Cold Crossover

by T. R. Kelly

  “Cold garage, but a hot lunch.”

  Arnold Dawson, my favorite deputy in the entire county.

  “Well, look who decided to join us,” Dawson smirked. “Our own private ace in the hole. Looks like we pulled out all the stops now. You just being here, Coach, makes me feel so much more confident. With your vast amount of experience, you’ve probably already got this case cracked. I mean, we can all probably go home right now.”

  “Arnold,” Harvey said. “Try to behave yourself.”

  “Harvey asked,” I said, loud enough for the group to hear. “So I came up.”

  Dawson shot me a nasty glare, then rotated his gaze, now nearly starry-eyed, into the cardboard box he balanced on his meat hook forearms. Odds were good he’d drool on his jacket before he could unwrap one of several foot-long sandwiches.

  “Right off the grill from that new Philly cheese steak place on Main,” Dawson said.

  “I should have figured my loyal deputy would make a side trip at this hour,” Harvey said. “But do us all a favor and hand out those things at the top of the driveway, away from any possible evidence. By the way, what was cookin’ at the office?”

  “Two-bit stuff,” Dawson said, “and a lot of curious callers about this Rice thing.”

  “You ready?” He nodded toward the box.

  “Yeah, but give me a handful of napkins,” Harvey said. “Dorothy’ll kill me if I bring this shirt home with a grease stain.”

  “She’s not gonna care,” Dawson said. “That shirt’s been around the block a few times. Almost ready for the gardening drawer, or Goodwill.”

  Harvey pointed a warning finger at Dawson and dug into the box.

  “Say, Coach,” Dawson said. “What was this guy Rice like?” He crammed a healthy portion of a French roll stuffed with barbecued pork into his mouth and began munching. It didn’t keep him from talking. “You must have seen him at some open houses, maybe a Realtor conference?’’

  Repeating information was not one of my favorite pastimes, much less to a nitwit I despised. But other officers were listening.

  “As I told your boss, just a nice—and successful—guy. He worked a lot with the white-wine-and-brie crowd on Queen Anne and the Eastside. Upper-end homes like this one that most of my customers couldn’t afford. Down to earth, though. Usually did what he said he’d do.”

  “Hey, Ernie,” Harvey said. “Could you make a list of other agents, maybe home-services people, for Arnold to talk to? Owners of other agencies . . ? Let’s see if Rice had a run-in with any competitor, pissed anybody off.”

  “Will do. I’ll start with the folks in my office, find out who knows who. Probably can get you some names before the end of the day.”

  “I’ll be poking around here with the forensics people into the night anyway,” Harvey said. “One of them lifted a couple of sets of prints he’s trying to trace. Some guy in L.A. who had a government job.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “It seems half of California has moved here the past few years.”

  Harvey pulled a pair of wadded black leather gloves from a side pocket, crammed in one hand, then the other, and tapped my elbow. “Let’s go take a peek down the sandspit. Walk with me a minute.”

  We turned and marched up the driveway, through the bright yellow-black crime scene tape that Dawson had just redone. Then down Sandspit Road toward the Dolan place, leaving the investigative team to comb the murder scene at the Sherrard house. In the distance, an icy fog crept below the ridgeline on the far side of the valley and rolled halfway across the lake like a fluffy white sheet pulled to one side of a huge celestial bed. A thin line of blue separated it from the thunderheads directly above.

  Harvey paced with his hands jammed in his jacket pockets. We stopped at the driveway with the sign Dolans’ Daze Off. He spoke, not taking his eyes off the gorgeous log structure.

  “Did the Dolans and Sherrard have anything in common? Maybe with old man Dolan, or Jim Junior?”

  “Zero, at least that I know about. Could not have been more different. New arrival versus old-timers. Uptight city boy against laid-back, crazy lake guys.”

  Harvey turned and looked straight at me. “What kind of crazy?”

