A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  “Oh,” Judy said, a quick glance to Orvid. “That’s it.”

  “Poetry aside,” Orvid said to me, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, “I believe you were about to say that you didn’t trust me, but you would be willing to share information in our common cause, finding the person who killed the little girls.”

  Orvid cleared his throat, eyes closed.

  “Yes,” I conceded. “All right.”

  “Show of good faith,” Orvid went on, wheezing a little, “I’ll start. I’ll try to finish telling you what I tried to say when you were here before. I believe I saw the murderer.”

  I was so stunned by his words that I was certain I’d heard incorrectly.

  “You saw what?” I asked.

  “I was in the abandoned train depot,” he fired back, his voice rasping. “I was there for a good part of the night. It’s a perfect vantage point, right at the bend in the tracks. You can see the crossing to your right and the trestle on the opposite side.”

  “You already told me you were there,” I prompted him.

  “I heard the crash,” he admitted. “Horrendous. I didn’t know what had happened, but since my business does not appreciate scrutiny, especially by the sort of person who would come to investigate a train wreck, I vanished almost instantly. When Judy told me the awful news, I realized I had been a witness of sorts to the events of the girls’ demise.”

  “But,” I whispered, “you didn’t actually see the wreck?”

  “No,” he said slowly, “I was quite hidden in the train station, which, as you know from your examination of the scene, is around a bend toward the center of town. I did eventually see the train, it took a remarkably long time for it to come to a standstill.”

  He coughed.

  “So,” I said, taking a breath, “you were there, but you didn’t actually see anything.”

  “Not exactly. I saw something that I think bears upon our work. I’m not quite sure how to relate it to you.”

  “Plainly,” I insisted. “Honestly.”

  I had no idea what he wanted to tell me, but I could see the reluctance tensing his entire body.

  He glanced at Judy, set down his teacup, breathing heavily. Judy touched his leg.

  “Use your damned inhaler, sweetheart,” she said gently. “Go on.”

  He complied sheepishly, an apologetic tilt of his head in my direction. He reached into the pocket of his linen pants and drew out a medicinal inhaler.

  “I have monstrous asthma,” he complained. “You would not believe the difficulty it causes me.”

  “It bothers him more when he’s upset,” Judy said, a look of complete adoration on her face as she stared at his profile.

  “That’s why I try to adopt a kind of Zen calm,” he said ruefully. “It works about seventy percent of the time.”

  “The green tea usually helps,” Judy said.

  Orvid put the inhaler in his mouth and breathed in a shot of medicine big enough for a man my size. He winced, swallowed, and returned the inhaler to his pocket.

  “Product of the albinism.” He shrugged.

  “What did you see?” I asked impatiently.

  He nodded.

  “I saw Sheriff Needle,” Orvid complied, “and Deputy Mathews, his supposed paramour, out on the tracks.”

  “After the accident.”

  “No, that’s just the point. I saw them at the trestle about a half an hour before the accident. And then they walked to the crossing, did something there, and went back to the trestle and disappeared into the wooded area there. I didn’t see them again. They were not on the scene for the accident until later.”

  “What were they doing at the trestle? And how could you see them?”

  “I see perfectly at night, as I said before,” he told me a little wanly. “But I also had night-vision binoculars.”

  “You stayed out of sight from them,” I suggested. “They didn’t see you.”

  “Correct.” He took in a deep breath.

  “And you won’t tell me what you were doing hiding in the abandoned train station with night-vision binoculars near midnight just before the train wreck?”

  “It’s not germane to the issue at hand,” he said calmly. “The point is that I saw Skidmore and Melissa behaving very strangely around the railroad tracks, and then less than thirty minutes later the girls’ Volkswagen got stuck on the tracks and a train hit it.”

  “And you examined the car,” I went on hesitantly, “to see if you could determine what had gone wrong.”

  “And I believe that the engine was turned off when it was hit by the train. The car was not running.”

  “How you determined that is a mystery to me, but I admit to having absolutely no knowledge of automobiles. Did you realize that the keys were missing from the ignition?”

  His head inclined in my direction.

  “I assumed the police confiscated them,” he began.

  “But they did not,” I assured him. “No one knows where the keys are. They weren’t in the car, on either of the girls, and nowhere to be found at the scene. They’re missing.”

  “They got knocked out of the car when the train hit, surely,” Judy offered.

  “Probably,” Orvid said, clearly not convinced.

  I could tell by his face that Orvid was reassessing his own internal assumptions.

  “This is news to you,” I said, “and it’s changing your mind about something, I can see that. Something about Skidmore and Melissa? What did you think they were doing?”

  “Please don’t ask me why,” he said, his voice grating once more, “but I thought they were doing something to the tracks, something to slow down or maybe even stop the train.”

  “At the trestle,” I said.

  “And at the crossing,” he managed, reaching for his inhaler again.

  I saw the look in his eye, a great sorrow.

  “Christ!” I said suddenly, louder than I wanted to. “You think that what Skid and Melissa did to the tracks at the crossing is what stopped the girls’ car!”

