The Sir Arthur Annals Book I

By James Ray

My Brother Who Would be Sherlock. Follow the fictional often fanciful tales of sleuthing in northwest North Carolina as Sir Arthur who inherited the moniker in honor of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, untangles mysteries and other strange cases with James his older brother and chronicler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Ray
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370682850

James Ray

Born in Detroit, Michigan, we moved down south to the mountains of northwest North Carolina where I attended eighth grade and high school. After a shortened semester and a half expirament at Arizona State University, I joined the US Marine Corps where I spent the next nearly five years with an abbreviated tour in Viet Nam. A lifelong tinkerer of poetry I finally published a collected volume of verse, Cosmos Clouds. I now spend time amusing myself writing poetry and short stories including a collection of case studies in the Annals of Sir Arthur, My Brother Who Would Be Sherlock. Married now for over 30 years, we split our time between the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Western Nebraska.

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The Sir Arthur Annals

My Brother Who Would be Sherlock

Book I

by James Ray

Copyright 2013 by James Ray

Smashwords Edition

I have taken to living by my wits.

Sherlock Holmes –The Musgrave Ritual.

Characters, names and incidents used in this book are products of the imagination of the author and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental or used fictitiously.

The adventures of sleuth Sir Arthur as he sorts out mysteries in the mountains of northwest North Carolina.

Table of Contents

The Case of the Missing Ashe Central Trophies

Lost Ledger

Missing Ueker Baseball Cards

1846 Family Bible Rescue

Arsenic in an Old Place

The Endowment

Bullit’s Blanks

The Strange and Bizarre Circumstances Surrounding the Search for Eric Rudolph

Art—or is it No Art

Samurai Sam

Missing Dollar Dispute

Nell Hardin’s Cryptogram

Randall’s Riddle

Secret Still

Plumb Puzzled

Sterkel’s Fishing Fib

Mary Jane

Missing Contactor

Meteor or Not

The Henhouse Heist

The Case of the Fake Memos

Postscript

The Atlanta Adventure

Coming Soon

About the Author

The Case of the Missing Ashe Central Trophies

Over the years there has been many and varied—and for all accounts, erroneous, versions of the events that led up to and accompanied the bizarre affair of the apparent theft and subsequent ostentatious display of the Ashe Central High School athletic trophies atop the façade of the Skyland Post newspaper building in downtown West Jefferson in the winter of nineteen hundred and sixty-nine. Many theories were put forth and bantered about by the local populace who were without sufficient evidence to formulate an educated deduction which fueled the fires of rampant and wild speculation between the time of the disappearance and the subsequent mysterious surfacing of their sports treasures some two weeks later.

For thirty-five years we have been sworn to secrecy but the time has come to make public the true and factual narrative that should once and for all clarify the situation and lay to rest the fabrication and rumors that have surfaced over these past four decades. This also is the story of how my brother Art acquired the moniker, Sir Arthur and the reputation and legend of his then burgeoning career as a true family and local artiste in the province of deduction in true Sherlockian form—a role he was to adopt and prolifically practice throughout his life.

I survived the rigorous ten-week Marine Corps basic training in San Diego, California, then two weeks of mess duty and a subsequent two-month Infantry Training Regiment course (ITR) at Camp Pendleton, California during the summer and early fall of nineteen sixty-nine. The powers that be in Headquarters, United States Marine Corps issued me orders to report to USMC Computer Science School, Quantico, Virginia to commence instruction in IBM 1401 Autocoder Programming and if successful, followed by an Advanced course in IBM 1311 Disc Programming. At the time I had no idea what a computer was and besides, it was all just another chapter in an unfolding and promising adventure of modern warfare I was engaged in following our proud Southern military heritage. How I was going to fight the Viet Cong enemy in Southeast Asia with an IBM computer escaped my comprehension but I was quickly learning the futility of understanding the ways and means of the modern day United States military. Upon successfully completing the course of study at Quantico, and before I was to report back to Camp Pendleton, California for staging in preparation for my tour of duty in Da Nang, South Viet Nam, I was at home in Ashe County, North Carolina and had in my possession leave papers for thirty days to recover from my recent exposure to the rigors of Marine Corps life. It coincided with the local high school break between Christmas and New Year’s holiday, which in turn worked out very nicely in my pursuit of a certain student of Scandinavian descent who was completing her final year in our rival high school, Ashe Central.

