Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Ah, well, you might be surprised to learn that Maryland has had over thirty-four sightings since we started keeping track of these things. I interviewed a guy recently who had an eye-to-eye standoff with a big, hairy creature in the Pax River watershed area near Fort Meade.’

  ‘No kidding. That’s less than twenty miles from my house. Did he get any pictures?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’ Jake stared at my face so intently I wondered if I had chocolate donut icing on my chin. I was reaching for a napkin when he said, ‘Can you spare a few minutes? I want to show you something.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t.’ I fingered the ribbon on my badge – the one that marked me as one of the hired help. ‘I’m on duty.’

  ‘Oh.’ He paused. ‘Well, then. I have a complaint.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A customer complaint. Something I want to show you. And Harley needs to go for a walk anyway.’

  ‘OK, but I’ll need to check in with Carole first,’ I said. ‘Follow me.’

  ‘No rush,’ he said. ‘When you’re done we’ll be in the lobby.’

  I found Carole exactly where I thought she would be, manning the reception desk. Only a handful of registration packets remained on the table in front of her. ‘You’ve got things well under control, right?’

  ‘You bet.’

  I indicated the remaining packets. ‘Any of those folks likely to show?’

  Three of the registrants’ names were new to her, she told me, but Carole fully expected to see the others, with one exception. ‘Homer Guthrie is a no-show,’ she said. ‘I should have pulled his packet, I suppose.’

  ‘Homer Guthrie? Sounds like a character out of Mayberry, RFD.’

  Carole frowned. ‘It’s a sad case, really. When he was two he was diagnosed with hypertrichosis. He’s got hair all over his body.’ She paused, leaned across the table and lowered her voice. ‘Long, reddish-brown hair – even on his eyelids, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Yikes.’

  ‘Exactly. He spent his youth in a carnival sideshow billed as “The Werewolf Boy” until around 1977.’

  I puzzled over the date for a few seconds then asked, ‘What happened in 1977?’

  ‘Star Wars happened. Then his loathsome parents reinvented him as “Son of Chewbacca.” From the photos I’ve seen, Homer really looked the part of a wookie, too. Hairy, six-foot-seven …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Nowadays they’d throw parents like that in jail.’

  ‘Was Homer going to speak?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, just attend. He wanted to meet Professor Cloughly. All his life people have been treating him like the missing link rather than a genetic anomaly, so he sent her a sample of his hair for DNA testing.’

  ‘I thought Cloughly’s expertise was scat.’

  ‘Oh, shit’s the name of her game, for sure, but there’s a DNA lab at South Jersey Shore University where Cloughly’s got tenure, so that’s where all the Bigfoot hair samples got sent. Homer’s was one of them. She’ll be presenting the results later this afternoon,’ Carole added. ‘Ron scheduled it late in the day on purpose so everybody’s going to be frothing at the mouth, waiting to hear.’

  ‘How come Homer’s not coming?’ I asked.

  ‘Poor guy. He had hip replacement surgery and rehab wasn’t going as quickly as he’d anticipated.’ Carole flapped her hand, shooing me away. ‘You go on. It’s just the walk-ins from now on. I’m good.’

  ‘I plan to be back for Professor Cloughly’s presentation on scat analysis,’ I told her.

  ‘I saw her a couple of years ago,’ Carole said. ‘She is a hoot!’

  I was trying to work out what someone – other than a group of potty-mouth pre-schoolers – would find remotely humorous about poop, but made a mental note not to be late for Cloughly’s talk.

  ‘It’s dead easy to put together a hoax today, technology being what it is,’ Jake said a few minutes later as I trailed through the lobby behind him and his dog. ‘But the same technology also makes it easier to weed out the fakes.’

  I had to agree. Martin Radcliffe’s talk the previous evening had made that abundantly clear. Jake opened the door that led from the lobby to the outdoor patio and held it open for me. ‘It’s amazing,’ I said, ‘that nobody, not even Radcliffe, has been able to debunk the Patterson-Gimlin film. That female Bigfoot Patterson filmed at Willow Creek looked convincing to me. I think it was the breasts that did it.’

