Town in a Wild Moose Chase

by B. B. Haywood

  Candy had read about this lately. She knew a body began to stiffen fairly quickly after death, and rigor mortis began in two to four hours. After a few hours, the entire body would feel stiff, though full rigor took between twelve and twenty-four hours, as far as she could recall.

  So if the body had been stiff when Solomon had found it, it had been there for a while.

  “Is the body still in the woods?” she asked after a few moments.

  “No, I moved it.”

  This surprised her. “Why did you move it?”

  “It was lying in a gully. Snowmelt was starting to cover it up, and more snow was coming soon. It was about to get buried. I had to do something with it.”

  Candy remembered. It had snowed later that day, though not too heavily. But it was reasonable for Solomon to think the body might have been quickly covered by snow.

  “How did you move it?”

  Solomon nodded with his head toward the sledge, parked next to the rock wall. “It took some maneuvering,” he said. Under his breath, he added, “I had to take that hatchet out of his back.”

  Candy was afraid he’d say something like that. “Solomon, you disturbed a murder scene.” She didn’t frame it as an accusation, but simply as a statement of fact.

  “Yup, I know all about that,” the old hermit said, “but there was no help for it. It was about to get buried, and then it’d be gone ’til spring, so I had to do something.”

  She understood his reasoning—he was just trying to help—but she also knew Chief Durr would be livid when he found out.

  He’d also be livid when he found out she was involved in the mystery, and had stumbled across Solomon on her own. She wondered vaguely what had become of Officer Jody. Hadn’t he been assigned to her so he’d be here when this sort of thing happened?

  She let out a long breath. “Where did you move him to?” she asked the old hermit.

  “I brought him here first,” Solomon said, nodding toward the cleft in the rock. “I put him in there for a while, but it just didn’t feel right.”

  “You moved him again,” Candy said, finally beginning to understand what had happened.

  “There wasn’t anything I could do for him,” Solomon said with a nod. “He couldn’t stay here all winter. It just wasn’t right. Somehow I had to get him back to the people he belonged to.”

  “So you put his body on the sledge and took him out to the Loop.”

  “It seemed like the best thing to do,” the old hermit said. “I hauled him over there right before dawn this morning. The moose went with me.”

  She glanced again at the creature, which was almost invisible in the woods but still hung around, as if eavesdropping on their conversation.

  “So it was Victor Templeton all the time then,” Candy said, pondering the ramifications of this latest revelation.

  “Who?”

  It took Candy a few moments to respond. She was thinking. “The body you found in the woods. His name was Victor Templeton. He was one of the ice sculptors scheduled to give demonstrations in town today. Now we know why he never showed.”

  Solomon considered the name for a few moments before shaking his head. “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s a tourist,” Candy simplified. “He was supposed to visit Cape Willington this weekend to take part in the Moose Fest. He was married to a woman named Gina.” Candy paused, her mind working. When she’d asked Gina yesterday about her husband, and the fact that he had pulled out of the exhibition, she’d said it was a private matter. And she had seemed distracted and evasive when they talked. Was that because she was worried about him, or had she known more than she let on?

  Candy tried to remember what else she’d heard about Victor over the past few days. She’d had so many conversations, and so many people had said so many different things to her. She couldn’t remember who had said what, and when.

  But then she recalled that she had all her recent interviews on her digital recorder.

  She looked down at her watch. It was nearly two thirty in the afternoon.

  How long would it take her to go through all her recordings? And what might she find there?

  As her brow furrowed in thought, she looked back at Solomon. “You said you took the hatchet out of his back. What did you do with it?”

  The old hermit pointed to a burlap bag resting by the chair under the lean-to. “I got it all right there.”

  “All of what?”

  “All of everything. All his stuff.”

  “His stuff? You mean…?”

  Solomon held up a gloved hand and started counting off on his fingertips. “His wallet, money, cards, papers, watch, reading glasses—everything.”

  “You stripped the body?” Candy asked, shocked.

  Solomon seemed surprised by her reaction. Somewhat defensively, he said, “What else could I do? I knew I was gonna dump it by the side of the road so someone else could find it. What if the person who discovered it was a thief who just took all his stuff? Then no one would know who he was. I couldn’t take that chance.”

  “But… what did you plan to do with all of his… stuff?”

  “Weeell”—the old hermit gave her a look that told her the answer was obvious—“I was gonna give it all to you, of course.”

  “To do what with?”

  “Take it to the police so I don’t have to,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Candy’s face lightened. “Ahh.” Now it was starting to make sense.

  But Solomon must have taken her expression the wrong way and thought she was making a comment on his honesty. “I didn’t steal none of it, really. It’s all there.” And to prove it, he waved to her. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  He set his pipe down, rose again, and walked to the lean-to, beckoning Candy to follow. He took up the bag and set it lightly on the table.

  “I handled everything as carefully as I could,” he said as he untied the bag. Slowly he began to remove items from inside it, setting them one by one on the table in front of them.

