The Waterfall Murders

By John A. Miller, Jr.

Art and Marsha Parker finally have a chance to get away for a week from Marsha’s medical clinic in the small town of Bearford to visit a plush resort for a honeymoon, a gift from their wealthy benefactor, Charles Drummond. Somehow their adopted sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary Ann Markham, who is also Drummond’s granddaughter, and Mary Ann’s best friend, Jennifer Martin, manage to convince the old man that Art and Marsha need chaperoning, so the two girls show up at the resort at the end of the first week, ostensibly to notify Art and Marsha that they’ve been booked for another week but really to investigate a corpse—soon to be two—discovered at the foot of a high waterfall on the resort’s property.

With their usual lack of good luck, all four get involved with searching for counterfeit fifty-dollar bills. Then Art, Mary Ann, and Jennifer manage to get themselves kidnapped by three thugs while attempting some unauthorized detective work on their own. While Marsha, inspired by the waterfalls at the resort, convinces Drummond to build a trail to an overlook for a waterfall on his property, the search for the counterfeiters goes on. Art, Mary Ann, and Jennifer keep getting themselves in more and more trouble until Art and Mary Ann come up with a brainstorm that finally leads them to the head of the counterfeiting ring and almost to their own deaths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John A. Miller, Jr.
• Release date: Jul 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476105567

John A. Miller, Jr.

John Miller, writing under his full name of John A. Miller, Jr., started writing novels back in late 1991 after working for many years in the mainframe computer and telecommunication fields. He had lived in southern Arizona so he knew the area well and set his first novel, Pima, in that area. Shortly after writing that novel he moved back to southern Arizona where he wrote five more novels in the Pima Series. He returned to his home area near Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1999 and continued to write, launching the Victorian Mansion Series with its nine novels.Since retiring from their day jobs John and his wife have enjoyed visiting Cape Cod and The Bayside Resort in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts at least once every year, so with their permission he partially set there a standalone novel, The Bayside Murders.Recently, after reading a number of cozy mysteries, John decided to launch a new series in that genre and named it Three-Zee for its main character, Zelanie Zephora Zook.

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Prologue

Things were going so well at the Bearford Medical Center that Marsha, who had now hired one general practitioner and one emergency specialist in addition to herself, was able to take a well-deserved week off. Although we’d been married since New Year’s Eve this was our first chance to take anything resembling a honeymoon. Adele Martin, the clinic’s accountant, was fully competent to manage the paperwork, and Marsha had added a receptionist, two medical technicians, and two nurses to the staff in addition to Susan Patkowski, her original nursing hire.

We were totally amazed that tiny Bearford was keeping the new medical facility busy and growing. Heretofore, the town had featured only a single dental office and a general practitioner, Sam Schwartz, who had split his time between his Bearford office and an office in Bridgewater, the county seat nearly thirty miles to the north. Sam, who lived closer to Bearford than to Bridgewater, had decided to give up his Bridgewater practice and ply his trade as part of the Bearford Medical Center staff, saving himself a bundle in office rent and giving him backup so he wouldn’t have to spend every weekend and holiday on call.

It was the beginning of August—the medical center had opened at the beginning of April—and very warm, almost sultry, but then the summer had been mostly that way. Our home, Charles Drummond’s huge Victorian-style mansion twelve miles north of Bearford, didn’t sport air conditioning, but it did have a beautiful swimming pool and a renovated lake with a sandy beach, which made living there not only tolerable but downright pleasant. Also, the well-insulated brick mansion with plenty of windows that could be opened at night to let in cooler air and then closed during the day to trap that cooler air inside, remained surprisingly comfortable even on the hottest days.

Confined most of the time to a wheelchair since an auto accident twelve years ago that had killed his only daughter and her husband—Drummond had been driving—the wealthy, retired auto parts manufacturer had been pretty much a recluse for most of those intervening years, living alone with his granddaughter, Mary Ann Markham; his cook, Rachel Peabody; and various other members of his household staff. Then I came along, and his life was never to be the same, but whether for better or worse I’ll let it up to you to decide.

