Jenny scanned the faded print. “Michael Collins, born May 28, 1919. Baile … something, Dublin. That’s the Irish version of John Smith. I’ll never find the right family.”
“You have a birthdate and place,” Lia said. “It’s enough. Add in your DNA and I bet you have relatives somewhere.”
Jenny clutched the passport, blinking against incipient tears. “I have roots.”
Bailey held the tube up, shook it gently. Something rattled. When she tipped it, three keys and a fat roll of bills slid out.
Peter nudged the keys apart with a long finger. “One of these is for a safe deposit box. I wonder what’s in it.”
“Has to be the egg,” Terry said.
“If the bank still exists,” Steve said.
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Bailey said as she peered into the tube. “There’s something else in here.” She handed the tube to Jenny.
Jenny drew out a folded piece of paper covered with foxing. It was a page from a magazine, featuring a photo of Andrew wreathed in smoke. Under the photo, the ad listed European tour dates for a magician named Lazarus.
Lia peered over her shoulder. “Covent Garden, Palais Garnier, La Monnaie, the Colosseum. He must have been huge over there.”
Jenny stared, unable to take it in. “He pulled quarters out of my ears,” she heard herself say. “He made balloon animals for kids.”
Lia placed a hand on hers. “And I bet he enjoyed making children happy just as much as he enjoyed the big stages.”
“He was a public figure,” Peter said. “There’s a record somewhere.”
Steve examined the roll of bills. “That’s a hundred on the outside. If they’re all hundreds, you’ve got the money to go over there and track him down yourself.”
Father Nicholas opened his eyes to darkness and wondered what time it was. Two, three in the morning? He’d dreamt of the Sin City days again, as he had nightly since Mal’s bones rose out of the creek in a mocking imitation of Christ’s resurrection.
When the church secretary showed him the magazine cover with the hideous skull, he’d admonished her about the destructive nature of gossip—a conversation they’d had before and one with little effect. Then he’d prayed: for Mal’s soul, for justice, for direction. He’d been praying ever since.
God had not answered. If Mal’s reappearance was a sign, perhaps it was not meant for him. If he’d sinned—and that was questionable—perhaps it was not a large enough sin to follow him now at the end of his life.
The bible says, “Thou shall not steal.” Nicholas hadn’t stolen, not precisely, and while he’d confessed decades ago—at a church far from Cincinnati, to a priest who did not know him and did not know he was a member of the priesthood—in his heart he never repented his actions.
How could he, when those actions saved the life of a young man in over his head and delivered a devout young woman and her unborn child from mobsters who would destroy her future?
What a pompous boy he’d been: Nicholas, named for the saint of penitent thieves. In his hubris, he’d seen himself as the instrument of Mal’s rehabilitation and demanded a promise from Mal to give up his criminal ways as a condition for abetting his escape.
Uncharitable of him, as only absolution required penitence. His assistance should have been free of conditions.
Rose’s fury put a stop to Mal’s forced conversion.
They’d completed the grisly amputation, spiriting Mal away while murderous criminals lay in a drunken stupor overhead. A veterinarian cut off several more inches of leg to correct the splintered mess he and Ruth had made of the job, then hid Mal in a barn. A mission to Canada provided the means to smuggle him out of the country, funded by the contents of a package hidden in the dismantled hearse.
In return, Mal asked for help disposing of his share of Pete Schmidt’s gems and gold. A third went to Mal, another third went to getting Rose out of Newport and into nursing school. Nicholas donated the rest anonymously to the church.
Mal winked when he offered the share for the church, expecting Nicholas to take it for himself. He’d declined. He planned to enter the seminary and saw this temptation as the first test of his commitment to God.
A message he’d sent through circuitous channels months later turned their brief connection into an uneasy friendship. Rose, pregnant, needed help. For more than forty years, Nicholas served as the conduit through which Mal looked after the family he could not acknowledge.
