The Winter Sickness by John Eider
Toby didn’t bolt for it, but let himself be shut in.
Once they were all inside, Sarah’s expression remained one of cold fury. Her arms were crossed in defiance. Toby had stepped into something here, he knew. A trap had been sprung. But set by whom and for what reason?
Adding to the oddness was the fact that it was Jake who led the talking, despite this being Mrs Emsworth’s house.
‘I told you you would see me again.’
‘Another prank, Jake?’ asked Toby, trying to sound tough. Yet he heard the words catch in his throat, almost squeaking at one point.
‘Not a prank, Toby. Not a prank at all.’
From his position up the stairs, Jake could remain seated yet still have the highest eyeline. Perhaps sensing the snare complete though, he lifted himself to shuffle down to ground level,
‘Take a seat,’ he instructed. Ridiculously, Toby did as he was told. He was no longer sure what was happening or where the power lay. He sensed that in that room his badge and his billy club were as useless as their foam equivalents in a boy’s police playset.
Toby looked then at his colleague from the Sheriff’s Office, still totally amazed,
‘Sarah, what are you doing here?’
But it was Jake who answered for her,
‘All in good time, Deputy. Ladies, please, if we could have ten minutes?’
They did exactly as he asked. The men sat opposite each other on the sofas, while the women receded to remain on the periphery, moving into different parts of the house but always in view and in earshot. Toby found this disconcerting, as if being kept under distant watch. He asked Jake,
‘You’ve been here all these weeks?’
‘Since the day after we last met. Or rather the night after. Gill Emsworth came to collect me from the house party. That house was on the outskirts, luckily, so I’d gotten there on foot; but I couldn’t risk walking into town on Council night. She drove me here on the back seat, beneath a rug.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘It was all planned you see – well, maybe not that bit, but it was always going to be this way.’
Toby didn’t speak, so Jake was almost needing to make conversation,
‘You know we nearly didn’t make it, you or I, when the snow came early.’
‘And what..?’ Toby couldn’t even form a question.
‘What am I doing here? I told you, I’ve been doing my research into your town, your secret lives. I could have published what I thought was going on here months ago. But this is the Internet Age, and people don’t believe anything without pictures and videos anymore.’
‘You’re here to film us?’
‘What did you think – that I was here to soak up the ambiance?’
Toby stiffened suddenly, remembering the town they were in and what he meant there,
‘What’s to stop me going right outside and calling in a dozen men?’
‘And arrange another car crash?’ (Toby winced at the reference.) ‘For me, for Gill, for Sarah?’
‘Sarah.’ Toby remembered it all then.
Chapter 26 – Sarah and Tommy
Jake narrated, ‘Sarah, who comes into the Sheriff’s Office on holidays and weekends to help Margaret the Sheriff’s secretary. Glad of the distraction, because her family have all left town: her sister Terri and her husband Joss, and their boy Tommy. Though little Tommy didn’t leave town, did he, he lies in the graveyard. Tommy Richter, who’d died four winters ago, in the year they called the Worst Year, supposedly in a car crash joyriding. Little Tommy who hated cars, who wouldn’t even travel with his dad in his truck, because the shaking on the town’s bumpy roads reminded him of the fits he used to have.’
Toby felt like he was going to start shaking himself.
‘So you get it now?’ Jake continued to speak for the three of them, the women maintaining their distance. ‘I’m sure you remember the tale of Tommy Richter’s death.’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘I know, you missed that year, the Worst Year. Two deaths, wasn’t it? One of them murder – or one that I’ve uncovered so far. I don’t know who the other boy was that your Sheriff’s Office placed in that car.’
‘Tommy wasn’t murder,’ began Toby, feeling the women’s eyes burn into him from other rooms. ‘He was epileptic. It was a seizure, it could have happened anywhere.’
