Mulvey Road, a Short Story

Chapter One

The aging heavy equipment repairman turned farmer wore his hearing aid only on Sundays. The noise from diesel engines had rendered him partially deaf. He hadn’t been to a church since he had been accused of puncturing all the tires from all the cars in the St Paul’s Lutheran Church’s parking lot, all that during the one hour service promoted towards the local trout fishing vacationers. The large sign said, in Times Roman Bold characters :

“Jesus liked to fish too”

Out of town families are

welcomed to our 10AM

Sunday Service

They had no proof. Circumstantial evidence at best, in the form of his late arrival and a long screwdriver dropped in the aisle. It needs to be mentioned that the latter was a long model with a point that had turned bluish from probable sharpening over a stone.

On Sundays Archibald Foote took 2 AA batteries from his refrigerator and slipped them into his hearing aid before leaving his house pedaling towards Upper Jay; there Tim Devine would sell him a tree foot length of breakfast sausage, a bag of potatoes, a large box of Milk-Bones, a real bone and assorted cuts of meat. His vegetable garden provided the rest while his rusty Flyer got him back before 5 pm except on rainy days when he got splashed if not sometimes blinded by speeding traffic. The summer cabin crowd were getting larger, driving larger SUVs every year at higher rate of speed, especially going down the hill in front of Foote’s property. In the old days, Mulvey Road was narrower and had several sharp turns discouraging such excesses.

The Highway Department had unwittingly played a series of dirty tricks on the forced cyclist, the first one when they removed his driver’s licence for advanced deafness. He had not responded to an ambulance siren at an intersection and had apparently caused the premature death of a tourist that had been rescued from a near drowning a little earlier. Then they built a straightened and wider highway in front of his farm. That new speed promoting creation was actually built 40 feet closer to Foote’s one bedroom house. The fill material used in the new roadbed contained a large amount of clay, making the ground shake anytime a truck hit the spring bumps and potholes. And since more and more cars looked and behaved like trucks, the old guy’s bed was a bowl of shaking Jell-O that did nothing to help him sleep, with or without a well developed sense of hearing.

Parts of old Mulvey road had been left in place when its demolition and removal was judged to be either too costly or too pointless as was the case near the Foote’s property. There a section of the old road described a thousand feet arc starting at Foote’s house, passing behind Foote’s barn, entering Foote’s pine grove and ending abruptly on a sand pit that had supplied the asphalt plant during the highway construction period. Part of that pit was on the farmer’s land and he was often seen bulldozing around in what the locals called the passion pit, a place of sin and secrets where jalopies filled with young people were seen since the thirties, long before birth control pills. Sordid tales still oozed from the sands and modern day lovers had long found better smooching grounds.

Archibald sold sand by the truckload and had gotten a revenge of sorts by eating away at the old highway’s supporting sand dunes, leaving a deep gash in the landscape that no one had really seen. The old road was closed to traffic with heavy concrete cubes and a chequered sign. Only an attentive plane passenger could guess that someone had been illicitly profiting from crown lands. Archibald had not seen an airplane over his property in years.

When on that spring morning the State Police Helicopter hovered over the area, Foote was not wearing his hearing aid. His big C5 Caterpillar blade was pushing a ton of sand towards the old highway when the shadow from the Scorpion two-seater swiped at the sheer 50 wall of sand dropping from where the old pavement was crumbling. A rush of blood to his head made him feel warm while a silent laughter rose inside him, as if he had just gotten close to being caught. He had felt that before when entering the Church service, having stuffed something inside his trousers.

Police were looking for a Mark Marshall, a youth that had a reputation for general troublemaking and car thefts. From the air, it appeared that this large bulldozer was trying to fill the immense gash at the end of the old road. Puzzled, the pot bellied inspector leaned and asked the pilot, a Highway Officer in charge of speed control and emergency service:

Y’a know what’s going on down there?