Mal prospered under a variety of names, performing in Europe as Lazarus while acting as a smuggler and go-between in dealings involving powerful and dangerous men. He could have provided better for his secret family, but they’d all agreed too much prosperity would draw eyes and awaken memories.
This connection and the resulting donations had been a blessing for his church. He’d come to appreciate Nicholas as the patron saint of secret giving as well as penitent thieves. He liked to think of his name as a sign that God had a sense of humor, approving of his actions and the good that came from the bad.
And after all, Mal was not a thief or murderer, though he trafficked with those who were.
Mal returned to Cincinnati when Jenny was ten and her parents died in a car crash. By then Rose’s health was already failing. He needed to be closer at hand, though he wished to remain a step removed. Nicholas thought it a foolish precaution.
Mal treasured his brief encounters with Jenny at church festivals. It had been Nicholas who suggested hiring her as a housekeeper, and he ached for Rose and Jenny when Mal disappeared. With that ache came fear that the past had refused to stay buried.
So Rose and Jenny disappeared as well.
He’d been right, in a sense. They’d arrested a man named Brewer for Mal’s murder. Rose’s uncle Stu had a daughter who married a Brewer. This man must be Stu’s great-grandson. Stu had been greedy and immoral. Not surprising his progeny was as well.
Nicholas recognized Jenny immediately when her photo appeared in the papers, despite the three decades since she’d left Cincinnati. He wondered if she knew this Brewer was a cousin of some sort to her or that Mal was her grandfather.
Stu’s great-grandson killed Mal in pursuit of the treasure Stu lusted for. Mal’s granddaughter caught his killer. Mysterious ways, indeed.
The paper said Jenny was a hospice nurse. Blood ran true there as well, this entire chain of events starting as it did while Rose nursed her dying mother.
How much had Rose told Jenny about her family tree? Nothing, or Jenny would not have returned. He was kin to her, if distant. She might like to know she had family left.
Perhaps he would contact her, tell her the whole story. Mal must have squirreled money away. Perhaps he could help her find it.
He would pray on it.
Nicholas shoved himself into a sitting position against the headboard and turned on the bedside lamp. He picked up the small box on his nightstand, holding it in his hands while repeating a small, private prayer he’d been saying for seventy years.
The box, Mal’s gift, a way to safeguard their private matters. He hadn’t removed the false bottom for more than a decade, hadn’t felt the need, and his arthritic fingers struggled to release the catch.
Seventy years ago, Nicholas briefly felt the presence of the glory of God, embodied in the indescribable beauty of Fabergé’s Cherub and Chariot.
He’d never been given to covetousness. This once, he’d yearned.
He could not keep it, could not give it to the church, not without endangering all of them. When Mal found a place for it in a private collection in Europe, he’d kept a photograph. Black and white, paling beside the original, but it remained unfaded so many years later.
He removed the photo from the shallow compartment and held it close to eyes that could barely make out the image, even in daylight. It was his last vanity, holding on to this remembrance.
He was long past the age when waking in the morning was a given. It would never do for his connection to the egg to come to light, regardless of
the time that had passed or good that came from it. Not for his sake. That was in the hands of God, and he was reconciled to God’s judgment. It was the church he thought of, and the many scandals suffered in recent years.
He set the photo down and fumbled in the drawer for the candle and matches he kept there. He lit the candle, staring into the bright flame while he prayed.
When he was done, he lifted the photo with a trembling hand, holding one corner to the hungry flame until it caught, held it as the glorious cherub darkened and rose to Heaven on a plume of smoke.
Epilogue
Slivers of daylight penetrated the bottom of the bandana tied around Peter’s eyes. Enough light to tease, not enough to tell him where he was. Instead, he tracked the turns Lia’s Volvo made as it twisted and looped, sloping gently up and down and up again.
There was only one place in Northside with roads this convoluted, where cars drove half the speed of your average turtle. The lack of traffic noise was another tip-off. Peter said nothing, not wanting to spoil Lia’s surprise, whatever it was.
