Clamtown

A new or old murder?

This is a story that I’ve had brewing for a while. It’s the start of a serial about a cop who returns to his small fishing town after years on the New York City police force, only to find that some things never change. Especially all the bad things.

Clamtown is a crime thriller with a paranormal element. I hope you enjoy it!

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The four old men smelled death before the first roll of the Yahtzee dice. It happened two mornings after an early autumn hurricane zipped up the New Jersey coast. Mel Halliday, third generation owner of Old Barney Bait n’ Tackle, dragged the warped card table out from the locked shed where it had been safely stowed so it wouldn’t get tossed into the bay when the storm barreled through. Now, two days later, the storm had passed but it was still dragging its tail across the blustery sky. By five a.m. only the pro fishermen had shown up for bait. The weather was still too rough for the local guys who crabbed off the docks and clammed, so Mel went outside to set up the table for his guys, his three best friends who would play outside until practically the first snowfall. Once the table was up and steady, he retrieved the battered Yahtzee box from the shelf behind the register, its rightful place since the 1950s.

Mel stopped midway across the sand-blown asphalt lot. He lifted his nose. The wind had suddenly shifted to westerly where it traded the sharp fish smell of the bay for the wet decay of the land. The sour whiff from deep in the scrub pine woods stopped Mel in his tracks and it caused the hair on his arms to raise.

“That’s a dead person out there,” he said aloud. He continued his trek to set up the table and the game. Behind him the cars of the other old men cruised into the lot. The first out of his 2004 Impala was Frank.

“It’s a female, too,” Frank wheezed after his own sniff. Mel didn’t bother to ask Frank how he knew. He had fished and clammed with Frank, hunted deer with him and together they served on the police force before turning in their badges in tandem when the pensions kicked in. Mel learned early on not to question how Frank knew things, because Frank himself didn’t know how he knew things, he just did. And he was always correct.

Henry pulled into one of the three parking spaces, clinking the bumper of his 1985 Cadillac Seville into the dented metal trash can that he had first dented in 1989, and he and Bernie spilled out of the tan leather seats. Mel had them sniff the air.

“Call Sean,” Henry coughed into his handkerchief. “Tell him he might’ve escaped the NYPD, but New York came callin’ and there’s a dead body to drag outta the woods.”

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The town’s name was Stirling, but it was the wrong name. The locals never really uttered the name Stirling out loud. It was a word on their bills, over the post office and on a few faded road signs by the town lines. Buried on country roads that ended in dead ends, the town wasn’t even advertised on the highway signs. The orbits of New York and Philadelphia skidded into stardust before the town began, and in that off-highway deep space was a network of freshwater creeks that emptied into murky saltwater of the bay, reeking of seaweed.

Aside from Mel’s, there were a handful of businesses. The Crab Shack sold buckets of steamed crabs, clams and whatever else could be trapped that day. The Tides Diner was a weather-beaten hole-in-the-wall with a cook who yelled obscenities all day and sold fried clam baskets with fries for five dollars. A few scattered stores, the police and fire stations and that was it for the town of Stirling. Spiraling from the town like tentacles were small homes most of which were built in the 1950s and 1960s when there was a large fishing operation just up the coast and more than eighty percent of the town was employed at the facility. But that factory had dried up more than thirty years ago and the homes were stuck in a mid-century time warp to this day, full of knotty pine kitchens and jalousie front porches.

The locals called it Clamtown, and that was right.

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Sargent Sean Halliday pushed his way through wild raspberry bushes and a creeping vine that attached little burrs to his uniform pants and snagged a thorn on his wedding ring. His swamp-caked boots touched the edge of the hard dirt road that rippled red and blue neon from the steady beat of cop car lights. It was his second trip out of the woods that morning, but this time he didn’t throw up.

Only a few hours before, his cell phone lit with Grandpa Mel’s number. His heart skipped a beat. Gramps never called him unless it was important.

Outside the store, the old timers were already fighting over Yahtzee.

“How many time you gonna flip that dice? Until it gets you the six you need for your large straight?”

“How many times do I have to kick your ass?”

“What’s up, fellas?” Sean said. He had walked up to this scene countless times since he was a kid and the players were all the same, except he remembered a time when these men were formidable. Seeing them had a Rip Van Winkle vibe, as if he walked away one day, spent almost twenty years in New York, then returned to them in the same seats, over the same game, arguing the same way, except now their fingers clawed with arthritis and their scalps were visible through combed silver gossamer hair.

“Somethings dead,” Frank didn’t even look up as he tossed the dice.

“Besides your libido?” Henry chuckled through his emphysema.

Frank’s die hit the warped little hill on the card table and flew into the sand and although it happened every single damn time they played, the others sat back in slack jawed exasperation.

“Something’s dead out by the bay road,” Frank went on as Bernie tossed the sandy die back on the table. “I smelled it on my walk. Then I get here and the wind’s carrying it forth. Stinking up these losers.” He shook his second throw and rolled the two threes he needed for his full house. The others issued identical exasperated grunts as the previous ones.

Sean leaned in the doorframe and said, “Everything stinks. Tide’s low and who knows what garbage the storm turned up?” Sean was about to say that it was their imaginations, but his grandfather was looking at him over his Yahtzee score card. Sean knew that look. He’d seen it only a few times but each time it meant something serious was happening.

Frank shook his head. “Everything rots. And no one can smell things anymore. People have been losing their olfactory sense for years. It has something to do with evolution. But I smell everything. Go check it out, Shawny.”

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Now Sean emerged from the woods and behind him were the voices of the EMTs mixed with the early autumn song of night insects. The crickets faded their chorus to the background noise of cursing as Fiona Jones and Art Davis took photos and maneuvered the body into the bag.

