The Mulligans of Mt. Jefferson

by Don Reid

  “Coming.”

  Buddy waited with his back to the screen and petted their golden retriever, Chipper, on the head as the dog frisked about his feet.

  “Come in, Buddy,” Darcy said. “I was just fixing some coffee.”

  “I’ll take you up on that. Does he come in or out?”

  “Oh, let him in. He has the run of the house.” Then she said directly to the dog, “Go lay down, boy.” Chipper found his corner on the cool kitchen tile.

  “You like it black best, I recall.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” Buddy said. “You heard from Harlan this morning?”

  “Yes. He had a pretty rough night. He’s in a lot of pain and very doped up. A nurse said the pain was normal and may get worse over the next couple of days before it gets better. And he’s still mad at you.”

  “Even through the pain and the dope, he still found the strength to dump on me?”

  “I think you hurt him yesterday, Buddy. You were pretty harsh with him, considering the shape he was in.”

  “Maybe so. And you thought I was too harsh with you, too?”

  “Not really, although I didn’t appreciate you making me leave the room while you three guys talked. There was no sense in that, and yes, that made me pretty mad.”

  “Sorry, Darcy. That’s the last thing I wanted to do. But if you were mad yesterday, you’ll probably kick me out of here today, because I’m not through.”

  “You’ve still got more questions?”

  “Let’s start all over again.”

  “No, Buddy. I’m not doing that. I told you all I know. Somebody broke in my home yesterday morning and shot my husband, and I am very upset. And that’s all I know to tell you, and I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal.”

  “And I don’t appreciate being treated like an outsider. I have a job to do, and please don’t tell me what you will and won’t do. If you want the same thing I want, you’ll answer any question I ask. My one and only goal is to find out who was in here yesterday morning, and you’re the only person right now that can help me with that. So calm down. There is no reason for you to make an enemy out of me. Let’s get on the same side here. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She sat down at the Early American kitchen table and put sugar in her cup. Buddy followed suit.

  “Tell me anything and everything you can to describe this person. His height, hair color, skin color, his clothes, his hands, any odor he may have carried. Did he move like he was twenty or fifty? Were his shoes dirty or shined? Was his voice old, young, high, low? Just anything at all.” Buddy waited for her answer.

  “His clothes were dark. Black, I think. And he was completely covered up. He had that horrible mask on, and I couldn’t see any skin. His gloves were black just like his clothes, and he moved kind of quick-like.”

  “He had on gloves?”

  “Yes. Leather gloves, I think.”

  “You didn’t mention the gloves yesterday.”

  “I didn’t? I was so upset yesterday.”

  “How about his skin?”

  “I don’t know about his skin.”

  “Yesterday you said he was white but with a dark complexion.”

  “I did? Maybe so then. I’m not real clear on that.”

  “You don’t know if he wore gloves or if you saw his skin.”

  “Buddy, what are you trying to do to me?” she screamed with tears forming in her eyes. “I don’t know. Can’t you just accept that I was upset and scared, and I just don’t know?”

  “I’m trying to help you remember.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re trying to trip me up for some reason. You didn’t believe Harlan yesterday at the hospital, and you don’t believe me now. What do you want from us?”

  “I want the truth. Darcy, I think you know who stood in this very kitchen and drew a gun and shot your husband just a little over twenty-four hours ago. I don’t think he came to rob you, and I think you could put me on the right track right this very minute if only you would.”

  Darcy got up and poured the coffee left in the cup from her everyday dishes into the sink. She went back to the table and picked up Buddy’s cup and said, “Are you through with this?”

  When he nodded, she said, “Then you’re through here.”

  Buddy sat at the table, not out of defiance, but trying to make sense of what his next move should be in order to get the optimum results from the interview. If it were all business, he knew what he’d do. But it wasn’t, and that was the thing tying his hands at every turn.

  Darcy walked around his chair and disappeared through the dining room. He heard her go up the steps and, in a few seconds more, heard the bedroom door slam. Chipper walked over and laid his chin on Buddy’s knee, and after rubbing the old dog’s head for a few moments, Buddy got up and went out the back door into the sunlight.

  Closing the screen door behind him, he heard the phone ring inside the house. It stopped after the second ring, so he figured Darcy had gotten it. He walked to his police cruiser and sat down on the already hot seat cushion and started the engine. As he was about to back up to turn the car around, he heard Darcy’s voice through the open window.

  “Buddy! Buddy!”

  He switched the engine off, got out of the car, and looked up to a window on the back of the house. Darcy was leaning out.

  “It’s Maxine on the phone. Maxine from the store. I think you might want to talk to her.”

  Darcy met him as he was coming back through the dining room and pointed to a telephone on a chair in the hallway near the front door. She stood over him, nervously twisting her ring and watch while he picked up the phone and talked to Maxine.

  “Hello.”

