Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

  A woman with short blonde hair and wearing a royal blue apron paused in her task – reshelving paperbacks – to answer me. ‘That’s Miss Jewel,’ she said. ‘And I’m Paula, one of the volunteers.’

  I took out my iPhone and showed Paula the picture I’d taken at Dixie’s of the boots that were similar to Brad’s. ‘This is going to sound crazy but I’m looking for my husband’s boots,’ I told her. ‘It’s so embarrassing but I wrapped up a bunch of things to give away and another to take to the cleaners and the stupid man took the wrong pile! Have boots like these showed up here recently?’

  Paula studied the picture over the tops of her eyeglasses then called out to another volunteer who was fiddling with a jewelry display, ‘Kim, do you remember that bundle we found on the porch yesterday morning?’

  A dark-haired woman I took to be Kim wandered over, an Indian necklace much like the ones for sale in Prairie Flower’s shop dangling from her fingers. ‘The one with the man’s outfit in it?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I put the clothes in the pile for washing but the boots are still in the back. I need to put a price on them. The Sisters rodeo is the week after next,’ Kim explained with a grin, ‘so we always feature our western gear in May.’ She waved an arm. ‘Boots, hats, shirts … get your complete western outfit here. They’ve been selling like hotcakes.’

  ‘Could I see the boots, please?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be right back.’

  While we waited, Paula filled us in on the Sisters Rodeo, now in its seventy-sixth year. Roping, racing, wrestling, bull riding. It was the real yee-haw deal.

  ‘Here you are, then,’ Kim said.

  Even before she closed the gap between us I could tell by the quill-pocks and the elaborate stitching that the boots she carried were, indeed, Brad Johnson’s.

  ‘Those are Brad’s!’ I cried, reaching out for them. ‘Thank you! You’ve saved my life. I’m happy to buy them back. How much do I owe you?’

  She plopped the boots onto the counter. ‘They’re yours, aren’t they? Mistakes happen.’

  I fumbled in my handbag and pulled a twenty out of my wallet. ‘You must let me pay you something,’ I said, handing the money over. ‘You’ve gone to such trouble.’

  ‘You want the shirt and pants back, too?’ Kim asked. ‘And the belt?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, feeling my face flush. I had no idea what Brad had been wearing on the morning he killed Martin Radcliffe but I suspected I was about to find out.

  When Kim went to get the clothing, Paula said, ‘It’s a good thing the rodeo wasn’t a month ago.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘If it had been, those fine boots would have been long gone.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Centerville, Illinois, September 4, 1883. ‘A wild man, naked as Adam, has been roaming around the country … causing intense excitement and consternation among the farmers’ families. His long tangled beard and matted hair, his tall athletic form and the fierce look out of his eyes make him an exceedingly unpleasant person to meet in a lonely spot … He was first seen by [a woman] who … was returning home shortly after nightfall … The wild man crept stealthily out of the orchard, and when near [her] buggy, made a rush to stop the horse … A telephone message was sent to Belleville, yesterday, asking the sheriff to come and capture the creature, young men of the settlement are searching the woods in every direction today, but some of them are not over-anxious to encounter the monster … Others are puzzled to decide whether it is the Missing Link or an escaped lunatic.’

  The Saturday Herald (Decatur, IL), September 8, 1883

  Although we nearly missed our flights because of it, Susan and I drove as fast as the speed limit would allow back to the lodge, where we delivered Brad Johnson’s discarded clothing to Lieutenant Cook, preserved as carefully as we were able in a new, reusable shopping bag. She’d searched Brad’s hotel room, with no results, and was extremely grateful that we had saved her from an equally fruitless up-to-the-hips delve into the brimming, malodorous dumpster.

  As we drove down the long drive heading away from the lodge I felt like I was leaving Brigadoon, a magical village where myth, fantasy and reality were so closely intertwined that it was often difficult to tell one from the other.

  Back home from the airport late Sunday night, I was surprised by how seamlessly I slipped back into the comfortable sanity of day-to-day life in Annapolis. The following day I battled the traffic on Route 2 to get to the hot food bar at Whole Foods. I cooked – unimaginatively – for myself, favoring cream of mushroom soup and peanut butter sandwiches. I carpooled the grandkids to dancing lessons and baseball practice. I walked their dog.

  After a week of batting around the house doing mindless chores, waiting for Resolute to sail back into the harbor and Paul to sail back into my life, I found I keenly missed my new friends.

  I’d been tempted several times to telephone Lieutenant Cook to ask how the investigation was going but the last thing she needed was a nosy phone call from me. According to the Nugget News, which came out every Tuesday in an online edition, Martin Radcliffe’s widow, her attorney and the History Channel’s network executives were keeping the local authorities on their toes, but as yet no one had been arrested for the crime.