  He nodded slowly.

  “They didn’t mean to,” he said, his voice a garble, “but I think they may have been responsible for the girls’ death.”

  Eleven

  I left Judy’s house in a daze. I would have stayed longer, challenged Orvid’s hypothesis, but his asthma had really gotten the better of him, and he needed to rest. Judy insisted on ushering me out quickly, politely. I could tell she was worried.

  With nowhere else to turn, I felt I had to confront Skid with the assertions Orvid had made. I took a gamble that he’d still be at the station and pressed on the accelerator. As the truck lurched toward Main Street, I realized how concerned I was about Skidmore. His voice, posture, even the lines in his face did not belong to the man I’d known all my life. He was changed; I didn’t care for it.

  The sun had gone beyond the western horizon. Still, some sort of light was scattered through a break in the charcoal clouds. The message was clear: beyond the bleak ceiling of this sky there lay something bright. Alas, such a revelation makes little difference to anyone who can look beyond the clouds but never fly there. In fact the light only taunted, seemed to cast longer shadows across the sloping face of Blue Mountain.

  I rolled down Main Street moments later. All the rushing around had given me a headache and every muscle in my neck and shoulders was tense.

  Some lights were on in the windows of the shops. A misting rain had begun to blur the edges of everything to the palest possible blue.

  The sheriff’s office was well lit. A lucky turn of events had kept Skidmore there, his car was parked in front. I pulled my truck into the space next to his and got out quickly.

  The front room of the Sheriff’s Office was small, less intimidating than it had been during Sheriff Maddox’s reign. Where wanted posters had once hung, there were now photos of the members of our entire police force, all five of them. Skid sporting his best haircut, several deputies who had been at their jobs for ne
arly twenty years, and a yearbook-style portrait of Melissa, hair pulled back, eyes sparkling. The fluorescent light was too bright, the furniture too old, but the walls were freshly painted and an enormous largemouth bass was mounted over the door to the left of the entrance, the one that led to the detention cells. It was a small lobby, barely enough space for five heavy wooden chairs and Melissa’s desk.

  She looked up when I came in.

  “Dr. Devilin,” she said, surprised.

  “Hello, Melissa.” I smiled quickly. “Is Skidmore in? I have something very important.”

  “Dev?” Skid called from in his office. “Is that you? I’m busy.”

  “Yes,” I said back, “do you have five minutes? It’s something you ought to hear.”

  I could hear him sigh.

  “Five minutes,” he said firmly. “No more. Melissa?”

  “Yes, sir?” she piped up.

  “Time him.”

  “Sir?”

  “Look at your watch right now,” Skid said impatiently, “and when five minutes is up, pull out your gun, come in here, and chase Dr. Devilin out of my office, you hear?”

  “Uh-huh.” She smiled, winked at me. “Should I put my bullet in the gun?”

  “Five minutes!” Skid insisted.

  I nodded to Melissa and moved immediately.

  “Skid,” I began before I could even see him, “I’ve heard something that I needed to ask you about right away.”

  “God,” he said softly. “What now?”

  I stepped past his threshold.

  The office was a mess. Coffee cups and water bottles littered his desktop. Piles of papers covered every surface. Sticky notes were everywhere, at least twenty adhered to the phone. Even the chair across from his desk was filled with files. The overhead light was off, and the lamp on his desk gave the entire room a film noir ambience that I found amusing, even under the circumstances.

  “Maid’s day off?”

  “Put those files on the floor, sit down in that chair, and tell me why you’re here.” His voice was firm.

  I turned and closed the door to his office behind me, then did as he’d suggested, leaning into my side of the desk, my voice at a whisper.

  “The hardest part is this, so I’m not beating around the bush about it,” I began, eye to eye with Skidmore. “You and Melissa were in Pine City the night of the train accident. You did something to the tracks at the crossing and at the trestle, possibly something to slow down the train. Whatever it was that you did may have caused the girls to get stuck on the tracks.”

  I sat back in the chair.

  All the color drained from Skid’s face. His shoulders sagged and he bit his lower lip.

  “Sometimes I forget,” he said barely audibly, “that you’re really good at finding things out.”

  “It’s not just a natural talent. I work at it.”

  “Well, you’re right,” he sighed, “up to a point. I was there for a while that night, but it was before the accident. Me and Melissa, we were there for other reasons.”

  “No point in hiding what the gossip is,” I said quickly, avoiding his eyes. “Were you and Melissa there for business or personal reasons?”

  “Personal?” His voice was twice a loud as it had been. “God damn it, Fever, you have to know better than that. I mean, I know what the gossip is; little town like this, all you got to do is talk to a single woman over lunch, and by suppertime you’re an item. But you got to realize that Melissa Mathews is a professional law enforcement officer and I treat her like Ned or any of these other deputies.”

  “Except that when Melissa tells you about her troubles, you spend your evenings with her, helping out. When’s the last time you did that with Ned?”

