12: A Body of Water, by Cadlin

 

MURDER AND MAYHEM AT CHERRY CREEK

EPISODE 12

BY: CADLIN

 

 

 

A Body of Water

 

    Sheriff Wallace had expected that by the time he’d finished his second piece of pie that the town would have settled back from its current state of total chaos to its more normal state of calm confusion, but for once he was wrong. He’d seen the arrival of the Powell boys, Scotty and Cad in his new cruiser, and watched them immediately become enmeshed in the thick of it. It was an almost cast iron guaranteed fact that if something was going on those two would be connected to it somewhere along the line. It was in fact this one truism that had made his family so successful as law enforcers. Four generations of the Wallace family had spent most of their time trying to keep the Powell family fenced in, after all if you had to have crime it was best to have it organised. For a moment he wondered at what point he would discover their involvement in today’s events, but the thought was cut short when Beau burst in breathless, crumpled and excited. "Pat! You’d better come quick", he almost shouted "Judd’s gone and fished us up a body".

 

     Two hours later, Sheriff Wallace was standing by the side of the lake, trying to get some clean air into his lungs and not to lose that second piece of pie in the process. Fortunately the bloated and rotting corpse was now covered. He’d seen some things in his time but nothing had prepared him for this. The body had been in the water for quite some time and nature had not been kind to it, but then nature was very practical when it came to leftover meat. Pat looked round, Beau and the two other deputies he’d brought with him were no longer excited at the thought of a dead body. They now looked grim and ashen faced, the gruesome reality of hauling a rotting corpse out of the lake had sobered them up real quick, the only one who didn’t seem to be affected by it was Sirus Vance, the local undertaker. But then Sirus had been through WW2 as a medic, so he’d probably seen a lot worse in his time. Pat was glad he’d thought to bring him along; the matter of fact way he’d dealt with the body had helped keep everyone calm. Sirus was the closest thing Cherry Creek had to a Coroner, not that they really needed one in this case because nobody went swimming chained and shackled to a concrete block, and definitely not with all their clothes still on.

 

     Having placed the body in a temporary casket, Pat let the four men carry it back up through the woods to Sirus’s hearse. Pat sent the deputies back with Sirus. He wanted to be alone, as he needed time to think. If only Judd hadn’t made such a dramatic entrance into town, then maybe he might have been able to keep this under local control, but that wasn’t going to happen now. Half the damn town must have heard Judd blurt out his story, not to mention Jackson, that snot nosed kid reporter. When tomorrow’s edition hit the streets the whole county would know, the real problem wasn’t that they had found a body, but where they had found it.

 

     The lake was on federal owned ground, and that meant federal involvement. The last thing Pat wanted was a bunch of Hoover men raking over his town, Cherry Creek had too many skeletons for that.

 

     Sheriff Wallace took a slow drive back to town, every bump and pothole he hit was accompanied by a wail of sirens and a flashing of lights, which did nothing to improve his mood, he’d kill those two half wits when he got his hands on them. Once back in his office he made the relevant phone calls and put the wheels in motion, there was nothing else he could do now but sit back and wait to see what happened next. Taking out a cheroot Pat lit and took a long draw on it, then shook the match out while exhaling the smoke towards the ceiling, shit he thought who’d be a sheriff when you had days like this.

 

     The news spread across town like some particularly virulent form of the plague. Within hours there wasn’t hardly a person who hadn’t been infected by it, pet theories on the who, the why, and the wherefores began to circulate. There hadn’t been this much malicious gossip since Reverend Roy Sanders’ daughter Lucy, had been found to be with child and couldn’t be sure which of the boys who attended the church socials was most likely to be the father. The Powell boys had made a small killing out of that one, by running a book on who the father was, and whether or not he would marry her or take to the hills. They would have made an even bigger killing, if only it hadn’t taken quite so much good quality alcohol to get Dr Philips drunk enough to reveal the results of the blood tests.