Quentin's Escape

By David H Fears

Stunned by the tragic loss of his soul mate, Quentin Haggerty flees east with no destination in mind, desperate to find peace. A wise old man in a small town café nudges him to meet the town police chief, who offers him a deputy position. Q’s bearing and experience qualify him, and he signs on with misgivings. Shortly afterward the chief dies and Q is sworn in as acting chief. Though over his head and haunted by visions of his lost love, Q gets to know the people. Growing in the job takes his mind off his grief, though life is made more complicated by a serial peeper and the first murder in the town since the 20s. Several females clamor for his attention. Can he find redemption as the head cop while solving crimes and dodging his own feelings of inadequacy? Is love a possibility or is he permanently damaged? Book 2 in the Quentin Romance Series. Set in 1945 in Oregon. Adult situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David H Fears
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370279029

David H Fears

David was known by the handle “professor” as a boy (no doubt the thick black spectacles, Buddy Holly style), and has had a lifetime interest in Mark Twain. He has also written nearly one hundred short stories with about sixteen published, and is working on the 14th Mike Angel PI Mystery novel.Fears is a pretty handy name for horror stories, but he also has written mainstream nostalgic, literary, some fantasy/magical realism, as well as the PI novels. For the past decade he has devoted his full time to producing Mark Twain Day By Day, a four-volume annotated chronology in the life of Samuel L. Clemens. Two volumes are now available, and have been called, “The Ultimate Mark Twain Reference” by top Twain scholars. His aim for these books is “to provide a reference and starting-off place for the Twain scholar, as well as a readable book for the masses,” one that provides many “tastes” of Twain and perspective into his complex and fascinating life. He understands this is a work that will never be “finished” — in fact, he claims that no piece of writing is ever finished, only abandoned after a time. As a historian, David enjoys mixing historical aspects in his fiction.David recently taught literature and writing at DeVry University in Portland, his third college stint. His former lives enjoyed some success in real estate and computer business, sandwiched between undergraduate studies in the early 70s and his masters degree in education and composition, awarded in 2004.He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and has lived in New England, Southern California and Nevada. David is youthful looking and is the father of three girls, the grandfather of four and the great-grandfather of two; he’s written, “It all shows what you can do if you fool around when you’re very young.” David’s a card. How many of us think humor has a place in mystery tales or history tomes? He claims his calico cat Sophie helps him edit his stories while lying across his arm when he is composing, and sinking her claws in with any poorly drawn sentence. As a writer, a humorist, a cat lover and father of girls, he relates well to Clemens. Writing hardboiled PI novels is his way of saying "NUTS!" to politically correct fiction.UPDATE: Beloved Calico Sophie died on Apr 24, 2016 at 13 & 1/2 years. She is sorely missed.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Mattie died the day the war ended, VJ day — the beginning of my war with sorrow, loneliness and loss.

I never went back to shipyard duty. Motivation for Uncle Sam died with Mattie. I wanted to put everything in my rear view mirror.

For the next month I lived on booze and flashes of scenes and scents of Mattie. I slid slowly into despondency and depression.

Our joyful years ended with a head on accident on Barbur Boulevard south of Portland. Mattie and I met at Oregon shipyards shortly after Pearl Harbor, a bustling successful yard cranking out warships by the dozen. I was spared being drafted due to my critical expertise cutting and beveling keel plates for sub chasers and mine sweepers.

Smitten at 25 I was totally devoted to a cute gal with moxie and eternal rose-colored glasses about life. Death was rarely mentioned unless it was about all the boys coming home in pine boxes. I felt guilt for staying behind, but Mattie helped me with that, as she did any problem or doubt I had.

We shared exactly 36 months of joy and marital bliss. Mattie’s voice continued to haunt me in early hours leaking through my depression. At times I imagined she was really with me, or her spirit was. On loan from the angels. Her optimism whispered thanks for those 36 months. Most men aren’t so very blessed. Her thoughts were mine, or so it seemed. She was gone yet with me. If I was going nuts I didn’t much care.