Yesseri mister Parker, I certainly do:, sand pit during the day, passion pit at night, ( laughter) I was there.

I see. ( after a pause ) Would Marshall go there?

Let’s just look around for green Ford vans, not yellow dozers. I figure Marshall has ditched the car the moment he got down from his cocaine high. We’re liable to see it in some of the lumber roads I’ll show you.

That night Archibald Foote went to bed wearing two fresh batteries in his hearing aid set at HIGH. It seemed that all of a sudden he enjoyed the speeding cars, sleep or no sleep. In the village, Tim Devine had noticed genuine joy on the old guy’s face. He also noticed that he bought more and better supplies. Obviously a happy turn in his life, possibly an inheritance.

He did have a rich sister that had left the area after an unwanted pregnancy in the forties. She had left home in shame. Yet she had later dated and married a highway contractor that made a fortune under the Eisenhower years building highway 87 from Canada to the Catskills, a part of the Interstate System.

Any news of little Elly, your sister? I heard she did good in Albany.

How come you know her, you nosy butcher? , had questioned Foote with humourous eyes.

Hell I took her to the pit a couple of times, when I bought my brand new Hudson Terraplane.

Good thing she left the area! She’d be making sausage today.

After adding a pair of Boston steaks to his shopping cart, Archibald Foote left the store with a frown. Maybe he was THE ONE. Forty years earlier someone had made his sister pregnant. In those days, these things were not brought out in the open. Devine has probably never heard about it. Still the thought was disturbing enough to distract Foote in his careful cycling by the roadside, his basket brimming with goods. Just as he turned the last curve before his house, he wandered past the white line as a large SUV was swooshing by with such speed as to create a pressure wave that unbalanced the man into the ditch, head over wheel and steaks flying into the spring mud, oranges and a box of cigars scattering in the countryside.

Yet although bruised and muddied, the man was not angry. He rinsed the meat in the wet part of the ditch and packed everything in his windbreaker tied into a knot, walking by his skewed bike to the house where his dog would greet him, awaiting his Sunday night Steak Special. As he crossed over to the driveway of his house, the old faithful Labrador should already have been there.

……..

Summer had drifted into the woods with burrs sticking to one’s pants and baby black flies learning to eat with knives and forks on one’s skin. Three FBI agents walked towards Pine Creek, an area where a dam had created a lake deep enough to conceal many cars according to local sleuth in the different police forces. Gary Beauchamps, the Upper Jay’s unique constable started a long monologue scanned by the FBI trio slapping flesh and removing burrs from their gray no-iron pants.

Just because fifteen of our tourists and their families disappeared doesn’t mean we’ll find their cars here. But I guarantee that when we open the vane, it wont take an hour before we get to the bottom of the lake.

Beauchamp was raising a rusty but imposing box wrench that had to weigh at least 50 pounds. These tourists had come to settle into their cottages or rented motels a month earlier. All had disappeared on one evening, only three days after kid Marshall had stolen the mailman’s van with a right hand steering column. A vehicle like this would quickly be spotted over a large area. US Postal had a web site for used delivery cars and trucks. Serial numbers in a database almost excluded reselling of stolen vehicles. This one had to be hidden along with its criminal driver.

After only a few turns of that huge tool, the vane was already ejecting a plume of water. With the water level dropping fast, a green metal object was emerging fast and Beauchamp yelled excitedly: We got the Van…! That’s the one, call the others..call the others.

Agent Parker was scouting the north side of Mulvey Road when the call came in from Beauchamp. The helicopter had a different pilot who did not hesitate, after the loud radio call, to make a steeply banked turn over Foote’s sand pit. After all, with three FBI agents sent from Washington, performance and punctuality were a normal attitude. A serial killer had robbed and killed these families and disposed of their cars. Lake Champlain was too far away. It would have been impossible to dispose of the cars and bodies , drive back to Upper Jay 25 miles, and start over with fourteen other tourist families and their cars in the course of the same night. Looking down at the sandy cliff, Parker whined to the pilot:

Gee’s , ya want to drop us to our deaths? This peaceful area’s got enough of those ……already!

