Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  Rick also noticed Carpenter’s face tightening as Matt with his camera and Melinda with the boom microphone followed Knight.

  “Here’s the problem…Officer Ballantine? Is that it?” Carpenter nodded toward the excavator and the flatbed. “The equipment, the manpower it takes to clean this up…this is costing the city quite some money. And this…what else would you call it but stunt, is the reason for it. Since you’re right in the middle of it, you’re bound to know more about it than anyone else.”

  “Come on,” Cornelia said. “You’re suggesting we had something to do with this?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Carpenter replied. “I just have questions about things that don’t seem to make too much sense around here. And again, right now your team seems to be closest to all the weirdness.”

  “We’re not close to it,” Knight snapped, then took a slow breath. “We’re in the middle of this because of an accident.”

  “If this is some sort of stunt, we’re as much victims of it as your city’s budget,” Rick said. “We just had a car totaled. That’s a rental our company now has to pay to replace. I got the living daylights knocked out of me when I got plastered all over the thing last night. So I think we’re on the same side here. We just want some answers.”

  Carpenter didn’t reply immediately. Instead, his gaze shifted to Matt and his camera, then over to Melinda and microphone. “Here’s one of the problems,” he said at length. “You’re looking for answers that’ll look good for the cameras. I want the truth. I’m just worried, see, because the two are not always the same thing.”

  Before Rick could reply, Cornelia asked, “And you think we planted this enormous stone out here for our show?”

  “Yeah,” said Rick. “How could we possibly do all this?”

  “Little some movie magic can’t create today, isn’t there?” Carpenter came back without missing a beat. “And now your cameras are rolling and you’re in the middle of a real unexplained investigation. Not the same old mystery light and Sasquatch sightings.”

  When Rick noticed Knight’s nostrils flaring, he could imagine the old professor sifting through a checklist of the most insulting retorts he could snap at the cop. Before Knight could say anything, Rick quickly asked, “How about we turn the cameras off right now? All of them.”

  Matt looked reluctant to do so, but he did as Rick suggested.

  “Everything!” Rick said, glancing at Melinda.

  “Everything’s off,” she said.

  “Whatever you might have heard about multimillion-dollar film productions,” Rick said, looking at Carpenter, “ours is not one of them. We’re shooting a low-budget TV pilot.”

  “Right,” Cornelia added. “Where would we get the moving equipment? Here in town? You could check that, couldn’t you?”

  “Listen,” Rick said, and waved at Carpenter. “Let’s just watch that globe getting moved, all right? I think we can prove to you that we’re not behind this. Trust me. I’ll explain everything later.”

  Loading the gargantuan stone sphere onto the flatbed took nearly an entire hour. The wreckage-hauler from McIntyre’s shop had to position itself on one end of the globe—the one facing roughly west, the side opposite from the one Rick had struck—while the excavator stood on the other. The big earth-mover needed to use its shovel to gingerly maneuver the stone onto the flatbed. With unerring precision, the excavator’s operator needed to make sure that the giant sphere moved onto the truck without tipping it a mere inch to either the right or the left. The smallest slip, what would amount to an imperceptible error to the untrained eye, could set the giant globe rolling off the truck and off the dirt road. By the same token, the tilting of the flatbed had to be maneuvered with the virtuoso skill of a surgeon. With the road descending on the west side, placing the flatbed back on the truck’s chassis in its perfectly lowered position could make the globe roll forward and crush the driver’s compartment. Then, once the monolith had been moved onto the truck, the McIntyre crew took another half an hour to secure it in place with a latticework of chains and cords.

  “You can see the tread marks, can’t you?” Cornelia asked triumphantly as the flatbed truck started backing up Scenic Drive, carrying its unstable cargo toward the spot where the dirt road connected into Signal Butte Road.

  She was right. All could see it. The removal operation left deep, treaded gouges in the soft gravel surface of the road. There was no mistaking the marks of heavy machinery having been in the area.

  “There was nothing like that on the gravel before,” she said, studying Carpenter for any reaction.

  For the moment, the cop remained stoic.

  “And make sure you take a look at something else that wasn’t there,” said Rick. “Look at that globe very closely when it gets back into town. Look at the scratches all over its surface. Look at those deep, jagged grooves the earth-mover put all over its face.”

  Knight nodded vigorously. “Exactly! That thing was polished as smooth as glass before it was moved. How did they move that ball in here—from wherever they carved it—without a scratch on it? What kind of heavy-hauling equipment leaves no marks on the ground?”

  “And look at the exact spot they put it,” said Rick. “On a natural step on a sloping road. One foot this way and it would go rolling down the hill. One foot that way and it goes rolling down the hill. Someone knew the precise spot—to the inch!—they had to—”

  “Wait a minute!” the chief cut him off. “Let’s hold on a second here before we all go jumping on the supernatural bandwagon. There are easy explanations for everything you’re saying. I’m sure museums have moved priceless statues, art treasures, without putting a mark on them.”

