deborah Kerr and he, her Burt Lancaster. Of course the scene unfolding now was the more explicit version of the novel and not the censored film, with all insinuations and frankness in tact.

When he entered her she opened her eyes to see the look on his face. It was his expression that interested her. For a moment he dropped his head to her chest, and she cuddled him as he pushed ferociously into her.

His breathing came in short gasps of delight and escalated as he penetrated her deeper, stretching her tight caverns further, opening her up with each measured down stroke.

Two years without so much as a kiss, and now Rebecca Jamison was receiving, quite possibly the screwing that broke the camel’s back. What would he think of her when she told him about her and Childress? Would he call her the same awful name Patty had when she’d found out? She didn’t want to think about that now. For the first time in a long time she felt worthy of receiving another man’s touch.

He continued to fondle her clitoris while his rhythmic thrusts grew faster. She felt herself coming into orgasm, and reached below to join the patrol of his more than competent fingers.

When she came it was like the weight of the world being lifted from her shoulders, allowing her to feel pure satisfaction, if only for a brief moment in time.

His hot lips lay gently on her hers before parting halfway as if to consume the energy she’d just released from within. She thrust her tongue down his throat but he captured it in his teeth and held it there, meticulously slowing down her motions. When he was ready his tongue playfully slurped away at the sides of her mouth, and then pushed softly inside. This one single action drove her wild, and made her wetter than she’d even been before they’d made love. But it wasn’t over yet, thankfully, he’d held off reaching his plateau and had concentrated on bringing her on.

Just then he withdrew himself from her and knelt backwards. She watched with undivided attention as he stroked himself. She waited with anticipation of the next venture.

He placed her right leg down and sandwiched himself in the middle. He then anchored her left leg against his chest, grabbed her ankle, and arched himself into position. This time when he entered her she felt his penis against her cervix, and let out a scream.

“Ray, it was me and Childress”, she confessed, “I was seventeen when it happened,” she murmured, and flung her head to the side.

Outside Tina Sycamore watched with a burgeoning animosity as the lights went out in the Litani bedroom, and then quickly rode off on her ten-speed.

As the town of Trinity’s Land End settled in to relieve itself of the day’s exhaustion, it did so with a sense of pride and accomplishment of having extended the life of one of its most cherished rituals: Founder’s Day. With the last of the fireworks display having just wrapped over at the Junction, most of the crowds had, by now, slowly dissipated. There were those who had plans for private after hour celebrations, and then there were those who simply wanted to power down and fade away nestled comfortably in their beds. In any event, the Town’s Square, among other venues, soon returned to its original pre-festivities tabula rasa slate.

Barring any major celebrations like the one just passed, most nights in Trinity’s Land End were met with a loud yawn and an even fiercer sigh. In reality, the town had failed to live up to its would-be notion of a boomtown that had been fostered by some long ago. Still, no one could have foretold the events that were about to come; events that had been originally developed in the basement of a bank teller’s home, just five days ago in New York City.

It happened around 3:00 am, and as one of the old timer’s from the swap meet was fond of saying, “Nothing good ever happens at 3:00 a.m.” A helicopter landed in the fields near old man Naylor’s grounds – surprisingly near the yellow-taped off area where Patty Lowell’s body had been discovered at the beginning of the week. Immediately afterwards, four armed men dressed in all-black ninja styled attire, with backpacks, catapulted out and nodded an “affirmative action” to the pilot left behind.

Soon after, a military style Humvee approached like clockwork, barreling through the cornfields en route to its landed party . One of the men, a much bulkier character steered two of his team members towards the approaching vehicle, while the other remained closest to the helicopter.

The commando team was then ushered stealth-like, through the barren town streets until they reached the medical examiner’s building. Using a set of pick tools the group successfully broke through the fifteen year old lock with ease. Once inside, with little chaos among the squad, two of the men made their way to the morgue on the bottom floor, and went about quickly extracting the body of Patty Lowell and Victor Salley, while the other two remained in the hallway on lookout.

Not a word was spoken by either of the morgue “rescue team”, as the bodies were lifted from the cooler trays of the morgue’s, and hauled into the lobby where they were fitted for two burlap sacks. Retreating back into the morgue, they quickly grabbed a couple of containers in the refrigerators that were filled with specimen samples. Amongst them, was Patty Lowell’s severed finger in an iodine solution, and a test tube of liquid blue-green algae excrement deposits.

Overall, it seemed that everything was on schedule, and that the mission would be accomplished with little to no effort. That was until one of Dr. Westminster’s attendants, Roddy Sandpipe, having just ejaculated all over Luanne Reeve’s breasts, following their shared secret fuck for the umpteenth time in the janitor’s closet, descended the stairs and was given the shock of his twenty-three year old life.

When the two armed men on lookout noticed the lanky, freckle-faced, red-haired former track star staring back at them immobilized, they knew they’d won half the battle already.

“Shit, oh shit,” said Roddy. He could feel his nerves weakening “Look, I don’t know what’s happening here, but – look, I promise not to get in your way,” alright?”

He held up his hands in surrender; his mind’s thoughts reflecting on Luanne back in the janitor’s closet, post-fellatio. He hoped liked hell she wouldn’t find his disappearance in search of beer too long a wait, and venture out to find him. Being married to a man who constantly used her as a punching bag was bad enough, but walking into the middle of an armed robbery was surely the last thing on earth anyone ever imagined experiencing.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” said Roddy softly. Don’t let them find Luanne, said the voice in his head.

The other two armed men exited the morgue stuffing the refrigerated samples in a small cooler container retrieved from one of the backpacks. They took one look at Roddy under armed detention by their colleagues, and began to laugh uproariously under their ninja masks. Thus, abandoning their previous code of silence.

Make them be quiet, reiterated the voice in Roddy Sandpipes’s head. Don’t let them discover Luanne!

No doubt bout it, Roddy Sandpipe was scared to death of the mere thought that at any moment, he could be wallowing in his own blood, and that something worse could be waiting for Luanne if either of these men were to get their hands on her.

As the laughter subsided, one of the men approached him. Before he knew it, the hard barrel of the assault weapon had caught him across the face and side of the head. The mere magnitude of the force sent Roddy’s very nubile and athletic body hurling to the floor. One thing for sure, he could be no help now as a buffer between his mistress upstairs, and the assailants should they decided to pursue a full sweep of the place.

Sure enough, one of them motioned for the other to go upstairs and check things out. As Roddy slid in and out of consciousness from the attack, he could feel the motion of the remaining three men parading around him in steel toe combat boots. Ninjas with combat boots, he thought. He wanted so much to laugh but the shards of pain ripping through his head and neck, and the left side of his body where the weapon had lain into him, were incongruent with anything light-hearted.

Upstairs Luanne Reeves went about the task of using some of the industrial cleaning agents used by the janitor to mask the smell of death in the morgue, to cleanse the semen stains from her bare chest. She harbored no concern about the idea of these skin irritants coming into contact with her body. Quite frankly, she needed something strong to wash away any trace of her tryst with Roddy by the time she got home. Her husband had been prone to smelling her in the past, and the last thing she needed was to get on his bad side. It was quite the task to de-spunk herself, especially since Roddy Sandpipe’s deposits had been growing thicker and in more abundance, with each episode. She hadn’t let him fuck her tonight because she hadn’t the time to spare.

She’d left that so-called man of hers passed out in a drunken stupor, face down on the couch. He’d been throwing whiskey shots back all day at the Founder’s Day celebration, and by the time he had arrived home, he could barely stand up straight or tie his boot laces. She’d crushed about seven or ten sleeping pills into a thin powder,cut it with Nyquil capsules, and had mixed the resulting paste in the bottle of Jack Daniels he always kept under the kitchen sink, for special occasions. It had occurred to her many times that one day she might accidentally kill the bastard this way, instead of on purpose like she should. But, he always woke up from each random dosing meaner than ever.

The janitor’s closet might have been the least likely spot to convene for a romantic get-away, but it was just right for a late night booty call.

The six foot tall man armed with an AK-47 assault rifle peered through the locked room door’s half-window into Dr. Westminster’s office. Luanne had just finished putting her blouse on and had pushed the janitor’s door open to enter the hallway. That’s when she saw him. He’d moved on to the toxicology lab to canvas the area further. Rattling the doorknobs at each post, he pressed his face against the window pane, trying to get the best look into the room from the outside. Not completely satisfied, he took out a small black square case that resembled the “works” a heroin addict might use. By this time Luanne had recoiled in dread at the sighting of the mysterious ninja-clad criminal, and pulled the janitor’s door shut as silently as she could. However, on second thought, she figured it might be helpful to observe him as best as she could for identification purposes later. So, with great fear but a need to know, she cracked the janitor’s door slightly ajar to witness the armed man use some kind of mechanical pick to open up the toxicology lab.

“Oh my God, Roddy,” she whispered under her breath. Was he dead? Had he been killed by this man? Or could there be more? Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear any traces of movement downstairs.

Her heart skipped several beats. She pulled the door in tight this time and turned the door latch to secure the lock. The janitor’s closet was the only room in the building that didn’t have a see-through half-shell window pane.

The armed man continued to move steadily down the hallway until he’d reached the janitor’s closet door. Inside, Luanne had taken up a crouching position in the back corner of the room.

The rattle of the doorknob nearly sent her leaping forward into hysteria but she was able to remain calm.

Her mind began to wander. “This kind of thing is not supposed to happen in this kind of town. Trinity’s Land End isn’t some crime-ridden big city where masked gunmen broke into medical labs dressed in ninja costumes, leaving a trail of bodies and tears behind. This isn’t Boston, for Christ sakes, or New York City, or anyone of those kinds of places.”

To say that her life flashed before her is both a cliché and a reality, that captured the terrifying moment perfectly. She hoped Roddy wasn’t the next corpse to fill the morgue he tended. What would people say?

All she knew was it was not her time to die. She firmly believed this. She’d taken some of the worst beatings in her life at the hands of her brutish caveman of a husband and had managed to survive them all. She refused to give either of the bastards – crazy spouse or nutjob with an assault weapon – the satisfaction of parading over her cold, dead body in glee.

On that note, she grabbed a container of liquid in a spray bottle on the bottom shelf nearby and turned out the lights. The smell was immediately identifiable as ammonia. As weapons go, she would have to wager her bottle of this cleaning agent against the tall man on the other side of the door carrying a really big gun, should it come to that.

She sprung up in fighting position, waiting for the inevitable moment in which the armed ninja picked the lock to the janitor’s closet, and let himself inside. Suddenly, she heard a whistle from down the hall, just as her would-be attacker slipped the tools of his trade into the door lock and began the prying process.

And then the motion of the lock picking stopped, and the closet door opened slightly. She could see the black gloves on the handle. The whistle came again, this time much louder. And this time its beckoning got the attention of the tall man, and he released the door just as Luanne was about to pounce forward with ammonia spray bottle a-blazing.

After waiting a good twenty minutes or so, she sprinted from the janitor’s closet down the stairs to find her lover spread haplessly across the floor.

“Damn!”, she screamed. And when that wasn’t enough, let out a choral secession of extra expletives to release the anger and devastation growing inside her.

As she bent down to cradle Roddy Sandpipe’s head in her arms, a slight murmur pursed his lips, and his arms flailed upwards towards her.

“Roddy, baby, you alright?” she asked, not wanting to concentrate on the pool of blood emanating from a wound at the back of his head.

“F-F-F-,” he sputtered.

“I’ll go get help, honey, Just hold on. Hold on baby.”

“Phone,” he said clearly. “ . . . back pocket.”

On his orders she pulled out the little silver flip phone in his back pants pocket.

I’ll tell them all what happened. “Listen,” I’ll say, “it was at least two of them, and the one I saw was dressed in a ninja suit like some cartoon character.” That’s what I’ll say, me, Luanne Reeves, said the alternate voice of her subconscious self.

“Send somebody, quick! A man’s been hurt! At the ME building, 666 Congressional Ave in Trinity’s Land End. Please, HURRY!”

She held Roddy’s hand in hers as she waited for the 911 operator to provide further instructions.

“What, huh?” she asked, “My name?”

Tell them! The voice in her under-mind kept nudging away at her. Tell them, you coward! Forget that meatball husband of yours, and tell them what you know for the sake of the man you love.

“My name?” she repeated the question, stalling for time, “Uhm, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not say”, she faltered, “Just come quick before he dies!”

She hung up the phone and kissed Roddy gently on the lips. For the first time in her life, Luanne Reeves felt truly ashamed.

. . .THIS CONCLUDES CHAPTER 5, P. 2  OF WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END: TOWN OF MURDER & DECEIT. STAY TUNED FOR MORE CHAPTERS COMING YOUR WAY . . .

Welcome to Trinity’s Land End:Town of Murder & Deceit by
La-Tonia Denise Willis is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

_____________________________________________________

CHAPTER 5: FOUNDER’S DAY: P. 1

(READ Ch5, P. 2 here)

Jewish tradition maintains that the body of the deceased be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. In most cases a typical autopsy is viewed as an unnecessary desecration of the body, and abhorrent to Jewish Law, mainly due to the nature of the incisions that alter the body drastically. As a compromise Jewish law sometimes permits, under special circumstances, what is often referred to as a “light autopsy”, a partial and less invasive medical procedure to determine cause of death.

It would be fair to say that there are some pathologists who consider nothing less than a full-scale postmortem autopsy as a viable means for ensuring the ruling out of other problematic possibilities,[as cause for death] that a limited scope autopsy was susceptible to. Detective Litani hadn’t discussed this matter thoroughly with Dr. Westminster for the simple fact that he wanted to wait until he made contact with someone in Victor’s family.

Now with the sudden disappearance of Victor’s wife, that someone soon became Victor’s sister. Mrs. Peabody, on hearing the recording of Victor’s desperate call to Detective Litani, coupled with the inability of anyone in the medical examiner’s office to safely say without a doubt that Victor’s death wasn’t foul play, was led to agree with the authorities that something should be done. Consequently, after speaking with her rabbi, permission to undertake the procedure was granted provided a number of pre-requisites were met: the procedure must be undertaken as soon as possible and be limited in scope, the pathologist must show sensitivity to Jewish law and any request that a rabbi be present during the autopsy must be permitted, and finally, all parts of the body must be retained for burial.

Detective Litani assured Mrs. Peabody that he would schedule an upcoming meeting to inform Dr. Westminster of these measures surrounding her brother’s postmortem, and to hopefully broker an agreeable deal in which the terms stipulated could be met. Although, as he had observed while working in Baltimore, the medical examiner’s office was under no legal obligation to adhere to any kind of restraint placed on it by families with religious objections.

“Do you really think my brother’s death is linked to the Patty Lowell investigation?” she’d asked him point blank, after he’d already gotten what he wanted from her.

That he’d insinuated as much in letting her hear the playback of Victor’s last call on earth in order to prompt her support of the autopsy, was, in fact, not particularly above board.

“Honestly ma’am,” he took her hand and covered it with his other, “I don’t know yet.”

She nodded and patted him lightly on the shoulder.

“Good answer, Detective. If you’d said otherwise, I would’ve figured you were lying and called the whole thing off. It’s one thing to come to my own conclusion but quite another to be conned into it. Don’t you agree?”

“Now there goes a lady who understands the nature of police work,” he said, after she’d left the Sheriff’s Department.

On the day of the big heritage festival called Founder’s Day, the New Englanders embellished the town with a beguiling mythos that wavered on being not quite true and arguably suspect to being a complete ahistorical interpretation. Flags were draped over every square foot of space and horns and tassels handed out to signal the celebration of the birth of the original colony Trinity’s Land End colony. With all the time and care, and hyperbole that such an event entails, the syrupy sweetness surrounding it made for quite a melodrama, that would have rivaled any Douglas Sirk production.

Within the walls of the Centennial Hall Lizzie French, under the auspices of the Historical Society gathered citizens of the town together for a special town meeting. The pertinent issue this time was to take a vote on a measure that was put forth in honor of founding father Elliot Trinity.

The article Lizzie read proposed a new fundraising auction to gather proceeds in order to have a big mural etched in stone of Elliot Trinity plastered on a concrete slab next to the WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END sign on the entrance to the town. If passed, the auction would occur two weeks from today.

Her proposal drew a mixture of applause and ridicule as citizens squared off about the importance or lack of, in funneling funds into such a highfalutin venture as a slab of concrete with somebody’s name on it.

“We already got a welcome sign with his name on it. We need some kind of giant picture of him too?” asked Bottle Cap Maynard. He had always been of the opinion that Lizzie French was a “shitstarter” and the whole idea seemed stupid to him in the first place.

“He’s our Founder Mr. Maynard, that’s why. It’s a memorial sculpture. I see that Ways to increase your vocabulary book you checked out from the library hasn’t been of much use to you,” she snarled. She had always been of the opinion that Bottlecap Maynard was a sad and pathetic sack of crap who smelled funny.

