A Fragment Too Far

by Dudley Lynch

  Now that I was seeing it again, I could tell that it was a long belt — one that had been worn hard. Its surface was so distressed that I wasn’t sure about the original color. I was guessing black, but it could have been a dark gray. The surface still had that bumpy leather look in the places where it wasn’t worn smooth. It seemed wider than most men’s belts.

  As Doc Konnie fiddled with it, I was reminded of something I already knew. Women don’t tend to treat things like men do. If I’d reached for the belt on the table, I’d have grasped the buckle and dragged the rest off until it dropped toward the floor. Folded it a couple of times to make it more manageable. Only then would I have invited my onlooker to examine it.

  Doc Konnie treated the belt like a pastry in the making. She left it lying on the table surface. Cleared away anything that might impede it. Then unwound it slowly the length of a belt loop or two at a time. Almost like she was kneading it. Taking care all the while to protect its position on the tabletop. She was arranging it so that the belt surface was facing me.

  Not until the beat-up strip of leather extended along most of the table did she step back. Then she reached for another pair of latex gloves. Waited for me to slip my hands into them. And gestured that I was free to reach for the belt and examine it close-up.

  My intention was to start with the buckle and do the man’s thing — let the rest of the belt hang free, double it up, and examine it a few inches at a time. First on one side, then on the other.

  But that never happened.

  As I stepped toward the table, I realized several things. Any one of them would have shocked me. Taken together, they left my knees close to buckling.

  I realized that the belt had been personalized. The letters carved or stamped — I couldn’t tell which — in the center of the belt were clear enough from a few inches away. Worn or not, they spelled “Sheriff John.”

  The buckle removed all doubt. The initials etched in it had long since lost their sparkle but not their power to identify. “JAM.”

  I’d seen that belt before. Many times. It had belonged to my father, Sheriff John Aubrey McWhorter. A few seconds earlier, if someone had asked me where it was, after thinking about it, I’d have said, “Probably in his casket.”

  From the look on Doc Konnie’s face, I’d gotten the casket part right.

  I searched her visage for the slightest sign that my fear was misplaced. But the look in her eyes wasn’t changing.

  “You found this belt in the box containing the professor’s corpse?”

  Her chin dipped twice in confirmation. Then she reached out and grasped my wrist. I recognized the gesture as one offering to join in my consternation. When she didn’t let go, I realized the worst was yet to come. I’d never seen those Greek eyes look as sad as they did as she shared what came next. “The dead man, I’m thinking he was strangled with the belt, neh.”

  * * *

  The skin oils that form fingerprints are nonvolatile, meaning they don’t vaporize. If left undisturbed, they can stay around a long time. Would a near-water-tight cedar box buried four feet underground in dry soil for twenty years be disturbance-free enough?

  Doc Konnie was reading my thoughts. “No prints I have found. Wiped? — could be. Deteriorated, maybe. Maybe not ever there. Don’t know. Just, όχι. No prints I find.”

  “Other things in the cedar box?”

  “Only the Holy Scriptures. Same again, όχι.” No, she was saying.

  “And the cause of death?”

  “I do tests more. But for now, I listen to the bones. The hyoid in the neck, it is broken.”

  “A homicide, then?”

  “Neh.” Yes, she was saying.

  I turned the subject to the other homicides. Told her that I’d read her report on the rat poison and asked her if that discovery had surprised her.

  She said it had been no surprise that the nine victims found in the house had been poisoned — the absence of other possibilities pointed to that. But she hadn’t suspected it had been done with an aldicarb-based pesticide. She’d never had a case like this before. Said finding Tres Pasitos responsible for homicides in America was almost unheard of. She’d done a search and found only one attempted Tres Pasitos homicide on record. Someone had put the deadly pellets in a couple’s coffee. An alert hospital lab had detected the chemical traces and saved their lives.

  “I will drink no Abbot County coffees for now. You will not drink the coffees, neh?”

  “I’ve always been a tea drinker. So, no, no coffee for me.”

  “And you will look to find who serves this coffee to rats and physicists in Abbot County?”

  “My best people are already lifting the lid on every coffee pot we can find.”

  When she headed for the door that led to her office, I knew we were moving on. The discussion about lethal coffee had been adjourned sine die.

  I followed her like an obedient puppy.

  She swept behind her desk. Plowed through a pile of file folders. Came up with the one she was seeking.

  Said she had more news for me.

  It was about the tangerine-colored fragment of plastic she’d found embedded in the hip bone of our tenth victim. She said it was from the front grill assembly of a Ford F-150 pickup. Which side, she didn’t know. The model year — that wasn’t so definite either. Anywhere from 1997 to 2003. The assemblies for those models had all been the same.

  “You will ask LoCash Cowboys to change their Madisonville Ford truck song, όχι?”

  I had no idea who the LoCash Cowboys were, but what Abbot County’s ME did next left me with little doubt.

