The Barrell, Bats and Bubble Gum

by N. L. Cameron

  The Barrell, Bats & Bubble Gum

  By

  N.L. Cameron

  www.NLCameron.com

  Copyright

  First Edition, December 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by N.L. Cameron

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination.

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.

  License

  This book is available exclusively on Amazon.com. If you found this book for free or from a site other than an Amazon.com country specific website it means the author was not compensated for this book and you have likely obtained this book through an unapproved distribution channel.

  Table of Contents

  The Barrell,Bats & Bubble Gum

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About The Author

  Chapter 1

  I stood behind the front desk in the entrance to my good old Barrell Inn. The front desk had turned out to be my battle station in the first few months after taking over the inn when my aunt Beatrice died and left it to me. I spent more time behind the front desk than anywhere else—if it wasn’t in front of the computer.

  When I first took over the Barrell, the inn had no website, no Internet presence, no marketing strategy—no nothing.

  The first hectic weeks after I took over involved launching the biggest Christmas party you ever laid eyes on and finally getting Nathaniel Rowe arrested for Beatrice’s murder. Once that passed and the FBI told me I could go back to business as usual, I settled into the serious business of making this inn a viable venture.

  So, that’s how I wound up standing behind the front desk with my nose stuck to my laptop when a dumpy little man in a long, greasy brown trench coat scuttled through the front door and sailed up to the desk. No one could mistake Fisk Van Steamburg, and he made an impression on everyone who met him.

  He waddled back and forth when he walked, and he thrust his elbows out from his sides every few seconds. He reminded anyone of a penguin, and his features only made the resemblance more profound. His drooping beak nose almost touched his chin. His snaggley teeth held his lips apart so they never met, and his eyes bugged out of his head.

  He bellied up to the front desk and waved his stubby arms. “Now what am I going to do? This is the worst disaster ever!”

  I did my best to remain calm. “Is there anything I can help you with, Mr. Van Steamburg?”

  “Help me! You want to help me?” he cried. “My car is stuck down at the garage surrounded by ten miles of police tape. How can anybody help me with that?”

  My hair stood on end. “Police tape? What do you mean?”

  His voice rose to a screech. “My car! My car broke down in this tin-pot town, and now the mechanic turns up dead on the hood! What am I supposed to do about that? I never wanted to be in this town at all, and now I’m stuck here. Now there’s no one left in this dive to fix my car so I can get out of here.”

  I froze in my tracks. “Max? Max is dead?”

  “Is that his name?” Fisk asked. “I never knew. Yes, he’s dead, and I had to stand there like a fool and explain to that nincompoop sheriff of yours how I found him draped over the hood of my car. Isn’t that a fine how-do-you-do?”

  I gasped. “That’s terrible. How awful for you!”

  “Not as awful as having no car to get out of here with. There’s not a living mechanic within two hundred miles of this nut house.”

  I relaxed now that I saw the solution to the problem. “I can recommend a decent mechanic in Hunterville. That’s the next town over, and I can even arrange a tow truck to take your car there. You’ll have it back in no time.”

  “That’s just the thing,” he yelped. “My car is part of the crime scene. I can’t get it towed anywhere.”

  My face fell. “Oh. Well, what did the sheriff say about the case?”

  Fisk’s shoulders slumped. “What did the sheriff say? Could that guy say anything about anything if his life depended on it?”

  I bit back a smile. “Whatever you may think of Sheriff Mills, he means well. Come on and let me help you, Mr. Van Steamburg. Tell me what he said, and maybe I can help you get your car back sooner.”

  Fisk took a deep breath. “He found a lump of chewing gum in the mechanic’s mouth—or was it bubble gum? I can’t remember. He found no other indication of foul play, so he’s ruled that the mechanic choked on the gum. That’s all he said—oh, and that I can’t get my car back until he finishes his investigation.”

  I frowned. “What investigation? If Max choked on gum, he shouldn’t need to investigate.”

  “That’s what I said, but he kept pacing up and down and pulling up his pants and shaking his head. He said the scene didn’t look right to him, but there’s nothing he can do without some further evidence.”

  My ears perked up. “He actually said that? He actually said the scene didn’t look right to him?”

  Fisk nodded. “That’s what he said.”

  “Then there really is something wrong. If he actually said those words out loud, then there must be cause to investigate.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to get my car back?”

  Now I knew just what to tell him. “Leave it to me, Mr. Van Steamburg. I’ll talk to Sheriff Mills. If he really decides Max died from choking on his bubble gum, then he has no need to keep your car in evidence.”

  His eyes brightened. “Would you really talk to him? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I already lost my temper with him once today. I don’t trust myself to talk to him again. This whole situation makes me so mad I could spit.”

  I shut my laptop for the first time in a week and walked around the front desk. “I’ll go talk to him as soon as I can. I have to go into town later today anyway. If I have time, I’ll try to get your car released.”

