I Wish I’d Finished the Book

The bell above the door rings. Morticia Astin smiles politely as Enid Skolnick enters her bookstore. Frizzy-haired, with glasses as thick as they come, Enid is a steady but hard-to-please customer, a devout “Star Trek” fan with more books, posters, and DVDs than the actors who starred in the series.

“Anything new?” Enid inquires.

Reaching under the front desk, Morticia shows Enid two paperbacks, proclaiming proudly, “The Pike Chronicles, volumes fourteen and fifteen.”

“Dun Quee!”

“Huh?”

Enid throws her arms around Morticia, smothering her.

“That’s Klingon for wonderful!”

It has taken Morticia eight years to adapt to the quirky residents of Bone Gap, Tennessee. Since quitting her job as a buyer for a shoe company and opening The Novel Nook, thirty-eight-year-old Morticia has traded her business suits for peasant blouses and Birkenstocks, embracing the town’s rustic lifestyle. She’s even gotten used to being called “Mort.”

Once a haven for hunters, Bone Gap reinvented itself in the 1980s as a home for 180 organic farmers, artists, musicians, and aspiring IT moguls. Neighboring towns, Vergoin and Mildenburg, were once thriving logging and industrial towns but failed to adjust and are now ghost towns.

A dark-haired, bearded man in a red checkered shirt enters the store. Giving Mort a dubious look, he heads for the new releases section. She can’t shake the feeling that his sad, grey eyes mean he’s up to something.

Moments later, the man quickly bolts past Enid as she opens the door to leave.

“Chech! That’s Klingon for ‘That’s rude, you Gorn!’,” Enid shouts.

Mort checks the display. Addison Minton’s newest book, “The Legend of the Vergoin Madman,” is missing.

***

Mort enters Bone Gap’s small, underutilized police station.

Sheriff Colt Keefe has his feet up on his desk, fighting sleep. Colt and Mort share the mantle of being the town's newbies. Originally from Knoxville, Colt became the Sheriff seven years ago, succeeding the beloved Duke Esterbrook, who’d served the town for forty years.

Unlike Mort, Colt hasn’t scaled back his citified manners or appearance. He still keeps his hair cropped close and disguises his boyish features with mirrored sunglasses.

“Morning, Mort. How’s business?”

“Good. The fall tourist crowd is picking up. I’m selling a lot of Vergoin Mountain maps.”

“I hope you tell them that the mountain’s treacherous and that Vergoin and Mildenburg aren’t exactly amusement parks.”

“Kill joy. I leave the legal stuff to you, buster.”

“So, what brings you here? I’m busy doing a paper clip inventory,” Colt jokes.

“I’d like to report a theft. I’m pretty sure a suspicious-looking dude robbed me.”

Energized, Colt sits up in his chair. Grabbing a pencil, he reaches for a form inside his desk.

“How much money did they get?”

“None. He stole a book.”

Colt drops the pencil.

“‘The Legend of the Vergoin Madman,’ by Addison Minton, Mort continues. “He’s a local legend.”

“Didn’t he write ‘The Chickasaw Trail of Tears?’”

“Yep. And to my knowledge, there’s only one copy of ‘The Vergoin Madman’ in existence.”

“So, it’s a collector’s item, worth some money?”

“You could say that.”

Colt lowers his sunglasses, signifying his seriousness. “What are you really trying to say?”

“It explains the disappearances in Vergoin.”

Colt smirks. “There’s thirty-five miles of uninhabited timberland surrounding Vergoin. There’s no boogeyman hiding in the forest. There’s nothing there but empty overgrown trees, crumbling buildings, and rusting cars.”

“Over a dozen people either disappeared or were murdered in Vergoin, and none of the cases were ever solved.”

“A lot of those so-called murders and disappearances happened over forty years ago…So, somebody stole the book from you because…”

“Because it tells the truth,” Mort answers. “I think the man who stole my book is somehow connected to the disappearances.”

Colt laughs so hard he nearly falls out of his chair.

