Chapter 9—The Half Life of Dragons

by Sonja Hakala

PREVIOUSLY IN THE HALF LIFE OF DRAGONS: It’s been seven years since Timmen Eldritch, lead singer of the mystical rock band Calliope, disappeared. To this day, most people believe he died. But there are enough conspiracy theories swirling online to keep his ardent cult members hopeful of “Timmens’ return .”

Eldritch and Calliope recorded their last album in an old farmhouse in Carding, Vermont so the town has become a reluctant mecca for Calliope culties, as they call themselves. They’ve already started to gather, and no one in Carding is happy about it. 

You can catch up on previous chapters of this novel in progress here.

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“Oooh, this doesn’t look good,” Aggie said as she and Ruth slowed in front of the Frost Free Library. A small clot of locals had coagulated around the town’s police cars—all two of them. “Can you see Edie?”

“You mean that woman over there tapping her foot with impatience?” Ruth asked.

Aggie laughed. “Has she always been like that?”

“Yeah, pretty much. My Mom used to say that Edie was the most impatient person she’d ever known,” Ruth said as Aggie negotiated a parking space. “Most of the time, she makes a quick decision, and she’s off. She has very little patience for dithering, and yet she’s quite deliberate in her pace when it comes to organizing herself to go somewhere.”

“I’ve heard Faye and Wil refer to that as Grandma Edie time,” Aggie said. “But all of us have our idiosyncrasies.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Has she ever been stumped by a decision?” Aggie asked.

Ruth thought about that for a minute. “Funny that, the only time I’ve ever seen Edie dither was when Harry Brown asked her to marry him. And I really wish she had thought about that one a whole lot more. Wretched man.”

They waved to catch Edie’s eye. “By the way,” Ruth said as they weaved their way through the growing crowd, “you’re the only one who knows the whole story about what happened to Sarah.”

“Okay.”

“She’s always been adamant about keeping it quiet because of all the half-baked wahoos that come out of the woodwork around Calliope,” Ruth said. “I know Edie will ask why I got so upset, and I will tell her…”

“…in your own good time,” Aggie finished. “That’s the way it should be, Ruth.”

Edie had settled on a nearby bench by the time her friends reached her. “This is turning out to be a hurry-up-and-wait event,” she said. “Charlet was pushing everyone out of the building just as I got here.”

“It’s certainly drawing a crowd,” Ruth said as she sat. “Do you know if David’s in there?”

“He was the last one in,” Edie said.

“Who was the last one in?” a woman asked, her thumbs flying over the biggest cell phone Edie had ever seen. And it was embraced by a cover in the vilest shade of purple. All three women noticed the white boots at the same time. 

Aggie raised an eyebrow to point at the phone. “Are you recording this on that thing?”

“Yeah. So? This is a public street. I can record here if I want,” Jaini said.

Aggie sensed rather than saw Edie and Ruth raise their phones, an action accompanied by the click-click sound of their cameras.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Jaini backed away. “Leave off.”

“This is a public street,” Ruth said.

“And we can take pictures if we want.” Edie stood up to move closer to the woman she now thought of as White Boots. “Smile.”

Jaini ducked into the crowd while Ruth and Edie kept their fingers on their electronic shutters. “Everything all right here, ladies?” Jennifer Osawa asked as she approached the three friends.

“Can’t we just declare Carding closed until this Calliope nonsense is over?” Ruth huffed.

“I wish.” Jennifer eyed the growing crowd. “Whatever you do, don’t give anyone your name, okay?” She turned to look at Aggie. “Especially you. Mr. Tarkiainen tells me you are in possession of some interesting archives.” She turned back to the crowd. “We’ve called in Officer Eakins to help with this. He should be at here any minute. If you give us a little time to get the herd moving then you three can make your way inside. And please use the back door. Annie tells me you have a key, is that right Edie?”

“Yes.”

“Chief Davenport would value your perspective on a couple of questions, okay?”

Once Evan Eakins arrived, it didn’t take long for the crowd to be dispersed. Most of the locals had better things to do, and they all figured the gossip would reach their ears soon enough. The Calliope culties took more persuading but Evan and Jennifer persisted. One of the last to move was Jaini Haskell. Pinned to her spot on the sidewalk across from the library, her phone close to her mouth, Jaini kept her lips moving faster and faster as the two officers converged on her.

