by Neil Plakcy
“Like I told you before, that stuff hasn’t been digitized,” he said. “Boxes of paper and rolls of microfilm, in the file room at the back of the station. But maybe it’s time I dug in.”
“Want me to help?”
He shook his head. “Not with police files. Though I appreciate the offer.” He stood up holding his iced coffee. “I’d better get back to the station. I’ll call Bob, and then head to the records room. I’ve got a long night ahead of me.”
Rick petted Rochester once more, then started back to the station. As I watched him go, I saw a tiny Fiat pull up down the block, and the guy who emerged from the front seat had a scruffy beard with a couple of dreads in it. He wore huarache sandals, knee-length shorts, and a T-shirt that read “Code. Ship. Repeat.” Over his shoulder he carried a woven Mexican bag in bright red and yellow.
He reminded me of so many of the guys I’d worked with in Silicon Valley. Would I have turned out like him if I hadn’t met and married Mary, who had tried to mold me into the kind of husband she wanted?
I doubted it. I’d been raised in the decades between the old hippie and the new hippie movements. I remembered the occasional tie-dyed T-shirt from my childhood, but the 1980s were the Reagan years, a conservative reaction to the looser sixties and seventies.
The clock had turned again, and what was old was now new. Eastern students and graduates were wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and granny glasses and dropping out of the rat race just like their predecessors had forty years before.
Rochester was nosing a copy of the Stewart’s Crossing Boat-Gazette, our local weekly newspaper, that had fallen to the ground beneath my table, and I picked it up and started to read while I waited for Mark Figueroa to arrive.
The front-page headline was “Friends Renovation Stalled.” Because the Meeting House had become a crime scene, rehab work had been halted temporarily. That recess allowed the critics of the project to complain again.
Were there other secrets hidden in that building? It was a couple of hundred years old, after all. And Quakers were human beings, so it was possible that all kinds of stuff could have gone on in the past, which someone didn’t want dredged up.
The article quoted Eben Hosford, which surprised me, because he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was easy to get hold of. He wanted the Meeting dissolved, or merged with the one in Yardley or Lahaska. The building should be razed, and the site sold to real estate developers. I couldn’t see Hannah Palmer or her sister or any of the other Quakers I’d met going along with that.
One of the disadvantages of small-town life is that we only have a weekly paper, rather than a daily, and thus our local news is often stale before it even arrives. I was sure that the fate of the Meeting House would take a long time to resolve, and that the Boat-Gazette would always be a few days behind. No wonder college students had a reputation for disdaining print media. The “real” story was more likely to be found in someone’s Twitter feed, in Facebook posts or Pinterest images. They were more up-to-date, at least.
By the time Mark arrived, it was early evening and still quite warm. He went inside and got an iced tea, then joined me and Rochester outside.
“I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch, but I don’t want to work with Joey,” Mark said. “He says that I have a low self-image, and that’s why I’ve been dating jerks. And then he had the balls to tell me that he thought the carpeting I picked out was ugly.”
“So which one pissed you off more?” I asked. “His criticizing your taste in men, or in carpet?”
Mark glared at me, but then he had to laugh. “The carpet. I have damned good taste when it comes to design.”
“I have to say I never liked the combination of green and brown,” I said. “It reminded me too much of what comes out of Rochester when he’s sick.”
“This is really the limit,” Mark said, in mock anger. “Now even a straight guy is criticizing my taste.” He sighed. “I guess you have a point. It was a drab combination.”
“But you could do better, right?” I asked. “You can show Joey Capodilupo that you do have good taste by finding a carpet that’ll knock his socks off.”
“Speaking of which, have you seen his feet? They’re enormous.”
“TMI,” I said, holding up my hands.
Suddenly, Rochester jumped to his feet and started barking. “What’s up with you, dog?” I asked, grabbing his collar. I looked up and saw Eben Hosford approaching.
