Mystery Bundle (Saints Preserve Us, Pray For Us Sinners, Murder Most Trivial)

by Leigh Ellwood

  “I’m guessing his love for God was stronger than his natural impulses,” Dan offered.

  “Yeah, he said as much. Plus he’s so busy running the parish he said he doesn’t have time to devote to a wife and family, even if that were allowed.”

  “So how come you never said as much to me, your own father?” Dan wanted to know. “Why all the secrecy?”

  Jason blushed. “I didn’t want to make you mad,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Mad? What th—” Dan lost his breath. “Why would I be mad about you considering the priesthood? You know how many years I’ve worried about your future, about what you were going to do once you finished college?” he cried. “Hell, at this point I’m relieved you decided not to get anything on your face pierced!”

  “Yeah, well,” Jason chuckled, “I thought, seeing as how I’m an only child, and you are too...that’s it for the Greeveys if I become a priest. Unless you count your cousins.” Dan’s cousins, sired by his father’s brother, had inherited their father’s penchant for getting into trouble and acquiring tastes for various illegal stimulants. Some of them were fast reproducing, of this Dan suspected. It was only a matter of matching said child to its mother. So despite Jason’s entrance into seminary, and barring a remarriage for Dan, the Greevey name would continue in one form or another, much to the chagrin of Dan and the Virginia State Patrol.

  “Doesn’t bother me one bit,” Dan said, standing straight. “I’m not going to live your life for you. If you decide to pursue the priesthood I’ll be happy. If you change your mind, I’ll support you, too.”

  “So long as I’m out the door and gainfully employed in four years,” Jason joked.

  “Damn straight. The sooner you’re gone, the better, too. I’ll finally be able to knock down that wall and set up the pool table.” Dan glanced at the digital clock by Jason’s bed. “Oh, man. I told Willie I’d call her when Simons left.”

  Jason made a whipping sound, and Dan cast him a steely glance.

  “Funny.”

  “Hey, maybe you want me out of here so you can fix up your little love nest,” Jason winked. “Maybe I won’t be the last Greevey after all.”

  Dan started down the hall. “Maybe you are the one jumping to conclusions now,” he said, but quickly craned his head back into the threshold and grinned.

  “Now who’s holding back?” Jason pointed at his father.

  “I have nothing to hide,” Dan said innocently. “It’s just too soon to tell, is all.”

  Jason leaned back and grasped the small of his back, which ached from his awkward sitting position. “Go, call your girlfriend. Excuse me, lady friend,” he added when his father frowned. “I’m guessing she called earlier when Simons was here?”

  “No, that was Bailey Stone.”

  Jason felt his backside sliding off the seat and he eased forward.

  “What? What did she want?”

  Dan leaned against the doorway and shrugged. “She was blubbering so incoherently, I ended up doing most of the talking. Hey, I’ll be in my room, alright?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  Jason tiptoed to the threshold and watched for Dan’s bedroom door to close. His father did not shut it completely, and through the open sliver Jason saw him pacing in and out of sight holding the portable phone as he punched Willie’s number. Knowing well Willie could keep him tied up in conversation, Jason quietly closed his own door and kicked a dirty t-shirt under the jamb tightly. Dan hated locked doors in the house, Jason knew.

  Until now, however, he really had nothing to hide. Perhaps the t-shirt could disrupt a surprise entrance.

  Idly he righted the light blue fitted sheet on his mattress and straightened the top blanket, shuffling around a lethargic Ringo to get it done. Only after he was finished and on his knees to search underneath the bed did the dog rise and amble to a cooler sport near the headboard.

  “Ringo,” Jason groaned as the beagle curled on the pillow. He eased onto the bed and elbowed the dog slightly out of the way. “C’mere.”

  The dog eventually settled for resting his front paws and chin on Jason’s lap as the boy reclined, knees up and propping the folder he had pilfered from Bart Scarsdale’s house. “This is the first time I’ve ever really looked at this,” he told the dog. “I guess I felt so guilty for taking it in the first place that I kept it hidden under the bed.” Out of sight, out of mind, out of guilt, he thought, but it does not always work that way. One more thing to confess next time he saw Father Ben.

  Ringo yawned, apparently not interested. Jason scratched him behind the ears and the dog’s tail thumped the pillow.

  “I don’t even know why I grabbed it in the first place,” he continued, fingering Bart’s handwriting on the tab—BASCOCK, INC. was written in neat block letters with a thick, blunt pen. “First thing that really caught my eye in that room, I suppose, that and the Pamela Lee poster. Can’t think of how it could be related to these murders.”

  He pried open the folder to reveal five letter-sized sheets; three appeared to be sales logs, one an invoice and one a photocopied handwritten note, which demanded from Bart copies of the company’s tax returns going back the last two years. No date, no signature.

  Perhaps Bascock was about to be audited when Bart was killed, Jason thought, staring at the note and squinting at the scribbled cursive and slanting, sharp Ls and Hs. Not completely indecipherable at first glance, he decided, though it really told him nothing pertinent.