  I’d been home for a week when the phone rang. I checked the caller ID, wondering who would be calling me from a 612 area code. Minneapolis! Jake!

  Jake responded to my breathless hello with, ‘I’ve got good news for you, Hannah.’ Brad Johnson had been arrested in LA and was being extradited to Oregon to face murder charges for the death of Martin Radcliffe. ‘He’s fighting extradition so it may take a couple of months, but eventually he’ll be cooling his heels in the Deschutes County Jail while awaiting trial.’

  ‘Fist-pump time!’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good thing the Thrift Store hadn’t gotten around to washing Brad’s clothing,’ Jake told me.

  ‘Was Martin’s blood on them, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Not as much as one might have expected from the nature of the attack, but yes.’

  ‘So, that proves Brad did it, right?’

  ‘Not so fast, Hannah. If they’d gotten a warrant to search Brad’s room for evidence and found the shirt there, it would have been one thing, but getting a judge to issue a warrant based solely on your intuition …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Story of my life,’ I said.

  ‘However, once Brad discarded his clothing it became fair game.’

  ‘Score one for our team,’ I said.

  ‘On the other hand, the chain of custody was broken, so without a warrant for Johnson’s DNA there was no way to prove that the clothing was actually his.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘So, now we come to the boots,’ Jake said.

  ‘Since Brad has been nabbed I’m feeling confident that the boots had something to do with it.’

  ‘Bingo. They got lucky. They were custom-measured and custom-made by a company in El Paso, Texas, specifically for a customer by the name of Brad Johnson. They keep meticulous records down in El Paso. Want to know Brad’s calf circumference? His heel, ball, high and low instep measurements?’

  ‘Hallelujah, but, wait a minute! That just proves they were Brad’s boots, not that he killed Martin.’

  ‘Ah, but there’s where you’re wrong.’

  ‘So there was blood on the boots, too?’

  ‘Not a drop, although Brad must have worried there could be since he gave the boots away. Damn things cost over a thousand bucks.’ He took a deep breath. ‘No. No blood. It was something else.’

  ‘What? What? You can be an infuriating man – you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Sphaerocarpos hians,’ he said.

  ‘You’re toying with me, Jake, aren’t you?’

  He laughed. ‘Turns out those ostrich quill follicles are dandy for picking up evidence. Cook sent the boots to the state lab for analysis and that’s what the lab came up wit
h. Spores of the trumpet bottlewort. Extremely rare.’

  ‘How rare is rare?’ I asked.

  ‘So rare the Native Plant Society of Oregon is doing cartwheels over it. Trumpet bottlewort has been reported only once before, decades ago near Corvallis, and Brad, by his own admission, has never been anywhere near Corvallis.’

  I remembered noticing moss on the rocks in the crime-scene pictures Jake had taken. ‘Does trumpet bottlewort look like ruffled, whitish-green rosettes about the size of a quarter?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I took another look at the photos you took.’

  ‘You said …’ he began.

  ‘I know. I lied.’

  Jake laughed.

  ‘So that’s it, then,’ I said.

  ‘All over but the shouting.’

  What did folks do before email?

  Jake emailed a month later. After a bidding war he’d sold his crime-scene photos to Dateline NBC, a true-crime television news magazine. Lester Holt would moderate the show, tentatively entitled, The Boots that Roared. Jake and Thad were using the money to buy a condo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Pet friendly, of course.

  Variety announced that Rolf Maxman, the ‘Silver Fox’ of daytime TV’s Don’t Try This at Home, would be taking over as host of Don’t You Believe It! ‘We are delighted,’ producer Leo Kopp was quoted as saying. ‘Rolf has the expertise, talent and gravitas to step into the shoes so tragically vacated by the untimely death of Martin Radcliffe.’

  Gravitas. One of the Roman virtues. Brad, sadly lacking in the gravitas department, would be taping weddings and bar mitzvahs for the foreseeable future, I supposed, keeping himself out of trouble while awaiting trial. According to The Nugget, bail had been set at one million dollars. Brad’s parents had signed a signature bond to spring their darling boy from the hoosegow. If he blew town, though, they’d lose the Brooklyn brownstone and the lakeside cabin in Canandaigua.

  Leah Solat’s tongue-in-cheek four-part series in the Bee caught the eye of Vanity Fair. Her feature article about the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial would appear in their November issue. I emailed her back. ‘Delighted! See to it that Sigourney Weaver plays me in the movie.’

  After a series of auditions with two call-backs, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra hired Cecelia Cloughly as principal horn. The instrument she brought to Flat Rock went to a needy student at Newark High School in New Jersey who, when informed of its history, promised not to hit anybody with it.

