The news of Uncle Raymond’s death was a surprise, but not unexpected.
“Ah, jeez, I really liked Uncle Raymond.”
“Me too,” echoed Kyle.
“I was just getting to really know him. Did you know that Uncle Raymond knew four languages besides English? Yeah, he could read, write, and speak German, Russian, Latin, and Hungarian—of all things. He just told me that last week. There was a lot to that old guy that I didn’t know.”
“I don’t think anybody really did,” remarked Kyle. “Mom always said that her brother was an enigma to everyone in the family, even to her.”
“And mother’s pastime was to figure everyone out and to learn what made them tick. Was it another stroke that did him in?”
“Badly put,” said Kyle. His voice began to quiver. “The cause of death appears to have been a stroke to the head with a blunt instrument.”
That was unexpected.
It took several seconds for me to digest it. I remember staring at Morgana when I heard the news. My mind raced from happy memories to imagined horrors.
“Uncle Raymond died?” Morgana asked innocently and waited for a response. But I didn’t have one. I was dumbstruck.
“Rich? Rich, are you there?” Kyle’s voice broke the spell of my silence.
“Kyle, are you saying that Uncle Raymond was murdered?”
“That is exactly what I’m saying, Rich. Uncle Raymond is lying on the kitchen floor face down with a cracked skull. He must have been hit from behind when he was getting something in the refrigerator.”
“How do you know he was getting something from the fridge?”
“Because the refrigerator’s freezer’s door was left open.”
“Do you want me to come over there?”
“I hoped that you would say that.” Kyle then lowered his voice. “There are some things that ought not to be said over the phone.”
That didn’t bode well, I thought.
“Okay, I’ll get dressed and drive to the house. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Dressed? Since when did you go to bed before ten?”
“Since Morgana and I planned a special evening for ourselves tonight,” I snapped.
“Oh? . . . Oh! . . . Well, then I hope that the two of you . . . ah, had a nice evening. I hope that I didn’t catch you and Morgana in the middle of anything.”
Considering the circumstances, I let his comment pass. “I’m getting dressed, and I’ll drive—”
“No need.”
“I can’t go to Uncle Raymond’s as I am,” I countered, having nothing on except a quilt.
“Well, yes, get into something appropriate, but no, you don’t have to drive.”
As if perfectly timed, the front doorbell rang.
“Who can that be?” asked Morgana.
“I don’t know. Go and see.”
“No,” She snapped, pulling her part of the quilt up to her chin. “I can’t go to the door like this.”
“Well, I’m not dressed at all,” I loudly whispered back.
“Rich . . . Rich!” yelled my brother through the phone.
“Sorry, Kyle, someone is at the front door.”
Morgana reached over and switched on the night light next to our bed.
“It’s Peterson,” replied Kyle.
“Who?”
“Deputy Peterson. I sent him to bring you here.”
“Hold on, Kyle.”
I handed the phone to Morgana and, clad only in moonlight, I warily walked to the window facing the street. Peeking through the side of the partially drawn curtain, I spotted the county sheriff’s patrol car in our driveway. And there, on our front walkway, staring straight up at me, was Deputy John Peterson dressed in his winter jacket and his beige, faux fur, trooper hat.
I poked my head out from behind the curtain and waved to the unexpected visitor.
“Sorry about your uncle, Dr. MacKenzie,” bellowed the young deputy whose breath formed a little cloud about his head.
“Thank you. I’ll be right down. Give me five minutes . . .”
Peterson cocked his head and peered up at me—he couldn’t hear me. From the side of the window, I awkwardly raised it a few inches open so the deputy could catch what I was saying. In the process, I jostled something that sent the window treatment crashing to the floor. With few choice words exploding from my lips, quickly reached for the fallen curtain. Protecting what modesty I had left, I shouted out some sort of appreciation for his condolences.
“The sheriff asked me to take you to your uncle’s house.”
“Yeah, I know. . . I’ll be right down. Give me five minutes.”
