Stamped Out

by Terri Thayer

  “Good thing you got out before the Big One,” the second guy, maybe John, said gravely. “It’s only a matter of time before Arizona is beachfront.”

  April smiled slightly. People in Aldenville pretended they wouldn’t want to live in California because of its tectonic shifts, but the truth was they were afraid that they were missing out on a big adventure. Convincing themselves California was full of loonies protected them from that realization.

  “What’s going on at the Castle?” the guy on the floor asked. “We heard the blast. Lyle make a big mess?”

  “Not that that would be anything new,” John said.

  A dark-skinned man crossed himself and kissed his knuckles, raising his eyes to heaven. “Dios mío,” he muttered. Surely this was Carlos.

  April knew construction workers could be a superstitious lot. They didn’t like it when things went haywire. People got killed on the job from a stray hammer blow or broken scaffolding far too often. The deaths usually seemed random and unpredictable, happening despite the best efforts at safety. For some guys, a job curse explained the unexplainable.

  She also knew that men would walk off a job rather than work under dicey circumstances. Her job was to keep them all here.

  She decided not to say anything about the skull. They’d find out soon enough. She didn’t want them too distracted to work. Instead she said, “Things are fine over there. Ed just wants you to keep doing what you’re doing.”

  John said, “So why are you here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders apologetically. “I know you’re not slacking off, but my dad—”

  “We know your dad, April,” Mike said. “He’s a nervine of the highest order.”

  She laughed. “So you know he sent me over here because he needed me to check, not because you needed checking up on.”

  “Exactly. Here’s the report. We’ve spent the morning ripping down the east and west walls of bookshelves. We’ve piled the salvageable lumber outside the French doors for Lyle to pick up. We’re right on schedule.”

  April was impressed. “You do know my dad. You’ve covered all the bases.”

  The barrel-chested guy stood and stretched out his back. “And we haven’t used Mrs. H.’s bathroom once.”

  April laughed again. “My father must be pretty predictable.”

  Butch said, “Someday I’m going to retire and open a porta-potty business. I’ll get the exclusive on your father’s jobs and just rake in the dough.”

  The men laughed, then started gathering up their sandwich wrappers. One of them held his fist to his chest and burped loudly. April ignored his bid for attention.

  “Well, I’ll tell my dad all is well here. In the meantime, you’ve got plenty to keep you busy?” she asked.

  McCarty nodded again. “Oh, yeah. You going to stick around? I’ve got some boards that need the nails pulled out,” he said.

  April could see he was only half kidding. “No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the Castle.”

  “What about the cleanup over there?” Mike said. “Ed said I needed to schedule that for this afternoon.”

  The cleanup. She’d forgotten Mrs. H.’s demand that it be done today. There was no way Yost was going to let that happen.

  “Probably not today. Ed’ll call you when he’s ready.” She said her good-byes and quickly left. She hadn’t done a great job of answering his questions, but it would have to be enough. For now.

  She walked back through the house, hoping not to bump into Mrs. H. She didn’t want to be the one to break the news of the skull to her. After all, if Mrs. H. wanted to, she could shut down the Mirabella job.

  Outside once more, April yanked the car door open. Hot air flooded out. She felt her thighs burn when they hit the upholstery. In San Francisco, she’d never needed one of those ugly windshield screens. Summer meant fog, cold fog. Here a screen was a necessity. Even though it was only early June, the heat and humidity built up in a closed car. The black interior felt hot enough to boil water.

  April rubbed her hands, touching the wheel now and again to see if it had cooled off enough for her to drive. Her phone rang. Ken’s ring. She threw the phone on the passenger seat. The day had been frustrating enough without adding to it.

  Bankruptcy. The word sent a chill down her spine. She’d done everything she could not to repeat the family history. In California, she’d paid off every creditor she’d had. It had taken all of her money, but it was worth it. The stigma of bankruptcy was hard to overcome. It had taken Ed years to build his business back up again.

  April pointed her car to the right, to return to the Castle.

  About a quarter mile up the road, a man in a real Smokey-the-Bear hat stopped her. Up ahead was a large white truck with “Forensics Van” written on the side, just under the Pennsylvania State Trooper insignia.

  The trooper leaned in. “Sorry, ma’am, but the road is closed. Are you a local resident?”

  She thought about lying, but he’d probably check the registration and find out she didn’t live on this road.

  She shook her head. “I work with Retro Reproductions, the contractor on the Castle job.”

  “Sorry, there’s an investigation in progress. You’ll have to turn around.”

  April hesitated. Her father was in there. The stony-faced trooper stood in the middle of the road, directing her three-point turn so she didn’t end up in the roadside ditch. She turned the car back toward the barn, trying to figure out how best to protect her father. Ed was going to be no help. She would have to do this herself. If she could prove to Yost that all her father’s employees were alive and well, he’d have to leave her father alone. No missing employee would mean that the skull belonged to some other unfortunate, and that her father was not involved.

  Back at the barn, April scanned the file boxes neatly stacked next to her father’s desk and pulled out the one marked “The Castle.” File folders slumped in the bottom, so she carefully set them on the kitchen table. Her father’s desk was littered with papers. She didn’t dare touch anything. He’d flip out if she disturbed his work method.