The Volvo pulled to the side and the motor died.
“We’re here,” she said.
“Can I take my blindfold off?”
“Not yet.”
The driver’s side door opened, then closed with its usual screech and thunk. His door opened. Her hand, warm and firm, took his.
“Please tell me this isn’t some kind of touchy-feely trust exercise.”
“Not in the usual sense. There are steps, and they’re uneven. Take it slow. I’ll tell you when.”
He let her guide him out of the car, across a soft expanse of grass, then onto the crunch of a gravel path. Around him, wind whispered through trees. The top of his head cooled as the sliver of light at the bottom of the bandana dimmed. Shade, no doubt from the shushing trees.
Lia ushered him up several steps, then turned right onto a curving path that climbed a slope. Between Peter’s blindness and the uneven ground, it took ten minutes to travel what he estimated as less than a hundred feet.
Lia halted. “Here.” Her hands on his shoulders urged him to turn ninety degrees to the right. “You can take the blindfold off now.”
They were in a familiar slice of faux forest, with small boulders peppering the hillside among the wildflowers and ferns. Each had a bronze plaque. He dropped his eyes.
A white rock the size of an ottoman sat in front of him. The bronze plaque read:
___________
Aurelia Amaryllis Anderson - Peter David Dourson
An oak, a cypress, and the moving sea
___________
“Aurelia?”
“I thought if we were going to spend eternity together, maybe you should know.”
Peter took her hand, chafed the back with his thumb. “I’ve never had a girl give me a cemetery plot. I don’t know what to say.”
Lia rubbed the lump under her T-shirt, the necklace he’d given her that always rested against her heart. “You gave me a rock. I want to give you one. Do you like it? We’re not stuck with that epitaph. We can come up with something together.”
Peter pulled Lia into his arms, rested his chin on her head. “Aurelia: golden. Amaryllis: a strong, confident, and very beautiful woman.”
“How on earth do you know that?”
“I ran you when Luthor died. I’ve known who you are for a long time, Aurelia.”
“Don’t start.”
“Why? It’s a lovely name.”
“And the source of childhood trauma. If you ever call me Triple A, I will hurt you. Bad.”
“Duly noted. Is it Aw-rel-y-uh or Aw-reel-ya?”
“Aw-rel-y-uh.”
“Thus, the derivative.”
“Yeah. Thus.”
“Why the urge to see to our eternal rest?”
Lia was silent for a moment. She pulled back in his arms and looked up at him, her moss green eyes serious. “When I lost Honey, I realized, unless we died together in a freak highway pile-up, one of us will eventually leave the other. I don’t believe in marriage—”
“With good reason, considering your upbringing.”
“Marriage is ‘till death do you part.’ I don’t want to let you off the hook that easy. Will you be my eternity?”
He pulled her back to his chest, shaking his head as he huffed a quiet laugh. “Mom will never understand.”
“Ever since Sarah’s funeral, I’ve thought you would enjoy becoming one with the woods.”
Peter glanced across the rows of boulders under the canopy of trees. Spring Grove Cemetery’s Woodland Walkway, not quite woods, not exactly. But it was a peaceful place. Sarah’s ashes, interred in a biodegradable urn, had no doubt achieved new life in the young maple behind her marker.
“I do like it. Very much.”
She handed him a wedge of white rock, no bigger than a half-dollar. He held it, his thumb rubbing the edges.
“I chipped it from the base. I thought you could use it as a worry stone.”
Peter liked the idea of carrying his forever around with him. “It will make a great keychain.”
The Swamp Monster Song
She’ll bite your toes and shred your clothes.
She’s a four-legged demolition team.
Don’t let the blue eyes fool you.
Her needle teeth will school you
in keeping things you value out of reach.
* * *
Swamp Monster.
Demon spawn.
Jaws’ little sister.
