Blood Ties

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Tea and cookies,” he said under his breath. “Tea and cookies. Stupid old witch.”

  He left the yard and didn’t return for three hours. There was an urge upon him. Happily, he was able to satisfy it, for in the new neighborhood cats were much more trusting than in his regular neighborhood.

  In the three hours away from the old lady’s house, he found and killed two neighborhood cats, using only a pocketknife and his imagination, sitting in the center of a large drainage culvert to ensure the privacy he needed for his experimentation.

  It seemed as each cat died, the smell of the old lady’s rose-scented perfume returned to his nostrils. He washed the blood off his hands in the trickle of water running through the culvert and left the bodies of the cats behind as he returned to the old lady’s house for tea and cookies.

  In his hospital bed, head tilted forward by the pillow below his neck, Russell Fowler grunted at the arrival of an orderly in one of the light-green uniforms he was learning to hate. This one backed into Fowler’s room, pulling a trolley. Then he closed the door.

  “I’m. sleeping,” Fowler said. Couldn’t they at least send female nurses? He hated being touched by a man.

  The orderly’s shoulders lifted and dropped in a shrug as he pulled the trolley over to the bed. Without saying a word – still facing away from Fowler – he lifted the bed sheets at Fowler’s feet.

  “Give me a break,” Fowler said. “Can’t you guys do this stuff during the day?”

  The orderly ignored him.

  Fowler could not see below his knees without sitting upright completely. He didn’t have the strength to move, so he stared at the ceiling and tried to maintain dignity.

  Poke and prod. That’s all these people did. Fowler felt like he didn’t even own his body any more.

  “Hey,” Fowler said, He realized the orderly had put a blood-pressure cuff around Fowler’s calf just below the knee. “Doesn’t that usually go on my arm?”

  No reply. The orderly bent over Fowler’s leg. He began to pump air into the cuff with the hand-held rubber bulb.

  Although he had yet to see the orderly’s face, Fowler noticed he wore white translucent rubber gloves. That was never good news. “Not another prostate thing,” Fowler said. “Tell me you’re not going higher than my knee.”

  Mute as ever, the orderly returned to his trolley and reached for something else. When he lifted his hand, he had a large needle in his hand.

  Fowler groaned. Poke and prod. With more poke than prod. He shook his head. At least this time they weren’t turning him over to jab the needle in his rump.

  The orderly stood motionless, waiting.

  Fowler’s toes were going numb. What kind of blood pressure test was this? he wondered. And with a needle?

  The orderly lifted Fowler’s leg in one hand. He leaned over and with the other hand, jabbed the needle into the back of Fowler’s calf. Then he dropped Fowler’s leg.

  “Happy now?” Fowler said.

  “Very.”

  Fowler struggled to his elbows. He knew the orderly’s voice.

  The orderly turned to him, finally showing his face. Only it wasn’t an orderly. And Fowler had been right about knowing the orderly’s voice.

  “You!”

  “The human heart is amazing,” the man said. “It circulates blood through the entire body in about four minutes.”

  “I don’t understand,” Fowler said. “We’re in this together. You’ve made plenty of money. There’s no need to do this.”

  “I’ll explain then. I’m pulling the plug on my life here. Time to start a new one somewhere else, so I’m wrapping things up, tying up all the loose ends. Choose whatever cliche you prefer. The end result is that I also need to pull the plug on everyone in our little group. First Old Man Evans, then Anderson, now you.”

  The man held up the needle. “Simple, actually. Find a vein. Inject a bubble of air. I doubt anyone will look for the needle mark.”

  He yanked the Velcro loose on the cuff around Fowler’s leg. “That should help the blood flow, don’t you think? Start that little bubble on its way up?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “I give you two minutes. Then, pop. There goes the heart.”

  Fowler looked frantically for the call button to alert the nurses’ station. He saw it, reached out but not quickly enough. The other man pulled it out of Fowler’s reach.

  Fowler played his ace. “I’ve got files to Re released in case of my death,” he said, his voice tinged with panic. He’d known he was dying for some time, but he wasn’t ready for it this soon.

