Kruste’ Falls was a small town. Alright to be honest it was a very small town. It was named after Francois Kruste’ who was supposed to be the first white man to see the falls. Since this happened over four centuries ago there weren’t a lot of people around to dispute the fact. The town’s folk all called it “crusty,” which turned out to be ironic considering how many times the place had nearly been toast in the forest fires that seem to come near to burning the place to the ground every year.
It was the forest fires, and his uncle’s job as a forest ranger, that got him out here in the first place. He being, Edward Ellis or Ed as he preferred to be called. His uncle, John Ellis, had moved back here twenty years ago to take a job as a ranger and to look in on his father. Kruste’ Falls was where his uncle and his father had been raised and had moved away from as soon as they had been able to save enough money for a bus ticket. His father and mother had been killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. That was when his uncle stepped up and took him in. He was four at the time and his uncle was the only relative able to take him in.
There was his paternal grandfather, but even then he was showing the first signs of dementia. Those signs would become more prominent as the years went by, so that by the time Ed was ten his grandfather was in an assisted living home some sixty miles south of Kruste’ Falls. Five years later he would pass away noisily in his sleep. The years had shortened his temper so that almost everything would set him off into a shouting rage. The nurses in the home claimed they could hear him shouting in his sleep. Ed didn’t have many good memories of the man, who had in great part been the reason his dad and uncle had moved east.
When they had first come here Ellis Motors had been the largest car dealership for one hundred miles around. Competition and his grandfather’s charm had doomed the business. Now all that was left of the place was Endeavor Rental Cars. Endeavor was a national chain that for some reason decided to have a branch out here in the middle of nowhere. To simplify the operation they bought the remaining cars left in the dealership as their starting stock. Those cars were long since gone and had been replaced with shiny new SUVs which were what the few tourists, who came out to the national forest that surrounded the place, seemed to like.
It was almost a right of inheritance that Ed should become the manager of the rental business. Ed had come back to the town right after he graduated from State, and the acting manager had immediately offered him the job. Ed suspected that he had gotten the job because the acting manager would have done anything to get out of town, even hire a totally inexperienced kid for the job.
So here he was minding the store and waiting for the evacuation call from the Forest Ranger’s office. Last night he had been able to see the fire from his window, and this morning he could smell the smoke. His uncle and almost every other able bodied person in town were volunteers, and had been called up three days ago.
Because of the impending inferno Endeavor had sent out two of those big car haulers to remove the stock from the rental lot. Ed had one car left on the lot and he intended to take it as soon as the Ranger called. There was zero chance that some tourist would show up and want to rent it. Although he did have one other car still out on a lease. Frank Watson had come by the day before the fire got going and rented it for the week. Mr. Watson didn’t say what he wanted an SUV for, or how he had gotten to Kruste’ Falls without a car of his own. It wasn’t the policy of Endeavor to ask why a customer wanted a car, and out here the rentals were few and far between so Ed wouldn’t care if he wanted it to rob a bank with it as long as his credit card was valid.
Ed was sure that the guy would return the car to one of the other Endeavor offices in some town well out of the danger zone. He would receive a notice of the return on the office’s computer system, which had been a little wonky for the last two days. Just to pass the time Ed backed up the office computer on to a set of flash drives. Then he organized the office files and by closing he had cleaned the floor, windows, and bathroom of the shop.
He realized that the fire was still raging since he could see the red glow in the sky all night, but there hadn’t been any call from the Ranger’s station so he didn’t have a good excuse to close up and head out of town. The town’s only diner had closed two days ago so he was at the mercy of his own cooking. Thank goodness for cans of stew and a working barbeque grill for the hotdogs. A quick check to see if the phone was working and he headed off to bed. He was sure tomorrow would bring the call to leave town.
For breakfast he ate the last of his stale doughnut stash and made a pot of coffee with the office coffee pot. Then he sat down and read the company policy bulletins for the third time hoping he had missed some notice that said the local manager could elect to close the shop in the case on impending danger, without official notice. It was nearly noon when he decided to walk around the town. It was only once he was away from the office front door that he realized there was a car in the side lot.
