Once Cameron's figured out what probably happened to Dr. Kerr (and that's probably not good news), he agrees to meet Chief Inspector Bond and several other IMP agents at what is now called "The Crime Scene" on the edge of town. As new problems develop inside the lab, complicating their search for this mysterious intruder, two Aficionati engineers turn out to be IMP undercover agents who, once their colleagues have infiltrated the building, now need to figure out what's with all the smoke...
And now, Kerr, having somehow found himself back in Trazmo's room during that fateful blizzard when the former prodigy supposedly disappeared, finds himself in another surprising situation, speaking of a "what the...?" moment.
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CHAPTER 24
And just like that, here I was, covered with snow and shivering from the cold, standing in a familiar-looking motel room. Since I could see sunlight through the half-closed blinds, it must be daytime, but was it the same day it had been the last time I'd seen it? Puddles of melted snow quickly evaporated.
So, where was Cameron? The last time I'd seen him, he'd been sitting in that now-empty chair, meditating. Had he made it into the room next door; could that be where he was now? I went into the bathroom – no sign of him, there – toweled my hair, then looked around for any note he'd left. What did he think happened to me when he returned to the surface? Or had my sudden departure interrupted his concentration? Maybe he thought, while he was “under,” someone broke in and kidnapped me.
If I couldn't see him, calling out so tentatively was ridiculous, but I refused the temptation to look under the bed. There was no phone on his nightstand, just that book on Nepali meditation. Since he did the driving, I remember seeing the keys to the rental car there earlier; they, too, were conspicuously absent. But there on my nightstand was my phone, not where I'd left it: I'd been sitting on the bed, not meditating, when Bond's call came in; the last thing I remembered was fumbling it.
“Might as well check my phone,” I thought, “see if anybody missed me.” There were several calls and, worse, several voice-mails. The most recent came in from Tom Purdue. Had Cameron missed his 1:00 appointment (“uhm, Terry's not here right now, so...”)? I had to check the time – no, just a little past noon. (Wow...) But if Tom was that concerned our phones had been hacked (he always had been paranoid about Big Brother and technology), why leave me a message now on my phone from his cell phone?
On the other hand, my general cynicism made me think maybe it wasn't Tom at all, now: if “they” knew my phone was back on-line, what if it's the hacker trying to reach me? Can a hacker gain access merely from me listening to a voice-mail message? When I hit play, however, it was Tom.
“Hi, Terry – this couldn't wait.” He didn't sound particularly urgent, but I could hear some concern in his voice. “During the night, I discovered something you should know. It makes no sense to me. I was wide awake worrying about that other stuff, when I searched for some videos to take my mind off everything. What I found was really unsettling. I know, a new piece by some young conservatory student from Missouri, big deal, right? So I started listening to it half-heartedly when something strange caught my attention.
“Suddenly I heard this phrase so familiar, I could almost identify it except I couldn't figure out what he was quoting. Then it finally dawned on me: I'd written it – a long time ago. In fact, it's from that piece I was working on at the White Hill Colony in Iowa that year – that year!
“It's not just a few notes, it's several measures, a whole phrase, note-for-note. Now, I never finished or published that piece, but I always remembered it. There were other bits that also sounded familiar. It's called Absence & Return, this piece; it's by Dexter Shoad – dedicated to his piano teacher, Rose Philips, 'who inspired it.' Now, how would this kid – who's, what, 20-something? – know what I'd been working on at that Colony days before Trazmo disappeared? And... he and his piano teacher live not far from where you are.”
Now, there's a large chunk of coincidence I think the Universe would have a little trouble explaining. What were the odds...?
“Just wanted to tell you – it bamboozles the mind!” and he signed off.
A massive amount of finger-pointing from that very same Universe suggested I should pay Mr. Shoad and Ms. Philips a visit.
Usually, I let Cameron handle the technological details, but I decided to log into the laptop assuming I could remember my own password – ah, I did! – and do a little research of my own.
It didn't take long to find the video and track down what little information – very little – about the two names involved, but lots of stuff about this Allegro Conservatory where Shoad was a student. Shoad's hometown was a place called Sanza in northwest Missouri, south of Orient, where Rose Philips was a long-time piano teacher.
As for Sanza, MO, how to get there? There were no train connections, apparently no bus routes, either. And forget airports. The suggested directions, two different routes, were both a little over an hour. Cameron had the rental (wherever he was) so how would I get there, not that I wanted to do the driving.