“That’s a real stretch, Mort. You know it's easy to get lost in Vergoin, and Sheriff Esterbrook attributed the killings to bears. But thanks, I needed a good laugh. Things have been a bit boring around here. Your theft case qualifies as the biggest crime this week, topping little Timmy Sprague walking into the bank and yelling, ‘Stick ‘em up!’ So, what did Light-Fingered Louie look like?”

“White, average height, dark black hair, checkered red shirt, jeans. And his eyes were light, sad.”

“The clothes sound like he could be a local. Could be one of Chopper Limbo’s logging hires on a bender. You feel like taking a ride with me?”

***

Chopper Limbo, owner of Limbo Lumber, snubs out his Chesterfield cigarette against his battered wooden desk.

The chair creaks as Chopper shifts his girth. Hacking, he says, “Sounds like any number of drifters me and Pop hired over the last fifty years, but it don’t fit anybody workin’ for us now. Probably some scruffy hippy passing through.”

“This guy looked a little more GQ. His jeans weren’t worn, and his beard was trimmed,” Mort says.

Chopper’s wide gap-toothed smile makes him resemble a Jack-O-Lantern. “So, he stole Addison’s book? The disappearances are easy to explain. How many hikers do we have to rescue every year, Colt?

“Dozens.”

“It’s easy to get turned around in the thick fog that settles over the mountain… But the murders are somethin’ else…The first guy, I.B. Bolden, worked for us. He was huntin’ on Vergoin Mountain. He went up there with his cousin, and they got separated. His cousin was missing for a day, but he made it back to town. Bolden didn’t. Took the rescue team three days to find him. He was on a high spot on Vergoin Mountain. None of us had been that high up the mountain before. He was lying motionless. His loaded rifle was leanin’ against a tree about ten feet away. There were boot prints around Bolden’s body. But he’d died from a bite to the jugular. We figured a bear got him, and somebody’d come across the body just like we did. But there weren’t any bear tracks. And that was the beginnin’ of the legend of the Vergoin Madman. The next incident with the Mulhern brothers freaked a lot of people out.”

Colt winces. “Duke told me that one. I thought he was teasing me. They went fishing in Frankie Lake in Vergoin. Mack went upstream, and Mike went downstream. Mack was never seen again. A month later, another fisherman found Mack’s skull sitting on a tree stump near the lake.”

“Hung up my fishin’ rod after that,” Chopper says.

***

Colt and Mort scan the police department’s storage room.

Colt removes his sunglasses. “Our files were kept in storage in Vergoin. A fire destroyed most of them. The rest disappeared when the town did. An officer who was curious about the legend of the Vergoin Madman brought what was left here. Duke discouraged us from looking into the Vergoin Madman. He said it was a waste of time, that there were a few unsolved murders and disappearances in the seventies and eighties, but nothing since then. And since nothing’s happened since I’ve been Sheriff, I took Duke’s advice.”

“To put it mildly, Duke wasn’t exactly telling you the truth,” Mort replies. “There’s a dozen boxes marked ‘Vergoin Madman’ here. Enough for each murder or disappearance and then some.”

“Duke was my mentor. He was meticulous. You’re talking about a town legend being involved in some sort of conspiracy.”

“Everybody has secrets,” Mort comments.

“I think you’re right about one thing, though. Whoever stole Minton’s book was either looking for answers or trying to hide them. So, who did Addison Minton name as the Vergoin Madman?”

Mort blushes. “I wish I’d finished the book. I only read a few chapters and didn’t get to the big reveal.”

Colt reads the label on the first box. “Muddy Rivers, September 14, 1983. Duke told me about him. What a character. Seventy-four, and he was still driving a truck between Bone Gap and Johnson City. He had a glass eye and impressed the kids by opening beer bottles with his eye socket. Vanished while hunting in Jupiter Hollow, about two miles west of Vergoin. It states that he was last seen by a friend on a trail, walking in the opposite direction. Volunteers from the State National Guard looked for him for ten days. The only thing they found was his glass eye. Whose file do you have?”

“Howard Stickel, October 17, 1984. A tourist. The report states that the last sighting of Howard was on the trail leading up to Vergoin Mountain. He got directions from another hiker and told him he’d only be gone for a few hours because he wasn’t dressed for when it was going to get colder that night. An award of $20,000 was offered, and a massive search party combed Vergoin and the Mountain. A jawbone and rib cage were found four months later. The rib cage had teeth marks on it.”