  Inside the bulging folders, April found invoices, bills of lading and statements from the various supply houses that Buchert Construction used. The old Castle job had generated a lot of paperwork.

  She leafed through the invoices. She found one for kitchen cabinetry—custom, from the looks of it. The invoice, clearly marked “The Castle” on the upper right-hand side, had been sent to the old business address, which was the house where Bonnie now lived alone. Red check marks were placed along the margin, indicating that the cabinets had been received. She saw a note in her mother’s handwriting. Back then, the offices had been in the garage and Bonnie had helped out.

  April set aside that folder. It was fascinating to see the raw materials that made up a job, but she was looking for people. She could get Yost off her father’s back if she could just show him that all of Ed’s men were accounted for.

  She found a folder marked “Payroll.” Ed used a payroll system with ledger entries attached to each check he wrote. Each payroll check had its own sheet, with the man’s name, the hours worked, the deductions taken: SSI, state tax, union dues.

  April started at the end. There was no payroll after the second week in June. The job had come to an end right after the party. She hadn’t made the connection until Yost said it earlier.

  Of course, she’d known that Buchert Construction had gone bankrupt. Her senior year in high school was one of no new clothes and no gas money. She’d been forced to sell candy to the neighbors to pay for her band uniform. She’d taken a part-time job at the IGA.

  She had escaped as soon as she could. With enough credits to graduate in January, she did that and left for college in San Francisco. And stayed there.

  Her father had found work with other contractors until he and Vince opened Retro Reproductions about ten years later. After a few lean years, they were just starting to make a profit.

&nb
sp; She went back to the file box. There were piles of change orders. The job had been started nearly three years before the graduation party. It seemed that Warren Winchester had changed his mind on a monthly basis.

  Red-striped code violations were mixed in with the papers. She pulled out one to read. The initials at the bottom were “GW.” George Weber. He had taken exception to the addition of an air-conditioning unit that had not been in the original plans. There was no sign of how Ed had fixed the problem.

  Nearly at the bottom, April found a rubber-banded group of time cards. The men used yellow time cards, gridded by day of the week. There were columns for jobs worked, in case a man worked on two different jobs on the same day.

  She flipped through the timeworn cards. There were six. She recognized a couple of names: Lyle Trocadero, Mike McCarty. The other four were Clyde Reiser, Danny Whitlock, Frankie Imperiale and Martin Festler.

  She walked over to her father’s desk. Were any of those four guys still working with her dad? Lyle and Mike had come back to work for Ed. Maybe there were others.

  She found the Retro Reproductions checkbook and pulled it out. Last week, Ed had paid ten guys. Excluding Lyle and Mike, she compared the list to the names of those who had worked on the Castle. One matched. Clyde Reiser.

  That left three.

  She turned on her father’s computer and clicked on the Internet icon. She’d go the easy route and see if anyone was listed in the online white pages. Bingo. Martin Festler lived in Moosic, thirty miles or so up north.

  She was two-for-four and feeling pretty good. If all the guys were still alive, her father would be in the clear.

  Where else would these former employees be listed? Her father had a cup on his desk, full of bright blue pencils with a gold insignia. Carpenters Union Local 76. The phone number was right below. Buchert Construction had been a union shop. Unions kept records. There were pensions and health care plans.

  April called the hall. “This is April Buchert, from Retro Reproductions. Can you tell me if Frankie Imperiale and Danny Whitlock are still members of Local 76?” she asked in her best businesslike manner.

  “I’m sorry,” a nasal voice whined. “We don’t give out information on our current members.”

  April thought fast. “That’s a shame because I’ve got a paycheck to send to them. I just need current addresses.”

  The phone went silent, and then April heard the dulcet tones of Johnny Mercer. She pushed the speakerphone function on her end, and waited.

  “Ed? Is that you?” a booming, hearty voice came through the tiny speaker. “It’s Danny O’Malley.”

  April’s heart sank. She wasn’t a member of the good-old-boy network that was so fundamental to doing business here. “No, this is his daughter.”

  “Cripes, I thought Ed was pulling my leg. Send a check to Danny Whitlock? He knows Danny disappeared. What, eight, nine years ago?”

  April’s heart pounded. “Disappeared?” What if it was more like fifteen years ago?

  “You know, moved to Florida. Those guys always say they’ll stay in touch, but then they disappear.”

  April let out a sigh of relief, then said, “Sorry. My dad isn’t here right now, and I was just trying to track down some of his old employees.”

  “Planning some kind of a surprise party, are you? Is the old geezer getting ready to retire?”

  “Something like that,” April lied. “What about Frankie Imperiale? That name ring any bells?”

  “Sorry, sweetie, no. But you know how it is. Workers come and go. Some guys don’t have what it takes, you know.”

  “I suppose.” April quickly realized she wasn’t going to get any more information from this source. She thanked him and signed off.

  She tapped the time cards. Frankie Imperiale was the only one not accounted for. That didn’t mean anything, she told herself, trying to resolve the niggling feeling she had that it might. He could have dropped out of the union or moved out of the county.