At the time, we lived in what we called the Burgess House, so named for the previous family inhabitants. Our domicile was set back off the road a ways more or less a quarter-mile or so. One reached it by a one-lane, badly rutted gravel driveway which turned south off State Route 221, what we called the Boone highway, dipped down through a pasture, crossed a narrow bridge spanning a small creek, the Old Fields branch of Beaver Creek went up the hill past the barn and curved around from the back of the house to the front forming a loop which was pretty handy because you never had to back up to get in or out of the place. We had a sizeable vegetable garden and a tobacco allotment of one-tenth of one-hundredth of an acre which amounted to one-half a row on the upper side of the garden. At the end of every summer the county agent for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services would come by and inspect our row of tobacco, making sure that the tops were chopped off so that we couldn’t sell any seeds and every year he would get out his tape measure and carefully measure our row of tobacco to make sure we didn’t exceed our ‘allotment’. Occasionally, he was known to chop down a tobacco plant or two that were growing outside his prescribed measurements of two feet by twenty-one point seven-five feet. In all reality, it wasn’t much of a cash crop and we more or less grew the tobacco out of a family joke just to irritate the county inspector who happened to be a third cousin, twice removed, an accountant type fellow who took his job far too serious than was healthy—suffering as he was from high blood pressure and a serious lack of a sense of humor—which I later discovered to be a common ailment of most government field employees.

In the pasture were a couple of dairy cows we milked regularly and a couple of feeder calves we raised for market every fall. That was the extent of our farming industry. As little as it was, there was never a lack of work to be done.

My brother Richard and I kept a cache of beer under the bridge in the creek which served two purposes. First of all, the running water in the creek kept the beer at an absolutely perfectly cold temperature and gave us a convenient place to pick up and deliver our libations without alarming or upsetting anyone in authority—family or otherwise; for that reason and we lived in a dry county. Go figure.

All in all, it was a typical northwestern North Carolina Blue Ridge mountain family farm which produced an endless stream of work and little-to-no income.

To augment the family farm revenue, or lack thereof, our father owned and operated a small grocery store gas station combination named after himself, Roger’s Grocery, two blocks below the high school in Beaver Creek on the Boone highway a mile or so to the east of our farm and two miles or so southwest of West Jefferson. In reality, the grocery business produced no real income and in time his failure to manage the credit side of the business eventually bankrupted our family. But at the time it provided us boys a dependable source of gas for the cars (or pickup) to drive around at night and something to eat during the day while we were working.

My typical days while on leave consisted of milking the three dairy cows in the morning, working in the store during the afternoon until we closed which was usually between six and seven in the evening. Normally, we would leave the store and stop off at grandma’s house for a short visit every night. Then, after driving my dad home I was free to drive his pickup around town for the night as long as I had it back by early morning when he left the house to open the store at six a.m. As I said, my nights were spent primarily chasing around an Ashe Central High School senior lass, Cindy who lived in Jefferson, who I eventually married the following September and who in turn dumped me four years later. I still haven’t figured out the whys and wherefores of that little ordeal yet.

My brothers were still in school, though on Christmas break. Richard and Arthur were seniors. Richard had just finished a stellar career as all-conference middle linebacker and Art was the team manager. The twins, Robert and Ronald were juniors and John was yet to start his storied high school career. When I wasn’t wooing Cindy, Richard and I were out running the roads looking for something to do for excitement in typical teenager, testosterone fueled fashion in rural Americana.