Oh yes, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m former journalist Arthur Parker, who showed up one evening a couple of years ago to apply for a job as live-in writing coach for somebody in the house. That somebody turned out to be fourteen-year-old Mary Ann, who had recently published a novel for teens. Her grandfather felt she needed a new writing coach—her old one had mysteriously disappeared—so he cast his net into the waters and pulled up—me. Now Mary Ann is sixteen, is Marsha’s and my adopted daughter, and is the biggest pain in the ass… No, to be fair, she’s small, has long, dark hair, is cute as a button, and sometimes is sweet as honey, but then there are other times…

Other current members of the household are Bridget O’Donnell, housemaid; Jason Pincola, butler and Drummond’s resident nurse because of the old man’s rather deteriorated physical condition; and Hiram Blasko, chauffeur, gardener, and general handyman.

Bridget is fun, very Irish, and my beer-drinking buddy at the local bar, The Bear Pause—I kid you not—on nights when Marsha works late at the clinic. Marsha goes along when she can, I guess just to make sure everybody knows who is really my main squeeze. Besides, I’ve never had those particular feelings for Bridget, as nice as she is.

Pincola is kept busy taking care of Drummond and occasionally answering the door and doing whatever else it is butlers do, which in our house isn’t a lot. He has helped out at the clinic a few times—he is a registered nurse—especially before Susan had backup and was sick or had to take a day off.

Blasko’s a decent sort and does an excellent job maintaining the property, but he tends to keep to himself much of the time, hiding out in his greenhouse behind the garage. In the past we’ve had trouble retaining housemaids, butlers, and gardeners for various reasons, but the current crew seems to be effective and reliable.

Finally, there’s Mrs. Peabody, cook extraordinaire. She was never married, but Drummond gave the woman the title Mrs. because in England cooks are traditionally called that. Rachel Peabody cooks like one might think an angel from Heaven would cook. I know my waistline, never small, has expanded at least a couple of inches from regular consumption of her daily delights. Mrs. Peabody has been with Drummond for years and years, the only household staff member left over from the days before the auto accident, and I hope she’ll remain for years and years more.

I met Marsha slightly more than a year ago when most of the household packed up and spent a month at an Atlantic Coast beach town named Shipwreck. A native of the town, Marsha was an emergency room doctor at the Shipwreck Hospital and Medical Center when fate threw us together on several occasions, at least a couple of which nearly had us dying together.

Dying together? you may ask. Well, that’s one of the little problems that seem to keep cropping up in our lives. Wherever we go, whether at home or on the shores of the briny deep, we seem to attract dead bodies. No, these aren’t the bodies of people who have expired of natural and normal causes. Instead, murderers have determined that our immediate vicinity is an excellent place to dump their unwanted refuse, and we haven’t figured out a way to make them stop. Also, those same murderers frequently have considered adding us to their collections of corpses, a practice from which I really wish they would desist. After all, there probably are plenty of people in this world who are more deserving of being offed prematurely than me, my family, and my friends, so why are they always singling us out for their attentions.

One additional player in this comedy of corpses is Mary Ann’s best friend, Jennifer Martin, who also happens to be Adele’s daughter. Jennifer, approximately two weeks older than Mary Ann, is anything but cute as a button. She’s skinny and definitely unattractive, but she does have brains and occasionally even uses them. She usually wears unbelievably ugly clothing—clothing that no manufacturer in his or her right mind would ever design, let alone put on the market. She says it’s her way of rebelling—against what I’m not sure—but admits she does have difficulty finding the stuff.

So Marsha and I planned a trip to The Paradise Mountain Inn, a posh resort in the mountains about a hundred or so miles north of Bearford, foolishly not keeping the location a secret. Mary Ann and Jennifer both volunteered to come along as chaperones. We explained to them that married couples don’t require chaperones, especially not on their honeymoons. Also, the couple’s children and their friends are seldom, if ever, invited to such events. I think all our expostulations fell on deaf ears, but fortunately neither girl had yet acquired a driver’s license so we felt safe. Little did we know.

Day 1

Sunday

Marsha had already made all the scheduling arrangement for the medical center staff, so Sunday morning we loaded up my car with luggage and headed north. Because we had requested our few wedding guests in December to bring no gifts we hadn’t expected the surprise from Drummond, who notified us that morning at breakfast that he was picking up the tab for our entire honeymoon. We offered the usual protests, but the man insisted, pointing out that we had done him a great favor by providing a set of reliable parents for his orphaned granddaughter. He also mentioned that he was unlikely to be bankrupted by the honeymoon expenses, no matter how extravagant we managed to be.

