Unfinished Business (2) At 8:12 a.m. Sheriff David Ward responded to a report of an accident north of town. He arrived back at the Department at 11:05. Janice, the dispatcher, looked up from behind the counter when he came through the door. “It must have been a tough morning, Dave.” The sheriff nodded slowly. “A boy and his girlfriend were in a pickup on their way to school. They were probably running late and driving too fast. The vehicle went off the road and hit a utility pole. Both kids died before the ambulance arrived. They weren’t wearing seat belts. It’s the kind of thing you expect late on a Saturday night - not on a beautiful morning like this. I just came from seeing the parents. It wasn’t easy. “Anything happen while I was gone?” “A man came in at 9:15 asking for you. I told him you wouldn’t be back for quite awhile. I asked him if he would like to talk to a deputy. He muttered something about coming back later. He smelled of alcohol and acted like he was too drunk to drive, so I followed him to the door. I was going to stop him if he started to get into a car, but he walked across the street to the park and sat on a bench. I noticed he was still there fifteen minutes ago.” Janice looked toward the door. “He’s coming up the steps now. He must have seen you drive in.” When the man saw the sheriff, he staggered across the room toward him and said, “I need to talk to you.” Even though he had not seen Josh Halloran in many years, the sheriff recognized him immediately. He led Halloran back to his office, holding him by the arm so he wouldn’t stumble, and helped him into a chair. “Josh, what brings you back after all this time?” “I didn’t expect you to remember me,” Halloran said, with a look of surprise on his face. “I always knew I’d have to come back someday. I started driving early yesterday morning. I got to town about noon not knowing what I was going to do. I drove past the farm. I hardly recognized it, all the houses that have been built out there. I was walking by this building late in the afternoon when I saw you come out. I realized you must be the sheriff. It was then I decided it was time to get it over with. “Last night, before I checked into the hotel, I bought a bottle of whiskey. I thought if I had something to drink in the morning, I’d be less likely to change my mind. I started drinking as soon as I woke up.” The sheriff suspected why Josh Halloran had come to see him and interrupted. “Josh, I think I understand. I don’t want you to say anything more until you’re sober. I’m going to put you in a cell. A deputy will bring you some food.” Halloran grasped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. “No, I can’t wait any longer. I have to tell you. I’m a murderer.” The sheriff found himself speaking slowly, as though he were talking to a child. “We’re not going to talk anymore right now. I’ll see you later.” Janice was eating salad out of a plastic container when the sheriff returned from the jail. “Is Ray here?” he asked. He left a little while ago to get some lunch. He should be back soon.” “When he comes in, I need to talk to him.” A half an hour later, the young deputy walked in the sheriff’s office and sat down. “Janice said you wanted to see me.” The sheriff nodded. “This morning, a man named Josh Halloran came to the Department and told me he wanted to confess to a murder. I didn’t let him talk because he’d been drinking. When I see him after he sobers up, I want you to be with me. While we’re waiting, I’ll give you some background information. You would’ve been too young when this happened to know anything about it. “Halloran was born and raised here. He left not long after he graduated from high school. That was twenty years ago. He’s never been back until yesterday. The Hallorans owned a big farm on Walnut Road just beyond the old iron bridge over Deer Creek. The family had farmed the land for generations. Josh had two sisters. One was four years older than Josh, the other a year younger. Both girls were really intelligent and nice looking. Josh was smart enough, but he was strange. He didn’t have any friends, and the other kids made fun of him. He spent most of his time wandering around the farm or reading in his room. Sometimes he would pace the floor and talk to himself. “I went steady with Karen, the older sister, for almost a year. I was a senior in high school. She was a junior. I guess you might say we were pretty serious. I spent quite a bit of time out at the Halloran’s, so I got to know the family fairly well. Karen used to worry about Josh, and I got the impression her parents did too. “I went into service the summer after I graduated. While I was gone, Karen married someone else and moved away. After I was discharged, I had trouble finding a job. Mr. Halloran heard about it and offered me work on the farm until I found something permanent. I’d worked there about six months when Mr. Halloran told me there was going to be an opening in the Sheriff’s Department. He said he would speak to John Todd, who was the sheriff back then, if I was interested in applying. I’m pretty sure I got the job because of Mr. Halloran’s recommendation. I really appreciated what he did for me. “Not long after I joined the Department, Mr. Halloran was diagnosed as having cancer. After awhile he couldn’t do much work, so I went out to the farm to help out whenever I was off duty. He died a year or so later. “Mrs. Halloran changed after her husband’s death. When friends went out to see her, she said she was too sick to visit with them. “Josh was a senior in high school when his father died. Martha, the younger sister, was a junior. The two of them had to take care of things. Every week or so Josh would drive to town in the pickup truck and