“We need to continue to show our founding father the proper respect like any good Christians. Our country, indeed our town is built on the fundamental properties of Christianity. It is our way of the land to honor those who came before us and paved the way to moral rectitude among our citizenry and no amount of gratitude is too much!”

No sooner than she’d gotten the words from her mouth, young Howard Peachtree sprung up from his chair as quick as lightening. He was a freshman at Infinity City University majoring in history and psychology and it just so happened that he’d chosen Trinity’s Land End’s Founder’s Day celebration as a topic for his next term paper. He swallowed and began tentatively.

“I don’t mean to offend anybody but the myth of a Christian United States was propagated by some of the early settlers, not the framers of the Constitution. The Constitution, contrary to popular belief, is not an inherently religious document. It doesn’t actually refer to any powerful authority from God in order to be a good ruler or representative of government. Actually.”

“Tell her about the Treaty of Tripoli!” yelled someone in the crowd. “Tell her to stop misquoting John Adams!”

He cleared his throat again and continued with the blasphemy he knew he was surely to be accused of.

“I was saying. Actually, not many people understand, I mean, realize that there’s no actual or official religious test or principles for national office.”

When he was nervous like today he tended to overuse terms; actually was one of his favorites.

It wasn’t before he’d finished his nervous chatter that the veins in Lizzie’s forehead took on a distinction all of their own as she contemplated the relevance of young Howard Peachtree’s speech and how she would like nothing better than to be the one to wash his mouth out with soap.

One of her favorite topics had long been the case of the infamous Anne Hutchinson’s interpretation of religious covenants and how it inexorably, led to her excommunication.

“Mr. Peachtree. Young Mr. Howard Peachtree whose parents were known hippies and sexual deviants in the sixties, is that the supreme education Infinity City University is coloring your mind with?”

“Actually ma’am, there are several books that present the case against Religious Correctness——“

“–Several atheist books no doubt——“

“——by Isaac Krammick and R. Lawrence Moore——“

“–that are nothing but trash, the whole lot.”

Young Howard Peachtree became aware of escalating grumbling within the audience. Nothing was said to him directly but several group discussions had emerged on the issue. Some were whispers and some were of a more forceful tempo but still hushed pitch, the way people sometimes shout in a somewhat low-key manner.

“Ma’am. I’m just saying that in my opinion Founder’s day seems to have this religious pretense around it. I mean, why can’t we just get together and drink a few beers and have a good time without all this other stuff?”

Lizzie French, a known teetotaler, laughed harder than anyone had every seen her laugh in the past. No one in their right mind would say it was a nice laugh, if there is such a thing. This laugh had venom all over it.

“Founder’s day is not about having a good time Howard Peachtree. How silly of you child,” Lizzie rebuked.

The irony was not lost on the youngster.

“Trinity’s Land End is not a commune, dear boy. Elliot Trinity founded this place as a community where God’s law could be rightfully protected. I don’t need any so-called made up history sanctioned by the ACLU, no doubt, to tell me differently.”

Howard Peachtree didn’t say another word. One of his teachers at the university had said there was a psychological phrase for what was happening now. She’d called it Cognitive Dissonance. He didn’t fully comprehend what it meant but he promised himself he’d look up the definition immediately after returning to the dorms. He was sure the phrase would come in handy when he started writing his term paper for next quarter. All things considered, he calmly retreated to his seat, took out a notepad from his jacket pocket and scribbled FOUNDER’S DAY: THE BIRTH OF A BLIND NATION. It was a perfect title for his upcoming writing assignment

“Lizzie’s right,” said Buddy Erwin’s aunt Julia. She had been in one of the impromptu group discussions arguing in defense of religion and its relevance to the concrete slab mural.

Buddy was asleep in her arms. He always slept during all the boring stuff and would wake up just in time for the parade and the eats. However, since discovery of Patty Lowell’s mutilated body, he hadn’t been able to sleep at night.

“What the boy means is that even though some of the men who ratified the Constitution were men of faith,it doesn’t make the document a religious litmus test to govern a nation,” said a man in the third row, with a peace sign drawn on the back of his hand. His name was Julian Miller and he worked at the local hospital as a male nurse. Suffice it to say he’d suffered many snide remarks about his vocation from the likes of one Lizzie French.

An old codger with a scraggly beard raised his hand and let out a big belch that quickly gained Lizzie’s attention. He apologized but she was not in the mood to forgive him.

“Yes, Mr. O’Leary what is it? And could you please show some manners from now on?”

The old timer Buford O’Leary was given to severely smacking his lips now that he was without dentures, due to the fact that they were stolen from his mouth one day while he slept in the park. He had his suspicions that led invariably to one of the Bobby twins who despite being in their mid twenties remained prone to exhibiting bouts of random childishness from their past.

“There gonna be a free Seniors Appreciation Day at the high school football game next week?” asked the old man, “They cut my social security benefits and every little bit helps. Lord knows I can’t afford them prices they charge at the game nowadays. ”

“That’s not the topic of discussion now is it? People, please, we have to get a vote on this and move on,” charged Lizzie, “As the town committee chair I stress urgency.”

Neil Arnold stood up front and center. He was the high school Principal whom Lizzie had butted heads with many times before. He was a Buddhist and she considered him a useless multi-culturalist who wanted to redo the entire curriculum by stamping out all that was traditional and proper.

“Mr. Arnold, I wonder what funny little thoughts are running through your mind? Are you still on that diversity in education bandwagon? Want to tell kids Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America? Or perhaps you want to start a transgendered activity club after school?”

Lizzie was pleased with herself. The remark drew a bustle of snickers from the crowd.

“No. Ms. French.”

“It’s Miss. Please don’t lump me in with the feminazis.”

“No chance of that ma’am, I don’t know what feminazis are. Anyway, Miss French, as you know the auction that the high school has is the sole fund raising program for the summer vacation fund every year. Are you aware that our auction also starts in two weeks and we could find ourselves in conflict if your project goes through.”

“Do enlighten me Mr. Arnold, please?”

“Well, I’m worried that your fund raising for this mural coincides with something we have going on at the high school. I feel it will be a general detraction from the high school’s field trip. May I remind you that we’re saving up for our trip to Canada.”

“Canada? What the devil for? Why would anybody go to Canada?”

She continued to sneer long after the words had left her mouth.

“We’re trying to establish a high school internship and exchange program in Toronto,” he said.

“Really?” she balked, “Those Canadians. They’re a little too socialist for my blood. What could our kids possibly learn from Canadians? What have they ever done for us anyway?”

Ideally Neil Arnold wasn’t the kind of person to get caught up in a public political debate, even though he was a history teacher and she was a librarian. However, he knew Lizzie French was the kind of woman who liked to use her hard-line sense of ethics to undermine all opposing thought. He was after all an academic and there was no way he was going to let her get away with this one.

“If you think back Miss. French I believe there was a little matter of a hostage crisis in Iran and a group of six Americans who were given shelter by the Canadian Embassy. Does the Canadian Caper, ring a bell? The man behind it was even awarded a US Congressional medal. That, my lady, is what Canada has done for us. And you call yourself a librarian?”

She grunted and banged her gavel.

“Hmmpf. As moderator, I say we really must get on with these proceedings. Now, about the mural . . .?”

“Shouldn’t this meeting be held after the Founder’s Day celebration when there’s more time?” asked Mrs. Peabody.

She had a deep look of sorrow on her face.

“We’re sorry to hear about your brother’s accident Anne. Too bad he wasn’t living a righteous life. Unfortunately, that is what happens when we take these things for granted,” said Lizzie.

Now it wasn’t that she had no way of knowing how much sting her remarks carried but rather she always seem to count on the fact that she could bring people to their knees without so much as a single expletive.

Mrs. Peabody, on the other hand was used to Lizzie’s way for the most part. That is to say she never really bothered to challenge her on any level for fear of the grief that strenuous exercise would engender but this time it was different. Lizzie wasn’t just degrading anyone, it was her brother and although they hadn’t been particularly close the last two years, she never stopped loving him.

“You got no right Lizzie French. Is that your Christian way? Let my brother Victor have some peace in death.”

“Christian? Anne, you’re Jewish, right? I didn’t think you people believed in Christ?”

Mrs. Peabody might as well have been talking to the wall. Lizzie only knew one way. To say that Lizzie French was antisemitic was to say that George Lincoln Rockwell was antisemitic, with both personalities having held personal beliefs that went so far beyond the assertion it defeated the purpose.

Another member of the captive audience attempted to chime in but Lizzie muttered something vile but Christian-like under her breath, swung the gavel three times and then started over.

“Now, about the mural,” she said, finishing where she’d started.

Undoubtedly making up a tradition took a certain kind of meticulousness and fortitude and the festival’s organizers went to complex lengths to give the crowd a nice full-size healthy dose of make-believe.

Originally, Founder’s Day was supposed to be a homage to the day back in 1622 that Elliot Trinity after being washed ashore from previously escaping a band of pirates, a school of sharks, a typhoon and an Chief Indian with a grudge, happened upon a section of uncharted territory somewhere outside of Massachusetts Bay and staked his claim.

There was another version to the story that didn’t get around much except when Mama Loas told it from a comfortable seat on her front porch.

According to the one hundred and ten year old former slave, Elliot Trinity was a spastic accident prone legally blind deckhand on that pirate ship and fell off one night when he went to look for the mop and mistook the ship’s bow for a closet. After he’d tumbled overboard, he was saved by an Algonquian-speaking Native from the Abenaki First Nations and brought to live alongside his tribal farmland.

When the Pilgrims who’d came before began killing off some of the Indian populations, Elliot Trinity, rather than risk persecution himself for being an Indian lover, cowardly led a group of Christian bandits to his Native friend’s hiding place.

“I know what I talk about and that Elliot Trinity won’t nothin’ but a miserable ole fool scared of his own shadow.” Mama Loas would repeat her mantra every time the occasion presented itself.

Mama Loas was a descendant of Crispus Attucks who was killed in the Boston Massacre. Attucks was thought to be a runaway slave who’d came to Boston to protest against the infamous Townshend Acts, originated by the British Viscount Charles Townsend and enforced by the British Parliament to levy taxes on imports to the colonies.

Attucks was the son of a Black man and a Massachuset (original one ‘T’ spelling)Indian woman. Mama Loas was proud of having a celebrity in the family from both her African and Massachuset Indian heritage. She wasn’t going to let something like Founder’s day shroud the truth.

Consequently, every Founder’s Day she held an alternate and alternative celebration at the Community Pavilion to speak about the other history of Trinity’s Land End and to challenge the town’s collective unconscious.

Detective Litani made his way through the crowd at Town Hall Centre. The parade was scheduled to travel the full spectator route. It would start and continue down the center of Main Street through Town Hall Square, passing alongside Centennial Hall onward to Eagle House, where it would carry over onto the walking tour of Historic Ambearse Avenue. Ambearse Avenue was the location of Elliot Trinity’s first colonial home Trinity Manor. It was there that he and the famous minister devised methods to restrict the efforts of non-Puritans into the colony and methods to convert the unconverted. Their document was called the Covenant of Fellowship and Good Workings.

Down the road a bit from where Trinity Manor stood was Josiah Samuels Esq. House where Trinity’s Land End’s town charter had been signed.

To cap it off the festival route would end just short of old man Naylor’s estate at the Navy War Museum, where a house reception was to be presided over by one of the ancestors from the original pilgrimage to the new country.

The prospect of two deaths all within a week hadn’t managed to dampen the attitudes or curtail the current luminous festival activities. Crowd participation of the town’s history celebration remained plentiful.

One of the locations, Town Hall Centre, full to the brim with eager citizens just itching to get a look at all the extravagant floats and costumes designed for this year’s festivities, boasted the amusing entertainment of a barbershop quartet and a skiffle band.

“Here it comes, here it comes!” said an overjoyed Buddy Erwin, waving a miniature liberty bell. He pointed dramatically in the direction of one of the most flamboyant and excessive floats — not to mention the biggest crowd pleaser — sponsored by the Historical Society. It was a reenactment of Elliot Trinity’s voyage on the high seas to his landing on the new colonial settlement.

“Look at the Injun chase him,” said little Buddy Erwin, to his aunt’s delight.

In years past the Historical Society had received several letters of protest from various Native American communities in response to the portrayal of said events, and being referred to as “Injun”. Buddy Erwin was referring to Eustace Duke, the high school gym teacher. That a man with reputed links to the Ku Klux Klan in nearby Ketchum Falls also held responsibility for shaping young minds, or at least their bodies, was a subject the Historical Society did everything in their power to shy away from.

So every Founder’s Day Eustace Duke would don Indian garb and make-up, grab a makeshift tomahawk and run around like an idiot on a two hundred square foot float. And each year he would choose one of his students to play the young town’s originator Elliot Trinity, the target of his lunacy.

The nefarious position on this occasion went to Tommy Studebaker, the quarterback of the varsity league football team. He played his Elliot Trinity for laughs, comically tripping about the float while trying to out maneuver Eustace’s crazed Indian in what can best be described as a rendition of an early settler minstrel show. As the float continued along the parade route it was met with a small contingency of Native Americans protesting its vile representation.

To a casual observer, as Detective Litani made his way through the ecstasy of the crowd he seemed rather out of place. It would be intuitive for one to presume his current state of melancholy as being directly linked to the two bodies that currently resided at the Trinity’s Land End medical examiner’s office. To be sure, the impending criminal investigation provided its own burden but if one really looked deep enough, it might be also be revealed that Detective Litani was simply, and most incontestably, lonely.

He was about to head back to the sheriff’s department when he felt a hand positioned on his shoulder, pulling him from behind. He looked back to see Tina Sycamore flashing her best Colgate smile.

“Leaving so soon?”

He turned around.

“Are you following me, Tina?”

She nudged him and frowned.

“Ray, you’re always so mean to me? Why? I do anything to offend you? I mean, when you blacked out in the car and ran off the road into the cornfields and scared me half to death, did I get mad or threaten to bring you up on charges of reckless driving?”

He didn’t like where this was going. The last thing he needed was to be threatened by a manipulative teenager desperately in need of attention.

“Tina, I told you I was sorry about that. I get these migraines, sometimes. But, if you want to press charges?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just trying to make a point,” she said, putting her hand in his.

“Okay then,” he said, removing it.

Little did he know he was trapped, treed and cornered. He looked out into the crowd, hoping to see Rebecca Jamison and her brood from the orphanage somewhere around.

“She’s not here,” said Tina decisively, with a big grin.

“Girl, what the hell are you babbling about now?” He tried to play it off.

“Ray, when are you gonna learn that I can read your thoughts. There’s this thing between us, this bond, but you’re hell bent on denying the truth.”

“Believe me Tina when I say there is no thing between us.”

“Come on, let’s go. Unless you don’t mind chatting up Lizzie French because she’s heading this way at two o’clock.”

He looked in the direction Tina pointed to see the librarian barreling toward him with the visage of a stubborn boar.

“That woman needs an enema,” he said, under his breath rather than shouting it aloud like he preferred.

That’s when Tina grabbed him hurriedly by the arm and steered him down the street until they came to the luncheon diner over on Main where the parade route originated every Founder’s Day. Charlene’s Smack’N Mack boasted an exclusive Founder’s Day special for a meager $2.99. It was no wonder the establishment made some of its finest tills during this time of the year.

“Come on in and pick a spot,” insisted Charlene as she swiftly ushered the two inside.

“Any room left?” he asked.

The place was covered from head to toe with hungry festival goers. Charlene’s Smack’N Mack was the beloved pit stop from all the other Founder’s Day activities and celebrations. Alternately, under the auspices of the Historical Society Lizzie French held a post festival dinner at Colonial House but it was a very exclusive affair and most of the regular townspeople had a hard time making the list. It was a welcome appreciation to know that Charlene catered to everybody.

Together Detective Litani and Tina Sycamore squeezed in next to a lumberjack and his dog at the far end of the counter.

“See, we don’t need a table, this’ll do just fine,” said Tina, pleased.

She unwound the two rubber bands that held her pigtails together and a mass of strawberry blonde tresses cascaded down her shoulders.

“Do you think I’m pretty Ray?”

“You know you are Tina. You could go a little light on the makeup though.”

She smiled mischievously, “Boys my age are silly. I like intelligent men.”

“Did Patty Lowell like men too? I mean, when she was your age? Is that why she got in trouble?”

“Patty Lowell was a born victim. Don’t get me wrong, I liked her all right. She was probably the only real person in this town with nothing to lose, except for Mama Loas maybe. The difference between us is she let men treat her any kind of way. I would never do that. I think too highly of myself.”