Following yet another dreary winter night on this particular Friday in question, Cindy and I were cruising the local hangouts and tiring of that I eventually took her home around eleven that night after of course engaging in a little kissy-face. I was driving away from the Stanley domicile thinking that it was too early to go home and wondering what I could do to pass the time. This was a tremendous challenge because the town streets and county roads were pretty well deserted long before midnight and none of the local establishments were open, especially during the wintertime. None that is, except for Ithiel’s place. He had a hole in the wall gas station on the road the locals referred to as the four lane highway between the towns of Jefferson the county seat and West Jefferson which was the center of commerce at that time in Ashe County before they built the bypass which effectively cut off West Jefferson from the major motor artery running through the county. In addition to gas, Ithiel offered a few snacks to the public; for his friends and partisans, there was always an excellent selection of hooch, both tax-paid and otherwise and great World War II stories about the Pacific island hopping campaigns that included Tarawa and Iwo Jima where he served in the Marine Corps (and was inspirational for me enlisting last summer). Many a night we were there until the wee hours of the morning listening to Ithiel’s war stories and imbibing in his rot-gut moonshine. He chain-smoked Camels before they had filters and I never saw him eat a thing. He stood about five-foot eight and I bet he didn’t weigh a pound over one-twenty. He was wiry and tough as nails and looked every bit the part of an ex-marine. Looking back I wished I would have recorded some of those stories. Later I was to learn that his name meant, God is with me in Hebrew which, if you knew Ithiel you would understand the irony of God’s ways. Later, he picked up the contract for trash removal in the county and made a small fortune at it, but at this time he toiled at his gas station and engaged in the distribution and sale of his excess white lightening to augment his meager living.

I drove by his place that night but it was dark and nary a soul was out and about.

After circling around back of his station just to be sure and continuing on east, without knowing how or why, without deliberate intention I found myself parked in front of Ashe Central High School. I got out of my dad’s ‘64 Ford F-150 faded blue pickup and walked up to the front door and stood there looking in past the front entrance to the hallway where the trophy cases lined the walls. I had never been inside Ashe Central High School except for the visiting team locker room when we played them in football on their field my sophomore and senior years and when we visited them for basketball once a year. I just stood there thinking. Earlier in the week I had read in the newspaper of a college fraternity prank where they stole the rival college’s mascot. With the story of this incident fresh on my mind, and who says kids aren’t influenced by the media, and inspired by a few beers and my recent Marine Corps training and indoctrination, I kicked in the front door without thinking breaking the glass up around the door handle. Later on I realized that I had cut my ankle and sport a scar to this day as a reminder of a young man’s foolhardiness. I reached through the broken glass, unlocked the door and when I walked up to the trophy case what occurred next was merely a logical extension of the frame of mind I happened to be in at the time. I removed the largest trophy from its prominent position in the trophy case –which happened to be the one they received when they won the state basketball tournament a few years earlier. It was the only state championship they had ever won and it just so happened that their coach succumbed to cancer a year or so later making that particular ‘trophy’ (I later discovered) more treasured than all the others. For good measure, I picked up a couple of other basketball regional trophies and returned back to the pickup where I carefully laid them on the seat beside me.

Without any particular plan or thought in mind I drove away, minding the speed limit so as not to attract any undue attention to myself. The local highway patrolmen and I were well acquainted and I saw no need in meeting up with them this night to collect another summons for speeding to go along with the stacks of others I had accumulated over the previous year and a half, especially under the present circumstances.

When I got home I carried the trophies into the house and up the stairs to the second floor where all us boys’ bedrooms were located. On a whim, I woke up Richard and showed him the results of my earlier endeavor. Without hesitation, he said, Let’s go back and get the rest of them. That sounded like an excellent idea to me and I quickly agreed.

So as not to wake up our parents, whose bedroom window happened to be located where the pickup was usually parked, we pushed the truck out from the house and down around the loop of the driveway far enough away from the house so that when we started it hoping nobody would be awakened. On the way out, we stopped off at the bridge to pick up some beers to take along with us for the ride. It was about a ten-to-twelve mile drive to the high school and when we got there we removed all the trophies from the trophy cases and carefully loaded them into the back of the pickup. For good measure, we also picked up the picture of their sainted basketball coach and took that along as well. In retrospect, I think it was the taking of that picture that upset their alumni more than the missing trophies.

When we got back home with our assortment of trophies, we parked the pickup by the back door. Our plan was to carry the trophies through the back door, past the mud room, through the kitchen and place them on the dining room table. When all the trophies were on the table we would then carry them up the stairs after pushing the pickup back into its regular parking spot. The plan was going well until about half way through, out from his bedroom comes the old man roaring like a lion, What in the hell is going on out here? What are you boys doing making all that racket? It’s enough to wake up the dead. Can’t you see that it’s almost three o’clock in the morning?