  We walked and talked down Sandspit Road until it intersected with North Shore Drive. I told Harvey about some of Jim Senior’s booze-boosted shenanigans, including decorating his classic 1952 nineteen-foot Chris Craft runabout On Assignment for every lake parade and holiday occasion. He always covered his bases, especially when he was playing hooky from work. He told his kids: “If anybody from the office comes by the house looking for me, just tell them I’m out on assignment.”

  “Senior” was well known to the Skagit County Sheriff Department and the North Fork Police Department for many reasons. He reportedly recorded the fastest time from the lake to North Fork when he sped an unheard-of eighty miles an hour in his 1966 Mercury Cougar on the treacherous section between Big Lake and the Finn Settlement. Senior was rushing to get Martha to the Skagit Valley Community Clinic after she slipped on her full-length, slit-to-the-thigh Cher ensemble and fell on the dock during a Fourth of July costume bash, knocking her unconscious and breaking three ribs.

  On another occasion, a hot day in June before Linn’s senior year had come to a close, Dolan got wind that the Washington High’s annual Senior Lockout Party was scheduled for the following weekend at the lake. He wasn’t eager to have a bunch of beer-fueled teenagers racing their daddies’ outboards on the lake, so he dressed up like a state park official, complete with Cool Hand Luke reflector shades and Smokey hat, and blocked the entrance to the boat launch with a series of orange road cones he swiped late one night from a county construction job on the lake road. When the kids showed up, boats packed with kegs and hot dogs, Dolan calmly informed them the launch was undergoing repair.

  One of Senior’s more controversial annual ventures was the self-christened Pull the Plug Party, an annual late-night caper that involved a small, quiet, secret flotilla—sans running lights—that demolished the beaver dams blocking the lake from the flow of Minnie Creek.

  I explained that eliminating the dams meant a lower water level around the entire lake. And that provided wider beaches, especially for folks living on or near the sandspit. But residents with short docks, no docks, or muddy lakefront objected because lower water made launching, landing, swimming, and diving more difficult or less attractive. Depending upon where you lived and the type of property you owned, the lake levels were serious business. But Senior just enjoyed the clandestine thrill of the escapade.

  At dusk on Pull the Plug Night, boats began arriving at the Dolans’ beach and dock. Many of the neighbors paid no mind; a gathering at the Dolans’ was no surprise at any time of day or night. Insulated plastic ice chests filled with push-button cans of Rainier Beer (“Vitamin R”) and the animal-logoed Schaefer (“The one beer to have when you’re having more than one”) were flanked by buckets of Lay’s, Fritos and French onion dip.

  One night, as the procession of dinghies and kayaks slowly drifted on the black passage about halfway between the lake and the small waterfall where the outlet fell into Minnie Creek, Junior and I came upon a dam that wasn’t built by beavers. Somebody had hand-driven four metal pilings and crossed them with sturdy boards and wire mesh. Whoever did it got it done with a heavy sledgehammer, and thought the Pull the Plug guys would not check as far down as the little waterfall.

  By the time we twisted, wiggled, turned, and cussed all of the pipes from the suction created by the mucky bottom, loaded them into an aluminum dinghy, and freed the remaining logs, we were dripping with perspiration. Our arms were covered with mud, and we were in desperate need of cold beverages.

  “Jim Senior told me that night that he’d been pulling the plug for forty years and had never seen or heard of any manmade blockade,” I said. “The next morning, everybody was feeling rough around the edges.”

  “I can imagine there were a few bodies moving slowly th
at next day,” Harvey said.

  “Got that right. We eventually got down to the dock with our coffee and found the dinghy carrying the metal pilings nearly submerged on the shore. The five-gallon gas tank, tethered to the motor by its fuel line, bobbed near the middle of the boat. Lake water covered the floor boards, blue indoor-outdoor carpet.”

  “What the hell happened?” Harvey asked.

  “Well, it got somebody riled up. Really hit their hot button. The outboard’s drain plug rested on the driver’s seat. Taped to the chipped steering wheel was a note scribbled in black crayon on yellow binder paper: “Who Pulled the Plug?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  5 p.m., Friday, September 28, 1923

  Patrick O’Leary, the youngest son of a legendary boundary hunter mysteriously found murdered on the North Skagit, was well aware that the smell of fresh-cut evergreens was now the smell of money. Everyone wanted a share.