  As we weaved our way through a half-dozen conversationally-oriented clusters of patio furniture each grouped around a mini fire pit, Jake said, ‘That fifty-nine-second clip has been analyzed frame by frame more often and more thoroughly than the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. Some see a guy in a monkey suit and point out a shiny bit they say is a zipper. No, no, someone else says, it’s simply matted feces. Others highlight the natural way her muscles ripple under her fur and the pendulous breasts. One guy zeroed-in so close he claims to have seen a braid dangling from Patty’s head.’ He stopped then turned to look at me. ‘Remember the spot toward the end of the film where Patty disappears over a log?’ When I nodded, Jake said, ‘When you zoom in and enhance the image? Apparently, Patty has hemorrhoids.’

  This made me laugh out loud. ‘If what I saw last night is any indication, the film is so grainy and jumpy you could probably see Elvis in it if you had a mind to.’

  We paused for a moment, waiting and watching as Harley auditioned several pine trees. After the winning tree had been sufficiently watered, the dog and I followed Jake along the path that led through the woods, away from the tennis courts. ‘A number of people have tried to recreate that video with a stunning lack of success,’ he continued. ‘Nobody’s been able to get the ape suit right. The recreations are, without exception, obvious fakes. To my mind, it beggars belief that two cowboys had the expertise to carry out such a hoax, especially using 1967 technology.’

  We’d reached a scenic overlook. While Harley continued to snuffle through the pine needles at the edge of the trail, Jake and I leaned casually over the wooden railing that separated us from the river chuckling over the rocks hundreds of feet below. ‘That’s the Metolius River,’ he said, pronouncing it carefully. Muh-toll-ee-us. ‘It flows north from here.’ He pointed. When I turned my head I could see a snow-capped mountain just to the north, too. ‘Is that Mount Jefferson?’ I asked. ‘I saw it on a map in the room.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Strange name for a river,’ I mused. ‘I keep confusing it with Grace Metalious, the woman who wrote Peyton Place.’

  Jake snorted. ‘Although it doesn’t sound much like it, it’s a Native American name. Means white fish, stinking water or spawning salmon, depending upon who you ask.’

  ‘Help me out here, Jake,’ I said after a moment. ‘Everyone has a cell phone these days. Even my nine-year-old grandson has a cell phone. They carry them twenty-four seven. With all those built-in cameras floating around in the world, why don’t we have zillions of Bigfoot videos?’

  ‘Bigfoots are reclusive,’ he explained. ‘If you see one, that’s usually Bigfoot being sloppy. They’re not likely to bother us up here in the open but if one popped out of the woods over there, what would you actually see?’

  He indicated the sun-splashed, spring-green grassy lowlands that bordered the river on the opposite bank then merged almost seamlessly into a wall of stately, dark pines.

  I squinted. ‘What? That dark blob?’

  He nodded.

  I eased my iPhone out of my handbag, entered my code, tapped the camera icon and held it up to capture the scene. ‘Not much,’ I admitted, studying the image on the screen, turning it sideways. ‘Could be a tree stump, a bear or even a guy in a monkey suit, stooped over to tie his shoelaces.’

  ‘And by the time you’ve done all that …’ Jake gestured at my bag and my iPhone. ‘Whatever it was will have been long gone.’

  ‘I see your point.’

  ‘But the thing that keeps me going, Hannah, is this. If you bundle all the evide
nce together – and there are well over three thousand reports in the BFRO database alone – how can all of them be hoaxes? You’d have to believe in a worldwide conspiracy going back for centuries with literally thousands of people involved.’

  ‘Occam’s razor,’ I muttered, dredging up the term from the place in my brain where arcane facts are stored.

  Jake shot me a lopsided grin. ‘Exactly. The odds are a lot stronger that Bigfoot exists than he doesn’t. Nobody’d seen a giant squid in the flesh until the Japanese first filmed one in 2004.’ He paused. ‘Remember the coelacanth?’

  I nodded, recalling an article I’d once read in National Geographic. ‘Thought to be extinct for some sixty-eight million years, then one of them turned up in a fisherman’s net off the coast of South Africa.’ Something else suddenly occurred to me, also gleaned from the stacks of the National Geographics my parents hoarded, military move after military move, in their attic. ‘Or take the mountain gorillas in Rwanda – those gorillas in the mist that were studied by Dian Fossey. Scientists believed they were extinct, too, until the turn of the last century when a couple of hunters shot one and dragged it down from the mountains.’

