AHMM, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  We headed due south and made good time to Marietta. We ate lunch there at a downtown diner. When we were settled in a booth where no one could overhear, I said, “You've been holding out on me, Jack. There's more to it than you've told me, isn't there? There has to be, or you wouldn't be driving all the way down to Gharkeyville."

  He lifted one eyebrow, then gave a careless shrug, as if to say I was wasting his time. “Nothing important, buddy. Cal Andres found a store that sells secondhand stuff near the sisters’ apartment. One day the owner had a little yellow sunsuit in the window. Something for a kid about two. He had seen Florence around the neighborhood, but never with a kid, so he was surprised when she came in and bought it. He showed her a few other things he had for someone that size, and she seemed to enjoy looking over the stuff. Then she suddenly got nervous and hurried out of the place.

  "On top of that, Cal saw a woman pushing one of those—what do they call them? Taylor Tots?—with a boy about two in it. He talked to her a while, mentioned Florence, and the woman said she was glad Florence was gone because she scared her."

  "Scared her? How?"

  "Every time she saw her, Florence made a big fuss over the boy. It got so it was happening so regularly the woman got the idea Florence was lying in wait for her. She felt there was something unnatural about it, and it frightened her."

  "Sounds like Florence may have been around the bend."

  "You called it for once, buddy. There are women like that, you know. Get obsessed with someone else's kid because they don't have one of their own. There's one more thing. Cal checked the county records and found that Florence had a baby at City Hospital six months after she came to Akron a few years back. It was a boy, stillborn."

  And Jack Eddy had said all that was nothing important. Our food arrived and we didn't talk anymore until we finished eating. I thought about what he had told me, of course. I had to agree with that mother, it was kind of scary.

  * * * *

  Marietta is a pretty little town on the north bank of the Ohio River, so I wouldn't have minded hanging around for a while. That was out of the question, and we soon were back on the road. Or to be more accurate, a series of them that got progressively worse as we went up, down, and around the precipitous hills that West Virginians call mountains. They might not be the Alps or the Rockies, but driving through them was just as difficult, maybe more so.

  After what seemed an eternity we came to a sign telling us we had arrived at Gharkeyville. Like others we had seen along the way, the sign was riddled with bullet holes. I was totally spent, as worn out as if it had been the longest ride of my life. Actually, when I thought about it, it had been the longest ride of my life. I had been to Fort Wayne once and Pittsburgh a couple of times, but fell far short of being a world traveler. I had an ominous feeling that that would change in the next few years, thanks to Adolph Hitler. He claimed that after being handed a large chunk of Czechoslovakia he had no further territorial demands in Europe. The amazing thing was that some people actually believed him.

  As promised, Gharkeyville was a dismal little town. Tired as I was, though, it looked okay to me. Best of all was finding that it possessed a hotel, or something that passed for one. I was eager to flop down on a bed and was almost, but not quite, ready to pass up Jack Eddy's offer to buy dinner. The diner a couple of doors down the street was as bad, if not worse than, the one in Switchback, where the waitress snarled at customers and the main offering on the menu was a greaseburger. I settled for pork chops, which were a little on the thin side but not too bad, and home fries that had been cremated and were ready for a well-deserved burial.

  I awoke refreshed in the morning. For breakfast we found another diner that was a slight cut above the one where we had eaten the previous night. The waitress gave me a quick smile before starting to flirt with Jack. For the umpteenth time I wondered what it was about Jack Eddy that attracted females like flypaper attracts flies. I was taller, better looking, and had a far more pleasing personality, and yet they completely ignored me when Jack was around.

  I was eager to hear what he had planned for us to do but wasn't too thrilled when he gave me my orders. I was to drive to the nearby county seat and check various records at the courthouse, a boring assignment. He was just going to nose around a little to see what he could learn. I had a sneaking suspicion that while I would be poring over musty old records, Jack Eddy would be spending time learning more about that waitress.

