The Hotspur Affair: A Richard & Morgana MacKenzie Mystery

by Jack Flanagan

  “What in the world happened here?” Kyle exclaimed.

  “Don’t know,” answered Cobourne. “I arrived here before Deputy Peterson did. I didn’t have the key for the place, but I knew that Peterson had one. So, I fetched some donuts and coffee for us and met up with him here just as he arrived.”

  Peterson joined in. “When Cobourne returned, the two of us entered the residence together and scouted the place. All the other rooms were just the way they were last night . . . except for this one. As soon as we got in this room and saw the mess, I called you, Sheriff.”

  “Well, somebody was looking for something,” I loudly concluded.

  Kyle gingerly walked over the debris-covered floor to the open the Do Some Donuts box on my uncle’s desk and helped himself to a cinnamon-sugared delight. “Well,” said my brother waving his treat to underscore his thoughts, “as I see it, several questions need to be answered. How did the intruder or intruders get in; what was the object of their search; did they find what they were looking for, who are these ransacking vandals, and are they somehow linked to Uncle Raymond’s death? And is there more coffee?”

  “There’s a twelve-cup thermal box of coffee on the kitchen table, but there aren’t any more plastic cups,” answered Cobourne.

  “Not to worry, I know where my Uncle Raymond kept his coffee mugs . . . Father Joe, Rich, coffee?”

  Joe and I declined the offer.

  As Kyle waddled off to get his free cup of java, I continued to survey the damage and found the scene was quite curious. Only the low shelves were disturbed and/or emptied. Not a single unlocked drawer from the desk or cabinet escaped from being pulled out and tossed with its contents spilling onto the ground. There were newly made deep scratches on the sides of the desk and tears on the throw rug in front of it.

  In short, the sight was unsettling. I used to play with my plastic army men in this oak-paneled library, and now this room had become another type of battlefield. But who was the enemy? What was being sought? And why were the items on the high shelves of the built-in bookcases left unscathed? Couldn’t the unknown object of interest be hiding up there? Why not look?

  I then began thinking about a clean-up protocol. I clearly saw that the job would require two things that I wasn’t inclined to give at that moment—time and effort. My mind went back to the new puzzle facing us.

  “Well, guys,” I asked, “how did the intruder or intruders get into the house?”

  “Funny that you should ask that,” answered Peterson, who was keeping several paces behind me as I cautiously slid the books and papers strewn on the floor with my foot and idly explored what was under them. “While Cobourne and I were waiting for the sheriff, we looked for a point of entry.” Peterson became silent.

  “And,” blatantly asked Joe looking up from an old photo that Uncle Raymond had on his desk.

  “We couldn’t find one,” said Cobourne between bites of his donut.

  “Well, maybe the person had a key?” I asked.

  “Your uncle had the house wired for an alarm system,” said the state trooper. “When the investigation teams left the house last night, they arranged it so that the alarm would automatically go off whether someone used a key or not to gain access to the premises.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, maybe more snarly than I should have. “That would have been interesting if I came over by myself and tried to enter my own uncle’s house. Somebody should have told me about the alarm system being reset.”

  “I’m sorry that you weren’t informed,” said Peterson apologetically, “but I thought that the sheriff would have told you about . . .”

  I slowly shook my head to dispel Peterson’s silly misconception.

  “Oh, well, the sheriff has his own way of doing things,” said Peterson.

  “He certainly does. Well then . . . ah, the investigating team last night must have rummaged through the library—”

  “—I was here in the library with the last team to leave,” interrupted Cobourne. “When we the locked up the house for the night, your uncle’s library was okay.”

  “Maybe the alarm went off, and nobody heard it?” added Joe.

  “The alarm goes off here and at the alarm /security center. The alarm here sounds like a banshee,” said Peterson. “You can hear it for half a mile or so. The two of us tested it this morning; it’s loud. Yet, no one reported an alarm going off before we arrived this morning. Plus, whenever the alarm is tripped, the time and the house address are immediately and automatically logged and recorded at the center. I checked. The alarm didn’t go off until I tripped it using the front door key earlier today.”