Richard froze in place with a handful of trophies in the kitchen and quick as a flash I went around the staircase where I met the old man before he could get to the dining room and see our growing collection of trophies on the table. I started talking ninety miles an hour explaining that I was just out riding around amusing myself and didn’t realize that I was making all that much noise. I apologized several times and promised to be even more quiet in the future; not to worry about anything and don’t you need to get back to sleep because you have to open the store at six a.m., which, as you pointed out is in less than three hours? Satisfied, sort of, he returned to his bedroom slamming the door behind himself and we completed our mission without further incident.

We got all the trophies put on the table, pushed the pickup back into its place and began carrying the trophies up the stairs stacking them all over Richard and Art’s bedroom that they shared. The bedroom was pretty small, no more than nine by ten feet and trophies were everywhere; all over the floor, on the dresser, in the closet, under the bed—everywhere. Our handiwork concluded, we finally crashed to catch a couple of hours of sleep before we had to get up to go work in the store, for Saturday was the busiest day of the week.

I was up by six thirty to milk the cows. In the meantime, our mother went upstairs to wake up Richard to go work in the store and when she opened the door to his bedroom let out a gasp, What, what, what’s going on here?

Look over here, replied a sleepy Richard, and look over there, pointing to the dresser. You should see the closet.

Don’t forget to look under the bed, a now wide awake Art added.

Where did they come from?

Central.

What are you going to do with all these trophies, she demanded.

I don’t know; you’ll have to ask Jimmy.

I should have known, she rejoined over her shoulder on her way out and down the stairs.

When I got back to the house after completing my morning milking chores she was waiting for me. She was sitting at the dining room table drinking a cup of coffee, pretending to read last Sunday’s newspaper when I came inside. Out of the corner of her eye she calmly watched me wash up and pour myself a cup of joe. What do you plan on doing with all those trophies? she asked as I sat down at the table. You know you can’t keep them, don’t you?

We have no intention of keeping those trophies, and I haven’t thought that far ahead of what to do with them. It was all rather a spur of the moment kind of thing.

How did you get them?

I kicked through the front door, broke the glass and ended up cutting my ankle, see, I said pointing to my injury.

It serves you right. Well you are going to have to pay for the broken glass. Tell you what, you give me twenty dollars and I’ll mail a money order to the school from Wilkesboro on Monday because I have an appointment down there in the afternoon. In the meantime, you have to figure out what you are going to do with those trophies. You can’t keep them.

I went upstairs and before Richard and I left to go work in the store, we had Art take a picture of us mugging in front of the camera like a cat who ate the canary. With the trophies as a backdrop and all around and in front of us, Art snapped the last picture remaining on our Polaroid camera.

An early winter storm passed through the area that Saturday night laying down a four-inch blanket of snow. It was Monday before they discovered the missing trophies. The news spread through the county like a late summer Montana wild fire.

Every morning at the breakfast table mother would ask, What are you going to do with the trophies, and every morning I would answer, I don’t know. It was becoming a ritual and I was at wit’s end on what to do with our stockpile of trophies. Time was not on my side. My thirty days of leave were rapidly diminishing.

In a matter of days the big shots in Raleigh sent up some folks from the State Bureau of Investigation to look around and see what they could come up with. We also noticed a couple of extra highway patrolmen cruising through the county. Seems like every time I turned around in the store there were a couple of new SBI agents nosing around, asking too many questions, trying to be cool—like they fit in and nobody knew why they were there. Right! It wasn’t hard to spot them in their neatly dry-cleaned dark suits, white starched shirts and blue ties. I mean, come on, nobody dressed like that in the county; not even the insurance salesman or the local lawyers. I didn’t mind pumping them up with all kinds of talk about who would think of doing such a thing, isn’t anything sacred any more, have you looked into any gang activity—stuff like that. They ate it up too. The more they ate it up the more baloney I fed them.

Later in the week one day, Richard came rushing into the store where I was helping out stocking the shelves and said, There’s a rumor going around that somebody dumped the trophies in the pond out by Shatley Springs. There’s a bunch of guys out there dragging the bottom of the pond to see if they can find any trace of them.

Let’s go check it out, I replied and grabbing my coat after getting permission from the old man we jumped in the pickup and headed over to Shatley Springs which was a mile or two east of Jefferson. We spent the rest of the day helping those guys drag the pond without success looking for those trophies that were safely hidden back in our house. Every once in a while we would catch the attention of each other and break out laughing. Nobody else there saw anything amusing about the whole thing and just glared at us. We were immediately met with icy stares from the guys in suits. Tired, cold and discouraged they finally called off the search along about dusk and chalked it up to a false lead.