  Most of the things I found in the records seemed of little importance to me. Florence wasn't married when she left home, or at least hadn't been in that county. She was thirty and her sister Gertrude was twenty-six. The elder Slades also had two sons, Anse, who was thirty-two and R.B., twenty-eight. It appeared that the parents and even a couple of grandparents were still alive and living at the family homestead. Aside from the father and one male grandparent, the only one with a criminal record was Anse. His sheet was as long as my arm.

  The tax maps were of some interest. The Slades owned a large tract back in the hills a couple of miles from Gharkeyville. If the map was accurate, the land was on a county road, probably dirt, that ended at their property. Isolated as could be.

  Jack Eddy was having lunch at the place where we had eaten breakfast when I arrived back in Gharkeyville. A different waitress was on duty, which made me wonder when the other had clocked out and where Jack had been at the time. I showed him the notes I had made, then asked what he had found out.

  "Nothing,” he said in a disgusted tone. “These people won't talk to an outsider. I didn't want to come right out and ask about the Slades, but subtlety gets you nowhere down here."

  I smirked a little and couldn't help saying, “The great Jack Eddy swaggered to the plate and was called out on three pitches."

  I thought he was going to slug me, but he managed to contain himself. After a pause that allowed him to regain his equilibrium, he said, “Cal Andres is on his way. Should be here before midnight. Cliff Austin is with him. If you see either one don't act like you recognize them, just walk on by."

  "Both of them coming? You must be expecting a war."

  "Cal knows how to talk to people around here, we don't. Cliff is just for backup."

  We sat quietly for a few minutes. If we needed backup it did indeed sound like Jack was expecting serious trouble. I had a disquieting thought. “Jack, Anse Slade shot some guy about the time Florence headed up to Akron. Maybe it was the one that got her pregnant. Anyway, the fellow didn't die, so Anse got six months, suspended."

  "I'm not sure that shooting someone is a serious offense in these parts."

  "Another thing, Jack. A while back I read a book called Battle Cry that was set somewhere around here, and it had a couple of characters named Anse. One was Bad Anse. Did you ever hear of anyone named Anse before we came down here?"

  Jack leaned his head back and laughed. “God, but you have a way of hitting on the trivial, friend."

  I was bored out of my mind until the middle of the next morning when I saw Cal Andres. He was wearing a worn pair of bib overalls, a tattered flannel shirt, and was leaning up against a post on Main Street whittling a stick of wood with a nasty-looking knife. Several other men were nearby doing pretty much the same thing. It seemed to be a major pastime in Gharkeyville. How could people stand to live that way? I wondered. I would have been willing to bet that not a single one of them, Cal excluded, had ever heard of Hitler, let alone Czechoslovakia.

  There was a weekly newspaper, though. It ran obits on the front page along with admissions to the hospital at the county seat. Releases, too, of those who hadn't moved over to the obituary column. There were the expected chicken dinner reports from the various towns and villages in the vicinity so you could keep up to date on who visited whom the past week. If you checked closely you could find that some people ate at the expense of their friends five or six nights a week. Also which single males and single females seemed to always show up at the same house at supper time.
/>   So social activity in the county appeared brisk. Privacy, at least with a large segment of the population, was not sought after, especially at mealtime. The Gharkeyville Gazette contained some church news, a few stories concerning coal mines or a store opening or closing, but not a word on national or world events.

  I searched in vain for a paper from a larger city. The man behind the counter at a variety store said they received the paper from Charleston but were sold out. “How many copies do you get?"

  "Two. One of ‘em's reserved for Doc Singletary."

  "Then you actually sell one copy?"

  "Yup.” That ended the conversation.

  The news on the radio station at the county seat was more of the same, obits and hospital admissions and releases. Closed in by the surrounding hills, cut off from the outside world, it could have been medieval times rather than 1938. Aside from the decrepit cars and trucks on the street, of course.

  Flat caps were part of the uniform for the males of Gharkeyville, although a few broke ranks by wearing battered fedoras that made my old one look pretty good. The youths that weren't wearing flat caps wore those little beanies made from the crown of an old fedora with the bottom turned up and scalloped. The women were nearly all clad in shapeless print housedresses, and most of the young girls wore dresses made from patterned flour sacks, also shapeless. Occasionally I saw an overweight woman, but most of them, like the men, were thin and had drawn, pinched faces. Depression faces, a sign of the times seen everywhere, but more pronounced in Gharkeyville.