  A black, well-worn leather wallet, bulging with credit cards. A wad of bills in a gold pocket clasp. A variety of coins. A comb. An Omega watch. A cell phone. Car keys. A hotel room key.

  And a hatchet.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Candy stared at it, shocked.

  The murder weapon.

  It had fallen right into her hands.

  Now what was she going to do with it?

  As her gaze swept over it, she noticed several things about it. It looked nearly new, with an oak handle, free of nicks or scuffs. It had a streamlined head, half coated in red, with a sharp, polished blade at one end that practically gleamed.

  That struck her as odd. This was—allegedly, she reminded herself—the weapon someone used to murder Victor Templeton. But it looked like it had just come right off the tool shelf at Gumm’s Hardware Store. Shouldn’t it look, well, less clean? As if it had actually been used to murder someone?

  There was no blood on it. No hairs, no fibers, nothing to indicate it had been plunged into the back of its victim.

  She looked up at the old hermit. “Solomon, did you wipe off this hatchet?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t touch it much. Just pulled it out of the body and stuck it in the bag.”

  “There’s no blood on it, no… residue,” Candy said.

  “Nope, there wasn’t when I took it out of the body. There wasn’t much blood on the body at all, come to think of it.”

  “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” He motioned toward the hatchet. “You might want to take a look at the other side of that thing.”

  She gave him a funny look and then curiously turned her attention back to the hatchet. Gingerly, using only the tips of her gloved index finger and thumb, she reached out, took the handle by its farthest end, and flipped it over.

  Immediately she saw what Solomon was referring to. Burned into the hatchet’s polished wood handle, using some
sort of heated engraving tool, in an old-fashioned typeface, were the words STONY RIDGE MUSEUM—HATCHET-THROWING CHAMPION, 2009.

  She drew in her breath.

  This was the clue, she realized with a jolt, that would lead the police to Victor Templeton’s murderer.

  Her hands went to her mouth.

  She didn’t know whether to be pleased or horrified.

  She leaned forward and read the inscription again, thinking. After a moment she pointed to the inscription. “Have you ever heard of this place?” she asked Solomon. “The Stony Ridge Museum?”

  He made a face, sticking out his chin and lower lip. “Nope. If it were around here, I’d know about it for sure. I’ve been here all my life.”

  “Do you have any idea who this hatchet might belong to? Have you seen it around town? Have you seen anyone carrying or using it?”

  He took his time considering that. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t see many people, and don’t know of any hatchets except my own, and I’ve had that one for twenty years.” He pointed at the hatchet on the table. “Never seen that one before I pulled it out of that feller’s back. Don’t know who it could belong to. But I’ll tell you this: whoever it was, that’s a pretty nice hatchet to leave out there in the woods, especially when it was sticking in the back of a dead body.”

  He was right about that. Candy had been thinking the same thing.

  Why would someone leave an incriminating murder weapon in the back of the victim—one that could so easily be traced by anyone with an Internet connection?

  She set that question aside until later, when she had some time to think about it. For now, she studied the other items Solomon had set out on the table.

  The car keys, she noticed, were for a Honda. Probably a late model, from the look of them. The hotel room key also caught her eye, mostly because it looked so old. Rather than a key card, as most modern hotels used, it was an old brass key, its teeth well worn and attached to a rather battered diamond-shaped piece of plastic. The room number, which once had been stamped in the center of the plastic piece, had been worn away long ago due to heavy usage.

  Her gaze focusing on it, she gently flipped it over.

  The opposite side was blank. No room number.

  “I wonder what hotel that’s from?” she said, mostly to herself.

  “There are a couple of older places up on 192,” Solomon said helpfully. “Maybe it came from one of them.”

  Lastly, she looked at the cell phone. It was a typical Blackberry. No doubt it contained a number of clues.

  Dare she switch it on?

  As she pondered the question, Solomon said from beside her, “I turned it on a while ago.”

  “You did?”

  “Took me a while to figure out. I haven’t had one of those things before, though I seen my daughter using one. She’s been trying to get me to buy one, but I just don’t have a use for it. I don’t make many calls out here in the woods, and frankly I don’t care much about people calling me.”

  Candy understood. “And what happened when you turned it on?”

  “It buzzed once or twice.”

  “When was that?”

  Solomon thought about it. “Would’ve been yesterday afternoon sometime.”

  “Did you pick it up? Were they alerts or incoming calls?”

  The old hermit shook his head. “I don’t know the difference. I got tired of it after a while and turned it back off.”

  Candy nodded. That’s the way she’d leave it.

  Right now, she knew what she had to do.

  “Solomon, we need to get this stuff to the police right away.”

  “I know that.” His eyes grew hard and his jaws tensed as he shook open the burlap bag and moved closer to the table. Carefully, he started placing the items back into the bag. “That’s why I’m giving all of it to you.”

  “But this could lead them to Victor’s killer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She chose her next words carefully, uncertain of his reaction. “Solomon, you have to go back with me. You have to go to the police.”

