Psycho Hill (JP Warner Book 3)

by Derek Ciccone

  Come to think of it, Allison hadn’t seen or heard any during her time at the Delaney’s place this summer. Just an occasional kayak or canoe gently paddling by.

  They launched the boat out into the river. Allison wouldn’t hear of any of the attempts by Mr. Chivalry to do all the heavy lifting. This was not a date, and they would be going Dutch on the rowing.

  They rowed in the opposite direction to the bridge, which after all the trouble there the last year, was probably a good idea. They found a good rhythm and the boat picked up the pace as they headed to what Will called his “primo spot.”

  Just beyond the area where the river ran along the Hastings Golf Course, they dropped anchor, and cast lines into the calm water. Allison had prepared herself for this part last night by going online to watch a tutorial on how to bait a hook. But the real bait this morning made her much more squeamish than Chase’s gummy worms, which she had used to practice on.

  “Do you eat what you catch?” Allison asked.

  “Not really—I don’t like the taste of fish.”

  “That’s a little surprising.”

  “Because I’m from Boston, and it’s against the law not to eat seafood there?”

  “It’s just that you spend your days trying to save lives, and then during your time off you would take a life without good reason. I would understand if you did it for food.” The random killing of any living creature, except for perhaps spiders, had become a sore subject with her—what if it had a wife and children waiting at home!?

  “Not sure if I’d describe my work as ‘saving lives,’ but if it will make you feel better, I’ve never actually caught one. Hell, I’m not even sure there’s any fish in this river.”

  “Then why come?”

  “I find it a calming experience. And I thought you might be in need of some calm. Think of it like a retreat.”

  Translation: I think you’re a stressed-out lunatic!

  “Not sure why you need that. You always seem so calm, dealing with all those patients every day. I’d go nuts ... I can barely survive my two kids.”

  “When I was younger I was a volcano constantly on the verge of eruption. Luckily, I was able to learn some calming techniques, to channel my built-up angst into good energy. But I always need to keep up the maintenance.”

  She looked hard at him, scrunching her face. “It’s hard to picture you like that.”

  “Most of it was related to my father, or lack of one. Living with my mom in Boston, I barely saw him growing up, and always thought he chose this town over his own son. It made me pretty resentful. I think returning here was like my final test in overcoming that.”

  Allison snickered, “I don’t mean to laugh—I know it’s a very serious issue for you—but from someone who grew up around your father, it’s really hard to envision Doc Mac as the bad guy. It’s like hating the Easter Bunny.”

  “That’s the thing—you grew up with him. I didn’t. Now that I’ve gotten to know him as an adult, I would agree with you. I’m just glad that we’ve been able to forge the relationship we have the last few years—and working with him has been a dream come true. We missed out on a lot, but we can’t change the sins of the past, we can only atone for them.”

  “It’s interesting that you followed in his footsteps, becoming a doctor, even though you had so many issues with him.”

  He smiled. “I guess it’s in the genes. My mother was a psychiatrist, so it was either try to heal the physical or the mental.”

  Allison held up her cut hand. “I guess with me, you’ve got the best of both worlds,” she said with light laughter, but Will looked as if he had traveled a million miles away. She could tell this was a tough subject for him.

  “To be honest, I think it was a competition thing,” he continued, almost in a trance. “I was going to pay him back for missing my birthdays by being a better doctor than he would ever be. Problem was, it was hard to win a battle of egos with a man who doesn’t have an ego. He never cared about accolades—with him, it was all about this town, and the people in it.”

  Allison was seeing a whole other side to the folksy doctor, who treated his patients more with a smile than with medicine. Half the town wasn’t sure if he had a medical degree, and most wouldn’t have cared if he didn’t.

  “Sounds like a storybook ending. You got to reunite with your father, and Rockfield got to keep him. He really has done great things for this town—in fact, I’d just recently heard about how he’s taken care of Bette Hastings all these years. He does so much, yet seeks no credit.”

  His smile returned. “He’ll tell you with a wink that Bette is the one who takes care of him. It’s fascinating to see them together—she can’t speak, but it’s like they have this unspoken communication. Almost like an old married couple.”

  The comment hit Allison right between the eyes. She and Marty would never grow old together. They would never be an old married couple. She felt the tears coming on, and shifted her position so that Will couldn’t see her. She made it look like she was casting her line to the other side of the boat, trying to change her fishing luck. He would probably say just the right thing that would make her feel better. She didn’t want to feel better.

  When she looked out at the river from her new vantage point, she saw it. Four tires sticking out of the water, on what looked to be an overturned car. She could see some of the vehicle protruding out of the water—it was a reddish color, perhaps rust.

  She had seen a lot of junk floating down the river this summer, even tires, but never a full car. She couldn’t identify the type, but it did look to be larger than the normal car you’d see on the road, and it wasn’t an SUV. She thought it might be an older model.

  She wiped her tears and turned around to face Will, who was pretending to untangle his line to give her a moment. She tapped him on the shoulder without a word, and pointed, as if she had discovered a bear and didn’t want to risk making a noise and waking it.