  Placing the note back into the folder, Jason turned to the three log sheets and quickly dismissed them, unable to decode Bart’s system of abbreviations. Numbers everywhere, and none of them made sense. Did they represent sales of whatever it was Bascock provided, or did they correspond to how much money the company spent for supplies to build and market their products? Who knew, besides Bart?

  What did Bascock do anyway? The invoice, though of little help, did tell Jason that Bart himself had once been a customer. The paper essentially served as a receipt for something called, in shorthand, Hum. Ph. Grge., which cost Bart nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents plus tax. Quantity: one. No specification of color or size, and Jason could not begin to think of how to decode the product’s name.

  “Hum. Ph. Grge.,” he said aloud, pronouncing it “humphigorge.” “What’s this supposed to be, and why does it cost twenty dollars?”

  Ringo blinked and snorted. Jason winced at a sudden gust of dog breath. “Ever hear of a ‘humphigorge’?” he asked, showing the dog the invoice. “Huh? Is it some kind of fancy dog toy?” Bart did not have pets, at least none that were visible at his house. No pet bowls resting at the foot of the refrigerator, no animal hair littered on the carpet and furniture. Then again, maybe he did have a pet, and maybe pets were not allowed at a shivah. Maybe if he saw Adam Wasserman again, he would ask.

  “Maybe it’s sports equipment, some kind of camping tool,” he muttered, pondering the thought of asking Miss Pratt of she knew of such a thing, given her enthusiasm for the outdoors. Then, of course, he might have to explain how he heard of the thing in the first place, and Jason figured he could not use the fitness magazine as an alibi if his father had not already combed the contents looking for subversive material.

  Miss Pratt.

  He leaned over to the nightstand and lifted the phone receiver. The dial tone hummed faintly and Jason was instantly curious. Rather short time for a conversation, he surmised, unless...

  The knob on his door turned left and right, and in a single thumping heartbeat Jason reinserted the folder’s contents and buried them underneath the bed sheet. He was reaching for Gooch’s fitness magazine when Dan called his name.

  “Jason?” Dan eased the door open and poked his torso inside. “What’s this doing here?” He leaned on the door, rolling the thick lump of t-shirt underneath the jamb until the door froze.

  Jason curled the magazine back to a bold advertisement for protein powder. “I dunno,” he shrugged. “Could be it’s finally learned to cr
awl.”

  “I’m sure,” Dan responded drily. “Willie’s on her way over. She taped her show, so we’re just gonna watch something else on TV and make popcorn. You’re staying up here?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Just me and Sven here.” He flashed the magazine cover at his father and grinned slyly.

  “Funny.” With that Dan left, leaving the door ajar. Ringo leapt upward and hurdled over Jason toward the door, clearly having understood the word popcorn.

  “Oh, the vet’s going to kill us for giving him all that junk food,” Jason moaned to himself, then shuddered. Kill, murder, death. Crank phone calls and X marks on photographs...not what he had expected for senior year.

  Through the door and down the stairs Jason listened for the distant whirr of the corn popper, accompanied in rhythm to Ringo’s excited yapping. “Settle!” he heard his father order the dog. “This isn’t for you!” Both men, however, knew better. Ringo would be licking the popcorn bowl clean by night’s end.

  He sat up, stretched and tried the phone again, punching 411 and waiting three seconds.

  Click. “City, please,” answered a bland female voice.

  “Uh, Hampton.” It made sense, he thought. Bart lived near Hampton.

  “May I help you?”

  He asked for the number to Bascock, Inc. Immediately he was put on hold, forced to listen to a recorded advertisement for Caller ID services relayed in overeager voices. Jason imagined two bug-eyed people sharing an ice cream soda at Dog ‘N’ Burger, chatting happily about such advances in phone technology as if nothing else in the world mattered. You mean I can know who’s calling my house before I answer the phone, Tammy? Golly, gosh, wow! That’s super!

  Jason rubbed his ear. Come to think of it, Caller ID would have come in handy this past week.

  “Sir,” the operator broke into the commercial’s calliope jingle. “I show no such listing in Hampton.”

  “Uh,” Jason frantically searched the top drawer of the nightstand for a pen and scrap of paper. “Could you try some other cities? Like Norfolk and Virginia Beach? Newport News?” Given the urban sprawl of the Tidewater area, the company could be located anywhere in a sixty-mile radius.

  “One moment, please,” came an exhausted sigh, a thinly veiled message to Jason that she really did not want to check other cities, but instead return to whatever she did to kill time in her cubicle between calls. No commercial this time, but an elevator music version of John Lennon’s “Starting Over.” Jason sighed. If the man had not been cremated, he thought, certainly he would be doing somersaults underground. He was actually singing along when another voice, this one sharp and robotic, filled his ear, spitting out numbers.

  Jason mashed the flash button and paused for the dial tone. It was late, well past business hours, he was certain, and too late to reach a human being. Not that it bothered him, because he had no idea what he was going to say anyway to these people. He certainly was not going to inquire about a “humphigorge” if such a thing did not exist, and therefore sound like a complete idiot.

  These people probably had Caller ID, and knew where to find the idiot. So much for anonymity.