  Doc Konnie dropped into an Elvis Presley crouch and began to mimic thrumming a guitar then let loose a ridiculous takeoff on a C&W-type song about an F-150 pickup.

  We’d all get along better in a F-150 pickup,

  But don’t order coffee, darlin’,

  Especially the three-step kind.

  The coffee, it’s no start up, it’s a hiccup,

  And you quickly run out of time.

  A number of things amazed me about her performance. But what startled me most was her pronunciation. It was perfect when she was singing.

  She shot me a glance. Not the mischievous look I expected, but a stoic and resigned one.

  “Humor. To it we go when our sanity needs a cover.”

  Her mangling of the English language was back, but she was right.

  I nodded. “Good place for our humanity to hunker down.”

  She stepped around her desk. Shoved the file folder with the report on the headlight deep into my midriff. Gave me a hug.

  But I had another folder to look at first. And I hoped that it had a clue. I was desperate to know how and why my father’s beloved belt had ended up around the neck of Abbot County’s most well-known missing person.

  Chapter 48

  Finding the large rust-colored accordion-type folder wasn’t going to require any searching. I saw it the moment I entered my dining room. The folder took up a quarter of the space in the last box in line along the far wall — No Cock Crowed Box No. 6. Its tab read, in letters bunched close together, “Dr. Wilson Carmichael, Missing Person.”

  In our marathon sweep through the boxes on Saturday, Angie and I had paid little attention to the folder. Main reason? The folder had intimidated us. It was jam-packed, and we knew if we started removing its contents, they were going to become the kudzu on the table. Spread everywhere. They would defy any effort to organize them. Plus, after scanning the first few documents, we hadn’t seen much of interest. They did nothing at all to explain why Dr. Wilson Carmichael had gone missing. Or where. Or who might be involved. My father and his investigators seemed clueless.

  A professor missing for more than twenty years wasn’t a priority, just another puzzling circumstance involving local college professors. And Flagler was drowning in
weirdnesses involving local college professors. Seeing no answers, we’d soon lost interest.

  But things had changed.

  These excuses for ignoring the folder in Box No. 6 no longer seemed valid. Acknowledging that seemed to blast a hole in the dam holding back my memories of my father. Now they flooded in.

  I remembered how I used to sit on his lap as a youngster and he would let me play with his gun. It didn’t matter that the gun wasn’t loaded. The very idea drove my mother to conniption fits. But then my dad allowed me to do a lot of things.

  On weekends and during summers, I often took the prisoners in our spartan little jail their two-a-days. I slipped their food trays under the door and handed them their drinks through the bars. In the field, I accompanied my dad to many a crime scene. He didn’t allow me to help cover bodies of the deceased, but I stood close to more than a few upturned cowboys boots while he or one of his deputies did the draping. I went with him to target shoot, using the sheriff department’s high-powered patrol rifles. At first, he positioned his large frame behind me so the gun’s recoil wouldn’t knock me backwards. But as I grew older, I could shoot them without him anchoring me.

  As I reflected on these memories, most of them treasured, I realized that these experiences were in large measure the reason I’d become a law officer myself. They also reminded me of something else. My father had been a very private man. There was a lot about him I’d never known. Now it looked like I was about to learn more than a few of his secrets.

  I carried the bulky container to my kitchen. Sat it in a bar chair. Moved some of its contents to the counter to make the box — and the chair — more stable. I made myself a glass of iced tea, perched on a stool, and began to read. I intended to skip nothing. Look at every piece of paper — typed or handwritten. Every newspaper clipping. Every receipt, every business card, every photocopy. And absorb every possible meaning in every image I came across. That’s what I intended.

  But it didn’t happen that way.

  The reason was the letters.

  They were in the first manila folder I removed from the accordion folder. A substantial file, crammed with numerous pieces of monarch-sized white stationery, each with a matching envelope stapled to it. The envelopes were all addressed to “The Honorable John Aubrey McWhorter, Sheriff of Abbot County, County Courthouse, Flagler, Texas.” In the lower left-hand corner of each was the word “Personal.” Underlined.

  The penmanship of the sender was ruler-straight. And not only the written lines. The cursive letters on the envelopes and the letters had an upright primness. You’d have thought they’d been to etiquette class.

  On the other hand, the writer had a penmanship style that struck me as giddy. Or bouncy. All the e’s were capitalized — and shaped backwards. The prongs flowed from the right, not the left. The descender on a capital Q had a short dash through it so that it looked like the Venus symbol for female. In letters like lowercase g’s, d’s, and p’s, the loops were larger than they needed to be. And descenders on the lowercase y’s looked like fish hooks and pushed the next line lower than it otherwise would have been.

  It pointed to a woman’s handwriting. But all this became insignificant the moment I began to read.

  From the beginning, it was clear that the world I’d woken up in this morning was not going to survive to the end of this file.

  Perhaps I’d feel a sense of psychological devastation later on. Maybe I was going to need a therapist to help me sort it all out. At the moment, my greatest hunger wasn’t for a shrink but for Angie’s presence. For her steady Cool Hand Luke counsel. But I wasn’t going to wait for it. When you are seeing lies in the landscape of your life being stripped away one by one, you want it sorted and done. At least, this was the way I was feeling.

