May Oak Murders

It took four men and a manual forklift to move the rusted cast iron stove from its nook, nestled in a foot of pine needles and dried magnolia leaves that had blown under the carriage house roof. Despite its age and the decades of neglect, its stalwart construction proved the iron beast worthy of one last fight. The men maneuvered the stove back and forth, scraping the feet of the ornately molded legs over deteriorating bricks. Their foreheads and forearms were already shining, slick with sweat.

The clay from these red hills was terrible for brickmaking. Old pavers like this were often of the clinker brick variety: uneven in coloring, tink-tink-clink sounding when plopped together in a mortar row. So many of the old houses downtown had misshapen cisterns and wobbly driveways fashioned from the knobbly masonry.

Clementine secretly loved the sound of the old bricks, despite how expensive they were to replace during restorations. Paying old whiskered masons to hand pack the clay and fire them in their beehive kilns was always a decent line item in the budget. But that was a project for next year’s grant cycle, she figured. This summer was all about the inventory. Mr. Coturn was finally dead.

…..

The old stove used to be the workhorse of the kitchen, a room built as far away from the other activities of the house as possible to keep the heat, smells, and clamor out of the posh parlors and the elder Coturn’s home study. The sounds of sizzling onions or frying potatoes weren’t meant for the ears of the delicate class. At least, that was the argument when the kitchen was added on at the turn of the century. Before, the cookery was set further back on the property, cleaving a visible separation between the well-to-do occupants of the home and the hired help scrubbing away at the pots and pans of breakfast, lunch, and supper. At that time, it was more improper to mix company than to let the smell of a delicious roast permeate throughout the hallways.

A small pine placard was affixed beside the front door, its inlay painted black to make the raised characters easier to read from afar: “Radner-Coturn House, Est. Ca. 1842.” This house had seen a lot of history roam through its doorways, parade past its porch, and unfold like the springtime flowers in the chain of parks across the street.

All of these snippets of ethnography flitted through Clementine’s mind as she stepped further back, giving the men and the forklift plenty of space to ease the old iron beast from its carriage house cave. As ginger as they were with palms slipping from sweat and a slurry of rust, bits of the stove creaked and wobbled in protest. The cover to a hot plate shifted and tilted in its corresponding hole, misshapen from years of moving on and off to make room for a pot or a frying pan. The man nearest the tilted plate tried to flip it back into place and found the task harder than anticipated. The plate was doing its best impression of the Titanic, slanted at an angle that had wedged it more into the incorrect alignment as the rest of the movers tugged and rolled the stove over the bumpy bricks.

“Hey, will y’all stop a minute so I get this piece to fit back in?” he asked his crew. The stove stopped moving, only slightly teetering on an even section of the courtyard.

The plate was perched just above the stove’s firebox, the hottest section for cooking back when it was in service. That meant there was a convenient door to the section underneath the plate, which the mover (Clementine thought his name might be Randall, but she wasn’t sure) took as a fortuitous sign. He hooked a finger onto the little door and tugged gently, testing the hinges and the years of rusted gunk around the seal. His first try unsuccessful, he pulled with a touch more force the second time. The door let out a small squeak of metal on metal objection, swinging open on unhappy hinges.

Clementine imagined that the interior was grimy with soot and humidified carbon. Randall ducked down to peer in, seeing only a dark box in shadow in the late afternoon sunlight. He carefully stuck his hand into the firebox, feeling for the tilted plate along the top of the short shaft. Not even three inches in, he felt the plate and tried to shift it back into a horizontal position.

“Ooh!” Randall snatched his hand back, the plate clanging back into its slightly inset position. “There must be an old log in there still. The back of my hand touched it. It was… crusty.”

He didn’t look pleased but he also was used to handling dirty antiques left to rot in the elements in various ways in backyards, junk piles, and amateur antique hoarders’ poorly insulated warehouses. He reached into his back pocket to retrieve his cellphone, touching the screen twice to turn the flashlight function on. Shining the little beam into the firebox, he bent over to give the inside a good look.

“Might be a nest of something, too, so it’s not a bad idea to check for critters before we move ‘er to the warehouse,” another crew member, John, offered. Randall nodded. Clementine agreed, not wanting to have to pull out another family of cats from an artifact as she’d had to do a few years ago on another restoration project. That had been a little traumatic.

“I think it’s an old log, honestly. Just poorly mummified by the Florida heat,” Randall said. He reached back in to see how deteriorated the log might be. “It’d be easier to just brush it out here rather than have it get all over the back of the truck.”

