Rogue River Heaven

By Roger E. Carrier

A compelling mystery embedded in a wonderful coming-of-age story! The body of Grants Pass, Oregon, a perfect hometown in 1959, contains a cancerous cell hiding in plain sight. We follow Troy Clay from age twelve to seventeen through many adventures on the Rogue River—the building of a tree house, a midnight raid on a golf course, the finding of a strange doll, a raft trip through Hellgate canyon, and a night voyage to solve a mystery. The story begins as a memoire but takes place in real time.
“From the age of fifteen to seventeen, I was a Peeping Tom, and I fell in love with a woman whose hair was as scarlet as her profession. So if you are a line-drawer, or a person who needs to have everything in neat little boxes, or if you are sanctimonious, don’t read another word. Close my book and find one more respectable.”

Troy’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend Monica Marsh is a big part of the story. Troy and Monica’s love had been maturing since the sixth grade and grew sexual as high schoolers. Troy’s friend, Jim Reynolds, gives Troy false advice about birth control, and that leads the story in an unexpected direction in an encounter with a serial killer.

Rogue River Heaven is a page-turner will keep you reading as it builds to a shattering climax. Another winner by mystery writer Roger E. Carrier!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664145856

Roger E. Carrier

Raised in Utah, Roger Carrier has traveled through some fifty countries by bus and train, including a three-month bus trip from Salt Lake City to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sleeping in bars and run-down hotels, he made a similar hard-class journey through Africa and India. Roger, a retired teacher and businessman, is the author of A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought (Prometheus Press, 1995, pseudonym David Allen Williams). He is also a mountain climber, a reader of the classics, and collector of early 19th century rare books. He lives in Utah with his family. Finding Sagrado is his first published novel.

Book preview

Rogue River

Heaven

Roger E. Carrier

* * *

Book Reviews for Rogue River Heaven

Portland Book Review, Alex C. Telander:

Written with a love and nostalgia that flies off the page, Carrier definitely knows how to arouse the emotions of his readers in Rogue River Heaven, (re-creating the old days) … and fear for the dark events happening in the book. The story is compelling, balancing memories and adventures well with the mystery at the heart of the book.

The book opens with a reminiscing prologue from middle-aged Professor Clay, as he writes down the story of his young life and we travel back to his early to late teenage years, starting in 1959, hearkening back to the coming of age story that the likes of Stephen King with The Body, Dan Simmons with Summer of Night, and Ray Bradbury with Dandelion Wine have done so well, where things are not always as they seem.

"The final chapter is a wonderful send-off to these people and unforgettable times:

He will not take another voyage like this one, but he will remember, hear, and even see at times. You people of the past, he thinks, you who were the very best and most excellent of human beings, you can go back to your lives without being watched so closely, and I can go on.

* * *

Manhatten Book Review, Rod Raglin:

Switching points of view from that of a naive teenager to a murdering psychopath, Carrier creates a dramatically jarring juxtaposition. The author’s skillful use of one particular prop leads to an authentic undoing of this monster and culminates in a riveting climax.

* * *

Midwest Reviews, Diane Donovan

"Deep in the story, Troy Clay is devastated by the disappearance of his girlfriend, Monica. Her disappearance is linked to those of other young women in Washington and northern California. Little does Troy realize how close he is to solving these tragic events.

Many twists and turns carry him into a life-changing experience with two different women before the story takes a final, satisfyingly unpredictable twist to a firm resolution.

