“The Piper family curse,” Bea said with a smile into her soda.
Lyon leaned back in the booth. “Well, Bridgeway house does have all the prerequisites for a curse. We have a nice dank mausoleum located in an interesting family cemetery. In addition to that, there’s a cliff jumper who returns during the full moon to finish her dessert. To really round out the haunting, I would like to add a baying dog and possibly some ancient bones cavorting on the lawns.”
“If you’re into the supernatural, Wentworth, you have the wrong criminal justice agency here. You want people really far out like the CIA,” Rocco said. “Is that your bag now?”
“Of course not! I don’t believe in curses from other dimensions, just as I don’t believe in agile killers pushing their second century. But something is going on here, Rocco.”
“If we don’t do something soon, we may have another killing on our hands,” Bea said.
Lyon agreed. “Maybe that’s what my dream was trying to tell me. Paula is next.”
“When?” Rocco asked.
“It could happen anytime.”
In the library of Bridgeway House, Peyton Piper continued polishing the 1840 Dragoon saber with the triple-bar brass hilt. His full attention seemed drawn to the weapon’s finish rather than to Lyon’s recital of past Piper deaths. When Lyon finished, he continued working on the brass fitting with a chamois cloth. When he was finally satisfied, he carefully replaced the saber on its felt cushion in an open case next to its mate. He ran his thumb across the sharp blade before turning to face his former classmate.
“Sure, we’ve had violent deaths in the Piper family,” Peyton began. “The nineteenth century was a turbulent time. Caleb’s son was killed in a hunting accident. Do you know how many people have died from accidents on Bridgeway property in the last hundred years? A bunch, Lyon. Another Piper was shot on a riverboat while playing poker. Anyone who plays that damn game with strangers ought to be shot. Speakeasies were illegal, bad things happened in them. Many thousands of men are killed after or during army training. Your problem is that you overdramatize!”
“There are too many coincidences that form a pattern, Peyton.”
“We Pipers are active people. We are involved in life. Things can happen to active and involved people. I resented Swan preying on Paula’s teenage obsession with death. His motives were sexual; yours are equally transparent and as insulting.”
“Paula is the target of a killer. Will you protect your daughter? Use that private police force of yours to guard her until we get to the bottom of this.”
“And the end of your little fable will just happen to coincide with the closing of the party nominating convention in July?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Isn’t it odd that at the same time that I make a bid for the senatorial nomination, a move opposed by your wife, you just happen to come up with this far-out story about a Piper curse.”
“I didn’t phrase it so sophomorically.”
“It must be magical since, according to you, these murders have been going on for one hundred fifty years. For a century and a half some evil force is eliminating the Piper firstborn. Come on now!”
“That’s exactly what’s been happening. The record speaks for itself. A computer model would indicate that the facts are impossible to explain without a murderous intent.”
“Give me a little respect! I am a businessman trained to make pragmatic decisions based on marketing, production, and financial facts. I do not avoid decision making, and I am quite capable of considering opposing possibilities. However, what you have just given me is an impossible train of circumstances dreamed up by a drunken police chief, augmented by an ambitious lady senator, and orchestrated by a space cadet. In other words, you speak utter nonsense. Your juvenile scheme is a poor attempt to screw me out of the nomination. Your advice seems to suggest that I retreat to Bridgeway with my daughter. We remain surrounded by armed guards and let the senatorial nomination go by default. Wentworth, you are using my daughter as a cheap weapon to defeat me.”
“Paula is in grave danger.”
“I agree on that. She is pursued by Charles Fraxer who wants to marry her for my money. The last time I saw that scum he had broken into my house to seduce my daughter in her own bedroom. I have taken steps to correct that young man’s attitude.”
ELEVEN
The world had become a menacing place.
Lyon leaned out the Saturn’s window and viewed the Welches’ small cottage and surrounding woods with deep suspicion. During his first view this tiny house, built to scale for small people, had seemed cozy and quaint. Recent events, however, had given Bridgeway house and its surroundings a bleak pall.