“I see. So men follow your lead, is that what you mean? I take it you’re looking for some sap you can order around.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

She was quick to let him know she was no apologist for her behavior.

Charlene shoved two Founder’s Day specials in front of them. The meal consisted of five golf ball sized meatballs smothered in gravy with mash potatoes, string beans and two homemade biscuits.

“Happy Founders Day. I’ll get a couple of pecan pies for you in a minute,” she said, “Oh, and you mind taking a piece to Sheriff Daniel at the hospital? That man loves my pecan pie and I want to let him know we’re all thinking about him.”

“No problem,” said Detective Litani, “I’ll swing by later to check up on him anyway.”

“That’ll be great. Funny thing, you always take for granted people you care about until something comes along and puts them in harms way. I can’t even remember Sheriff Daniel ever having a sick day.”

She smiled and rushed away to the next customer.

For a moment Detective Litani felt a little uneasy, having spent his moments with Sheriff Daniel prior to his emergency, in an uncomfortable disagreement. He was the new guy in town and on one hand, should have been grateful that for the most part the townsfolk had welcomed him into their little community, alongside their beloved Sheriff. Yet on the other, his lingering internal dissatisfaction for being, what he could only describe as politically hustled into the current occupation and change of location, seemed to always supersede any latent enthusiasm or appreciation.

He could feel Tina’s eyes on him, unashamed and unabashed.

“That Charlene — she looks damn okay for a woman her age wouldn’t you say?”

“You shouldn’t be so concerned about looks Tina. They fade.”

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re a man,” she quipped, and slapped his knee.

“Meaning?”

“You’re allowed to age. Everybody always says my uncle Damien looks distinguished the older he gets, but with aunt Coraline they just say she must’ve had a hard life ’cause of all the bags around her eyes. Not fair and you know it.”

He couldn’t argue with her there. It was certainly much easier when she wasn’t making so much sense.

“Hey, how about some town trivia on Founder’s Day?”

She moved closer and pushed him further towards the lumberjack with his dog.

“When was the first Founders Day celebrated? Give up?”

“I don’t know any town trivia, Tina.”

“Take a guess.”

“Okay, 1622?”

“Wrong. 1623. Oh and we are also the oldest town in New England. You know that?”

“Nope,” he said and proceeded to divide the meatballs on his plate in half with his fork.

“What is the oldest freestanding statute in New England from colonial times?”

“Tina, I’m trying to enjoy my meal. Will you please, give it a rest?”

He stuffed a meatball in his mouth and savored it.

“It’s the Eliza Trinity fountain statute in Great Awakening Park, hel-lo? Don’t you know any of this stuff?”

There was hardly any space to spare between them but he made sure he was as far away from Tina Sycamore as a man sitting on a stool right next to her could be. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust himself in that regard but stupid misunderstandings are sometimes made and he had no doubt a girl like Tina would make you pay for it.

“You seem nervous Ray.”

She massaged his knee.

“I am nervous Tina.”

He removed her hand from his leg.

“Shoot, all business. You’re no fun. I guess the only thing you want to talk these days is Patty Lowell. Well, she was my baby sitter when I was little like I said before. She kept this diary. I bet it’s the missing key if you find it.”

“You’ve been hanging around that film forum place too much.”

“It’s called Filmspace”, she corrected.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? About the diary? How do I know this isn’t a figment of your fanciful imagination?”

“And why would I lie?

“Oh I don’t know Tina, that’s a good question. I’m still trying to work out all your angles. Am I supposed to trust your past memory as a seven year old?”

“Jeez, you’re so cynical. Is that any way to talk to the person that just saved you from the wrath of Dizzy Lizzie?”

He looked deeply into her eyes when she said it.

“You’re wondering where I get that from I bet. Your mother used to call her that didn’t she? I heard it through the grapevine. I’m telling you Ray, I remember a lot of things. I’ve got a very good memory. She had a lot of initials in that diary like B.T., D.R., and I think it was L. R.or L.K. Something like that and N.C. And she wrote that one of these days she was going to have to play the right cards for her ticket out. Something like that anyway.”

“So you’ve sized up the whole case, huh? Got a fresh angle straight form the memory banks – a child’s memory of long ago. That kind of information is beyond circumstantial. No more than speculation, Tina.”

“Hey, it was her hustle. Don’t chew me out. Would you believe one night she was over and fell asleep on the couch and–”

“Now that I believe. That is quite possible that one night Patty Lowell fell asleep on the couch while over at your house babysitting. Yeah, I can see that.”

“Hey, stop your joking around, I’m serious. Listen now, I trying to tell you that I picked up the diary and the entry for that day said she was pregnant. That’s all. Just “I’m pregnant written in all caps.” Now that’s something, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s something Tina”

“NO Ray, listen, I’m serious. Look, don’t blab it around but there’s a big story in this Patty Lowell thing. It’s got everything – sex, murder, and violence. How big is that, huh? Really big. And I started talking with some of the group at Filmspace and all I can say is don’t be surprised if Patty’s story comes to the big screen one day. One of my director friends is interested and I get a producer’s credit. It’s all on the hush-hush, okay?”

He didn’t bother to respond. Unfortunately for Tina, Detective Litani had long ago zoned out to her banter. He swallowed another meatball and looked up to see Childress enter the diner with an entourage that included two two-hundred plus hefty bodyguards, a middle-aged woman clutching a steno pad and a young model he’d seen on on the cover of magazines before, on the industrialist’s arm.

Childress motioned for one of his men to go to one of the tables where a group of townies were sitting having a couple of beers. The entire thing went down in a matter of minutes, as the two hundred plus bodyguard convinced the townies that their time was up. Subsequently, they took their beers and left, carefully not to make eye contact with Childress on the way out.

“Ray? Ray, are you listening? I don’t like to be ignored.”

“N.C.?”, he thought to himself. “Tina, the only N.C. on my mind is that one over there.”

“Norman Childress III?. The big shot, yeah, that’s what I thought too. I mean it is the most logical, right? Hey Ray, we think alike!”

“All right. Be cool.”

He might as well of been speaking Latin because before he could get the next syllable out she was on her feet and heading across the room.

“Just wait right here,” she said, with the toss of her golden locks.

She marched over to the table where Childress and his men were sitting and began a conversation that included several looks by the entrepreneur over in Detective Litani’s direction. When she was finished and as she was walking away Childress couldn’t keep his eyes off her, leaving the model who was fawning all over him, to wonder.

“Are you crazy? What was that about?” He pulled Tina close to him.

“Call it a social experiment Ray, just a little old experiment.”

“I call it a stupid thing to do Tina. You’ve got to stop listening to the voices in your head. You can’t just parade around like that and expect men not to notice.”

“I can do what I want Ray. Haven’t you noticed that about me yet? So, did he stare at my ass when I was walking back here?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because Patty Lowell always talked about one of her fellas having an ass fetish in her diary. He was always looking at her behind and feeling it in public places and so forth. So my conclusion is that he must be the N.C. she was talking about. I mean, the only other N.C. I can think of is Noah Crabapple the mailman and rumor has it he bats for the other team.”

“Plenty of guys like to look at women’s behinds. That’s no proof,” he said.

“Oh so now you do consider me a woman? Finally.”

He shook his head repeatedly, “That was just a figure of speech Tina.”

“Well, anyway, you are going to question him, right? Unless . . . you already did when you stayed over in Infinity City?”

He stuffed another meatball in his mouth and chewed rigorously.

They were interrupted by Charlene’s return with two glasses of homemade lemonade and two slices of pie.

He thanked Charlene for the both of them and hoped to put an end to the questions emanating from the Tina Sycamore locomotive.

“Hey Charlene, what kind of seasoning did you use on these meatballs? They’re magnificent.”

“Ancient New England secret, Detective.”

Just then the door opened and Rebecca Jamison entered the diner. She wore an off the shoulders white cotton dress and a big white summer hat. As she approached the counter Childress intercepted her and pulled her to the side. Detective Litani stopped eating immediately and watched carefully as they exchanged words. He exhaled right at the moment Rebecca’s right hand caught Childress across the face.

The diner went silent. The two body guards jumped up and so did Detective Litani. When Childress waived his two protectors off Detective Litani sat as well but his eyes remained fixed on the situation should there be a need to step in.

Besides being a wealthy industrialist and town benefactor, Childress was the kind of person that demanded the public keep its distance.

Whenever he was in town it was widely encouraged that he never be engaged on any level of communication. It was a unwritten rule that stipulated he must make the first contact. And under no circumstances was anyone ever to do anything remotely considered as threatening to the man. With the bold slap across the face Rebecca Jamison had broken years of town etiquette in just one afternoon.

“Hey now, you good folks needn’t worry about what’s going on over here. Miss. Jamison and I just had a minor disagreement. Everything is fine I assure you,” announced Childress.

“Yeah, what he said,” replied Rebecca, in jest.

She then beckoned for Charlene, who had been left a little shaken up following the proceedings.

Childress shot Detective Litani a quick look, who in turn raised his glass of lemonade in acknowledgment.

“So anyway,” Tina continued, “About the investigation–”

To Tina’s dismay, Detective Litani’s newly found concentration was on Rebecca Jamison.

He tried to imagine what Childress must have said to her to cause that kind of reaction and he didn’t like it one bit.

It was about five minutes before Charlene returned with a large ziplock bag full of at least a dozen slices of the Smack’N Mack’s famous pecan pie. Rebecca graciously accepted the bag and handed Charlene a bill from her purse.

“Thanks Char, keep the change”, she said, and turned to leave.

She’d gotten nearly halfway to the door when Detective Litani found himself leaping from his seat and positioning himself between her and the exit.

“Uh Miss. Jamison, I mean, Rebecca, a minute of your time, please?”

His was a nervous voice of excitement.

She turned with a half smile. “Yes, Detective?”

He got closer. He wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do but he felt it was exactly what was needed.

“Are you alright? Did Childress threaten you, because if that’s the case you have every right to file formal charges?”

“No”, she said glumly, “I thought you knew, Childress never threatens directly. It’s more like a polite nudge.”

“Well, I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure yet but my time with the man is coming.”

“Yeah. I don’t know who tries my patience more, Childress or that Lizzie French. You know I ran into her a little while ago. She was talking to some of the other members from the Historical Society about drafting some kind of proclamation on morality or some such nonsense and bringing it before the townspeople. Says she’s tired of so much “loose morality and heathenism” in the country and that Trinity’s Land End should try to set an example to the world. The heathenism part I think she said explicitly for my effect. Anyway, we just looked at each other like she was from Venus and I was from Mars and that was that. I swear that woman will not be satisfied until the “Republic of Gilead” is finally established, and we can do away with the Constitution and be ruled by Old Testament religious dogma.”

He chuckled.

“There’s a reference in there to something literary and profound but I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“It’s out of a wonderful but frightening little book, The Handmaid’s Tale. It was one of the books Lizzie tried to have banned from the library last year and it happens to be my oldest girl’s favorite.”

“Banning books, now there’s a past time. I wonder what kind of far-reaching benefit does she imagine the adoption of her pointless proclamation would have? She can’t seriously believe the state legislature would give it any credence. Does she really believe the American government should be run in the fear of God, like a theocracy?”

“Detective Litani, surely you’re not asking for me to explain logic when it comes to Lizzie French, are you?”

They both laughed. She touched his face lightly.

“You know I haven’t had a real friend in town since Patty.”

He got the impression that she was reaching out to him and it made him feel good, even confident.

“Listen, what are you doing later on this evening?”

She thought for a moment.

“Well, after the Founder’s Day festivities, I suppose I’ll pick up the kids and head back home.”

“I have a better plan. I think you should drop by my place for a little conversation and commiseration,” he said soothingly, “Think about it.”

She kissed him on the cheek and left.

Across the room Tina Sycamore fumed.

At the hospital Detective Litani found Sheriff Daniel in good spirits surrounded by a plethora of flowers and get-well cards. Looming over the bunch was a humongous inflatable Sheriff’s badge balloon with a large greeting card trimmed in gold lace, and held in place by a bountiful red ribbon tied garrulously in a bow. On the front of the card at the very bottom was the Childress insignia.

Turns out Sheriff Daniel had been diagnosed with a mild case of angina but that didn’t stop him from devouring the mammoth slice of pecan pie Charlene had sent over from the diner. He thanked Detective Litani for dropping by and bringing the treat but there was more than a sliver of disappointment and feeling of helplessness in his voice.

“Sorry to hear about the transfer of the Lowell girl’s body to that private medical lab in Boston.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“So, then, what’s the official word?”

“Well, the chief forensic guy at the lab indicated there was, unbeknownst to him at the time, some kind of conflict in the pick-up schedule. Gave me his deepest apologies and said a team would be in town by Monday.”

“Really? Kind of makes our little medical examiner’s office look like a FBI lab in comparison, don’t you think? I mean, sonofabitches can’t even get their appointments straight.”

He knew where the Sheriff was going with this and he didn’t like it.

“It’s not like they botched the autopsy, Sheriff.”

“No, no, no, they botched the transport, Detective.”

“I never said they were the best in the world.”

“No, no, no, you just let it be known our little outfit here in town wasn’t good enough. This town’s been my bread and butter for over fifty years and I don’t like it when outsiders come in and suggest we don’t know our business. Now I didn’t say it on the record before, but having that girl’s body sent away is an insult to Doc Westminster, pure and simple. Anyway, tell Charlene I said thank you for the pie. I think I”ll be needing my rest now. Thanks for coming by, Detective.”

In simpler terms Sheriff Daniel was an unchanged man living in rapidly changing times; a relic of a bygone era. By all accounts he was generally viewed by everyone in town as respectable, fair and honorable. It was clear the Sheriff wanted to stay away from all the political stuff that sometimes accompanied high profile criminal investigations. And of course, the prospect of Childress’ possible entanglement with the Patty Lowell case, screamed political with a capital “P”. It was also clear that Detective Litani’s philosophy of jumping into the deep end rubbed his more conservative colleague in all the wrong ways.

And there they were, the old versus the new, two men vying for leadership in a community on the verge of an explosion. Both trying desperately to figure out how to coexist as police authority figures without feeling slighted by the others actions, wanting to say all the right things but invariably saying the wrong ones.

. . .THIS CONCLUDES CHAPTER 5, P. 1  OF WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END: TOWN OF MURDER & DECEIT. STAY TUNED FOR MORE CHAPTERS COMING YOUR WAY . . .

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WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END . . . Chapter 5: Founder’s Day p. 1

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WHO KILLED PATTY LOWELL?

The Creativemultimediaartist Weblog that posts chapter entries on  the novel Welcome to Trinity’s Land End: Town of Murder & Deceit will relaunch on July 10 with all chapter entries fully revised in conjunction with the ongoing PODFICTIONONLINE podcast that serializes the novel.

Until then enjoy the latest episodes of the PODFICTIONONLINE companion podcast to the blog.

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Welcome to Trinity’s Land End:Town of Murder & Deceit by
La-Tonia Denise Willis is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

July 28, 2008

CAVEAT: *Some of the formatting has been garbled in the chapter transfer from WORD doc to blog post. **Please BE ADVISED certain chapters in the novel contain graphic material and sexual content. Rated R. ***Welcome to Trinity’s Land End: Town of Murder & Deceit is copyright, 2008. All rights reserved. The novel is a work of fiction set in a fictitious Massachusetts town with fictitious characters. ****Information from this novel excerpts post may be reprinted or distributed in its original form only, for non commercial and educational purposes only BUT please link back to this blog site to give credit, if you do!!! Regarding this, please see our CREATIVE COMMONS license above. For any questions, send an email to creativemultimedia@qwestoffice.net

Chapter Four: The Ides of Summer

UNDER REVISION!

]]> http://creativemultimediaartist.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/murder-in-trinitys-land-end-chapter-4/feed/ 6 creativemultimediaartist Creative Commons License http://creativemultimediaartist.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/murder-in-trinitys-land-end-chapters-1-2/ http://creativemultimediaartist.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/murder-in-trinitys-land-end-chapters-1-2/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:53:32 +0000 creativemultimediaartist http://creativemultimediaartist.wordpress.com/?p=97 ]]>

July 10, 2008

This is the beginning of the serialization of the upcoming novel WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END:TOWN OF MURDER & DECEIT. Below are Chapters 1-2 . . .

CAVEAT: The serialized novel WELCOME TO TRINITY’S LAND END: TOWN OF MURDER & DECEIT contains graphic language and adult situations that some may find offensive. READER discretion is advised!

. . . Follow the hidden passions and murderous deeds of the citizens of Trinity’s Land End, to eventually discover WHO KILLED PATTY LOWELL . . .