I had purchased a GPS unit for the car, so we managed to make it to our destination without getting lost although a couple of times I felt like arguing with the woman hidden inside that tiny box. I’m sure she works for one of the oil companies and took us the longest possible route just so we’d burn more gas.

The resort was everything its brochures and Internet pictures had promised: a rustic-looking mountainside retreat with individual log cabin suites and a huge, log lodge that housed more guest rooms as well as the dining rooms, indoor swimming pool, and health club. Somewhere out there also were tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course, but those weren’t our interests so we never did check them out. Our own private cabin, at Drummond’s insistence one of the plushest, consisted of one large bedroom with a king-sized bed and flat-screen TV, one large living room with a queen-sized sofa bed and another flat-screen TV, and a huge bathroom with a big Jacuzzi tub in the center. The tub had two rainfall shower heads directly above it, so the occupant—or occupants as the case may be—could bathe, shower, or do both simultaneously. They could also do other things, but we won’t go into that here. Oh yes, there were two-bedroom, two-bath cabins, too, but one of those would have been ridiculous for a honeymooning couple. An enormous outdoor pool complemented the recreational facilities, plus the literature in our cabin included a trail map because the resort owned a good percentage of Paradise Mountain right up to and over the top.

Although I’ve expressed my feelings in the past about healthy physical activities, I knew my beloved would have me out on those trails in no time. In a weaker moment the previous winter we had joined a local hiking club, the Over-the-River-and-through-the-Woods Club or ORTWoods, along with Mary Ann, Jennifer, and Adele. We had taken several ORTWoods hikes in the Bearford and Bridgewater areas, most of them interesting although a couple had included climbs on hair-raising, narrow trails with no guard rails to places high above anywhere a human being should ever be expected to go on foot. Marsha and Jennifer, who aren’t bothered by heights, did their best to avoid criticizing Mary Ann and me, who are. However, occasionally we could tell they were biting their tongues to keep from calling us wusses. I guess we were lucky. There are worse things they could have called us; some of them pretty much unprintable.

We had arrived in time for dinner. Although later in the week we would have to dress more or less formally for that meal, Sunday evening attire was casual because many of the guests would be just arriving. So, after unpacking our suitcases and hanging up clothing that had begun to wrinkle just from having been in a suitcase for a few hours, Marsha and I made our way along a paved walkway through beautiful gardens to the main lodge.

Inside the building we drifted with the crowd through the main lobby and other large rooms toward what we hoped was dinner. The place was definitely a luxury resort. The main lobby looked like pictures I’ve seen of large mountain lodges in the West. However, the rustic furniture, like that in our cabin, was well constructed and expensive looking; not merely a few old logs nailed together with cushions thrown on top. An enormous chandelier, actually a wagon wheel far too big for any wagon on Planet Earth, had shaded lamps around its perimeter and provided gentle illumination for the entire room.. The other rooms were equally well furnished, some like big living rooms with cozy, overstuffed sofas and chairs, and others with the same rustic ambiance as the main lobby and cabins. I wondered whether the guest rooms in the lodge also looked like something out of the old West.

After about five minutes we found ourselves in a line of people waiting to be admitted to the dining room. The woman in front of us, a tall brunette who couldn’t have been less than fifty, turned and gave us the once-over. The skin on her face was smooth, but it showed evidence of having been stretched a bit, perhaps with the aid of a plastic surgeon or a few injections of botox. Also, I suspected her dark hair owed some of its even color to the contents of a bottle wielded by a professional. My own red hair is beginning to show a bit of gray, and I’m only forty-two.

Hello, I said, I’m Art Parker, and this is my wife, Marsha. Marsha is thirty-five, hasn’t a trace of gray in her hair, and is stunningly beautiful, or at least I think so, and I know for sure her brunette isn’t bottled.

Veronica Held, the woman replied in a deep voice. She glanced to her right toward her husband, a graying man probably a few years older than she—his hair color didn’t come out of a bottle, either, unless they’ve invented a variegated tint—and then added, Your first time here?