Working in the store like we did we heard it all when it came to gossip. Of course, in that sardonic sense of humor of ours, we really fueled the rumors and kept them going. All kinds of stories were going around about disgruntled alumni, mean spirited rivals from the other two high schools in the county; how they had been taken down state and sold; how they had been destroyed. Half the county was nervous and jittery. I just stood there with a straight face and went right along with the story telling. A time or two, I was even known to embellish a few of the tales myself and pass them along just to make them more interesting. I stood there behind the counter of Roger’s Grocery and repeated it all and then some to anybody who would listen.

Finally, going into the second week I hit on an idea. Remember, I said to Richard one night on our way over to Ithiel’s place, that story Roger once told of when he was in high school back in Virginia how he and some other guys dismantled an old man’s Model A, and reassembled it on the roof of a building in downtown Grundy?

Yeah, I vaguely remember something about that.

Now I know what to do with the trophies. This Friday night we’ll put them properly on display and put an end to our little practical joke before it gets any further out of hand.

What are we going to do?

You’ll see.

Come Friday night long after everyone else was in bed asleep, shortly past midnight we pulled the pickup up to the back door and started to carefully load all the trophies into the back where we had laid down an old blanket. It was cold but fortunately, there wasn’t any snow this night. This meant, naturally, we were wearing gloves. We wiped down all the trophies as we loaded them in the truck. Once we had all the trophies loaded, we headed for downtown West Jefferson.

Slowly driving along Main Street in town we assured ourselves that we had the place all to ourselves. Just to be on the safe side, we drove up and down Main Street a couple of times and circled around both back streets and did not encounter any other cars. Feeling safe, I directed Richard to kill the headlights and turn into the narrow driveway alongside of the Skyland Post building all the way to the back and behind the building into the alley by the loading dock. Quietly, and talking only in whispers (why, I have no idea why we were whispering) we got out of the truck and surveyed the surroundings. From the dock I hoisted Richard up onto the roof of the building. Once he was in position, I started tossing a few of the trophies up to him. After we had about ten trophies up on the roof, Richard helped me up onto the roof alongside of him. Crouching, we carried the trophies along the roof to the front where the façade rose up about two to three feet higher than the level of the roof where we stood. After we had a couple of trophies moved to the front I heard a hurried whisper from Richard who was at that moment, at the front of the building. Quickly moving up alongside of him, he pointed off to the right where I could see the local town cop car slowly driving up and down Main Street. Each time he approached the building where we were we crouched down, hopefully out of his sight. After his third pass we waited several minutes and decided the coast was clear.

First we placed the largest one, the state basketball championship trophy which was a good three feet tall in the middle on the top and in the middle of the parapet. We arranged the remaining trophies in descending order by height, tallest to shortest out on both sides, somewhat symmetrically. Originally, we planned to place all the trophies on the façade but with the patrolling town cop car that could arrive at any minute, we decided to quit while we were ahead and not push our luck. We ended up placing about a dozen trophies on the façade. We then hopped down off the roof and offloaded the remainder of the trophies onto the loading dock up next to the building where they would be safe. By now dawn was quickly approaching and we headed home for some much needed sleep and rest.

Saturday morning I woke up, milked the cows, finished my chores and Richard and I headed down to the store to face our end-of-the-week rush of shoppers. When we got there we thought it was strange that the parking lot was full of cars even though it was still early, perhaps about eight-thirty. We went inside, there were a lot of people milling around the potbellied stove the old man kept off to one side with a few chairs so the locals to chew the fat during days of inclement weather as well as on hot summer days. It was around that very Franklin wood stove in nineteen sixty-six that I heard and recorded for prosperity in the Ode To Billy Brown, based the remark that made Sheriff Brown a legend in his own time. Asked what he thought about the Civil Rights Bill, he responded that he thought we ought to pay all our bills which elicited a few guarded chuckles—and much guffawing behind his back.

Once inside the store we were cornered by one of our cousins who was in his early twenties, Roger Wyatt, who was a barber in West Jefferson and was all agog. He was babbling about downtown and all the excitement going on. After we calmed him down