‘Only it isn’t anywhere, is it, where having a fit has you beaten black and blue.’ Jakes eyes flashed then, ‘And I notice you didn’t deny the car crash was faked?’
‘And how would I know?’
(But Toby did know, knew it for a fact, though hadn’t found out till months later.)
Sarah, the boy’s aunt, re-entered the room, explaining,
‘Tommy was too young for the sickness. But those brutes beat him up anyway, shouting at him to calm down. They’d never seen an epileptic seizure before. They thought he was defying them, thought he needed punishing.’
‘And then...’ Jake laughed grimly at the horror of it. ‘And then, someone made the decision to put this boy’s dishonoured body in a motorcar and shove it over a hillside... God, it’s the Wild West out here. Even the dead aren’t sure of burial!’
‘He got a burial.’
‘Yes, the second time around. But he didn’t get the truth, did he, Toby?’
Gill Emsworth came in and put her hands on the troubled woman’s shoulders. Meanwhile, Jake took back the reigns, getting up and joining the women standing on the wooden floor,
‘They killed him, Tobes. Men you are lined up alongside again this year. They killed him, pure and simple. And then your friend the Doctor signed the autopsy report to say his bruises had been caused in the car wreck.’
Sarah cried again, to further comforting. Jake, apparently the world’s expert on Stovian Affairs, resumed,
‘Poor Thomas. He had a seizure. No worse than that, nothing that his mother hadn’t had to contain so many times before. Just a family secret. Had they lived in a bigger town then she might have found a doctor to take him to. But this was Stove, high up in the mountains. And so she bore a nervous twitch when it came to her child’s health.
‘The family knew they’d have to run away eventually – they feared what the sickness could do to their boy. But they hoped they had a year or two yet. Until that evening where a wired, roughed-up Deputy heard the sound of breaking glass and raised the alarm. Before he got the situation totally wrong.
‘Just an epileptic seizure then. But on the wrong night and in the wrong town.’
Toby looked to Sarah then, asking,
‘You’re in the room with us guys. How do you manage it?’
Jake answered for her,
‘Sarah’s done brilliantly, Toby. She was already half-way to breaking the secret before I was on the scene. She’d got herself nicely bedded-in at the Sheriff’s Office. Not that they’d left much for her to find.’
‘But didn’t they remember?’ asked Toby. ‘Didn’t they know you were one of Tommy’s family?’
Sarah answered from where she stood,
‘I went to them at the start of the next winter, and said I wanted to help, help the town, now that I was at a loose end.’
‘Her family had left by then, you see,’ added Jake.
Sarah went on, ‘I said I wanted to assist them in their difficult work. I played it straight, lost, downcast. They thought that giving me a few duties was an act of charity, a way of helping me get over Tommy’s death. Perhaps a way to make them feel less guilty.’
‘But how could they bear to have you there reminding them?’
‘After a while I think they forgot.’
She drifted back to the hall. Jake resumed,
‘Sarah knows the Town-side Deputies, Toby. She knows how they think. She takes their confessions, hears then agonising after every bloody battle.’
‘But never that confession?’
Jake shook his head, ‘No, none of them will speak of it. Even Sarah’s sister wouldn’t tell her which Deputy it wa
Toby looked to the ground, ‘There’s been nothing like that since.’
‘As if that makes it all okay?’ Jake had moved to a chair next to Toby’s sofa now, right in Toby’s eye-line, arms gesturing at his sides. ‘Just listen to yourself, look at what you’re excusing.’
‘I missed that year,’ he repeated, near-whispering in pathetic self-justification.
‘I know you did, and also that your calming presence since might be the reason why it hasn’t happened again. It’s also why I’m even speaking to you now, and not watching and waiting to consign you straight to hell with the others.’
‘Don’t take my kindness for granted.’ Toby’s inner-Deputy surged back suddenly, and was not open to assumptions made about him.