  “Buddy, this Maxine at Stone’s. I don’t know if it means anything or not, but I thought Darcy should know, and she felt you should know.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t find Fritz.”

  “What do you mean you can’t find him?”

  “He hasn’t come in to work. He didn’t come in all day yesterday, and now he’s not here this morning, and I don’t know quite what to do.”

  “Does he miss work very often?”

  “Never. He’s never even been late in thirty-five years.”

  “What about yesterday? Why didn’t you check it out yesterday?”

  “Well, I did. After I heard about Harlan and got over the shock of it myself, I tried to find him. I thought maybe he was home by himself and maybe he was upset too. He doesn’t have a telephone, but I called his landlady and she knocked on his door and couldn’t raise him.”

  “Has she gone in his apartment or just knocked on the door?”

  “Well, this morning I had her go in. And it’s not really an apartment. It’s just a room he’s always rented from Agnes Coraday. You know out there on West Beverley Street?”

  “Yeah, I know where it is. What did she find?”

  “Nothing. He’s not there. And I guess that means he wasn’t there yesterday either. It’s just not like him, and I worry that something might have happened to him.”

  “I’ll go out there and look and see if I can pick up on anything. Thanks for calling, Maxine.”

  “And thank you for checking on him. And Buddy—how’s Darcy doing? Is she holding up okay? I know she can be a little high strung and take things to the extreme sometimes.”

  “Then considering all that, Maxine, I’d say she’s doing just fine.”

  “Thank you, Buddy. And call me if you find out something.”

  They said good-bye, and as Buddy put the phone back in its cradle, he saw Darcy standing on the second step of the staircase, seemingly not knowing whether to ascend or descend.

  “Where do you think he is?” she asked.

  “I hav
e no idea.”

  “Do you think it means anything?”

  “I have no idea.”

  And good ole Chipper saw Buddy to the door again.

  Chapter Forty

  By the “Spring of ’39,” plans had been made, as well as a few compromises. Leading up to the day, Darcy and Harlan spent nearly every evening together, and most of them ended in arguments. If they were going to the movies, they were usually late because they couldn’t come to an agreement on a comedy or a drama, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy. If they were going to eat, they fell out over whether they wanted to get a sit-down dinner or grab a quick sandwich at a café. They even disagreed on what brand of gasoline to use in their cars; what radio shows they’d listen to; what friends they would go to dances with—and Amanda and Buddy remembered, and still laughed about, the night Harlan and Darcy yelled feverishly at each other over which side they were going to sit on at a high school football game. They both held out for their home schools, and Amanda wound up sitting with Darcy in the bleachers while Buddy stood on the opposite sideline with Harlan and ate hot dogs and peanuts.

  But mostly they just argued about the wedding. Harlan wanted to keep it simple and do it soon. Darcy wanted it big and fairy-tale–like and wanted plenty of time to plan it. He wanted it to be a suit-and-tie occasion while she demanded a formal affair; the veiled gown and train with equal numbers of bridesmaids and groomsmen. He contended they should save the money for the honeymoon while she maintained that her daddy and mother were paying for it so it should be no skin off his hide how much it cost. He wanted to invite no more than fifty people, and she wanted invitations for at least two hundred and fifty since her family was bigger than his and fifty wouldn’t begin to accommodate her clan. And Harlan was still holding out for the country club location. When he had to give in on the number of guests, he used that to bolster his case that the club room would hold so many more than the local Presbyterian church.

  “But a country club is for dances. People go there to get drunk and hang on other people’s wives. It is no place for a wedding,” Darcy argued.

  “A wedding is a wedding no matter where you have it. You come away just as married if you have it in a barn or in the middle of a carnival.”

  “Yes, maybe that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get on the Ferris wheel and let the minister go around with us and take our vows.”

  “Okay by me. And that’s something else. We don’t need a minister. It can be a justice of the peace or a judge. It doesn’t have to be a preacher.”

  “I am not getting married by some lawyer in a black robe. It will be a minister who marries me, or there will be no wedding.”

  “Well, now that is an option worth considering. That just might be the way to go, now that I think about it.”

  One of them would go out the door and slam it behind them. And a few days later, history would repeat itself with variations on the dialogue and embellishments on the details.

  But in the end, concessions were traded and modifications were made and not only a date (April 29th), but a place (the Mt. Jefferson Country Club) and a presiding official (the Reverend Parker Tate of the Faith Presbyterian Church) were decided on even if not agreed upon. Darcy cried over the country club and Harlan pouted over Reverend Tate, but in the end the “Spring of ‘39” came and went, not without its quandaries and a few vexing moments—but for all concerned, they left the grounds as a happy bride and groom.