  She found her father’s local phone book. It was at least five years old. There was an Imperiale in Butler Township. She called the number, but there was no answer and no machine to take her message. She saved the number in her cell to try again later.

  She closed up the box and stashed it back in its place among the others by her father’s desk. A set of blueprints was rolled up in the corner. Written in blue ink on the light blue page, she saw the word “Winchester.” She pulled them out. The rubber band was so thinned with age, it broke as soon as she touched it.

  April spread the prints out on the kitchen table. They were dated September 1991. These must be the prints for the Castle, April thought, but the building didn’t resemble anything remotely regal. It was a simple design. No towers, no turrets, no crenellations. Just three rooms. One half was a large living space. The other contained a kitchen and a bath and a bedroom. A modest fireplace. Nothing like the stone façade that had come tumbling down earlier.

  The plans were initialed by GW. George Weber, Code Enforcement.

  She hadn’t really found exactly what she was looking for, but she was getting closer. She needed more details before she went back to Yost, though. Then she thought about the skull. Yost had no real reason to suspect the skull was only fifteen years old. Maybe it was much older, dropped there by an animal after the site had been abandoned.

  She looked at the pictures of the skull on her phone again, wishing she could decipher what it had to tell her. How long had the skull been there? Was it a male or female? How had it come to be inside the fireplace of the Castle?

  Suddenly she realized she knew someone who could help her.

  CHAPTER 6

  Since Deana’s place was only a few miles from the barn, April decided to take a chance and drive by the funeral home.

  The Hudock Family Funeral Home and Mortuary was out the Sugarloaf Road. She turned off Route 93 and headed south. Once she was past the new elementary school, farms took up most of the available acreage. Now and again a cookie-cutter Harris rancher would appear at the end of a long driveway. She drove slowly, remembering how the deer liked to amble from field to field using the road as a cut-through.

  At the top of a long rise, she saw the funeral home. The sign was discreet, carved wood with gold accents. Billboards announcing its location were unnecessary. The Hudocks had been in the same spot for over fifty years. Only the building had changed. Deana’s parents had built the new place, a sprawling red brick Colonial, in the eighties. A colonnaded front porch spanned the length of the building. White wicker furniture was grouped in several seating areas. Large pots of geraniums graced the top steps.

  April pulled into the farthest spot of a large black asphalt lot. A line of Normandy poplars blocked the view of the back door. April got out, leaving her car window open, hoping the car wouldn’t get so overheated again. She headed toward the hidden path she knew was there. This route, through the trees into the rose garden to the family entrance, more than all the places she’d been since returning to Aldenville, felt like home. As a child, she’d ridden her bike to Deana’s house every day during summer vacations. She felt herself relax.

  At the back door April admired Deana’s décor. She’d done everything she could to distinguish it from the formal front, the business end of the house. A peeling faded blue wheelbarrow held a dozen pansies. Deana had arranged a bright yellow rain slicker over a distressed wooden bench and placed a pair of green rain boots alongside. The resulting vignette was homey and inviting.

  When there was no answer to her knock, April’s disappointment was sharp. She couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the empty barn, with its unanswerable questions about Ed, just yet. It was only four thirty. Dinner at Bonnie’s was always at six. Going there early was not an option. Her mother was not very social in the throes of cooking.

  Reluctant to leave the backyard, she wandered through the roses. Deana’s mother had planted most of them. The tiny red buds promised a good show later. From the back corne
r of the garden, April noticed a new trail, a path of colorful flagstones with hues of subtle pinks and reds and purples leading away from the parking lot. The path turned through some trees, and following it, April came to a pond.

  The water was rimmed with tall grasses, reeds and cat-tails instead of the pampas that April was used to seeing.

  Bushes clustered along the bank—mock orange, forsythia. The leaves from a low-reaching weeping willow dappled the light on the water’s surface. A rustic wooden bench had been placed facing away from the house, with a pretty view of the geometric cornfields beyond.

  There’d never been a pond here before. This had to be one of Mark’s projects. An oval stone sign read “Sanctuary.” What a beautiful place to see the sunrise, April thought. There was silence except for the occasional splash from a fish or the rustle of the wind through the grass. She could see for miles. Quiet spaces with wide-open views had been too rare in her busy San Francisco life. Too often, her view had been the inside of her car or the paint store, or a customer’s wall.

  This day had been a crazy one. April scratched her chin. Trying to keep Mrs. H. happy was looking as though it would be a full-time job. Add to that, trying to keep Yost away from her father, and she felt close to a breaking point. But being here was helping her to relax. April breathed in and watched a mallard serenely paddling. The sunlight changed the green iridescence on his feathers until they looked translucent. The duck was unaware of the beauty on its back. She thought about going back to the car for her sketchbook, but the sun on her face felt too good.

  She heard a car pull in, and as she came part way up the hill from the pond and saw Deana exiting her car, April waved.

  “Stay there,” Deana called. She was wearing tan slacks and a crisp button-down pink shirt. With her blonde hair, which would get even lighter as the summer went on, she looked more like a California girl than a funeral director.

  April waited, watching a goldfish with a speckled back surface to catch a fly and go back under the water.