The Hunt Chronicles: Volume 1 (19 page)

“Carol and Dennis
don’t seem to have a very good relationship.  They were fighting last
night at the party too.”

“Ah, so you did hear
that?”  Leon asked.  I nodded.  “Well, it’s no secret that
Dennis has been eyeing Arnold’s job for a while.  He figured all of his
butt-kissing would get him a recommendation for the promotion when Arnold
retired.”

“So what’s that got
to do with Carol?”  I asked.

“Well, I’m not in
the habit of repeating office claptrap, but word around the water cooler says
Carol and Arnold had a, well…”

“A
thing
?”
  I asked.

“Yeah,
sure.
  Don’t ask me when it
started or when it ended or if there’s any proof of it at all because I haven’t
got any.”

“Well if it’s
not
true, how did the rumor start?”

“Hard to say,” Leon
said, standing up.  He turned and looked down at me.  “Maybe Dennis
found out who Arnold was recommending.  Maybe it was Carol instead of
him.  Maybe he started it.  Carol and Arnold were working together on
a budget amendment to fund some new exhibits. 
Started
spending a lot of time together over in Town Hall.
  For all I know,
a lonely secretary over there started it.”  I stood up and began walking
with Leon towards the door.

“Leon, would anyone
really know who Arnold was going to recommend?”  Leon stopped walking
abruptly and turned to me.  His eyes then shot right to his feet and he
began walking again.  He wiped under his nose with the side of his
hand.  “No, Reevan.  No one knows, and I guess no one ever will.”

“Hey, where’s
Emily?”  I asked, finally noticing that she wasn’t in the precinct with
the rest of us.  Leon sat on the bench nearest the precinct entrance as I
stood, shoving my hands into my pockets.

“She turned down the
ride,” he said.  “Said she’d come in her own time.  Hope she’s
alright.”

“Yeah,
me too.”
I said.

“You know I can’t go
giving out statements during a murder investigation, Professor.  Frankly,
I’m surprised that you would ask.”  Embarrassed, I looked down into my lap
as Myron turned onto
Bires
Road and headed for Town
Hall.  “However,” he added, and I felt the beginnings of a smile twitch on
my lips.  “I keep all of my notes in that pad there,” he said, and nodded
to his right.  In between us on the tan leather of the front seat lay his
small notepad.  “I can’t be held liable if that book fell into the wrong
hands.”  The car stopped at
Bires
Road and Old
Route 9.  With a red light in front of us, Myron turned to his left and
gazed out the window up at the sky.  “Looks like rain,” he said aloud.

“Oh, does it?” 
I asked, too nervous to move a muscle.

“
Yessir
,
those are rain clouds.  I’m no weather man, but I know one thing…”  I
looked up at him and watched as his right hand left the steering wheel,
fingered his notepad and flicked it in my direction.  “…I can’t be
watching that pad every minute of every day.”

“As I suspected, everyone
went to sleep while their boss was being bludgeoned to death by a golden
rhino.”  I said as we walked into Town Hall.

“Everyone except
Dolores,” Myron added.  “Haven’t gotten an official statement from Dr.
Sellars
yet, or that
Scribbs
woman, but-”

“You can’t possibly
think Emily had anything to do with this, Myron?”  I said, stopping dead
in my tracks at the entrance to Human Resources.  “She’s a doctor.”

“She’s a suspect,
Professor.  Their all suspects until this murder
is
under wraps.”  Myron looked into the office and back at me.  “Why are
we here anyway?”

“Listen Myron, why
don’t you go and get your statements from Dr.
Sellars
or Ida
Scribbs
?  I’ll find my own way home when
I’m done here.”  Myron cocked his head sideways, looking at me the way Niki
looks at me when I say the words
cookie
or
sausage
.

“You
sure?”
  He finally
said.  “You want to share anything with me, Professor?”

“Nothing
to share, Sheriff.”
  With
that, he turned and headed back the way we had come.

I walked into the
Human Resources office and stood at the counter for ten minutes as the woman
behind it sat at her desk balancing her checkbook.  Around minute eleven,
she finally acknowledged my presence and slowly hoisted her large rump off her
chair and up to the counter.  “Can I help you?”  She said, chomping
on a wad of gum and rolling her eyes up towards the ceiling.  After a
minute of silence, I finally answered her.

“I’m sorry.  I
was busy watching my tax dollars at work.”  Her head cocked sideways, her
eyes looking at me the way Niki looks at me when I say the words
cookie
or
  s
ausage
.

“What?”  She
finally asked.

“I’d like to make a
public records request.”

“For
what?”
  After a moment of
thought, I smiled and stood on my tiptoes.  I peered over the large, lazy
mass in front of me to a row of filing cabinets behind her desk.  They
were labeled PERSONNEL FILES.  She turned around slowly to see what I was
looking at, and when she turned back to face me I was holding out a pen.

“You’re going to
need something to write on, Sunshine.”

That night, for the
first time in months, I did not turn on Law & Order, or PBS, or any of my
other staple time killers.  I pulled the coffee table up to my chair and
dropped all of my photocopies on top of it.  I spread them out into several
piles: TRAGO, SYKORA, KINNEY, TILSON, SELLARS,
MEDLEY
. 
Niki seemed confused and restless, as though she couldn’t sleep without the
television spitting out its brain cell-killing entertainment.  “I’m about
to do some research, Niki.  You know what that
means,
don’t you?”  She finally sat directly across from me, staring into my eyes
over the buried table. 
“Ginger ale and saltines!”
I said, clapping my hands.  Niki did not react.  “Well, go get it,
girl!  Saltines!  Go get it!”  I waived my hand towards the
kitchen.  Still my canine companion didn’t budge.  “Fine,
sausage
…” 
I mumbled, and her head cocked sideways.  I laughed and headed for the
kitchen, Niki in toe. 
“A sausage for you, a ginger ale
for me.”
  My little voice piped up for the first time in quite a
while. 
Some people never change
he said.  “Baby steps,” I
said aloud. 
“Baby steps.”

