Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp

Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp

Joan H. Young

Published by Books Leaving Footprints at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Joan H. Young

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ISBN: 978-0-9765432-9-9

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To:

People in any small town who
love historic buildings

Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp

Chapter 1

Points of crinkly white
tissue paper peeled open under my fingers like the petals of a
flower around an irregular umber center. The curved stem ended in a
rubber grip. My mind struggled to rearrange the imaginary flower
into the actual contents of the carton, and a ragged gasp escaped
my lips. I pulled my hands away from the hatchet, its blade stained
a dark reddish-brown. It was a good thing I’d placed the box
solidly on Cora’s desk or it might have slipped from my hands.
Sitting with a thump in the rolling office chair, I skidded into
the wall.

“What the...? Holy moley,
Cora! Come look at this. Where did you get this box?” It was a
Tuesday in late August, too hot and humid a day to be opening boxes
containing bloody weapons.

“That one came in the
mail,” Cora answered. “Why?” She was sorting Depression Glass on
one of the work tables of her private Forest County museum, but in
response to my alarm she walked briskly to the office space,
enclosed by half walls in the corner of her large pole
barn.

“Is this some kind of sick
joke?” I asked. I’d been working my way through a stack of cartons
filled with donated items. I helped Cora once a week, and my task
this day was to make lists of the contents of each box. I continued
to hold the flaps open so Cora could see, but I didn’t want to
touch the hatchet, which lay flat and diagonally in the
box.

“Is that blood? Who would
do this?” Cora asked, peering into the box.

“It looks bloody.” I leaned
over and sniffed in the vicinity of the hatchet head. “Doesn’t
smell right, somehow.”

“What’s the postmark?” Cora
asked.

I’d already touched the
outside of the carton, as had the mailman, and probably a lot of
other people. I folded the right flap in and squinted at the
smudged inky circle on the box. “Chicago, I think. It’s pretty hard
to read.”

“Does the Post Office still
use that kind of cancellation stamp? Most things that come by mail
have a sticker with a bar code.”

“I think you can still ask
for hand cancellation, but wouldn’t that make it likely someone
would remember who mailed the box?”

“They probably get so many
packages at any Chicago Post Office no one would know.”

“What if the person paid
with a credit card?”

Cora sighed. “I don’t know.
I only use mine for online ordering. I suppose we have to call the
Sheriff’s Department.”

She opened the desk drawer
and pulled out a battered phone book that was probably out of
date.

“I’ll call,” I said,
pulling my new cell phone from my purse. “I’ve got the number
programmed in.”

Cora slid the old directory
back in the drawer. “I’ll bet you do, after that run-in with Larry
Louama’s gang.” She chuckled.

I put my finger to my lips
as the number rang through. I was glad to know there was service at
Cora’s rural location. “Detective Milford, please. This is
Anastasia Raven,” I said.

“Not going to settle for
small potatoes, I see,” Cora said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes at her and
rotated the bottom of my cell away from my face, leaving the
speaker near my ear. “This is a weird thing someone sent you.
Milford should know me well enough to realize I’m not joking. I
just wish he wasn’t so gruff.” The phone squawked. “Yes, Detective.
I’m fine, thank you. At least I think I am.”

“Put it on speaker,” Cora
requested.

I continued talking to the
detective. “I’m at Cora Baker’s. I’m going to switch to
speakerphone so she can hear too. She’s just received something
very strange in the mail.”

Milford’s voice suddenly
boomed into the air, sounding oddly tinny on the small speaker,
although deep. “... think there’s something criminal or
illegal?”

“We don’t know what to
think. I opened this box and there’s a hatchet carefully arranged
in tissue paper. The head is covered with something that’s dried
into reddish-brown flakes that could be blood, although it doesn’t
smell quite right.”

“How is the box addressed?”
Milford asked. “Wait. Don’t touch it any more than
necessary.”

“It’s all right. I can lift
the flap with something, although I’ve already had my hands all
over the outside. And the tissue paper.” I slipped a pencil under
the cardboard and folded in one edge of the box. “’Mrs. Gerald
Caulfield, Forest County Historical Society, Cherry Hill.’ There’s
no street address. That’s Cora, you know, right?”

“So I’ve been
told.”

“I guess the post office
just knew to send it out here since she doesn’t live in town any
more,” I said.

Cora had scurried to her
stash of cotton archival gloves. She returned to the office wearing
a pair and handed a set to me.

“Is there a note or
anything else in the box?” Milford asked.

“We’ve got gloves on now.
Let me look. I’ll try not to disturb anything. Oh! Here’s a card
slipped right down the side of the box where it’s easy to
find.”

“Give it to Cora, since
it’s addressed to her. What does it say?”

Cora took the card gingerly
and balanced her petite frame on an upturned potato crate.
“Detective,” she began, speaking loudly in the direction of the
phone, “I hope you are aware that I haven’t been Mrs. Gerald
Caulfield...,” she enunciated each part of the name precisely,
“...for several years now. Obviously this person is unaware of my
personal situation.”