do the shopping. Apparently, Martha did all the cooking and housekeeping. “When Josh graduated form high school, Charlie Daniels, who owned the hardware, gave him a job as a stock boy. People figured Charlie did it because he was a good friend of Mr. Halloran. It didn’t seem like Josh was very well suited to the work. “It was just a couple of months later, early in August, that Martha went to pick blackberries out near the old abandoned limestone quarry that backed up to the Halloran farm. Josh said he got worried when she wasn’t back by dinner time, so he went looking for her. There were some pretty high cliffs at the quarry after the limestone had been cut out of the hillside. Martha had gone over the edge of one. It was a fifty foot drop. She must have died instantly.” The sheriff paused to take a drink of coffee from the mug on his desk. “I was at the site with Sheriff Todd when the body was removed. We couldn’t figure out how Martha had fallen. She’d picked blackberries in that area every summer for years and would’ve known enough to be careful when she was close to the quarry. “It was a very sad situation. For awhile after Martha died some of the neighbors took food to the house. Josh would always come to the door. He never allowed anyone inside. “One night in September, Doc Jenkins got a call from Josh. He said when he came home from work his mother was in bed, and he couldn’t wake her up. Doc told Sheriff Todd that Mrs. Halloran had probably been dead for eight or ten hours by the time he saw the body. He wasn’t able to determine the exact cause of death, but he thought it must have been a stroke. Of course, back in those days in a small country town like this, we didn’t have access to a facility that could perform a thorough autopsy. “The farm was put up for sale right after Mrs. Halloran’s funeral. As soon as it sold, Josh left town without telling anyone where he was going.” “Dave, you figure Halloran pushed his sister off the cliff and somehow managed to kill his mother to get the inheritance?” Ray asked. The sheriff rubbed his chin and nodded. “Josh was a very strange kid, so it seemed like a possibility, but there was no evidence for a case against him. Finally, it looks like he’s ready to confess. Maybe it’s because of the guilt he’s carried around all these years.” * * * At three o’clock the sheriff got a call from the jail. Halloran was awake and sober. When the officer on duty in the jail brought him to the conference room, he moved slowly and was unsteady on his feet. The sheriff motioned for him to sit at the end of the long table. “This is Deputy Ellis. I’ve asked him to be here when you give your confession. There will be a tape recorder on while you are talking. I have to inform you that whatever you say may be used against you in court. Do you understand?” Josh nodded slowly and let out a breath. “Yes, I do.” “Alright then, let’s go ahead,” the sheriff said as he turned on the recorder.” “Do you remember a man named Sam Parsons?” Josh asked. “I knew Sam,” the sheriff answered. “I killed him.” The sheriff was not sure he heard correctly. “You killed Sam Parsons?” Halloran nodded and repeated, “I killed him.” The sheriff shook his head. “Josh, I don’t understand.” “When my father died, my mother took it really hard. She sat in her rocking chair all day and refused to talk. She seemed to be getting a little better but after Martha’s death, she gave up completely. I couldn’t get her out of bed. I had to beg her to eat. Sometimes I had to feed her. The day she died, I found her on the floor in her bedroom when I came home from work. She had trouble sleeping, so I would buy her sleeping pills at the drug store. There were two empty bottles next to her body. I lifted her into the bed and threw the bottles in the trash before I called the doctor. I didn’t want anyone to know.” Josh shifted in his chair and stared at the tape recorder. The sheriff found himself becoming impatient. He felt like telling Josh to get on with the story but managed to hold back. After several minutes, Josh began to talk again. “The day after my mother’s funeral, I went into her bedroom to straighten up the mess. That’s when I found Martha’s diary. It was under one of the pillows wrapped in a piece of cloth. I was curious as to why my mother kept it hidden there. After I read it, I understood. “In April before she died, Martha began to write about Sam. She thought he was so handsome. At first, I couldn’t imagine who this might be. Then I realized it had to be Sam Parsons. He was living in an old farmhouse a short distance down the road from us. “Later, she wrote how excited she was when he touched her, and how much she loved him. I was shocked. Sam was probably six or seven years older than Martha. He worked at the grain elevator. He had the reputation of being a heavy drinker. During the time he was our neighbor, there had been several different girls living with him. He wasn’t the kind of person I would’ve expected Martha to be interested in. “When my father was very sick at the end, Sam would work on our farm on his day off. Dad said he didn’t like having someone like him around, but he was a good worker. It must have been during that time that he got to know Martha. “That spring Martha was away from the house quite a bit in the evenings. She said she liked to take long walks. I figured she was spending that time with Sam. “In the last entries in the diary, Martha wrote about how worried she was that she might be pregnant. She seemed to be getting more and more desperate. On the day before she died, she wrote that she was going to meet Sam the next morning at the quarry. If he wouldn’t agree to marry her, she was going to have the sheriff put him in jail for what he did