Unfinished Business

My footsteps echoed in the empty hall as I walked through the school. If I listened closely, I could hear the sounds of students and teachers rushing through the corridors. The bang of a locker door would punctuate the roar of talking and the yelling of the students as they tried to navigate the halls and learn about life. It had been decades since I’d been here—four to be exact.

Leaning against the door frame of one of the classrooms, I looked at the wall covered with blackboards and scribbles from the last class, never erased. The enormous world map hanging from the many pull-down rolls that lined the ceiling along the far wall caught my attention.

I wandered through the maze of desk chairs to face the map. Decades ago, the world was my oyster. I could do anything and go anywhere when I was seventeen—but the intervening years had shown me the harsh truth.

Sighing heavily, I turned and headed back to the hall and down the corridor to the large gym on the opposite side of the school. The news of the fortieth reunion had reached me several months ago. At first, I refused even to entertain the idea of going. They would all be strangers to me, and I doubt any of them remember Robert Pike—my name or face. At this point in my life, I had the time and money to go but not the desire. That is until I saw the RSVP list online.

She was going to be there, Tammy Porter. She was the one girl I remembered from those days. We had been close during the last couple of years of school. There had been talk of us getting married. However, she decided to become a teacher, taking her to college in another state. After graduating, we kept in touch for a while, but our lives eventually drifted apart.

After graduating from the local junior college, I joined the police force. A close friend died from a gunshot, and rumor had it that members of the Strong family, who held a monopoly on business in town, both legal and illegal, were responsible. I decided to be the hero to take them down, but I quickly learned what the police chief already knew. It was impossible to break the Strong family's control over the community. Witness imitation, lack of evidence in some cases, and the fact that they weren’t afraid to attack law enforcement or even kill them was insurmountable. Several officers died, and no one could prove they died at the order of the Strongs.

Eventually, I moved on to the State Police. Over the years, I kept tabs on the goings on in my hometown. I knew Casey ran the Stone family business now, and things were just as bad as when his old man ran things. I’d heard he married a local gal sometime after I left, but I never knew who she was.

I took my time reaching the gym as memories surfaced as I walked along the corridor. It seemed there was always some senior who did something stupid and got himself killed or hurt every year. The year I graduated, the death had not been a student but the murder and rape of a teacher. The teacher, Mrs. Jean Haily, a distant cousin, had been well-liked by all the kids. At least half the guys in her classes had crushes on her. When she turned up dead and raped in the women’s restroom at the local park, the crime shocked the town.

Suspicion had naturally fallen on the students in her class. The police questioned them extensively, and their alibies were checked and double-checked. No one seemed to have a gaping hole in their whereabouts the night of the attack.

I had been in the park with Tammy that evening. We had a picnic and discussed her attending college and what she wanted to do. We stayed way later than either of us had planned. It was almost dark when we finally packed up and left.

Summer flew by. Tammy went off to college, and I attended junior college and then on to law enforcement training. The police never discovered Mrs. Haily’s murderer and marked her case, with few leads and little physical evidence, closed/unsolved and forgotten. I never forgot it because Mrs. Haily was a relative. Granted, she was a distant cousin, and very few people knew she was related to me, but she was family, and she was dead. I carried that in the back of my mind all those years.

As I neared the gym, I remembered how happy I'd been with Tammy before we went our separate ways. That was motivation enough to come, but seeing Casey Strong’s name on the list reminded me of something I’d forgotten. That's when I decided to go to the reunion.

The committee had converted the gym into a dance hall of sorts. Banners proclaiming the class of 1984 and various other images of our school years hung on the walls. Dressed in one of my best suits, I looked out of place among the other casually dressed people. But then, I had always been out of place, even in the right place.

A mix of music genres from the time blared from the PA system, and I could barely hear anyone talking. Along one wall were some tables with stacks of yearbooks and pictures donated to the cause. I sorted through the photos without recognizing any of them.

With a plastic cup filled with punch in one hand and a name tag hanging from my jacket pocket, I stood next to the table and tried to scan the room, looking for anyone I even thought I knew.

I took a swallow of the punch and shuddered. There was more than juice in the bowl. The echoing of too loud music against the wood panel walls and stacked bleachers combined with strobe lights hanging in the middle of the gym were disorienting and only compounded the feeling of not fitting in and my desire to go running from the school and hide in the car.