He had phoned Bea from the mansion. He told her that although he did not have Peyton’s cooperation, he had a plan for temporarily hiding Paula.
There had been an uncomfortable pause on Bea’s end of the line. “I suppose you’re considering asking her to visit Nutmeg Hill?” she finally said.
“You’re being Freudian over that dream again.”
“As we speak I’m looking directly at the subject in question and wondering where I hid my aerobic exercise videos.”
“I have another idea,” he had replied. “I think I can get her admitted under a false name for the summer session at Harris Junior College in West Virginia. Bill Johnson is director of Admissions down there and will help me out if I explain.”
“That’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“Exactly. What better place for her until we get this sorted out?”
Bea and Paula stooped to exit the cottage’s small front door as they hurried out to the car. They waved to Frieda standing in the doorway. Lyon moved to the passenger seat while Paula squeezed into the narrow rear compartment.
“Lyon hates to drive,” Bea said to Paula. She drove past Bridgeway’s front gate to the lane that led down to the secondary highway. Two lone protesters, their placards on the ground, drank coffee from a thermos as they slouched by the side of the road. When they saw the coupe they jumped to their feet and began waving their signs frantically.
Paula tapped Bea on the shoulder. “Stop, please.” She leaned out to talk to the protester waving the PITCH PIPER OUT placard. “Have you seen Chuck Fraxer today?” she asked. “He told me he’d be out here.”
The middle-aged woman waving the sign seemed relieved to substitute normal conversation for belligerency. “A Piper Corporation truck stopped by to get him about a half hour ago,” she said in a neighborly tone. “We were concerned, but Chuck said that a girl named Paula wanted to see him.”
Lyon glanced at Bea with concern.
“Oh, my God!” Paula said. “Which way did they go?”
The woman pointed down the lane toward the obscured entrance of a logging road. The narrow rutted path wandered north past several cornfields. It disappeared into the center of a heavily wooded stand of second-growth timber. “Over that way. They said it went to the back entrance.”
“That’s the north woodlot I walked yesterday,” Lyon said. It wasn’t necessary to stress Chuck’s danger. “There’s no entrance down that way.”
“Let’s go!” Bea said as she threw the car into gear. The Saturn leaped ahead and nearly knocked over the woman with the protest sign. Bea took the turn into the logging road with a screech of tires, but was forced to slow as the car jounced over the rutted path.
“I never sent him any message,” Paula said. “We talked on the phone early this morning and were to meet at his place near school. I think Barry’s got him.”
Bea edged the speed of the small car up to its practical maximum on the inadequate road.
Directly ahead a Piper Corporation security truck erupted through a thicket in the woodlot. It lurched up the single lane logging road with a wavering trajectory that its driver fought to control.
“Get off on the shoulder!” Lyon shouted.
“There isn’t any. Let those bastards move,” Bea yelled back
.
“We’ll all be killed!” Paula screamed from the rear seat.
“I have the right-of-way!” Bea yelled. “You hear that, you guys?” she shouted out the window at the pickup, which was now only yards away.
Lyon could now see Barry grimly hunched over the wheel. He also saw that they were vehicle-jousting against superior equipment. The truck was equipped with a roll bar for protection of the cab. Oversize tires raised the reinforced front, designed for a winch and snow plow, above their hood. It was obvious that in any front-end collision the small Saturn would be destroyed.
“Let them by!” he cried as he grabbed the wheel and forced their car to swerve off the road into a ditch. The car tilted precariously. Their wheels spun uselessly in the dirt until they stalled to a stop.
The pickup sped past without reducing speed. A cloud of dust swirled over the tipped coupe.
“Unless Chuck was lying down in the truck bed he wasn’t with them,” Paula said.
“I think we had better look for him in those woods,” Bea said. “And I think we had better look for him fast.”