* * *

City Book Review, Elizabeth Kristy

I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I was going to. The writing of the story flowed well and although it was told in the third person, it was easy to see everything happening through the eyes of young Troy. There were many moving parts to the story and the characters were all vivid in the description of their looks as well as personality. Roger E. Carrier does an amazing job of summing the whole book and its plot up in the last chapter in which he tells the reader what becomes of each character and how the story affected them. It reminded me of movies that are true stories in which the moviemaker shows its viewers what happened to the real-life characters after the depicted story.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger E. Carrier.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/28/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

-1-

-2- Troy age 12, Spring 1959

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-7- Troy, age 12

-8-

-9- Troy, age 13

-10- Troy, age 14

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

-15-

-16-

-17-

-18-

-19-

-20-

-21-

-22-

-23- Troy, age 15

-24

-25- The Cold Man: Troy, age 16

-26-

-27-

-28- The Cold Man: Troy, age 16

-29- Troy, age 16

-30-

-31-

-32- The Cold Man: Troy, age 16

-33-

-34-

-35-

-36- Troy, age 17

-37-

-38-

-39-

-40-

-41- Monica and Troy, age 17

-42-

-43-

-44- Monica and Troy, age 17

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-46-

-47-

-48-

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-52-

-53-

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-56-

-57-

-58- Troy, age 17, three months later

-59-

For

Kristen,

Stacey, and Ryan

* * *

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

* * *

-1-

E VEN BEARDED PROFESSORS of philosophy had once been boys, and that is where Dr. Troy Clay wanted to begin his memoir. The murders and sexual darkness could lurk on the sidelines for a while.

Troy pauses to stare at his empty spiral notebook. At last he takes a breath and begins to write.

From the age of fifteen to seventeen, I was a Peeping Tom, and I fell in love with a woman whose hair was as scarlet as her profession. So if you are a line-drawer, or a person who needs to have everything in neat little boxes, or if you are sanctimonious, don’t read another word. Close my book and find one more respectable.

Troy stops his pen and reads the lines aloud. For some reason, writing by hand always feels more immediate—intimate, that’s the word—than tapping his fingers on a keyboard. Troy owns a computer, of course, but has not made the leap to a laptop. A laptop would be handy in the out-of-doors, where he now sits looking down at the Rogue River, whose sparkling waters smile back at him.

Life experience, Troy muses. They can shape a man’s worldview in unconventional ways. His first paragraph proves he has no use for Puritanism, and he holds no absolute opinions prohibiting a teenager from having that first sexual experience. He simply wants to write an account of his early life the way it really was. He wants it to be more than a coming-of-age confession. But for now, he avoids writing about what had happened. That could wait.

There would be no tears streaming down his face like some TV evangelist begging Jesus to forgive him for being a human being. Plain and simple, it was a wonderful experience. The other part was not so plain or so simple, but none of it matters if he cannot hook the reader, if he cannot get his book published. He taps his pencil against the paper.

Something pretty might work.

There is an American memory, a dream of a winding riverside where an ancient oak tree overhangs the water and rainbow trout catch the light of the sun. The river is smaller than the Mississippi, and clear, not muddy. And there is, of course, a barefooted boy, who, setting aside his bamboo fishing pole, takes a rope and swings over the water and pretends to fly.

A friend comes down the bank, and the two boys sit in the sand, smoke corncob pipes, and talk all kinds of mischief as three long-necked birds slowly wing their way upstream. And from somewhere back in the woods, a Sunday choir sings Amazing Grace, its sweet strains borne on a breath of honeysuckle.

An America, for every boy, forever!

Troy nestles himself into the large pillow propped against the cooler. It makes a comfortable backrest while he spins reveries about the river bottoms where he played as a boy and teenager. The rest of his life was not boring, but how could anything match those early years? He tries some more lines.

We all grew up there, every last American man, woman, and child. All in the exact same place. The town hasn’t changed, and I’ll prove it. You already know the place. Everything I am about to describe will be as familiar as if you lived it yesterday. Remember the old rambling house with a verandah? Every house back home had a verandah.

You can remember strolling along that dirt road past Aunt Pearl’s house with all those hollyhocks out in ten colors. Remember the white picket fence and the old swimming hole? How could you, any of you, forget the swimming hole and the rope hanging from that tree? And you were bare-naked that one time, but we made oaths so nobody ever found out, or if they were watching, they kept it to themselves.

Yes, if you were born in America, even if you were raised in a city apartment, you really lived in that house, where lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Walt Whitman’s line from more than a hundred years ago proves that he grew up there, too, and your smile of recognition double proves it. The dooryard, the front yard, what difference does it make?

