The Pied Piper of Death

by Forrest, Richard;

  Bea Wentworth, as ingenuous as it was possible for a politician to be and still survive in elective office, did not care for Congressman Roger Candlin. Since he had long ago given up any attempt to control her activities, their mutual hostility was obvious but suppressed.

  They met by prearrangement at the gates of the Piper Corporation’s main plant during the 7 A.M. change of shift. Candlin wore a hard hat and casual clothes that made him seem more awkward than a dark Brooks Brothers suit, and carried a handful of leaflets. His brush with the unwashed would last only long enough for the mobile television crew to get their byte.

  Bea stood by the congressman’s side as he handed out leaflets and offered a limp hand to the emerging shift workers. It was his usual habit to mumble something completely immaterial to the passing workers. On one past occasion Bea had heard him repeat the phrase, “Down with Carthage,” several hundred times to batches of confused submarine welders. Their frowns had provided poor television coverage. A bright aide had suggested that he now use the phrase, “Hope you win the lottery this week.” This had produced far more telegenic results.

  “Why do you do this, Roger? These people all know how insincere you are.”

  “They’re setting up the cameras now, Beatrice. After that we can have some decent coffee,” he said without moving his lips.

  “Please warn me before they film since I don’t care to be seen at the gates of a munitions factory owned by a man I detest.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, lady,” he mumbled as the camera operator and producer moved into view.

  “Hold it like that, Congressman,” the mobile television producer said as Bea stepped aside. That command caused an immediate metamorphosis in the congressman that was just short of miraculous. His smile broadened. His handshake instantly changed from a fish-fin dip to a hearty grasp that would do a lumberjack proud. His lottery comments to the workers as they passed through his gauntlet seemed to carry a special significance, as if he had personally rigged the drawing on their behalf.

  “We got it, Congressman. Thank you, sir.” The television crew began to pack up their equipment. Candlin instantly dropped the remaining handouts to the ground, where they were promptly retrieved by an assistant. He turned and strode away from the gate, leaving several workers looking after him with their hands still extended.

  Bea followed him to an RV parked in the corner of the lot. The Winnebago had a huge banner across its side that read, RE-ELECT CONGRESSMAN ROGER CANDLIN. YOUR FRIEND AND MINE.

  Candlin shrugged Bea toward a built-in table. He stood in the kitchen area at the small sink and began to scrub his hands with bacterial soap. An intense young woman served coffee from a Silex.

  “God, I hate campaigning. I really ought to run for the Senate. At least then I’d only have to do it every six years.”

  “Why don’t you try for the nomination?” Bea asked. It had instantly occurred to her that, for all his faults, Roger would be the far lesser of two evils compared to Peyton Piper.

  “Because the nomination’s not going to fall that way this year. I am also not convinced that I am the right person to make that run now or in the future.”

  “And Peyton Piper is?”

  With a nearly imperceptible gesture, Candlin signaled to the woman with the coffee. She evidently received the command clearly as she immediately left the RV. “Peyton’s an ass.”

  “But a wealthy one?”

  “Of course. You know, Wentworth, you blow my tanks.”

  “Egalitarian today, aren’t you? That’s real assembly line talk.”

  “You are a hypocrite. We need the Piper plant here in our district. You know it. I know it, and God only knows the people who work here know it.”

  “Even if they make a product that maims people throughout the world?”

  “Even if they make botulism that is used anywhere but here. We need the wages. Wake up to economic reality.”

  “Sometimes I do wake up. It’s usually in the middle of the night. I sit bolt upright and think, now why in hell is the congressman backing me politically? What am I doing wrong?”

  “The more wrong you do the better I like it, Senator. Your state district covers a good chunk of my national district, Beatrice. You’re very controversial and often in the limelight. I try to be inconspicuous. Your liberal churning fogs over my backstage maneuvers. You take most of the heat and I am elected because of my incumbency. It’s a marvelous trade-off. Actually, our relationship is rather like that of those jungle parasites. The pairing of the ferocious predator with a nearly inconspicuous parasite living on his left ear who performs some small but necessary function.”