  “That infantile blackmail is only effective while I live here. When I say I’m pulling the plug, I mean it. Whoever I was will no longer be. If you’re lucky, at the most the files will make for good newspaper copy.

  Another glance at his watch. “Do you mind if I stay with you as you die? I’ve seen it countless times. The final moments, I mean. But you know, it never loses its fascination.”

  Fowler was no longer listening. He had dropped back down from his elbows and was staring at the ceiling. The reality of death was finally hitting him, cold and hard. He was not ready. What had happened to the invincible body he’d been so sure of all his life? Please, he thought, couldn’t he go back and change the paths that had taken him here? He was dying with an untouched $5 million Swiss bank account, and he’d trade it all for the peace he’d seen in Clay Garner’s face earlier in the day.

  “Russ, I’m guessing about a minute. The bubble’s probably well past your hips now. Remember, every beat takes it closer.”

  Fowler missed Thelma. Divorcing her had been a big mistake. He wished she was sitting beside him, holding his hand. If a man had to die, there would be some comfort in that.

  “Thirty seconds, Russ. Get ready for the big bang.”

  Russ Fowler did something he had never done in his entire adult life. He began to cry.

  10:30 p.m.

  Clay had covered eight miles of forested ridges in the daylight available after parking and hiding his Cherokee off a rutted dirt road in a neighboring valley. The final two miles he had to cover in darkness, and he was grateful when he finally reached the gravel road that led to George Samson’s cabin.

  Clay stepped onto the veranda of the cabin. He eased out of the straps of the knapsack on his back and knocked on Samson’s door. “It’s Clay,” he called.

  The door opened seconds later. George Samson was fully clothed with no trace of sleep in his face. “I was afraid I’d have to go out there and track you down myself,” George said. “He shook his head in mock disgust. “White people. How we lost to you is beyond my imagination.”

  Clay stepped inside and pointed at the lantern hanging from a ceiling beam. “We have telephones and electricity. Some of you still haven’t figured that out yet.”

  George smiled. "Sit down, my friend. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too.”

  Clay set the knapsack at his feet and eased into a large stuffed armchair, vintage 1950s. Clay had always felt good in this cabin. George preferred a simple life: water from a well, cooking on a butane stove, no television, radio, or clock. The unhurried simplicity was calming.

  George had sold the original land near the Flathead reservation and purchased a quarter section higher up in the foothills, leaving an ample savings account to take care of his minimal yearly expenses. With this cabin, however, he’d shunned even a telephone line. The cost of running utility poles this high into the hills was not the reason. With Johnny grown, there was no need to worry about emergencies. George had decided he didn’t need a telephone for himself.

  His furniture consisted of the armchair, a matching sofa, the kitchen table and chairs that George had crafted himself, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that took up three walls. More than once Clay had stopped by early in the day and done nothing but read, with George doing the same, the only break in their companionable silence being when George brewed tea.

  “Johnny drove up
and told you?” Clay asked.

  “Johnny drove up and told me. He didn’t say much except to expect you.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell him much. Cell phones are not secure.”

  “You are welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

  “It’s not that easy, George. I imagine tomorrow you’ll have visitors from the sheriff’s department. Once they figure out I’m not going home, they’ll start checking my friends. This is a logical place.”

  George, sitting on the sofa opposite, smiled again, deep shadows in the wrinkles of his face. “The root cellar is not a logical place. I’ve already set up a mattress and sleeping bag and lantern. Even if they were looking for it, I doubt they’d find it. I dug it into the hill, and it’s protected by brush.”

  “Works for me,” Clay said. He doubted any of the sheriff’s men would think of a root cellar. They’d grown up with wells, electricity, and telephones. Clay had grown up with an outhouse in the back and a pump-well out front, much the way George lived now. Clay knew about vegetables and berries preserved in rubber-ring glass jars. He knew about root cellars, where the poorer folks stored everything they needed kept cool during sweltering summers.