The pilot was smiling as Parker appeared distracted. Something had changed in that sand pit. He could not quite put his hand on it. Something was different from the last time. When the helicopter came to rest on a large granitic mound near the dam, the three FBI agents had removed their coats and were sitting on the edge of the damn, laughing hysterically at Beauchamp and his fifty pound box wrench. The policeman was squatting near a shiny green Coleman camping cooler retrieved from the pond. Parker was angry at his deputy sheriff, but he managed to launch another wisecrack:

Smallest van I’ve ever seen! …Let’s go back to square one. First no one found the cars, no one found Marshall or any other bodies, no one saw anything on the night of the crime, no one called for ransoms, shit! This has got to be the spookiest disappearances ever…

Parker went into a reverie wrapped into the smoke of a freshly lit Kent while the FBI shirts nonchalantly dropped sentences like:

We see plenty of those back at Langley’s. Serial killers. Or just ordinary Joes that want to do big stuff. One undertaker would drive entire families to false cemeteries to bury their dead. Once there, he would kill all of them and take their money after stuffing them in one hole in the ground. We need to look at each and any one of your citizens. One of them had something against tourists. We’ll get him sooner or later if your black flies don’t kill us first. Parker and Beauchamp had went over that hypothesis several times together, nailing the donkey’s tail on Foote every time, but rejecting him as too feeble and incapable of murdering fifty people in one night. Besides he had been seen working in his sand pit that evening. He had a solid alibi.

Yet the sight of these fifty cars around the white church with all tires flat was still vivid in their heads, thinking that had the pastor not decided to take things in his hands they would have caught and convicted him. The latest twist of their scenario involved the help of much younger Mark Marshall, an athletic man capable of scaring any cop when high on crack cocaine. After all he had disappeared just a day or two before all the others. Beauchamp had been the butt of jokes and putdowns from his obese and red-faced boss. The green cooler incident had removed from him any desire to participate in this unlikely brainstorming that was now alive with speculative chatter of Parker with his three outside guests.

…………

August had several heavy rain episodes that had attacked and sometimes washed down roads and river banks in Essex County. When Charley Briddle of Public Works went to get a 12 foot detour sign with stand and flashing lights at the depot, he was surprised to find it missing. Deciding to settle the matter before a car would collapse a soft shoulder and end up in the Ausable river, he went to the police station, actually the living room of the private house where his friend Beauchamp lived. His boss Parker lived in Plattsburgh and only came down when absolutely necessary, or also when he felt like torturing his deputy. Briddle saw the blue sedan with 1001 E on the license plate and police equipment; he entered the living room without knocking as was his habit. Beauchamp wore his habitual sad dog eyes and said without turning his head towards his visitors:

At least you I know why you’re here! It’s that washout on highway 86 near Foote’s property. I just got a call. Let’s go.

In a small town, the Public Works people do everything. Surveying, permits, road surveillance, debris and dead animal clearing and even in some case traffic police work if a large accident occurs. No wonder Charley Briddle was naïve enough to think of a Mulvey Road detour, closing the new road where flood conditions had taken off half of the pavement. After all this was customary. Using the old road as a belt around obstacles, fires or accidents was customary, and Briddle had no way of knowing that Mulvey Road had a treacherous gap in it stemming from sand extraction below and near it . He had driven the Upper Jay dump truck several times to the sand pit but never went deep enough to realize that behind a natural bend the old road was surgically cut into the sand pit, providing a vertiginous vertical drop to the bottom of that same pit.

The two men turned back towards town after deciding to create that detour. They flagged down the only car to warn its driver of the difficulty ahead ; few people except fishermen and campers used that highway so that this was not a true emergency. The men had relaxed and quickly got to the junction of Mulvey road, across the highway from Foote. They then walked around the concrete blocks. As they inspected the old road, Beauchamp mused:

This old road is so good we wont even need to lower the speed limit from 50MPH.