  Bea didn’t much care for his analogy since she had an idea which of the pair she was meant to represent. “That may be, Roger, since I’m not a big important fish. But if Peyton gets the senate seat he will be on the national scene.”

  “It keeps the factory here. His nomination also funds our soft money by at least two hundred thou, and it shuts him up.”

  “You know, Roger, there’s always the chance that he could be elected. Then what?”

  “I’ll handle him if he ever gets to the Hill. You know, his family and mine go way back. We’ve always been able to control the Pipers, whether they’re colonels or senators.”

  “How far back do your families go?”

  “The Civil War.”

  “Your people served with the old colonel in his regiment?”

  “Practically every eligible man in this county served with that drunken coot during the war. He raised the regiment.”

  “And everyone basked in his glory.”

  For one of the few times since she had known Roger Candlin, he actually smiled. It was a thin-lipped affair, but since it was neither a grimace of pain nor a preamble to a sarcastic remark, she could only construe that it was an actual smile. “Glory, you say? They gave the old bastard a medal and then shipped him off to run an ordnance depot for the rest of the war to keep him out of trouble.”

  “I understand that your family lost a great deal of money because of some machinations by one of the Piper colonels.”

  Candlin shrugged as if it were a question of little significance. “Over dinner one night at Bridgeway, the colonel confidentially told my grandfather that the company earnings were going to be way down that year. Those were the days when there wasn’t any law against insider trading. My family sold thousands of shares of Piper Corporation stock short. It was the colonel’s idea of a fearsome joke. The earnings figures were released and they were excellent. When my family came to replace the short sale they had to pay through the nose to buy stock from the colonel.”

  “Enough to start a generational family hate?” Bea asked.

  “That was over sixty years ago when the world was populated with a different cast of characters.”

  TWELVE

  “Are we going to observe Confederate artillery positions from our hot air balloon?” Bea asked. She leaned against the barn door with her hands folded across her chest as she watched Lyon spread the balloon’s empty envelope carefully across the lawn in preparation for inflation.

  Lyon finished his preliminary work and began the process of inserting hot air into the balloon. “Very funny.”

  “Recently we seem obsessed with the Civil War. Didn’t they use balloons for observation?”

  “Yes, but there are few gun emplacements around Murphysville, Connecticut, so I thought I’d just think.”

  “About minié balls?”

  “And of people who shoot them.”

  “You know, catching this guy is really simple. All we have to find is someone either one hundred thirty years old or with a weird picture in their attic.”

  “How about climbing inside the balloon and extending your arms so the bag fills faster?”

  “You’re out of your mind. The last time I did that, I ended up with the shortest haircut in New England. You know of course, that thing is really only half a balloon. It d
oes not have a cockpit.”

  “Gondola,” Lyon corrected.

  “Whatever. At least in a regular balloon I have the faint illusion that I’m standing on something substantial. In that thing there is nothing at all beneath you.”

  “The harness is safe enough.” Lyon stopped adjusting the flame on the propane burner of the Cloudhopper balloon and looked across the yard at his alarmed wife. She seemed more frightened now than when she faced down the pickup truck on the narrow logging road.

  He looked up at the thirty-foot-wide 21,000 cubic foot balloon. It was bobbing a few feet above his head, straining against its tether, which was fastened to an iron stake buried in the ground. “It’s perfectly safe. I’ve been hot-air ballooning for years and this is just a slightly different model. It’s a tad smaller than usual and with a harness instead of a gondola.”

  “Not being able to land properly in any balloon is bad enough, but that thing is dangerous. And if you’re so damned experienced, how about the time you landed on the golf course and those men tried to kill you with their putters?”

  “They were five irons actually. Those guys had a lot of money riding on that particular hole.”

  “Or the day you dropped in on a nudist camp?”

  “I’ve always liked volleyball.”