CHAPTER 1: THE BODY

It was discovered behind the old barn on Jim Naylor’s property. Everybody laughed when Naylor first got the idea to convert the grungy barn into a rooming house but it beat living in a retirement home as far as he was concerned. For seventy-five years Naylor had a solid reputation as an old curmudgeon who never liked anyone to go near his property. So you can bet your bottom dollar that if he were alive today he would sure as hellfire resent the current package.

During the Civil War the location served as a convening post for Union soldiers between battle destinations. Naylor had come into its possession when one of his Bostonian descendants passed it on in a will. His several months spent working on it, fixing it up just right, were the best days of his otherwise unfulfilled life.

Upon his death the Trinity’s Land End Historical and Preservation Society claimed the property and declared it a national monument. There were no delusions about this being a benevolent gesture, but rather everyone knew it had far more to do with the committee members needing to find a new spacious spot for their bingo sessions. The executives on the board considered this requisition of the barn and its surrounding property a far greater service to the community than anything Naylor had to offer in life or death.

The years had been kind to Trinity’s Land End. Its picture postcard visage lent great credibility to the image of the classic sleepy eye little hamlet. where everyone knew each other and doors were usually kept unlocked. Ostensibly a happy town, no one was in any hurry to speak of what lie beneath the surface. It was almost as if years ago a summation had been issued to its citizens, defacto of course, that prevented any inquiries into the hidden passions and agonies compartmentalized in the lock box of citizen emotions tucked safely away. Until today, the last murder on the books was nearly thirty years ago to hear the old timers tell it. It was a legend that was passed down from generation to generation. The last murder occurred when a member of the feuding McGee clan ambushed a fellow rival of the Waddells with a double barrel shot gun over the dispute of how a very nasty rumor of infidelity came to be. The result of that past affliction which saw both patriarchs meet their end at the hands of the other was remarkable in that it became romanticized by some and was seen as a bold cautionary tale by others. However, there was no mistaking the ominous discovery of the naked female body in the mud basin behind the barn today with anything remotely connected to a thirty year old feud grounded in hyper reality. It too would be talked about in the days to come but for entirely different reasons.

The police detective arrived a half-hour later. He was on the other side of town when the call came through. He noted the time of arrival. It was five minutes past four in the afternoon and only minutes ago harsh rains had pummeled the town with seemingly no end in sight. As a result, there was barely an inch of dry territory to be found and this made for a very sloppy affair.

He ran his fingers through his thick illustrious dark wet mane and wondered why he was so opposed to wearing hats, or carrying umbrellas. Was it a man’s thing? His perfectly chiseled but somewhat hardened face showed his age to be about thirty-five. It was the kind of face that had stories to tell and made you want to listen but that was inviting and standoffish at the same time. The cleft in his chin was his most remarkable feature. He never thought too much about this particular genetic imprint acquired from a father whose Lebanese roots counted seven such male members with the same attribute. Yet he was well aware that often it was the initial point of attraction for many women. They said it reminded them of that famous Hollywood movie star in his hey-day. And his golden brown skin provided just the right kind of “exoticness” to engender either desire or antagonism.

On his entrance, he noticed the crime scene had attracted the attention of many of the town’s curious Georges. To his dismay the crowd of onlookers had done a pretty good job of tramping over the muddy terrain. He quickly abandoned the hopeful notion of finding untainted trace evidence and replaced it with a more rational one of “Let’s take a look and see what happens.” This attempt at finding a peaceful accord between the natural curiosity of the townsfolk and the demand for procedure by the law lasted for all of three seconds when one of the beloved citizens bent down to get a closer look and spilled coffee all over the body.

“What the hell are you people doing?!” bellowed Detective Litani as he slammed the door to the police car.

The guilty party, a young man in a velour jogging suit and a baseball cap quickly faded back into the crowd. In the past his disposition often came into question as he was frequently accused of falling prey to the foreign Argentine and Lebanese blood that ran through his veins. He refused to put much stock in this theory that was often applied to Italians, Latinos and people of Mediterranean descent. He saw his passions as being relative to each situation rather than any biologically racial predisposition.

It was no secret that he shared a love/hate relationship with the citizens of Trinity’s Land End, with more of an emphasis on the latter. For the record, the town had chosen him, not the other way around. There is an old saying that sometimes shit happens which could astutely be likened to the manner in which he had been hoodwinked to take up residence. It all started a few years ago after his mother suffered a fatal heart attack. It had been her desire to be buried back in Trinity’s Land End, the idyllic town she had adopted after moving to the States. She wanted it to the birthplace of all future Litanis. Due to a troubled childhood she wanted so much for her offspring to assimilate and share in the idea of a wholesome American existence. She even stipulated in her will that her body be put to final rest in Trinity’s Land End. The only thing he could do was honor her memory, even though he disagreed with her cultural observations. It was this dedication that allowed him to humbly put his reservations aside and make the pilgrimage from Baltimore to the small coastal Massachusetts village setting, in order to carry out his dear mother’s request.

Since coming to town he’d spent most of his time in the office shuffling paper. On weekends, he liked to venture down by the Janus River and lie amongst the lush vegetation while watching the plentiful wildlife and careening with his thoughts. The majestic location he was most fond of was the source spot where all the little tributaries poured into the mouth of the river’s flow. The area was ideal in its natural simplicity. It was the kind of serene venue cops went looking for to clear their mind of excessive baggage.

It was no surprise that what was occupying his thoughts lately was still the manner in which he was duped into staying on in town. On the day he was to return to Maryland after settling his mother’s estate, he received a call from the Baltimore Special Crime Victim’s Unit. It was his captain along with the police commissioner instructing him that a deal had been struck between the administrators of the local Sheriff’s department and the “powers that be”, as they put it. Apparently, just last year the Sheriff’s department suffered the lost of two of their premier lawmen to homicide units in a big eastern metropolis and they wanted compensation. It turns out the city of Baltimore shared a special sister relationship with Boston whose mayor office in turn was on a relentless mission to reach out to many of its satellite communities. At the time, he was a star on the rise in the Baltimore PD after having departed the FBI. The play went like this: The mayor in Boston informed his captain of detectives in Baltimore who immediately informed him that it would be a good political move to offer his superb credentials to the small but eager town of Trinity’s Land End.

It was a bittersweet victory, however. Nobody asked the opinion of the current long time Sheriff of Trinity’s Land End on the matter of bringing in a city detective. If they had they would have discovered that not only was he violently opposed but he also thought it was a stupid idea in general conceived by men who had nothing better to do, often called bureaucrats.

Detective Litani was well aware of Sheriff Daniel’s position on the functionality, or rather lack of, in having the transfer take place. The Sheriff failed to comprehend any of it, especially how a little town like his could make use of someone who was a leading authority in the violent crimes division and who specialized in profiling hideous murderers and psychological deviants. And no matter what the benevolence behind the trade the whole thing seemed hokey and a waste of time and taxpayer’s money. The Sheriff got quite a laugh from the newly instituted Special Sections Unit branch of the Sheriff’s department developed solely to give a means to the insanity of their inception. Still, it was a done deal and neither one of them dared do anything about it without risking opening up a can of political worms.

The fact that Detective Litani perceived himself as a man who always tried to make the best of a precarious situation was the overriding factor that kept him trying to remain in the Sheriff’s good graces. He worked hard not to step on the Sheriff’s toes but in reality, his very presence was the issue. He bit his tongue about all the jaywalking, parking ticket violations and domestic squabble cases that clouded his daily roster. After all, he was a man of the law and it was his duty to attend to crime in all its facets. Yet he never stopped thinking like a homicide investigator even when there had been nothing to really investigate. For that reason, when he arrived to find the crime scene trampled on by the various lookey-loos as he often referred to them, he was more than a little perturbed with this bothersome New England flock and could do without the whole lot of them. It was the stupidity and carelessness of mass crowds all over again. He had witnessed it time after time on crime scenes in the big city and it was no different here in Trinity’s Land End.

“Hey Detective, you here to investigate?” asked Luanne Reeves. The fragile looking housewife was wearing a house dress and a kerchief. She was a plain looking woman with an even plainer name. Unfortunately, the most common thing about Luanne was her meatball husband and his bulldog bite. Their trailer park was the site of many 911 calls.

“Looks like you locals beat me to it. I suppose each and every one of you has already devised a theory as to what happened,” he said, his voice brimming with sarcasm.

“Well, now that you mention it,” replied Tina Sycamore, “There are some things-”

He waved her off.

“It was a rhetorical question Tina. Now please, all of you move out. That’s an order. This is important. What the hell are you doing here in the first place? My responsibility is to try to preserve the integrity of the crime scene and it’s a little hard to do, just that, when I’m swimming in bystanders.”

It was a perfunctory request at best. He knew that human nature being the way it was meant that people were naturally attracted to accidents of all sorts, even while detesting them. Although he hastened to admit it it, inside he also felt the slightest bit of enthusiasm that something major had finally happened to squash the boredom. He hated himself for thinking it.

He made his way through the maze of inquisitive citizens scattered about along the perimeter. The group formed an ever-widening circle. He felt like a trapped chicken. It was the way they were eager to pounce on him with sheer innuendo and quasi-scientific criminal theories. It was the essence of group behavioral psychology.

As he was surveying the scene a voice carried out through the crowd. “Where the hell’s Henry Westminster? Shouldn’t that old mama’s boy be here?”

Henry Westminster was the local medical examiner. He lived with his very sick and very demanding mother down on Northrup Road. Northrup Road was the main road that connected Trinity’s Land End to its more prosperous neighbor Infinity City.

“That’s a good question. I called him as soon as I got the word but his mother said he was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. I won’t begin to interpret that one,” he answered without identifying the speaker. “By the way, who said that?” He peered into the audience.

“Looks like the gypsy girl Patty Lowell. She ain’t exactly home grown you know.” The mysterious voice said again.

The little man with a face full of stubble struggling to stand up straight was Victor Salley. Alias, the town’s drunk. Cliché as it may seem, every town really did have one. Victor staggered toward him.

Detective Litani cast a pitiful look in Victor’s direction. If there was ever anyone who looked exactly the way he was it was Victor Salley, a man tethered to the bottle. The alcohol had seeped into his skin over the years causing his entire body to exist in a sort of perpetual rancid funk. If this were Baltimore it would be the glass pipe but nevertheless, the outcome was a lot the same in the end, the loss of self-respect.

“Oh Mr. Salley, it’s you. I do appreciate the unofficial identity but maybe you should just go home and get some rest,” said Detective Litani and then waited for the resident inebriate to move out the way or at least out of breathing range.

“What was that?” Victor Salley tapped his hearing aid twice and when that didn’t work took it out completely and blew on it before reinserting.

“I said thanks, Mr. Salley. Now please excuse me, will ya?” He repeated it several octaves higher than before and shook his head. As far as he was concerned there was nothing worse than a drunken man with a hearing problem, as far as the pantheon of maladies goes.

When Detective Litani moved closer to examine the bruises on the naked body before him, he noticed a peculiar discoloration of the skin but no apparent blood evidence. One thing was clear. It was evident that someone had taken great pleasure in using the deceased for a punching bag. The contusions were to her face and midsection and they were relentless.

The body was immersed in a massive mud pile that had developed from an ever widening sunken hole in the ground brought on by dastardly rain showers, that if nothing else, did wonders to complicate the crime scene further. The town had suffered tremendously under these severe rains for the last two weeks. Devastating torrential downpours had caused rampant overflowing of the reservoirs. Detective Litani wondered how long it would be before an official state of alert was eventually called due to the subsequent flooding into the Janus River.

He bent down and touched her skin with the tip of his fingernail. It was ice cold. Not the coldness of rain water but rather the frost bitten kind from a deep freeze. Had the body been dumped? It was a first guess and he believed a good one.

As he came face to face with the body he wondered how this poor woman had come to suffer such a humiliating fate. It was something that he asked himself each time and with every victim. Over the course of the next few days, he would begin a rigorous regiment of attempting to piece together small elements of the life of the poorly demised. Her breasts were bluish-purple, indicating rigor mortis. He cleared some of the mud from around her mouth and discovered that her lips had been sewn shut with black thread. Ritual killing? It was the first thing to pop into his head but in the back of his mind he felt it a rather outrageous conclusion given the locale. But then he thought, maybe the scene was designed that way. Staged to look like something it wasn’t. He liked to second-guess himself. He was about to take another step when he felt something hard underneath his new pair of Buster Browns. He knelt down to dig it up. When the result of the discovery became shockingly clear there was a collective gasp from the peanut gallery.

“That what I think it is?” asked Lizzie French, Trinity’s Land End only librarian and foremost authority on the oral history of the town‘s settlement at the turn of the century. She was also the co-founder of the Historical Society and a board member on the town meeting Council. She greatly enjoyed all these titles and eagerly looked forward to adding more.

Lizzie repeated the question but Detective Litani was too engaged in the dynamics of the crime scene to respond. He knew it was up to him to collect as much evidence as possible, especially since Henry Westminster wasn’t around, and this meant stern concentration. In Baltimore he was used to working with an expansive crime scene investigation team bearing elaborate tools of the trade. Trinity’s Land End was as streamlined as you get. With a murder finally on hand, his job as an investigator of the Special Sections Unit was to work with the office of the Sheriff in determining the motives for and the methods used in the cause of death. The time had come for him to now flex his muscles and he secretly relished the thought of consulting with a specialized forensic team in nearby Boston, knowing full well the wrath that would no doubt occur internally from selecting this option.

He reached into his coat pocket and took out a small paper bag. He dropped the severed finger in the bag and frowned. He leaned forward to brush away caked mud from the right hand. After thoroughly clearing away the dirt and debris he found his answer waiting. It was the missing appendage’s former location. As plain as day the middle finger had been severed three quarters of the way from the phalanx.

“What kind of person would chop off another’s finger? It’s gro-tesque,” said Bottlecap Maynard separating the word in hope of emphasizing to the others his new found literacy. In his spare time he was in the process of studying various books on increasing your vocabulary because he wanted to impress a woman he’d met in Infinity City while attending a professional wrestling match there at the Coliseum; it was his other passion besides collecting bottle caps.

Detective Litani cleared his throat and tried to shake off the uneasiness of the horrific scene before him. He had always been amazed by scientific approaches to criminology and murder that soughtt to explain the nature of crime in society. As far as he was concerned, it all came down to one thing: power. And, inevitably, as these things go, the person that wielded it would always be one step ahead of its prey.

Young Tina Sycamore, eager to enlighten the Detective about certain things, stepped forward with anticipation.

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking everybody’s name? I read that’s what you’re supposed to do. Take names of anyone present at the crime scene.”

“Are you some kind of crime junkie Tina? Please let me be the first one to tell you not to glamorize this business.”

“No, no. Look, I think you should know something. It’s very important,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

With her blonde flowing pigtails, thigh high cut-off jeans and lips that seemed always in a pout, she reminded him of a case he’d worked back in Baltimore. The girl, Callie, was a teenage runaway turned child prostitute who managed to get herself tagged as a mule for a South American drug cartel. Callie was a sweet but naive wannabe who thought she had all the answers. That is until her body was found slit from the navel down with her entrails still leaking cocaine residue. Also discovered, inside Callie’s womb, had been the vestiges of a decaying and calcified fetus. He remembered the medical examiner at the time recounting the amount of tremendous emotional pain suffered during and after the autopsy.

Tina Sycamore, with her budding sexuality shrouded in schoolgirl innocence exemplified the contradictions of female adolescence. He could tell she was very much aware of this effect.

“What is it? What’s so urgent Tina?” He didn’t want to know.

She looked out at the faces of the citizens before her. She knew that not a one of them was beyond a good piece of gossip but, what she had to say was for his ears only. She covered her mouth and pulled him closer. It made her feel special.

“Patty Lowell was part of a big scandal way back then. About ten years ago.”

“Really? Ten years ago you were only about seven. Why would a seven year old be so immersed in the politics of a little town?”

“Don’t listen to her, whatever she’s saying. Tina’s got this active imagination,” said Mrs. Peabody, the checkout cashier at the Dixie Mart. She was also Victor Salley’s sister.

Tina, offended, put her hands on her hips and pouted like she’d probably done a thousand times before. Her lush lips were fullest when she was upset and she exuded an uncontrollable seductiveness, or brazenness, depending on how you saw it. She continued to direct her answers to him only.

“I’ve always been wise beyond my years. Patty Lowell was my babysitter back then. Plus, she kept a diary that she used to bring to the house — and guess what? I used to read it. Understand?”

“Barely,” he said and turned away.

She took him by the arm and ushered him away from the pack.

“Detective, I know some things and you can take me for an interview if you like.”

Young Tina Sycamore liked to be the center of attention, the grand dame of the ball. She was highly skilled at working an audience and Detective Litani had no doubt she would grow up to lead some man by the nose.