Come on, you know my English, our English. So set aside all those adult chains and wander with me down those summer roads.

Breathe deeply, and let me take you far away.

You walked the country lane that winds through the American heartland. You came of age one day and awoke to the sound of a rooster on a morning that you just knew you would never forget. Breathe again and the day of your first kiss will return. You’ll remember helping Tom Sawyer paint that fence, or how about the time you hid some things in that tree in front of Boo Radley’s house? And what about that fall evening when you and Jim Nightshade heard the calliope as the evil carnival entered the town? You don’t really think, do you, that Ray Bradbury in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird just thought up those stories on their own? No, think about it. It happened to you, and the story was told so far and wide and so many times that it was destined to be written up in a novel.

Robert McCammon told it again in Boy’s Life, and Dan Simmons retold it in the Summer of Night. And don’t forget The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon. We all loved those Ohio summers, even if we had never set foot in Ohio, or maybe it was Mississippi—yeah, or Hannibal, Missouri on the Big Muddy.

I know I can go there. I just hope I can take you with me, and, in the taking, maybe I can find someone to understand what happened and not be so quick to judge. Isn’t that what we all want—understanding of our life experience? So go with me into a big story that is so long and complicated that people fail to realize that those novels I mentioned are just chapters of their own lives.

Youth wanders carefree through the decades, pausing here and there, then moving on to another romance or adventure. Go ahead and name the places. There will be no disagreement about them, only the years: the 1780s, the 1880s, the 1980s. There is no end to this dream called youth. The springs and summers of a hundred generations, like yellow butterflies above a grassy brook, invite us to reach out, to go back.

Hey, Jim, wait up! Troy yells, knowing he can’t compete with the authors he listed. I’ll do my best, he thinks as his distant friend on a bicycle stops and looks back. Well, come on! The sound of Jim’s voice barely reaches Troy’s ears. He looks around, relieved that he is alone. He wonders if he has considered these things too long. People who talk to themselves are—uh, normal. It’s the answering.

So where do you buy a map or guidebook for a journey backward, back to that morning of mornings? Find the place, of course. But how you get there might be important, so Troy made preparations. In an attic trunk, he found a map from the 1950s, and a few days ago, he followed the back roads across three states on the theory that forgotten roads, rather than freeways, run closer to what he is seeking.

His was not the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but at least there was and is a river. Its crystal waters have a romantic name—the Rogue River. The river flows through the town and on down to the sea through a sixty-mile strip of wilderness in southern Oregon. Once you see the Rogue River Valley on a good day, you’ll know why his Uncle John called Grants Pass God’s country.

Troy turned thirteen a couple of years after the Russians launched Sputnik. It was the same year the Cavemen erected a ten-foot concrete Neanderthal in front of the Flaming Kettle Restaurant. The city council had refused to allow the statue to be placed on the grounds of the Josephine County Court House.

This caveman stuff is getting out of hand, the mayor had said. People will start thinking we’re a bunch of Loony Tunes here in Grants Pass.

And it was Grants Pass without an apostrophe, even if it was named after General Ulysses S. Grant for his Civil War victory at Vicksburg in 1863. That missing apostrophe drove the town’s English teachers crazy, although the story that one tight-lipped grammarian hung herself over it is probably a myth circulated by the Cavemen (a reference to the nearby Oregon Caves), who started their meetings with grunts and chants and didn’t give a hoot for apostrophes. These rich businessmen had a lot of good-old-boy fun, and rumor had it that at some meetings a naked woman would jump out of a cake. A big cake, you know?

Troy remembers the Cavemen, Sputnik, hiding under his desk at school in practice for a nuclear attack, the Little Rascals and the Mickey Mouse Club on TV, and especially the window-peeping on Maggie.