I’d never known such pain. I wanted to run from its grip, escape even as I knew it would be futile. Just where to run off to was a big blank question. Maybe simply to run would be my answer. I started calling the urge Quentin’s escape.

§§§

I set out eastward in a beat up brown ’37 Buick not knowing where I might land. Not caring. I ran to leave the pain behind, pain that came from remembering those years: Kaiser ship yard years, Commercial Iron Works years. My body wanted rest from backbreaking fourteen hour days pushing out Victory ships until I could do it in my sleep, if I could sleep at all. Like Scrooge I was haunted by times past, all those memories and hopes cut short pressing down the future. Hopes of children with Mattie, a long and good marriage to the world’s best woman. I felt cheated. All I could do was run.

I ran from the lilt of Mattie’s laughter, her now unwelcome optimism, the way she always nudged me to be a better man. I ran from the memory of her funeral and my sobs at her gravesite. I’d visited her grave with flowers every day but knew she wasn’t there; she was inside me and always would be. I talked to her at night as I paced, asking how to go on, fighting the pull to give up. She wouldn’t like me to give up. Gone but still nudging me.

So I left the big wet city of Portland. Never wanted to go back. No one who mattered was in Portland.

I drove and drove. Late summer. Dry. Out to the desert country of Eastern Oregon, hills of dull pastels, so unlike the lush green of the Willamette Valley. Beyond The Dalles the drive was mind-numbing flat, parched brown.

Fatigue caught me outside of Pendleton. I took the exit and wandered till I found a hole-in-the-wall bar where cool smooth scotch relaxed me. I took a fifth to go and checked into a motel. I stood staring at drab scrub, shifting shades in the sunset. Just like my heart — nothing alive, nothing notable.

When I’d been with Mattie I stayed tuned to what she wanted, even liking that challenge of becoming a good husband. If Mattie’s happy, I reminded myself, I’m happy. It wasn’t always true. But I thought at the time it should be true and insisted on trying to make it true, and it was, most of the time. Three years wasn’t enough to perfect that approach. At times I was selfish; they were like thorns in my memory. I shook my head sadly in the small room. She wanted me to become a cop, said my talents could be well used in that role. As an unlicensed private eye I’d been lucky. So I crammed for the patrolman’s exam and she helped enthusiastically. Living up to Mattie’s ambition was my goal: if Mattie’s happy, I’m happy. I admittedly took pride in digging up evidence, on making judgments on what was really there, both in my old case in Wyoming and the missing heirloom quest for a stolen rare stamp, so I went along. Still, I lived with the feeling that no matter what I did I couldn’t keep Mattie happy forever. Marriage might be till death do us part, but it also might die of boredom, a possibility which frightened me.

You’re a fake, Quentin I said out loud . . . .When you start talking to yourself . . . .

I smiled and chugged scotch straight from the bottle. My image looked strange in the full-length mirror on the wall beside the bed. I lifted the fifth at the mirror. Get a grip, Quentin. Booze isn’t the answer. It’s only another problem.

§§§

Past Pendleton up Cabbage Hill I pulled over and took in the pine-scented air, the cold dark green of the evergreens, the easy glimmer of white light leaking through dark vapors working overhead, suggesting a downpour afoot. The smell of approaching rain was in the air.

I often pulled over and let cars go around. I watched each car headed to loved ones, life with a purpose. I envied them. Even resented them. How could they be alive when she was not? I got out every so often and drank in the serenity of the mountain woods.

A fawn-colored buck with huge rack towered on a high outcropping and eyed me with regal challenge as if I had no right to invade his world. I was fifty feet from him, watching him snort and paw the ground until lead-colored drops as big as quarters splattered on my shoulders. He didn’t seem to mind. Why should I?

I got back in my beater and went on my way, continuing east toward Baker City. I planned to stop there for the night. With the approaching tempest the sky grew purple. Blue-green pines bent stubbornly against the wind. Over a ridge the horny backbones of mountains rested under a line of distant yellow. Light at the end of my grief? What a fool I am. Keep going east. Don’t look back.

No rush. No plans. Drive to New York then keep going to Ireland where my ancestors fought famine for decades only to give it up and head west. Irony.