Well, yes, I said. Isn’t it yours?

Our tenth.

Not your honeymoon, then?

No. Paul and I celebrated that fifteen years ago with a cruise around the world.

Paul, who I assumed was the man beside her, continued to stare straight ahead. A cold fish, I decided, or else we weren’t his social equals. For that matter, I could tell by the look on Veronica’s face that she wasn’t exactly putting us on an equal footing, either. Of course, with what a week at this place was costing, Paul and Veronica either had a wealthy angel sponsoring them as we did with Drummond, or they weren’t hard up for cash in their own right. And then there was that cruise around the world…

Are you newlyweds? Veronica asked.

More or less, Marsha replied. Art and I got married New Year’s Eve, but we’ve been busy, so this was our first opportunity to get away.

Oh. Are you from the city?

Which city? No, actually we live in a rural area south of here that’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

We’re from Manhattan—the Upper East Side. Veronica’s voice was acquiring a distinctly chilly tone. Although I haven’t been to New York in several years, if I remember correctly the Upper East Side is pretty ritzy, depending of course upon how far up and how far east. Too far in either direction and things go downhill fast.

Paul is a Wall Street broker, and I’m a fashion designer. Perhaps you’ve heard of me, Veronica added, probably to let us country hicks know just where we stood.

No, I’m afraid I was never into designer fashions, Marsha said.

I’ve known Marsha for a little more than a year and been married to her for a bit over half that time, so I’ve come to recognize a number of her mannerisms. One of them is that she tends to clench her fists when she’s starting to get pissed off. I glanced down at her hands. Full clench.

And what do you do out there in the middle of nowhere? Veronica asked.

I merely run a medical center. You see, I’m an M.D., actually an emergency room specialist, by profession.

Veronica seemed a bit taken aback by this reply. I suspect she had been thinking Marsha got up early every morning to milk the cows.

At that moment the line began moving forward, so Veronica had to turn around to face forward. In a few minutes we were led into the dining room and seated at a table with another couple, a kindly looking pair who probably were in their seventies. I glanced around and saw the Helds being led to a table on the other side of the room.

The dining room, much like the main lobby, was constructed of rough-hewn logs with huge poles and cross-beams supporting a high ceiling. The tables had polished wooden tops and the chairs were cushioned, but they had more conventional underpinnings. Rough-hewn logs there probably would have played hell with women’s stockings and pantyhose at dinnertime.

Our tablemates, who each wore a set of facial wrinkles and crown of white hair that tended to emphasize their age rather than make them look younger, introduced themselves as Henry and Millie Barralong from, of all places, Bridgewater, our county seat. Surprisingly, they were newlyweds.

Our children—I have two daughters and Henry has a son—chipped together to give us this weeklong honeymoon, Millie explained. Otherwise we’d never have been able to afford it. She looked around the room at the elegant décor. It looks like it’s going to be wonderful.

So you’re the young doctor who opened up the Bearford Medical Center, Henry said to Marsha.

Yes.

Are you having any success with it?

Oh, quite a bit, I guess. We’ve had to add two doctors to our staff already.

That’s good. I’m retired now, but I was a purveyor. I sold food and supplies to local restaurants. The Bearford Diner and The Bear Pause were two of my clients.

Oh, we know them both well, I said.

Are you Bearford natives? Millie asked.

No, I’m employed by Charles Drummond as a writing coach for his granddaughter, whom Marsha and I recently adopted. I originally came from the Midwest and spent a number of years as a journalist and magazine writer. Marsha’s from the East Coast town of Shipwreck.

Oh, we’ve been to Shipwreck. It’s a lovely town.

Yes, Marsha said, I was born and raised there.

You said you work for Charles Drummond, Henry said, addressing me, but then you said you adopted his granddaughter. I don’t quite understand.

It’s a bit complicated. I’ve been working as Mary Ann’s writing coach for a couple of years, now. Mary Ann’s an orphan—her parents were killed in an auto accident when she was four—so after Marsha and I got married Drummond asked us to adopt the girl, his only grandchild. He’s not in such good health, and because Mary Ann’s only sixteen he didn’t want her to be left alone or put into foster care if something happened to him.