  Jake grunted. ‘If it takes finding a specimen as proof, I hope it’s one that has died of natural causes rather than having been blasted to smithereens by some moron in the backwoods.’

  ‘Radcliffe talked about that last night,’ I said. ‘There was this guy in Georgia who claimed to have a dead Bigfoot in his freezer, but it turned out to be a Halloween costume covered with roadkill.’

  Jake nodded. ‘I’m familiar with that one. Dyer tried the same trick again a couple of years ago, this time using foam, latex and camel hair. Sold tickets, too, before owning up to the fraud on Facebook.’

  ‘What was he thinking?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Who knows? Starved for attention, maybe?’

  A splash of red caught my eye on our side of the river, several hundred yards downstream. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where?’

  I pointed. ‘Up by the rapids.’

  Jake shielded his eyes and squinted. ‘Probably just a fly fisherman.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Don’t fly fishermen wear hip boots and wade out into the water, flicking a rod back and forth?’ I raised my iPhone, waited for the camera to focus then used two fingers to zoom in as closely as the app would allow. ‘This guy’s squatting on the ground, hacking at it with an ax, fiddling with something.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Bigfoot.’ Jake’s elbow nudged mine.

  ‘Not unless Bigfoot is partial to Hawaiian shirts. My keen detecting skills tell me that we’re watching Jim Davis fine tune his surveillance cameras.’ I squinted. ‘Yes. He’s digging up the dirt and burying a cable. He told me last night he’d be demonstrating the system later today.’

  The iPhone, still in my hand, began to vibrate and play a fanfare. I’d set an alarm so I wouldn’t be late for the first session. ‘Time’s up,’ I said. ‘If I’m not back when I’m supposed to be Susan is bound to send out a search party.’

  Jake smiled. ‘Have I converted you, then?’

  I dropped the phone back into my bag and scurried up the trail, calling back over my shoulder, ‘As persuasive as your arguments are, Officer Cummings, the jury is still out, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You getting paid for this?’ he hollered.

  I stopped and waited for him to catch up. ‘No, just helping out a friend.’

  His eyes caught mine, and for a moment the only sounds around us were the susurrus of the wind in the tree tops and the raucous call of a far-away bird. ‘Sorry, gotta go!’ I squeaked and dashed away before I could get sucked into the vortex of those dangerous, ice-blue eyes.

  SIX

  Gladwin, Michigan, October 26, 1891. ‘[Two] reputable citizens report having seen a wild man near the Tittabawassee River, in Gladwin County. The man was nude, covered with hair, and gigantic in proportions. According to their stories, he must have been at least seven feet high, his arms reaching below his knees, and with hands twice the usual size. Mr Vivian set his bulldog on the crazy man, and with one mighty stroke of his monstrous hand he felled the dog dead. His jumps were measured and found to be from 20 to 23 feet.’

  The Commoner (Colfax, WA), November 6, 1891

  I had intended to visit the dealers’ room before the first session of the day, but after playing hooky with Jake and Harley I was too late. In fact, the doors to the William Clark Room had already closed on Professor Cloughly’s session, so I eased in as quietly as I could and stood at the rear of the room, not far from the refreshment table. I didn’t want to take a better spot from a true believer.

  I was relieved to see that the professor’s PowerPoint equipment seemed to be functioning perfectly. SCAT ANALYSIS! ADVENTURES ALONG THE DUNG TRAIL filled the screen standing just to the left of the podium. The dot on the exclamation point had been replaced with the emoji I recognized as the wide-eyed, smiling pile of poo. My grandddaugther, Chloe, had once pointed out that, except for the color, the poo emoji was identical to the one used for soft-serve ice cream. I smiled, remembering. It was hard to un-see that.

  The presentation was ready, but unless Professor Cecelia Cloughly, PhD, Mzool, MusB was a six-foot-four guy wearing a blue baseball cap with the Ford logo embroidered on it, her session had not yet begun. This had to be Ron Murphy, I thought, the car dealer Carole Pulaski told me had sponsored the conference. He wasn’t listed on the program so he must be preparing to introduce the scientist.