Sean wished he could talk to those old men now, because they knew things. They came from long lines of fishermen and clammers. They knew the bay and the ocean but also how to track an animal through the thick swamplands or the web of genealogy of the families who had been in town for generations. They would have known the name of the dead woman in the woods had they seen her.

Sean stood on the flat surface of the road and caught his breath. His balls still ached from a middle-of-the-night altercation with drunk Simon Coverton. The storm coupled with high tide sucked Simon’s one room cabin into the bay, where it looked like a kid’s cardboard fort had collapsed. Simon dealt with this predicament by renting a room over the liquor store which also had a small bar and downed an entire bottle of Southern Comfort.

“The crabs are in my couch!” Simon slurred while absurdly wearing a decorative lifebuoy that he had ripped from the outside wall of the bar that said SS Bag-n-Booze.

Sean had backed away thinking he meant crotch and was crawling with nasty lice, but then realized he was talking about bay blue claws who were now the only residents in Simon’s home. “Those bastards got me back! I boiled them alive for years and they’re in my couch!”

“Enough, Simon, let’s get going.” But the kind hand he extended turned into a fist when Simon kicked him right in the balls. It was all Sean could do to not belt his teeth down his throat, but he remembered his father telling him that once upon a time, Simon’s family had run a dozen fishing boats for the big factory and when that went kaput, so did the Coverton money. Now all he had was a little cabin on a now-collapsed dock, and once his family had owned over half of Clamtown.

Sean often heard his father’s voice come to him at unexpected moments, dropping out of nowhere. He willed the voice to come at him now, but it was like tuning a radio between stations. Nothing.

He turned his face to the dark-cloaked sky and heard nothing except footsteps behind him upsetting the early autumn vegetation that did indeed stink like rot and didn’t cover the smell of the body, just as old Frank said.

“That’s it, Sarge,” Patrolman Eddie Henderson removed his cap and wiped sweat from his brow, replacing the shine with a streak of dirt. He had only been on the force for a little over a year, and the most action he had seen was a standoff between the liquor store owner and a drunk with what turned out to be a cap gun. Eddie had thought that perhaps now he would find himself as an investigator in a homicide case. That the body was just that of an old woman who probably escaped from a house or nursing home, riddled with dementia, held little drama.

Eddie swore and picked a few of those little burs off his sleeve, still wearing the good-natured expression that was his trademark. “Doesn’t look suspicious,” he said with a finality that made Sean clench his jaw. “Looks like she was taking a walk and she just went over. You see her face?”

“Odd place to be taking a walk, don’t you think? No path. Thorns.” Eddie’s naïve assessments annoyed him, and he had to remind himself that Eddie didn’t spend almost seven years in the NYPD’s homicide division.

Eddie considered this basic observation while a flush of embarrassment reddened his cheeks and Sean was glad. “You think she was dumped there?”

“Not unless she was murdered, and from what we just saw, there’s no outward sign of trauma, so frankly, I don’t know what happened. We’ll know when Jake takes a look at her.” But the coroner was on vacation and wouldn’t be back for two more days.

“Weird, isn’t it? When I was a kid we told stories about some old witch who lived in the swamp by the bay. We used to search for it. Her house, I mean. We never found anything.”

Sean went cold. “Everyone told those stories.”

“Yeah. Funny how those things get passed down, though, right?”

Sean thought of the old men outside the store again and nodded. He tried shaking off those horrible little burrs but gave up and plucked them, despite their tiny bite. “Let’s go back and start the paperwork. I need to stop home first, but I’ll be along soon.”

“Sure,” Eddie said and got into the patrol car and dumbed the lights. Sean watched him pull away. Now, only his unmarked car and the ambulance were left.

He glanced toward where the EMTs worked. Bright orange jackets moved around green curtains of scrub pines and the orbs of flashlights caught the grim face of Art as he struggled with the bag. He heard Fiona drop a string of curses. The sound of a zipper pulling fast seemed like a chainsaw.

He got into his car before anyone else could show up and talk to him and inserted and turned the key before he even realized it had been in his hand. He exhaled and tried not to look toward the crew as they made their way through the brush and back to the red lights of the ambulance.

His chest constricted and he watched a blackbird fly low over the road, followed by another. Ravens. You knew they were ravens because they dwarfed the crows and always flew in pairs. Their bass caws made the hair on his arms rise. He passed a shaking hand over his mouth that was so dry he reached to the cup holder and swigged the ice-cold coffee, gagging it back into the paper cup.

He pulled onto the road and just drove, grateful that he knew every curve since he was seventeen and first got his license. He knew every bend and dip and could navigate without much thought. For a small moment, he felt seventeen again and out of the corner of his eye, even saw his hands on the wheel as they were then, kid’s hands, smooth and unmarked and covered with dirt.

He squeezed his eyes shut longer than anyone should when driving. He opened them and felt no clarity but emptied his mind and tried not to think that there were two things that made his stomach crawl. The first, was that in order for a body to emit an odor like that, it had to be in an advanced state of decomposition. Even then, the location of the body was far enough from the bait and tackle store that it was highly unlikely that Grandpa and the rest of the guys would have smelled it. But they had, and so had Sean the minute he got out of his car that morning. For a body to smell like that, it had to have been in the swamp for weeks, yet the state of the old woman’s body was as if she had just died the night before. It didn’t even look as if rigor mortis had fully set in, but he hadn’t touched it to find out for sure.

The second thing made the bile rise to his throat and it was much harder to push away to the back corners of his mind where he had relegated the first memory of that old lady. He had seen that old lady dead already, in the exact same place, in the exact same position.

Twenty years ago.

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