  “Can you be tempted not to go?”

  “Nope. Care to come with me? I can rig it for two.”

  “Everyone has a price.” Bea closed the distance between them and slipped her arms around his neck. Her foot kicked the rucksacklike frame containing the propane burner under a bush. “How about a matinee?”

  Lyon kissed her. The Cloudhopper began to dip toward the ground as its interior air cooled. “I’ll inflate the big balloon and we can go up together and do interesting things.”

  She broke away and retreated toward the house. “No way. I’m not into airborne performances.”

  He retrieved the propane burner and centered it under the balloon’s envelope. A ten-second flash of flame was sufficient to reheat the interior air and restore balance to the balloon. He slipped into the parachute-type harness and adjusted the rucksack containing the propane burner. After the mooring line was released, he pulled the short lanyard to give the burner another five seconds of fire. The last burn changed the balloon’s equilibrium and he was snatched aloft as the balloon bobbed quickly above the trees.

  The balloon rose slowly after its initial surge for altitude. He nursed it slightly higher and stabilized at eight hundred feet. A light wind from the northeast carried him away from Nutmeg Hill along the westerly bank of the river.

  Lyon hung suspended from the harness as the wind carried the balloon slowly forward. As the noiseless journey continued he began to feel the rush of freedom and release that balloon flight always created. He rocked gently in the harness and occasionally shattered the silence with the barking whoosh of an additional propane burn to maintain level flight.

  He remembered a free-fall parachute jump he made years ago. Before the canopy opened there were fleeting moments of this exhilaration. Balloon flight was an extension of such feelings. He often imagined that his view of the slowly moving panorama below was the same as that of a large bird whose sweeping glides banked at the whim of warm air currents.

  These trips were a time for reflection. The scenery of the flights was so far removed from ordinary surroundings that the mind seemed to view the world and its problems from a different perspective. It was a time when the subconscious could chew on a seemingly unsolvable problem like a silent terrier dog. If a solution or even the hint of an answer were reached, the thought might be fed to the conscious mind.

  He looked down with interest as wind currents carried him over Bridgeway. The balloon’s trajectory pushed him past the Piper Pie dominated by the tall monument. These were the graves whose silent headstones held the secrets of an anguished family sacrificing their youth to an early death. The firstborn in each generation was seemingly murdered by some ancient cabal.

  The balloon was nearly out of its hour-long supply of propane before the answer came. He knew what his dream of Paula in the minefield had been trying to tell him. She had called the name of Rebecca—the Piper woman in the 1930s who had mysteriously disappeared. Rebecca, the young mother who had so callously deserted her young baby. The young woman who had last been seen walking on the Piper Pie near the mausoleum.

  He had a good idea what had happened to the young mother; a certainty that she had met the same fate as other firstborns in the Piper clan.

  Lyon impatiently pulled the ripping panel line. This emergency cord released a large section of the balloon’s envelope and allowed large gulps of hot air to escape. The massive loss of air immediately changed the temperature of the balloon’s interior and caused the craft to begin a rapid descent. He was now committed to a landing pattern. He would be unable to make course changes or regain vertical control.

  Lyon estimated that if he continued on his present course he was going to land on the Murphysville town green. This seemed far preferable to snagging the steeple of the Congregational Church.

  He had vented the balloon too early!

  During his descent the wind had shifted toward the edge of the town green. This reversal changed his horizontal drift and swept him toward the buildings lining the green’s north border. He had planned a stepped approach, with a gradual loss of altitude, until he hovered over the lawn near the gazebo. At that point he intended to touch down gently for a stand-up landing. This was not to be. He would be lucky to survive.

  The wind carried him at treetop level toward the classical New England Congregational Church situated at the edge of the green. He frantically pulled the lanyard for a propane burn, but before the burner could heat air within the partly open balloon envelope the fuel was exhausted and the burner sputtered to a halt.

