El Rio de Animas Perdidas...

GUARDIAN OF THE DARK SCHOOL, A Mystery

To be published in Spring 2014 by 

Green Phoenix Productions

Set in the dark woods of a remote estate in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, it is 1993, the 14th year of the annual Liam Fagan Residency Prize for Emerging Poets. Fiona, a young MFA poet from Baltimore, is this year's winner. She arrives at the Fagans' rambling and lavish adobe hacienda, the hallways of which are filled with eerie carved Green Man masks, to find an ambiguous host and hostess and surly groundskeeper, who are reluctant to discuss the history of a poet who disappeared there 14 years ago. 

Fiona decides not to stay, sensing trouble...but in the local village meets last year's prize winner, Raven, who seems bitter about her own disturbing ritualistic experiences at the Fagan estate. Fiona, now intrigued and feeling braver in Raven's feisty company, reluctantly agrees to stay and team up to find out what happened to the missing poet. With the help of Hank, an aging and cantankerous gumshoe from Durango, Colorado, the two poets find themselves led deeper and deeper into the woods and some sinister goings on. The lurking presence of someone in the woods - is it the mythological Green Man? -- and a hypnotic spell of Eros form the compelling backdrop to their disconcerting adventures. 

And then...things get decidedly darker. 

EXCERPT:

from CHAPTER 18: Chivalry 

Michelle MillerAllen (c) 2014

September 16, 1993 – Durango, Colorado

        Hank Walker squirted a blast of Vitamin B under his tongue, and sat staring at the last message he’d sent to the Irish student writer at University College Galway.  What time was it there?  He counted on his mental fingers...about nine-thirty in the evening.  Hopefully not too late for a literature major to be checking his email in the student computer center on a week-day night.   

Hank was seriously craving his second daily cigarette, for which he was now about a half hour late.  This was not a good thing.  There was a certain amount of superstition attached to the timing of his two daily smokes: as long as he stuck religiously to the schedule, he told himself, he wouldn’t slip up.  He was only three weeks away from his long-term goal of going down to one-a-day.  This was not the time to be getting sloppy.  He had slipped up once this week, during a telephone conversation with Raven -- lit up before he realized what he was doing.  Stubbed it out after one puff.  Meanwhile, he hadn’t missed his two o’clock back-door ritual in six months. 

     But, he mused, the nicotine recovery market was missing a big clue: searching computer bulletin boards and libraries was damned compelling!   If you could cure the heroin habit by substituting methadone, why not the cigarette habit by substituting compu-net sessions?  Or, better still, this new internet stuff.  He was in the middle of a transition -- in his jargon, his thinking and computer browsing habits -- from the ‘compu-net’ mentality to the ‘Internet’ mentality.  Hank Walker tried to keep up with all this, realized that it was the wave of the here-and-now future for a private investigator.  He drew a skull and crossbones on one of his little pink Post-it notes and stuck it to the frame of the computer screen.  Not in reference to his idea, but to remind himself about one more item he should check in his research today.

       He went outside for the smoke, leaving the back door open in case the phone rang, and stared out at the La Plata Mountains.  They stood up to their name today.  It had rained this morning and the rocks still glistened silver in the sunlight.  He’d not put on his jacket, so he shivered through the whole ordeal -- the smell of snow was in the air.  Another part of his ritual, to make the smoke as physically uncomfortable as possible.   He’d told himself it was the relative boredom of his current life that kept him smoking. 

      He’d been widowed four years, had no offspring and no dating life.  He’d paid off the house -- a humble 1970's wood structure on two and a half acres -- with his wife’s insurance money.    His cases were almost entirely from the two big insurance companies out of Denver, with the occasional local process service for dead-beat dads on the lam from other jurisdictions.  He supposed he’d reached the burn-out stage long ago and was just going through the motions for sake of a pay check here and there.

     Yet here he was, less than nine days into what looked like a piece of cherry pie ala mode compared to his usual stale Danish – this business of reopening the Devlin case.  It wasn’t so much that Raven and Fiona had presented him with any new evidence.  But their intuitive approach to the subject, their passion – for life, for poetry, for righting the world’s wrongs – their wound-up, angry, sultry, hot female energy – that had him a bit stirred up.  Poets, he chuckled to himself.  Who would have thought a couple of poets from the hills of Northern New Mexico would have been in the crystal ball of his immediate future? 

       Having met them also stirred up something else.  A memory of who he was during the Devlin investigation.  Someone he hadn’t been since then, that was for sure.  Someone who could feel that little catch in the chest, that little thrill-chill down in the gut, when he got close to a hidden truth.  When he, Hank Walker, was about to become the guy who figured it all out. 