Mr. Watson must have come during the night and returned the car after he had closed for the day. He walked over to the SUV and could tell from the ash build up that the guy must have been out in the fire zone. The keys were in the outside “after hours” box. The guy hadn’t bothered to fill out the return form, so Ed checked the glove box and sure enough all of the paperwork was still there. He took the form, recorded the mileage, fuel gage, and date of return and went into the office to record the return. Watson had put quite a few miles on the SUV, but since he had leased it with the unlimited mileage clause it didn’t matter. Either the guy had been driving around the entire time he had the SUV or he had made several really long trips.
Once he finished the paperwork he went out and moved the SUV to the back lot where he could wash it off and clean the interior. A half an hour later the SUV looked spotless from the outside. Although Ed was wondering what difference that would make if the fire closed in on the town. Even if he put it in the garage if the place burned down the garage wouldn’t be much protection.
He got out the shop vac and began to clean the inside of the car. It seemed that Mr. Watson wasn’t the neatest renter they had ever had. There were fast food wrappers scattered on the floor, and butts in the ash tray. He moved to the back while thinking that if Watson returned he would give him a piece of his mind before he would rent him another car.
Ed pushed the lift release and then nearly fell over backward when it opened. He realized that Mr. Watson wouldn’t be renting another car from them. He knew this for a fact because Mr. Watson was still in the car, or at least his body was. The man was stuffed in the back of the SUV. Part of his body was wrapped in one of those super large, heavy duty trash bags. Ed could see why since there was blood seeping out from the bag.
The town didn’t have a police force so there wasn’t anybody he could call to come over. The nearest law officer was the county sheriff. Ed closed the back gate and went in to call the sheriff’s office. His hands were shaking as he dialed the number. When the phone answered there was a message that said all of the sheriff’s staff was out fighting the fire that was threatening the entire county. There followed a listing of numbers of where medical help could be found, and another number to call to leave a message for the sheriff.
Ed called that number and left a detailed message about the body in the car. Then he took out the digital camera that was supposed to be used to photograph any damage to the rental cars and went back to the SUV and the body. He started to take pictures of all of the outside parts of the car and then realized that when he had washed he car he had probably destroyed evidence that the sheriff was going to want.
There was no helping it now. He looked around on the floor and saw that there was still a brown residue on the floor that hadn’t washed down the drain so he took a shovel and scrapped some of it up and put it in a bucket. He saw the shop vac and went and emptied the container into a garbage bag and put it by the bucket. He got a pair of gloves and put them on to preserve any finger prints that he hadn’t already washed off the car. Then he opened all of the doors and started to take pictures of the entire interior of the SUV. When he got to the back it occurred to him that he hadn’t checked to see if the man was really dead. Of course since the man hadn’t moved in the past hour and seemed to be lying in a bag filled with his own blood the odds were strongly leaning towards dead, but you could never be too careful. So Ed leaned into the back and tried to find a pulse on the man’s neck.
There was nothing resembling a pulse there. Ed shook the man and got no response. Yep he was dead alright, and now that he was closer to the body he could confirm that it was the man who had rented the SUV four days ago. He took several close-up photos of the man and the bag and then got out of the SUV.
What should he do next? Without any response from the sheriff and his uncle out with most of the rest of the people who he could turn to? Ed was on his own. He had already moved the car from where he had found it this morning. He remembered he had to move the seat forward to comfortably drive the car, so whoever had driven the car to the rental lot was a lot taller than he was and he was just over six feet tall.
He took out his Endeavor office notebook and started to take notes on what he had found and what he had done with the SUV. When he was finished writing he went back to the spot where the car had been left last night and took pictures of the ground. There didn’t seem to be much there but then he wasn’t an investigator and the pictures were the best he could do.
He went back into the office and tried to think of what he should do next. There certainly wasn’t an Endeavor Car Rental policy that covered finding a body in one of the cars. He thought he had to preserve the evidence, or least what evidence that he hadn’t already destroyed. If the call came to evacuate the town and the fire got here, the car could be destroyed along with anything inside it that might identify the killer.