  It was late evening before we had a council of war in Jack's room at the hotel. Cal Andres did most of the talking. He had wormed his way into the trust of a few people that took him for one of their own. Cal was an enigma. In a suit and tie he could pass for a successful businessman or a rubber company junior executive and was able to mingle at will with those types. In bib overalls and a flat cap he was perfectly at home on the streets of Gharkeyville. He wasn't a big man, no more than five nine, but he worked out at a gym almost daily, so he was wiry and strong as a bull. Before coming to Gharkeyville he had shaved off the slim, Clark Gable-style mustache and mussed up the slicked-back dark hair that gave him the appearance of a Latin romancer. He could stand out in a crowd or lose himself completely in one, whatever suited the occasion. In a sense, he was a human chameleon, an ideal private eye.

  "The Slades could be dangerous, Jack,” he said. “They run a big still on their property, and the sheriff and the revenuers leave them alone. They peddle their moonshine over a large area, but from what I heard, most of the buyers pick the stuff up themselves. Nobody came right out and said he was afraid of the Slades, but I could tell that people give them a wide berth, especially Anse. He doesn't run the moonshine business, the father does that, but he's the strongman of the operation. Back home we'd call him an enforcer for the mob. Oh, and one more thing, Anse has a brown panel truck.

  "The other son, R.B., is regarded as a pretty nice fellow. As for Florence, she's looked on as a little ‘tetched,’ as they say down here. Now here's the interesting part: She showed up a couple of months ago with a kid, a boy about two she claims she had while up north. The husband she had married up there had died, or so she told everybody. We know that was a lie. For a week or two she was showing the kid off around town. Since then she hasn't been seen."

  Jack Eddy shook his head for a moment, then gave a curt laugh. “I think I get the whole picture now. It's about like we figured, this Florence was nuts to have a kid. One day she was visiting her sister Gertrude on Portage Path and got a look at the Stauffer boy. He was the one, none other would do. It was easy to talk Gertrude into going along with her plan, and she managed to recruit Anse for the job. From the sound of him that wasn't too difficult.

  "It worked to perfection until it was Gertrude's time to play her role. She's incredibly stupid, so when she talked to the police about seeing the panel truck she got all flustered, and when asked to describe it she could only remember her brother's truck. It was probably supposed to be black or red, but she said brown. Then she managed to recover enough to tell about the fake lettering. Next she had the job of mailing the ransom letters. I never would have believed it possible, but she was dumb enough to get the wrong address on the envelopes. Florence must have written the second letter and left it with Gertrude to mail later.

  "In the meantime, Anse, Florence, and the kid were either back in Gharkeyville or well on their way. None of them are what you would call heavy on the gray matter, and yet they managed to pull off a pretty decent snatch, one they almost got away with. They let Florence run loose with the kid for a couple of weeks, but something happened, and now they've got her tucked away at home. The question is how do we get the boy and Florence away from that mountain hideout and back to Akron. The cops can take care of picking up Anse. And I don't mean the local cops. Whatever, he's none of our concern except for dealing with him when we pick up Florence and the kid."

  Cliff Austin said, “It won't be easy, Jack. I used Bram's little sketch and drove up there in Cal's car this afternoon. Man, talk about isolated. The way I see it, we'll have to approach on foot and by going through the woods. There's a Y in the road about half a mile away. We can have Bram park his car there because we'll need one and then give him a signal or a time when he should drive up to the house."

  I didn't like the sound of that one bit.

  "And we have to remember,” said Cal Andres, “that these are hill people. The men will all have guns. That means four of them. Chances are that Anse is the only one that knows Florence's story is phony, so the others will think that we're the kidnappers. Like Cliff said, it won't be easy."

  Again, Jack Eddy's laugh was curt. “Since when did any of us look for easy jobs?"

  If it hadn't been for foolish manly pride, not to mention embarrassment, I would have raised my hand and shouted, “Me!"