  He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

  He strolled toward the staircase, but instead of climbing up to his room, he stopped to pet Pixie. She curled in a black furry ball on the lowest step with her tail wrapped over her nose.

  Fisk’s countenance brightened when he spotted her. His shoulders lifted, and the closest thing to a smile he might be capable of spread across his sharp features. He bent down and scratched her behind the ears. “Kitty, kitty.”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t even twitch her ear, which is what she usually did when someone touched her. If I did that, she would have looked up and probably meowed at me. Instead, she lay impassive as if Fisk wasn’t there at all.

  When she didn’t respond, he cast a sheepish smirk over his shoulder at me and scuttled upstairs.

  Now that he was gone, I gave my full attention to the matter at hand. So, Max Nash, owner and mechanic at Max’s Garage, was dead under less than ideal circumstances. I hadn’t gotten to know him as well as some of the other townspeople since I moved to Heather’s Forge. Every time I went to his filling station to gas up my car, he got grouchier than ever. This town b
red grouchiness in the wrong kind of people, and he took the cake.

  All I learned about him, mostly from my friend Eliza Potter, the town chatterbox, was that he was in his mid-sixties and worked like a dog most every day of his life. He started working at the garage at the age of eighteen. He worked there every day, filling gas tanks and pumping up tires. He worked himself up to mechanic and saved his pennies until he saved enough to buy the garage twenty years ago.

  It was the classic American success story, and now he was dead. The Nashes were one of the oldest families in Heather’s Forge. They moved up here during the Depression, and Max was born and raised here. How many enemies can a grouchy man earn in sixty-plus years on the main street of town? He must have known everyone in the area and dealt with them, for good or bad, on a semi-daily basis.

  Now there I went again, thinking about Max making enemies. Sheriff Mills said he died by choking on his gum, so enemies had nothing to do with it. Then again, Sheriff Mills also had major misgivings about the circumstances and the scene. What could make him think the death might be suspicious?

  I had no time to think about that right now, though. I put away my laptop and locked up the front desk before jumping into my car and buzzing off to town myself. Sure enough, a bunch of yellow cordon tape sectioned off the gas station.

  I glanced down at my fuel gauge. Half empty, half full. Where was I supposed to fuel up until the gas station reopened? Maybe the gas station wouldn’t reopen. Maybe it would just sit there, defunct, for the next twenty years. Then what? Everyone would have to drive down to Hunterville to fill up their cars.

  Half the economic traffic in this town came from motorists stopping on Interstate 40. They fueled up at Max’s. Then they decided to get a meal at the DoubleDown Diner. Then they realized it was getting late, so they decided to spend the night. Then they needed entertainment, so they crossed the street to the NightHawks bar. What would this town have been without a gas station? What if Heather’s Forge went under, all because Max choked on his gum?

  I had to get my head together. Max had been dead less than six hours, and I was already planning the town’s demise. So, what was a couple of days driving down to Hunterville? I still had half a tank, and that could last over a week if I conserved and didn’t drive too much. I might actually enjoy the drive down the mountain once in a while, and I could do some shopping for the inn in the larger town.

  I crashed from bright optimism to the depths of despair on these thoughts, and they weren’t getting me any closer to my dentist appointment. I parked the car in front of Glenda Garner’s florist shop, equidistant between the dentist’s office and the police station. With luck, I would have time after my appointment to visit Sheriff Mills and pick his brain about Max’s death.

  I was barely on time for my appointment, though, so I pushed the case out of my mind and hurried inside. As per usual, I had to flip the pages of magazines in the waiting area for almost half an hour before they called me.

  A middle-aged dental assistant ushered me into the exam room and guided me into the chair. She snapped her chewing gum between her teeth and chomped her teeth while she talked. Her frosty blond hair didn’t budge from the sky-high tower on her head when she moved around, and I caught a glimpse of glitter in her pale green eye shadow.

  “That’s the way. Make yourself comfortable,” she told me. “First time here? I thought so.”

  I settled back in the chair while I surveyed the room. Diplomas and certificates covered the walls. One said, Arthur Drilling, DDS. That was about the most perfect name for a dentist I ever heard. That was why I chose him out of the phone book.

  I could have chosen from half a dozen dentists if I wanted to drive down to Hunterville to see them. Maybe if I had known I would be down there gassing up my car, I would have done just that, but I wanted to support a local. That name sealed the deal.

  The other certificate said, Viki Morgan, Dental Hygienist. That must have been the lady leaning over me right at that moment. She clipped the bib around my neck and switched on the overhead light. She fluttered in a circle around the chair until an aging man with a too-dark comb-over came in. This must be the famous Drilling.

  He slipped on rubber gloves and held my cheeks apart with two mirrors while he had a look around inside my mouth. “Uhh-huh. Uhh-huh. All right. You’re here for a cleaning, aren’t you? Good.” He stood up and stripped off his gloves. “You can handle this, can’t you, Viki?”