to an underage girl. At that moment, I knew how she died.”Josh stopped to wipe the perspiration off his forehead. “At first, I was going to show the diary to the sheriff, but after I thought about it more, I decided that wasn’t a good idea. You couldn’t prove Martha was murdered based on what she’d written. In the predicament she was in, it would’ve been just as likely that she took her own life. I realized that there was no way the man who killed my sister, and was probably responsible for the death of my mother, would be punished unless I found a way to do it myself.” Josh’s mood seemed to change. He clenched his fists on the table top and began to speak more rapidly. “I got out a shotgun intending to go to Sam’s house and blow his head off. I was so angry I didn’t care if I ended up in jail for the rest of my life, but I changed my mind because if I did that, he would die quickly. I wanted him to suffer. “A few days later, I was trying to figure out how to get back at Sam when I remembered there was a cave on our farm. It was maybe a half a mile back off the road. I’d found the entrance years before when I was looking for arrowheads. I asked my father about it. He told me there as a small room inside the cave entrance. At rear of the room, there was a hole in the stone floor. Down below, there was a larger room. He said that a long time ago our family would sometimes hide escaped slaves there while they were traveling north. My father told me never to go into the cave alone, because if I fell through the hole, I wouldn’t be able to climb back out. “I got a ladder and a flashlight from the barn and went out to take a look. It was just like my father described it. I lowered the ladder into the opening in the floor and climbed down. On one wall of the room, there was a narrow passage that extended a long way back into the hillside. By the time I left the cave, I’d worked out a plan.” By this time, the sheriff and his deputy were sitting on the edge of their chairs as they listened to Halloran’s story. “On Friday, I called the hardware and said I was sick and wouldn’t be able to come to work for a couple of days. That night, at sundown, I drove over to Sam’s place and knocked. When he saw who it was, he started to close the door. Before he could get it shut, I asked him if he would like to earn some money for an hour or so of work. He looked suspicious but stepped outside to listen to what I had to say. “I told him that just before my mother died, she told me about a chest my grandfather had kept hidden in a cave on the farm. She said there were some valuable things in the chest, and that I should get it out right away. I described the cave and told Sam that there was a ladder down to the lower part. I said the chest was back in a narrow passage. I said if he would meet me at the cave in the morning and help me get it out, I’d give him a hundred dollars. “Sam asked me what was in the chest. I said I didn’t know, but it was heavy. At that point, he agreed to help me. I gave him instructions to the cave and told him to meet me there at sunrise. “I drove back home and went straight to the cave. I hid in the brush near the entrance. A little while later, Sam showed up carrying a lantern and a coil of rope. As soon as he was inside, I went over to the entrance and listened. I waited until I heard him climbing down the ladder and then slipped inside slowly, trying not to make any noise. From the edge of the opening in the floor, I could see his light moving around below . When I was sure he’d gone back into the passage, I grabbed the top of the ladder and pulled it up. “After a minute or two, I heard Sam cursing. I told him he was getting what he deserved for killing Martha. Then he began to beg. I stayed for awhile and listened. When he realized I was leaving the cave, he started screaming.” Halloran closed his eyes. “I still hear those screams in my dreams.” Ray looked across the table at the sheriff and shook his head slowly. “What did you do after that?” the sheriff asked. Halloran opened his eyes as though he was coming out of a trance. “I went home. I couldn’t sleep, so I sat in my mother’s rocker the rest of the night. The next morning I walked down the road to where Sam had parked his pickup. I was lucky. He’d left the key in the ignition. I drove to his house. The door was unlocked. I threw Sam’s clothes and some personal stuff in the truck and began driving. “Just after I crossed the state line, I saw an abandoned house that was set back off the road. The roof was caved in and the yard was full of junk. There was a deep, wooded ravine behind the house. I drove to the edge of the ravine. I took the license plates off the pickup, smashed the windows with a rock, and gave a push. It hit a tree on the way down and rolled over on its side. I hitchhiked home.” The sheriff finally broke the long silence that followed. “Josh, do you have anything more to say?” Josh shook his head and in a quiet voice said, “That’s the way I killed Sam, and I don’t regret it.” The sheriff turned off the tape recorder. He got up from his chair and walked slowly over to the window that overlooked the jail. He stood there for a moment and then turned toward Halloran, who was sitting with his head bowed. “Josh, we couldn’t find twelve people in the county who would convict you of murder based on what you’ve told us. If we could recover Sam’s remains there would be a case against you. But with all those houses that have been built on the farm the bulldozers must have sealed the cave entrance. There would be no way to find it. “I’m going to put you in a cell overnight. I think you need to get some rest. Tomorrow when I let you go, I want you to leave town immediately, and I don’t want to see you