He had already vacuumed the inside of the car and preserved that waste in a bag. He put a new bag in the vacuum and went out to the SUV. He vacuumed the back of the car around the body bag. Then it occurred to him that whoever was using the car might have lowered the seats, and so he slipped back and dropped the rear seats into their lower position. With the seats down he could see refuse in the section of the floor that the seat mechanism rested in. He went back into the office and got one of those little plastic bags and returned to the car. Then he scraped out the stuff and put it in the bag
.
As he did so he recognized a smell that he remembered from his college days. Whoever had been back here had weed with them. When he lowered the other seats he found more marijuana in the recess for those seats. A lot more. These people weren’t just smoking back here they must have dropped a whole bag or more on the floor.
He collected as much as he could and tried the vacuum but there was still some of it stuck in the crevices of the car. He raised the seats back up and checked the back section again. Sure enough there was more of the stuff wedged in the back next to the seat back.
He closed up the SUV and took his bags into the office. There he labeled everything with dates and locations. He emptied the vac again and marked that bag as well. It was obvious that he hadn’t gotten everything that was there from the car. He just didn’t have any better equipment, and really didn’t think he was doing it correctly any way. The car and the body inside it had to be preserved.
He looked around the office and then looked out the front window. The car rental building and most of the rest of the buildings on the street were wooden frame buildings. Just the right feed for a fire if it got this far. The garage out back was no better. If the fire got here the car was gone. Ed thought, “That’s probably why the killer brought the car back to town in the first place. He, or she, was hoping the firer would consume the car along with the town.” The killer probably hadn’t realized that Ed was still there, since most of the rest of the town had been abandoned.
He was thinking as fast as he could because he thought his hours were numbered. There simply wasn’t any place in town where he could be sure that the SUV would be safe from the raging fire. Ed stopped pacing as soon as he said that. Then he told the coffee pot, “That’s right. There isn’t any place in town where the car could be safe. But what about out of town? I could take it out of town when I leave instead of the blue Chevy.”
He pulled out a map and looked at the route he would probably have to take to escape the fire’s path. The fact was that the roads leading away from the fire and toward safety weren’t very good. It was one thing to race the fire in his souped up Chevy, but the SUV, with the body in the back, wasn’t built for speed. The problem was that the hills he’d have to go over to get away would be a challenge, even on a good day. But he was sure that the body would suffer from the bouncing and sharp turns he’d have to make on those roads. He thought, “It’s too bad I can’t drive right through them.”
Then he looked at the map again. “Maybe,” he thought, “I can’t go all the way through them but I might be able to go part of the way through.” The old Aldercot mine was about fifteen miles from town, and the way there was fairly level so the bouncing wouldn’t be too bad.
The Aldercot’s were one of the oldest families in the town. The Aldercot’s son Frank had been four years ahead of Ed in school so he didn’t know the guy very well. Ed was pretty sure that the boy and his mother still lived out there farming the low land beneath the mine. Ed looked up the name in the fifteen page local phone book and called the number. A lot of these older folks never left when there was a fire coming until the very last minute. The number rang but there was no answer, and they didn’t have an answering machine so he couldn’t leave a message.
Ed took out his notes and quickly typed them up. Then he copied the file onto two flash drives. He put one into the office safe. He was able to fit some of the plastic bags he had collected from the car, but not the bucket or t big trash bags into the safe. He scraped some of the stuff from the bucket and put it into the safe along with a sample from the big trash bags he had used. Then he closed the door and locked the safe. He was fairly sure the safe was fire proof. He took the other drive with him and went out to the SUV.
He put his old mountain bike in the back seat after he laid down some of those plastic mats they put in the cars when they serviced them. Then he threw in his traveling goodie bag as well. As he got in he said, “Mr. Watson we’re going to take a little ride.” As soon as he said that he realized just how creepy this was going to be. He was taking a dead man for a ride out to an old abandoned silver mine. It sounded like a plot for one of those old “B” grade movies that they show late at night. He pulled onto the street and said a silent prayer that he’d be able to get back in time to leave in the faster Chevy.