In short order, I was dressed and out the door. I had told Morgana not to wait up for me, but knowing her, I knew she would. I waved up to the bedroom window as I got into the patrol car and, within a blinking of an eye, we were on our way to Uncle Raymond’s. As we traveled along the lonely dark roads, lines from a Bobby Burn’s poem tumbled about in my head. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” Yeah, I thought to myself, the evening’s activities had definitely, “gang agley.”
#
CHAPTER 2
Neither Peterson nor I said anything during our ride. I didn’t feel like talking, and the usually loquacious deputy probably didn’t know what to say—perhaps for the first time in his life. I appreciated the silence. I wanted some quiet to collect my thoughts and prepare for the emotional maelstrom that would be waiting for me at Uncle Raymond’s.
My expectations were proven correct when our car came out through the other side of the infamous ‘Dead Man Curve’ on Kemper Road. A ferocious bout of anxiety leaped into my stomach. There, looming out of the darkness, stood Uncle Raymond’s house on a low hill—castle-like, solitary, besieged.
“This is going to be fun,” I muttered, longing to be back in bed with Morgana.
First responder vehicles had encircled Uncle’s home like ants around a piece of candy. Pulsating red, white, blue, and amber lights flashed grotesque shadows onto the three-story stone structure and its manicured lawn, over onto the nearby cut field, and into the wild woods beyond. The nocturnal display was both hypnotic and disturbing and set my mind to wander.
“Uncle Raymond would never have approved of all this commotion,” I said to myself about the man who cherished both his privacy and his unique home.
It then struck me that I never really thought of Uncle Raymond without thinking about this house of his. When I was a very young, my uncle had been, shall I say, an elusive figure, a mere rumor of a relative. He was always away and doing something or other—especially during times of family get-togethers. My first clear and detailed memory of Uncle Raymond was when he invited mother, Kyle, and myself to have Easter brunch at this house. I was maybe eleven years old, or so, at the time. I remembered that I was very excited to finally meet him. My mother, Uncle Raymond’s sister, must have sensed my anticipation. “He’s much like you, Richard, an oddball,” she cautioned. “He’s been all over the world, and he still doesn’t know which way is up.”
But it wasn’t his oddity that piqued my interest in him. No, it was the fact that he traveled the world.
I knew what Uncle Raymond looked like. I had seen photos of him that were taken at various exotic locations. Mother said that I met him several times when I was a baby, but I didn’t recall. And because of that first visit, I had come to a mistaken conclusion. I thought that my uncle had always lived in that Normanesque edifice that he called home.
It was some years later, at one of Uncle Raymond’s backyard Oktoberfests, that I off-handedly mentioned my erroneous assumption about my uncle’s residency to Mother.
“You really aren’t very astute,” she snapped. “Your uncle has had this place for a decade or so. He was still living at your grandparents’ house when your father and I conceived Kyle.” My father’s mentioning prompted my mother to take a large sip from her glass of Rhine Wine.
“Really?” I said, almost
daring to contradict mother’s reckoning of history. But I thought better of it, and I changed the subject. “Why is it, Mother, that I don’t recall seeing Uncle Raymond when I was very young?”
“He was never at home, and he almost never visited us at ours. He did show up with your grandparents at your baptism and at your first birthday—probably for the free meals and drinks. He was always away when we visited my parents. God only knows what he was doing, or where he was doing it. But, oddly enough, he was always curious about you. Even when he phoned to say he wasn’t going to be home for our visits, he asked about you.” Mother paused for a second and looked into space. “It’s funny. He never asked about me or Kyle.”
Mother tapped her finger on her glass, lost in thought. “Yes, he was always away, your Uncle Raymond, even for the holidays . . . Mom and Dad never knew where he was . . . Well, that was what they always told me, anyway.”
Mother paused and gazed down into her glass. “Oddly, Raymond’s absence never really bothered your grandparents.” She sighed and finished her wine with a grand gesture.
“In any case, the wine is good,” I joked, secretly hoping that she wouldn’t have anymore.