Damn good thing since we’re completely out of road signs with these friggin floods and robberies!

Briddle had answered cheerfully, adding:

Lets just create that detour immediately before the road falls away completely. I figure I can drag these cement cubes to the new road with my winch.

Jeep owners are proud of their front bumper winches like Mercedes owners are proud of their brand name hood ornament. After much grinding noises, all three blocks were moved in the new road, their tops reunited with a heavy steel cable from which hung chequered highway signs. A perfect job where all that was missing was the word DETOUR, preferably in reflective letters. That sign being dearly missing, Briddle thought of asking Foote for some paint and a panel of sorts. He suddenly remembered the aging labrador, horribly crushed under the wheels of a tourist who never bothered to even slow down after the accident. He had picked up and delivered the carcass to its owner who was running around his farm waving a large piece of red meat, wearily calling the dog’s name. Briddle had learned from the folks in upper Jay that the old man had suddenly gone weirder and weirder, suspected of killing pets with poisoned meat concealed in the camping grounds by the river. The FBI investigation had been rotated to a national team since no one and nothing could point to a locally plotted crime. The rich families had posted a reward averaging $25,000 each and several false leads had developed in Florida because of similar Postal trucks. Now TimDevine only sold potatoes and beans to the old man who came only once or twice a month, not talking to anyone. Inspector Parker had given him a thorough shakedown and decided that the old fool didn’t have the brains to be a quality criminal, one that could do 16 murders in 3 days. Before leaving Upper Jay for the last time, Parker had said in a low monotone:

Beauchamp, this is national FBI shit! You don’t have the class for TV stuff. Before they do a police video in Essex county, you would need to import a few high class criminals from Chicago, New York or L.A. – Here you have more trouts than tramps and frankly you’re more pencil pusher than euh! police officer. Don’t call me unless you get a hold of these out of town bad guys…or, what’s his name,…Nick Marshall!

Beauchamp used one of his large shoulder to break into the barn as the door was jammed by growth of tall grass at its base. There he was hoping for a board and a can of paint since no one answered the door of the house, although the red bicycle was leaning against the first step of the front staircase. He did not need to find any of this since there was a beautiful reflective sign shining with five large letters on an orange background, very professionally spelling DETOUR in the middle of two large lights and a small solar panel. Briddle followed in and immediately cried:

There’s my emergency detour sign, this guy stole my sign…What the…!!!!

Briddle, fearing a possible accident, was attaching the detour sign to the concrete cubes and very professionally Beauchamp reported the crime to his superior like he always did, over his cell phone. Paker had another job in Plattsburgh and managed to collect a police chief salary while not even being present in Essex county, doing detective work in Clinton County. Beauchamp was secretely hoping that the obesity of his boss would bring on an early death. Beauchamp would then automatically be promoted to police chief with a good pay raise. This was worth putting up with the put downs and wiseracks.

Public works material, worth $3400. , suspect known to police for having been a suspect in two other situations….

OK leave it to me. I’m in Clintonville, just 12 minutes away. I know the little retard so just leave him to me.

Public property crimes were often reported in the County or State Gazette, and Parker did not want to miss out on this one. A piece of cake, he thought. Foote would collapse under his questioning. He lit another Kent forgetting that one had been resting in the car’s ashtray when the call came in on his cell phone. He also lit his roof strobes and thought about the siren and laughed.

That fool is as deaf as one can be. Ha Ha.

Parker was fast approaching Ausable Forks his tires squealing pleasurably in every Adirondak curve. His face was red, his knuckles white and his heart was green. It was good to be a speeding cop in this gorgeous nature full of retarded people and white tail deers. Having a dumb and loyal assistant like Beauchamp was also part of the charm.