  Curiosity got the better of them. They pulled up their lines, and the anchor, and rowed over to the upside-down vehicle, which was about fifty yards away, close to the riverbank. Will climbed on top, and bounced on it, making it bob like a buoy.

  Allison warned him to be careful, which he took as a sign to lay on his stomach, on the rusting underbelly, and lean over the side to try to look inside the driver’s side window.

  “Toss me the flashlight,” he called to her. She found it inside the tackle box and flipped it to him.

  Will’s body tensed as he peered inside. When he looked up, his face was ashen as if he’d seen a ghost.

  It wasn’t a ghost, but it wasn’t living either.

  In the driver’s seat of the vehicle was a skeleton.

  Chapter 37

  Gwen sat patiently, while I paced Rich Tolland’s small office.

  The door swung open and Rich barreled in, almost knocking me over in the process. He slammed the door shut and sat down behind his desk.

  “There’s a press conference scheduled for twenty minutes,” he got right to the point. “Out of respect for my hometown newspaper, I wanted to talk to you first. But I caution—I don’t have much to say at this time, and much of what I can tell you isn’t ready for the official record. Am I clear?”

  We both nodded, Gwen more willingly.

  “The car that was pulled out of the Samerauk River is a 1959 Studebaker Lark. It was rusted out, but was in good enough shape to be identified.”

  “So was it him?” Gwen asked.

  “The license plate was intact, and it matches the car driven by Thomas Archibald on the night he disappeared.”

  Gwen and I maintained our journalistic cool, acting as if as Rich didn’t just blow our minds.

  “There was one body, located in the driver’s seat. The skeletal remains match the general size of Thomas Archibald. But I repeat,” again looking at me. “We can’t confirm it at this time. We are basically going off heights that were recorded in fifty-year-old school files. There was
no DNA or anything like that to base any findings on.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first hoax on this subject in the last week,” Gwen said.

  “But this one would be pretty elaborate, even for Reality TV. An actual body that matches the victim? And the same car type?” I countered, and Gwen seemed to agree.

  “We’ll know more about the cause of death when the tests are complete. In the meantime, Dr. Will MacDougal, who made the discovery, inspected the remains. There was no blunt trauma or broken bones visible. So our initial guess would be drowning. We will also be able to further narrow down the age of the deceased with carbon testing, and all that type of fancy stuff the state uses.”

  We could play the “can’t confirm” game all day, but the fact was that Thomas Archibald just showed up in the Samerauk River. “I can’t believe he was right under our noses. I thought they searched the river—what kind of Barney Fife’s were working here back then?”

  “That’s the problem, JP—we really don’t know about the search, or the investigation as a whole. None of us were here, and nobody on the Rockfield PD at the time is either alive or available to comment,” Rich said.

  “All we can go on is the records,” Gwen added.

  “And those records show that multiple drags of the river were done the week following Archibald’s disappearance, stretching all the way to Lake Lillinonah. The state police were also on high alert—there weren’t the types of communications like when someone goes missing today, but they did post his photo throughout the state and at the border. But how much vigilance was put into the search, especially if the consensus was that he was a runaway, I don’t know.”

  “So that’s the roundabout way to say we have no clue,” I said, receiving an annoyed look from Rich.

  “For all we know, whoever is behind this—whatever this is—could have come back and dumped the body long after the search ended. It’s possible that the search was done in the best possible manner, but there was no body to find,” Gwen said.

  “Let’s say Archibald drove into the river and sank—suicide, accident, murdered, whatever—it’s still no coincidence that it suddenly surfaced, in connection with the recent incident at the bridge.”

  “It could be a coincidence,” Rich replied to my most skeptical look. “The extreme weather pattern this year—intense rains and flooding in the beginning of summer, followed by a drought that brought the river to historical low water levels—shook up the river bed, and we have been receiving complaints for the last month about items, mainly junk, floating in the river.”

  “That’s really what you’re going to go with?” I asked with disbelief.

  “I have no idea how or why the car surfaced, but it’s my job to explore all possibilities, even the less fun ones. If you don’t believe this is a possibility, JP, then I suggest you Google it. It’s more common than you think—in fact, a car carrying two teenage girls, missing for over twenty years, recently surfaced in an Oklahoma river with the bodies inside.”

  “I just find it hard to believe this car remained hidden in the river bed all this time.”

  “Maybe it didn’t remain hidden,” Rich said.

  “Now you’ve completely lost me.”

  “It’s possible that it has surfaced before, but was ignored. The river has been cleaned up dramatically in the last twenty years, but prior to that, there were objects floating down it all the time—on purpose. Those who lived along the river used these items to try to curb erosion of the riverbank. If you take a look at some of the photos your mother has over at the Historical Society, you’ll see that the river used to be double its current size, but the new wave of residents decided they preferred erosion over eyesores, and it became against the law to dump in the river.”

  “That’s true,” Gwen chimed in. “When my dad first moved into his place on River Road, we would always see rusted out cars and old farm machinery floating down the river. Meaning it’s possible that the car was amongst it, but nobody gave it a second look, and it eventually settled on the bottom, and sunk into the muddy riverbed.”

