Wisdom Spring (19 page)

“Then we’re missing something,” she said.

“This article,” asked Scott, “has gotta be about Hillstrom, right?”

“I suppose it doesn’t have to be,” answered Jess, “but I’d guess that’s the best bet. Why?”

But Scott was on a mission and had already walked away. He went up to Elmer.

“So, Elmer, have you read all these magazines and newspapers?” Scott had learned how to communicate with the man. Starting off with a joke that he hoped would lead to an answer was obviously his method.

Elmer just gave him a dirty look.

“Ever run across anything in here about Gary Hillstrom?”

“What the hell is a Gary Hillstrom?”

“You know, he’s a senator. Just decided to run for president?”

“There’s a reason I live in Alaska. It’s about as far away from Washington as I can get. I don’t know who’s running for president, and I couldn’t give a shit. I might know the name of our governor if you give me a second to think.”

Although Scott and Elmer were doing some friendly sparring, I had no doubt that Elmer was telling the truth. He probably wanted to stay as far away from the lower forty-eight as he could. Their problems were not his problems.

“Marie,” Scott pointed to Jess, “does some writing, and had heard somewhere that Hillstrom had some ties to Homer. I’ve never heard of it, but you’ve been here a bit longer.”

“About four generations longer,” interrupted Elmer.

“Yeah. Well, now that Hillstrom is running and she was going to be here anyway, she figured she’d see if it was true. Obviously not.”

“Obviously.” Elmer was done.

Scott motioned for us to follow. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Not if I see you first.” His joke was as old as he was.

We were standing in front of the store trying to figure out our next step, when there came a banging on Elmer’s window. We looked in and he crooked his finger toward Scott. Scott looked at us and went back into the store. We were close behind.

We stood in front of the counter while Elmer rummaged through his bulging desk. He didn’t say anything, but held up a finger to say wait a minute. Finally, he grunted and emerged with a single sheet of paper that looked like it came off a stenographer’s pad.

“That name Hillstrom. It suddenly rang a bell as you were going out the door. I had a guy a year, maybe two years ago, ask me about him. I wrote down the name ‘Hillstrom’ and the guy’s name and phone number.”

I was excited, but I already knew better than to interrupt Elmer. Scott, on the other hand, had no problem.

“Why was he asking you about him,” asked Scott.

“Beats the crap out of me. He saw a picture, and got all excited about something. It’ll take me a minute to remember where I put that photo. It was in a frame.”

“Do you know who the man was who asked?” said Jess.

“Yeah, it was him.” He pointed to a framed article hanging on the wall near his desk. We quickly crowded around while Elmer painfully got out of his chair to go find the photo.

It was a travel piece from the
Washington Post Magazine
on Homer, with a good-sized section on Wolf Run and Elmer, as the resident expert on the history of the town.

Suddenly Jess gasped, then turned white. They always talk about people suddenly turning white, and I thought it was an exaggeration. But I had just witnessed it in person.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Look at the author of the article,” she whispered. Right under the title was the name Robert Norton.

“My father,” she said simply.

“Yeah, that’s the name on the piece of paper,” said Scott, reading Elmer’s note.

“Did you know he was here?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I had no idea. I didn’t always know where he was going, and sometimes he combined trips to save the paper some money.”

“So, obviously he was here to write a travel piece about Homer,” said Scott. “So what do you think got him interested in Hillstrom? Had he ever mentioned him to you?”

“Never. He was a
Post
reporter, and although he didn’t do hard news, he was obviously familiar with the politicians in Washington. But I wouldn’t think he’d have any interest in any of them.”

“Here it is,” called out Elmer. It was the most animated I’d seen him. He was winding his way through the junk with a picture frame in his hand. “I used to have this hung up where that article is now. The reporter got so excited when he saw the picture, he asked to take it to make a copy. I let him. But he returned it promptly. Nice guy. Don’t meet a lot of nice people from the lower forty-eight.”

He handed the picture to Scott, who showed it to us.

“Oh my God!” exclaimed Jess.

It was a picture dated thirty years earlier of a group of twelve people, all with smiles and their arms around each other, standing around an outdoor grill. Looking to be about twenty-five years old, was Gary Hillstrom! There was no question in my mind that I was looking at a young Hillstrom.