“Can you hold him for a minute?” I asked Mark. “I know that Rick wants to talk to that guy.”
I shoved Rochester toward him, still barking, and Mark leaned down to him and spoke directly into his ear. “Excuse me, dog? Can I help you with something?”
I pulled my phone out and texted Rick. eben h @ gails. Rochester stopped barking long enough to lick Mark’s face.
Mark said, “Eww,” and recoiled as Eben approached us.
“Ornery beast,” Eben said as he passed, his open shoulder bag sagging with soap and candles. “You watch out I don’t shoot him sometime.”
I held my tongue, not wanting to scare the old man off before Rick arrived. But I felt in my messenger bag for my dad’s gun, just in case. And I hoped Rick had kept his cell phone handy during his records search.
Eben went inside, and through the big windows I saw him showing some candles and soap to Gail. I sent her a mental message to take her time looking at the merchandise, giving Rick a chance to get there. But all circuits must have been busy, because instead I saw her shaking her head, and Eben began to pack up his wares.
As I looked at Hosford, my brain began to assemble all the information I knew about him. He was an old hippie, who had been around Stewart’s Crossing in the sixties. He probably smoked dope and might have been part of the group that hung out in the woods behind the Meeting House.
He hadn’t been a Quaker back then, but he had joined the Meeting soon after. Why? Because he knew what had happened to Don Lamprey and wanted to protect the evidence? Was he the one who had sabotaged the Meeting House heater so that no one would smell the decaying body?
And biggest question of all, could Hosford be Don’s killer? I saw him finish packing up and head for the front door. Rick was still nowhere in sight.
I had to stall Hosford. When he walked out the door, I called, “Hey, Eben.”
He looked over at me, and Rochester growled. I petted the dog and said, “You were around Stewart’s Crossing in the sixties, weren’t you?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“Did you hang around behind the Meeting House back then, smoking dope?”
“What I do or did is no concern of yours. You keep your nose out of my affairs.”
“You probably weren’t surprised when Rochester found that sneaker in the false wall at the Meeting House,” I said. “You knew that boy, didn’t you?”
“He was alive the last time I saw him!”
He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a short-barreled shotgun. He pointed it at me and said, “I told you, stay out of my business. Or you’ll have a 12-gauge Mossberg in your face.”
36 – Jailhouse Lawyer
I wrapped my free hand around the grip of my dad’s gun, keeping it inside the messenger bag. Could I get the gun out, and get in a shot at Eben Hosford before he shot me? I remembered what Rick had said when we were at the shooting range together. Aim for body mass.
Shouldn’t be too hard, with the man six feet away from me. But I was no kind of quick draw. I’d probably fumble the gun out of my bag, screw around too long with the safety, and end up with a bullet in my brain.
“Put the gun down, Mr. Hosford.”
I turned and looked behind me. Rick was a few hundred yards away, approaching us carefully. He had his hand on the holster of his gun, still attached to his belt.
“I didn’t kill him!” Hosford said, waving the shotgun. It looked like an old model, but still very threatening and effective. “He came around our campfire, looking to sell h
is dope, but none of us had any cash. He cursed us out and walked away. I got up and followed him through the woods.”
My heart was beating like crazy, and Rochester growled and strained to go after Eben. I held onto the dog’s collar with all my strength. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mark Figueroa grasping the edge of the table, his eyes wide with fright.
Rick kept walking calmly toward us, keeping his hand on his gun in his holster. I was sure that a shoot-out on Main Street was the last thing he wanted. Cars moved past us quickly, oblivious to the drama taking place on the sidewalk. I was scared that one of them would blow a horn and startle Eben into shooting.
“Dumb ass came snooping around us in the woods, trying to sell some dope he said was excellent,” Eben said defiantly. “But none of us knew him so we shooed him away. He could have been a narc for all we knew.”