Other details also loom large, like those first-and-the-last-time things which cannot be measured. He remembers that spring always arrived the Saturday after his mother bought him a new pair of canvas shoes. Spring came with the wonderful smell of those shoes as surely as fall came with the smell of waxed floors and Crayola crayons, and the Fourth of July with the smell of caps from a toy gun. Ah, the smell of caps and crayons. No one ever forgets those things—not ever.

The more Troy remembers, the closer it feels. The great something is almost here, but he is now so tired he can barely write. He yawns and tries just a few more lines, avoiding for now the ones about the ghost he is almost sure he had seen, except to say that if you find yourself alone in the woods one hot afternoon and you meet a girl who passes by without speaking, then you probably saw a ghost. All kinds of unreal things go bump in the night. Whole books have been written about those delusions, but if a day passes before you wonder about what you saw, then you probably encountered a ghost. That’s Troy’s theory, anyway, even if he doesn’t believe in ghosts.

For now, he must go back before the beginning and approach everything from the other side, not knowing what is coming. Knowing the future would ruin everything. He must go over the mountain, as the song says, and close his eyes so that on the way back everything will be new like it should be. Words might set the stage.

After a winter of heavy leather shoes and galoshes, there was always a morning when I would step barefoot out onto the back porch and sit on the steps with a new shoebox. I’d open the box and sniff the insides of the new sneakers. The spring sun always shone warm that first morning.

Slipping on my soft new socks, I would lace up my new shoes and stand and stretch. In those seconds before I leaped off the porch onto the grass, I was always convinced that I could leap again and again without touching the ground, and by that means of flight, touch the robin in one of the oak trees in my backyard. Alas, the laws of gravity always held, but almost weightless, I would hit the ground, bringing an end to my private rite of coming out.

A best spring was about to blossom into a string of summers that changed everything.

-2-

Troy age 12, Spring 1959

T ROY LIFTED HIS bicycle onto the middle seat of the aluminum boat. Minutes earlier, he had unchained the vessel hooked to a tree and pulled it from its hiding place in the brush. Always obedient to his father’s stern warning, he had slipped on his life vest before climbing aboard. He reached out from the bow, unhooked the rope tether, and crawled over his bicycle to the motor.

The current soon pulled the boat to the center of the Rogue River, at this point two hundred feet of drifting water. Troy set the choke and pulled the engine cord. Like always, it sputtered and died, but on the second pull, the engine came to life. Turning the throttle, he swerved around and headed upriver.

On both banks stood wonderfully tall Douglas firs, some towering cottonwoods, the ever-present California black oaks, as well as greenery of every variety as celebrated by the botanists all over America, his science book had noted. And, of course, it was a sunny morning. This was Grants Pass, after all, or God’s country, as his Uncle John called it. When you have a sign spanning Main Street declaring: It’s The Climate, it had better be.

Yeah, by God, it was God’s country. In other words, it was Heaven.

Had this been a school day, Troy would have motored four miles up the river and docked below John’s service station. John, his mother’s brother, had a six-foot square dock, where Troy could safely leave the boat while he was in school. He could have walked the quarter mile from his house to the bus stop and gone to school like a regular kid, but who would want to do that when you had a motorboat? It was a long walk from the little dock to Riverside Elementary, but an easy jaunt on a bicycle. Today being a Saturday, Troy had another destination in mind.

Earlier, he had grabbed his bike and wheeled it out from under high porch—and that was what it was called because it was five feet tall and the front porch stood two feet above the ground, a slope-of-the-riverbank thing. But as he started toward the river, his mother appeared on high porch.

Troy William Clay!

Troy had almost said the word that starts with the sixth letter of the alphabet, and which he didn’t believe his mother had ever heard, much less said, or did—oh my God. He wasn’t dumb, though. He caught himself while his back was still turned to Missy. His tough friends called their mothers Ma, Old lady, or used their first name. Of course, you never used your mother’s first name to her face. That was something you saved for being out with your friends, and in Troy’s case, saved him from getting swatted with the straw end of a broom.

Yes, ma’am, he said, looking up to high porch, wondering what was it now?