“So what’s so interesting about the picture?” chimed in Elmer, oblivious to the silence that had suddenly come over us.

I slowly turned the picture toward him and pointed to Hillstrom. “Do you know who that is?”

“Of course. That’s Ben Fremont.”

“Not Gary Hillstrom?”

“Hell, no. I could never forget Ben, or any of them, for that matter. They’re all dead—well, except for Clyde,” he pointed to an older man. “He’s still alive, but about ninety now and crazy as a loon.”
Takes one to know one
, I thought.

“What do you mean they’re all dead,” asked Scott.

“How long have you been here?” asked Elmer, implying that Scott was either stupid or deaf. “You’ve never heard the story?”

“I guess not,” answered Scott patiently.

“Goddamn flatlanders,” said Elmer to the air, referring to Scott. “Why do we let them come here?” He addressed us all. “Well, find a pile to sit on, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

We found small tables and broken chairs to sit on and dragged them over to Elmer’s desk. Jess had discovered an empty wine barrel, and ended up with the highest seat in the house. As we got settled, the door opened and a local guy, obviously familiar to Elmer, started to walk in.

“Get out, I’m closed!” Elmer shouted, and the man turned tail and literally ran out of the store.

“That must’ve come as a shock to him,” I said to Scott.

“Probably,” Scott answered. “That was the mayor.”

“Are you two done?” asked Elmer, glaring at us.

“Go ahead,” said Scott.

He started, almost cutting Scott off. “This was the last picture taken of the Wilcox family and their employees. Mort Wilcox owned the Moose Antlers Restaurant—a stupid name, if you ask me—the most popular eating spot in town. On a Saturday night you had to wait in line to get in, and you saw everyone you knew there. Food was good, and it was cheap. Nobody had much money back then—Homer wasn’t the thriving metropolis it is now—and if you weren’t at the Porthole Bar, that’s where you were.”

He continued, “So you had Mort and Sally Wilcox, their two sons, Pete and Aaron, and their daughter Erin. Tell me, what kind of brains does it take to name your kids Aaron and Erin? You say those two names and tell me if you hear a difference? And they didn’t even come up with a nickname for one of them. They just lived with the confusion. Anyway, they had seven workers besides the family. I can’t remember most of them, ‘cept your boy Ben, and Clyde, the dummy.”

“Dummy?” asked Jess.

“Yeah, he wasn’t right. A little slow. Actually, a lot slow. He did odd jobs there. Some people made fun of him and called him a dummy. Not your friend Ben. The two of them were close. Strange, ‘cuz Ben was smart, really smart, but it was like he had a soft spot for Clyde. He was very patient with him.”

“Was Ben from here?” I asked, taking the chance that I would incur Elmer’s wrath for interrupting him. But he seemed to have mellowed out.

“No. Showed up about three years before. He was probably about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. Don’t know his story. Never did. But the Wilcox family took him in. Gave him a job and found a small room for him. Over time he and Erin, who was about his age, became sweet on each other. Mort and Sally seemed okay with it. They liked him.”

He took a sip of ice-cold coffee that had a look of sludge about it.

“Then one day—almost thirty years now—Clyde walked into the restaurant early in the morning to clean, and discovered Mort, Sally, Pete, Aaron, and one of the employees dead. They’d all had their throats slit. Must’ve made the national news.” He looked at us expectantly.

We looked at each other and shook our heads.

“I would’ve been about ten,” I said. “And Scott would’ve been seven.”

“I wasn’t even born yet,” said Jess.

Elmer made a disgusted sound. “Well, anyway, they were dead, and Erin, Ben, and the other employees were all missing. State Police came in, but they had nothing to go on. Then a few days later, another body—Smitty, that’s right, I’d forgotten about him—anyway, they found Smitty’s body up in the hills off a trail. Again, his throat slit. A month later they found Erin’s remains. Not much left. The animals had done a pretty good job. They never found the bodies of Ben or the other three. I think they just assumed they went by way of the animals.”

“Did they ever suspect anyone?” asked Scott.