  “There is no way to override the alarm?” I asked.

  “No, not the way it is set up now. One would really have to do some workarounds. So, it is very unlikely.”

  “Whose great idea was it to have this alarm arrangement?”

  “It was Detective Thomas’ idea,” answered the trooper.

  In retrospect, it really was a good idea. The problem was that it didn’t work.

  “Which one of you two made a mess of the utility closet by the kitchen, or who knows who did,” asked Kyle, appearing in the library doorway and holding a large mug that was boldly inscribed—The World’s Greatest Assistant. The fact that the last six letters of the mug’s last word were covered by Kyle’s finger gave me a needed chuckle.

  “I haven’t been in the kitchen closet today,” declared Peterson. “Have you?” asked the deputy of Trooper Cobourne.

  “No.”

  “Really? . . . Hum, well there is a mess in the closet that wasn’t there last night,” said Kyle.

  “Kyle, what made you go into the closet in the first place?” I asked.

  My brother held up his mug like it were a trophy. “Uncle Raymond kept a collection of novelty mugs and glasses on the shelf in the back of the utility closet. I gave him this mug for Christmas when I was ten years old . . . Anyway, the things in the closet have been knocked about. Most of Uncle Raymond’s keepsakes on the back shelf are now in pieces on the floor.”

  “Nothing was out of place when we investigated last night,” Cobourne replied.

  “But none of you thought to look inside the closet this morning?” asked Kyle.

  Their silence spoke volumes.

  Though Kyle’s inquiry questioned the young officers’ lack of curiosity, mine was piqued. With a wave of the hand, I led our whole entourage back to the kitchen closet, which was not really a closet, but, in fact, a pantry.

  The closet was conveniently located just feet out from the kitchen, not far from the sink. Because my Uncle Raymond didn’t cook and never needed to stock many can-goods and such, he relegated the pantry to be the house catch-all storage area. It was at least seven feet high and both eight feet deep and wide. It was lined with sturdy, well-crafted, reinforced oak shelves and cabinets on three sides.

  Besides a few cans of soups and a few dry goods, the shelves were jammed packed with boxes, plates, glasses, cleaning supplies, and other things that would be unsightly if left out in the common living area. Indeed, all the shelves were filled to capacity except for one section in the back wall. There, amid a line of brass hooks that held brooms, mops, dusters, and such, was a single shelf containing what remained of a collection of souvenir mugs and glasses.

  Only one light bulb of three in the closet’s ceiling fixture was working, and it automatically went on when I opened the pantry door.

  “It sure is dark in here and chilly,” quipped Kyle.

  “You can change the bulbs anytime you want,” I growled. “And by the way, it’s always chilly in here. Room was used in the olden days to kept potatoes and root veggies.”

  Feeling an unfamiliar crunching underfoot, I warned, “Be careful where you step, guys.”

  Shards of glass and broken ceramic lay on the floor, but what struck me, however, were the pantry’s back shelves. “This doesn’t seem quite right,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “No, fooli
ng, Einstein,” jibed, Kyle who unexpectedly became suddenly solemn. He was looking down at his feet, “The barbarian even broke the ashtray that I made for Uncle Raymond when I was in second grade.” My brother groaned, retrieving from the floor two pieces of what was a large, purple-painted clamshell. “ I swear to you, Rich, this will not be ignored.”

  “Don’t fret about it. Uncle Raymond didn’t smoke, and he isn’t going to take it up now.”

  “I know, but—”

  “—He kept your ashtray as long as he lived because you made it. And you were special to him. If that weren’t true, he would have thrown the damn thing out long ago, just like we will have to when it is time to clean out his house.”

  “You know exactly what to say to make someone feel better.”

  I didn’t know if Kyle was sarcastic or not. I was too absorbed in looking at all the pantry shelves and the debris field. “Something is not right,” I said again in the hope of getting feedback.

  “Yeah,” said Kyle, “we maybe shouldn’t have touched anything. This is a crime scene.”

