McKain's Dilemma Read online

  McKAIN'S DILEMMA

  By Chet Williamson

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / Chet Williamson

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Image courtesy of:

  http://indigodeep.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Chet Williamson attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania, receiving a B.S. in 1970, and went on to be a teacher at public schools in Cleveland, Ohio, then became a professional actor before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. His earlier novels include Second Chance, an ecological thriller/romance, Ash Wednesday, Reign and Dreamthorp. His story, "Gandhi at the Bat", was made into a short film by Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm. Figures in Rain, a collection of Williamson's short stories, won the International Horror Guild Award. He has been shortlisted twice for the World Fantasy Award, six times for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award, and once for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award. His books have been translated and published in many languages and countries, including France, Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan.

  Williamson has also worked in the field of theatre, and a ghost story/psychological thriller, "Revenant," was produced at Theater of the Seventh Sister in Lancaster, PA. From 2001 to 2007, he was the lead singer and guitarist for the Irish duo Fire in the Glen, in which he was partnered with fiddler and bodhranist Tom Knapp. A lifelong member of Actors' Equity Association, he eventually resumed his acting career, and has performed in plays and musicals at Lancaster's Fulton Opera House and Theater of the Seventh Sister. In 2010 he began recording performances of Andrew Vachss's short stories, as well as some of his own, for the MPformance.com website (www.MPformance.com). He has also recorded unabridged audiobooks of several of his novels, as well as works by Michael Moorcock, Tom Piccirilli, and Zoe Winters for Crossroad Press/Springbook Audio.

  Novels:

  Ash Wednesday

  Defenders of the Faith

  Dreamthorp

  Hunters

  Lowland Rider

  Reign

  Second Chance

  Soulstorm

  The Searchers Book I: City of Iron

  The Searchers Book II: Empire of Dust

  The Searchers Book III: Siege of Stone

  Collections:

  Tales From the Crossroad

  Unabridged Audiobooks (as Author and Narrator):

  Ash Wednesday

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  Soulstorm

  Unabridged Audiobooks (as Narrator):

  Blood: A Southern Fantasy

  Blood Lust (Preternaturals, Book One)

  Fabulous Harbors

  Gun in Cheek: A Study of "Alternative" Crime Fiction

  Nightjack

  On the Third Day

  Save My Soul (Preternaturals, Book Two)

  Son of Gun in Cheek

  The Light at the End

  The Seventh Secret

  The War Amongst the Angels

  Torment

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  For Lloyd Arthur Eshbach,

  author, pioneer, and gentleman

  McKain was not the sort of man to write a journal. But after what happened was over, he felt it necessary to put down everything on paper before time further eroded his already pocked memory. There was much he had forgotten, much he wanted to forget, and much he never knew. Although he felt that everything was fully resolved, there was always a possibility that evidence could arise linking him to that final day. If it did, the journal would speak for him.

  At the same time, he felt the need to simply tell the story, to have the assurance, by seeing it on paper, that it had happened as he thought it had. Of his story and his actions he was neither ashamed nor proud. In the several days it took him to write it, he felt, more than anything else, a quiet ache of ambivalence. The only satisfaction came in knowing that the right people had died.

  So he wrote the truth as he knew it. He wrote it for security, for reassurance, and because he felt he must. He wrote it for the same reasons that frightened children pray in the dark.

  McKain I

  We know ourselves so little, that many think they are about to die when they are well, and many think they are well when they are near death, unconscious of approaching fever, or of the abscess ready to form itself.

  —Pascal, Pensées

  Chapter 1

  My name is Robert McKain. I'm a self-employed investigator, and have been one for the past five years. I don't expect to be one much longer. If you wanted a private eye and called me, you might be disappointed. I'm not very good at the fine art of snappy patter, nor am I physically daunting, being made up of 170 pounds of stringy meat on a broad six-foot frame, with just a hint of middle-aged paunch, as if I've got a money belt under my shirt. Ev says I look good naked, and I still believe her. My face is smooth for my age, with no distinguishing features like a scar, a big nose, a glass eye, and the rest. My official face shape is oval. Pretty undistinguished all the way around. So much for how I see myself.

  How the world sees me can best be determined by a medical report I peeked at in a dermatologist's office when I visited him to clear up a patch of dermatitis. Quoth he: "A pleasant fellow with a mild case of . . ."

  A pleasant fellow. After thirty-eight years of struggling with life, one could do worse than be referred to in that way. I hoped then that "a pleasant fellow" was the impression with which I left my clients as well, though of course if they'd have cared to add efficient, courageous, and self-confident, I wouldn't have minded. I always tried to be pleasant with clients, as I tried to be pleasant with everyone. I don't read many detective novels, and when I have I've always been unimpressed by the unbelievably smartassed qualities of most fictional investigators. No sooner does the investigator meet a client than he starts to insult him. Admittedly, the first insults come from the client, so the detective looks justified in giving back as good as he gets, and in real life, clients can be unreasonable pricks. But they've got a good reason. They're scared. They're scared of their wives or their husbands, or scared of their wives' or their husbands' lawyers or lovers or mistresses. They're scared of me because they see detectives on TV or in the movies who carry guns to go buy a newspaper, and belt somebody who looks at them funny. They're scared because they're in a situation they've never been in before. I'm convinced that most fictional detectives are smartasses because most writers are smartasses—I've written for a newspaper, so I know.