Mattie’s mother passed over a year back and Mattie’s last days were spent selling the Andrews house and taking care of a lifetime of possessions, things that became a millstone around our necks. When the final truckload of goods was hauled off to the Salvation Army, we celebrated on the patio of our tiny bungalow in Sellwood on the east side of the Willamette. We’d rented the place furnished. When I was left alone I didn’t have to worry about selling anything. I couldn’t stand another night in that house.

Highway 80N is a boring flat reach to Pendleton, then up into the mountains to Baker City, named after the only U.S. Senator ever killed in combat. Mattie and I made the trip to Boise one fall, and learned about Senator Edward Baker. He was killed at the battle of Ball’s Bluff in the Civil War. From Baker to Boise, cute little Mattie joked about those Union boys bluffing with their balls. I felt her laughter in my pain.

As I pulled into Baker and gassed up, I remembered her many little whimsies, which we giggled at for a hundred miles.

Why can’t I leave those bittersweet pictures behind with all the rest?

There will never be another Mattie Andrews.

§§§

I pushed on out of Baker City.

It was dusk when I pulled into Nyssa, a little town near the Idaho border. The thick odor of ripe onion fields flooded through the windows, stirring my appetite. I realized I’d had nothing to eat since morning.

I parked on the main drag where cars angle-parked. The yellow-front Thunderegg Café with navy blue awning was nearly full, farm folks, old timers, a few teens. Wondrous invitations to my nose met me ten feet from the door.

Breakfast burritos were on the special menu, even this late in the day: Chorizo, bacon, sausage. I downed four of them at the counter before looking around at the patrons. Everyone inside was in a really good mood, laughing and smiling and nodding to each other. Didn’t they know Mattie was gone?

One rusty cowpoke nodded my way and gave me a thumbs up. Pastries, of every sort sat under glass near my seat, and I downed two bear claws and a tall glass of OJ.

A grizzled duffer took the stool next to me.

I do enjoy watching a man with an appetite, he drawled.

I looked in his rheumy eyes and noted deep sun-made wrinkles, a face aged by the sun. I didn’t say anything.

He wore tired Lee overalls repaired with different colored threads and chewed holes that had been ignored. His breathing was like a leaky radiator.

They call me Gus Hooligan, he said, extending a twisted paw my way. Augustus by birth but Gus is a heap friendlier.

He had a grip like my old crane at Commercial Iron works.

Gotta name?

I looked at his face with friendly stamped all over it.

Q. That’s what they call me.

Q.

Yep.

Short for?

The alphabet letter.

He nodded with a serious look as if I’d revealed a top secret.

Saw your jalopy pull up. ’37 Buick.

I nodded.

Staying in town long or in a rush to get to Idaho?

I didn’t say anything.

If’n I be bugging you Q, I’ll skedaddle.

I shook my head. No problem.

He motioned to the waitress and she filled his coffee cup, kissing his thankful expression with a smile that would melt an igloo.

Know her? I pointed at the escaping waitress with my chin.

Betty? Everyone knows Betty, best thunderegg hunter in the valley.

His expression stayed serious.

I’ll bite. What’s a thunderegg?

He stuck a bony finger at a shelf behind the counter where a row of cut rocks the size of baseballs sparkled. Them’s thundereggs, so called. Some valuable. The valley’s thick with ‘em. We have a great hunt once a year in October. Winner gets cash. I just watch. Lumbago keeps me lame. Can’t scramble over hill and dale, so to speak.

I stared into my disappearing glass of OJ and pictured locals scrambling about for the round stones that were drab brown or black on the outside with sparkling treasure once cut open. Some folks I’d known were like that. Some folks. Mattie for sure, though only drab in her shipyard duds which is how I first saw her. At first I didn’t notice her gender, the way she hid in crusty work clothes, hair bundled under a cap, face smudged. A living thunderegg.

My epiphany came when she invited me to the giant Andrews house up on Vista Drive and boy howdy — did I notice her gender then. Mattie sparkled. She would have laughed at the idea of her being like one of those magic rocks.

When would I let go? stop remembering things about her? Something about this old timer suggested I ask him my question. But he interrupted.