But Jake just laughed, and turned away, still talking as he went to the kitchen, calling from the other room,
‘You know, you don’t have to be very nice to still be the best of this town. Toby, do you think it’s an accident I’ve been at your college, and not at Eddy’s wood yard, or Fitch’s printing shop?’
‘Because they work in Stove year-round, you couldn’t risk being seen here before the winter.’
Jake emerged with a can of cherry soda, giving it to his guest, ‘Okay then, why not hiring Job to decorate my house? Or trailing Crawley around the towns, teaching college football and freelancing as a fitness instructor? Because, to borrow a term from the commercial world, you’re the person I can do business with, Toby. Now, you need to get that into your head, because this isn’t a deal you can back out of.’
Chapter 27 – Jake’s Investigations
Once they were settled, Jake changed tack, ‘How soon will you be missed outside?’
Toby turned his head quickly, as if looking through the locked door.
‘I’ll have an hour easily. We can say that Sarah was upset by the scenes at the Hinklin house,’ (which was only down the road) ‘that they bought it all back for her.’
This brought a look of scorn from Sarah, and chastisement from Jake,
‘Don’t you dare, we don’t want anyone being reminded of her part in the town’s history.’ He turned to the women by the door,
‘Though don’t be upset with our friend’s efforts to help us, Sarah. He’s feeling his way into this. And an hour should cover us. For we need to go backwards before we can go forwards, for the Deputy’s benefit.’
‘Why do anything for him?’ she spat, at last able to unleash long-held fury.
‘Because we need him, Sarah. You know we do. Now, will you give us some space? I don’t want to scare the guy off.’
He asked this kindly, and the women again agreed.
He turned to Toby,
‘Shall we have a proper drink?’
With Jake reaching to the cabinet from the low sprawling sofas of the Emsworth home, they split the can of soda with a little something extra in their glasses.
‘But why are we in this house?’ began Toby,
‘Because it has far the better views from the upper windows. They show you half the town, in fact.’
‘But what’s Mrs Emsworth got to do with it, when it’s Sarah who’s your ally?’
Gill Emsworth answered herself – for the women hadn’t really left earshot, as they wouldn’t the whole time the men were downstairs,
‘I felt Tommy’s death just as strongly. His parents were my friends, I was bridesmaid at their wedding. Sarah has confided in me from the start.’
Jake confirmed, ‘Rest assured, Toby, Gill shares every bit of her friends’ feelings for your operation. And they aren’t the only ones.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Don’t look so shocked. I thought you knew the people of this town?’
‘Perhaps as well as Carvel knows you?’
Jake smiled at the retort, ‘Knew. I won’t be back there. Though almost everything that the college know about me is true. I only kept my motive for choosing Carvel a secret.’
With Toby listening, Jake began his story,
‘I really am a scientific researcher. Freelance, moving from town to town, project to project. Three years ago I was working for a famous motor corporation, investigating deaths in autos of their manufacture. It was no fun, I can tell you, going through five-hundred police case-files of teenage deaths in auto wrecks. I was looking for accidents where safety fittings were criticised by investigators, or were found to have failed – seat-belts, airbags, impact-protection. You know the drill.
‘Now, I often found myself speaking to law enforcement officers, just to clear things up on the file or to ask for extra details. Officers current and retired, I should say, for some of these cases went back twenty years.
‘Now, do you want to know a human truth, Deputy? Sorry, I won’t call you that... Do you want to know a human truth, Toby? Or rather two of them? One, that there is nothing sadder than the death of a child. And two, that there is nothing witnessed by a human soul that they’re as keen to share their experience of, and in so sharing unburden themselves – isn’t that Shakespeare?’
Toby didn’t know.
‘Well, either way, I would testify to each being true. These were the officers who’d attended the accident scenes, who comforted relatives, who often knew the families, especially in small towns. In those months I must have spoken to hundreds of them.