  I also know that if you go around trading quips with your clients, you won't have any after a while. Maybe the boys in the books can afford to be cavalier, but I can't. I had a family to support. So what I did was try to make the clients feel as comfortable as possible. They wanted to get snarky, I'd let them get snarky. I'd be their whipping boy, and in ten or fifteen minutes they'd get it all out of their systems and then we could get to business. Like the man said, I was pleasant.

  I was even pleasant to Carlton Runnells the first time I met him. I knew who he wa
s, of course. You can't live in Lancaster and not have heard of Carlton Runnells. Many people thought he was the richest man in the county, and they may have been right. I was sure that he was far richer than most of the so-called captains of industry the town had to offer, because in Lancaster the big industry was tourism. And when it came to tourism, Carlton Runnells was the Sun King.

  He had inherited Barnes-Fordham Tourist Attractions from his wife, Leona Coyle Barnes. Now I realize that Barnes-Fordham Tourist Attractions may not sound too impressive, but it was a multimillion-dollar-plus operation, and Runnells owned it all—every funnel cake stand, every ride, every phony Amishman. The Amish are what draw people to the area, though I've never been able to figure why. And it's been worse since Witness was released. Now they come in droves expecting to see not only Jakie Stolzfus, but Harrison Ford as well. The tourists, most of them from New York and Jersey, line Route 30 from April to October, and lined Carlton Runnells's pockets as well. They buy their tickets to Amish Paradise, a second-rate amusement park with rides purchased from the old park near Neffsville that was torn down in the late fifties; they eat at The Amish Kitchen, a third-rate restaurant whose only claim to fame, as far as I can see, is a twenty-foot-high plaster Amishman out front that starlings love to crap on; and they pay ninety bucks a night to stay at The Amish Inn, a fourth-rate hotel where the bellhops wear overalls and red bandannas.

  Barnes-Fordham owns more as well—the local Antique Wagon Museum, The Museum of Lancaster County Farm Life, Zeb's Toy Train Barn. . . The list is nearly endless. If it's something that just sits there, and people have to pay to look at, it's a Barnes-Fordham attraction. And Carlton Runnells owned it all.

  The Barnes of Barnes-Fordham was Christian Barnes, a canny Pennsylvania German who was bright enough to predict that shoo-fly pie, broad black hats, and quaint phrases like "Throw the horse over the fence some hay," would one day lure tourists to an area with no natural attractions other than the most fertile farmland east of the Mississippi. I've got to hand it to him—he had to be one hell of a huckster to draw people away from Atlantic City to look at green fields and catch glimpses of a pacifist religious cult which just wanted to be left the hell alone. Who Fordham was I'll never know. Probably the guy who put up the money.

  When Barnes was middle-aged he married a young wife. When he died, very old, the wife was just old, but not so old that she still didn't want some male companionship, and apparently that was what Carlton Runnells provided. He was a designer for a local furniture store when she met him—in to do a room, everyone supposed—and right away the rumors started to fly. She took up with him for a few weeks, and pretty soon they were married. It was quite a scandal at the time, as he looked half her age. Lancaster society didn't know what to expect next, and they were surprised and disappointed when nothing whatever happened. The new Mr. and Mrs. Runnells holed up in Ravenwood, the estate Barnes had built in the thirties, and lived an apparently peaceful life until Leona Coyle Barnes Runnells's death in her bed in 1982. Carlton Runnells's five years of devoted married life netted him an estate worth roughly twenty million dollars. The settlement was uncontested by the sole surviving Barnes son, an investment banker in L.A. who had always hated the way his father had earned his fortune, and who was glad for the large amount of cash his mother had left him. The tourist crap? Runnells could have it and welcome.

  All this was public knowledge, as the lives of the wealthy often are, and in a community as insular and incestuous as Lancaster, the activities of the Barneses and families like them were followed as closely as the box scores of the Phillies. So I had a picture of Carlton Runnells in my mind when his secretary, for want of a better word, called me. It was Ev, my wife, who took the call. I was out on a domestic case, performing my usual heroic deed of trying to catch some horny, middle-aged businessman shtupping some bimbo from the steno pool.

  I was looking good in my T-shirt and baseball cap, which I've found to be one of my most unobtrusive costumes, sitting in the passenger seat of my dark-blue '82 Chevy, looking as though I was waiting for the driver. The fornicator and fornicatee had just gone into their room in the motel across the street, looking as guilty as only the Lancaster County bourgeois work ethic (cultivated by decades of stern-faced Deutsche forebears) could make them. The door closed, and I began to count. When I hit twenty-four one-thousand, the light went off. It was the third assignation, so the pattern was undeniably there. Both inclination and opportunity had been established. God, I was glad I didn't have to catch people in the act. It was bad enough doing this much.