  * * * *

  The next day was the shortest of my life. The hands on the clock just seemed to whirl around out of control, and all too soon it was evening. We checked out of the hotel, left Cal's car parked along the street leading out of town, then the four of us drove in my car to the dirt road leading to the Slade homestead. As planned, I was to wait at the point where the road forked off to the left; the other three took off on foot. The signal for me to pick them up would be gunfire. That was a comforting thought as I began my lonely vigil.

  It was only later that I learned what transpired when they reached the house. Cal Andres did a bit of stealthy window peeping and found the entire family, including the Stauffer boy, gathered in the living room listening to a program on radio. Cal and Jack Eddy moved to the rear of the house, Cliff Austin to the front.

  The fun began with Cliff firing two shots in the air. Anse Slade, who was carrying a pistol in his jacket, rushed out the front door as Jack and Cal charged in the back. Cliff leveled Anse Slade with a bullet in the leg. Cal stopped R.B. and the two older men from reaching the rack holding their rifles. Jack swooped up the kid in one arm and Florence in the other. All the women were screaming their heads off.

  I came careening up the rutted drive within seconds after Cal and Jack came out of the front door. Everyone piled into my car. Florence was still screaming and trying to put up a fight. As we roared off back down the drive, someone at the house began firing. I gave the Hupmobile a little more gas when I heard a bullet ping off its back end.

  Then we were in the clear. “They'll be after us, Jack,” I yelled.

  Jack, Cal, and Cliff laughed. “Not until they hike somewhere to get a vehicle,” Jack said. “Cliff has the distributor caps off the two back there at the house."

  We dropped off Cal and Cliff at the other car, then headed north as fast as the hills would allow. Cal's car, a souped-up 1935 Buick, was close behind. It was tricky enough driving those narrow, winding roads with daylight making the curves and other hazards visible. At night it was tortuous. Jack was in the backseat with Florence. Her right hand was cuffed to th
e armrest, her left to Jack Eddy. The child was asleep on the seat to his left.

  At Jack's orders we didn't take the most direct route, the one we had followed on the way down. Florence began keening as soon as we were on the open road. It was the fearful cry of an agonized banshee. After fifteen minutes of it, Jack stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when a little before first light we crossed the Ohio River on the Silver Bridge at Gallipolis. We were still in hilly country, but it wasn't anything like that around Gharkeyville. Near Logan we pulled up at a roadside diner and parked well away from the other cars and pickup trucks. Cal Andres pulled his Buick up beside us, and he and Cliff went inside. A short time later they came back with food for the rest of us. Florence refused to eat, which didn't come as a shock.

  In the meantime, I had checked the rear of my car and found a bullet hole in the left fender. Fortunately it was above the level of the tire or anything else of importance. Just seeing it, though, made me even more aware of how easily our adventure could have ended in disaster. With a disabled car, armed men in pursuit, and two miles from town, what would we have done? I didn't even want to think about it.

  Jack Eddy made a call from a phone booth on the outskirts of Canton, and half an hour later we saw the Akron city limit sign. I did as ordered and stopped in front of the downtown police station. Cal parked right behind us. Jack and Cal got the handcuffs off Florence, and then Cliff Austin frog-marched her inside. The few people on the sidewalk stood gawking as over and over she screamed, “Give me back my baby!"

  Fifteen minutes later we pulled into the Stauffers’ driveway. Jack Eddy had called the house from the police station, so both of them were waiting outside for us. Joanne began crying as soon as she had the boy in her arms. Jack gave her husband a brief summary of what had happened, then we both got a kiss from Joanne before we headed back downtown.

  The only way for the Times-Press to beat the Beacon Journal was to put out an extra. It was a big enough event to warrant one, and my story created a sensation throughout the city. Only it wasn't actually my story. Ben Goldsmith had a rewrite man handle it with me feeding him the details. I was mentioned only as “a Times-Press reporter.” Goldsmith said, “We're not having another first-person story with you coming out the hero.” I didn't really care but was a little put out that I didn't even get to share the byline. Uppermost in my mind was getting home to the boardinghouse and falling into a deep, well-earned sleep.