“It should be; I gave him a case for the party. I paid $30 a bottle.” Mother soon had one of her enigmatic faces as she waved her empty glass at me as if it were a conductor’s baton. “Your Uncle acquired this house when you were in the fifth or sixth grade . . . or something. Why he bought this place, I’ll never understand.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s a nice house, an extremely nice house if you are a fan of horror movies. Much too grand for your uncle if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t then, but I do now.
“It must have cost him a small fortune. Why the money alone to heat this place must give him nightmares. He is so damn . . . eh, frugal. Yes, this house is quite a mystery.” Then Mother looked at me squarely in the eyes. “And you know, Richard, how much I detest mysteries.”
That I did. Mother hated mysteries, secrets, or being out of the loop. Planning birthday surprises for her was impossible; so was keeping my romantic life private.
After procuring another glass of wine, my mother then proceeded to tell me that Uncle Raymond had never explained to her satisfaction how he could manage this house of his on his civil service salary.
Mother’s lack of knowledge about her younger brother’s finances and the details concerning his acquisition of the house really got under her skin. She was always feeling that she was being shortchanged by the world-at-large and by the family in particular. This character flaw had led my mother to make many outlandish speculations about her brother’s monetary situation—which I was blessed to hear, continually, until she died.
But contrary to Mother’s opinion, when my grandparents relocated to Uncle Raymond’s new residence, they gave their house—title and all—to Mother. She was recently divorced from my father, and my grandparents knew she needed help. In short, Mother was not shortchanged by the family.
Despite Uncle Raymond’s mysterious financial status and his penny-pinching reputation, he was generous enough to have my grandparents move in with him. By that time, both of his parents were well on in years and not in the best of health. They eagerly accepted Uncle’s invitation—so I was told—to take up residence in his great stone house. The three of them basically kept the same living arrangements as they had previously at my grandparents’ house. That is to say, my grandparents were at home and, for the most part, my uncle wasn’t.
From what I could see, my grandparents lived happily at Uncle Raymond’s until the two old birds died. Grandpa Richard went first. He died quietly in his bed, watching re-runs of Playboy After Dark on TV. Two months later, Grandma Annie left us. She died in the parlor while reading Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.
Soon after my grandparents’ departure, Uncle Raymond’s lifestyle changed. He retired. Relieved from work’s responsibilities and his parents’ presence, he was found more at home than away. He began throwing parties, formal dinners, and barbecues at his place. These get-togethers were often elaborate and thematic affairs, and at the same time, they reflected Uncle Raymond’s thriftiness.
The guests brought the consumables—appetizers, food and drinks, paper plates and cups, napkins, and disposable cutlery. Uncle’s contribution was to provide a spacious and picturesque venue. His friends seemed very grateful that Uncle opened up his grand home to them and made a point of telling me so. All his invitees seemed to be happy to attend and to supply the needed provisions. And I never heard a word of complaint from anyone about the party arrangements—except for Mother.
And it was customary at these affairs for Uncle Raymond, who had a gift for storytelling, to weave tales about the interesting people he met and the exciting places he had been. The stories were always engaging, often funny, and some, I was sure, were even true. But he got particular enjoyment in recounting the local lore about his house. He would eagerly inform his guests—ad nauseam for those unfortunates who paid him multiple visits over the years—that his Norman-style home served as the gatehouse to a grand estate of a long-forgotten robber baron of the 1800s. When the childless capitalist died, the estate was purchased by an Old World bootlegger soon after the First World War.
I remember the glimmer of delight in my uncle’s eyes when he told the tale about the old manor house’s destruction. “It caught fire,” he would say, “during a wild New Year’s Eve party. A solid silver candelabra somehow got knocked over, setting a large punch bowl of prohibition hooch ablaze. In desperation to save the hooch, the drunken merrymakers tried to put out the flames, but in their inebriated state, they just made matters worse. Flames quickly spread from the table in the great hall to the rest of the house. The fire’s glow in the sky, people said, could be seen as far away as Bennington County.”