“Probably some seedy drifter from the big city who surprised her for a little hanky panky and something went wrong,” said Lizzie French, still trying to get in on the action. “She was a tramp and everybody knows I’m telling the truth.”

“Drifter? Hmmf. Maybe, highly unlikey. Here’s a little sidebar people — in most homicides the victim knew the killer. If nothing else, I think I have to start there.”

“He’s right,” Tina agreed proudly.

“All right folks, who found the body?”

An unassuming young boy with a catcher’s mitt took a step forward. He held his head down and spoke softly.

“I lost my ball in the mud.”

Detective Litani looked the boy over. The youngster probably never thought that this would be his day in the spotlight, an eyewitness to the discovery of a mutilated body of all things. He hoped his parents could afford the therapy the child would undoubtedly need in the years to come.

“Hi there fella. I promise to find that ball for you but I’m going to need you and your parents to come down to the Sheriff’s department, okay?”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

“What’s your name short stuff?”

“Buddy . . . Buddy Erwin.”

“That’s the Erwin boy,” said Mrs. Peabody, “His folks are in the army. He lives with his Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe.”

“Will somebody do me a favor and make sure this boy gets home immediately?”

Tina Sycamore volunteered and took little Buddy Erwin by the hand. She gave Detective Litani a lingering smile that said she was glad to do his bidding. He could only imagine but tried not to.

Detective Litani went back to his car and retrieved a camera from the backseat. He snapped several shots — one from the four corners of the scene, a long distance shot and a couple of medium-distance ones, close up shots of the body and the location of the severed finger and a few spontaneous shots of the surrounding area with no particular subject in focus. He finished the day by routinely checking for fiber details and hair strands and other possibilities of trace evidence.

Back at the Sheriff’s department, a statement by little Buddy Erwin explained how he had left the house and ran up to old man Naylor’s property to “get away”. Apparently, his uncle wanted him to eat his vegetables and as he hated digesting anything green with roots he saw it as the natural thing to do. While he was playing with his ball, he saw the dead body and ran back to tell his aunt Julia. And the rest of the story reads remarkably like Chicken Little’s famous escapade: Aunt Julia, instead of going directly to uncle Joe, since she knew nothing much moved him from his place in front of the boob tube, went straight to her church buddy Lizzie French; Lizzie French, having passed a drunken Victor Salley on his way to the Dixie Mart, yelled at him for the millionth time for being a degenerate alcoholic and subsequently mentioned there was a dead body near old man Naylor’s; Upon arriving at the Dixie Mart and to his dismay being denied more alcohol from his cashier sister, Victor did his duty to carry the word on which caused Mrs. Peabody to close the store immediately and rush to the site. In her haste she ran into Tina Sycamore who was on her way to take Bottlecap Maynard a bag of fresh new bottle caps she’d saved from the school party her parents put on for her right after high graduation this year; And then there was Luanne Reeves. She said she was just out for a walk when she chanced upon the group but Detective Litani felt she was hiding something that more than likely had to do with her husband’s unpredictable temperament.

Word of Patty’s death quickly made its way into the grapevine flooding the Sheriff’s department with one too many questions. Detective Litani anticipated that the autopsy would indicate several blows to the head by a blunt instrument of some sorts, something that most autopsies seem to generically indicate at one point or another. Yet there was little doubt that this particular case went well beyond the mundane — if anything about murder can be considered mundane. Multiple cranial injuries of any kind are nearly always fatal but someone had let out an enormous amount of rage all over the decedent, caving in the back of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Along with the cut-off finger, the person or persons responsible for her assault had made doubly sure that the defacement was over- the-top.

The next day fingerprint analysis provided an official identity confirmation that the deceased was correctly named Patty Amersyth Lowell, a former resident of the town’s orphanage. Local lore concerning Patty Lowell was scandalous. She was born in Trinity’s Land End to the mother of a Gypsy woman employed in the company of a traveling band of Gypsy artisans and entertainers.

Detective Litani knew a little of Gypsy culture from a previous relationship with a woman he met in Spain. Her name was Katarina Eloakri and she was a professor of history with concentration on the oral tradition of oppressed indigent populations throughout Europe. At the time of their courtship she was enmeshed in a battle with Spanish authorities over a wave of hate crimes against Gypsies, or Rom as they are historically known. He remembered Katarina as a passionate advocate of the Rom people so much so that there were times when her activism put her at odds with anything outside of its scope. For her, he soon became one of those liabilities and it ended as quickly as it had begun. Still, in the six months that they’d spent together she introduced him into a culture filled with hardship and pride, destruction and resurrection, but most of all, vigilance about reclaiming the dignity lost from centuries of being “the flogged mule of the world” as Katarina put it. Her lectures at the university were those of an eloquent speaker who could turn a tale with the greatest of ease and poise. Her words were powerful and fierce as she captivated her audience with Gypsy folklore that spanned from the origins of India to the present day migrant populations in the diaspora. They loved each other as hard as two people could, although neither ever uttered the word. He knew he could never replace her mission and she knew she would never settle for anything less.

Detective Litani closed his eyes and rested his head back against the armchair, with the collective files on Gypsy arrests in town dating back over twenty years balanced haphazardly in his lap. Trinity’s Land End was no different than many other places when it came to dealing with Gypsy encounters. During the summertime the Gypsies often annoyed the townsfolk by settling in campsites along the waterfront. Arrested on numerous occasions for various vagrancy charges and disturbing the peace they, nevertheless, always seemed to end up back in the same spot. Perhaps the fact that they provided a valuable slave labor source for some of the hometown mariners had something to do with it. Patty’s father, as far as anyone was able to tell, was an anonymous white man and she was abandoned shortly after birth and placed in the town’s orphanage.

He pulled out a dingy file cluttered with dust and battered newspaper clippings of women and children stationed behind tables of pottery and various artifacts. In one of the photos someone had taken a red marker and drawn a big circle around a petite woman with a daisy stuck in her hair, kneeling near a box of mementos and whatnots. Below the picture, they’d written: MORAVIA ZAFIRI LOWELL = PROVOCATEUR. The rap sheet on Moravia included six arrests dating back to the nineteen nineties on charges stemming from unlawful selling of stolen goods to various vagrancies, thefts, and breaking the noise ordinance. He held the photo closer, with his attention drawn to the woman’s long flowing apron-like, seemingly homemade, blouse pushed back just slightly off the knees as she squatted. There was something there that he couldn’t articulate at first until an even closer screening brought the matter to light; the rather thin woman had a significant growth underneath the garment. He folded the clipping and stuck it in his wallet. He ran into Sheriff Daniel as he was leaving. With only a courteous nod between the two their relationship was slowly deteriorating.

Lloyd McNally’s Children’s Orphanage was located on the outer banks of a riverbed five miles from a secluded woodland area known colloquially as the End Zone. The End Zone formed a watershed that separated many of the river basins. When he arrived at the orphanage there was still a little daylight left. He found the director outside with the kids. They were all lined up distributing sandbags around the circumference of the building.

She took a quick look at him but continued to work. As he moved closer, the first thing he noticed was the mole on her cheek. Katarina had a similar beauty affect. He was discovering that there were so many things about this case that reminded him of her.

“Hi there, I’m Detective Ray Litani with the Sheriff’s department. I’d like a word with you, Miss Jamison, is it?”

He found it interesting to watch their work habits. He remembered his mother’s stories about all the collective efforts that went into preventing wipe out from the Janus River during flood season.

“Detective, huh? Well, I’d be happy to answer any of your questions so long as you grab a bag and get in line. I don’t intend to lose my home to the Janus river.”

“All right Miss Jamison, anything you say.”

“You can call me Rebecca. What is this about?”

He fell in at the end of the line and waited for his turn.

“Actually, I’d rather we go inside,” he said while glancing at the children present, “It might not be appropriate out here.”

As soon as she was sure the orphanage was secure enough to withstand the rising tides she escorted him to the house leaving the kids outside to play.

Once inside she gave him a quick tour of the old farmhouse estate now converted into a childcare facility complete with aligning bunk beds. Four bathrooms were located in the back of the house that served its eleven occupants, including Rebecca who slept in a modest bunk of her own. The old wood furnace designed in the early eighteen hundreds was still there and being used as a heating stove and oven unit. It was located in a remodeled kitchen that expanded to include a huge oblong table and several chairs all nestled together.

“Here it’s the old meets the new Detective. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of that old furnace because it reminded me of the simplicity of things past. Trinity’s Land End is still trying to come to terms with its colonial past. I happen to believe there are some good things worth salvaging for the future. And the kids, well, they’re just grateful to have a roof over their heads and somebody to care for them.”

“I want to talk about a girl who used to live here a long time ago by the name of Patty Lowell.”

Rebecca flinched at the name. He knew immediately something was there.

“What’s wrong?”

She cleared her throat. “Pat? I remember Pat. Boy, you’re talking ancient history. I grew up with Patty Lowell. My mother was the caretaker here then. Patty and I are around the same age. We used to spend a lot of time together. She was my best friend until–”

“Until what ma’am? What is it about Patty you recall?”

“–’til she ran away that summer,” she concluded and got up from the table in despair.

He continued to jot down information in his notebook. Sometimes it was necessary for him to dissociate temporarily when gathering vital material on the victim so that he could assure himself of a thorough investigation. However, he could sense she was extremely distraught about reliving the events of the past and he knew he would have to help her help him.

He stopped writing and went over to the window where she stood silently, trying to hold back tears.

“Rebecca”, he said and placed a hand gingerly on her shoulder, “Patty’s body was found mutilated yesterday and you are my only link to her past as it stands at the moment. We–you and I–need to do everything we can to find and punish her killer. Okay?”

On hearing this she lost it completely and fell into his arms. He held her for what seemed like a lifetime and when her tears had ceased, he guided her back to the table for more questioning.

“When Pat was sixteen she ran away from here. My mother just figured it was because she was upset about the situation, you know, her plight in life as an abandoned child and all. I talked to her the night before and she was a basket case. She appeared to be in some kind of emotional and physical shock. She cringed every time I touched her and then she’d just break down and weep.”

“Did you finally get her to tell you about it? he asked, eager to have her reveal what she was so carefully avoiding.

As a result of dealing with hundreds of homicides he had learned to be concise and to the point in these matters.

“Yes, she told me all right.” It was a bare whisper but it was clear.

“You can do this”, he assured her, “Just take a deep breath.”

She did as she was told and on the next exhale let it all go. He could tell that it was a welcomed release.

“Pat said she was raped. She said nobody would believe any story a Gypsy orphan had to say even if she did have white in her. Those were her exact words. I wanted to help her so I told her I would go to the police and lie and claim to be a witness if that’s what it took. It was important to me that she not let the bastard get away with it. She said she couldn’t let me lie for her and that she had made up her mind to forget about it but a woman never forgets her rape or her rapist. You don’t just forget something like that Detective.”

“Please, call me Ray.”

She smiled and he noticed how modestly beautiful she was for the first time. It was the kind of natural beauty that came without a hint of manufactured makeup or glamor. Just like Katarina. He couldn’t stop looking at her and thinking Rebecca Jamison could have been the toast of the town anywhere but here she was showing unselfishness and human kindness to those who could really use it. If there was such a thing as altruism in its purest sense, he had found it for a second time in the form of this woman with a sense of purpose. Yes, just like Katarina. And it made a difference in the everyday horrors of a job most would find sick to their stomach.

She told him four months ago on her twenty-seventh birthday Patty reappeared in Trinity’s Land End as if nothing had ever happened. To her surprise, however, her old best friend wanted nothing else to do with her. She refused all contact. She went on to describe several occasions whereupon her efforts to regain Patty’s confidence was met with heartbreaking disdain. Shortly thereafter, Patty disappeared again only to make one last appearance as a corpse out near old man Naylor’s field.

Detective Litani spent the rest of the time with Rebecca and her kids. It was probably natural for an outsider to assume that these kids were besieged emotionally by thoughts of depression, dejection, hopelessness and despair given their position in life. To the contrary, he found that nothing could be farther from the truth. They were the most outgoing children he had ever met.

“This here’s Chadra, she’s six going on sixteen,” Rebecca smiled, “Chadra’s been with me since she was two years old. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was a victim of a hate crime.”

He took a hold of the little girl’s hand. Her skin was the darkest of all the others. Shades darker than his. Loads of curl ringlets rippled down her back. She was the most gregarious of all the children running around full stop like a locomotive and stopping only when Rebecca’s firm voice called her to attention.

“Hi Chadra, you’re a pretty little girl. You’re going to be a beautiful young woman some day I can tell.” He then turned towards Rebecca and somehow he knew that she could tell what he was wondering. It was his policeman mind that made him want to know.

“Her father? Yeah, right. Well, unfortunately some Ku Klux Klan members from nearby Ketchum Falls took issue with him stopping to get gas one night and cut his throat. His crime was being Pakistani.”

He looked deep into Chadra’s brown eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, this little girl’s gaze should have revealed a lifetime of pain but what he saw was far from it. Her rapturous giggles said it all.

“You staying for supper?” interrupted a teenage girl with a massive amount of green hair. She looked to be the oldest of the bunch.

“Don’t be presumptuous Mandy,” said Rebecca.

“That’s an interesting choice of color you have there for your hair,” he said.

“Detective, I let my children have freedom to express their own individuality. I know that doesn’t often sit well in a small town like this but I don’t care. Nowhere is it proven that because a child likes a different image other than the one society wants to prescribe that the child is automatically morally bankrupt,” said Rebecca as if she had spent a lot of time rehearsing this reprisal that was specifically designed to stave off the strange stares by the locals.

“Green is my favorite color,” he said. “And for the record, I’m not technically from Trinity’s Land End, I mean I was born here but grew up elsewhere.”

This got a smile from Rebecca and let her know that she was not in the company of one of the townsfolk who thought that way.

“I guess I can really turn it on, huh? It comes from a lifetime of having to be defensive,” she said, enveloping Chadra in her arms.

“Never mind. You remind me of another. It’s quite uncanny.” Again, his thoughts went to Katarina.

She smiled again and kissed Chadra lovingly on the forehead.

The other eight children were in the kitchen preparing what might have been a chicken casserole of sorts had it not been for the fact there was no chicken and the mysterious concoction that seemed to be taking shape resembled something you might use for plaster rather than eat.

“Would you be interested in dining with us?” she inquired, still hoping the earlier outburst hadn’t succeeded in pushing him away.

Somehow it sounded different than when the green haired girl had asked before, he thought. It was more deliberate and dare he think it, desperate. Just then another girl around seven or eight came into the room with flour all over her face. She brought Rebecca a note and then returned to the kitchen.

“Thanks Joanie,” said Rebecca and opened the small pink piece of paper.

She read the note silently and put it away quickly. Her demeanor changed. Her face took on a rattled appearance and she spoke in a measured tone.

“These girls are very skilled and we take care of each other and . . . I make sure they get the education that’s due them and I refuse to let the people of this town treat them like pond scum and . . . this is our home damn it!”

“Would you like to talk about it?” he asked not knowing exactly what it was.

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “Oh, I don’t know if it matters but Patty worked at the library for a short time before she dropped out of school.”

“Everything matters in an open case,” he said.

The meal turned out to be somewhat of a delicious surprise as the mysterious entrée quickly revealed itself to be a Cajun stew recipe one of them saw on television. It appeared to him that all the girls were indeed as responsible as Rebecca claimed they were. They had impeccable table manners for children and afterwards each child was given a task towards cleaning up the kitchen and they didn’t even make a fuss about it. It was contagious. Even he, a lifelong bachelor who dreaded housework of any kind, saw fit to roll up his sleeves and plunge right into scouring the pots and pans, in order to make a good impression of course.

That night as he was departing the orphanage and good graces of one Rebecca Jamison, caretaker, he unfolded the newspaper clipping he’d taken from the old police files and presented it to her.

“Anyone resembling this picture ever visit the orphanage while your mother was alive?”

Rebecca studied the picture intensely.

“Who is she?”

“A Gypsy from one of the summer caravans at the marina, I presume. She has a record. Her last name is Lowell.”

Rebecca looked up at him with mouth agape, struggling to find the words.

“Look closely and you can tell that she’s pregnant in the photo,” he said.

Rebecca held the picture for as long as it took for the rush of emotions to settle before giving it back to him.

“All Patty ever wanted was to know her birth mother. To feel a connection to something that was a part of her origins. My mother loved her dearly but it wasn’t enough, she was always, restless.”

“People spend a lot of time searching for the impossible,” he said, “You can’t build a life on make-believe.”

“Spoken like a true cynic. Good night, Detective,” she replied warmly and closed the door.

It wasn’t until he was pulling into his driveway that he realized the sweet and amiable Rebecca Jamison hadn’t answered his question on whether she’d ever seen the woman in the photo, Patty’s mother, around the orphanage. One thing for sure, he was certain he’d ask it again, and again, and again if necessary, until he was completely satisfied.