  I gave my brother a cold hard stare, “It’s a little late to remind us all of that, don’t you think.”

  “How do you mean, ‘not right,’” asked Joe?

  “I rarely came in here —maybe to get a broom or a mop. So I can’t say what exactly was here on these shelves or not. But it looks to me that the things that were dislodged and broken on the floor came mostly from the back wall shelf unit.” I went closer to the shelf in question; I then looked around at the adjacent walls. “Nothing on the side shelves appears to have been moved or dislodged or even missing as far as I can tell. In fact, if you look near the back shelf, toward our left, there are very few fragments of broken bric-a-brac on the floor, but from the middle and the right side of the shelving, there is a significant amount of debris.”

  “I see,” said Joe as he crouched low to get a closer look. “The broken items had obviously come from the left side of the shelf where there are empty spaces. But they are not on the floor near where they were obviously stored but over on the right. How curiously strange.”

  Joe stood up and checked his palms for stray glass fragments in his palms.

  “What’s the big deal?” barked Kyle, who was having a difficult time moving about in the confines of the pantry/closet with four people in it. “The barbarian who ransacked the place, searching for whatever he was searching for, grabbed things from the left side of the shelf and dropped them to the ground on his right.”

  “Get real, Kyle. Don’t you think it’s odd that our intruder was so selective in what he chose and where he tossed things about?”

  “Huh?”

  “If you were an intruder and were searching for something in here, why toss a shell ashtray and several shot glasses from the last New York World’s Fair on the floor?” I then pointed to a ten-inch tall ceramic statuette on the center middle back shelf, “And leave, the statue of the Manneken Pis where it is, undisturbed? That big thing could hide something behind it or in it for that matter.”

  Kyle became quiet. His forehead wrinkled, and one of his eyebrows rose; he was more than listening. He was thinking.

  “If you were looking or searching for something,” I continued, “in this closet with limited time and with the fear of discovery, wouldn’t you just sweep all the shelves clean and not be so selective?”

  “Probably,” replied my brother. “But how do you explain this mess?”

  “It was an accident,” answered Peterson behind me. The deputy went by Joe and squeezed past Kyle to where I was standing.

  “An accident?” said Kyle. “What do you mean by ‘accident’?”

  Finally making it to my side, Peterson said, “See these metal things,” the deputy poked at one of the brass block-like things that were strategically placed at the ends of all shelves in the room. “Maybe they are not just decorative.”

  “No fooling,” snapped Kyle angrily. “They obviously serve as braces to hold the shelves up.”

  “Maybe,” said Peterson, whose nose by this time was almost touching one of the metal braces. “But this one is also some kind of a hinge from what I can see.”

  “Hinge?” I said, running the idea through my mind.

  “I didn’t notice at first,” continued Peterson, “but when you were talking about the pattern of broken stuff on the floor, I asked myself what could make that pattern? . . . Maybe the sweep of an opening door?”

  “A door?” I looked again at the mess on the floor and then at the so-called hinge. “Yeah, a door.’

  “Are you really serious?” asked Kyle. “The back shelf is a door?”

  “And when the door opened, things on the shelves fell off and broke,” replied Peterson, a little sheepishly.

  “A door?” repeated Kyle. “A door to where?”

  The deputy remained silent with downcast eyes.

  “Do you have any idea what is on the other side of these shelves?” grumbled Kyle.

  “No, sheriff,” said Peterson, flatly.

  “A stone wall, Peterson, two feet thick,” Kyle shot back.

  “Kyle,” I said calmly, as I continued to mull over Peterson’s theory, “do you think there is any space between the backside of the outside wall and the rear of this shelf? And if so, how much?”

  “I don’t know, Rich, an inch at most.”

  “Hey, guys,” piped up Joe, “this room isn’t square.” I watched my friend getting up again from a crouching position while holding several credit cards in his hand. “And not only is the wall at the pantry entrance is wider from side to side than the back shelf-wall by a half foot or so, but the floorboards get narrower toward the rear of the pantry. In my humble opinion, this room gives the illusion that it is deeper than it really is.”