  The one dark element was H. V. Stone’s health. He had been in and out of the hospital for years after his initial stroke and heart attack. He had done little to take proper care of himself, and in his final years he spent more and more time in bed than he did even in the back room of Stone’s. His health had taken a toll on Esther’s, and she looked older, more tired, and even sicker than he did. But come the week of their only child’s wedding, Esther vowed she wouldn’t let anything prevent her from being there. And she didn’t. Even H. V.’s return to the hospital the night before the wedding rehearsal didn’t detain her.

  Harlan was worried about his dad, and if it hadn’t been for Cal coming home from seminary to be at the wedding and Buddy’s daily support, he might not have been able to see it through. His dad was to be his best man and his two best friends his ushers. But the call from his mother telling him about H. V.’s latest setback sent him speeding for Lenity General Hospital to be at his dad’s side.

  “You all right, Dad?”

  “I’m all right. I may not get out of here to get to that wedding of yours, but don’t let that spoil anything.”

  “We’ll postpone it till you’re strong enough to come.”

  “No, we won’t, son. We won’t do any such thing. This is not my wedding. This is yours and Darcy’s.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not standing up there without you. We’ll wait till you get out.”

  “Listen to me, Harlan. Don’t you know anything about women? All those girls you ran with all those years, and you still don’t know anything about them? You don’t postpone a woman’s wedding day. You honor it. She’s your wife, or going to be in about forty-eight hours. So you do what’s right by her. Me being there isn’t going to matter a hoot in a hollow. It’s about you and her. Now get your butt over there and get on with that wedding, and I don’t want to hear anymore about it. And tell Darcy to come see me. I want to kiss the bride.”

  H. V. Stone spent his only son’s wedding day in room 326 in Mt. Jefferson’s only hospital. His absence was bigger than all the others’ attendance and nearly stole the show from the bride’s gown and glory.

  It was a four o’clock wedding, and by seven thirty the reception was in full swing. The Rhythm Kings, a small dance band from Roanoke, was providing the music that had the ballroom floor full and the party pitched to a high fever. No one seemed to notice when one participant sneaked out the side door with a small package in hand. In this crowd it would be easy for anyone to go missing for a few minutes to run an important errand.

  H. V. was listening to the Washington Senators ballgame on the radio. His eyes were closed, and his mind was going back and forth from childhood memories of Harlan to what was happening on the field. When he was thinking about the game, he was wondering if this might be the year Bucky Harris would bring the team back from their doldrums. Bucky had been the best second baseman in baseball, but he was proving to be only a mediocre manager. And when H. V. was thinking of Harlan, he was wondering if Harlan would be as good a husband as he had been a son. The boy had been running the family business since seventeen years of age and doing a bang-up job. H. V.’s own health had robbed the lad of his education, but he had never heard Harlan complain about anything he might have missed out on in life. His son was a man before he ever had the chance to be a complete teenager, and H. V. only hoped Harlan would continue to be the man his family would need him to be. Lying alone in a hospital bed with pain as a constant companion, H. V. sensed the family just might need his son to be that man any day now.

  That’s when he felt someone in the room. Before he could open his eyes, he heard a voice say, “I thought I’d bring the party to you. Even a man in bed can eat a piece of wedding cake and drink a little punch.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  “Mrs. Coraday? I’m Lieutenant Briggs with the Mt. Jefferson Police.”

  “Yes, come in. Maxine said you might come by.”

  “When was the last time you saw Fritz?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say, Mr. Briggs. I never see Fritz. I mean, it may have been months since I’ve laid eyes on him. But that doesn’t mean anything. Not anything at all because you see, I hardly ever see him at all.”

  “Does he have his own entrance to his room?”

  “Oh, yes sir. He comes in that door around there. Would you like to look through his room?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Buddy fo
und nothing suspicious. What he did find was rather neat, clean, and sparse living quarters confined to one room with a shared bath down the hallway. There were only a few clothes hanging in the small closet. Besides the bed, the only furniture was a nightstand with a radio and soiled doily and an overstuffed easy chair with a footstool that neither matched nor coordinated. A tall, skinny bookcase stood in one corner and held a few tattered hardbacks written in a foreign language. Buddy wasn’t sure, but thought it was one of the Latin languages. Knowing Fritz’s nationality might have helped him in determining which. The room smelled of the same chicken broth Fritz always smelled of but appeared spotless. There was no hint of anything that could explain the old man’s absence from work.

  Once back in his car, Buddy took on the duty of every police officer involved in a case. He had to evaluate all the information at hand and ask himself what the next logical move was. Mulling over everything he had gathered, learned, or assumed, he felt in his bones that it was time to drop in to the hospital for another visit. It was almost 10:00 a.m. He knew this meant he might run into Darcy again but couldn’t let that deter him from seeing Harlan.

  The drive from the west end of Beverley Street to the hospital took him through the center of town, and while sitting at a red light, he heard someone call his name.

  “Where you heading on such a sunny summer morning, and why the long face?” Vic Princeton asked as he peered into Buddy’s passenger-side window.