  “Do you want to talk?” George asked.

  “Not much more to say than the obvious,” Clay replied. “I’m worried sick about Kelsie and Taylor. From what I’ve learned today, chances are she – they – have been taken by someone who’s stalked her for years.”

  “Years?” George said softly. He understood.

  “Years.” Clay looked at his hands. “Not once did she turn to me for help. And of all the people in the world...”

  “...you would be the one who could help.”

  “Something like that.” Clay didn’t voice the rest: how her distance had increased over the years, how she had left him without warning, and how badly it hurt.

  “What will you do?” George asked.

  “I’ve got a friend back east. He’s got the fax number to Johnny’s school. We’re hoping a computer search gives me a place to start, and he’ll fax what he finds to Johnny. Until then...”

  Clay gestured at the knapsack. He’d stopped at a camping store and paid for it with a credit card, making sure to complain obnoxiously to the sales clerk over the price. It wouldn’t hurt – if the sheriff got serious about a search – to give the impression he’d gone for an extended trip into the woods.

  “It’s loaded with some files and evidence that Russ Fowler saved into his retirement. Remember the night I got shot at Mad Dog’s cabin? Fowler knew all along that something wasn’t right. The person who shot me from the cabin? It wasn’t Nick Buffalo.”

  George’s normally impassive face took on a look of surprise.

  Clay told George about Kelsie’s message, the notes in the music dancer, and about the conversation in the hospital with Russ Fowler.

  “That means it probably wasn’t Nick Buffalo who took my granddaughter either.”

  “No, George. Probably not.”

  Clay could not read the older man’s face. The murderer of his granddaughter had been walking as a free man for a quarter-century, and George merely nodded.

  “You get some sleep,” George said. “Tomorrow, you and me, we got some work to do.”

  * * *

  Clay did not sleep. He kept the lantern lit and sat in his sleeping bag.

  Clay wasn’t bothered by the confines of the root cellar. He could stand inside if he remained severely stooped. The root cellar extended ten paces into the hill. Spade marks were still clear in the dirt walls, with four-by-four lumber supports every few feet.

  Earlier in the evening, George had moved all the food toward the back to make room for Clay. Beneath deer haunches, hanging from the ceiling, there were jugs of milk, yogurt, cheese, fresh fruits, and vegetables. A root cellar was remarkably efficient; with the cool earth to shield its interior from the sun, temperatures rarely rose above forty degrees, even in summer. Before modern refrigeration, Clay knew, people often placed blocks of ice in root cellars to lower the temperature even further.

  With the heavy sleeping bag and mattress, in fact, the root cellar actually provided a comfortable place of rest. Clay’s habit at the ranch house – summer and winter – was to sleep with the window open, so he preferred cool air on his face.

  Instead of attempting to sleep, though, exhausted and stressed as he was, Clay opened the sheriff’s files for the first time.

  He first found photocopies of police reports. The same typewriter had been used on all of them. The bottom half of the s was missing, and the o was blotted. He smiled wryly. If law-enforcement agencies all had one thing in common, it was the dislike of filling out reports and – in the pre-computer days – the usual infighting for too few typewriters, most old and barely functional.

  His smile disappeared as he concentrated on the police reports. He skipped the attached autopsy results and instead scanned the summaries.

  There were three full-length reports, all murder investigations. The first one detailed the 1976 drug overdose death of a twenty-one-year-old Caucasian male named Nathan Yancey. He’d been found on the couch of his walkup apartment, the needle still in his arm, blood samples showing he’d taken a hot dose of heroin tar. Yancey had plenty of needle tracks, including dozens on his inner thighs, a place experienced addicts shot up in order to hide the puncture scars. Final conclusion: accidental death.

  The second report, dated March, 1978, had an attached photo of Richard Lee Patterson, a blond-haired ski instructor with a confident grin. Richard Lee Patterson, according to the report, drank too much beer and stepped into a hot tub with improper grounding. Death by electrocution had made a mockery of the confident grin. Final conclusion: accidental death.