Time to call Cameron.
My call went unanswered, so I left a message. “Where are you? I'm – uhh... here at the motel. We need to go to Missouri – get back to me... right away?”
In the meantime, there was the need for lunch. So much for a trip to Someplace Else. “The Dining Car” will have to do, one of their “Poirovian Club Car Sandwiches with Christie Chips.” When I walked in, Hank behind the counter told me “your associate was lookin' for you, maybe 'bout an hour ago?”
(I'd been gone that long?) “Just missed him!”
I thanked him and took my sandwich back to the room to wait. Still no sign. Why hadn't he just waited for me in the room?
Reluctantly, I decided I needed to get to Sanza with or without him, so I called the desk for Alice Hubbard's number again with the hope I could arrange another ride with Uber Alice. She could meet me in twenty minutes at the motel, so I called Cameron one more time and left another message.
When I'd given Alice the address, she seemed mildly surprised but made no comment, quickly checking the GPS, calculating the mileage and quoting me a price which, I guess, seemed reasonable enough, given everything. There's around two hours' driving, total, plus whatever time it'd take talking to them. We'd probably stop somewhere to eat dinner. I pretended I was tracking down loose ends for a friend's family back East and had found some unexpected genealogical leads. She didn't seem terribly interested so I didn't dig myself in any deeper.
Whatever I expected to find, it couldn't be weirder than my latest discoveries. There was plenty of time to prepare myself. Perhaps the best tack was to start with the piano teacher, maybe pretend I was a composer – well, I am a composer – interested in interviewing her about how she had inspired her student's composition.
Fortunately, any likely conversation with Alice was soon exhausted and I was left with my wandering thoughts. The scenery, mostly flat fields, farmhouses and the occasional hamlet, rapidly became exponentially less and less picturesque.
“You want to go gravel? There's road construction ahead.”
“Gravel...?”
“Aw, sorry, local-speak for back roads. Shorter in the long run.”
“Expect Delays,” the sign said. There, not too distant, just as we entered Missouri, you could see the traffic backed up.
“Yeah, the short-cut – avoid the delays.” She swerved off onto a side road.
Sanza wasn't a big town like the county seat down the road, but what I found on-line indicated a pleasant place to live, with an old-fashioned, Midwestern mind-set for kids to grow up in. “A place where you couldn't measure time,” the town's official website proudly declared. The weekly newspaper was called “The Sanza Times.” Photographs on the website included a well-kept park across from the town hall, its circular bandstand surrounded by well-trimmed rose bushes. Did anything like the Express Motel constitute a seedier part of the town?
Cameron trained me how to become enough of a stalker on the Internet. I soon tracked down “long-time resident and respected piano teacher,” Rose Philips who's been teaching Sanza's children for thirty years – interesting... In a directory of “local music teachers” was a listing for Ms. Philips, only a block from that bandstand's well-trimmed roses.
We were on a back country road beyond the middle of nowhere, greening fields all around us, a cluster of woods here and there, without a house in sight, the road barely a road. Alice continued driving, fully focused on the road, fully confident in her directions. Still, I had this gnawing sense of trouble.
“I know these GPS things are modern technological miracles and all,” I said, breaking the silence, “but are you sure this...?”
“Don't you worry, Dr. Kerr,” she said, “I know exactly where we are.”
She pointed at the map read-out which I could barely see, but what I did notice was a faded photograph stuck to the dashboard above the screen, a family shot taken at a picnic. An older man on the right caught my attention: orangey-red hair, pale complexion.
“Oh, him? He's my Uncle Guido – from Italy.”
She wondered, me being a geologist and all, if I couldn't do one of those things rooting through her family tree. “Mom's often wondered about Guido and his family back in the Old Country. We don't know much about his story or how he ended up here – never talked much about life back in Venice.”
“Venice?” I swallowed hard. “Why, I'd just been in Venice and saw a few people who looked kind of like him.”
“Really? His name was Ciapollo. I wonder, d'you think they could be related?”
“Oh,” I said, “we're here already?” It sounded like sarcasm, but I recognized the bandstand in the park on the right. The sign, “Welcome to the Town of Sanza,” was no doubt the clincher. The last part of the trip, however many miles and even more minutes it lasted, passed in resumed but uneasy silence. I'd promised her, if I got back to Venice any time soon, I would ask around, see what I could find. Meanwhile, here I was, ominously alone with the niece of yet another Ciapollo.