Colt opens half a dozen other boxes.

“Empty. The reports are missing,” he notes.

“If they ever existed,” Mort comments.

She pulls a thick set of pages out of a box marked “Sightings.”

“Listen to this…May 24, 2019…Two eighteen-year-old twin sisters, Olivia and Jane Lafontaine, rode their bikes to Vergoin… There’s a statement from Olivia. It says, ‘It was midday. We stopped at the town square. I went to the well for some water. I heard laughter. Crazy, creepy laughter. When I turned around, Jane was gone. The laughter continued, and a voice shouted, “Wife! Wife!”

Colt gives Mort a worried look, looking at the label on the box.

“That’s the most recent date. There hasn’t been a murder or disappearance in Vergoin since then.”

“None that were reported,” Mort notes.

***

Addison Minton greets Mort and Colt with the same cordial grin he displays in the jacket photo of his books. Despite a hint of sadness in his light grey eyes, Addison speaks with perfect southern gentleman charm.

“I could scarcely believe my ears when I got your phone call, Miss Astin. Who would want to steal my book?”

“I was hoping you could tell us. Do you have any overzealous fans? Any enemies?” Mort asks.

“Not that I know of. ‘The Legend of the Vergoin Madman’ was a book I’d always wanted to do. My last book about the Chickasaw Indians is still selling well, so my publisher didn’t want to release ‘Secrets’ because he felt it was more flight of fancy than factual. So, I decided to pay to have it published myself. I just wanted to have a few copies for myself and friends, so I only had six printed. My publisher sent one to Miss Astin on consignment. A week or so after getting my copies, I came home and found that my front door was unlocked. It took me a while to realize my copies had been stolen.”

“I always thought the Vergoin Madman was a hoax,” Colt says.

“That’s what the police wanted people to believe because he was a very dangerous man, who stayed hidden. He killed men in horrific ways and abducted women.”

“So, who was the Vergoin Madman?”

Addison sighs. “It’s complicated. I named three men in the book: Bo Hammel, Curtis Coke, and Marcus Moniack. I laid out what I’d found out about each of them and left it up to the reader to decide.”

Colt flips a page in his notebook. “I’ll need their contact information. I want to talk to them.”

“Hammel died in Biloxi, Coke in Nova Scotia, and Moniack is buried here in Bone Gap.”

***

Colt checks the clock on the patrol car’s dashboard. “Been quite a day so far. It’s nearly five o’clock. We’ll have about four hours of daylight.”

“Are you starting to believe there is a Vergoin Madman?”

“Was. Remember, there haven't been any crimes we could attribute to him since 2019.”

***

The patrol car passes overgrown weeds, rusted tin cans, and broken, stripped cars, coming to a stop in Vergoin’s square.

Crumbling buildings line the mile-long main street, including a weather-beaten hotel, a theatre marque with broken lights announcing Kurt Russell in “The Thing,” and a dingy church with a fallen steeple.

A rusting Ferris wheel in the Vergoin Amusement Park looms in the background like a depressed dinosaur.

The woods encroaching on the town are dark and foreboding.

“You hear that?” Mort asks.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“That’s just it. There’s no birds. No insects.”

“Guess they died out too.”

“So, what now?” Mort asks.

“We search for signs of your Madman in town, then follow the trail to the top of the mountain.”

“But no one’s ever reached the top.”

“No one we know of,” Colt replies.

“You’re starting to sound like me.”

***

By the end of the day, the duo had climbed higher up the mountain than anyone else had before.

Colt bites his lip as he watches the sun set.

A thick fog moves in, making every step a potentially hazardous gamble.

“We’re trapped up here now, aren’t we?” Mort asks nervously.

“We’ll find our way back down. I’ve brought along two of the best flashlights money can buy.”

“I sure hope you remembered to buy batteries for them.”

The pair follows a narrow path into an open field.

“I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” Mort says.

They stare at a crashed Huey helicopter. Its rotors are bent like weeping willows. Next to the oxidizing craft are two rudimentary graves with crosses made from sticks.