Fortunately, as the story goes, no lives were lost in the calamity while the mansion burned to its foundations. Only the estate’s gatehouse, Uncle Raymond’s home, survived the New Year Eve’s conflagration, a mere echo of the magnificence that once was.
Over the years, the mansion’s charred ruins became enmeshed with the woodsy landscape environs and turned into a de facto habitat for various forest creatures. Therefore, it followed that the old ruins became a place of great interest for Uncle Raymond, who had a genuine affection for animals.
Using his second-hand binoculars, my uncle enjoyed observing out his second-floor bedroom window the sylvan activities amid the green covered rubble as he convalesced. Why just the other day, as he spied on some birds pecking at some trees, he said to me, “Richard, there is a sublime majesty in nature. Just take a look down at the old ruins.”
I did, but I wasn’t impressed—birds and trees, so what.
His hand trembled as he pointed out through the window to the distant scene below. “You’d be surprised what goes on down there. Birds, squirrels, and raccoons make their homes in the trees and undergrowth. Little creatures make their nests in hidden nooks and crannies. Oh, yes, there are other creatures, too, who visit,” he said with a sparkle of delight in his tired eyes, “searching for food and shelter from our encroaching civilization . . . It’s all part of nature’s plan, you know. She’s a wise old one, Mother Nature is. She doesn’t waste a thing. She’s always doing something.”
I took my uncle’s observations and comments for what they were, an old man’s attempt to make some sense of the world that he would soon be leaving. Then for some unknown reason, we slipped into a discussion about Shakespeare’s plays—in particular, Henry IV, Part 1. After all the years that I knew him, I never knew that we shared an intense interest in the play, and, in particular, in one of the characters, Henry Percy. The drama had been the subject of a paper that I had written years ago in grad school—I almost remember every word of it today. In fact, the play was a college favorite of Uncle Raymond’s. He offered some unique and personal insights into the play’s leading characters and their mot
ivations. “Living a long life—as I have,” he said, “wisdom grows in one’s soul if the soil is fertile. To figure out why a person does something lets you truly understand that person. There is always more to Shakespeare’s characters than first meets the eyes of the casual observer.”
And I agreed.
Sadly, that was the last real conversation that I had with Uncle Raymond. I felt a little guilty in the car that his words had already become a half-forgotten memory.
As our patrol car turned onto the long gravel driveway, I reminisced about those days of my childhood when mother dragged Kyle and me here for those obligatory family visitations. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Uncle Raymond, I did. But mother, nine times out of ten, would schedule our pilgrimages to Uncle Raymond’s on a Sunday, immediately after church. The result was that my brother and I were always dressed in our good clothes—an attire that imposed severe restrictions.
In no uncertain terms, Mother had decreed that while we were at Uncle Raymond’s, Kyle and I were forbidden to roughhouse, run around, or touch anything dirty—including each other. “Remember, your wardrobe is sacrosanct; you and your brother aren’t.”
To enforce her edict, she reminded us of the bath brush—her go-to behavioral modification tool. Mother would brandish that back-scrubber like a gladiator would wield a Roman short sword. And I’m sure that I still bear some of those behavioral modifications somewhere deep in my psyche to this very day. But, for the record, however, the bath brush was something that Kyle only knew by its reputation, and not—to my knowledge—by personal experience.
So while we were at Uncle Raymond’s, my brother and I abandoned our rough and tumble cowboy games and assumed the roles of The Courtly Knights of Starkshire County. My uncle’s home became our castle—our Fortress Indomitable. Armed with a badminton racket, as my broadsword, and imaginary crossbows, Kyle and I went about the house and grounds looking for adventure. With gentlemanly deportment—that is to say with no unruly or sweat-inducing activity—we defeated fire-breathing dragons, hosts of invading armies, and several evil wizards from the stone porch, which wraps itself around a good third of the house. Our battles always ended in our favor, though our victory celebrations were subdued—so ordered by our Queen Mother.
The Hotspur Affair: A Richard & Morgana MacKenzie Mystery Page 2