  “We’ve got people taking our stumps, gyppos cutting into buffers near the creeks,” O’Leary told his fellow members of the MacTavish & Oliver Lumber Company Board of Directors. “A lot of these guys are family men looking for roof shakes on a Sunday. They bring in a buckboard with the wife, pick through a logged section, then transport a few cedar bolts back home. Fine by me.Then we got larger gyppo outfits like Virgil Knight bringing in lots of men, using handcars on track we still have in use. They cut and run anytime they please and just don’t give a damn about the land.”

  Henry Oliver peered down at the new timber contracts he had negotiated with the state of Washington and Skagit County and looked out the window at the huge log dump adjacent to company headquarters at Camp One on the Skagit Flats south of North Fork.

  “Remember, we don’t own the land, Patrick, only the trees,” Oliver said. “It’s going to be difficult keeping some people off the land. Not only land where we have been but also areas where we plan to go.”

  O’Leary unraveled a crispy, cumbersome parchment from a metal cylinder, unrolled the map onto a massive round oak table, and anchored each corner with a civil engineering manual. He surveyed the company’s progress: each logging camp illustrated by a miniature tent, each stretch of track stenciled across the region like tiny black sutures on a giant’s weathered face. Camp Nine was to be the final stop of the Linnbert Railroad Company’s push into southeastern Skagit County; however the timber adjacent to the camp proved to be of excellent quality and so easy to log that the company decided to extend, establishing three more working camps over the next five years. O’Leary rested his left elbow on the map and pointed out to Oliver the tree symbols and stick-like structures representing the logging camps and successful harvests. O’Leary ran a stout index finger along the recently completed stretch of line to Camp Nine and noted that it had brought the total number of railed miles to more than thirty. Eight more miles—a tedious stretch toward a dragon-shaped muddy puddle known as Knight Lake—were scheduled for 1924. He stepped away from the table, rolled up the sleeves of his buckskin shirt, and placed his hands on his hips. “Now that, that piece of track is going to be interesting.”

  It was along this stretch that O’Leary designed and constructed a spectacular trestle, using single pilings from one-hundred-and-ten-foot-long fir trees, cross-braced by twelve-inch-diameter cedar to span one hundred and six yards across Brookens Gorge. The vibration of the huge pile-driving hammer propelled by the donkey steam engine shook the surrounding trees. The heavy iron machine sat on the tracks high above the gorge, gradually extending the railway over the abyss one piling at a time. The total weight that the span could bear was another issue.

  O’Leary was adamant that no train en route to the mill should cross the trestle with a load greater than one locomotive with four loaded freight cars. He was mindful of the crews’ safety and instructed all inbound passengers to walk across the new trestle until the timbers had properly settled. “Nobody rides on the train across this trestle except for the engineer,” O’Leary told his crew. “One engine, one engineer until the timbers settle properly. Until then, everybody else walks across.”

  O’Leary watched as Virgil Knight followed his every move into the mountains and forests of Skagit County. Knight’s “gyppo” or “come-behind” company waited until skid roads and railroad spurs were established, then worked behind the original logging crews once they had vacated a camp. Knight kept a watchful eye over the Oliver empire, quickly realizing that the MacTavish & Oliver roads were better graded, and its crews left more trees standing, than any other Northwest logging company. Knight made some of his money by felling immature and left-behind trees, and cutting shakes from healthy, stout stumps. He pocketed a majority of his revenue, however, by taking trees beyond the boundary of an owner’s timber rights, knowing that companies like MacTavish & Oliver typically cut just short of the agreed-upon border. Knight’s gang slashed and processed recklessly, laying any blame for overcutting at the feet of an “overly zealous” O’Leary crew.

  Virgil and his wife, Juleen, a former secretary in the main MacTavish & Oliver office, were familiar with the company’s procedures. They studied every timber contract recorded at the county courthouse and noted the exclusive rights of timber owners. They recognized that Henry Oliver had initially negotiated only the ownership of “standing timber” with the county. In Knight’s view, once a tree was down or deserted, it was fair game. It made no difference to them if it happened to be in a buffer zone.