“Let’s go,” Edie said.

They took their time checking the area for their bags and phones as women of a certain age are wont to do, all the while making sure they were being ignored. 

Being ignored can be another benefit (at times) of living to a certain age.

As they moseyed along the narrow road that separated the town hall from the library, Edie led them in a conversation about the hanging plants the library planned to buy for its front porch. By the time they reached the library’s rear entrance, the three friends had exhausted their debate over petunias versus geraniums, and were glad to drop the subject because, as they all knew, the choice of plants would be geraniums, like always.

Their chatter attracted the attention of a young woman at the far end of the road, a woman busy moving boxes from her car up the stairs to a “loft apartment” above a dentist’s office. While she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the diminutive size of her new digs, Pearl McGregor appreciated its shiny appliances and the smell of fresh paint. She was a bit peeved that the sale price of her Timmen Eldritch photos hadn’t met her expectations but she remained determined to hold out until his birthday—April 19—to sell the rest of her treasures.

“At least I’m back in Carding,” she thought as she examined the three older women, careful to keep her own face turned away. Wasn’t the short one the same woman she’d seen at the hospice center? Gawd, what a disaster that turned out to be. It had taken her ages to talk her way out of the clutches of hospital security.

Just then, the shortest woman of the trio looked straight at Pearl so she faked a struggle with the box on her hip so she could swing her face away. Then with a jut and thrust of her elbow, she stepped inside, and out of Ruth’s sight. This was not the time to take a chance on being recognized, she reminded herself as she climbed the stairs. Her plan was to ride the crest of the Calliope wave, sell all the stuff in her treasure box for lots of money, and then buy one of the condos up on Mount Merino where she would sip Prosecco while looking down on the Carding-ites who once ignored her.

“Looks like my ex-husband, the Good Dentist, has a new tenant,” Ruth said as she and her friends stepped inside the library’s back door.

“Hmm, that may be his second tenant,” Edie said as they walked deeper into the empty library. “Wow, it’s quieter than quiet in here.”

“What do you mean, a second tenant?” Ruth asked as they climbed the stairs. 

“Faye told me that your ‘Good Dentist’ was bragging in the Crow Town Bakery about how he slipped a loft apartment into his building right under the nose of the lister’s office,” Edie said.

Ruth stopped short. “You’re kidding? The old hay loft over the garage is now an apartment? It’s just one big room. The town would never allow that.”

“True. But apparently Max is tickled by the extra rent he’s getting. You know how hard it is to find places to live around here,” Edie said.

“Ha, I wonder how long that will stay a secret,” Ruth said. “Max has never been able to keep his mouth shut about anything. That’s how I found out about his other women.”

When they reached the top of the stairs, the chaos in the research room made the three friends gasp. Books and magazines were strewn across the carpet. Microfiche tapes had been unspooled, and lay coiled like deranged ribbon on top of the mess. Three-ring binders, their contents meticulously catalogued over the years, lay open-faced on every horizontal surface. Other materials—town reports, brochures, and pamphlets—were stacked in tottering piles ready to topple down on unwary passersby.

“Oh my,” Aggie breathed. “This is awful.”

“Yeah, it is.” Annie Crane was pale and shaken. Next to her, David Tarkiainen looked both horrified and outraged. Only Charlet Davenport moved, stepping slowly and carefully among the debris piles, taking picture after picture with the town’s evidence camera.

“Thank you three for coming,” she said. “I know all of you are involved in the library in different ways, and I could use your perspective on this.” Edie was the chair of the library’s board of directors, Ruth held the same position in the Friends group, and Aggie was the institution’s legal counsel.

“Please be very careful where you step but do come in a bit more, take a good look, and tell me what your first impressions are,” Charlet said.

Suddenly Annie whimpered. “Oh Edie, I am so sorry. This is all my fault.”

“What? How so?”

“I don’t remember locking the front door when I left last night,” Annie said. “That’s how they got in. I’m sure of it.”