back here ever again. Do you understand?” Josh looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded. When the sheriff returned to his office after taking Josh to the jail, Ray was there waiting for him. “Dave, we’ve got to talk about this.” The sheriff closed the door and sat down at his desk.Ray was obviously agitated. “Most of the houses that have been built on the old Halloran farm are fairly close to the road. I bet we could find the entrance to that cave. Even if we couldn’t find any remains, Halloran’s confession should be enough to send him to jail.” “I agree with you,” the sheriff said. “I guess you think it was a justifiable homicide, but there’s no way of knowing if Parsons actually killed the girl. She could have fallen accidentally, or like Halloran suggested, given her state of mind, she may have intentionally jumped off the cliff.” “Ray, let me give you some more background. Sam Parsons and I lived in the same neighborhood when we were growing up. He was a year or so older than me, but we were in the same grade in school. Sam was mean. If you were smart, you stayed away from him. He was good looking. In high school a lot the girls wanted to go out with him in spite of his bad reputation. “When I got out of service Sam had a job at the grain elevator. He was living with a young girl in that house Josh talked about. Her name was Mary. At the time I signed on as a deputy, she was a waitress in the diner where most of the guys in the department ate lunch. Everybody figured Sam was pretty rough on her, because sometimes she would show up with bruises on her face. One time she came to work with a swollen jaw and a missing front tooth. “When Mary wasn’t at the diner for a couple or days, Sheriff Todd asked the owner, Jim Walton, what had happened to her. Jim said when he called up to find out why she hadn’t been coming to work, Sam told him she’d moved out, and he didn’t know where she’d gone. “Sheriff Todd was suspicious, so he went see Sam at the grain elevator. Sam said he’d found out Mary was running around with another man. On Saturday they had a big fight about it. After dinner, he went to town and spent the night at the Station Tavern. When he got back to the house, Mary had packed her things and left. Sam said he thought she must have run off with that other guy.” The sheriff saw that Ray had slumped down in his chair, and there was a slight frown on his face. “After meeting with Sam, Sheriff Todd decided to check into his story. He sent me to talk to the bartender at the tavern. He confirmed that Sam had come in early on Saturday night and had stayed until closing. He said that Sam was drunk when he left. “I contacted Mary’s sister who was living in town. She told me Mary had been thinking about moving out of Sam’s place but was afraid of what he might do to her if she did. She hadn’t heard from Mary and had no idea where she might have gone. “At the time, we had no solid evidence that Sam was lying and since Mary had good reason to fear him, it made sense that she would’ve left town.” Ray shook his head. “Dave, I don’t see how all the fuss about this girl leaving town has anything to do with Halloran’s confession. It looks like he didn’t push his sister off the cliff or kill his mother, but the murder of Parsons was premeditated, and he should go to prison for it. I bet when Parsons disappeared, nobody bothered to find out where he was.” The sheriff worked hard to maintain the respect of the men who worked with him, so he was pleased that Ray felt free to express his opinion so openly. “Ray, there’s no doubt that Halloran committed a murder, but this is a complicated case. Sheriff Todd took his job seriously. If he found out that there might be something suspicious going on in town, he would follow up on it. He played poker every Wednesday night with a few of his friends. The manager of the grain elevator, Joe Thompson, was one of the regulars. One night Joe happened to mention that Sam hadn’t shown up for work for over a week, and he was going to have to hire a new man. “Sheriff Todd thought that was strange. Sam was a heavy drinker, but he never missed a day of work. He’d lived in this town all his life, and it was hard to imagine he would just pick up and leave. After a couple days, and there was still no sign of Sam, Sheriff Todd and I went out to check his house. “The door was unlocked. It looked like Sam had left in a hurry. There was a six pack on the kitchen table and some spoiled food in the refrigerator. We went through the place pretty carefully. There wasn’t a clue as to why Sam left or where he went. “We looked around outside. In an old rundown barn there was an area in the floor that looked like it had been dug up fairly recently. It turned out to be a shallow grave. The coroner concluded that the remains were those of a young woman who had died of a broken neck. She had a missing front tooth. “We put a lot of effort into locating Sam, but we were never able to come up with any significant leads.” The sheriff paused. “Ray, if it’s not a problem for you, I’d like you to forget what went on here this afternoon.” The deputy shook his head. “No problem, Dave. Maybe I should get rid of the tape?” The sheriff nodded. “That would be a good idea.” * * * The next morning the sheriff drove to work knowing he wouldn’t feel comfortable until Josh Halloran was out of town. When he pulled into the department parking lot, Ray came out of the building and walked over to the car. “I just called your house. Your wife said you’d left for work early to take care of some unfinished business. When Russ went in to check on the prisoners at the beginning of his shift, Halloran was dead. He’d hung himself with his belt.”
Copyright © 2005 Richard Kelly |