  She expected a strong reaction from him, but instead he was silent for a moment as he placed the wallet inside the bag. He gave her a sideways look, as if he had known her request was coming. For a moment his eyes grew dark, and she was afraid he was about to go ballistic on her. But instead the darkness receded, and he allowed a slow grin to work its way across his face. Softly, in a gravelly voice, he said, “Well, now, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Solomon—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “It ain’t no use. I ain’t going to see no police.”

  “But you have to tell them what you saw,” she pleaded. “You’ll have to tell them how you found the body—”

  “I already told you how I found it,” he said evenly, “and you can just pass along all those details to them.”

  “But they’ll want to talk to you. They’ll want you to show them the place in the woods where you discovered the body, and they’ll want to know why you moved it out to the road.”

  “Like I said, I already told you all about that. As far as that gully where I found the body, I’m not even sure I could find the exact spot myself in these woods at this time of year. It’s likely buried by now, or disguised somehow. These woods change a lot after a snowfall, you know. Even a little one. Makes everything look different.”

  “The police can help. They have all sorts of investigation methods.”

  “Well, there you go.” Solomon’s grin was gone, and he scratched the back of his neck. “You see, me and the police, we don’t always get along. I leave them alone, and they leave me alone, and that’s the way we like it.”

  He lowered his voice and leaned in close to her, and for the first time she realized he hadn’t taken a bath in quite a while. “You see, I had this little problem with the police way back when. It’s all settled now—at least I think it is—but there’s no sense doing any investigating and digging it all up again, you know what I mean?”

  Candy felt a breath go out of her. “Isn’t there anything I can say to convince you?”

  He didn’t answer as he gathered up the last few items on the table.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked after a few moments, watching him.

  He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, chewing over his words carefully. “I thought about staying here—not many folks know about this place, and I’d probably be just fine. But I know of another place a little farther up in the woods, way out of town, and I’ve been thinking of moving up there until things quiet down.”

  “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

  Solomon placed the last item in the bag, tied it up with a length of twine, and handed it over to her. Reluctantly she accepted it, cradling it in her two hands.

  He swept off his hat, ran a hand through his disheveled hair, and looked up at the sky. “Clouds are coming in again,” he said, studying them with a practiced eye. “The almanac predicted it, you know. Said we’d have this series of little snowstorms, with a few nice days in between each one.”

  His gaze dropped and shifted to her. “The almanac’s right seventy percent of the time, you know. They got a lot of useful tips in there too. That’s how I learned to cook them biscuits. I got the recipe right out of the almanac.”

  He chuckled, shook his head, and grew more serious as he returned to a previous question. “I don’t know for sure, to tell you the truth. Maybe ’til spring. Maybe longer. Maybe not. Depends.”

  She nodded. “Okay. But just so you know, you can always stay with us at Blueberry Acres, if you ever need a place for a few nights. Doc and I would love to have you.”

  He gave her a warm smile. “I appreciate that, Candy.”

  She looked around the camp. “Do you have enough food?”

  “Oh.” He waved a hand, as if it were inconsequential. “Don’t worry about that. There’s always plenty
of food around, if you know where to look for it. I had squirrel stew for dinner a few nights ago. Caught a wild turkey last week. I make do.”

  “If you ever need any staples, like sugar or flour or salt, just let me know. You can always stop by the farm. The back door’s always open for you.”

  He nodded, but she could tell she wouldn’t hear from him for a while.

  She took a deep breath and looked around. “Well, I guess I should be going. I’ve got to get these items to the police.”

  “Okay. You do that. Think you can find your way back out?”

  “Sure. Just follow my footprints in the snow, right?”

  “That’s right. And if you get sidetracked, head south-southwest,” he said helpfully, pointing in the general direction with the vertical flat of his hand. “You’ll eventually come to the farm—or the sea. One or the other. Either way, you’ll be fine.”

  She felt for the compass in her pocket and knew she had a backup in case she got lost. She nodded toward the woods. “What about our friend, the moose?”

  Solomon put his hat back on and squinted at the creature. “Well, I guess that’s up to him, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is.” She watched the moose for a few moments, still awed by its silent majesty. “Do you think that’s why it came this way? Because it sensed that body out there?”

  “Been wondering that myself,” said Solomon thoughtfully. “It’s the strangest behavior I’ve ever seen for an animal like that—and I’ve seen some strange things out in these woods. What drew it to the body, or made it come after us, I couldn’t say.”

  “Well, I figured something was bothering him,” Candy said. “He’s been chasing me all over town.”

  Solomon chuckled. “Chased by a wild moose, huh? He must have given you quite a start.” He laughed a little harder, amused by the thought.

  Now it was Candy’s turn to give him a sideways look. “So, you think it’s funny too? My friends think he’s in love with me.”

  Solomon laughed again. “Well,” the old hermit said, slapping her on the back, “if that’s true, he’s not the only one.”