  “When’s the last time Ned had the slightest notion that parking fines aren’t our number one problem in this county?” He was nearly shouting. “Melissa did good detective work following her cousin Nickel, and when she had enough facts, she shared them with the sheriff. Then the sheriff and the deputy began an investigation about drug traffic in our town!”

  I was about to up the stakes of the argument when I realized the actual point he was trying to make, though he wasn’t expressing it in any coherent manner. He was chiding me for thinking of Melissa as an attractive woman first and a county servant second, the way everyone else in the town surely would have. My shame was the realization that he was correct in his assessment.

  “You’re right,” I said firmly. “I’m wrong.”

  “Fever?” he said hesitantly, cocking his head to one side.

  It was the only thing I could have said that would shock him that much, phrases so seldom in my mouth.

  “I’m disappointed in myself for thinking the way I have. I owe you and Melissa an apology. I think you ought to speak to your wife exactly the way you did to me just now. I know I’m more of a feminist than she is, but Girlinda’s her own person, and I think she’d be just as mortified as I am to realize how far her perception had strayed from the truth.”

  “Girlinda?”

  “Remember, I told you that she called me a while back, in tears. Worried about you. I didn’t know what to say to her. I certainly didn’t help her. But you can. You’ve got to reassure her.”

  “What’s the matter with everybody?” he moaned.

  “You have to know that this sheriff job has changed you,” I said, a little more defensively than I’d intended. “You’re very strange lately.”

  He let out a breath so heavy it rustled the papers on his desk.

  “I used to be one of them,” he said softly, lifting his head in the direction of the outer room. “A deputy in the other room who thought that parking overtime and domestic fights was the worst of our troubles in Blue Mountain.”

  “Well,” I said gently, “I refuse to let you wallow in the beauty of the days gone by, when you were a carefree deputy. You hated being a deputy under Maddox, and as to what your worst troubles were, I’ll remind you that you solved two murders with me. Maddox was a horror, whereas you’re the most brilliant sheriff this county has ever seen. The good old days? They haven’t gotten here yet.”

  “Is that so?” he asked, a brief smile playing on his lips.

  “Are you going to tell me what you were doing at the railroad crossing the other night?” I could feel my teeth grinding uncomfortably.

  Skid stared at me, clearly trying to decide what to say.

  “All right,” he finally surrendered. “Deputy Mathews and I have been conducting an ongoing investigation concerning the drug traffic in our little corner of Eden. We believe that every now and again a certain railroad employee tosses a package off the train that goes through Pine City. We also believe that a local man recovers these packages and is the main distributor here in the county.”

  “What drugs?”

  “A little weed”—he shrugged—“and recently, a lot of ecstasy.”

  “Really?” I didn’t even bother to hide that I wasn’t surprised.

  “Melissa and me were on a stakeout. And before you make fun of me, I’m just as embarrassed to use the word stakeout as you are to hear it. But based on Melissa’s observation of previous patterns, last Friday night was supposed to have been the next in this series of drop-offs. We were certain the man in question was hiding in the old train depot, waiting.”

  “You can just go ahead and use Orvid’s name,” I said, shifting in my seat. “I’ve already come to the conclusion that he’s your so-called man in question.”

  He only stared a moment.

  “How you come to know all this,” Skidmore said, shaking his head, “is a mystery I don’t care to solve.”

  “So you were staking out Orvid Newcomb.”

  “We were,” he confirmed, “when there was a distraction down at the trestle.”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Did you put something on the tracks?”

  “Sensing foil,” Skid said quietly. “One set at the crossing, one at the trestle, to see did the train slow d
own more than usual. It has to slow down for the curve, but we believed it slowed down more to drop off the packages. We’d taken a measurement of the same train every night for a week. We were trying to establish a predictable pattern.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, mocking and amazed at the same time. “This really is like actual police work. You could have your own television show.”

  “I never liked you,” he reported drily. “I pretended to ’cause I felt sorry for you, but now you’re being such a pain in the butt, I can be honest about it now.”

  “Good to know,” I said, grinning. “So you had some kind of official surveillance equipment with you?”

  “All we needed was a laptop,” he said, marveling a little at the technology. “It’s really something, some of these programs they got.”

  “Anyway, I interrupted you. You saw something at the trestle.”

  “Well,” he said, slumping a little in his seat, “we already knew that these rail riders hang out down there. Pine City’s a good stop for them, because the train already has to slow down a little on account of the big curve coming into the city and the intersection, like I said, but these bums, they seemed to know that some nights it really goes slow. Slow enough to get on or get off.”

  “Because of the drug packages.”

  “That’s what we think.” His lips were thin, and he was staring at the top of his desk.

  “I’ll tell you what I hate about this more than anything,” he said slowly. “I hate being a cliché. Small-town drug traffic. Is that weird, or, I don’t know, cold or something?”

  “No,” I told him quietly. “I know what you mean. You thought we were immune. I did too.”

  “No place untouched by dark matter.” He shook his head. “Is that what you said?”

  “So you went to roust the hoboes.”

  “You remember May? That homeless woman who spoke French; lived at the county cemetery whenever she was up this way?”