He cocked the shotgun and my heart raced. With my left hand I gripped Rochester’s collar; with my right I ease the gun upward, doing my best to keep one eye on Eben and one on Rochester. I’d seen the way the dog reacted when he thought I was in danger. This time, though, I was going to be the one to protect him.
“I was curious, so I followed him through the woods. Dumb ass didn’t even have a flashlight, walked into the branch of a big old tree. Knocked him out.”
I glanced to the side. Rick was moving forward carefully, his weapon still holstered, and still too far away to get a good shot.
“So you didn’t hit him yourself?” I asked, to keep Eben talking, keep his mind focused on the past.
“Why would I hit him? I just wanted to see where he went. I had a few bucks, and if he wasn’t a narc I was going to buy some dope from him. When he fell, I went right over to him, to make sure he was still breathing.”
He waved the rifle. “Yeah, I stole the dope. And all the cash he had on him. But then I hung around in the shadows and waited to make sure he woke up. I wasn’t going to just leave him there.”
I didn’t think that was the whole story, but at least Eben had demonstrated enough human feeling not to leave an injured man alone in the woods. “What happened when he did wake up?” I asked. “Did you two argue?”
Eben shook his head. “I thought he’d make a fuss when he found out he’d been robbed, that he might go for the police and accuse us dirty hippies. So I followed him as he wandered through the woods for a while, until he found his way to the Meeting House.”
Traffic began to move more slowly on Main Street. I wondered if the drivers had noticed the armed man standing in front of the café, and I prayed that none of them would try to interfere – or that someone impatient at the back of the line would start honking and disturb our tentative equilibrium.
Eben stopped talking to rub his eyes, and the shotgun waved madly. “It was the middle of the night by then, and I was tired. I went on back to where we were camping and went to sleep, and I didn’t think no more about it for a few days. But then I got kinda curious. What was that boy doing sneaking around the Meeting House in the dead of night? I knew this Quaker girl, Debbie, so I asked her if she knew him.”
“Debbie Allen?”
He nodded. “She told me, all in confidence, she said, that he was a draft dodger supposed to be on his way to Canada. But he had changed his mind at night and gone back home instead.”
He wiped his brow with the hand that wasn’t holding the rifle. “I didn’t see how he had gone anywhere when I’d taken all his money. I started to worry about him. What if he’d gone back into the woods after I left him, and passed out again? I combed every inch of those woods and couldn’t find a trace of him.”
With relief, I realized that Rick was only a few feet away, barely beyond the reach of the café’s awnings. I released my grip on my gun – but I held onto the dog.
“We can talk about this at the station, Mr. Hosford,” Rick said. “Now please, put down the shotgun.”
But Eben was still too lost in the past to stop. “I started going to the Meetings with Debbie,” Eben said. “I had to know what happened to that boy. It was like a sickness inside me.”
I looked through the window into the café. Gail was standing behind the cash counter, ready to duck at any minute. Mark was frozen next to me. Rochester kept growling, a low sound that rose at the base of his throat and was more menacing than anything I’d ever heard from him.
Behind Hosford, I saw a Stewart’s Crossing police car stop at the intersection of Main and Ferry, beneath the traffic light, directing cars away from us.
I couldn’t help myself. “You didn’t know about the false wall?” I asked.
“Not back then. But after a week that boy started to smell. Everyone else said it was a raccoon or possum, but I knew better. One night I broke into the Meeting House and followed my nose.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone then?” I asked.
“I knew they’d blame it on me.” He began to shake. “We just wanted to be left alone to smoke our dope, I tell you. But the pigs hated us and people in town used to shy away whenever they saw us. I knew no one would believe me. I broke a couple of parts off the heater so that no one else would go inside the Meeting. By the time they got it fixed the smell was gone.”
He pulled the shotgun up and racked it. “I’m not going to prison. You can’t lock me up. I’d rather die.”
Keep waving that shotgun, I thought, and you’ll get your wish. From Rick, I knew the term “suicide by cop,” when somebody who doesn’t have the courage to end his own life does something to convince the police to do it for him. I hoped that wasn’t the way this day was going to end.