  Rick noticed Knight’s brows pinching into an angry frown. “And you think we used a helicopter for this? Because that’s the only way—”

  “Look, Chief, you’re right,” Rick jumped in, then paused. Raised eyebrows and squinty, skeptical looks came from his own colleagues. “I mean, let’s take a nice, logical, rational approach to investigating this. You’re absolutely right in that. Someone flew a what—fifteen? twenty?—ton globe in here. Well, someone must have seen it. Let’s all go to Eunice Stevens’s place. She’s got to be close by. Maybe she saw it. Maybe that’s why she contacted us in the first place. Maybe she knows something. And who else lives out here? Let’s get all the addresses and talk to everyone.”

  3.

  The drive the rest of the way to Eunice Stevens’s cottage had, indeed, been a short one from the site of Rick’s accident. He, along with Knight, Cornelia, Ian, and Melinda, had piled into their remaining Pathfinder and followed Chief Carpenter’s cruiser to the Stevens residence. The drive took exactly eight minutes, according to Rick’s watch. He was glad for that.

  “She lives almost literally around the corner,” Cornelia said, turning around from the front passenger seat. Dan Knight was behind the wheel.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Rick replied.

  “Yeah,” said Knight. “I think she’ll nicely torpedo most of the chief’s theories.”

  “Like the one about the helicopter?” Melinda asked with a perfect deadpan.

  “Maybe,” Rick said, unable to overlook a need to stay cautious.

  “If getting that stone ball in there took the sort of construction project Carpenter’s describing,” said Cornelia as Knight brought the Pathfinder to a slow roll and a stop behind the chief’s car, “Eunice Stevens should have seen and heard something. Especially if they used a helicopter.”

  “No kidding,” said Ian, and chuckled. He sat sandwiched in between Rick and Melinda.

  “Makes you wonder,” Rick said, once again tentatively. There was something troublesome in what his colleagues were implying.

  But Knight picked up on it now. “About what? Think there’s something wrong?”

  “This woman should have had s
ome clue as to what was going on up here last night. And shortly before I got here at that. There’s no way that stone thing was placed in the road much earlier. This may be a gravel road through the forest, but others have houses out here. This road is being used all the time. Someone would have seen it. But if Eunice saw something….”

  Rick saw the proverbial glow of realization lighting up Cornelia’s face. “Why didn’t she come out to the gathering this morning, or try and do something to contact us again?”

  “Wow. Yeah,” Ian said slowly.

  “She’s a recluse,” Melinda added.

  Knight turned off the Pathfinder’s engine now. “And that’s a problem.”

  “Recluses can be weirdoes,” Cornelia said grimly. “Know what I’m saying? Highly unstable.”

  “Instead of clearing this whole thing up,” Rick said, “she can help muddle it.”

  “Do we think the chief’s explanations make any sense?” Cornelia asked as Rick opened his door.

  “I don’t know,” Rick said.

  “Yeah,” Cornelia said, “because if they don’t, then what are we left with?”

  Knight opened his door and got out. “Let’s find out.”

  4.

  If he would have decided to switch careers yet again, Rick mulled, going from ex-cop reality-TV star to author, he would want to start with buying a country cottage like Eunice Stevens’s. His mysterious contact lived in the kind of tree-shaded little abode every writer dreamed of moving into and writing the Great American Novel. Although the place looked smaller the closer his group got to its tidy, freshly painted porch, a thicket of towering pine trees seemed to surround the house like a phalanx of bodyguards shielding a particularly vulnerable charge. With the glimpse of the snow-capped Mount Shasta visible through the forest, Rick thought he was looking at the sort of scenery no painter could resist putting on canvas.

  The sense of guarded frailty Rick felt as he studied the house amidst its protective perimeter of trees perfectly represented Eunice Stevens herself.

  It took a three-minute discussion between Stevens and Chief Carpenter before the woman allowed the entire Confirmation crew to enter her home. As per her previous written request to Rick, the cameras and recording equipment had to be left outside. Eunice Stevens was ready to “give direction about the mess on Scenic Lane,” as she put it, but she wanted to stay at “just arm’s length from the spotlight.”

  “Something’s been all over that road,” Eunice explained when the entire party had settled into her living room.

  The cottage, as far as Rick could tell, looked every bit as well kept on the inside as it did on the outside. More than just being clean and orderly, the entire home looked like no expense had been spared to keep it looking new and elegant. An orderly house, more often than not, Rick had often concluded, was a sign of a sane and orderly mind. There were exceptions, of course, but Eunice Stevens, in Rick’s estimation, struck his cop’s instincts for human nature as being normal and in full grasp of her faculties. That impression helped her delivery of a story that turned ever more fantastic.

  “Something had to happen sooner or later. It was obvious. That’s why I needed to get your attention when I heard that you were filming in town. An unbelievable coincidence, I know, so I needed to take advantage of it.” Stevens explained calmly, her attention focused on Rick and Dan Knight throughout the conversation more than on any of the other people in the room.