  When the sagging envelope cleared the pointed steeple he had renewed hopes of a safe but jarring landing in the empty parking lot behind the church. Then the suspension harness snagged on the steeple point. The abrupt halt spilled the remaining hot air from the bag and slammed him against the side of the building, where he hung against the belfry.

  He was never sure whether the cause was the shock of his body hitting the belfry or an irate custodian, but the church clarion began blaring a version of “Onward Christian Soldiers” from a gigantic speaker aimed directly at him.

  The church’s minister, working in his study in the rectory next door, looked up from his desk and gave a puzzled scowl at Lyon hanging from the steeple.

  “Call the Fire Department!” Lyon yelled loudly, half-deafened by Christian Soldiers.

  Within two minutes Lyon heard separate sets of approaching sirens and then the deep-throated whistle blast from the volunteer firehouse.

  A patrol car swerved to a stop in front of the church and Rocco catapulted from the driver’s seat and rushed toward the building with a bullhorn in his hand. “You know what this means, Wentworth?” Rocco Herbert’s voice echoed over the green. “The volunteer fire department is going to have to bring out the hook and ladder. They are going to be pissed.”

  It was another five minutes before the extension ladder slowly began to rise from its fire truck bed and swing toward the steeple.

  “Crimminy nicket, Wentworth,” Volunteer Fire Chief Terry Randall said as he hooked his safety harness to the rail. “You’ve got to stop this.” He perched near the top of the ladder as it hovered over the church. “We voted last year no more kittens. This year you head the list,” the volunteer fireman said as he maneuvered the ladder closer to Lyon. “You know, I got a guy waiting in my barber chair. When he finishes leafing through my Playboy he’s going to get restless. That’s when he starts thinkin’ about the new unisex shop on Essex Street with them young women stylists wearing them tight pants.”

  “Sorry about that, Chief.”

  “If I didn’t think so much of Senator Wentworth, you’d stay up here until they replaced you with the Star of Be
thlehem at Christmastime.”

  When Lyon was able to shift his weight to the ladder, he released the harness. The balloon envelope fell free and plunged into the parking lot. With Rocco’s help he rolled up the deflated balloon and stuffed it into the back of the patrol car. By the time the balloon was secure, the fire engine had pulled away.

  “I know where one of the missing bodies is,” Lyon said.

  “We’ll celebrate that fact at Sarge’s Bar as I write up your summons,” Rocco said.

  “Exhume whom!”

  Lyon’s prior assessments of Peyton Piper’s cool social aplomb were destroyed as the CEO of the Piper Corporation exploded in rage. His face reddened. His body shook. He seemed to have difficulty in holding a fork in his trembling hand.

  “We need you to make a formal request with my department,” Rocco said in an officious monotone as he looked past Peyton’s shoulder to the panoramic river valley outside the Piper dining room. “That will simplify the paperwork and allow us to proceed.”

  “You actually want to open my family crypt?” Peyton Piper asked incredulously.

  “They just want to peek a little, dear,” Katherine Piper said. She took a sip from her goblet of spiked orange juice. “The whole thing seems perfectly harmless to me. I doubt that Chief Herbert is stealing bodies for Yale Medical School.”

  Peyton glared across the table at his wife.

  Rabbit scowled at the whole proceeding as he cleared away the remains of the meal. He balanced a serving tray over his head with one hand as he pushed through the swinging door into the pantry. Rocco and Lyon stood awkwardly by the doorway to the large dining room. Lyon felt like a poacher brought before the country squire for punishment, rather than a classmate trying to solve a serious family problem. They were pointedly not invited to the table for coffee.

  “Why in God’s name would you want to desecrate a century-old grave?”

  “I think there’s an extra body buried in the crypt,” Lyon said.

  Piper pointed the tines of his fork at Lyon. “You know, Wentworth, the reason you were never a Thumper was because of this type of radical reasoning. What in the hell makes you believe there’s someone else in my relative’s grave? How could you know if they were? Finally, who the hell cares?”