  As a youth, Henry Oliver had witnessed firsthand how families had fallen apart when men were away from their homes and loved ones. As long as he had a primary say in railroad and logging matters, he would find a way to get his crews out of the forests and back to their homes on the weekends. On Friday after the shift whistle had blown, a locomotive with at least one closed-transport mulligan car, complete with sitting benches and wood-burning stove, left from camp for company headquarters near the log dump at Conway. Wives, children, and friends would meet the train, greet the loggers, and make plans for a weekend. When the MacTavish & Oliver weekend train pulled out, Knight escalated his operation.

  In court, Knight contested Oliver’s exclusive right to use the Linnbert-built railroad. Since Oliver and his partners did not own all of the land over which the railroad traveled, why should MacTavish & Oliver have absolute use of the track and access road? Knight asked the judge. Knight’s attorney contended that any improvements to county or state land should be for the benefit of all citizens, not just for the wealthy few who could afford a railroad or a road-building venture.

  “There’s more behind this decision than you think,” O’Leary told Oliver outside the Skagit County courthouse. “What happens when one of their handcars throws a spark into a trestle? Do you really think they are going to worry about a fire or repair any damage? What if we lose one of our trains because another company created a problem on our line but didn’t tell anybody else about it?” O’Leary brushed back his silver hair and stared up at the courthouse tower. He folded his arms, leaned back as far as he could, stretching his six-foot-six frame. “Henry, my men say that the judge and Virgil been known to take a sip together, play a few cards in a warehouse down by the river. Been doing so for years.”

  Tempers often flared in the woods between employees of the come-behind companies and the teams of initial contract loggers when the judge granted temporary use of the rails to the gyppo operators until he “could thoroughly research the issue.”

  Two incidents brought the controversy to a head, and the consequences of one of those events were not fully understood until decades later.

  When O’Leary closed Camp Ten at the east end of Lake Wilhelmina in 1938, the company packed up its mobile shacks and portable rooms and swung farther east above Deer Creek and the Stillaguamish River. MacTavish & Oliver signed and honored a strict extended-buffer agreement mandated by the county above the creek. They did so in the fear that aggressive logging would jeopardize the hillside and result in a possible slide during the rainy season.
Knight found the safeguarded area and logged all of its harvestable trees. Included in that region were hundreds of acres on or over the crest of the ridge above the Stillaguamish River watershed. Deer Creek, the largest tributary, wound its way through miles of the North Cascades Foothills and was home to the most prodigious steelhead-spawning region in the country. Oliver publicly chastised Knight for his unthinkable “raping of the land” above the Stilly. Knight paid a minimal fine. It was later discovered that he bribed three county commissioners for the reduced penalty.

  Two years later, a fireman aboard a Linnbert locomotive was killed and three others injured when one edge of a trestle gave way over Brookens Gorge. The train slid off the track and tumbled into Minnie Creek at the bottom of the valley. The mammoth, jet-black iron engine and three cars were disassembled, transported piece by piece up the steep incline on the backs of Linnbert maintenance crews, and reassembled on a spur on which O’Leary had posted signs and verbally warned Knight’s crew not to log near the trestle. But dozens of mature trees continued to disappear at both ends of the span, the huge barren semicircles growing every weekend. O’Leary comforted the fireman’s widow while Knight countered Oliver’s negligence and misconduct claims in the press.

  “Henry Oliver simply jinxed his own track by trying to forbid others to use it,” Knight was quoted in The Skagit Valley World in 1940. “Now the jinx has cost the life of a good railroad man. Trying to place the blame elsewhere is ridiculous. This is what happens when one man’s greed and selfishness gets the better of him.”

  When Virgil Knight died at age ninety-two, his wife moved into a nursing home in Texas and his sons, Bart and Billy, sold what remained of the gyppo logging business. That same year, one million cubic yards of sediment slid into Deer Creek. Its steelhead fishery never recovered.

  Chapter Twenty-Four