But when he went to dislodge the log from the firebox, it didn’t really budge the right way. Clementine could tell from Randall’s face that whatever the texture was that he encountered with a fuller grip was not what he was expecting. He stopped abruptly, pulling his hand back out again. He looked at his fingers, which were covered in something: a mixture of rust, grime, and now some sort of disintegrating fiber. John looked at his hands as well, a frown of disgust forming on his face.

“I don’t think it’s a log. I think it might be a dead animal, honestly. A really dead animal. Maybe a possum crawled in there one night and died.” His face mirrored John’s, nose scrunched up like a pug’s. “Does anyone have an old plastic bag they’d like to donate to the cause?” Randall looked up and around for a willing volunteer.

“I got you,” Clementine piped up, trotting off to her little hatchback parked just outside the back gate. She knew she had plenty of random bags from the quick gas station stops she made for snacks between project sites and research rooms. She pulled a yellow dollar store bag from the back seat, the rumpled “Thank You” a cheery reminder of the chocolate bar it no doubt ferried from the cash register to her car.

She returned, handing the bag to Randall to use like a doggy bag for rover’s leftovers. He turned the bag inside out over his hand, reaching into the firebox with more confidence now that whatever was in there wouldn’t make direct contact with his palm. For a few moments, the crew stood by, living vicariously through Randall’s facial expression journey. By Clementine’s measure, it looked squishier than anticipated with a side of “ew.”

“Got it,” he said, pulling everything out and setting the bag on top of the stove. John still had his hands bracing the stove, the backsplash and warming oven on top very easily made unstable on the forklift tines. He peered at the lump with suspicion.

Randall opened the bag back up once again, trying to make out what the stove had hidden from sight before. “I honestly can’t tell what it is,” he said, rolling the plastic down, “since it’s so wrinkled. But where’s the head?” he mused, as everyone tried to fit the shape to a mental image of a possum, cat, or even a large squirrel.

“I don’t think it’s a critter after all. Unless it was a snake?”

A pause.

“Is that bone?” John pointed at the end closer to his side of the stove.

“Uh… maybe? I’m not touching it again to find out.”

John leaned over. He squinted. His frown deepened. “It might be a deer leg, honestly. Mr. Coturn was a hunter, after all. Could have had something to do with it.”

“Well, just make sure there’s nothing else in there before we finish moving this thing. If it’s venison jerky, it’s past its prime for sure,” the third mover suggested. Kyle might have been his name, although that morning’s introductions were so long ago in Clementine’s mind. They’d already lugged out a series of mule-drawn hunting carts, a couple banged up car bumpers, and a derelict monitor-top refrigerator from the 1920s. Mr. Coturn, forever the bachelor, had never really disposed of anything he thought he could fix up and use again. He got that frugality from his mother, a collector of antiques and a pincher of pennies.

Clementine, without missing a beat, handed Randall another plastic bag. “I figured it could be a multiple bag affair,” she said, grinning.

Randall chuckled. “Everything old Coturn was involved with was a multiple this or that affair, from what I can tell.” Everyone laughed.

He reached in once again and carefully raked along the bottom of the firebox for any lingering bits of what they now believed was ancient deer meat. As before, he set the bag and its contents atop of the stove. He peeped into the bag for the next collection of unidentified bits. This time, he looked even more perturbed at what he’d fished out. John and Kyle also lost their smiles from laughing a moment before.

“I don’t think that’s a deer leg after all.” John shuddered.

Not unless the deers Coturn hunted had evolved to have fingers.

…..

Despite the small street grid of the town’s layout, rush hour was rush hour and it took Doc Macrae about a half-hour to get from the police station to the old mansion downtown. Swinging a bowed leg from the cab of an old pick-up truck, he looked like he was ready to step out of an old spaghetti western flick at most public appearances. No one was exactly sure if it was an intentional fashion choice, or if the phrase “intentional fashion choice” had ever crossed his mind. Most folks just let him do his work in his cowboy regalia in peace, because he was, after all, the most senior detective at the station.

The heels of his boots clinked against the brick pathway leading from the parkside road down to the back of the property, to the courtyard where the moving crew and Clementine stood waiting. Clementine had called the non-emergency line of the police department, trying to describe the unexpected finding of a dismembered arm without sounding culpable. She stood just outside the gate to wave the detective down and around the mansion’s back staircase to the area they were clearing. She’d never met him before, but he matched the description Kyle had given her when he wondered aloud who they’d send to investigate the bags of forgotten forearm.

“Doc Macrae knew Mr. Coturn from way back when, so they might send him out, if he’s not busy,” Kyle mused. “He knows this house better than some of Mr. Coturn’s extended family. He used to hunt with the old guy back when he was a kid.”