  Both Peterson’s and Joe’s observations added fuel to my own speculations. I again looked carefully at the deputy’s so-called hinge. “Trooper Cobourne,” I asked, “do you have, by any chance, a long tape measure?”

  “I do in the patrol car,” wearily answered the state trooper.

  “Would you mind getting it, please?”

  Cobourne and Peterson looked at each other and then to my brother for guidance.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Jimmy,” said Kyle, “it could be helpful.”

  Cobourne left without question, and when he was out of sight, Kyle asked, “Rich, do you really think that there might be some type of a door in the shelf?”

  “I don’t know. At this point, anything to do with Uncle Raymond wouldn’t surprise me. But before we go around poking about and maybe unwittingly damage something in the process, let’s see if there is space enough behind the pantry wall for a door to lead to somewhere. As you have said, Uncle Raymond’s house is a crime scene. We don’t want disturbed things more than we have to.”

  Kyle agreed.

  And so, with the help of Cobourne’s tape measure, our group, with our limited math skills, figured that there was substantial space between the back wall of the rear shelf in the pantry the exterior wall directly behind it.

  “At least four and a half feet!” Kyle said with some disbelief at our joint conclusion. “Is that possible?”

  “I calculate the space is closer to five feet,” said Peterson as he put away his smartphone.

  “That is one huge gap,” I said, being impressed by the deception. “I never suspected it at all.”

  “I think that was the idea,” said Joe stroking his chin as if he were smoothing an invisible beard.

  “Well,” said Kyle, “I suppose that the next thing to do then is to see if there is a door of some sort that leads to the space behind the shelf wall.”

  Peterson happily provided us all with latex gloves which he had in his car. In fact, he had ten boxes of these multi-purpose gloves, with each box containing a hundred pairs. Taking advantage of the Sheriff’s department’s discount, the deputy had purchased a slew of gloves, out of his own pocket, for his fellow members of The Molly Stark His
torical Civil War Re-enactors Association of South Central Vermont. The gloves were for his friends who would be using them when cleaning their antique weapons for the association’s Grand Review—a local re-enactor event scheduled for the upcoming Saturday.

  With latex-covered hands, the six of us carefully searched and felt about the pantry for some kind of lock or latch that would indicate that there actually was another door or a hidden compartment. And it so happened that Joe found our prize by depressing a panel board which was located at the back of the waist-high self. With a loud metallic click and surprisingly little effort, the rear shelf unit’s left side began to pivot slowly into the pantry on its own accord.

  “Nice going, Padré,” exclaimed Trooper Cobourne.

  “Joe is just showing off,” I said. “Jesuits think they know everything.”

  “That is not true, and you know it,” countered Joe with a grin. “We only know what is worth knowing; the rest we look up.”

  “Oh, boys,” interrupted Kyle, “shall we see what is behind the door.” Kyle struggled to maneuver himself around us to the newly discovered portal much in the manner as he would belly up to a urinal in a crowded men’s room. Pushing the door wide open, my brother aimed his flashlight into the void. “Ayup, a very small room is what we have here.”

  He slowly bobbed his head up and down and peered into the darkness. “There is nothing in there except some metal stairs. Where they go down to, I haven’t a clue. And there is an odd metal plate type thing on the floor.” Kyle cautiously pressed down on it with his right foot, and the shelf-door began to close. “Hey, prop the door open,” ordered Kyle as he put his foot again on the metal trigger plate.

  Though the door stopped moving, Peterson and Joe held the door to be sure it stayed open. Cobourne provided us with a cookbook to serve as a door jam.

  “Well, are we going to stay here all day?” I said impatiently, “Let’s move along, Kyle. Let’s see where the stairs lead.”

  Wanting to see the room for myself, I made my way to its entrance. My brother sucked in his gut, and I squeezed my head past him. I looked into the room. I appraised our discovery to be a concrete chamber about five feet deep, six feet long, and seven feet high. The odd thing was that there weren’t layers of dust and nets of cobwebs—something that would be expected to be found in secret hideaways.