A wise man. I know Charles Drummond slightly—I remember that he’s been pretty much of a recluse for a number of years—but I didn’t know about the girl.

Do you have a home in Bearford? Millie asked.

No, actually we live in Drummond’s mansion with him. I’ve been living there ever since I took the job, and he insisted we stay living there after we married. It’s an enormous place, so we’re not in each other’s way.

Henry looked thoughtful for a moment; then he asked, Aren’t you the person who’s been involved with some of the murders that have occurred in the past couple of years? I seem to remember that several of them took place on Drummond’s property.

Guilty as charged, your honor, I said, not really wanting to get into the subject, and I guess looking like I didn’t.

Oh. Yes, I guess you wouldn’t want to talk too much about stuff like that. Then, I suppose you’ve met our local sheriff.

You’re not a relative of his, are you?

Good Lord, no!

That’s good. If you were, I’d have to say nice things about him. As it is, well…

Henry laughed. At least on that subject we were apparently in agreement.

Dinner was delicious, and the Barralongs were pleasant company. I’m not sure what we would have done if our tablemates had turned out to be snooty Veronica Held and her silent partner, but then Marsha’s a doctor and for all I know might have undetectable ways of eliminating people. No, bite your tongue, Parker. You’ve been involved in enough questionable deaths. On second thought, most of them weren’t very questionable. At least neither my wife nor I had deliberately murdered anybody… yet.

Days 2-4

Monday through Wednesday

The first three days of our honeymoon were heavenly. We lazed by the outdoor pool, ate gourmet meals nearly as good as those served by Mrs. Peabody back home, and did husband and wife things in the privacy of our cabin without fearing that a certain adopted daughter and her best friend might use her purloined key, barge into our room, and make critical comments. All in all we were having a great time.

Marsha and I called home every evening, both to let the folks there know we were okay and because Mary Ann had threatened us with death and dismemberment, not necessarily in that order, if we didn’t fill her in on every little detail of our private time together. Have I mentioned that the kid is nosy?

Unlike some establishments where you’re expected to share your dining table with different people for each meal or at least each day, The Paradise Mountain Inn paired you off with the same people for the entire week. I suppose if one protested, they would realign the seating arrangements—for what we—okay, make that Drummond—were paying they’d better—but I didn’t notice anybody changing places. Fortunately, Henry and Millie were pleasant dining companions, so we had no complaints. I’m not sure who was suffering with the Helds, but then maybe they were from the Upper East Side, too, and were able to swap stories.

Wednesday, the fourth fine, sunny day in a row, brought Marsha’s healthy exercise instincts to the fore. Because I had actually swum a few laps in the pool and even spent a couple of half-hour stints on a health club treadmill, I had hoped my beautiful wife would be satisfied and not urge me to join mountain-climbing excursions in which I had no interest. I was wrong. I hadn’t read the fine print, which described a nice, guided trail hike that would include stops at several overlooks where we could observe a series of waterfalls in a small stream that wends its way down the mountainside. Marsha was ecstatic, partially because she likes looking at waterfalls and partially because she wants to set up a trail and overlook for the Pirates’ Hill waterfall on Drummond’s property at home.

I had been hoping she had forgotten her plan, but apparently it had merely been lying dormant while she got the clinic up to speed. I knew Mary Ann would support her, and if the kid supported her I knew Drummond would throw his money behind the project. After all, he had shelled out big bucks for Mary Ann to renovate an entire lake, so a mere trail and overlook would be chickenfeed.

And so it was that on Wednesday morning, after an early breakfast, twenty or so couples, a few singles, and several children of various ages clad in shorts, tee shirts, and sneakers gathered outside the lodge to embark on a perilous journey into the wilds of the local mountainside. Neither the Helds nor the Barralongs were part of the group. I could see why Henry and Millie weren’t with us—besides being in their mid-seventies they both had some difficulty walking. On the other hand, the Helds seemed to be in good health, but I guess hiking mountain trails was beneath people from the Upper East Side where I assume they rode on elevators.