Armed with that knowledge, Clementine attempted to place Doc Macrae in some sort of generation. Was he her parents’ age? Her grandmother’s? How old was Mr. Coturn when he died, anyway? The Coturns had been in this old house since the 1920s, in the city since the turn of the century. They hadn’t helped found the town or anything as genealogically-geographically noble as that, but they were prominent enough given that the elder Coturn was a statesman. The more recently late Mr. Coturn was more of a playboy, a lifelong bachelor who owned horses, fast cars, and many smart pinstripe suits. Still, he had been soft-spoken and respectful the handful of times Clementine had been able to meet with him to create his home’s historic preservation plan. Mr. Coturn’s estate planner was a little more curt with her.

“Ms. Pennock?” Doc Macrae inquired, a hand extended in an absent-minded introduction. “Where’s the arm, around here?”

“Yes,” she said, only giving his palm a fleeting squeeze before he rounded the corner and made his way to the old cast iron stove. The moving crew was getting antsy: it was nearly six in the evening and their contracted work hours were technically up at five. However, they didn’t want to unload the stove only to reload it the next day.

“Boys, you will have to leave the stove here, I’ll need to poke around a bit more and it technically is evidence in whatever this is.” Doc Macrae gestured at the half empty carriage house stalls, some still packed with old bits of furniture and equipment, others blanketed in a few year’s worth of decomposing yard detritus. “If you need to unload it off your forklift, go ahead.”

Randall coughed. John shook his head. None of them wanted to move the stove again, even if the forklift was company property. “We can prop it up so it’s stable for you. Lock the wheels. It’s heavy enough it won’t roll away, it’s just top-heavy,” John said.

The men spent a few minutes building a rough buttress out of some two-by-fours they found stacked under the back stairs. The uneven surface of the bricks was an advantage, as they allowed them to wedge the wood just so and give the old stove a back brace.

“Call us when you’re ready to complete the move, Ms. Clementine,” Kyle said, as the men shuffled out of the courtyard toward their work trucks. Clementine felt since she was the project manager, she had to be the one to stay with the detective while he did his preliminary survey.

He looked at her, expecting her to leave with the workmen. She decided he was only a little younger than her grandmother, and about twice as judgmental.

“My contract stipulates my guardianship of the property and its artifacts for the duration of this grant cycle, so I have to stay with you,” she offered as professionally as she could.

He nodded slightly. If he’d been wearing a proper ten-gallon hat, she could easily imagine an “Arighty, ma’am,” from him. She was spared, however.

“So y’all found this in pieces?” he asked her, using a pen to steadfastly rifle through the bag with the fingers.

“Yes, Randall only pulled the bigger... chunks out first. He thought it was a possum who crawled in there and died.”

Doc Macrae let a small smirk deepen the wrinkles around his mouth. He was clean-shaven, but his eyebrows bushed out to punctuate his expressions for him. The eyebrows were decidedly grandfatherly to Clementine.

“Normally, I’d agree with him. Happens all the time. People find them in their chimneys or dryer ducts. You can usually smell them before you find them.”

Clementine nodded, saying, “Yeah, the guys were saying that as well. I guess it’s more common than I’ve experienced. But I rent, so I don’t have a fireplace to capture unsuspecting marsupials.”

He nodded again, now shining a small but proper flashlight into the firebox that had been the arm’s housing for however long.

“Did y’all open any of the other oven doors?”

“No, I didn’t even think to do so.” That was true. She’d been more concerned with the one limb than with looking for any more accompanying parts. She wasn’t as freaked out about discovering a hunk of human being as one might think; then again, she’d worked as an archaeological consultant on projects that turned up bits and bones a few times. What was scarier to her was stopping movement on the grant project in order to adhere to the federal law of Section 106. The next grant payout was a month away and boy, did her checking account look forward to that deposit raising the balance like a buoy at high tide.

Doc Macrae deftly pulled at the next lower door, where the ash from the firebox would gather back when the stove was in regular use. It probably had a muddy paste of soot and coals, if not a sticky residue from neglect and pest droppings. The detective aimed his flashlight’s beam into the larger cavity, revealing a patina of carbon but, thankfully, no other body parts.

He proceeded to repeat the process on the main oven door and the warming oven up top. The stove’s pipe was back in the storage area, half hidden by leaves and dilapidation. It was vaguely crumpled, as if something heavy (like a cast iron stove) had accidentally fallen atop it and squashed it into its misshapen form. Still, Doc Macrae made his way over to the pipe to give it the same investigative treatment. Satisfied with a lack of remnants in the pipe, he returned to Clementine and the stove.

“So I’ll need you to come back with me to the station,” he said as he began jotting down a few spidery bullet points in a pocket notepad. Clementine blinked, finally truly surprised by an event today. “To make the formal statement about this southpaw we’ve got here. It shouldn’t take too long. I know you didn’t put this souvenir here.”