Then, I spotted Tammy standing on the other side of the room. At this distance, her name tag was only a tiny square on her ample chest. I decided to stay. Tossing what was left of the cup in the nearest trash bin, I worked my way over to her side of the room.

She was talking to a woman, and they appeared to be having a deep conversation, so I kept my distance and watched them. Tammy was tall and generously proportioned in all directions. I remembered her as being on the large side even back then, but I never thought about it much. Even today, a person's size doesn’t matter much to me if I like them.

The woman she was talking with was a direct contrast to Tammy. She was short and thin with bobbed hair and a tight-fitting dress that hugged her curves. Of the two, I preferred Tammy’s proportions to Skinny Lady. I couldn’t see her nametag, so I didn’t know if she was a classmate or the spouse of a classmate.

I played with the old textbooks on the table where I stood, pretending to read the pages I could barely see in the haphazard light. Eventually, Skinny Lady kissed her on the cheek and hurried off to meet someone she saw across the room. That told me they knew each other and had a history. Then Tammy turned toward me.

Her face lit up with recognition. “Robbie!?” She shouted over the music, and I nodded yes. She pulled me into a giant hug that almost buried my face into her shoulder, and my back squeezed tight as she welcomed me back into her life. Eventually, she let me go, and I could breathe again.

We talked briefly about the weather, how we got here, and whether we were married. Did we have kids, all the usual questions? Yes, she was married, and he was around here somewhere, but she hadn't seen him in a while. That didn’t surprise me. It was impossible to tell who you were talking to until you were on top of them. I told her I had never married. My job took up my life, but I was retiring soon and considering returning home.

As will happen, we quickly ran out of things to talk about and stood silently for a couple of minutes. I almost wished I still had that horrible drink in my hand. At least I’d have something to do while we each tried not to say something either would regret.

“So, Tammy, how long have you been married?” I knew she’d told me a few minutes ago, but I’d already forgotten and couldn’t think of anything else.

“Thirty-one years. It's been good, but….” She hesitated ever so slightly, and I almost asked what the problem was when it presented itself in the form of her husband, Casey Stone. He came up behind her wrapping his arms around her waist and practically squeezing her boobs in front of me.

“So, last I heard of you, Robbie boy, you left the local police and disappeared. We placed a few bets on whether our class cop would show.” I could smell the alcohol from where I stood. He’d already had too much to drink.

“Yeah, I decided I needed to settle an old score.” What motivated me to come more than seeing Tammy was what I remembered.

“Forty years later?” He breathed over her shoulder and showed no signs of letting go of Tammy.

“Yeah, forty years later, some things still need settling.” I looked him straight in the eye and didn’t blink. He knew what I was talking about. He coughed, sending a spray of phlegm over her shoulder directly at me. Fortunately, I was too far away for it to hit me, but I caught the odor of his booze breath. He was as drunk as I’d ever seen him.

I knew he always liked the bottle, even back in high school. He’d been arrested and ticketed for drunk driving often but always managed to get by with a fine or a suspended license for a while. It helped that the Stones were one of the more influential families in the county. They owned most of the major businesses and employed half of the county. No one, even the police, was in a hurry to do what they should have done all those years ago.

Now, forty years later, it was time to face his reckoning. If what I remembered was right, I would see that he did, and if I could help Tammy in the process, all the better.

“Okay, Casey, let's get this done.” I motioned for the doors behind us.

He let go of Tammy and glared at me. She looked at me, and I knew she realized what I was about to do. That was her chance to stop me, and she didn’t. She gave me a slight nod and walked away. I pointed to the doors, and Casey, drunk and not thinking straight, headed for the set of double doors. I was pretty sure he thought he could take me. I followed him into the hallway, reached into my pocket, and hit the voice recorder button on my phone.

I directed him to an empty classroom near the gym and leaned against the teacher's desk, facing him.

“Mrs. Haily, Jean Haily. You remember her?”

He looked at me blankly for a second. “No.” He paused. “Oh yeah, she was the teacher that was killed the year we graduated.”

I nodded yes. “Do you remember where she was found and what had been done to her?”

“No. What's this got to do with me?” He fidgeted with a pencil some kid had left on a desk near him.

“What was that car your old man got you that year?” I changed tactics midstream.

