Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

She thought back. “Must be two or three years ago now. The house has been sitting empty since the early ’90s, you know. After the Murphy murders. They stayed for a few days, and then they were gone again.”

“Do you think the body belongs to one of the transients?” I asked.

Brandon opened his mouth to answer, then deferred to Wayne, who said, “Could be. We’ll know more when we’ve gotten it out. You’d better get busy, Brandon.”

Brandon nodded and excused himself. After rooting around in the trunk of his car, he pulled out a roll of yellow crime scene tape and started stringing it around the perimeter of the yard, from tree trunk to tree trunk and bush to bush. It was just a matter of time before our small group was either corralled or asked to leave, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

“I’m going to take off for a while. If that’s OK with you, Wayne.”

Wayne nodded. “I know where to find you. And I’m not worried that you had anything to do with this body. This poor fella’s been down there longer than you’ve been in town.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, only half kidding. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Bring some pizzas,” Derek said.

“Gack!” I answered, as Lionel turned a paler shade of green. “How can you be hungry at a time like this?”

“Digging is hard work. And Brandon ’s still a growing boy.” He bent to kiss me on the cheek. “Drive carefully. And I wasn’t kidding about the pizzas. Three ought to do it. Unless we get company.”

“Better get four,” Wayne said, pulling out his wallet to give me a couple of twenties. I stuck them in my pocket. “We’ll start seeing Josh and his friends in about a half hour, most likely. I really have to get that police band radio away from him. And once Josh knows, then Shannon knows, and then Kate knows, and soon everybody knows.” He shook his head, wandering toward Brandon ’s car, talking to himself.

My adopted hometown has two newspapers. There’s the Waterfield Clarion , established in 1915, and the Waterfield Weekly , established in 1912. Because it’s a weekly, the latter isn’t quite as timely when it comes to reporting hard news as the Clarion , but it does a much better job with human interest stories, like reports of the Garden Tour and the school bake sale. The offices of both papers are located on Main Street, each in its own turn-of-the-last-century Victorian commercial building. I started at the Clarion , and if I couldn’t find what I was looking for there, I figured I’d cross the street and try the Weekly instead.

OK, so I know it seems a little odd that I’d shoot off so quickly, leaving Derek to handle the mess back at Becklea, but it’s not like there was anything I could do there, you know. I don’t know anything about working a crime scene, and Wayne wouldn’t let me help even if I did. And I had absolutely no desire to get any more intimately involved with the skeleton than I had been already.

But there was just a chance that I might be able to discover something in one of the papers. If I could put a name to the skeleton, or at least come up with a missing person or two during the time when Brian Murphy had been in residence, maybe that would help…

Derek had showed me how to operate the microfiche machine last time we were here, and it didn’t take me long to get what I needed from the archivist, who remembered me from last time. Derek has a way with middle-aged women, from spinsters to happily married matrons. They all adore him, and I always feel like they’re looking at me askance, trying to determine whether I’m good enough for him. I had that feeling now, as the plump sixty-something behind the counter handed me the boxes for the late ’80s and early ’90s and gave me a thorough once-over.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling my most winning smile.

She nodded but didn’t smile back. “How is Derek?”

“He’s fine. Busy. We’re renovating another house.”

She nodded. “I heard he bought the old Murphy place. That what you’re looking for?”

She glanced at the boxes I was holding. I hesitated, and she added, “Because the tragedy took place here.” She tapped her finger on a box halfway down the stack. “You won’t need the others.” She leaned back on the chair and folded her plump arms across her plump chest.

“I’m going to read about the… um… tragedy,” I admitted, since I was, “but I’m also looking for anything else I can find. Just out of curiosity, you know.”

She didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t blame her. But since I couldn’t very well tell her about the ulna and the fact that the Waterfield PD was currently digging up the Murphy house crawlspace, I excused myself with another bright smile and scurried off to the microfiche machine, where I muddled my way through the process of getting everything set up.

I knew exactly when the Murphy murders had taken place, so those stories weren’t difficult to find. They matched Derek’s account in pretty much every particular, with very little additional information. The police had been notified in the early hours of the morning, when one of the neighbors called to report a domestic disturbance and shots fired at the Murphy house on Becklea Drive. According to the newspaper article, five-year-old Patrick Murphy had been woken from sound sleep by a “bang,” and when he stuck his head out into the hallway, he had seen his father, gun in hand, move from the master bedroom to the room where Patrick’s grandparents, Margaret and John Duncan, slept. Patrick, being more astute than the usual little boy, had made for the outside door and had run down the street to his friend Lionel’s house, where Lionel’s father had called the police. Upon arrival, the Waterfield PD had found all the inhabitants of the Murphy household (with the exception of Patrick) dead: Peggy and her parents in their beds, and Brian on the floor in Patrick’s room. Police Chief Roger Tucker had gone on record to say that the police were treating the case as a homicide and suicide, and that there was no doubt whatsoever that Brian Murphy had killed his wife and his in-laws, and that he had then gone to his son’s room to finish the job. The police found several bullets in the boy’s bed but were unable to say for sure whether Brian thought he had actually succeeded in killing Patrick, or had realized, too late, that the child was gone. In either case, he had ended his short reign of terror by shooting himself.

A follow-up story, a day or two later, quoted a couple of neighbors and friends of the family as saying that Brian had been increasingly sullen and difficult to deal with over the last few months. There had been problems at work-he had been a forklift operator at a nearby warehouse-and management had had to give him several warnings about his temper and about his increasing tardiness. He had taken to hanging out at a local bar late into the nights, and it must have made it difficult for him to punch in by six in the morning. Once he had turned up at his wife’s place of employment and caused trouble. Mr. Nickerson, her boss, didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he had gotten the impression that Mr. Murphy was, not to put too fine a point on it, stinking drunk. And at four o’clock in the afternoon, too. Brian had removed his wife, bodily, from the premises, but the next morning, when Peggy Murphy came back to work, she had claimed that everything was fine, and having no choice but to believe her, Mr. Nickerson had taken her word for it.

So much for that part of it. I started scanning the microfiche for missing persons.

In any town of any size, people disappear once in a while. It was just a few months ago, as a matter of fact, that Professor Martin Wentworth from Barnham College had gone missing. He had been acquainted with my late Aunt Inga, and at the time, while we were trying to figure out what had happened to him, Wayne had explained to me that it’s extremely difficult for someone to just disappear without a trace. Someone usually knows something, whether it’s the missing person himself, if he left under his own steam, or it’s whoever did away with him, if he didn’t. In most cases and both scenarios, the missing person shows up sooner or later, either alive or dead.