Briddle had scrupulously removed every branch and twigs that had grown at the entrance of Mulvey road , some of it through the pavement. Drivers would barely slow down and enter the detour with smoothness and confidence. Beauchamp was now walking around the house and sheds, stumbling upon a crude flat stone standing vertically against the fence. In white paint he read.

PAL

DIED

12 /3/ 2004

Briddle looked up and saw Beauchamp running excitedly towards him. At almost the same time the police car was heard.Parker could not resist the temptation to hit Archibald Foot in full patrol car regalia.

He buried his dog the night of the murders. And you said…a tourist probably hit him and drove away. There’s sufficient motivation don’t you think, coming from a guy who had a history of hate towards tourists? That sinister detour could be our answer!

OK WHERE IS HE interjected Parker before his car was into a full stop. Beauchamp said, looking at the house:

I dunno Chief Parker sir…He’s nowhere to be seen and yet his bicycle is at the front door.

Parker was standing with a bullhorn in front of that staircase, his enormous shape bobbing like a buoy in the tall grass.

You moron, there’s no more bicycle here than snowballs in hell. Your guy has fled…fled this way…check it out…tire tracks from this puddle…there! I’m so fucking brilliant I should be an FBI agent.

Parker was already entering Mulvey Road with sirens blaring and tires on fire. As he drove towards the pine glade in a slow arc, Briddle and Beauchamp were staring at each others face…

He was pedaling away as we entered the tool shed. Musta been hiding somewhere. Shit we look like nitwits!

Beauchamp ushered to Briddle who responded…Let’s go, in my car…

Parker was doing 120 mph when he became airborne at the road cut. Coming out of the pine grove’s green shade, the pavement dropped gradually in such a way as to make it impossible to see the 75 feet of missing pavement that dropped into the sand pit 50 feet below. Parker had his large head against the side window thinking out loud:

OK OK I GOT IT….When I flew over this place last spring the sand was much higher the second time around. That’s because of all these buried cars that the rains have uncovered recently….Damn it I’m so smart I’m so smart I’m so smart it’s scary!

The little frail man tiptoed behind a large granit boulder to stay away from view. The Jeep stopped short of the edge and Briddle tied a cable from his rear bumper to around a few large pine standing on the north side. One never knows. This chunk of pavement can follow the Parker’s car whose roof strobes were still eerily flashing in spite of the condition of the car, a giant crumpled beer can that was burning brightly in a cloud of black smoke.

Underneath , the remnants of several other cars, mostly SUVs poking sadly through the sand while several suitcases and trunks were littered about. One aluminum canoe appeared bent in two, as if to more easily conceal it, a large green van had been towed aside and used as a storage locker for more suitcases. The large Caterpillar had been working these grounds feverishly and looked poised to cover the victims as soon as the dry weather returned.

The winch was happily pulling up a line hooked up to a red bicycle that had fallen into the Ausable creek. Thanks to the huge water swell, the poor man was probably being carried away to Lake Champlain by now. The men were friends. Both had the mutual respect of two overworked civil servants whose performance was not recognized except by each other. Briddle said coyly, clutching Beauchamps hand with two of his own:

Congratulations for your promotion.

And you for the prize money we’ll share. How much is 25 times 15 ?

had said Beauchamp before they both returned to Foote’s house to complete the investigation ; the FBI where on their way with the reward money. It would be needed very fast…

………………

Old Archibald Foote never knew he liked driving so much. He was heading towards the Hudson Bay town of Chisasibi where his skills had been appreciated 30 years earlier as a earthmoving equipment repairman. He would have a c lassroom of 14 Cri Indians and a large hall with full size mechanical devices. He entered Chief Diamond’s front yard in his blue sedan with 2 NY State plates saying FOOTE - .

We don’t need those here, do we?

Said Foote. The chief responded:

Not unless you want to snob us.

The plates were laying on a pile of garbage under the starting rain and some black gouache was being washed away, revealing 1001E as the original number.

….But get these holes blocked on your roof.

Some people might think you’re an ex- Police. Officer.

(to be continued)