  Sure it was possible, but it’s also a possibility that a curse really exists, or that the Cubs will win the World Series.

  “Was there anything found in the car that might shed some light on how the car got there in the first place?” I asked.

  “No wallet or identification. The deceased was wearing a watch that was still attached, and the time had stopped at 10:23. This matches the time-frame between Poca last seeing Archibald, and returning to the scene to find him missing.”

  “Maybe you should speak with Poca or Vivian to see if Archie wore a watch that matches that description,” I pushed.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Rich said, and I sensed a little sarcasm.

  “So to summarize …” Gwen interjected. She has always been big on summarizing.

  Rich sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “The circumstantial evidence is strong, pointing to Archibald being the one in that car. As far as what happened, that will be trickier to figure out. The headlight switch on the dashboard was still on, and the car was in high gear. So the most probable scenario is that Thomas Archibald sped over the side of the bridge, and plunged into the water, sometime around 10:23 p.m. on Sunday October 4, 1959.

  “Maybe he was driving at the mysterious figure he saw. Maybe he committed suicide. Maybe there really is a curse that pulled him over the side. It’s possible that we’ll never know.”

  With that, the door cracked open and my father stuck his head in. “Are you ready, Rich?”

  Rich stood and straightened out his uniform. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  But I thought the real question was: Would Rockfield be ready to return to its past?

  Chapter 38

  Gwen could feel the buzz as she stood outside Town Hall on what had been a perfect sunny September day. Now it was just sunny, she thought, as she slipped on her retro, bold-framed Wayfarers.

  This wasn’t the biggest press conference in the history of Rockfield, or even the past year, but it was the biggest one she’d attended. The one last year to arrest serial killer Grady Benson made national headlines. Of course, it wasn’t the real Grady Benson—the real one was holding her and Carter hostage on Ocracoke Island, which was the reason she wasn’t able to attend.

  But before she could focus on the discovery in the river, she had a more important subject on her mind.

  She hadn’t seen Allison since her morning fishing trip turned up a whopper. When she sought her out, Allison looked a bit overwhelmed, but no worse for wear.

  After a long embrace, Gwen asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It was more creepy-weird than scary. But after having to identify Marty’s body, nothing can ever scare me again.”

  “So, I didn’t know you were such an avid fisherman,” Gwen said with a smile, trying to avoid the Marty subject.

  She smiled back. “Sorry—I’d like to discuss my ‘big catch’ with you, but I’m in negotiations to sell my story to the Crime Channel.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Only kidding—I’d love to give you a juicy story, but it wasn’t very exciting. Will and I rowed out to a spot he normally goes to, and caught nothing, which is the usual, according to him. I changed my position, hoping to change my luck, and suddenly I’m Captain Ahab looking at Moby Dick.”

  “Now, that sounds pretty juicy to me.”

  “Except it was just some tires sticking up out of the water. It was upside down, and sort of a faded red color with a lot of rust. Will actually climbed onto the car and began searching it with his flashlight—and that’s when he saw the bones behind the wheel, the seat belt across the skeleton’s lap, holding him in place.”

  “And I thought I had bad first dates.”

  “I see where you’re going with this, Gwendolyn. You know I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be … and besides, you’re the one who forced me to go.”

  “I was just teas
ing.”

  “I do like spending time with him. He makes me laugh, and for a few brief moments I’m not thinking about how my life has changed, or obsessing on not trying to screw up my kids’ lives anymore than I already have.”

  Gwen thought of Thomas Archibald’s parents, now deceased. How gut-wrenching it must have been to have their son go out with his friends one Sunday night and never return. The not knowing must have been the worst part.

  Peter Warner came out of Town Hall, followed by Rich Tolland and Will MacDougal.

  Peter stepped forward and addressed the group of reporters that had gathered on this late afternoon. Gwen was always amazed how he maintained the same demeanor, whether he was reading to a kindergarten class or discussing the discovery of a body in the river. And he always got right to the point, which she appreciated as a reporter.

  “Earlier this morning, a car was discovered in the Samerauk River—it was identified as a 1959 Studebaker Lark. Inside the vehicle were skeletal remains. The initial examination of the remains, along with the vehicle, has led us to believe that the victim is Thomas Archibald, but we will not be able to confirm it until the Medical Examiner’s Office complete their tests.”

  Gwen noticed that most of the reporters were playing catch up—using their phones to search the name Thomas Archibald. She nodded at a couple of her competitors from local newspapers, and avoided eye contact with the television reporters from the Connecticut CBS and ABC affiliates. There was always a rivalry between the print and television media, and Gwen was still surprised she had crossed that line to date a guy from the other side.

  Peter continued, “For those who aren’t familiar with Thomas Archibald, he was a senior at Rockfield High back in 1959. On October fourth of that year, he went missing, and had not been seen again—so we are going off past reports and documents to get a better idea of what happened that night, and the search that followed. That he might have been here in Rockfield the entire time is a surprise to us all … if it is indeed him.”