Chuck Fraxer had been hanged.
Lyon did not actually locate him in the search so much as run into the young protester’s dangling feet when they struck him on the shoulder. Small droplets of blood dripped from the hanging body and fell on his face. He looked up into the foliage where the body was tied. Paula was only a few feet behind him and Lyon pulled her against his shoulder and away from the sight of the hanging man.
“What is it?” The young woman asked.
“Don’t look.”
“Break it up, you guys,” Bea said from behind them. “Let’s cut the guy down.”
“God, I hope I can be as tough and unfeeling as her when I’m older,” Paula said.
“If you don’t get out of my husband’s arms you aren’t going to get much older,” Bea said as she began to lower Chuck Fraxer to the ground.
The protester had been hoisted aloft by a rope that ran around his chest and under his arms. His nose had been bloodied in the beating, while the words “I love Tommy” had been painted across his bare chest. He groaned.
“He’s not dead,” Paula said as she rushed to cradle his head on her lap and brush hair back from his blood-streaked face.
“They just seem to have beaten the hell out of him,” Lyon said.
“Barry did this, just like he probably killed Mr. Swan,” Paula said. “He senses what Daddy wants and then does it without being asked. It’s clever that way. My father is never responsible since he never directly asks for these terrible things to be done. And when they are, somehow Barry gets rewarded.”
It took an hour for Lyon to walk to a nearby farmhouse, phone, and wait for Rocco Herbert. He returned with the police cruiser to drag the Saturn from the ditch. When Chuck Fraxer adamantly refused hospital treatment, Rocco used the car’s first-aid kit to make a rudimentary attempt at treating his cuts and bruises.
Rocco insisted that Lyon and the graduate student ride with him for the trip to Middleburg. Bea and Paula would follow in the Saturn and meet them at Fraxer’s rented house on the outskirts of the Middleburg University campus.
“How many guys were involved?” Rocco asked as they waited at the bottom of the Seven Sisters hills for the ferry.
“Three,” Fraxer mumbled through bruised lips.
“I’ll need their names for the warrant,” Rocco said.
“Don’t know,” was the mumbled response.
“Well, we can start with Barry Nevins and offer him a deal if he implicates the others,” Rocco said.
The two-car ferry nosed into the wooden pier as its single deckhand roped it taut and raised the gate. Rocco drove aboard and braked at the far end, where he crossed his arms and glared at the injured man in his finest authoritative manner. “Somebody takes a fall for this adventure of yours or I arrest you for trespassing. Got that?”
They sat silently for a moment and were halfway across the Connecticut River before Chuck Fraxer spoke. His words were slightly unintelligible because of his split lip.
“For God’s sake, those guys were sicced on me by her father,” Chuck said. “If I start rattling that Pandora’s box it will work its way back to him and I’ll end up in a court case against my potential father-in-law.”
“How potential?” Lyon asked.
“Very, as far as I’m concerned,” Chuck replied.
“She’s awfully young,” Lyon said.
“Eighteen going on thirty-two,” Chuck answered.
They were nearly at the end of the short trip and the ferry was positioning for the docking when Lyon made his proposal. “If you do what I say, Rocco will drop all charges against everyone.”
“I will?” Rocco asked without a great deal of protest.
“I am sending Paula away for a few weeks,” Lyon said. “You will not know where she has gone nor will anyone else. I want you to insist that she go for her own safety.”
“That makes sense,” Chuck agreed.
The house, which Fraxer shared with several graduate students, was located a block from the campus. The building was a rambling wood-frame dwelling typical of homes built in the late twenties. A wide porch containing an assortment of mountain bikes, old car seats, and piles of newspapers circled three sides of the first floor. The upstairs windows boasted an assortment of coverings that included torn window shades and psychedelic throws.
Rocco helped the limping Fraxer up the outside stairs, past the broken screen door, and into the hallway.
“God, I hurt all over,” Fraxer moaned.