He thought for a minute. “Oh yeah, the red Corvette?”

I nodded yes. “You were the only kid in school with a new car, much less a car like that. Everyone in town knew that car.” I let it sink in for a second.

“So what? I had a fancy car. My old man could afford it.”

“The only new Corvette in the county. Your dad drove an older model.” I stood up. “Mrs. Haily was found in the park—raped and murdered. Everyone in town knew you had a thing for her. What happened? Did you try to pick her up, and when she wouldn’t put out, you took her anyway and killed her? “

“No, that never happened. Yeah, I had the hots for her. So did most of the guys in the school at the time. That don’t mean anything.”

“You remember where you were?”

“Come on, that was forty years ago! How am I supposed to remember what I was doing back then?”

“Let me refresh your memory. According to the statement you gave the police, you were at a party over at Lonnie’s Burke's place.”

“Yeah, so? If I said I was there, I was there. He always had good booze.”

“The police checked your alibi, and you were there alright, but no one could remember seeing you there all night.”

“Yeah, so? So what? I got bored or had my fill of his hooch and left to sleep it off somewhere. I drank a lot back then.”

I scoffed. “You still drink a lot. I can smell you from here. See, the thing is, there were people in the park that night who saw a car leaving the area where a park worker found her body the next morning. They didn’t say anything because their folks worked for one of your old man’s businesses, and they were scared of what could happen if they did. So, they kept quiet.”

“This matters now because?” I saw the panic in his eyes as he realized where I was going with it.

“Because they recognized the car. It was the only new foreign car in town. And the only new foreign car in town then was your red 1984 Corvette Ragtop. Your car was seen there.”

“I wasn’t there.” He backed up, trying to put distance between us.

“Casey Stone, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the rape and murder of Jean Haily in nineteen eighty-four.”

Suddenly, he was sober. “What do you mean? You can’t arrest me. You don’t have any authority here.”

I showed him my badge. “State Police Detective Captain and I got Haily’s case reopened based on new eyewitness testimony.”

Casey turned white as I pulled him around, put the cuffs on him, and read him his rights.

~~~

I sat in the integration room across from Casey Strong and his lawyer an hour later. He’d been processed, photographed, and fingerprinted, and his Corvette, which he kept, had been impounded.

“You see, Casey, I wasn’t the only one in the park that night. In addition to three guys who had seen the car but refused to tell out of fear, I was there, and Tammy was there—with me.”

He had sobered up. At least enough, he started to understand where he was and why. “Tammy was there? With You?” I nodded yes.

“We were having a picnic and got to talking. It was late when we finally left, and we saw your car leave the park that evening. We were talking about her going to college. She didn’t want to stay around. I was trying to help her think through what she wanted to do. To be honest, I was trying to get her to stay. We were sitting at one of the picnic tables talking when we saw a red sports car leave the restroom building and pass right by us. She said she thought it looked like your car. The next day, Jean Haily’s body was found in the women's restroom. Someone raped and murdered her.”

He squirmed in his seat.

“We didn’t put it together until later when we heard the time it was supposed to have happened. Tammy and I talked about saying something, but she knew what would happen if we did. Your old man would make it impossible for her family to run their lumber business. She said she wouldn’t back me up if I told the police. So, we kept quiet. She went to college, as you know, and came back, met you again, and by then, she’d buried the incident in her mind, forgetting about it. As did the rest of the county eventually.”

I picked up the file, opening it to a photo of my cousin. “I never forgot it. I became a cop, and when I started working for the county, I investigated your family. When the reunion triggered my memory of seeing your car at the murder scene, I went to my superiors and the local police. I discovered they were already putting a case together to arrest you and your family. Detectives are right now serving warrants on your businesses. Charges are pending for your brothers, which concern your racketeering and other enterprises. You, however, are being charged with the rape and murder of Jean Haily."

~~~

This was my last big case. Six months later, I retired from the force and returned home. Tamny divorced Casey soon after he’d been convicted, and we picked up where we left our relationship in high school. She admitted she married Casey only to protect her father’s business and that she had never stopped loving me. A year later, we married.

I found peace. After having a long and fulfilling career as a detective and retiring, I was now married to my high school sweetheart, and more importantly, my cousin had the justice she deserved. She could rest in peace as well.