The trail started out fairly level but then began to climb. Fortunately, the earlier parts of the hike didn’t take us past any sheer drops, and we didn’t meet any bears or other dangerous forest fauna. We did startle a couple of deer, but of those I have no fear, and the woods abounded with birds, squirrels, rabbits, and other harmless creatures.

We rounded a bend, and through a gap in the foliage we could see the first of the promised waterfalls, a good hundred-footer or so, dropping from a ledge high above. Even curmudgeonly old me was impressed, so much so that I snapped a number of pictures.

After everyone had made serious inroads on the capacity of the memory chips in their digital cameras our guide again began dragging us forward across the creek on a rustic bridge and along the trail, now considerably steeper as it switchbacked up the mountainside. So far we hadn’t reached a stretch as steep as the one on Pirates’ Hill back home on which I almost invariably slipped and fell on my ample butt, but I was beginning to fear what might lie ahead.

My fears were justified, not by the steepness of the trail, which suddenly leveled off, but by the fact that we no longer had woods on our left. Instead, we had open air as the trail began to follow the edge of the cliff over which that lovely, hundred-foot waterfall drops. I hugged the right side of the trail, the side with trees, wishing the space between them was not so thick with brush so I could walk behind the first row and use them more or less as guardrails. Things got worse when we reached the stream, which we had to cross on a series of stepping stones. Although the brink of the falls is at least twenty feet from the crossing, to me it seemed to be directly beneath my left armpit, and I was sure I was about to lose my footing, slip off a stepping stone, and become the falls’ next victim; not that I was aware of any victims in the past.

Immediately after we all made it safely to the farther bank, I discovered that the trail curved to the right, away from the perilous drop. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Marsha, who hadn’t been a bit fazed by how near she had been to a horrible death, smiled at me but kindly didn’t laugh out loud, sparing me the jeers of my other hiking companions. Of course, some of them might also have felt as I do about the peril of high places, but they had done an excellent job of hiding their feelings.

We rounded another bend and there, just ahead, was a broader, but less precipitous, waterfall. This one is only about thirty or forty feet high, and it’s more of a cascade than a fall, leaping from rock to rock down a steep slope. Again the trail switchbacks up the hillside near the cascade, and a couple of times it comes dangerously close to the edge, but I gritted my teeth and managed to reach the top alive. This time the trail doesn’t cross the stream but merely follows alongside for several hundred yards.

We passed three more falls, a thirty-footer, a twenty-footer, and one that’s more like a very steep rapids. In each case the trail switchbacks up the mountainside near the falls, the steepest portion being where it more-or-less parallels the rapids. However, that wasn’t too scary, or maybe I was getting used to making like a mountain goat.

Our hike ended at a large pond—the source of the stream. There we discovered a picnic ground with a number of rustic wooden tables. We also discovered a parking area containing two hotel vans, out of which staff members were unloading eating utensils and food.

During lunch we shared a picnic table with two other couples: Jack and Theresa Long from Minnesota, and Becky and Joe Salvaggio from just a few miles south of Bearford. I was surprised to meet a second couple from our immediate area, but Joe said this was the best resort within a reasonable driving distance, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find others from the Mercer County area. As it was, quite a number of the guests had come by air, which required a forty-mile drive from the nearest large airport in Blackwood City.

The Longs were a fairly quiet couple, probably in their early fifties. The Salvaggios were much younger, probably only in their middle to late twenties. Becky Salvaggio had flaming red hair, much brighter than my own dull mop, but was a bit too pale and plump for my liking. Joe, on the other hand, was lean and wiry with features that corresponded to his Italian surname including jet black hair, a widow’s peak, and a somewhat large nose. Becky didn’t seem to be very talkative, but Joe more than made up for her silence.

While Jack and Theresa obviously would not be interested in Marsha’s clinic, my dear wife made her little sales pitch to Joe and Becky, who said they’d check it out, especially because they had been driving all the way to Bridgewater for a family doctor. They had two young children at home who were being watched by Becky’s aunt and uncle for the week, so here was a pile of potential new clients, especially if the aunt and uncle also became interested. Becky was a Bridgewater native, but Joe said he had wandered in from out of state initially to work in the office of one of the larger paper mills and had met Becky there. Although he was still an accountant Joe now worked for a smaller company while Becky stayed home with the kids.

After we finished our