Feeling the cold, wet fluid rushing onto his flank and identifying the highly combustible fuel from its distinctive odor, the sheriff quite understandably panicked. His pursuers suddenly completely forgotten, the sheriff let loose with a piercing, high-pitched yelp that left little doubt as to his whereabouts. He then began to wriggle his behind frantically while pushing himself with all his might backwards toward the opening through which he had entered, managing somehow to make good progress but scraping the side of his gun against the wall just before he emerged, knocking it from its holster.
Naturally, given the general lines along which the events of the day had been unfolding, when it landed, the gun discharged. And when the gun discharged, the blast ignited a tendril of fuel oil that was slowly trickling its way across the basement floor, flowing roughly along the very same path the sheriff had chosen to follow.
Not certain whether he’d been shot, only certain that if he didn’t get out in a hurry it wouldn’t matter whether he’d been shot, the sheriff renewed his already violent efforts to free himself from the narrow confines of what he believed was quickly becoming a deathtrap. Finally reaching a point at which there was room to rise, he climbed to his feet, wheeled wildly about, and lunged for the relative, albeit short-term, safety of the open territory in the middle of the basement, in the process banging his head against one of the many foot-thick pipes sprouting from the furnace.
With Withers and Jeffries standing by, watching his antics in open-mouthed astonishment, Sheriff Duncan emerged at a dead run from behind the furnace. Blinded as much by the blood that was pouring from a gash he had opened up in his forehead as by the intensely bright light coming from their hurricane lantern, he careened from one obstacle to the next, bouncing his way across the basement. Navigating from memory alone, as it were, yet always traveling in the general direction of the foot of the stairwell. And he almost made it.
In all likelihood would have made it had his mad dash for freedom not been foiled along the way. Tripped up by a misplaced roll of carpet remnant that had been left over from Miss Petula’s renovation project last spring, stumbling ahead a few more steps under the momentum he’d built up, traveling on a course tangential to the original, he fell headlong through the open doorway that led into the smaller room in the back of the basement that housed the fuel oil tank.
It was a relatively low-slung open doorway, unfortunately. Striking his head on the top of the doorway frame as he passed through and knocking himself unconscious in the process, he pitched forward into the room beyond. Where he first knocked over, then landed smack on top of, a small folding chair set up in the middle of the floor. A chair that at the time contained the bound and gagged, and rather startled, Miss Virginia Watson, lately of Kansas City.
Miss Watson, having been whisked without benefit of explanation from the sidewalk in front of her college dormitory back in Kansas City late one night of the previous week, had in the intervening days had little opportunity to orient herself to her new circumstances, much less to acquaint herself with the details of the case. Under the circumstances, then, I’m certain she can be forgiven if she quite naturally jumped to the same conclusion anyone else in her position would. Believing that she was experiencing the preliminary stages of a violent sexual assault, and discovering that her fall had freed her legs from their bonds, she immediately began to rain downward, or rather upward, upon the limp and unconscious body of the sheriff a veritable storm of swift and vicious kicks.
It was at this point that Withers and Jeffries, overcoming their initial shock at the sudden, not to mention bizarre, turn of events, and having a clear view of the rapidly spreading fire around the base of the furnace, decided that it was in their best interests to depart. And in what was probably the most curious part of the whole affair, they rushed headlong up the stairs to the ground floor and across the family room on their way to the back door. Unbeknownst to them, however, said family room happened to be situated directly above the furnace, which had also not been drained by Miss Petula and which chose that very instant to detonate.
Against all odds, neither member of the notorious gang of two was killed, or even seriously injured, by the violent explosion. However, they did wind up unconscious out on the front lawn, buried beneath a rather substantial pile of rubble and debris. When the volunteer fire department, arriving on the premises a short time later, finally succeeded in freeing them, they were both still too stunned and disoriented to provide any kind of coherent explanation for how they had ended up where they were. Shortly thereafter they were transported to a medical facility over in Osage Beach, and after receiving treatment there for a variety of minor cuts and bruises, they were transferred to the county jail.
In the meantime, back within the protected confines of the fuel tank room’s foot-thick concrete walls, neither the unconscious sheriff nor the bewildered Miss Watson received as a result of the explosion even the most minor of cuts or scrapes, though the sheriff’s uniform was scorched in one or two places by small pieces of burning debris that landed on his backside. And in a curious twist of perspective, in addition to halting the terrible beating she had been inflicting upon him, the explosion and the calm that followed afforded Miss Watson the opportunity to reinterpret the peculiar actions of the sheriff that had precipitated the aforesaid beating.
In perhaps the greatest irony of them all, when members of the volunteer fire department finally extracted them from the basement, which was now nothing more than a giant, gaping hole in the ground where Miss Petula’s house had once stood, the grateful kidnapping victim proceeded to absolve the sheriff of all wrongdoing in the matter. Worse, in a gush of gratitude and adoration that many of us found a bit difficult to stomach, she insisted that the heroic sheriff, with no regard whatsoever for his own welfare, had burst into the room where she was being held, pushed her onto the floor, and thrown himself on top of her in order to shield her with his own body from the imminent explosion.
Well, anyway, that’s pretty much the real story of how the sheriff of Crenshaw came to receive the credit for solving the Watson kidnapping case. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the accolades he received, that he continues to receive, were deserved.
As a postscript, I should mention that both the media and the mayor made such a fuss over the sheriff’s heroic actions, to the point of having a parade in his honor, that it never even occurred to anyone that he could also be held responsible for the enormous amount of damage that was done by the subsequent conflagration that he had ignited, and that before it was done had consumed the better part of Crenshaw.
Not that it ended up costing the citizens of Crenshaw a single penny to repair, of course. In yet another twist of irony, in a fit of gratitude not unlike that of his daughter, Miss Watson’s father, who as it turned out was an enormously successful, not to mention enormously wealthy, Kansas City businessman, contributed more than sufficient funds to completely rebuild the entire town. Better than it was before, most folks would say.
Of course, that was small consolation for Miss Petula, who returned from Europe at the end of the summer to find that her beautiful old mansion, along with a large number of priceless antiques, had been completely destroyed. Needless to say, she was not so inclined as others to overlook the negative aspects of the sheriff’s conduct. But then that’s another story altogether.
King José’s Hobby, Part II
by Linda Paul