Furry piranha.
Nothin’s safe since
She came to live here.
* * *
Mop the floor, one time more.
My shoes are toast, this can’t go on.
Keeping up is such a chore.
That helpless little ball of fur
Will keep you running, run some more!
Author's Note
The biggest obstacle I faced in writing Swamp Monster was wringing a confession from Dick Brewer. Dick Brewer is a narcissistic sociopath, a quality that enabled him to cheerfully lie, manipulate, and maneuver throughout the book. It has been pounded into my head at multiple Writers’ Police Academy sessions that narcissistic sociopaths like Dick are immune to standard interrogation techniques. Simply put, you can’t play on remorse they don’t feel.
I turned to Peter’s virtual uncles, fellow mystery authors Nick Russell and Billy Kring, who are retired, old-school law enforcement. I’m still shaking my head over their answer, but that didn’t stop me from using it.
My descriptions of Mill Creek come from personal experience, both from having a studio overlooking the creek in the eighties, and from Mill Creek Yacht Club events. Commodore’s trash free zone is a thing.
If you are one of the thousand people who have traveled the creek on one of his float trips, you’ll know I narrowed the creek where the cottonwood fell. I hope you’ll forgive me. If I hadn’t, Terry and Steve would have paddled around the tree and we would have no story (And for anyone who’s wondering, MCYC no longer launches from the Millvale garage.)
Pete Schmidt, George Remus, Red Masterson and the Cleveland Four are all part of Sin City history. After I took the Newport Gangster Tour, I went down rabbit holes looking for details to make Mal’s story real. There were discrepancies between various sources, but Pete Schmidt’s battle with Moe Dalitz is well documented. I fudged the timeline to allow Mal time to become a stage magician before Dalitz resumed his attacks on the Beverly Hills.
Marvelous Malachi is a product of my imagination, as is his role in the conflict between Schmidt and Dalitz. To the best of my knowledge, that conflict ended when Pete sold to Dalitz a few months after Mal’s fictional disappearance. In my mind, Mal’s disappearance was the final straw.
I found no record of Cab Calloway performing at the BH but he was local and it would have been strange if he hadn’t.
And while I do not know if anyone ever amputated a limb with a circular saw, Rose’s gunpowder ca
uterization is a historical fact.
I visited the roadside Elvis museum and the gas station selling vials of Elvis’s sweat on the fifth anniversary of Elvis’s death. Graceland was overrun with the faithful that day, so the closest I got to the King’s grave was a trip through the Graceland parking lot.
I originally planned to take weeks to identify Not Elvis. Then I signed on to the Ohio Missing Persons database and realized Peter would solve that part of the mystery in less than an hour.
The young woman missing from Toledo is real. I left out her name—Cynthia Jane Anderson—because Peter stumbling across a possible connection to Lia would have been a complication too far. Still, Cynthia’s story is so bizarre, I had to indulge myself and include it.
I’ve been a fan of Ruth’s proprietor David Tape since he ran Mullane’s Parkside Cafe downtown in the nineties. It’s my favorite restaurant for special meals. And as soon as this book is published, I plan to treat myself.
Acknowledgements
When I first visualized bones on Mill Creek, I didn’t know why they were there. I held a contest through my mailing list. Andrew Heenan’s entry about a retired crime lord offered fun territory for me to explore, dovetailing neatly with Sin City history. Andrew was a pleasure to work with as I fleshed out details of my fictional Andrew, though I saved surprises I hope he will enjoy.
Many, many thanks to the folks who served (knowingly or not) as technical advisors for Swamp Monster:
Commodore Bruce Koehler and friends in the Mill Creek Yacht Club, along with Linda Keller of the Mill Creek Alliance, provided more material about their work than I could fit into the book. I can’t say enough about the amazing work they do to revitalize this important urban waterway and address regional watershed issues. The canoe trips are a delightful experience. If you have the chance, I urge you to take one (or several!).
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