“That’s nonsense,” David said. “We were both by the door when you turned the key. I even remember thinking how its scraping noise sounded like a horror movie. That lock is old and balky but it still works, and you definitely turned the key in it.”

Annie gave a loud sniff. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as I’m standing here watching you take the blame for something that’s not your fault at all.” David was so adamant, everyone else in the room saw Annie’s shoulders relax from their hunched-up position. “You were definitely irritated with me in that moment but you were never careless, Annie.”

“Then how did someone get in here, and why was our resource room ransacked?” Annie asked.

“I wouldn’t say ransacked.” Everyone turned to look at Aggie. “I would call it rearranged.”

Charlet was visibly pleased by Aggie’s observation. “And why do you think that?” she prompted.

Aggie pointed at the microfiche spool closest to her. “David, I know you’ve been doing research in the Carding Chronicle archives for a while now. We put those newspapers on microfiche years ago. What happens if you fast-forward past the end of the tape?”

“Oh, I’m careful not to do that. Annie warned me it was a real challenge to get the spools re-threaded if you do. Why?”

“Take a close look at the microfiche spools,” Aggie said. “They’ve been unwound like ribbon but…”

“…the ends are all still in place in the spools,” David said as he dropped to his hands and knees to look closer. “Now that’s interesting.”

Ruth maneuvered herself a bit further into the room, wiggling her feet forward under the debris one inch at a time. When she could go no further, she turned to look at the emptied shelves, and then down at the pile of intact gardening magazines at her feet. “When we re-shelve these, that’s the space they will fill, am I right?” she said, pointing.

“Yes, exactly,” Annie said.

“And I bet the same is true all the way around the room,” Aggie said. “This was no frenzied or random act of vandalism. I saw something like this once before when an heir who feared he was going to be disappointed in an inheritance that he’d already spent staged a burglary in a law office to delay the reading of the will.”

“What happened?” Charlet asked.

“My client had put all her documentation into a safety deposit box, and given her executor the key,” Aggie said. “She knew her son could not be trusted. As it turned out, he was too lazy to make a big mess so he just pulled things off shelves and out of drawers, and then laid them on the floor. This,” she swept her hand around the room, “looks very similar.”

“I agree with you,” Charlet said. “This was staged. So now the question is, why? What did he or she take? Were there any one-of-a-kind Calliope archives up here that any of you know of?”

David and Annie looked at one another, shaking their heads. “No, nothing. It’s all public records,” Annie said.

“I haven’t see anything that you couldn’t find in a public record,” David said. “I mean the Chronicles are not widely known outside of Carding but there are copies in the state library, just like with every other Vermont newspaper.” 

He suddenly turned toward Aggie. “My wife reminded me that you have Calliope’s legal archives. Is that still the case?”

“Yes. They’re in a safety deposit box.”

“Do you know if there are any contracts or agreements in those papers? Financials? Anything like that?”

Aggie heaved a big sigh. “There’s some financial stuff about album and concert ticket sales but no contracts, no. There’s paperwork that refers to a contract but we’ve never seen one. There’s a couple of back-of-the-envelope agreements about copyrights on songs, and how the album sales should be divvied up.” She took a minute to run through her memories of the Calliope cache. “But nothing else in that line that I recall. However, Timmen Eldritch did leave a will. It’s very informal but it’s signed and notarized so it’s legal.”

It suddenly became so quiet in the resource room, chimes of the grandfather clock on the first floor could be clearly heard. “Okay,” David said with a sigh, “can I ask who witnessed the will?”

“Ashley Bentsen and Oliver Quigley,” Aggie said.

“Both of whom have died,” David said. “Now can I ask…no, I can’t ask who inherits, can I?”

Aggie shook her head. “No. That can only be revealed at the reading of the will, and the will can only be read if Timmen Eldritch is declared dead.”

David sighed. “Checkmate.”

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Thanks for sharing some of the minutes of your life with me and Carding, Vermont. I hope you’re enjoying The Half Life of Dragons and can visit next week for the latest chapter.

When I reach the end of the tale, the entire book will be available here as an ebook. In the meantime, if you need to catch up or would like to share this adventure with someone else, you can do so by clicking this link.

~ Sonja Hakala