On balance, I will admit to having handled the whole thing rather sloppily. So far, this wasn't what I like to think of as a typical E.G. Wages performance. Allowing Brenda Cashman to come along had been my first mistake, and bringing her back out to the site of the Percy Kramer affair had been an even bigger one. To top it off, I had ignored Cosmo's advice, and instead of carrying my survival kit with me everywhere I went, I had opted to leave it in the Z. Here I was, practically defenseless, at the site of an all too recent unsolved atrocity. The closest thing I had to a weapon was a small butane cigarette lighter. Not vintage E.G. Wages.
I had uttered the magic words, and it was just what Brenda wanted to hear. Immediately, a look of relief captured her finely sculptured face, and she quit shaking. She slipped her hand into mine and leaned forward with her head on my chest. "I'm sorry, E.G.," she managed, "but I'm worried about him. What could have happened to him?"
"Probably the same thing that happened to you. I figure he came to, realized what happened, couldn't find his keys and did the same thing you did — stumbled out of here."
"Where did he go?"
"Probably home. Remember, he's embarrassed. Getting yourself zonked out by the lady of your choice when you're trying to put the moves on her is a little tough to explain. I'll give you two to one odds he falls all over you with apologies the next time he sees you."
Brenda looked up at me, smiled and squeezed my hand. Before she could get the words out, a shrill, piercing scream raced up and around the words already forming in her throat. The sound erupted into the twilight grayness. She fell back, pointing, her face twisted in terror.
I spun around.
There he was. Percy Kramer hadn't stumbled out of his embarrassing situation after all. Instead, he was hanging by his feet from the gnarled limb of a dead rock pine. His throat had been slit.
B.C. was hysterical. "Oh, my God, E.G., look at him. What have they done to him?"
It was all too obvious. Percy Kramer had been intentionally hung upside down to drain the blood. Percy Kramer, Chambers Bay druggist and erstwhile Brenda swain, was somebody or something's intended food supply.
PART 4
Jake Madden's office was a drafty, inadequately lighted, two-room citadel of chaos tucked away at the rear of the same building that housed the Chambers Bay volunteer fire department. One room contained Jake's somewhat limited official needs — a battered old oak desk, a couple of nondescript chairs, circa sometime in the twenties, two three-drawer gray metal file cabinets, and an arsenal. The desk was cluttered with papers, a tarnished brass gooseneck lamp, a telephone and two empty Coke bottles.
The room adjacent to his office was somewhat larger, just as poorly illuminated and equally uninviting. The room's main feature was an old yellow formica dinette table that served as the center of the village council meetings. At other times the room was employed as the big man's holding pen, an interrogation room, and just about anything else he wanted it to be. There was an overhead light sheltered by a dirty, military green, metal lampshade. The walls, once papered, now defied description.
I had the distinct feeling that the old room existed primarily in these more modern times for the swapping of stories, guns and telephone numbers, all-night poker games, and the painful passing of all too many long, snowy Canadian nights.
Jake was there along with a man he had introduced as Harlan Gorman, a string bean of a man, bereft of hair and minus a few teeth as well. Harlan was the chief of the volunteer fire department. Those two, along with Caleb Hall, the charter boat captain and elected head of the village council, who now sat at the far end of the table, constituted the "officialdom" of Chambers Bay.
Jake had summoned them when I reported the discovery of Percy Kramer's body.
Jake was an artful juggler. He had somehow managed to round up his cohorts, organize this meeting and, at the same time, supervise the discreet delivery of Percy's remains to the closest undertaker in the village of Kemper, a wide spot in the road some 17 miles west of Chambers Bay. He had accomplished this rather impressive list in the short span of two and one-half hours, amidst a now driving rain which the locals were calling a lake squall.
Brenda had tried valiantly, but the day, the hour and the ordeal had taken their toll. She had repeated her story for each of them, and now she was exhausted. At the moment, she sat in the far corner of the room next to the potbellied wood-burning stove with an old woolen blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She had a cup of coffee tightly clenched between her hands, and she had slipped off into her own world.
"You say you're a writer?" Caleb asked. He was a white-haired, hawk-nosed man with cracked and weathered skin and a musky voice that sounded like it was coming at you through damp speakers.
"I checked him out," Madden confirmed. "He's a writer, all right; had the boys at the RCMP post down at Waverly punch him up on their computer." Then he turned and looked at me. "They tell me you're a professor, too, right?"
It didn't particularly seem like the time or place to get into a long dissertation on the subtle differences between a professor and a writer-in-residence, so I let Jake's explanation stand, confirming it with a nod.
Harlan Gorman was the silent type. For the past hour he hadn't said more than a couple of words. Again, I had the distinct feeling that old Harlan would have given just about anything to be anywhere else other than here, sorting through what was fast becoming the fifth in the series of incidents. That's the way both Jake and Caleb were referring to it now that I had paraded them step by step through the sequence of similar attacks.
"Every eleven years, huh?" Harlan repeated.
I nodded. "So far that's the pattern we think we see."
"But it ain't the same thing, Harlan," Jake insisted. "Like Wages here was sayin', we got two different things goin' on. Them kids we discovered out back of the motel this mornin' — that's a different thing than old Percy. Them kids was carved up slick as a whistle; those parts was taken out just like a surgeon had done it."
"You mean we got us two killers on the loose?" Harlan gulped.
"To be honest, I don't know how many there are," I admitted.
"You're tellin' us that them kids this mornin' are just as different from Percy Kramer as old Percy was from those animals we found earlier this week," Caleb parroted. He looked over at me for confirmation of his assessment.
Brenda looked up from her cup just long enough to insist that all of the incidents were somehow related.
"She's right," I confirmed, "but that's the second thing we don't know. We don't know how all these incidents are related."
For the last several minutes, Madden had been in the pacing mode. He was walking around the room, checking on the progress of the storm, checking on Brenda, pouring more coffee. Finally he lowered his bulk in the chair next to mine. "Weird thing about this is I ain't seen anything different goin' on around here. I haven't noticed anyone or anything."
"Me neither," Caleb confessed, "but then I'm pretty well tied up all day down at the slip. By the time I get home of an evenin', the old village is pretty well buttoned up for the night. Outside of a couple of fishermen that've been hangin' around for the past week or so, there ain't nobody new in town."
"What about the Austin woman?" Harlan grunted.
Jake looked up. "What about her?"
"Weird old gal," Harlan assessed. "I see her comin' and goin' at all hours of the day and night. Seems awful busy for a widow lady."
Jake slumped back in his chair, neither frowning nor smiling. He looked at me as though the Austin woman needed some sort of explanation. "Chambers Bay is small enough that everybody knows what everybody else is doin'. The old lady Harlan is talkin' about is a widow woman. Gotta be close to seventy from the looks of her. I kinda figure she ain't all there." Jake gestured to his head to make the point.