  She snapped her gum again but said nothing. Drilling sidled out of the room, and I never saw him again, not even when I craned my head around to catch a glimpse of his retreating form. That was strange. I never saw a dentist do that before.

  Viki slotted into the chair he just vacated. She put on her own gloves and picked up the tools. She snapped her gum louder than ever, and she didn’t look at all happy when she barked out, “Open wide.”

  I opened wide and braced myself for the most excruciating cleaning of my life. To my surprise, Viki proved remarkably adept. She didn’t hurt a bit, and she worked fast. I waited for a break to start a conversation. “You’re really good at this. You must have been doing it a long time.”

  She smacked her gum in my face. “Not too long, but I do enough of it to learn the ropes.” She let her eyes slide toward the door, but she made no attempt to lower her voice. “He doesn’t like putting his hands in people’s mouths, so I wind up doing most of the work, even fillings, which is what he’s supposed to do.”

  My eyes widened. “Really? That’s strange.”

  “Strange! It’s criminal, is what it is,” she shot back. “If I’m going to do the work, I ought to get paid as much as he does when all he does is stand around and supervise. Most of the time, he doesn’t even do that—like now. He doesn’t bother to check if I did a good job. He just sits in his office working on his business plan.”

  “It’s lucky for him you do do a good job,” I remarked. “He would have no patients left if you didn’t.”

  “Oh, I always do a good job,” she returned. “I take pride in my work, unlike some people I could mention.”

  “Does he know you feel that way?”

  “Oh, he knows. I’ve told him to his face a million times.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “He doesn’t say anything. He just gives me that inscrutable little smile of his and goes back to what he was doing. He’s from out of town, you see. He moved up here a few years ago. These out-of-towners can’t possible care as much about what goes on in Heather’s Forge as we long-time locals. I was born and raised here, so it stands to reason I care about the people in my hometown. He’ll never care enough about these people to do a decent job for them. That’s what I say.”

  This conversation made me uncomfortable. After all, I’m an out-of-towner, recently moved into the area, too. Was she gonna say the same thing about me?

  Her comments gave me an idea, though. “You were born and raised here? Maybe you know something about Max Nash. Have you heard he died this morning on the hood of some tourist’s car?”

  “Have I heard? It’s all over town.” She popped a loud bubble in her gum. “They say he choked, but I don’t believe that. Do you? No, there’s too many fishy coincidences going on all at the same time, and now Max winds up dead. I think someone got to him. Someone bumped him off. That’s what I say.”

  I cocked my head to one side. “Do you really think so? What fishy coincidences made you think that?”

  Viki leaned over my head and lowered her voice for the first time. “There’s some strange guy lurking around town. He creeps between the buildings in the dead of night. They say he wears a black cape and flaps his wings like a bat.”

  A shiver scurried up my spine. “You don’t really believe that, do you? It sounds like a tall tale to me.”

  Viki leaned back. “You wouldn’t say that if you had seen him for yourself. He wears a balaclava to cover his whole face so no one can see who he is. I’ve seen him myself, and no one who h
as seen him has seen him before eleven o’clock at night. Now don’t you think that’s strange? Don’t you think it’s strange that Max turned up dead just when some stranger is haunting the streets? I do.”

  I frowned. “Now that you mention it, it does seem a bit odd. Has anybody confronted this stranger to ask what he’s up to?”

  “Confronted him! You must be crazy. Who would confront a stranger dressed like that in the dark?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the sheriff. Has anybody told him? If this stranger is connected with Max’s death, Sheriff Mills ought to know about it.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “He’s been spotted in some strange places, like the cemetery. What if he’s digging up corpses and doing profane things to them? What if he’s some pervert? That’s what keeps me up at night.”

  “Are there any reports of graves vandalized, or break-ins anywhere else in town?”

  “Nothing like that, but people are worried.”

  I sank back onto the chair while she readied her weapons for another attack. “They aren’t worried enough to report it to Sheriff Mills, though, are they? Sounds like a lot of ruckus to me.”

  “He was spotted in the alley behind the diner and poking around the fountain in the town square. Something weird is going on. Some people think it might be a ghost haunting the town. Maybe it’s the disembodied spirit of someone buried in the graveyard, and they’re trying to reunite with their dead body so they can find peace in the afterlife.”

  I tittered, but she made me nervous. “If it’s a ghost, then we don’t have to worry about it being connected with Max’s death, do we?”

  She fixed me with her hawkish glare. “We do if it’s Max’s ghost.”

  “You said this person started lurking around before Max died, so that’s not possible.”

  She tossed her tools onto the tray. “I don’t care what you say. Someone should investigate this and find out what’s going on.”

  “Yeah. Sheriff Mills should investigate it and find out what’s going on.”

  “Oh, he’ll never do that,” Viki exclaimed. “You know how he is.”