“I wish I’d finished the book,” Mort says. “I’d love to read Minton’s explanation for this.”

They continue creeping up the mountain.

Colt suddenly pulls Mort to the ground.

“What the…”

He points ahead. “Do you see it? That light in the distance?”

“Who the heck would live up here?”

“Let’s find out.”

***

Colt knocks on the door, his hand swiftly moving to his gun.

“POLICE!”

A feeble voice screams, “Help me!”

Colt thrusts the door open.

A grimy-faced, barefoot woman in tattered clothes is sitting on the floor. Her hands and feet are tied. She looks up sheepishly at Mort.

“Help me…Hurry, before he comes back!”

They drop to the floor, fumbling with the knots holding her prisoner.

“Are you Jane Lafontaine?” Colt asks.

Jane bursts into tears. “Yes! I’ve been here for years! I never thought anyone would come!”

Colt and Mort exchange guarded looks when they notice Jane is pregnant.

A crazed, shrill laugh draws their attention.

A bearded man with unkempt, bushy hair stands in the doorway.

Seeing Colt, he brandishes a rusty Bowie knife. He swiftly pulls Mort up from the floor, holding the knife against her throat.

Colt whips out his revolver. “Well, if it isn’t the legend himself. Drop the knife.”

Scratching the knife against Mort’s throat, the man draws a trickle of blood, saying gruffly, “Next time, deeper.”

Colt drops his gun on the floor.

“Why?”

The Wildman’s grey eyes bulge. “My master said as long as I kill, I can live forever.”

“Where’s your master?” Colt asks.

The Wildman points to his head. “In here.”

“Where are the bodies of the people you killed?”

The Wildman points to his stomach. “Here.”

Addison Minton appears in the doorway, his head bowed.

Colt’s eyes narrow. “You told us the Vergoin Madman was dead to protect him. But why?”

“I wrote the book because the guilt was too much for me to bear. I felt I had to tell people who the murderer was. But I couldn’t live with my betrayal. So, I disguised myself, went to Miss Astin’s bookstore, and stole my own book. My copies of the book weren’t stolen. I burned them.”

“Who is this man?”

“My father, Myles. That Army helicopter you saw? He was the co-pilot. It was their final training mission in 1974, before they were supposed to be deployed to Vietnam. A dense fog set in. They became disoriented and crashed. My father was pinned in the wreckage. He didn’t know where he was. He was lying next to the pilot’s body for four days, while search teams combed the mountain. In order to survive…”

“I ate flesh,” Myles says.

“I was part of the rescue team that found him. We buried the rest of the crew there, so the bodies were never examined. But one of the men, Luke Poe, saw the teeth marks. Dad was fine for about a month, but he’d only eat raw meat. Then he started hearing voices telling him what to do. All the doctors we took him to said he should be institutionalized. But I couldn’t do it. He was my father. Dad’s secret was safe until that vile Luke Poe sent me a letter saying he knew what Dad did and he was going to the newspapers unless we gave him forty thousand dollars.”

“So, Poe disappeared into the woods one night,” Myles says, laughing heartily.

“Then another person disappeared, then another,” Addison laments.

“So, you brought him back to the scene of his trauma, hoping it would turn him around?” Colt asks.

“Instead, he found a hunting ground,” Addison sighs. “I tried to take care of him…”

“And Duke Esterbrook helped keep your father’s identity hidden.”

“Duke was a close family friend. He convinced people that bears were killing people.”

Colt grits his teeth. “How many?”

“Thirty men over forty years.”

“How many women?” Colt asks.

“Six, maybe seven. But he didn’t kill them.”

“Wife,” Myles says, his fetid breath turning Mort’s stomach.

“You picked the wrong woman this time, buster,” Mort replies.

Mort bites Myles’s arm, pulling free.

He throws the knife at Colt.

“No, Dad!” Addison shouts, pushing Colt aside.

The knife buries itself in Addison’s chest.

“SON!”

Letting out a shrill, wrathful scream, Myles charges at Colt, who fires off two shots, watching remorsefully as Myles’s body pitches toward the floor.

Mort helps Jane to her feet, hugging her closely.

“Next time, Mort,” Colt says, “finish reading the book.”