It was discovered behind the old barn on Jim Naylor’s property. Everybody laughed when Naylor first got the idea to convert the grungy barn into a rooming house but it beat living in a retirement home as far as he was concerned. For seventy-five years Naylor had a solid reputation as an old curmudgeon who never liked anyone to go near his property. So you can bet your bottom dollar that if he were alive today he would sure as hellfire resent the current package.

During the Civil War the location served as a convening post for Union soldiers between battle destinations. Naylor had come into its possession when one of his Bostonian descendants passed it on in a will. His several months spent working on it, fixing it up just right, were the best days of his otherwise unfulfilled life.

Upon his death the Trinity’s Land End Historical and Preservation Society claimed the property and declared it a national monument. There were no delusions about this being a benevolent gesture, but rather everyone knew it had far more to do with the committee members needing to find a new spacious spot for their bingo sessions. The executives on the board considered this requisition of the barn and its surrounding property a far greater service to the community than anything Naylor had to offer in life or death.

The years had been kind to Trinity’s Land End. Its picture postcard visage lent great credibility to the image of the classic sleepy eye little hamlet. where everyone knew each other and doors were usually kept unlocked. Ostensibly a happy town, no one was in any hurry to speak of what lie beneath the surface. It was almost as if years ago a summation had been issued to its citizens, defacto of course, that prevented any inquiries into the hidden passions and agonies compartmentalized in the lock box of citizen emotions tucked safely away. Until today, the last murder on the books was nearly thirty years ago to hear the old timers tell it. It was a legend that was passed down from generation to generation. The last murder occurred when a member of the feuding McGee clan ambushed a fellow rival of the Waddells with a double barrel shot gun over the dispute of how a very nasty rumor of infidelity came to be. The result of that past affliction which saw both patriarchs meet their end at the hands of the other was remarkable in that it became romanticized by some and was seen as a bold cautionary tale by others. However, there was no mistaking the ominous discovery of the naked female body in the mud basin behind the barn today with anything remotely connected to a thirty year old feud grounded in hyper reality. It too would be talked about in the days to come but for entirely different reasons.

The police detective arrived a half-hour later. He was on the other side of town when the call came through. He noted the time of arrival. It was five minutes past four in the afternoon and only minutes ago harsh rains had pummeled the town with seemingly no end in sight. As a result, there was barely an inch of dry territory to be found and this made for a very sloppy affair.

He ran his fingers through his thick illustrious dark wet mane and wondered why he was so opposed to wearing hats, or carrying umbrellas. Was it a man’s thing? His perfectly chiseled but somewhat hardened face showed his age to be about thirty-five. It was the kind of face that had stories to tell and made you want to listen but that was inviting and standoffish at the same time. The cleft in his chin was his most remarkable feature. He never thought too much about this particular genetic imprint acquired from a father whose Lebanese roots counted seven such male members with the same attribute. Yet he was well aware that often it was the initial point of attraction for many women. They said it reminded them of that famous Hollywood movie star in his hey-day. And his golden brown skin provided just the right kind of “exoticness” to engender either desire or antagonism.

On his entrance, he noticed the crime scene had attracted the attention of many of the town’s curious Georges. To his dismay the crowd of onlookers had done a pretty good job of tramping over the muddy terrain. He quickly abandoned the hopeful notion of finding untainted trace evidence and replaced it with a more rational one of “Let’s take a look and see what happens.” This attempt at finding a peaceful accord between the natural curiosity of the townsfolk and the demand for procedure by the law lasted for all of three seconds when one of the beloved citizens bent down to get a closer look and spilled coffee all over the body.

“What the hell are you people doing?!” bellowed Detective Litani as he slammed the door to the police car.

The guilty party, a young man in a velour jogging suit and a baseball cap quickly faded back into the crowd. In the past his disposition often came into question as he was frequently accused of falling prey to the foreign Argentine and Lebanese blood that ran through his veins. He refused to put much stock in this theory that was often applied to Italians, Latinos and people of Mediterranean descent. He saw his passions as being relative to each situation rather than any biologically racial predisposition.

It was no secret that he shared a love/hate relationship with the citizens of Trinity’s Land End, with more of an emphasis on the latter. For the record, the town had chosen him, not the other way around. There is an old saying that sometimes shit happens which could astutely be likened to the manner in which he had been hoodwinked to take up residence. It all started a few years ago after his mother suffered a fatal heart attack. It had been her desire to be buried back in Trinity’s Land End, the idyllic town she had adopted after moving to the States. She wanted it to the birthplace of all future Litanis. Due to a troubled childhood she wanted so much for her offspring to assimilate and share in the idea of a wholesome American existence. She even stipulated in her will that her body be put to final rest in Trinity’s Land End. The only thing he could do was honor her memory, even though he disagreed with her cultural observations. It was this dedication that allowed him to humbly put his reservations aside and make the pilgrimage from Baltimore to the small coastal Massachusetts village setting, in order to carry out his dear mother’s request.

Since coming to town he’d spent most of his time in the office shuffling paper. On weekends, he liked to venture down by the Janus River and lie amongst the lush vegetation while watching the plentiful wildlife and careening with his thoughts. The majestic location he was most fond of was the source spot where all the little tributaries poured into the mouth of the river’s flow. The area was ideal in its natural simplicity. It was the kind of serene venue cops went looking for to clear their mind of excessive baggage.

It was no surprise that what was occupying his thoughts lately was still the manner in which he was duped into staying on in town. On the day he was to return to Maryland after settling his mother’s estate, he received a call from the Baltimore Special Crime Victim’s Unit. It was his captain along with the police commissioner instructing him that a deal had been struck between the administrators of the local Sheriff’s department and the “powers that be”, as they put it. Apparently, just last year the Sheriff’s department suffered the lost of two of their premier lawmen to homicide units in a big eastern metropolis and they wanted compensation. It turns out the city of Baltimore shared a special sister relationship with Boston whose mayor office in turn was on a relentless mission to reach out to many of its satellite communities. At the time, he was a star on the rise in the Baltimore PD after having departed the FBI. The play went like this: The mayor in Boston informed his captain of detectives in Baltimore who immediately informed him that it would be a good political move to offer his superb credentials to the small but eager town of Trinity’s Land End.

It was a bittersweet victory, however. Nobody asked the opinion of the current long time Sheriff of Trinity’s Land End on the matter of bringing in a city detective. If they had they would have discovered that not only was he violently opposed but he also thought it was a stupid idea in general conceived by men who had nothing better to do, often called bureaucrats.

Detective Litani was well aware of Sheriff Daniel’s position on the functionality, or rather lack of, in having the transfer take place. The Sheriff failed to comprehend any of it, especially how a little town like his could make use of someone who was a leading authority in the violent crimes division and who specialized in profiling hideous murderers and psychological deviants. And no matter what the benevolence behind the trade the whole thing seemed hokey and a waste of time and taxpayer’s money. The Sheriff got quite a laugh from the newly instituted Special Sections Unit branch of the Sheriff’s department developed solely to give a means to the insanity of their inception. Still, it was a done deal and neither one of them dared do anything about it without risking opening up a can of political worms.

The fact that Detective Litani perceived himself as a man who always tried to make the best of a precarious situation was the overriding factor that kept him trying to remain in the Sheriff’s good graces. He worked hard not to step on the Sheriff’s toes but in reality, his very presence was the issue. He bit his tongue about all the jaywalking, parking ticket violations and domestic squabble cases that clouded his daily roster. After all, he was a man of the law and it was his duty to attend to crime in all its facets. Yet he never stopped thinking like a homicide investigator even when there had been nothing to really investigate. For that reason, when he arrived to find the crime scene trampled on by the various lookey-loos as he often referred to them, he was more than a little perturbed with this bothersome New England flock and could do without the whole lot of them. It was the stupidity and carelessness of mass crowds all over again. He had witnessed it time after time on crime scenes in the big city and it was no different here in Trinity’s Land End.

“Hey Detective, you here to investigate?” asked Luanne Reeves. The fragile looking housewife was wearing a house dress and a kerchief. She was a plain looking woman with an even plainer name. Unfortunately, the most common thing about Luanne was her meatball husband and his bulldog bite. Their trailer park was the site of many 911 calls.

“Looks like you locals beat me to it. I suppose each and every one of you has already devised a theory as to what happened,” he said, his voice brimming with sarcasm.

“Well, now that you mention it,” replied Tina Sycamore, “There are some things-”

He waved her off.

“It was a rhetorical question Tina. Now please, all of you move out. That’s an order. This is important. What the hell are you doing here in the first place? My responsibility is to try to preserve the integrity of the crime scene and it’s a little hard to do, just that, when I’m swimming in bystanders.”

It was a perfunctory request at best. He knew that human nature being the way it was meant that people were naturally attracted to accidents of all sorts, even while detesting them. Although he hastened to admit it it, inside he also felt the slightest bit of enthusiasm that something major had finally happened to squash the boredom. He hated himself for thinking it.

He made his way through the maze of inquisitive citizens scattered about along the perimeter. The group formed an ever-widening circle. He felt like a trapped chicken. It was the way they were eager to pounce on him with sheer innuendo and quasi-scientific criminal theories. It was the essence of group behavioral psychology.

As he was surveying the scene a voice carried out through the crowd. “Where the hell’s Henry Westminster? Shouldn’t that old mama’s boy be here?”

Henry Westminster was the local medical examiner. He lived with his very sick and very demanding mother down on Northrup Road. Northrup Road was the main road that connected Trinity’s Land End to its more prosperous neighbor Infinity City.

“That’s a good question. I called him as soon as I got the word but his mother said he was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. I won’t begin to interpret that one,” he answered without identifying the speaker. “By the way, who said that?” He peered into the audience.

“Looks like the gypsy girl Patty Lowell. She ain’t exactly home grown you know.” The mysterious voice said again.

The little man with a face full of stubble struggling to stand up straight was Victor Salley. Alias, the town’s drunk. Cliché as it may seem, every town really did have one. Victor staggered toward him.

Detective Litani cast a pitiful look in Victor’s direction. If there was ever anyone who looked exactly the way he was it was Victor Salley, a man tethered to the bottle. The alcohol had seeped into his skin over the years causing his entire body to exist in a sort of perpetual rancid funk. If this were Baltimore it would be the glass pipe but nevertheless, the outcome was a lot the same in the end, the loss of self-respect.

“Oh Mr. Salley, it’s you. I do appreciate the unofficial identity but maybe you should just go home and get some rest,” said Detective Litani and then waited for the resident inebriate to move out the way or at least out of breathing range.

“What was that?” Victor Salley tapped his hearing aid twice and when that didn’t work took it out completely and blew on it before reinserting.

“I said thanks, Mr. Salley. Now please excuse me, will ya?” He repeated it several octaves higher than before and shook his head. As far as he was concerned there was nothing worse than a drunken man with a hearing problem, as far as the pantheon of maladies goes.

When Detective Litani moved closer to examine the bruises on the naked body before him, he noticed a peculiar discoloration of the skin but no apparent blood evidence. One thing was clear. It was evident that someone had taken great pleasure in using the deceased for a punching bag. The contusions were to her face and midsection and they were relentless.

The body was immersed in a massive mud pile that had developed from an ever widening sunken hole in the ground brought on by dastardly rain showers, that if nothing else, did wonders to complicate the crime scene further. The town had suffered tremendously under these severe rains for the last two weeks. Devastating torrential downpours had caused rampant overflowing of the reservoirs. Detective Litani wondered how long it would be before an official state of alert was eventually called due to the subsequent flooding into the Janus River.

He bent down and touched her skin with the tip of his fingernail. It was ice cold. Not the coldness of rain water but rather the frost bitten kind from a deep freeze. Had the body been dumped? It was a first guess and he believed a good one.

As he came face to face with the body he wondered how this poor woman had come to suffer such a humiliating fate. It was something that he asked himself each time and with every victim. Over the course of the next few days, he would begin a rigorous regiment of attempting to piece together small elements of the life of the poorly demised. Her breasts were bluish-purple, indicating rigor mortis. He cleared some of the mud from around her mouth and discovered that her lips had been sewn shut with black thread. Ritual killing? It was the first thing to pop into his head but in the back of his mind he felt it a rather outrageous conclusion given the locale. But then he thought, maybe the scene was designed that way. Staged to look like something it wasn’t. He liked to second-guess himself. He was about to take another step when he felt something hard underneath his new pair of Buster Browns. He knelt down to dig it up. When the result of the discovery became shockingly clear there was a collective gasp from the peanut gallery.

“That what I think it is?” asked Lizzie French, Trinity’s Land End only librarian and foremost authority on the oral history of the town‘s settlement at the turn of the century. She was also the co-founder of the Historical Society and a board member on the town meeting Council. She greatly enjoyed all these titles and eagerly looked forward to adding more.

Lizzie repeated the question but Detective Litani was too engaged in the dynamics of the crime scene to respond. He knew it was up to him to collect as much evidence as possible, especially since Henry Westminster wasn’t around, and this meant stern concentration. In Baltimore he was used to working with an expansive crime scene investigation team bearing elaborate tools of the trade. Trinity’s Land End was as streamlined as you get. With a murder finally on hand, his job as an investigator of the Special Sections Unit was to work with the office of the Sheriff in determining the motives for and the methods used in the cause of death. The time had come for him to now flex his muscles and he secretly relished the thought of consulting with a specialized forensic team in nearby Boston, knowing full well the wrath that would no doubt occur internally from selecting this option.

He reached into his coat pocket and took out a small paper bag. He dropped the severed finger in the bag and frowned. He leaned forward to brush away caked mud from the right hand. After thoroughly clearing away the dirt and debris he found his answer waiting. It was the missing appendage’s former location. As plain as day the middle finger had been severed three quarters of the way from the phalanx.

“What kind of person would chop off another’s finger? It’s gro-tesque,” said Bottlecap Maynard separating the word in hope of emphasizing to the others his new found literacy. In his spare time he was in the process of studying various books on increasing your vocabulary because he wanted to impress a woman he’d met in Infinity City while attending a professional wrestling match there at the Coliseum; it was his other passion besides collecting bottle caps.

Detective Litani cleared his throat and tried to shake off the uneasiness of the horrific scene before him. He had always been amazed by scientific approaches to criminology and murder that soughtt to explain the nature of crime in society. As far as he was concerned, it all came down to one thing: power. And, inevitably, as these things go, the person that wielded it would always be one step ahead of its prey.

Young Tina Sycamore, eager to enlighten the Detective about certain things, stepped forward with anticipation.

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking everybody’s name? I read that’s what you’re supposed to do. Take names of anyone present at the crime scene.”

“Are you some kind of crime junkie Tina? Please let me be the first one to tell you not to glamorize this business.”

“No, no. Look, I think you should know something. It’s very important,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

With her blonde flowing pigtails, thigh high cut-off jeans and lips that seemed always in a pout, she reminded him of a case he’d worked back in Baltimore. The girl, Callie, was a teenage runaway turned child prostitute who managed to get herself tagged as a mule for a South American drug cartel. Callie was a sweet but naive wannabe who thought she had all the answers. That is until her body was found slit from the navel down with her entrails still leaking cocaine residue. Also discovered, inside Callie’s womb, had been the vestiges of a decaying and calcified fetus. He remembered the medical examiner at the time recounting the amount of tremendous emotional pain suffered during and after the autopsy.

Tina Sycamore, with her budding sexuality shrouded in schoolgirl innocence exemplified the contradictions of female adolescence. He could tell she was very much aware of this effect.

“What is it? What’s so urgent Tina?” He didn’t want to know.

She looked out at the faces of the citizens before her. She knew that not a one of them was beyond a good piece of gossip but, what she had to say was for his ears only. She covered her mouth and pulled him closer. It made her feel special.

“Patty Lowell was part of a big scandal way back then. About ten years ago.”

“Really? Ten years ago you were only about seven. Why would a seven year old be so immersed in the politics of a little town?”

“Don’t listen to her, whatever she’s saying. Tina’s got this active imagination,” said Mrs. Peabody, the checkout cashier at the Dixie Mart. She was also Victor Salley’s sister.

Tina, offended, put her hands on her hips and pouted like she’d probably done a thousand times before. Her lush lips were fullest when she was upset and she exuded an uncontrollable seductiveness, or brazenness, depending on how you saw it. She continued to direct her answers to him only.

“I’ve always been wise beyond my years. Patty Lowell was my babysitter back then. Plus, she kept a diary that she used to bring to the house — and guess what? I used to read it. Understand?”

“Barely,” he said and turned away.

She took him by the arm and ushered him away from the pack.

“Detective, I know some things and you can take me for an interview if you like.”