I sat it my living
room until 2:00 a.m. combing through memos and emails and correspondence from
six different files.  I fell asleep halfway through Leon’s file and lay
there all night with my head on paper pillows.

I had a dream that
night.  Its relevance to the murder investigation was probably
nonexistent, but its relevance to my state of mind was most obvious.

I was twelve years
old again and back in Owl Creek.  The school bus had just dropped me and
Charlie
Billington
at our stop, a good mile from
home.  We stood there and watched as the school bus grew smaller and
smaller until it was nothing but a yellow spec in the distance.  Charlie
and I turned and looked west, towards home.  We had smiles on our
faces.  It was our favorite part of the day.

The bus dropped
us off, had always dropped us off, at the top of
Naddler’s
Hill.  During the winter, kids from all over town would converge here to
slide down the icy slope on garbage can lids and pieces of cardboard, but then,
in the middle of April, there was no snow.  There was just Charlie
Billington
and Reevan Hunt atop the mountainous
Naddler’s
Hill.  We were rolling in the cool grass all
the way down.  Life was good.

We lay on the
cool grass staring up at the sky.  You’d have to wait a few minutes before
the fluid in your brain would let you get up, never mind walk in a straight
line.  I could feel the cool grass on the back of my neck and
earlobes.  I could see the cumulonimbi billowing across their blue
canvas.  I could hear Charlie’s laughter and the whistling of the wind
through the trees around us.

We got up
together, wobbly and giggling.  We determined who had the best trip down
Naddler’s
Hill by rating
each others’
grass stains and knee scrapes.  We strolled on together for a short
time.  Charlie turned into his walkway and headed for his front
door.  I still had six more houses to go.  Not a long ways, but long
enough to find the phone is the ringing.  What?  The phone is
ringing.  What?  Get up get up the phone is ringing!

As fast as it had
begun it was over.  The scents of clean air and freshly cut grass
faded.  The smells of dog hair and bachelorhood rolled into consciousness,
and the phone was ringing.

My head shot up too
fast, giving me an instant migraine.  My drool and night sweat had caused
a piece of paper to stick to my face like a huge white sticky note.  I
stood up and yanked it off as I ran for the phone.  Niki lay in the middle
of the living twitching her feet and whimpering. 
Chasing rabbits
I
thought to myself as I stepped over her.

“What!” I barked
into the receiver.  I pulled the phone away from my ear momentarily, as if
my voice came from the phone instead of my own mouth.  “Hello? 
Hello!”

“Reevan?
  Reevan, are you alright?” A soft voice
asked. 
A woman’s voice.

“What?  Yeah,
what?  I’m fine.  Who is this?  What time is it?”

“It’s almost
ten.  Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I said I was fine, didn’t
I?  Who is this?”

“It’s me…Emily
Sellars
.”  Then silence for a few moments. 
“Reevan?”

“Yeah,
yeah.
  Dr.
Sellars
, what’s wrong?”  I answered, wiping the sleep
from my eyes.

“Well, I really need
to talk to someone.  This whole thing,
well
it’s
just
tearing me
up and-
” She continued to talk but her voice got further and
further away. 

I had just started
reading the sheet of paper that was in my hand; the one that I slobbered all
over after succumbing to slumber on the coffee table.  As I read, my eyes
grew wide and my heart started to pound faster and faster.  When I was
finished, I lowered my hand and just stared at the kitchen wall. 
“
Reevan?
 
Reevan, are
you
listening? 
Reevan, why won’t
you
say
something?”
  Her voice came
in clear again with piercing force.  “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yes, yes I’m
fine.  Sorry, I…I just woke up.  I’m sorry.  Please, say it
again.”

“I asked if you
could meet me at my office in an hour.  I could really use a friendly
ear.”

“Oh,
oh.
 
Of
course.
  It’s just that, well…”  I trailed off again as I held
the sheet of paper up to my old eyes once more.  “Actually, could we make
it closer to noon instead?  I have a stop to make first.”  She said
sure and I hung up and raced into my bedroom.  A quick shower and shave
later and I
was
out the door, my guard dog still
chasing rabbits in my living room.

“You lied to
me!”  I screamed.  “What the hell are you trying to do, Leon?”

“I did not
lie
, Reevan.  I swear it! 
Just
calm down.
  What’s this all about?”

“It’s about this,
Leon,” I said, thrusting the piece of paper.  He clutched at it, missed,
and it fluttered to the floor like a leaf from a tree.  He stooped to pick
it up as I plowed past him and into his living room which, for another
bachelor, was suspiciously tidy.

“Is this
drool?”  He asked.

“Just read it,
Leon.  You read it and then you explain it to me.”  I paced with rage
as his eyes combed the page.  When he was finished, he folded the sheet in
half and walked it back to me.  I snatched it ravenously and shoved it into
my pocket.  I froze on the carpet, eyes open wide, nose upturned, arms
crossed, and I waited for a damn good explanation.

It seems Arnold
Medley was a religious documenter.  This wasn’t any surprise to me since
the first personnel file I examined was
his own
. 
Nor was it a surprise after reading Carol’s or Dennis’.  In each file, in
all
the files, were notes; dozens and dozens of notes.  Conversations,
meetings, phone calls were all logged or jotted down or synopsized in some form
or another. 
Post-its, napkins, whole sheets of paper.
 
If the man said it out loud, he wrote it down somewhere.