As he drove up to the Aldercot’s he rehearsed what he would say when he got there. “Hello Mrs. Aldercot. I don’t know if you remember me but I went to the same school as Frank.” Yeah that would be brilliant since there was only one school in town. He tried again, “Hello Mrs. Aldercot. My name is Ed Ellis. My grandfather owned the car dealership in town.” He stopped again. Mentioning his grandfather might not be the best idea, given how many people he had offended over the years. Back to the drawing board. “Hello Mrs. Aldercot. I wonder if I could leave this car in your silver mine until the fire burns out. You see I’ve got this body I need to protect.”
Drat. Nothing he could come up with seemed reasonable. Just as he thought that he realized he was on the road that led up to the Aldercot’s farm. He was right; they were farming the bottom land out here. He stopped in front of a gate that was blocking the road. There was a sign that said “KEEP OUT.” He tried the latch on the gate and it opened. He drove through the gate stopped and then went back and closed the gate.
He drove up to the farm house and was about to talk to Mrs. Aldercot, when he realized there didn’t seem to be anyone around and there weren’t any cars or trucks in sight. He got out, went up to the front door, and knocked. There was no answer, so he walked around back. He knocked on the back door and still there wasn’t any answer. He checked the barn but it was empty as well. Over to the right of the house there was a road that led up to the hills behind the farm. Ed remembered from a school trip that the mine was in that direction. He got back into the truck and drove up the road. He was hoping that his childhood memory was accurate and the mine entrance was huge, or at least big enough to hold the SUV.
Less than a half a mile and he was there. There was a sort of wooden door in front of the mine entrance. They had painted a message that read “DANGER, KEEP OUT” on the make shaft door. He drove up to the entrance and got out. The door was sort of leaning against the hill so with a little effort he was able to pull it away. He looked inside and said, “YEP, this should do nicely.” He walked into the mine and reached out his arms to measure the opening. It would easily be big enough to hold the SUV. It was then that he saw what could be a major problem.
Just in front of him in the mine was another car. The Aldercot’s must have two cars and they put this one in the mine for safety just as he had planned to protect the SUV. He paced off the space behind the other car and it seemed a little short if he wanted to get the whole SUV into the mine. Perhaps he could pull their car forward a little and get the space he needed.
Ed walked around the car and saw that there seemed to be at least five or six feet in the front of the car before the mine shaft began to tighten up. He tried the door to the car and it opened. The keys were in the ignition. So he slipped in and started the car. The air-conditioner blasted cold air. Funny he thought it hadn’t been all that warm lately. He shut off the air-conditioner, and as he did he looked at the car. The seats were real leather, and the radio was one of those satellite jobs that got thousands of channels. Pretty fancy for a farm family.
It was then that he noticed a sticker in the window. It was from a parking garage in a large city more than a hundred miles away. That was even stranger yet. He didn’t have a lot of time to spare, but he opened the glove compartment and dragged out the papers inside. There was a registration for the car, and the name on it was Frank Watson.
Ed looked at the registration again to make sure it was for this car. He sat back and said, “It’s for this car all right. What the hell is Frank Watson’s car doing out here in the Aldercot mine? This must be how he got to Kruste’ Falls in the first place. But why leave it out here and then come into town to rent an SUV? Why didn’t he just drive to the car rental office in his car and leave it in the lot behind the shop?”
There were a whole lot of questions that he didn’t have any answers for. He carefully pulled the car as far forward as he dared and then went back for the SUV. He went over to the SUV and as he did he could hear a growling thunder that he knew was from the forest fire. It must be getting close. He got his bike out of the SUV and leaned it next to the mine entrance. He drove the SUV into the mine and pulled it up so that it touched the other car’s rear bumper.
Then he went out and started to pull the wooden door back across the mine’s entrance. Just as he was about to finished he suddenly felt a blast of searing hot air. He wasn’t going to make it back to town. He grabbed his bike pulled it inside the mine and pushed the door over the entrance as far as it would go. There was a loud bang and then something crashed against the mine’s entrance.