  Poor stupid shit, I thought, as I always thought. Such a price to pay for a little love. I'd met the man's wife. I knew why he was doing what he was doing. But it was the wife who was paying me my $350 a day plus expenses, not the husband. She had the right to have him spied on; I had the right to do the spying. He didn't have the right to screw the girl he maybe loved, maybe didn't. I tried not to judge. If I'd judged, I'd never have been an investigator. We're watchers, recorders, researchers. Most of the time it's as exciting a job as that of court stenographer. But with Carlton Runnells's call, all that was about to change.

  I recorded in my notebook the time the light went out, then called home. When she answered on the fifth ring, Ev sounded sleepy. "I'm finished," I said. "Did Mrs. Evans call?" Mrs. Evans was the strident wife of Mr. Evans, the fornicator.

  "Twice. I told her you'd get in touch as soon as you got back."

  "Okay, I'll call her now."

  "She's a bitch, Mac."

  "I know."

  "Did you think about lying to her?"

  "Sure."

  "Would you?"

  "There's no romance in your soul, boy."

  "How's Carlie?"

  "Lonely. She wants her father. So do I."

  "You want your father?"

  "Smartass."

  "I'll be home right away. Keep the bed warm. And no more cases for at least a week, I promise."

  "Don't promise."

  "Why not?"

  "Carlton Runnells called."

  "The Carlton Runnells?"

  "I assume so."

  "Did he sound rich?"

  "It wasn't him. A secretary or valet or somebody."

  "Did the valet sound rich?"

  "He sounded dumb. But I made an appointment for you anyway. Tomorrow afternoon at two. At Ravenwood, if you please."

  "Good God."

  "I told you not to promise."

  "He probably wants me to guard a party or something."

  She sighed. "Don't speculate. Come home."

  I did. She woke up when I climbed into bed shortly after midnight, and we made love for the first time in over a week. It was very good, as always—predictable, warm, loving. Tomorrow was Saturday, and neither Ev nor Carlie would have school. I decided to do something with them both in the morning, and see Runnells in the afternoon.

  Chapter 2

  The three of us drove up the river to Harrisburg the next morning and hit The Museum of Scientific Discovery, one of Carlie's favorite places. It was paradise for a gifted and mechanical seven-year-old, a hands-on playground that was fun for an old fart like me as well. Evelyn had no complaints either. She was a life-sciences teacher at Hempstead High School, as well as my highly appreciated and underpaid assistant, and she was always getting project ideas from the new exhibits and experiments. Though Carlton Runnells was very much on my mind, I was able to shove him and his millions to the back of it and reacquaint myself with my daughter. In truth, there was little reacquaintance to be done. Although domestic cases took up most of my evenings for the few weeks I worked on them, Carlie and I maintained our emotional bond with no problem. She was the dearest thing in the world to me. I had delivered her myself in the middle of a snowstorm when our car got stuck in a drift on the way to the hospital. Thank God it was an easy delivery. Carlie looks like a Reader's Digest version of her mother. Her hair is red, clustering in tight curls on her head like a cap. She has her mother's eye
s too—blue and nearsighted. But while Ev wears contacts, poor Carlie is stuck with glasses, round plastic ones that make her look like a miniature owl, a fitting image since she seems bright beyond her years.

  Gifted? Of course, and Ev and I proudly take full credit for giving her the necessary genes. We might as well—if she grows up to be an ax murderess we'll get the blame. Frankly, Carlie is everything I had ever hoped to have in a son. She's intelligent, as I realize I've mentioned every other sentence; she's athletic, enough to intimidate even the older boys in the neighborhood; and her mechanical ability is astounding. Legos should hire her as a creative consultant.

  After she tore the museum apart, we lunched at McDonald's, Carlie's first choice—she has a lot to learn about taste—and then went home, where I dressed in a blue blazer, powder-blue shirt, and tie, all the better to impress the impressive Mr. Runnells, and drove over to Ravenwood.

  The name was highly anachronistic, as no one's seen a raven in the county since before Prohibition, but I had a feeling that if ravens ever returned to the area, it was more than likely they'd make Ravenwood their eyrie. The estate was located in the northern end of Lancaster County, far from Barnes-Fordham attractions, as if to disclaim, through geographical distance, its comparatively tawdry origins. The closest town was a little two-street village named Lawn, just over the line in Lebanon County. The land grew more hilly here, and Ravenwood was invisible behind a row of glacial ridges covered with trees.

  I followed the instructions Ev had taken over the phone, and easily found the heavy iron gate to Carlton Runnells's estate. The supporting posts were made of heavy red stones. The mortar was cracked, and in many places chunks were missing. On the right post there was a bronze plate, weathered green, that read RAVENWOOD Built 1934. A modern-looking bell was on the side of the post, and I pushed it.