Cora was being as polite as
possible, but I knew she was inwardly seething. Her relationship
with the owner and editor of the
Cherry
Hill Herald
had not ended amicably, and she
bristled whenever Jerry’s name was mentioned, even if it wasn’t
being connected to her. I’d gotten to know Jerry Caulfield earlier
in the year, and thought he was quite a nice man, but Cora
certainly disagreed.

“I understand, but we have
to accept that you are the intended recipient,” Milford
said.

“Well, there is that,” Cora
said. She sighed and turned the card over. “It doesn’t say very
much, Detective.”

“What, then?”

“‘
For your museum—found in
Dead Mule Swamp.’ There’s no signature. The printing is plain block
letters.”

“This hatchet wasn’t found
in any swamp,” I said. “There’s no mud on it at all.” Cora winced
at the sharp edge in my voice.

“Can you tell if there’s
anything else in the box, without disturbing things?”

I felt carefully under the
edges of the white tissue paper. “That seems to be it. What should
we do?”

“Better bring the whole
thing in here. I’ll have the lab look it over. It might just be
someone’s idea of a joke, but we can tell pretty quickly if there’s
real blood on it. That would change things a bit.”

“We’ll come right away.
Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

Cora picked up the potato
crate she’d been sitting on and lifted the carton the hatchet had
come in, sliding it into the wooden crate like a drawer into a
cabinet. “We can carry it in this without touching the box. I don’t
feel like wearing gloves all day.”

“Cora, let’s drop this off
and treat ourselves to lunch at the Pine Tree Diner.”

Her gaze dropped to the
floor. “Maybe not today. I don’t want to discuss this in a public
place.”

“Oh, come on! I bet you
haven’t eaten out since our treasure hunt earlier this summer.”
Cora began to restack the remaining unpacked boxes by the desk and
didn’t look at me. My suspicion was confirmed by her fidgeting. “We
can talk about your interesting gift in the car. Have you even been
to town since July?”

“Not really; Tom does my
shopping, you know.” With thin fingers she straightened one of the
straps on her faded blue overalls and checked nervously to be sure
the ends of her gray braids were tucked tightly around her head.
“All right, the food is decent at the Pine Tree. But, Ana, my life
was much calmer before you moved to Cherry Hill.”

“What? I didn’t have
anything to do with you receiving this hatchet.”

“Oh, I suppose not, but
lots of things have happened since you moved here.”

“And you haven’t enjoyed
that?” I said, winking at her.

“Let’s go, then,” Cora
said. She turned toward the door, still looking away from me. But I
saw her grin.

Chapter 2

There wasn’t much to do to
prepare for a trip to town. We put the crate with the box inside it
in the back seat of my navy blue Jeep Cherokee, and Cora locked the
museum and her little house on the south bank of the Pottawatomi
River. From her place to Cherry Hill, the county seat, it was
sixteen miles. Once we got off the narrow sand roads that led to
her house on Brown Trout Lane the drive was easy, straight north on
paved Freetown Road.

Cora wasn’t usually
reticent, but neither was she one to ramble, so I knew the hatchet
was weighing on her mind when she began to talk before we’d even
reached the pavement.

“Do you think it was meant
to scare me?” she began abruptly. “It was a little shocking—mostly
for you when you opened the box—but I’ve lived a long time, Ana.
I’ve seen much more frightening things.”

“If it was meant to be a
message of some kind, it’s not very clear.” I shrugged but kept my
hands on the wheel as I navigated around a deep hole in the sand
road.

“I certainly don’t know
what they were trying to say.”

The words ran through my
mind:
For your museum-found in Dead Mule
Swamp
. “The note wasn’t very
intimidating.”

“No, it was pretty bland,”
she said, shifting her hips and pulling the shoulder belt away from
her neck. “Darn cars nowadays aren’t made for small
people.”

“I was thinking about the
address.”

“There wasn’t one, except
Cherry Hill,” she said.

I thought about that for a
minute. “I’m surprised the Post Office delivered it. I heard they
were really cracking down on vague addresses, and packages without
a return label,” But I suspected rural communities were still more
forgiving of missing information.

“No, there wasn’t a street
address, and whoever sent it knew I have a museum, but they still
addressed the box to Mrs. Gerald Caulfield. The first part is based
on relatively recent events, but I haven’t been Mrs. Caulfield for
four years.”

“That is strange. Maybe
it’s some kind of warning for Jerry.”

“Then they don’t know that
I’m not speaking to him,” Cora said through tight lips.

“Did that box really come
in the mail?” I asked. “There were a lot of cartons that came since
last Tuesday.”

“It was sitting beside the
mailbox post when I walked out to get the mail Saturday. The other
boxes were brought to me by Kelly Skarvaald last week. She’s
cleaning her grandfather’s attic. But I know that one was by the
mailbox because it was taped shut and labeled ‘This Side Up.’ I
just piled it with the others because I was in a hurry to do some
baking. I didn’t even look at the address label.”