You didn’t answer — staying in town long?

I shrugged.

Depends.

Forgive me son, I’m naturally curious. Depends on what? A woman?

No woman, I said softly.

Forgive me, but a strapping six foot buck like you there’s always a woman. If not, then what?

He cradled his coffee cup in both hands in front of his mouth. Wisps of steam rose against his face. He took a long sip and put the cup on the counter, turned halfway and bore into me with deep gray eyes. Depends?

I said it without realizing what I was saying: On what you tell me about the town.

He pulled back and gave me a long stare. I guessed he hadn’t expected that answer. Little did he know I hadn’t expected it either.

You gonna finish that cinnamon roll? There’s thirty million starving Chinese who’d kill for it.

You Chinese Gus?

Irish, and damned proud of it. Seems like every genration has it’s own starving country — now it’s China, then it was Ethiopia. God’s curse, I reckon.

Then you’re the lucky salvager of my cinnamon roll.

He stuffed it in his mouth and put a look of ecstasy on, washed it down with jo.

If’n you take me over to Adrian and buy me some hooch at the Sunset bar, I’ll spill my brain about all things Nyssa. Better yet, haul me to my trailer and crack open some great aged Irish whiskey.

I nodded and paid my tab and we walked out under a pale green sky that still glowed on the horizon. A quick detour wouldn’t hurt my escape. Maybe I’d find Nyssa to be an ideal hideaway from grief.

Chapter 2

Gus’s bony finger directed us over dusty goat tracks into hills away from town. We came to a level lookout. A rusty single-wide trailer slumped in tall grass. Chickens were pecking around the gravel yard and a calico cat jumped on a fencepost at our arrival to get a better view of us. Two small wooden barrels sat next to a table made from an old wire spool shaded by a giant umbrella rigged into the middle of the spool. The material of the umbrella was thin pink muslin which afforded sunlight to seep through.

The air was clean but dry with a light breeze out of the south. No onion fields here. Nothing but bare brown hills as far as the eye could see. The place was sun-baked and looked like no one lived there.

Gus pointed me to one of the barrel seats and said he’d bring out some liquor he’d been saving for a special event. A guest was special enough, he said with pride.

The calico hopped from the fencepost, sauntered over sniffed my boots and hopped up on the table. She squinted, licked my outstretched fingers and purred loudly. I scratched behind her ears and told her I was Q.

Sophie loves men, Gus said, bringing two shot glasses and a cut glass decanter with honey-colored liquid.

Murphy’s, he said, proudly. Impossible to get since before the war.

We sat sipping and listened to crickets playing in tall grass around the trailer.

Sophie flopped on the table top and sniffed at the liquor, backing off as if shot.

She keeps the chickens close to home, Gus said. And my best friend. I think she knows her name and what I’m thinking at times.

I nodded and scratched her again. A mind reading cat is a good thing.

Gus downed his shot and I sipped mine. He poured himself another.

Mighty good whiskey, he said. Headed somewhere particular?

I searched the horizon where a fading glow was barely alive on the hills now. I didn’t have an answer. Somewhere particular? Away, is all. Away from grief and loss of Mattie. Away from three wonderful years that were now heavy with remorse. What was I running to? Didn’t care. No sense in spilling my gut to a broken down prospector or whatever he was.

I shook my head and drained my shot. Gus poured another. It went down smooth and surprisingly so. I rarely drank hard stuff but in this setting I liked the way it warmed and pushed away lonely feelings.

If’n that’s so, why not stick around Nyssa for a spell. You can always pack up and scoot should you feel so. Folks is mighty friendly in these parts. Hard working. They don’t judge a man afore they get to know his innards, if you catch.

The idea struck me as a good one. Besides, I was already tired of driving.

Maybe I will.

You’re non-committal, ain’t you Q?

I said nothing.

Might be you need work? A man can’t run on dreams out here. With your physique you can tolerate hard work, I’d say. Hush me if’n you want me to mind my own bidness.

Work, sure.

Tell me about yourself. What sort of jobs you been doin’. I may be able to point you in a die-rection.

"Since early ’42