  The third report contained much more speculation than hard fact. It covered a 1988 whitewater-rafting accident that killed two young men, Thomas Joseph Bell and Michael James McNeill. An intensive one-week search had failed to find the body of Michael James McNeill. Tommy Bell’s body had been found washed ashore, three miles downstream of the inflatable raft, which had been trapped by the branches of a low, overhanging tree. The coroner reported that water in the lungs was consistent with death by drowning. A large bruise on the head made for an easy conclusion. The water had swept him into a boulder and knocked him out. Blood samples showed alcohol content to be .15, high enough to explain carelessness on a dangerous river. Final conclusion: accidental death.

  As Clay read through the reports, he fought a sense of revulsion that almost became physical nausea. It confirmed the horror of the series of notes he’d found in Kelsie’s dancer. Although the reports had been filed by the sheriff’s office in three separate counties, they had one thing in common, one thing not listed in the reports. Nathan Yancey, Richard Patterson, and Thomas Bell had all made the same mistake: They’d all fallen in love with a woman named Kelsie McNeill.

  Again, Clay realized the torture Kelsie must have faced in the aftermath of each death. The dancer notes clearly explained that the murderer blamed Kelsie for the deaths. She had borne the guilt for years, unable to share her fears, unable to ask for help.

  Clay had assumptions only Kelsie could confirm. After the first death, Nathan Yancey’s, perhaps the stalker had disappeared long enough to let her believe she might be able to risk another relationship. And again, after the ski instructor, murder number two, perhaps there had been another lengthy illusion of safety to allow her to come out of her solitary cave.

  Clay pushed his mind from the subject and sifted through the remainder of the folder. On the back of the first file folder, he found an ambiguous note. In the lantern light, Clay squinted to decipher the scrawled writing.

  7:12 a.m. on July 12, ’73 – southbound, 87 m.p.h.– 325/I-15 – Conrad – cross ref: K1200598.

  The speeding ticket Fowler had mentioned? Clay tried to translate.

  I-15 was simple – the interstate highway. Conrad? Clay was pretty sure it was a town somewhere north o
f Great Falls. Maybe “325” referred to the mile marker on the interstate.

  On the file folder, below Fowler’s terse note, Clay wrote out the long version of what he believed it meant. At 7:12 a.m. on July 12, 1973, a southbound vehicle had been clocked at 87 miles per hour at mile marker 325 on I-15 near Conrad, Montana.

  Clay didn’t need a map to visualize the location. In a direct line from Kalispell, Interstate 15 was well east, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. The highway ran north-south from the Canadian border, down through Great Falls, Helena, and Butte, continuing south to the Idaho state line. As a rookie FBI agent assigned to the train crash from the office in Great Falls, he’d traveled the highway more than a couple of times on his way to and from Kalispell.

  Clay stared at the information. Who had been ticketed? What was that person doing on the interstate at that hour? Why had the person been traveling so fast? Where had the person been headed? And most important, why had Fowler decided the ticket was significant?

  Then it clicked. July 12 was the night that Clay had been shot at Mad Dog’s cabin.

  His skin prickled at a conclusion that leapt into his mind. South on I-15. Did Fowler believe this person had been driving away from Kalispell?

  Clay frowned, doing his best to recall the route from Kalispell to I-15. Highway 2 was the only road, a two-lane blacktop cutting through the mountains over to Shelby, 160 miles east. Clay had always driven during the daytime when traffic was heavy. It usually took a little over three hours. There were sixty miles of mountain road before the land leveled and the road straightened across the beginning of the Great Plains.

  Clay tried to see if the math would work. He remembered he’d been shot just after three o’clock in the morning. He estimated it would take a person an hour to hike from the cabin down the mountain to the nearest road. Another half-hour from the ranch to Kalispell. Then, at night, speeding with no traffic, it would take two hours to Shelby instead of the usual daytime three. The town of Conrad was what, less than a half-hour south of Shelby on I-15? Especially at speeds averaging eighty-five to ninety miles per hour?