       But the guy who had investigated Aisling Devlin’s disappearance and the guy who was waiting for email from Ireland this afternoon were quite different people.    These days, as he took his usual Sunday stroll along the Animas River (his version of church services), where he’d sprinkled Loraine’s ashes back in ‘89, he often speculated that it was appropriate he lived here.  For those who knew and cared, the river was really called El Rio de Animas Perdidas – the river of lost souls.  That’s how he’d come to feel, between losing Aisling Devlin’s case, and then losing Loraine.

    Until the Devlin case, Hank had always fancied himself a pretty good detective -- thorough, tenacious, shrewd.  And, yes, intuitive, that most important quality that Raven Shane Cordova and Fiona Kelly had plenty of.  When he had come up against a brick wall on the Devlin case, he had lost a piece of his edge and, therefore, some of his confidence.  Maybe that was why he’d taken on more insurance fraud cases.  More of a sense of control? 

      There had been that car, left right there at Link’s gas station like an Easter bunny basket of brightly painted clues.  But they led nowhere. . . .That whole New Mexico mountain village was full of characters worth checking out.  But they all had alibis for the time frame of Aisling’s Colorado disappearance, and, being a small village where everyone knew when you took your last pee and what you had for breakfast last Sunday...every alibi was fully verifiable. 

      Hank had closed that file with anguish and reluctance.  He tried to tell himself Aisling had decided to disappear for reasons known only to her.  That she had come to no harm.  What the hell, he’d told himself, might as well paint an ending he could live with, since reality wasn’t coughing one up. 

    This week’s discoveries were ringing a lot of those old bells again.  This last communication from the Galway student should be the last piece of the day’s puzzle.  Where was Chahil O’Shea, the 1986 Fagan poet?  Hank had emailed a couple of writers he’d found through the Irish/American bulletin board Raven’s Dublin contact had sent.  Yesterday the Galway student responded, and said he had two of O’Shea’s books from the 1980s in his personal library.  He said O’Shea wasn’t a very important Irish writer, but was listed in the course syllabus of one of his literature professors because the professor actually knew him, and because O’Shea was part of a particular movement from the 1980's. O’Shea had been in a lot of anthologies from that decade.  However, once the poet left for America in 1985, the publication trail seemed to fade out and the student hadn’t heard anything about him in recent years.  The student said he’d check with his professor and get back to Hank.  This morning’s message was that others were looking for O’Shea also.  “Who and why?” had been Hank’s question.

     Through the open basement door, Hank heard the cheerful tone and static that indicated that he’d been bumped off line and was about to be reconnected.  He crushed out his cigarette – nothing left but the filter -- and carried it back down the steps inside to the ashtray.  He heard the cheerful announcement of “incoming mail.”

The student said his professor would himself be very interested to know where O’Shea was located: 

       “Some years back, a letter was sent to O’Shea in America from the publisher of his last book -- a friend of my professor’s, that is, Prof. McNiff  -- offering a contract to do some Gaelic translations of certain Irish/American poets residing in the United States.  O’Shea responded that he was definitely interested, returned the contract with his signature, and wrote that he would be coming back to Ireland for a visit in the early spring of 1987, and would bring some drafts then.  In response, a small advance was sent by the publisher, in the form of an international money order. . . . It has never been cashed and the publisher has not heard from O’Shea again.  It all seems very much out of character, says Prof. McNiff. . . Prof. McNiff says O’Shea was thought to be an honorable man who kept his word and wouldn’t take a signed contract lightly, but seven years is a long time to not hear anything.  Let me know if I can help otherwise.”

       Hank leaned back in his chair, staring at the word “seven” on the screen.  He’d seen references to the importance of the number seven on the pagan bulletin boards.  Seven days a week.  The seven seals.  Seven planets, seven wonders of the world.  Seventh son of seventh son.  Seven year itch.  The body even changed every seven years, at the cellular level, so he’d read in Scientific American.  The pagans said seven year cycles were magical.  Number seven was obviously important and mysterious, for reasons beyond his understanding.  Hawthorne’s courthouse record dated back to 1972.  Aisling Devlin disappeared in 1979.  Now it was clear that Chahil O’Shea disappeared in 1986.  

       Seven years apart, each event.

COVER:  Lyle Miller (c) 2014, May not be reproduced without Author's permission. 

[Guardian of the Dark School will be published this Spring by Green Phoenix Productions, www.greenphoenixproductions.org.  Announcements of publication date and availability of Kindle and Print-On-Demand copies will be made here shortly.]