  So much so that I lost all track of time.

  * * *

  The letters were arranged by date beginning with September 26, 1997. Most were only a single page. Most contained only a few lines. The salutation was the same on all of them: “My dear sheriff.” And all were signed the same way: “Faithfully yours, The Prairie Canary.”

  The first line of the first letter read, “Question for you: do you favor power or principle?”

  The second line read, “I think you are a person of principle. And they’re setting you up That’s why I want to tell you how to find Wilson Carmichael.”

  Only the letter didn’t tell my father how to find Professor Carmichael. Its few sentences read like a manifesto. A run-on manifesto; there wasn’t much punctuation. But each new sentence started with a capital letter and had a tiny measure of separation from the sentence preceding it. The meaning was not hard to follow.

  She said Abbot County had been taken over by people of power.

  This had confused people of principle. They couldn’t tell which lies and which liars in Abbot County warranted a close look and which were a waste of time. Unless these judgments were made soon, Flagler’s underbelly was about to be ripped open like it had been sliced by a samurai sword.

  She said this had gone on long enough. She could help it end. She’d write again soon.

  She did on October 8.

  The next letter took its cue from an interview my dad had given the local paper two days earlier. The Prairie Canary said he had been wrong to suggest that Carmichael’s disappearance might stem from a midlife crisis.

  “You said you based this view on what the wife has told you. But again, you were told lies.”

  She — and again, I was just guessing at the writer’s gender — said Carmichael’s problems at home had begun long before he reached middle age. But that these hadn’t led to his disappearance.

  She closed, “He got sucked into the conflict. You need to discover who is at war in Abbot County.”

  She promised to write again soon.

  But she didn’t. Not until March 12 of the next year.

  My dear sheriff,

  Forgive me for pulling a Professor Carmichael. For disappearing myself.

  You could say that I’ve been at war too.

  It’s especially difficult when your child

  1) doesn’t know who his real father is.

  2) has a father who doesn’t want him to know.

  3) has a mother who isn’t his father’s wife.

  4) has been told that someone is his mother when she isn’t.

  I then am one of the liars.

  I also know things that may not be lies. But you’re going to have to decide which is which.

  She promised to begin spilling Flagler’s secrets in her next letter.

  She did and she didn’t. She seemed to be offering an important clue, but it was enigmatic.

  The next letter was dated March 20. It was brief. Only three sentences.

  Have you ever wondered why crime in Flagler seems so well organized?

  And yet, we have no organized criminals in clear view.

  Is it because the crimes are something else or is it the criminals who aren’t what they seem?

  There was no promise to write again, soon or otherwise. But the winds move at a brisk pace on the West Central Texas prairies in March, and so did the Prairie Canary’s imagination.

  The next letter was dated a mere two days later.

  I hope my letter the day before yesterday didn’t confuse you.

  Usually when we think of organized crime, we think of the Italian Mafia.

  Flagler’s organized criminals are too genteel for that.

  But it’s the same old, same old. The defenders against the adventurers.

  Since biblical times, it’s been a fearful thing to get caught between them. As Professor Carmichael found out.

  She added,

  More to come soon.

  “More” was dated March 26. As usual, the letter was short.

  I know you know a thing or two about religion. But to unra
vel Flagler’s mysteries and crimes, you’ll need to know more than your Sunday-school-shaped understanding of religion can provide. So don’t worry about the bookish issues. Focus on practicalities. And on people.

  She’d say more about which people and which practicalities in her next writing.

  She did so in a letter dated April 2.

  Even twenty-plus years later, reading it caused the muscles around my eyes to tighten. My father’s reaction must have been similar.

  The Prairie Canary said she had gone sleepless for several nights wondering what to do with the information she was about to reveal. She was going to trust my father’s judgment. And his sense of discretion.

  Discovering the fate of Wilson Carmichael was all about uncovering secrets. Helping my father uncover secrets was why she’d started writing. But she hadn’t anticipated that she’d need to reveal secrets so personal.

  He’d have to keep the secret she was about to share with him or there would be no hope of uncovering the others.

  But she never said what that secret was. At least, not in that letter or any of those that followed. Over the next five months, she wrote nine more letters to my father. There were numerous references to Thaddeus Huntgardner. She said Huntgardner had let his life passions cause him to retreat from the rational. He genuinely believed that the piece of space junk he’d brought to Flagler harbored the potential to change the world. He believed the aliens who had manufactured his fragment were returning for it. And when they came — to Flagler, of all places — all the technological and spiritual systems of thinking that had preceded them in history would be antiquated.

  This was why Huntgardner had selected the few members of his “Mafiosi” with great care. First, they had to be physicists who had trained with him at the University of the Hills. And they had to share his curiosities and passions. None was permitted to take a job outside the United States. This was so they could assemble on short notice.