Now the sheriff, no matter what else he is, or has been called, is at heart a man of action. Having already been put on his guard with respect to the possibly criminal nature of the mysterious stranger’s activities, and seeing what looked like the perfect opportunity to strike a preemptive blow against the counterfeiting operation, it seemed only natural that he should surrender to his natural proclivities and attempt to follow the man back to his base of operations. Which, At least to some degree, accounts for why it was that on that fateful afternoon when the town of Crenshaw burned to the ground the sheriff of Crenshaw found himself, of all things, conducting surveillance on the beautiful old Victorian mansion that belonged to none other than the love of his life for these past sixty-some years, Miss Petula Clairborne.
Of course, the real key to understanding the utter chaos that ensued lies in the realization that, in spite of his profound dedication to the enforcement of law and order and his fifty-odd years of loyal service as an officer of the court, the sheriff was not about to let something as insignificant as his inability to secure a search warrant stand in his way. Not of his catching the counterfeiters, of course, though that was how he was later to justify his actions. For them undoubtedly he would have waited. After all, it would only have been a matter of another day or two before the circuit judge finally made his way to Crenshaw and the warrant could have been obtained.
But if it wasn’t for fear of losing the opportunity to capture the counterfeiter, you might well ask, what then was the source of this great urgency that drove him? It was, of course, nothing less than the opportunity of obtaining some especially succulent bit of goods on Miss Petula. For such a plum, there can be little question, an illegal search would have seemed trivial to the sheriff. In the past, as is well known among Crenshaw’s insiders, bigger obstacles than that have failed to stop the man. As they no doubt will in the future, too.
So it was that, when Martin Withers and his partner, a squirrelly little twice-convicted con artist by the name of Donald Jeffries, left the Clairborne mansion shortly after four o’clock that afternoon, the sheriff quickly availed himself of the opportunity. Using the spare key he just happened to know Miss Petula kept hidden under the gorgeous, hydrangea-filled ceramic planter standing next to the front door and totally unconcerned with the finer technicalities regarding the legality of his actions, he entered the mansion for a quick look about.
Now, at this particular point in the story it might be helpful if you knew just a little more about the layout of the town of Crenshaw. Comprising a population that for most of the past century has generally hovered right around the eight hundred mark, the town is laid out pretty much in the shape of a giant egg, with the longer axis running from the northwest to the southeast. For the most part the boundaries fall along Highway 17 on the northern and eastern sides, and along the dry bed of Stimson’s Creek on the southern and western sides.
Vernon’s Diner, where the saga began, is situated on the west side of Highway 17, at a point just south of where the highway ceases to run northward and executes a sharp bend to the west. Miss Petula’s mansion, on the other hand, is on the south side of the highway on the other side of the bend, where the highway has taken on a course pretty much due west. Which means that, though the hilly, heavily forested terrain prevents the one’s being seen from the other, the mansion and the diner are actually on the same side of the highway, roughly three-quarters of a mile apart.
The sheriff’s office, which adjoins the front of the county jail, is situated in the south end of an old brick building located directly across the highway from Vernon’s Diner, which displaces it sufficiently to clear the intervening obstacles and put it on a direct line of sight with the Clairborne mansion. Seeing one from the other requires only that one look out the window, an interesting feature that in the past, rumor has it, the sheriff and Miss Petula have frequently put to good use.
The good news, therefore, was that the sheriff was able to conduct his stakeout from the privacy and comfort of his own office. Which, for a man of seventy-three years who was suffering from yet another flareup of the gout, was not a trivial consideration. The bad news, however, was that the post office, which was where Withers and his partner were headed when they left the mansion that afternoon, occupies the north half of the same building that houses the jail and the sheriff’s office. Withers and Jeffries had set out by car on a round-trip journey that was no more than about a mile and a half long.
As fate would have it, therefore, the sheriff arrived at the mansion roughly the same time Withers and Jeffries entered the post office. Consequently, he had not much more than begun his survey of the dozen or so rooms that composed the ground floor of the mansion when the nefarious duo, having completed their short journey to the post office, unexpectedly returned. And when Withers, becoming suspicious on finding the front door unlocked, dispatched his partner around the house to cover the back door, the sheriff was, for all practical purposes, trapped inside.
Instantly recognizing his predicament, and wisely choosing discretion as the better, really the only, part of valor, the sheriff beat a hasty, and in retrospect perhaps ill-considered, retreat down the stairway to the darker recesses of the basement. From which, of course, the only avenue of escape was the very stair down which he had just so hastily, and now he could see so foolishly, descended. Withers, therefore, on meeting up with his empty-handed partner in the center of the house and reaching the conclusion that the intruder must therefore no longer be on the first floor, had only to set his foot on the uppermost step of the basement stair to effectively cut the sheriff off.
It was, as everyone around these parts already knows, at this fateful moment that, on hearing the men coming down the stairs and realizing that he had no way out, the sheriff made the crucial decision to seek refuge behind the huge and sprawling nineteenth century furnace that covered at least a quarter of the basement. What is less well known, you might be interested to learn, is that in the process of crawling through the narrow passageway between the furnace and the wall, the frightened and by now almost breathless, slightly claustrophobic sheriff somehow managed in his haste to lose his grip on his flashlight, allowing it to slip free and fall onto the hard cement floor a short way behind him. Unfortunately, it failed to break when it landed and instead simply lay there shining, like a beacon marking the way into the harbor of his refuge.
Finding he could not retrieve the flashlight from his current position, the sheriff compounded his earlier error by attempting to crawl backward the requisite distance so as to bring it within the reach of his backstretched arm. In the process, however, he caught the pocket of his trousers on the valve set under the rusty old pipe that carried fuel oil to the furnace’s reservoir from the tank in the next room. Or would have, had Miss Petula not had the foresight to drain the tank before departing on her vacation.
Having no way of knowing on what it was that he had snagged himself, and with his mental functioning perhaps understandably impaired by his mounting sense of urgency, the sheriff chose to force the issue. That is to say, to barge recklessly ahead, or rather behind, without first disentangling himself from the snag. It was a strategy that had disastrous consequences.
Unfortunately, you see, in its current state of advanced decay the pipe to which the valve was attached was somewhat weaker than was the coarse fabric of the sheriff’s trousers. Therefore, the pipe, which had not been drained along with the tank, was the first to give way, and the rather substantial quantity of fuel oil that still remained within it began to pour out.