Ed was sure that he was finished. He and Mr. Watson were going to share this mine as their final resting place. He looked out through a crack in the make-shift door and could see over the slight rise in the road that the fire had indeed reached the Aldercot farm. It was blazing over where the farm house and barn were. There was metal on the ground in front of the mine and Ed surmised that something, maybe the oil tank, had blown up and parts of it had reached the mine site.
The area in front of the mine was free of brush or trees. The stuff that they use in the mine had killed off all the vegetation. Other than the door he was leaning against there wasn’t anything that could burn. As he watched the fire from the farm house raged. He was sure that if he got out of the mine alive he would find only ash where the farm had been.
The heat from the fire was getting brutal and he moved away from the doorway. It was probably only a matter of time before the wood in the door caught fire. He went past the SUV and then the car as well. He wanted to get as far into the mine as he could before the forest fire got into the mine and blew up the gas tanks in the two vehicles.
He squeezed past the car and then went back to the SUV. He reached in and dragged out his goody bag that he had thrown in back with his bike. Again he went past the car in front of the SUV. He reached into the bag and got out his flashlight and a bottle of water. He turned on the flashlight and opened the water. After a drink he started to look around the mine. He started to move farther into the mine. He figured out that distance from the opening of the mine was the best he could hope for as protection.
The shaft turned to the left and he followed the tracks into the back of the mine. He was surprised to find equipment this far back in the mine. Perhaps the Aldercot’s were still able to get a little silver out of the old seam. But no, this wasn’t mining equipment. There were several tables and lights rigged in the ceiling of the shaft. He saw what seemed to be a switch and he turned it. The shaft was filled with light. He could see a bunch of batteries lined up. They must be powering the lights. Farther down the shaft there were racks with chicken wire across them. It was hard to believe that Mrs. Aldercot was drying her clothes here in the mine.
Once he walked past the chicken wire racks he began to figure it out. The floor was littered with what must have been hanging across the chicken wire to dry. There was more weed scattered on the floor than he had ever seen. If he correctly remembered the size of the bags they use to get in college the floor must have enough for a hundred of the bags.
There weren’t any of those little plastic bags in here though. Here there were boxes of the same garbage bag that they used for poor Mr. Watson. It would seem that the Aldercots weren’t growing tomatoes out here they were growing marijuana. Judging by the size of the racks they must have quite a big operation.
Ed looked around and found several empty boxes from the garbage bags. Each box was supposed to contain fifty bags. If they used all of those bags to collect their weed, they would have had over a hundred bags filled. Well of course you would have to deduct the bag they used for Mr. Watson. That would have been more marijuana than…
Ed stopped and realized he had no way of figuring that out since he didn’t know how much could be stuffed in one of those bags. They were always careful not to crush the stuff they bought but if you were packing it in those large garbage bags you might not be as careful. What had the Aldercots been up to here in the mine shaft and what had Mr. Watson to do with it.
There were thousands of SUVs up here. Another one on the road wouldn’t attract any attention. Mr. Watson must have been the driver to ship the weed. No, based on the expensive car he owned, he was more than a driver. He must have been the wholesale buyer for the weed. God only knows what that much of the stuff would be worth, but it must have been a small fortune.
Based on the mileage Mr. Watson put on the SUV, he must have made at least two trips. Then he came back to get his car, and probably pay the Aldercots for the marijuana. Maybe they had a falling out over the price or something to do with the sale and Mr. Watson got killed. Now the Aldercots have the money but they also have a dead body. They put him in the car and drive back to town. They made a reasonable guess that he would have closed up shop and evacuated with the rest of the town. So they leave the SUV parked out in the open, with the very reasonable possibility that the fire will consume the vehicle and the body inside. Since Mr. Watson’s name was the only one attached to the rental agreement, even if he body had been found in the fire clean-up there would be no trace back to the Aldercots.
Now that he thought about it the fire was what had caused this whole thing. The Aldercots probably feared that there crop of marijuana would be lost in the fire. So they bring it in and call their buyer, Mr. Watson, and tell him that they have a big score for him but he has to come and get it. He gets here with his fancy, but small car, and they realize they need something bigger. That led them to his rental shop. And that ladies and gentlemen was how he got caught in the middle of this whole mess.