‘I’ve never known such conversations, they could go on for hours. I’d call District Attorneys out of court and drag cops off stake-outs – and every one was willing to have me do so. They only wanted to tell me how they’d tried to help the victims, or honour them as they handled their remains. I was invited to towns to look at recent wrecks still in the pound. I was even put on to the families of the victims, who were just as keen to speak. I heard of college football stars in sports cars bought them by proud fathers, daughters taken off hill roads in their SUV’s. They didn’t think that I was helping, didn’t think I’d right any wrong. They only told me of their children and how they missed them. And all I got the whole time were people glad to talk.
‘That’s until I called your town. For there wasn’t one other officer or civilian I spoke to as unwilling to help as your Sheriff Thornton.’
Chapter 28 – A Marker on the Road
Jake continued,
‘To go back a step: I’d found a report of an accident within his jurisdiction. Really a horrible, horrible business: two boys killed when their station wagon went through the barrier on a mountain road. They were found the next morning, and were handled by members of your Sheriff’s Office. It seemed exactly the kind of accident I was investigating, so I gave them a call and got through to the man himself. The conversation went something like:
“Hello, my name’s X, working on behalf of Corporation Y. I’m calling about a fatal road traffic accident that occurred in your town three years back. Two teenage boys, out on Highway...”
“Who are you, a reporter?”
“No, as I say, I’m working on behalf of...”
“And what are you asking about that for? The matter’s closed.”
“As I say, I’ve been charged with investigating it for the motor company, and I just wanted to ask a few...”
“And so you’re ringing me now, stirring up old upsets?”
“I really don’t think I’m...”
“Don’t you think the family have suffered enough?”
...This went on and on, until I made my apologies and rang off. I went away and got a coffee, cursing him: he was a public servant, Goddamnit. He had a duty to help. Now bear in mind, I didn’t know what I was dealing with then. Had I done so I wouldn’t have done what I did next, which was call him right back up, determined to force this guy to get with the programme:
“Hello again...”
“You! I’ve just told you...”
...This time though your Sheriff sounded even worse, like he was still upset from last time. And then it clicked – he wasn’t being rude, he was being de
‘In the end I didn’t use that case in my research – seatbelt integrity becomes irrelevant once a car’s gone that far down a mountain – but I took a copy, before handing the material back for storage.
‘Report completed, I gave myself a fortnight’s grace before my next job. I went over to Aspen to catch the end of the season, kicked back at my hotel, and looked the file over again: two kids, one young, one not-so young, stolen keys, a powerful car. It was the start of spring, the roads still icy. Maybe they were drunk? But the doctor quoted in the report didn’t specify. It was the kind of thing that happens all the time. There was nothing untoward, nothing criminal, no follow-up investigations. So why had the Sheriff been so cagy?
‘I knew I couldn’t leave it, so started to make more calls. A town just along the road from Stove had been quite helpful on another case, a place called Gaidon. So I called their Sheriff back, lied that I couldn’t get hold of his opposite number in Stove, and did he know why that might be? I got the feeling from the Sheriff that that wasn’t the only odd thing about your town.
‘Now, I haven’t a recording of my call to Thornton. But I didn’t make that mistake twice. Sneaky, I know, but what I got was pure gold.’
Jake leaned from his chair and pressed play on the cassette deck of the Emsworths’ hi-fi. The tape was already prepared. Toby heard the voice of the Sheriff of Gaidon:
‘So, you’re asking about Sheriff Thornton, eh? And the issue of him being evasive? Well, I sure do thank you for trusting me enough to ask the question. And I know I can trust you in return...’
‘We’d already worked together, as I say,’ interjected Jake in the room.
‘...The fact is, he can be evasive, even to me. And that’s not the only odd thing about his Office, or his town. Now, you might call this local rivalry, or just our suspicions of what goes on up in those mountains when they’re closed off for three months of the year. But a part of a Sheriff’s work is instinct, having a nose for things. And... well, let me tell you a story that to me seemed very odd at the time.