Another squad car pulled up beside the first, and two officers jumped out, guns ready, approaching quietly down the middle of Main Street. A woman with a small boy by the hand stepped out of the front door of the drugstore, saw the cops, and hurried back inside.
The sun’s last rays flared against the windows of the old bank building. In the distance I heard a train’s whistle. I thought for a moment about Lili. She was going to be really pissed off if I got killed, just as we were moving our relationship to the next level. I wouldn’t be too happy about it, either.
“I’ve lived for forty-some years worrying about what happened to that boy,” Hosford said. “I tell you, I’ve done my time.”
Once again, I couldn’t help myself. I had to jump in. “There’s a statute of limitations for theft,” I said. “If that’s all you did, then the time to prosecute you has long since expired.”
“Shut up, Steve,” Rick said.
“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” I twisted my head to look at him, with my hand still on Rochester’s collar. “His story matches the one you heard from Peter Bobeaux.” I’d been a bit of a jailhouse lawyer when I was incarcerated, helping my fellow inmates understand the law. “There’s nothing you can charge him with that would stick. You and I both know there’s no way Eben could have knocked Don Lamprey dead and then gotten his body back into that narrow space without Peter Bobeaux knowing about it. Don had to get back in there himself, which means he was alive when Eben saw him last.”
The two cops behind Hosford continued their slow movement toward us. A cool breeze swept down the street and shook loose a couple of dead leaves from the maple above us.
I looked back at Hosford. “That boy’s family would like to know what happened to him. You owe him that much. Help us put together a story for them.”
“Is that true?” Hosford asked Rick, still holding his shotgun, though I noticed he’d taken his finger off the trigger. “You can’t arrest me for anything?”
“I can arrest you, and I will, for waving a shotgun in the middle of Main Street,” Rick said. “But Steve’s right. The statute of limitations for theft is long since expired, and you could plead out to a misdemeanor for the gun offense and get off with a fine.”
I let go of my dog and stood up. Rochester stopped growling but he looked poised to jump at any moment. “Please, Eben,” I said. “Put the shotgun down, and tell your s
tory to Rick. That’s the only way you’re ever going to put this behind you.”
He dropped the shotgun to the ground and began to weep. I kicked the gun away from him, and Rochester lunged forward, intent on staying by my side. I grabbed his collar once again.
Rick strode up with a pair of handcuffs. “Eben Hosford, in accordance with the provisions of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Title 18, Chapter 61, I’m taking you into custody for displaying a firearm in a manner dangerous to public safety.”
The two cops hurried up, and one of them grabbed the shotgun from the ground. “Careful with that,” Hosford grumbled. “It’s an antique.”
The cop sniffed the barrel. “But one that’s been fired recently,” he said. “I can see the gunpowder residue.”
Rick began to read the old man his rights as he led him down the sidewalk toward the police station. The two uniformed officers headed back toward where they’d left their squad car, beneath the traffic light.
My brain was still buzzing, though. If Hosford’s gun had been fired recently, did that mean he was the one who’d shot at me the night before? And why? The only thing I’d done to attract his attention was walk my dog past his house.
Did that mean there was someone else out there who had a grudge against me?
37 – Nasty, Brutish and Short
The cops moved their car, and traffic began to pass by again on Main Street. I looked over at Mark Figueroa, who appeared shell-shocked. “You okay?” I asked.
“That guy could have killed you,” he said. “Or me. Or even your dog.”
I didn’t want to tell Mark that I’d mourn Rochester a lot more than I’d mourn him. Though it was the truth, it wasn’t the kind of thing you say to another human being.
“I took a gamble,” I said. “I knew there had to be a reasonable solution to the question of how that boy died, and I guessed that Eben had it. And despite the fact that he’s creepy and cranky, I didn’t see him as a murderer.”