  The woman gave Rick a strange contradiction of impressions now. Much like her home, there was a sort of patrician elegance about Eunice’s appearance. Her casual dress looked new and pricey. While pegging her age somewhere in the early sixties, Rick thought Stevens must also have at one point undergone some cosmetic procedures to subtract about a decade or so from her face. She had the kind of tight, slightly frozen features of the face-lifted, chemically-peeled, and Botoxed aging matrons one saw around Beverly Hills and Malibu. Soon after their brief acquaintance, though, Eunice told her visitors that she was a retired general-practice physician from Santa Barbara. She had moved to the Mount Shasta area soon after her husband’s death. He had been an ophthalmologist. That accounted for the money, Rick realized, but the information had to serve another purpose in this conversation. Eunice Stevens must have been telling her guests so much about her background in such a short period of time to make sure they understood that she was an intelligent, sophisticated woman of a respectable background and social circles, not given to telling wild stories about the paranormal and the unexplained. If she was talking about strange goings on in the woods, Rick attempted to decode her intentions, then her stories could well be taken to the bank.

  “You know,” Eunice said, her large brown eyes focusing in on Rick, “I’m just so sorry you had to discover what all…all the strangeness added up to in such…well, such a violent way.”

  This time he noted something else about her manner and delivery. She radiated a sort of tautness of the nerves, like someone who had struggled long and hard to manage the assault of chaos on her life. Rick couldn’t help but think that Eunice reminded him of a cornered cat rearing up on its hind legs and desperately clawing at its assailants. He could now start to try and understand some kind of a reason behind her theatrics of speaking only off the record.

  “Did you know that globe was going to be in the middle of the road?” he asked.

  “Oh, no!” Eunice’s reaction was quick. “Oh, absolutely not. I mean if I knew you would have an accident, I would have warned you about it.”

  “Sure, of course. I believe you. What I meant was, did you know a globe was going to show up somewhere?”

  Before Eunice could reply, Cornelia jumped in with, “Do you know what that globe is?”

  “No,” Eunice said tightly, her gaze calmly shifting now between Rick and Cornelia.

  Again, Rick was sensing the tension beneath her veneer of cool composure.

  “I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know where it would happen, or that it would be…well, the appearance of this giant stone. I mean, I have no idea what the meaning of this strange object is…except that I had seen some strange things in the area and I was suspecting something was going to happen for real this time. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The reason I sent you that message.”

  “This time?” Dan Knight asked.

  “Well,” Eunice said cautiously, but with an equal thrust of determination in her voice. “Some of the…what I’ve seen in the woods, well, they’ve been going on with enough of a frequency lately, I could sense that it was all building up to something.”

  When she paused, Chief Carpenter cleared his throat. “Mrs. Stevens. Can you just give us the details? Exactly what have you been seeing in the woods?”

  “Well…for one, lights. And yes, I know it’s something scores of people can always be counted on to say. Lights in the skies, UFOs, flying saucers—what do they like calling it around here?—ghost lights. But it was always near that same area.” She paused and looked at Rick. “By the road. Where the stone showed up.”

  Where I smashed into it last night, Right thought. Did she have a glint of satisfaction in her eye? he wondered. Had she spoken of this to others before? Only to be rebuffed? Ridiculed? Rick again considered that the Mount Shasta area was perhaps one of the safest places in the world to openly talk about paranormal experiences. It was akin to talking about UFOs in Roswell.

  “All right,” said Carpenter. “Can you describe these lights exactly? When did they start showing up? How often did they come? What color were they? We need as much detail as possible.”

  “About two weeks ago. I first started seeing them about two weeks ago. Sometimes as early as sunset. Then throughout the night. Lighting up the area. Shining beams of light through the trees.”

  “Did you ever hear anything?’

  “No,” Eunice said with a firm resolve in her voic
e. “Just the lights. No sounds like helicopters or airplanes or anything like that.”

  “Not even last night?”

  “No.”

  “Just the lights? Like usual?”

  “I’ve been seeing the same lights every night.”

  “Now the way these lights moved,” Knight suddenly jumped in. “What were they like? I mean, was it all one light source?”

  “No, not just one. It was like…things. I don’t know—whatever it was that was emanating the beams…I mean, it looked like multiple objects shooting beams of light from the sky. I don’t want to say craft because I didn’t hear anything that sounded like a helicopter or aircraft engines of any sort, but what else can fly through the air and light everything up?”

  “Forgive me,” Carpenter exclaimed, “but can you be absolutely certain you didn’t hear anything?”

  “Last night,” Eunice snapped at him forcefully, “while I was waiting for Mr. Ballantine, I had the TV on for a while. It was running an old episode of NCIS. But I do not blare the TV loud enough to drown out the sounds of multiple low-flying aircraft. My hearing is perfect, Chief Carpenter.”