The Telegram Read online

  Hanson burst into the room six-gun in hand, ordering Roy to put down his gun. Dumbly the kid dropped the weapon with a clatter on the floor.

  Chuck picked the smoking gun up and put it down on the bed. Then he pulled Roy to his feet and slapped handcuffs on him behind his back and took him through to the lock-up. Roy was covered in blood, was clearly deep in shock and went quietly.

  Molly checked Stan for a pulse, there was none, there could not be one but she had to check. She spread a sheet from the bed over the body where it lay in the middle of the floor.

  Sheriff Horne turned up at the office just over an hour later. There was still a crowd of citizens outside on the sidewalk spilling out onto the street. By then Roy’s Mom and Dad were in the Sheriff’s Office arguing with Chuck about holding their boy in the lock-up. Roy was sitting on the cot in the single cell, still in his blood-splattered uniform, crying his eyes out.

  The Sheriff sternly asked the Cavenaghs to be quiet and to step out of the office while he questioned his deputy as to what happened.

  Chuck explained the scene for him and showed him the weapon. Horne opened it up and saw that there was only one shell case in the center chamber and that had been fired recently, leaving the cartridge case in the cylindrical chamber. Horne noticed it was a nine-shot cylinder pistol of about .44-inch caliber with a 7 inch barrel combined with a lethal 16 gauge shotgun barrel about 5 inches long, which was the barrel fired. It looked an antique from the Civil War period, some 90 years old. The round fired was grapeshot, which was highly destructive at such close range. The nine conventional chambers of the pistol were empty. Horne thought it was quite possible that Roy didn’t even know the weapon was loaded. There was a selector switch on the trigger which chose one of two firing pins, one for the top chamber of the cylinder and the other for the center shotgun chamber.

  The Sheriff had never seen anything like the weapon and had never looked at this one close up before, but he knew that Roy had worn this old uniform, which included the gun, for at least the last three Independence Day celebrations. His late brother, Lenny also toted it for several years before him and Roy’s father for thirty years or so before that, with no-one ever even remotely aware of how potentially lethal it was at such close range.

  Horne allowed Roy’s mother to go into the cell and get her son cleaned up. Then, leaving them locked in, he went to the hospital next door to see the body. Nurse Molly was sitting sadly in the otherwise empty waiting room. She had seen the Sheriff arrive and was waiting for him to finish speaking to Chuck.

  “Hi Nora,” the Sheriff said, he was a much older man and had never got into the habit of calling her anything else, unlike her contemporaries, “Looks like we got a can o’ worms here. Can I see the body?”

  “Sure, Sheriff, I left him just as it was for you. I think he died instantly.”

  Horne nodded grimly and then walked through to the treatment room. He lifted the sheet and very soon satisfied himself as to what happened. He went back to the office and called Hanson in to help and together they lifted the body up onto the bed.

  And that is all they could do. The celebrations continued during the day but the incident definitely put a damper on the whole proceedings.

  The coroner’s department was called after the holidays and the court met a few weeks later and decided that the death was a homicide by misadventure and Roy was let go with no charges against the kid.

  There were no photos of the deceased which could be released to the public. A description of the man was put together from information supplied by Nurse Molyneux and Deputy Hanson. The only name they had was Stan, that he was Polish by origin and had lived in England before coming to the US after the war and had been naturalised about 1950. They didn’t even know what state he was from, the name of the ship he was on or where it was registered. Stan hadn’t worn a wedding ring but mentioned that he had a girl that he promised to get back to. They didn’t even know the girlfriend’s first name. The description, with the Sheriff’s Office telephone number, were given out to local and regional radio stations and newspapers. They repeated the information three months later, with the addition of an artist’s impression, which appeared in a number of papers ups and down the coast, and seaports north and south and their efforts didn’t bring in a single enquiry. Case closed, unresolved.

  ***

  Philadelphia July 4th 1980

  Beth opened her bedside dresser. She pulled out a drawer containing a faded telegram, dated twenty-eight years before, wondering once more what happened to her father. He had promised he would be home, and he always kept his promises. He had brought her to her mother’s home state in 1947 when Beth was only three years old. Her Aunt Lydia had brought Beth up as if she were her own daughter. Beth’s mother had died in the London Blitz in 1945, killed by a daytime V1 rocket. The hospital found a family to take her in until her father came home from the war.

  As a young man her father had studied for a year at med school until war interrupted his career, he was never able to restart. Her father often had to be away earning a living as a useful first aider on merchant shipping vessels but he always came back at the end of each contract. All that stopped in 1952.

  Her mother was a nurse who fell in love with and married a British Indian surgeon who was gaining experience at an American hospital where she worked. She moved back to England with him in 1932. A mixed race marriage of a Black woman and an Indian man was more accepted in the British Isles than it would have been at home in those days. The surgeon had served in the British Army in the 1920s before settling first in Edinburgh and then in London. He was called up in 1939 as a reservist and shipped out to Singapore. Beth’s mother Eleanor remained in London.

  When Singapore fell to Japan in February 1942, she received news of her husband’s fate, murdered at the hands of the invading army who slaughtered virtually every unarmed man in the Alexandra military hospital.

  One of Eleanor’s patients was Stanislaw, shipped to England from North Africa suffering from bullet wounds which should have killed any normal man. He was so determined to hold onto life and return to his unit that he willed himself to recover.

  She cared for him and, although she was ten years older then this tall, slender soldier with the kindly soft brown eyes, fell in love with him. She became pregnant, they married and eventually Elizabeth was the result.

  Before the baby was born he returned to Army service, joining the Free Polish Air Brigade, while she continued nursing, while carrying their child. He couldn’t be there for the birth but he did see them once before Operation Market Garden, where he was wounded again.

  After Eleanor was killed, baby Beth was cared for by nursing friends of her mother until Stanislaw was demobbed. He took her to America where Lydia acted as a mother and grandmother to the pair of them.

  A proud and devoted father, Stanislaw wanted to resume his studies to become a doctor and worked long spells on ships where his first aid experience was an asset. He wired most of his money home for Lydia to bank until he had enough to pay his way through med school. Aunt Lydia told Beth that, after five years’ hard work, two more trips should have been enough.

  The telegram read “Lisibet stop Home by 4 July stop miss and love you always stop love Papa stop.”

  Her father Stanislaw was legally declared deceased in 1959, his life insurance and savings secured to pay her med school studies. She had hoped Papa would be there for her first prom, her coming of age, her graduation, her track meets at home and in Munich, finally being there for her fiancé who would ask him for her hand, but Papa never came to any of those events.

  If it was at all possible, she was sure he would have come, she knew he would have.

  So today, even after all this time, Beth hoped and prayed Papa would make it in time to walk her up the aisle and give her away on this, her special day. Special for both of them.

  For Beth the worse thing that was tearing her apart was not really knowing for certain where
her father was or what had happened to him ...

  THE END

  Tony Spencer

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