“For a time they wondered about Erin and Ben, ‘cuz Clyde told ‘em that Erin had a knock-down drag-out argument with her parents the day before. He didn’t know why. Some people wondered if it was about her seeing Ben. The cops wondered—as sick as it was—if Erin had enlisted Ben’s help in killing her family, then they took off. Wasn’t much of a theory, especially since Ben and Erin had been going together for over a year with Mort and Sally’s blessing. When they found Erin’s body, that was the end of that theory.”

“Did you tell my f… the
Washington Post
reporter the story?” asked Jess.

“Oh yeah. He asked a lot of the same questions. Like you, he was convinced Ben was this guy Hillstrom. I don’t see how. I think he was killed along with the others.”

Elmer was finished with his story, and Scott asked to borrow the picture so we could copy it.

We went back to Scott’s house for a bite to eat, each of us deep in our thoughts. When we arrived, Scott made us lunch and we sat around the table looking at each other.

“So,” said Scott, breaking the ice. “Does that help or just make it more confusing?”

“It’s gotta help somehow,” I said. “I think that was the article we were supposed to see, as a link to the picture. What do you think, Jess?”

I looked over at her and saw a tear running down her face.

“It clears up some things for me,” she said quietly. “There’s something I’ve known for a while, but I didn’t want to tell you until I understood why. Now I do. It all makes sense now why I was led here.”

“You see,” she continued. “The Voice is my father.”

Chapter 21

“Your father?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Scott just raised his eyebrows. Never one to jump to conclusions, he wanted to hear this one out.

“I began to realize it after you killed the man in Utah. When I had my breakdown and you were trying to talk me through it, remember I told you that I was getting feelings and emotions coming from The Voice that kind of matched your words?”

I nodded.

“Well, that wasn’t all. Two real words also came through from The Voice, and they were repeated a few times. The words were “punkin” and “persevere.” My father always called me Punkin. He also refused to let me give up and was always telling me to persevere when I was going through a difficult time. It also explains why The Voice is always so comforting, and why it seems to know me. I always feel a tenderness coming from it, even when it’s yelling at me.”

“And now we know why you were set on this path a year ago,” I said. “You were the only person your father could communicate with, as fragmented as it is.”

“Why would he bother, though?” asked Scott. “Why would he get his own daughter involved in something like this and put her life in danger?”

I couldn’t believe we were talking about a dead guy as if he were alive and in the next room.

“Unless the consequences of Hillstrom going through with this were worse than any danger she could be in,” I said.

Jess let out a little gasp, then looked at me. “Do you think it’s possible that my parents’ death on that ferry wasn’t an accident?”

I quickly filled Scott in on the details of their demise.

Jess continued, “What if the picture my father saw prompted him to contact Hillstrom? Especially if Elmer told him the story he told us. My father wasn’t an investigative reporter, but any good journalist would follow up on that. What if he uncovered other things too? Hillstrom would have had to have him killed. Oh my God. This is just too much.”

She stopped and thought for a moment, trying to slow down her breathing. I could see her shaking and I reached out and held one of her hands. Finally she said, “The whole last year is now beginning to make sense. And now I know why I was led here. This is where it all began.”

“I can’t believe he passed on too much information about his suspicions,” said Scott. “If he had, Elmer would probably be long-since dead and his business burned to the ground. I’d guess your father just asked a few questions about Hillstrom’s past. Maybe enough to worry them.”

“And maybe enough to get him killed,” Jess said quietly, with a deep sadness in her eyes.

“Let’s assume,” I said, trying to move on, “that Hillstrom
is
the man in the picture. He showed up here at the age of twenty-one, or thereabouts, but from where? Elmer didn’t know, but did someone?”

“If Elmer didn’t know, the chances of anyone else knowing, are slim,” said Scott. “He pretty much knows everything that is happening or did happen in this town.”

“We’ve gotta try,” I said. “Maybe you could ask Elmer if Hillstrom … Ben … hung out with anyone else.”

“If he did kill everyone,” said Jess, “why not Clyde?”

I could see that Jess was struggling to maintain her composure. The idea that her parents might have been murdered had really thrown her for a loop.