  Perched on a chair to the right of the podium, sporting a blonde mop of Orphan Annie-style curls, was a woman I took to be Cloughly. Although her hands remained demurely folded in her lap, she seemed to be shooting daggers at Ron through a pair of round, oversized eyeglasses. Cloughly couldn’t have been more than five feet tall because, even in heels, her feet barely touched the floor.

  As Ron droned on – ‘How many of you here have had a Bigfoot experience?’ – I stood at the rear of the room surveying the crowd, or rather the back of their heads. It was astonishing how many men wore hats while indoors – ball caps were well-represented, of course, as well as a half-dozen visors and a bandana or two – but the proliferation of cowboy hats caught me by surprise. The guy sitting directly in front of me was hatless, though. He sported a comb-over that defied the laws of gravity, a prize-winning effort that began an inch above the nape of his neck and swept upward, a comb-over so elaborate that even Donald Trump’s hairdresser would have taken three steps backward and fallen to his knees in awe of it.

  The big coverup. So many bald spots to disguise. So little hair to do it with.

  At the refreshment table nearby, the server I recognized as Tina was fussing with a plastic tub of ice and cans of soda – Pepsi products, not Coke, I noticed, feeling annoyed – but when Ron’s question boomed out she set down the can of Mountain Dew she was holding and, like at least fifty others in the room, tentatively raised her hand.

  ‘You have?’ I whispered.

  Tina sucked in her lips and nodded, her hand still aloft.

  ‘You! In the back!’

  Tina jumped as if she’d been shot, immediately withdrew her hand and took two steps back. Her pale face flushed red, as bright as bad sunburn. ‘Not me,’ she croaked.

  ‘Yes, you!’ Ron waved Tina forward, twisting the mic out of its stand as he did so.

  Professor Cloughly, scowling, made a production of checking her watch. Ron Murphy was hijacking her session. If he didn’t relinquish the mic soon, someone – probably me – was going to have to make a dash for the stage and wrestle it out of his beefy hands.

  Meanwhile, Tina was dragging herself up the side aisle as slowly as a reluctant bride – one step, then another, staring at her feet as if she had forgotten how they worked. Tina might have had a story to tell, and a good one, too, but this didn’t seem like the time. According to the schedule, Friday and Saturday evenings were set aside for audience participation, sitting around-the-campfire-style sessions
on personal Bigfoot encounters. Didn’t anyone remember we were supposed to be analyzing shit here today?

  As Ron urged Tina forward – ‘Come on, young lady, don’t be nervous. We’re all family here, aren’t we folks?’ – among the bobbing heads and murmurs of approval there was a lone dissenter. Professor Cloughly leapt to her feet, her voice infused with exasperation. ‘Mister Murphy! This is my program, I believe. The microphone, please. Or I’m leaving.’

  You go, girl, I thought, suppressing the urge to applaud.

  At that moment, the screaming began.

  The sudden silence that followed Professor Cloughly’s ultimatum was filled not with a long, drawn-out, Friday the Thirteenth slasher-in-the-woods shriek of terror but staccato whoops of excitement, as if someone’s come-from-behind team had just scored a winning touchdown.

  I had been leaning against the door so I nearly stumbled into the hallway when someone wrenched it open behind me. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ Athena Davis appeared, her face flushed as red as her hair. She paused to draw a deep breath and gulped it in.

  I touched her arm. ‘What’s happened? Are you all right? Where’s Jim?’

  Athena pressed a hand flat against her chest as if trying to keep her heart from leaping out of it. She gulped again. ‘It’s finally happened! Something triggered Jim’s camera!’

  All heads in the audience swiveled in our direction, turning to focus on what Athena was telling them. ‘He set it up this morning!’ Another gasp. ‘Then we went to breakfast. Oh my God, why did we go to breakfast? I wasn’t even all that hungry!’ Another deep, ragged breath. ‘When we came back to the conference room just now, it was recording.’ She grasped the back of a chair, steadying herself. ‘Proof! We finally have proof! Martin Radcliffe can eat his snotty words. You have to come see. Hurry!’

  With an elaborate, follow-me sweep of her arm, she dashed out of the room.

  Half the audience were already on their feet, scrambling for the aisles.