“They did a professional job on you. Notice they didn’t break anything or do permanent damage. This is called the warning. They’ll go for broken bones at some future time no matter what sort of deal Lyon thinks he cut with you.”
“I believe in nonviolence, but if they keep this up I may go in for that paramilitary revolutionary bit.”
“It’s my job to take care of them,” Rocco said.
“No way. This is between me and her old man,” he said with a nod toward Paula. “The bastard has had his shot, even if he did use surrogates. Next time is my turn.”
“Knock that off!” Rocco ordered as he steered him into the living room.
The long room took up the bulk of the first floor and was a strong contender for a World War One battlefield look-alike. What had once been built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace were now filled with beer bottles, potato chips, and assorted junk food wrappers. Paper cups, partially filled with indeterminate beverages, were placed along every available flat surface. The furniture consisted of several couches and easy chairs whose protruding stuffing identified it as early American curb. Throw pillows strewn around the floor completed the decor, except for a large photograph of a rather nondescript man that dominated the mantelpiece.
Rocco glanced casually at the large picture. “That guy looks like Willie Sutton the bank robber.”
“Jack Kerouac,” Lyon answered. “He’s the beat generation author who wrote On the Road.”
Chuck Fraxer looked at Lyon through a swollen eye with more respect than he had shown previously. “That’s right.”
Lyon gently took Paula’s arm. “What did you mean back in the woodlot when you said that your father had Swan killed?”
Paula hesitated before answering. “I was very upset over seeing Chuck beaten. I just meant that it was possible. Swan was beginning to hit on me and Daddy knew it. Everyone at Bridgeway knew something was going on between Swan and my stepmother. Daddy said that he intended to fire the man, and I just wonder if Barry didn’t follow those orders literally.”
“Barry was in the house at the time of the killing,” Lyon said.
“It took me about three minutes to get from the gate cottage to the house,” Chuck said. “Barry could easily have done it in one of those silent carts.”
Rocco made a note. “Nevins has his foot in everything, doesn’t he?”
“The bastard Swan dese
rved what he got,” Fraxer said with a wince. Paula had taken over the treatment of his injuries and was dabbing his various cuts with a strong antiseptic solution.
Lyon picked up a thick book with a heavy cover from the couch partially covered with the ripped Indian blanket. “This is the second volume of Lee’s Lieutenants. Who’s the history buff?”
“Ow,” Chuck Fraxer said as Paula dabbed a particularly sensitive injury.
“Chuck’s a graduate history major,” Paula said with pride.
“Really,” Lyon answered. “What’s your area of expertise?”
“American history,” Fraxer mumbled as he grabbed Paula’s hand. “How about working to get that paint off my chest?”
“Any particular period?” Lyon asked.
“Civil War and Reconstruction,” Fraxer replied.
“Ever fire a musket?” Rocco asked in a casual tone.
“Once, at a Powder and Ball gun exhibition.”
“That’s damn interesting,” Rocco said. “I don’t suppose many people have done that these days?”
“Of course they have,” Fraxer replied. “There are lots of gun nuts who collect working muzzle loaders and fire them as a hobby.”
“Lots?” Rocco asked.
“Jeez, Chief, what is this? A class in logic? Okay, there are some people around that know how to fire those old weapons. What does that mean?”
“It means that if you’re over a hundred and thirty years old you’re in big trouble,” Bea said.
Since Congressman Roger Candlin had to run for office again in November, it was time for him to pretend to be an appealing personality. In his case, the most drastic change consisted of portraying himself as an ordinary worker. This ruse was not entirely successful, and he was as ill-suited for that role as aristocratic members of the ancien régime might have been.
Candlin was a grand manipulator in the heritage of the great puppeteers. His present control was primarily restricted to two Connecticut counties. Nevertheless, this power was sufficient for him to act behind the scenes on a state and, to a certain extent, national level.
The Pied Piper of Death Page 14