Young Tina Sycamore liked to be the center of attention, the grand dame of the ball. She was highly skilled at working an audience and Detective Litani had no doubt she would grow up to lead some man by the nose.

“Probably some seedy drifter from the big city who surprised her for a little hanky panky and something went wrong,” said Lizzie French, still trying to get in on the action. “She was a tramp and everybody knows I’m telling the truth.”

“Drifter? Hmmf. Maybe, highly unlikey. Here’s a little sidebar people — in most homicides the victim knew the killer. If nothing else, I think I have to start there.”

“He’s right,” Tina agreed proudly.

“All right folks, who found the body?”

An unassuming young boy with a catcher’s mitt took a step forward. He held his head down and spoke softly.

“I lost my ball in the mud.”

Detective Litani looked the boy over. The youngster probably never thought that this would be his day in the spotlight, an eyewitness to the discovery of a mutilated body of all things. He hoped his parents could afford the therapy the child would undoubtedly need in the years to come.

“Hi there fella. I promise to find that ball for you but I’m going to need you and your parents to come down to the Sheriff’s department, okay?”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

“What’s your name short stuff?”

“Buddy . . . Buddy Erwin.”

“That’s the Erwin boy,” said Mrs. Peabody, “His folks are in the army. He lives with his Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe.”

“Will somebody do me a favor and make sure this boy gets home immediately?”

Tina Sycamore volunteered and took little Buddy Erwin by the hand. She gave Detective Litani a lingering smile that said she was glad to do his bidding. He could only imagine but tried not to.

Detective Litani went back to his car and retrieved a camera from the backseat. He snapped several shots — one from the four corners of the scene, a long distance shot and a couple of medium-distance ones, close up shots of the body and the location of the severed finger and a few spontaneous shots of the surrounding area with no particular subject in focus. He finished the day by routinely checking for fiber details and hair strands and other possibilities of trace evidence.

Back at the Sheriff’s department, a statement by little Buddy Erwin explained how he had left the house and ran up to old man Naylor’s property to “get away”. Apparently, his uncle wanted him to eat his vegetables and as he hated digesting anything green with roots he saw it as the natural thing to do. While he was playing with his ball, he saw the dead body and ran back to tell his aunt Julia. And the rest of the story reads remarkably like Chicken Little’s famous escapade: Aunt Julia, instead of going directly to uncle Joe, since she knew nothing much moved him from his place in front of the boob tube, went straight to her church buddy Lizzie French; Lizzie French, having passed a drunken Victor Salley on his way to the Dixie Mart, yelled at him for the millionth time for being a degenerate alcoholic and subsequently mentioned there was a dead body near old man Naylor’s; Upon arriving at the Dixie Mart and to his dismay being denied more alcohol from his cashier sister, Victor did his duty to carry the word on which caused Mrs. Peabody to close the store immediately and rush to the site. In her haste she ran into Tina Sycamore who was on her way to take Bottlecap Maynard a bag of fresh new bottle caps she’d saved from the school party her parents put on for her right after high graduation this year; And then there was Luanne Reeves. She said she was just out for a walk when she chanced upon the group but Detective Litani felt she was hiding something that more than likely had to do with her husband’s unpredictable temperament.

Word of Patty’s death quickly made its way into the grapevine flooding the Sheriff’s department with one too many questions. Detective Litani anticipated that the autopsy would indicate several blows to the head by a blunt instrument of some sorts, something that most autopsies seem to generically indicate at one point or another. Yet there was little doubt that this particular case went well beyond the mundane — if anything about murder can be considered mundane. Multiple cranial injuries of any kind are nearly always fatal but someone had let out an enormous amount of rage all over the decedent, caving in the back of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Along with the cut-off finger, the person or persons responsible for her assault had made doubly sure that the defacement was over- the-top.

The next day fingerprint analysis provided an official identity confirmation that the deceased was correctly named Patty Amersyth Lowell, a former resident of the town’s orphanage. Local lore concerning Patty Lowell was scandalous. She was born in Trinity’s Land End to the mother of a Gypsy woman employed in the company of a traveling band of Gypsy artisans and entertainers.

Detective Litani knew a little of Gypsy culture from a previous relationship with a woman he met in Spain. Her name was Katarina Eloakri and she was a professor of history with concentration on the oral tradition of oppressed indigent populations throughout Europe. At the time of their courtship she was enmeshed in a battle with Spanish authorities over a wave of hate crimes against Gypsies, or Rom as they are historically known. He remembered Katarina as a passionate advocate of the Rom people so much so that there were times when her activism put her at odds with anything outside of its scope. For her, he soon became one of those liabilities and it ended as quickly as it had begun. Still, in the six months that they’d spent together she introduced him into a culture filled with hardship and pride, destruction and resurrection, but most of all, vigilance about reclaiming the dignity lost from centuries of being “the flogged mule of the world” as Katarina put it. Her lectures at the university were those of an eloquent speaker who could turn a tale with the greatest of ease and poise. Her words were powerful and fierce as she captivated her audience with Gypsy folklore that spanned from the origins of India to the present day migrant populations in the diaspora. They loved each other as hard as two people could, although neither ever uttered the word. He knew he could never replace her mission and she knew she would never settle for anything less.

Detective Litani closed his eyes and rested his head back against the armchair, with the collective files on Gypsy arrests in town dating back over twenty years balanced haphazardly in his lap. Trinity’s Land End was no different than many other places when it came to dealing with Gypsy encounters. During the summertime the Gypsies often annoyed the townsfolk by settling in campsites along the waterfront. Arrested on numerous occasions for various vagrancy charges and disturbing the peace they, nevertheless, always seemed to end up back in the same spot. Perhaps the fact that they provided a valuable slave labor source for some of the hometown mariners had something to do with it. Patty’s father, as far as anyone was able to tell, was an anonymous white man and she was abandoned shortly after birth and placed in the town’s orphanage.

He pulled out a dingy file cluttered with dust and battered newspaper clippings of women and children stationed behind tables of pottery and various artifacts. In one of the photos someone had taken a red marker and drawn a big circle around a petite woman with a daisy stuck in her hair, kneeling near a box of mementos and whatnots. Below the picture, they’d written: MORAVIA ZAFIRI LOWELL = PROVOCATEUR. The rap sheet on Moravia included six arrests dating back to the nineteen nineties on charges stemming from unlawful selling of stolen goods to various vagrancies, thefts, and breaking the noise ordinance. He held the photo closer, with his attention drawn to the woman’s long flowing apron-like, seemingly homemade, blouse pushed back just slightly off the knees as she squatted. There was something there that he couldn’t articulate at first until an even closer screening brought the matter to light; the rather thin woman had a significant growth underneath the garment. He folded the clipping and stuck it in his wallet. He ran into Sheriff Daniel as he was leaving. With only a courteous nod between the two their relationship was slowly deteriorating.

Lloyd McNally’s Children’s Orphanage was located on the outer banks of a riverbed five miles from a secluded woodland area known colloquially as the End Zone. The End Zone formed a watershed that separated many of the river basins. When he arrived at the orphanage there was still a little daylight left. He found the director outside with the kids. They were all lined up distributing sandbags around the circumference of the building.

She took a quick look at him but continued to work. As he moved closer, the first thing he noticed was the mole on her cheek. Katarina had a similar beauty affect. He was discovering that there were so many things about this case that reminded him of her.

“Hi there, I’m Detective Ray Litani with the Sheriff’s department. I’d like a word with you, Miss Jamison, is it?”

He found it interesting to watch their work habits. He remembered his mother’s stories about all the collective efforts that went into preventing wipe out from the Janus River during flood season.

“Detective, huh? Well, I’d be happy to answer any of your questions so long as you grab a bag and get in line. I don’t intend to lose my home to the Janus river.”

“All right Miss Jamison, anything you say.”

“You can call me Rebecca. What is this about?”

He fell in at the end of the line and waited for his turn.

“Actually, I’d rather we go inside,” he said while glancing at the children present, “It might not be appropriate out here.”

As soon as she was sure the orphanage was secure enough to withstand the rising tides she escorted him to the house leaving the kids outside to play.

Once inside she gave him a quick tour of the old farmhouse estate now converted into a childcare facility complete with aligning bunk beds. Four bathrooms were located in the back of the house that served its eleven occupants, including Rebecca who slept in a modest bunk of her own. The old wood furnace designed in the early eighteen hundreds was still there and being used as a heating stove and oven unit. It was located in a remodeled kitchen that expanded to include a huge oblong table and several chairs all nestled together.

“Here it’s the old meets the new Detective. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of that old furnace because it reminded me of the simplicity of things past. Trinity’s Land End is still trying to come to terms with its colonial past. I happen to believe there are some good things worth salvaging for the future. And the kids, well, they’re just grateful to have a roof over their heads and somebody to care for them.”

“I want to talk about a girl who used to live here a long time ago by the name of Patty Lowell.”

Rebecca flinched at the name. He knew immediately something was there.

“What’s wrong?”

She cleared her throat. “Pat? I remember Pat. Boy, you’re talking ancient history. I grew up with Patty Lowell. My mother was the caretaker here then. Patty and I are around the same age. We used to spend a lot of time together. She was my best friend until–”

“Until what ma’am? What is it about Patty you recall?”

“–’til she ran away that summer,” she concluded and got up from the table in despair.

He continued to jot down information in his notebook. Sometimes it was necessary for him to dissociate temporarily when gathering vital material on the victim so that he could assure himself of a thorough investigation. However, he could sense she was extremely distraught about reliving the events of the past and he knew he would have to help her help him.

He stopped writing and went over to the window where she stood silently, trying to hold back tears.

“Rebecca”, he said and placed a hand gingerly on her shoulder, “Patty’s body was found mutilated yesterday and you are my only link to her past as it stands at the moment. We–you and I–need to do everything we can to find and punish her killer. Okay?”

On hearing this she lost it completely and fell into his arms. He held her for what seemed like a lifetime and when her tears had ceased, he guided her back to the table for more questioning.

“When Pat was sixteen she ran away from here. My mother just figured it was because she was upset about the situation, you know, her plight in life as an abandoned child and all. I talked to her the night before and she was a basket case. She appeared to be in some kind of emotional and physical shock. She cringed every time I touched her and then she’d just break down and weep.”

“Did you finally get her to tell you about it? he asked, eager to have her reveal what she was so carefully avoiding.

As a result of dealing with hundreds of homicides he had learned to be concise and to the point in these matters.

“Yes, she told me all right.” It was a bare whisper but it was clear.

“You can do this”, he assured her, “Just take a deep breath.”

She did as she was told and on the next exhale let it all go. He could tell that it was a welcomed release.

“Pat said she was raped. She said nobody would believe any story a Gypsy orphan had to say even if she did have white in her. Those were her exact words. I wanted to help her so I told her I would go to the police and lie and claim to be a witness if that’s what it took. It was important to me that she not let the bastard get away with it. She said she couldn’t let me lie for her and that she had made up her mind to forget about it but a woman never forgets her rape or her rapist. You don’t just forget something like that Detective.”

“Please, call me Ray.”

She smiled and he noticed how modestly beautiful she was for the first time. It was the kind of natural beauty that came without a hint of manufactured makeup or glamor. Just like Katarina. He couldn’t stop looking at her and thinking Rebecca Jamison could have been the toast of the town anywhere but here she was showing unselfishness and human kindness to those who could really use it. If there was such a thing as altruism in its purest sense, he had found it for a second time in the form of this woman with a sense of purpose. Yes, just like Katarina. And it made a difference in the everyday horrors of a job most would find sick to their stomach.

She told him four months ago on her twenty-seventh birthday Patty reappeared in Trinity’s Land End as if nothing had ever happened. To her surprise, however, her old best friend wanted nothing else to do with her. She refused all contact. She went on to describe several occasions whereupon her efforts to regain Patty’s confidence was met with heartbreaking disdain. Shortly thereafter, Patty disappeared again only to make one last appearance as a corpse out near old man Naylor’s field.

Detective Litani spent the rest of the time with Rebecca and her kids. It was probably natural for an outsider to assume that these kids were besieged emotionally by thoughts of depression, dejection, hopelessness and despair given their position in life. To the contrary, he found that nothing could be farther from the truth. They were the most outgoing children he had ever met.

“This here’s Chadra, she’s six going on sixteen,” Rebecca smiled, “Chadra’s been with me since she was two years old. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was a victim of a hate crime.”

He took a hold of the little girl’s hand. Her skin was the darkest of all the others. Shades darker than his. Loads of curl ringlets rippled down her back. She was the most gregarious of all the children running around full stop like a locomotive and stopping only when Rebecca’s firm voice called her to attention.

“Hi Chadra, you’re a pretty little girl. You’re going to be a beautiful young woman some day I can tell.” He then turned towards Rebecca and somehow he knew that she could tell what he was wondering. It was his policeman mind that made him want to know.

“Her father? Yeah, right. Well, unfortunately some Ku Klux Klan members from nearby Ketchum Falls took issue with him stopping to get gas one night and cut his throat. His crime was being Pakistani.”

He looked deep into Chadra’s brown eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, this little girl’s gaze should have revealed a lifetime of pain but what he saw was far from it. Her rapturous giggles said it all.

“You staying for supper?” interrupted a teenage girl with a massive amount of green hair. She looked to be the oldest of the bunch.

“Don’t be presumptuous Mandy,” said Rebecca.

“That’s an interesting choice of color you have there for your hair,” he said.

“Detective, I let my children have freedom to express their own individuality. I know that doesn’t often sit well in a small town like this but I don’t care. Nowhere is it proven that because a child likes a different image other than the one society wants to prescribe that the child is automatically morally bankrupt,” said Rebecca as if she had spent a lot of time rehearsing this reprisal that was specifically designed to stave off the strange stares by the locals.

“Green is my favorite color,” he said. “And for the record, I’m not technically from Trinity’s Land End, I mean I was born here but grew up elsewhere.”

This got a smile from Rebecca and let her know that she was not in the company of one of the townsfolk who thought that way.

“I guess I can really turn it on, huh? It comes from a lifetime of having to be defensive,” she said, enveloping Chadra in her arms.

“Never mind. You remind me of another. It’s quite uncanny.” Again, his thoughts went to Katarina.

She smiled again and kissed Chadra lovingly on the forehead.

The other eight children were in the kitchen preparing what might have been a chicken casserole of sorts had it not been for the fact there was no chicken and the mysterious concoction that seemed to be taking shape resembled something you might use for plaster rather than eat.

“Would you be interested in dining with us?” she inquired, still hoping the earlier outburst hadn’t succeeded in pushing him away.

Somehow it sounded different than when the green haired girl had asked before, he thought. It was more deliberate and dare he think it, desperate. Just then another girl around seven or eight came into the room with flour all over her face. She brought Rebecca a note and then returned to the kitchen.

“Thanks Joanie,” said Rebecca and opened the small pink piece of paper.

She read the note silently and put it away quickly. Her demeanor changed. Her face took on a rattled appearance and she spoke in a measured tone.

“These girls are very skilled and we take care of each other and . . . I make sure they get the education that’s due them and I refuse to let the people of this town treat them like pond scum and . . . this is our home damn it!”

“Would you like to talk about it?” he asked not knowing exactly what it was.

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “Oh, I don’t know if it matters but Patty worked at the library for a short time before she dropped out of school.”

“Everything matters in an open case,” he said.

The meal turned out to be somewhat of a delicious surprise as the mysterious entrée quickly revealed itself to be a Cajun stew recipe one of them saw on television. It appeared to him that all the girls were indeed as responsible as Rebecca claimed they were. They had impeccable table manners for children and afterwards each child was given a task towards cleaning up the kitchen and they didn’t even make a fuss about it. It was contagious. Even he, a lifelong bachelor who dreaded housework of any kind, saw fit to roll up his sleeves and plunge right into scouring the pots and pans, in order to make a good impression of course.

That night as he was departing the orphanage and good graces of one Rebecca Jamison, caretaker, he unfolded the newspaper clipping he’d taken from the old police files and presented it to her.

“Anyone resembling this picture ever visit the orphanage while your mother was alive?”

Rebecca studied the picture intensely.

“Who is she?”

“A Gypsy from one of the summer caravans at the marina, I presume. She has a record. Her last name is Lowell.”

Rebecca looked up at him with mouth agape, struggling to find the words.

“Look closely and you can tell that she’s pregnant in the photo,” he said.

Rebecca held the picture for as long as it took for the rush of emotions to settle before giving it back to him.

“All Patty ever wanted was to know her birth mother. To feel a connection to something that was a part of her origins. My mother loved her dearly but it wasn’t enough, she was always, restless.”

“People spend a lot of time searching for the impossible,” he said, “You can’t build a life on make-believe.”

“Spoken like a true cynic. Good night, Detective,” she replied warmly and closed the door.