  Susan telephoned via Skype from Punta del Este, Uruguay, where she was shopping for a vacation cottage. Heather’s mother had passed away, leaving her only daughter a modest inheritance. The former assistant had used the money to buy Susan out. Susan was enjoying the expat community, grateful that no Bigfoots had been spotted so far in Uruguay, although she suspected it was only a matter of time. She’d been on a couple of dates with a retired neurosurgeon named Jorge De Los Santos but claimed they were ‘just friends.’

  I would check out the cottage and Dr De Los Santos on a future visit.

  Paul arrived home on a high morning tide. He breezed through the front door carrying a duffle bag full of dirty clothes. After we’d had time to get reacquainted, I told him all about the conference. Needless to say, it took a while.

  ‘The whole thing sounds bizarre,’ he said, turning to me in bed and propping himself up on one elbow.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What do you think is more bizarre? Spending a weekend with a bunch of folks who truly, madly, deeply believe in something that’s just a teeny bit hard to prove, or …’ I paused then stroked his arm thoughtfully. ‘I could have been wandering around in public wearing a terrycloth robe chanting Namaste. Or sitting half-naked with strangers in hot tubs that smell like rotten eggs.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said, ‘especially the half-naked part.’ And shut me up with a kiss.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Yale, British Columbia, July 8, 1884. ‘Last Tuesday it was reported that the wild man, said to have been captured at Yale, had been sent to this city and might be seen at the gaol. A rush of citizens instantly took place, and it is reported that no fewer than 200 impatiently begged admission into the skookum house. The only wild man visible was Mr Moresby, governor of the goal, who completely exhausted his patience answering enquiries from the … visitors.’

  The Columbian (New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada), July 12, 1894

  My husband and I were curled up on the sofa binge-watching House of Cards on Netflix when the doorbell rang. ‘You get it?’ Paul pointed to the bowl of popcorn balanced precariously on the bridge created by his long, lean legs between the sofa cushion and the ottoman.

  I squirmed to an upright position. By the time I got to the door the UPS delivery truck was already turning right onto Maryland Avenue but he’d left a large shipping carton behind on the stoop.

  ‘Put the show on pause,’ I yelled, ‘and come give me a hand with this!’

  ‘What on earth?’ I muttered as we wrestled the box into the entrance hall. The printing on the cardboard box gave no clue to its contents. ‘Maybe it’s a major award?’ I smiled up at my husband.

  A mischievous I-know-something-and-you-don’t grin spread across his face.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’ I said.

  ‘And spoil the surprise?’

  ‘Brat! The least you can do is fetch me a knife so I don’t break off my fingernails trying to get the damn thing open.’

  While Paul was in the kitchen fetching a serrated knife, I examined the box like a kid on Christmas morning. It had been shipped from a company in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, but otherwise the contents remained a mystery.

  Paul leaned against the door jamb, arms folded, supervising, as I slit the packing tape, opened the flaps and began flinging packing material to the floor. Something gray, plastic, as tall as my youngest grandson …’ I tipped the box toward me and peered deep inside.

  ‘You are kidding me.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Seemed appropriate somehow.’

  I figured my husband hadn’t consulted with Prairie Flower about the availability of the Sasquatch garden figure I’d seen offered for sale back in Flat Rock, Oregon, so I asked, ‘Where on earth did you get it?’

  ‘Bought it from one of those mail-order catalogs that are always cluttering up our entrance-hall table.’

  ‘I’m speechless.’

  Paul grinned. ‘I could have bought the life-sized one, of course. But it was six feet tall and cost over two thousand dollars.’ He paused. ‘Plus shipping.’

  Paul helped me extricate the statue from the box. When it stood in our entrance hall in all its polyester resin, hand-painted glory, I said, ‘I know just where to put him.’

  ‘Or her?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ I pointed. ‘This guy’s got abs.’

  Although the Squatch weighed only about twelve pounds (according to the packing slip) I let Paul carry it out into our backyard. Following my instructions, he installed the statue in the back corner of our garden, near the wall. The following April, when my azaleas bloomed yellow and fuchsia and white, the Squatch would be stepping casually out of them.

  ‘You realize, don’t you, Paul, that this means an end to backyard garden parties? Except for family picnics, of course. The family already knows I’m nuts. My friends simply suspect.’

  ‘You’ll have to name him,’ Paul said after a moment.

  I studied the ridiculous object, thinking how unlike a Sasquatch he probably looked, if Sasquatch existed. ‘His name is Martin.’

  Paul’s arm snaked around my shoulders, drawing me close.

  ‘NÄR LÄ KÜ,’ I said, leaning into him.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘According to a former US Navy linguist, it’s Bigfoot speak. I like to think it means, “I love you” but I could just as easily be saying “please pass the salt.”’

  Paul’s laugh rumbled around the garden like rolling thunder. ‘
NÄR LÄ KÜ back at’cha, Hannah Ives.’