Now of course he was about to be incinerated along with the evidence of the operation all around him. Well at least he’d go happy, once all of this weed started to burn. He’d read stories of how the people would come for miles to be there when the police would burn up the marijuana they had collected in drug raids. It could get an entire town high for a week.
This was not going to look good on his employment record with the Endeavor Car Rental Company. Being found high on the job would have to be a real bad mark. With that thought he decided to risk going back to look at how close the fire was to the mine opening.
He made his way back to the opening and looked out through the cracks in the door. He could see that the entire area in front of him was black. There might not have been any trees that he could see but there must have been some grass and brush which the fire had devoured. There was still a lot of heat in the area, but apparently there was no immediate danger from the fire. He knew enough about these fires to realize it wouldn’t take much of a wind shift to bring the fire back to his front door.
He went back into the mine shaft. Just as he got past the front of Mr. Watson’s car he heard a big bang. Then he heard another. His first thought was that the Aldercots had come back. They must have realized someone was in the mine, and were shooting through the door. He heard another bang and then something he hadn’t expected to hear. It wasn’t gun fire, it was thunder, and the other sound was rain. He went back to the door and looked out at a deluge. The fire had burned out everything on the ground. Now the rain was falling onto a completely bare surface.
Fortunately the mine was higher than the ground in front of it. After about an hour he ventured out of the mine. The rain was still coming down pretty hard, but if it was raining all over the region it would put out what was left of the fire. He was safe from being burned alive, but not safe if the Aldercots decided to come back to their farm, and marijuana processing plant.
He went back to where he had left his bag and got out his cell phone. He wasn’t getting much of a signal back in town but here he was much higher and there was a tower somewhere in front of him. He turned on the phone and checked. He had about half a signal but that might be enough to call for help. He thought about where he was and realized he was even farther from the sheriff than he had been in town.
He decided to take a chance on the ranger station since they had that big tower next to them. The phone range quite a few times but then there was an answer. He told whoever it was that he was trapped out at the Aldercot’s farm and then asked if his uncle was there. He was. The crews were coming in to wait for the heaviest part of the storm to pass and then they would go out and bury the rest of the fire.
Someone was shouting and then his uncle was on the line. His uncle John had panicked. As soon as he got back to the Ranger Station he called to the Endeavor office. When there wasn’t any answer he called to the office where he knew Ed was supposed to evacuate to, but he wasn’t there either. His uncle was afraid that he had been trapped by the fire and caught out in the open.
Ed spent the next ten minutes explaining what had happened. First to his uncle and then to the sheriff who was also out at the station. The sheriff said he was sending out some deputies out to the Aldercot mine to secure the evidence and pick him up.
By the time they got to the mine they already knew that the sheriff from the next county had found the Aldercots staying in the finest hotel in his town. When they saw him they had asked when they would be able to go back to their farm since they were worried about what the fire might have done to it. He said they weren’t calmed down much when he told them a team of deputies were at their farm as they spoke carefully protecting everything that was left. He even volunteered to give them a lift back. When they declined and said they could drive their own truck back to the place he insisted on taking them.
Three hours later they were all gathered back in town at the rental offices, which had survived the fire along with the rest of the town. Crusty had been saved from the fire by the rain storm that had started to fall just before the fire could engulf the town.
Ed had given his statement to the sheriff. The Aldercots had finally given up denying that they had no idea how a car could have been put in their mine nor how Mr. Watson’s body had been found in the back of an SUV, which he could not have driven back to the rental office since he was dead in the back of the vehicle. A vehicle which just happened to be covered in marijuana that came from the mine at the Aldercot’s place. That along with the $70,000 dollars they had with them that they couldn’t explain pretty much closed the case.
Several hours later the sheriff and the Aldercots had left for the sheriff’s office and county jail. Ed’s uncle had gone back to the ranger’s station to finish cleaning up the fire. Ed sat there and thought about how lucky he had been to escape the fire, and the Aldercots. Then he sat down and drafted a new policy bulletin for Endeavor concerning rental cars used in a crime.