It wasn’t until he was pulling into his driveway that he realized the sweet and amiable Rebecca Jamison hadn’t answered his question on whether she’d ever seen the woman in the photo, Patty’s mother, around the orphanage. One thing for sure, he was certain he’d ask it again, and again, and again if necessary, until he was completely satisfied.

CHAPTER 2: THE PURITANS LEGACY

The Chinese woman emerged from the shower dripping wet. The first thing she did was reach for the bottle of body oil on the dresser and slowly pull back the nozzle with her teeth. She looked intently in his direction and playfully rocked the bottle back and forth between her thumb and forefinger.

“Do me the honors?”

It was one of her many requests that night with the first being the choice of cheap motels she’d selected for their weekly tryst. Her fetish revolved around sex in less than flattering places. Cheap motels, marooned shipyard boats,church pews, were viable places of engagement that contributed to her exciting escapades. They had been dating, if you can call it that, for a little more than a month with no clear conception as to what was to come next. She refused to tell him where she lived or what she did for a living and he accepted it all on her terms.

The arrangement involved her calling him from an undisclosed location with a set of instructions for the hookup. He was always conscientious to meet every request to her liking like a puppy dog eager to please his master.

“What kind of oil is this?” asked Detective Litani. He peered intriguingly at the mysterious liquid in the nondescript bottle.

“Open it,” she implored. “It’s erotic, for pleasure. Understand?”

He held the nozzle toward the palm of his hand and squeezed gently. She was a woman of few words. The first time they’d met, in a local downtown Baltimore bar, he had spent hours trying to pry information from her. All she’d given up that night was her name, Bai;her age, twenty-eight; and her favorite book of all time, Ibsen’s A Doll House. Since then, the unscripted alliance had proven to be wholly beneficial to both parties, with neither wanting to risk its immediate effectiveness by speculating on its inevitable dissolution.

He smiled as the palm of his hand gingerly swept across her breasts, leaving behind glistening and erect nipples.

“Go ahead, suck on them a little,” she insisted in the unique demanding and oddly sweet persuasive way she had.

He obliged by hungrily attacking her breasts, one after the other,and lashing out at the nipples. After a couple of minutes had gone by he withdrew his mouth from her flesh and placed his head on her shoulder. And then, it happened. It was too late to try and pretend. He watched as the first tear drops left his face and hit her bare skin. He waited for her to inquire as to what was troubling him but it wasn’t her style. Instead, she took the bottle of oil away from him and pushed him down to his knees.

He hadn’t felt this vulnerable since his first kill. He had been a rookie when it happened and it continued to devastate him to this day. The shooting was ruled “suicide-by cop”. It’s a common term in the world of law enforcement that signifies the forced shooting of a victim by a cop in which the victim aims to kill himself by bating the cop into firing. His bosses at the top had all complimented him at the time for a job well done and labeled his actions a “good shoot” but their reassurance failed to clear his conscience. Still, that incident wasn’t what was bothering him today. He wanted to talk about it, to try and articulate his feelings of melancholy to a sex partner who wasn’t interested in communication, in the traditional sense.

“You know, I feel like, well,” he mumbled right before she poured several drops of oil on her middle finger and let it slide in and out of his mouth. “The police can’t stop crime. The doctors can’t cure the sick. Our postmodern institutions have failed us.”

He didn’t expect an answer although it would have been refreshing. However, he had known her long enough to understand that part of the enthusiasm of their sexual dalliances rested in its casualness; the primary objective being to relieve sexual tension and it was important that everything serve the plot. In other words, he was beta to her alpha.

With little afterthought of the question he’d posed, she clasped her hands together, cupped the back of his head, and mashed his face hard into her pussy. She furthered the cause by throwing her head back to one side and egging him on down below with periodic thrusts.

He could feel the hard plastic nozzle of the bottle of oil grinding into the back of his head as she pushed his face forward. He reached up to part the lips of her outer labia and simultaneously crammed his tongue within the inner fleshy folds. She whimpered slightly. For the next five minutes she allowed him to eat her pussy uninterrupted. As he grabbed on to her clitoris for dear life his thoughts went temporarily to his poor dead mother. Tomorrow he would be on a plane en route to Trinity’s Land End to lay her to rest. Her death, just days ago from breast cancer, marked the third biggest event in his life this year; the first was his departure from the FBI to the Baltimore PD and the second, the end of his relationship with the woman he loved. He was well aware of what it meant to be on the rebound and was fortunate his involvement with Bai was allowed to be what it was. He had to admit that the absence of guilt made it quite liberating.

As he massaged her clitoris with his tongue she squirted a nominal amount of oil in her hand then subsequently, pushed his mouth away. Before he knew what was happening she was plying her pussy with the hot liquid, using her talented fingers to mesh it with the lather of his saliva and her natural sex juices.

“So kind to the skin”, she moaned.

He watched attentively as she methodically dispersed the oil upward from her nether regions to across her midsection. He could not tell with any certainty whether she was in need of any assistance and so he waited mercilessly at her feet, literally, looking for any indication.

As she worked herself into a frenzy he could sense her orgasm mounting and he wanted very much to be a part of it. With the urge guiding him, he grabbed a firm hold of her buttocks and plunged his tongue along the length of her inner thighs causing her body to quiver.

“You have a lot of pain, use it to your advantage,” she said, while pushing him back against the floor and straddling him. Perhaps this was her way of responding to his previous emotional plea.

Until now he’d given little thought to his throbbing and fully erect condom sheathed cock,opting instead to follow the plan she’d designed for him.

She mounted him with an unbridled passion he hadn’t felt in a while and fucked him with reckless abandon. She ran her fingers over his chest and closed her eyes.

“The skin”, she explained, “It is our greatest sex organ.”

With eyes wide shut she leaned her body carefully forward and kissed him vigorously.

He wrapped his fingers around her waist and met her feverish bucking with strong upward thrusts of his own. She aimed the bottle and squeezed the last remaining droplets of oil on to his sweaty torso. Before long the tip of her tongue had found its way to his navel with a vigorous and systematic swirling action. He loved the breathlessness in her voice as barely audible echoes of “Mmm” graced her lips with each tenacious tongue lashing. All the while she continued to impale herself on his cock.

Without a doubt, she was the most sensationalist woman he’d ever known. She liked to put on a show and his heart sped up every time he thought about her taking charge during one of their clandestine meetings.

She came over his cock not once but three times, riding herself into delirium. As he was about to release his very own load, she quickly pulled herself up from her straddling position to squat firmly on top of his hard cock for the final denouement.

He closed his eyes and tried to think about his impending trip to Trinity’s Land End. It was not a trip that he’d have willingly made by any stretch of the imagination. Some might say that his hatred for the place was irrational, purely based on an unfounded prejudice, and they might be right. With any luck the burial would go off without a hitch and he’d work tirelessly to make the final preparations to put his family’s house on the market and return as soon as possible to his life on the Baltimore PD.

These were the thoughts that occupied his mind as he came.

****************

Detective Litani arrived at the library around noon. He found a note placed on the door explaining that Lizzie French had stepped out for lunch. The community library’s only full time employee was the typical eccentric old lady that you often found in small towns. She was dogmatic and religious to a fault. Before she finally succumbed to breast cancer, his mother had often spoke about Dizzy Lizzie, as she was fond of calling her. Mrs. Litani held very strong opinions about the woman who once called a town meeting to lambaste her for removing the American flag that the Historical Society had decided everyone needed on their front lawn.

“Son, that woman was put on earth to torment me. I am proud of what this country offered me as an immigrant but never felt it mandatory to keep a flag on the lawn. Is that wrong hijo?” she would ask and he would counter with, “Only if you believe it to be so mama.”

According to his mother there had been at least three occasions in which she and Dizzy Lizzie had nearly come to blows. He was so enthralled in his remembrance of his mother that he didn’t notice the other subject of his vast recollections standing behind him on the library steps glaring upward with disapproval.

“Detective Ray Litani, what do I owe the displeasure?” snarled Lizzie French in true old spinster fashion.

He turned around to see her standing there clutching an apple in her hand. He wondered if she had plans to hit him with itto make up for all the debacles she’d had with his mother so very long ago.

“The message says you left for lunch.” He looked down at his watch. “I didn’t expect you back so early. It’s only ten past the hour.”

His gaze was temporarily diverted to her attire. She wore a nondescript black dress with a neck length so high he wondered if she had trouble breathing in the thing. The sleeves were overwhelmingly frilly and long enough to completely cover her arms and the hemline was practically two inches or so from the floor. Standing there in full seventeenth century regalia, she evoked images of early settler Puritan women. It peaked his interest to wonder if she was wearing a corset underneath.

“Just like a Litani not to pay attention. Must have something to do with that crazy bloodline. Anyway, it says I went out to get lunch. It doesn’t say I planned to take a full lunch hour. I only need an apple, which is good enough. One mustn’t overdo it.”

“Are you on a diet?”

She blew past him with a quiet animosity and unlocked the library doors.

“I believe in asceticism Mr. Litani like my Puritan forefathers. Purity of the body and mind is a blessing. After all, a greedy palace is the Devil’s playground. Glory be,” she said and closed her eyes.

She snatched the sign from the door and looked back at him once more before entering. It was a scolding look of defiance emblazoned with a fiery attitude that gave one pause.

“I guess you’re here to find out what I thought about Patty Lowell. What can I say about Patty Lowell? Well for starters, don’t expect me to say anything nice because she was a slut. Hmmpf. She was a promiscuous young girl who grew up to be an even more promiscuous young woman. She indulged in everything and anything. No doubt it never occurred to the little tramp that her legacy of shame would be the death of her one day.”

“Someone murdered Patty Lowell Miss. French, she didn’t die because of bad morals. Just to be clear,” she confirmed.

The remark made the spinster suck her teeth and shake her head obstinately. “One and the same Detective, one in the same. If she’d led a decent God fearing life she’d still be alive. I am sure of it. God hates ugly. The truth is in the Scripture, praise God.”

She then clasped her hands together and looked up towards either the ceiling or Heaven, depending on your preference.

As time went by their conversation degenerated into a lot of awful pauses and uncomfortable looks. Meanwhile Lizzie French continued to stack the books as well as cram the good Book down his throat. She was certainly consistent. He had to give her that. That is about all he would give her. As he jotted down fragments of information he could not help but stop periodically to look around the place at the empty tables and cubicles. Back in Baltimore, on a weekday, the libraries were always filled with dozens of bibliophiles and routine researchers. With Lizzie French as the primary overseer of the town’s community library he figured not many people wanted to come around. The grim librarian elicited in him a great deal of feelings but he tried desperately to remain calm for the sake of professionalism. Besides, there were far worse people than Lizzie French in the world and with more resources to cause havoc.

“Please try and think back to the day she quit her assistant’s job here at the library? I know it was a little over a decade but there may be something still fresh in your mind about her attitude that day. Did she say anything was troubling her?”

“She didn’t quit”, Lizzie quickly retorted and stopped what she was doing to face him head on. “I remember that day fondly. I got rid of her. She was trouble — her and that Rebecca Jamison. Two peas in a pod.”

“Rebecca Jamison — the young woman who runs the orphanage that helps needy kids?”

She took a deep breath, so deep he thought she just might explode right on the spot in a hail of apple guts that comes from a long time of starving oneself for piety’s sake. He stepped back just in case because you never, ever know.

“I don’t see one thing noble about raising children to be heathens. Those little misfits at the orphanage don’t even go to church. She refuses to send them. I asked her about it and she told me she wasn’t in the habit of forcing religious dogma on her children or some such nonsense like that. It’s beyond reproach.”

She cast a disparaging eye at him and picked up a new addition to the archives. It was a book by conservative media guru Ann Coulter. She paraded it around for him to see like it was the Gospel of St. Luke.

“This lady here knows how important the fight against the treacherous liberal media is. She’s a God fearing woman like me. Let me enlighten you as to how Trinity’s Land End got those little dandies at the orphanage in the first place. It’s because of the outsiders. Outsiders move here hoping to de-Christianize good pious citizens and they spread their perverted behavior and they leave behind bastard seeds. We all bear the mark of original sin but only a small select group will be spared that final day from hellfire.”

Detective Litani was numb for a second. Something hit him. It was a flashback to his high school days and the history lesson on Calvinism. It scared the hell out of him then and there was still nothing comforting about it now. And come to think of it that picture of Ann Coulter on the book jacket didn’t inspire in him any feelings of harmony or goodwill towards your fellow man. He wanted to tell Lizzie that but to his dismay she had more to say on the subject of sin before her time was up.

“Are you listening to me? Patty Lowell was a whoremonger. You can put that on the record.”

He cleared his throat. He actually found it quite amusing when people used the term whoremonger to unilaterally discuss their rage against sex outside of traditional procreation concepts. It is such an archaic word rooted in Old English etymology and nobody really understands the proper use of the term but everyone uses it to incite disgust and vitriol of the most heinous kind. Most of all, he found hilarity in the exponential heights of comedy in the term’s proliferation of use by angry zealots of all religions.

“Getting back to the point Miss. French, did Patty ever say anything peculiar or talk about reasons she might have for leaving Trinity’s Land End so sudden back then? You see if only I can establish what the last days of her life here were like, before she left. I have reason to believe her leaving town as a teenager has a direct correlation to the sudden reappearance a couple of months ago before her murder.”

She looked at him hard as if to declare once and for all that her interest in Patty Lowell’s death and anything leading up to the aforementioned incident, or blessing as she might have called it, was virtually nil.

“You’re talking about ancient history, you hear me? It’s best you know now that we don’t like dragging up the past around here. And I wasn’t her confidante. All I know is she sinned from morning to night. That’s what I know. Drinking. Carousing. Parading around in revealing outfits. Dear God, she went around with every boy in the neighborhood growing up. Lucy Jamison was running the orphanage back then and she let Patty and that Rebecca of hers break curfew all the time to go whoring. It was downright disgraceful. I recall one time your departed mother even defended the young tramps when I caught them fooling around with the Bobby twins down by the Janus river. Shameful it was, in the eyes of the Lord.”

“Well, we can’t all be blessed with the saving grace like yourself,” he said.

“You think this is a joke?” You think you can come here to my sanctuary and ridicule my beliefs?”

“With all due respect Miss. French, this is a library not a church. And the only person making light of a situation seems to be you regarding my murdered victim. I don’t get to chose the victim, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Why did you come back to this town? You don’t belong here and you know it. We have a town’s sheriff. We don’t need any special police force,” she said.

He bowed his head and took it all in stride. She was partly right. He didn’t belong here and he was very much aware of that fact. Still, what Lizzie French and others failed to realize was something that he had come to understand during his formative years with the FBI. It isn’t whether you belong or not. It’s what you do while you’re there.

“One thing I don’t understand. If you hated her so much then why hire her to work here in the first place?”

“That wasn’t my idea. Oh no, Mr. Childress pressured me into that. That man has a lot of clout in this town but at least he goes to church.”

“Childress? The venture capitalist”?

“And town benefactor, Detective Litani, the man helped this community to rise from the ashes, helped it to be born again.”

“What’s he got to do with Patty Lowell?”

“Well, the little slut did some volunteer work for his company over in Infinity City. Later on, he said I was doing the decent thing by giving her some working hours here at the library. I told him there wasn’t one single solitary thing in this world decent about Patty Lowell. It all came from her mother, she was one of them Gyp”

“Thank you Miss French, that’ll be all,” he interrupted with the sturdy wave of a hand that caused her to jump back with caution. “If I need anything else I know where to find you.”

“I don’t imagine you’ll be joining us at Congregational Church on Sunday, huh Detective? It’s the oldest one in New England I’m proud to say. It’s a matter of record that even our forefathers used to attend,” she announced proudly.

And then she tried something that was probably meant to be a smile but unfortunately her face was not used to contorting in such a favorable way. The result was a gross distortion that did not suit her well at all. In fact, it ended up looking more like she suffered from a rather unpleasant case of gas and was in need of a healthy dose of bicarbonate soda to clear up the problem.

“No, I don’t imagine I will. I’m more of a non-practicing type myself. My parents were Catholic though. I was once an altar boy believe it or not.”

She gave him the evil eye or something akin to it.

“What I believe is that you look like a man whose spent a lot of time engaging in pleasures of the flesh. Hmmpf, and the Litani folks never were one for true honest to God religious inspiration. What can you expect when you mix all kinds of races. And all that Catholicism is nothing but worshiping false idols. All that pomp and circumstance. And just where are you going to be when Judgment Day comes?”

He didn’t bother to answer. It was no use. It was one of those questions where nothing you said would have made the slightest difference. In fact, it was a trick question. She might as well have asked him the square root of Tuesday. It was simply one of those thoroughly incomprehensible questions that made sense only to the person who asked it.

As he was leaving, he could have sworn he heard her mutter “