His mother wasn’t exactly happy with him spending the whole day around Jim’s big brother, even if he was going to help Jim build the best treehouse in the state. Last year as a senior, Dave Reynolds had screwed half the girls in the high school, and now after some more screwing, he was home on leave from the Marines.

These facts were connected to the word virgin, whose definition Troy knew because it had been used so much about his big sister, Linda, who had to get married at age seventeen. In his mother’s mind, all these things had distilled into a generalized distrust of the Reynolds boys and a constant worry about their influence over her son.

Before you go, trash these papers, Missy had said with an overweight disgusted look on her face. She stooped to set a lunch sack on the porch floor. I’ll keep this shoebox.

Yes, ma’am.

Troy had flown up the steps and grabbed the papers from the box that had contained his new Converse All-Stars.

Don’t you dare! Missy cried as he was about to leap off the stairs.

I wasn’t. Troy turned to walk down the stairs. His mother always worried that he was going to break his leg in that long jump.

As he ran the papers to the garbage can at the side of the house, his new All-Stars added an extra spring to his stride. Jim said All-Stars were the best, so everyone bought All-Stars. If you wanted to be a real teenager, you wore All-Stars and genuine Levis, not J. C. Penney denims. It was, of course, hard to be a teenager when you were only twelve, but Jim and his friends did their best.

Missy blamed Jim for all this expensive nonsense. His dad—known as Big Clay to his fellow logging truck drivers—called it a crock of horse shit.

I know, Troy said, but you don’t want me to be a dipshit weirdo, do you?

He had won the battle, even if he had come close to getting swatted by his mother, who didn’t like swearing—unless she was doing it—and used a broom to enforce her rules. A few swats from the straw end of her broom didn’t hurt much. Her lectures, however, were shear torture. Troy would choose the broom any day. He could run away from the broom, and return when Missy’s anger had evaporated. With a glance at the broom in the corner of the kitchen, he would say sorry and get a hug and kiss on the forehead. Missy’s response would always be, What am I going to do with you?

Troy didn’t have an answer to that, or why she never said such things to Mandy, his seven-year-old sister who, thankfully, was in her room playing with her dolls.

He tiptoed past the garbage cans at the side of his dad’s one-car garage that didn’t have a door. He could see his father’s legs protruding from under the front side of the family’s blue Kaiser, the very kind of car that the parents of a dipshit weirdo would drive. If only Big Clay owned a Ford, or Chevy, or Buick, or some other normal car. The disgrace was almost unbearable.

Breathless, he lifted the lid of one of the garbage cans and deposited the tissue papers, but he had been seen. His father, a union man who liked to stir people up, began to sing. He only sang when he worked and thought somebody might be around to hear about their real enemies, the rich cats and big business. He started up with the old Joe Hill ditty, the blasphemous version of Sweet Bye and Bye.

Long-haired preachers come out every night

Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right

But when asked ’bout something to eat

They will answer in voices so sweet

You will eat bye and bye

In that glorious land above the sky

Work and pray, live on hay

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

Troy, is that you?

Yeah, Dad.

Good. Why don’t you be my gofer and go get that five-eighths box wrench in the toolbox.

Troy rummaged through the wrenches until he found the right one.

Is this it? he asked, handing the dirty tool under the car.

Let’s see. Make it a nine-sixteenths.

His father’s long legs hadn’t moved. A strong hand with a smear of blood on a knuckle reached out from under the fender and returned the wrench.

Earl Clay’s history began in 1917 when his parents were swept away in the great flu epidemic. The teenage boy could have stayed in Seattle with his aunt, but he chose to live with his uncle, who owned a farm near Grants Pass. But the thrill of adventure that sent him packing for Oregon soon returned him to Washington to find a real job in a logging camp. Later in the 1930s, he returned to Grants Pass to collect his inheritance when his childless uncle died. That’s when he met Melissa Boyce, Troy’s mother.

I never went back to live with my relatives, Earl always said. Boys grew up fast in those days.

Troy handed his father another wrench and waited through a lecture