  His stomach rumbled. The peanut butter shake from earlier had worn off long ago, and in the wake of Detective Simons’ visit dinner was forgotten. Popcorn sounded good, and Jason was willing to join the party downstairs, even if it meant sitting through the Learning Channel.

  “Patience,” he whispered to his gurgling stomach. “Just one quick call first.” He hoped the number would lead to an extensive answering machine recording, or at the very least an answering service in the know. He got the former. After the fourth ring a chipper female voice greeted him with, “Thank you for calling Bascock, Incorporated. Our office hours are Monday through —”

  Jason hung up the phone. He was not interested in office hours anymore, only that voice. That light, feathery voice ringing in his ears, singing sweetly to him and chanting “Danny Boy.”

  That voice belonged to Bailey Stone.

  Chapter Twelve

  That Jason managed to pass all of his finals during the week—he was certain he would tell family and friends for years to come—without succumbing wholly to paranoia had to have been a minor miracle.

  Thankfully, the intercessory prayers of the Blessed Virgin possessed some merit, Jason believed. He never felt more at ease taking such tests, this despite the indentations on his fingers left by the solid metal nubs of his mother’s rosary ring as he clutched it in his free hand while the other one diligently marked test answers. Fortunately for Jason, none of his teachers objected to his bringing along the Catholic sacramental, so long as the answers were not etched into the crucifix.

  Prayer in school may no longer be the norm, Jason thought, but let them try to stop me.

  Friday afternoon after classes he lounged on the living room couch flipping channels, Ringo panting on his lap, feeling as much at ease as someone expecting to be murdered could be. He continued to “pray without ceasing” as dictated by First Thessalonians, invoking the intercession of every saint whose name he could recall off the top of his head, from Mary’s mother Anne to St. Zita, asking them to storm Heaven with their prayers.

  “Lord, I don’t want to die,” he had cried one night in bed, his eyes falling on the framed photograph of his mother. Liza Greevey smiled in the foreground of a ride entrance at Disney World. Lying on his stomach, he reached out to touch the picture, hoping in his semi-conscious state he could actually feel her again and stretch past the barrier of glass and paper and touch her soft, serene face. He remembered when that particular photo was taken, and his mind reeled back in time to the family’s “last chance” trip to Florida, eight months before Liza succumbed. The trip lasted the entire summer so Jason would not have to miss school.

  Now, Jason settled on a rerun of The Simpsons and padded to the kitchen for a snack, groaning aloud as his bare feet trod into a puddle of water spilled from Ringo’s dish. “D’oh!” he cried, nearly in unison to Homer on television.

  Jason was convinced his prayers were being answered. Exams aside, the week passed quietly. There were no more news reports of trivia contest winners being killed, nor had Jason or Dan received any more surprise packages or phone calls. A clandestine phone call to Adam Wasserman revealed, also, that neither the cantor nor his wife had experienced anything out of the ordinary the past week.

  On another note, however, neither Detective Simons nor Detective Gross had contacted them with test results from the photograph. In fact, Jason wondered if the two had slipped away to the Outer Banks for water skiing and blue crabs, considering that all attempts to contact them during the week proved fruitless. Neither cop bothered to answer pages, and the secretary at the Norfolk precinct proved to be a master at stonewalling.

  Even Father Winslow, to whom Jason made his confession Wednesday evening, was convinced that the murders were unrelated and likely not to occur again. “I don’t think you had anything to worry about in the first place,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Jason replied half-heartedly, then launched into his litany of sins, aware of how unpriestlike he had been acting.

  Being that it was Exams Week, every teacher at Colley High was present to administer the proper papers and supervise test-takers with hawk-like diligence. Therefore, Bailey was not around for him to confront.

  I wouldn’t know what to say to her, anyway, he thought as he rummaged through the pantry. Hey, Miss Stone, still obsessed with my dad? And what is Bascock, Inc.? How’s the patent on the “humphigorge” coming? Sigh.

  He even tried an Internet search on the name and found nothing. Hence, he hesitated in bringing the information to the police. What value would Bascock be if he did not know what they did?

  He shook some excess water from his damp foot, grateful it was only water. When he turned to the television, the program had already faded to a commercial.

  “Typical,” he muttered, setting his sandwich and paper towel of corn chips on his lap
. Ringo, perched on the other end of the couch, lurched straight for the kill.

  “No!” Jason said sharply, gently bracing the dog’s nose against the outstretched palm of his hand. “Don’t whine. You have a whole bowl of food in the kitchen you haven’t touched.” Of course, Jason knew, what kind of being—human, canine, or otherwise—would settle for ordinary, hard kernels of horsemeat when there was a double-decker turkey club in sight?

  Dan entered through the front door, the mail pinched in his mouth and a heavy clothing bag weighing down on his back. His forefingers were looped around several wire hanger hooks and Jason could tell they were cutting into his father’s skin.

  Three steps into the living room, Dan spat out the mail on the couch. “Watch your food,” he warned Jason, whose attention had turned briefly away from the dog. “The vet’s been on my case about his diet.”

  “Need any help with that?”