The house Alice pulled up to was a well-kept, two-story frame house painted pale blue with a wrap-around porch and dormers. There was a helpful sign in front, also: “Rose Philips – Piano – (inquire within).”
“This must be the place,” I said, as jaunty as possible. “Could you wait here, Alice? I shouldn't be too long.”
There were rose bushes growing beneath the sign, two large roses at either side of the steps up to the porch with other shrubs and lots of tulips and daffodils planted across the front. A gravel path wound around toward the side street; whatever Ms. Philips did with her spare time, she apparently enjoyed gardening.
I wanted to call Cameron again, let him know I'd arrived, but when I flipped the phone open, it was dead. No signal in or out, not even the time and date.
“Damn technology...”
Stepping across the porch – one of the boards creaked – I noticed the door was ajar but there were no lights on. I heard someone moving around as I slipped my phone back in my pocket, but didn't hear anyone playing the piano – she's between students, waiting for her next pupil? Then I heard a crash.
I looked back to get Alice's attention but she was already walking up the street toward the park, on her phone. Young children ran up and down the bandstand steps: a game of hide-and-seek.
“Ms. Philips...?”
I stepped up to the door, cautious about ringing the bell. Was she in the kitchen and dropped something? I didn't want to walk in unannounced and startle her if she was. Then again, I didn't want to knock on the door and announce myself so someone burgling the place knew I'm coming.
There wasn't much to see through either of the front windows – the drapes were open but sheers obscured the view – so I walked over to the left side which looked into the front parlor. There was enough to know the dread in my stomach wasn't just the Poirovian Club Car Sandwich I'd had for lunch.
Behind an ornate, wrought-iron table, I had found an opening between the sheers. If I cupped my hands around my eyes, I could see the fireplace and a sofa reminding me of my grandmother's.
The place had been ransacked, things tossed everywhere. There's enough light to see through the archway into the next room. I wasn't sure: were those legs on the floor? And were they still alive?
I couldn't call 911 on a dead phone. Alice stood near the bandstand but couldn't see me waving frantically at her.
So I stepped inside into the ominous gloom.
There wasn't time to let my eyes adjust. I pushed the door back as far as it would go in case someone hid himself behind it.
The only sound I heard was the leaden ticking of a grandfather clock. I kicked against some magazines on the floor.
A lamp and a chair had been knocked over, everything on the mantle shoved about or swept off onto the hearth.
Before I heard him, someone grabbed me around my neck, knocking me down.
Quickly overpowered, I crumbled to the floor and rolled away to the right but not fast enough to shake my assailant. I couldn't catch a glimpse of him – I say “him” since it was unlikely to be Rose Philips, mild-mannered, middle-aged local piano teacher, unless she smoked heavily and had a preference for cheap-smelling beer.
He'd caught me from behind, wrapping something across my neck like a garrotte, but he was having problems holding it tight. I tried scrambling away when he'd lost his grip and kicked at him.
Then he threw his weight against my hips, grinding my chest into the carpet as he pulled the would-be garrotte tighter. It would've been easier to hit me over the head with a candlestick. However, I desperately tried to steer him away from the fireplace so he couldn't bang my head against the stone hearth.
As long as this dragged on, I hoped maybe he'd tire himself out before he broke every bone in my body. He yanked me up like a rag doll. The pain was more intense than anything I could remember from the past. Now would be a good time for Cameron's meditation escape to kick in.
I know I should go limp, save my energy, pretend I'd passed out. That's not how fear works in the moment. This guy wasn't going to kill me that easily, not without a fight.
My mind raced with possibilities, not who this was or what I'd walked into; not why was this happening to me. I consciously wondered how I'd orchestrate this and ratchet up the harmonic tension.
This had become a scene in an opera. Clearly, it couldn't be sung: everything's in the orchestra, molto furioso, scrambling strings.
My gasps became choked-off chords in the winds; my kicking, stabbing attacks in the brass; glockenspiel and vibes cascaded like shattering glass broken by a whip-crack.
What'll happen once everything stabilized, the tension released?
The man hauled me up to my feet but I could barely breathe. I hoped my thrashing about would kick him hard, knock him off balance.
He twisted me to the left and right.
Things grew darker, my gasps more wrenching, when – subito – I heard a shot.
I felt suspended in mid-air.
Then I dropped.
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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