Chapter 23—The Half Life of Dragons

by Sonja Hakala

*** PREVIOUSLY IN THE HALF LIFE OF DRAGONS: It’s Saturday morning, and Allison Owen (along with a couple of old friends) is at the auction of Calliope artifacts in Burlington.

The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. You won’t want to miss this.

If you need to, you can catch up on previous chapters of this novel in progress here.***

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As you can imagine, the auction room exploded after Henry Yates, a special investigator with the Vermont attorney general’s office, made his announcement. The roar became even louder when Nick Kelvey joined Timmen (we’re going to call the former lead singer of Calliope Timmen Eldritch just this one last time to avoid confusion) at the podium. Off to one side, Smugs Gallagher pointed at the two men, yelling until every vein in his forehead rose to the surface.

“Looks like a grilled tomato, doesn’t he?” Edie Wolfe said as she elbowed her friend Ruth. Ruth didn’t reply so Edie took a closer look at her friend. Ruth’s hands were tightly fisted in her lap, her jaw clenched. Edie patted her friend’s hands. “Breathe, my friend, breathe,” she said. “He can’t touch Sarah now, and it looks like his world is about to fall apart. He’s getting his.”

A scuffle ensued at one of the exit doors, and half the room got up to watch. “Who is that?” Dexter asked as he stood up. 

“I think it’s Pearl McGregor,” Allison shouted. “She’s with some big guy who’s into decorating his hairy chest with gold chains. I think the police just stopped them from leaving.”

That’s when Ruth and Edie stood up in hopes of seeing better. “It’s no use. I can’t see much,” Ruth said, craning her neck. “Is he tall?”

“Yeah, with a big beard,” Allison said.

“In that case, I can tell you he calls himself Gusto,” Ruth hollered. “Our friends Aggie and Charlie think he’s an embezzler. He works at Aggie’s old law firm.

“Excuse me. Excuse me.” A woman rudely pushed her way along the row where Allison stood. “Get-out-of-my-way!”

“White Boots,” Edie and Ruth said together. 

Ruth turned toward Allison. “I assume she’s coming for you. Do you want to talk to her?”

Allison looked at the struggling woman for a moment, her eyes narrowing, her lips thinning. “Jaini Haskell,” she said through barely parted lips. “Yeah, let her through. This won’t take long.” She glanced at Dex, and he gave her a thumbs up.

“It’s your time, Al,” he said. “You’re ready.”

Allison nodded then turned toward the two older women. “Would you two stay close by?”

“Glad to,” Edie said. “Get between Ruth and I. That way, you’re covered on both sides.” She pulled a short metal rod from her pocket, gave both ends a twist and tug, and then brandished a collapsible cane. “Old women are much harder to move than people think.”

“Yes we are,” Ruth said, matching Edie’s actions. “I knew these things would come in handy some day.”

Which is what Allison did, standing tall between two of her mother’s dearest friends. It seemed only right since she was finally not afraid of who she was or the truth about herself. Dex beamed at the young woman who had finally emerged from the dark cave of emotional pain and addiction where she had lived for far too long.

Meanwhile, up at the front of the room, a phalanx of the friends that Timmen had made on the Appalachian Trail emptied their first row seats to line up in front of him. Each of them carried a walking stick similar to the ones Edie and Ruth carried. As they faced the crowd, their arms interlocked, their walking sticks held horizontally in their hands, forming a protective barrier between Timmen and the mob of fans, celebrity seekers, bloggers, vloggers, and sundry news people eager to land a story on the home page of their outlet’s websites.

Nick kept a close eye on his friend, ready to intervene if needed. But Timmen did not flinch from the crowd. He found and held Allison’s eyes, each damaged soul supporting the other. Together, they waited for the tide of the tumult to turn.

Jaini Haskell, in her effort to collar Allison, had now reached Edie, leaving a lot of irritated people in her wake. “Get out of my way, you old bag,” she yelled.

Allison’s hand flashed out over Edie’s shoulder, shoving Jaini back. “No one calls my friend an old bag,” she said in a very loud voice. Around them, the noise cratered, and people turned to take in this new distraction.

“Edie, is it all right to call you my friend?” Allison whispered.

“Of course it is,” Edie said. “Welcome home, Allison.” 

Ruth squeezed Allison’s shoulder from behind. “That’s two friends, I should say,” she said.

Jaini Haskell was now got back on her feet, microphone in hand, and she was very, very angry. “How dare you?” she shrieked. “I’ll ruin you.”

“Duck, Edie,” Allison yelled as her hand whipped out again to snatch Jaini’s phone from her hands. “All of you around me with phones,” she yelled, “watch this.”

“Give me back my phone,” Jaini yelled. “You have no right.”

“Shut up,” several in the crowd yelled. “We want to hear what she has to say.” Phones all around Allison came up to eyeball level. “Go ahead,” one woman said. “We’ve got you covered.”

Allison took a very deep breath, and then began to talk in her loudest voice. “My name is Allison Owen. I met Calliope when I was seventeen, and they were living in Carding, Vermont. I’m well over thirty now.”

She glanced over at Timmen and Nick, who smiled and nodded at her. “When I was twenty, I married Calliope’s drummer, Ol…Ol…”

“You can do it,” Edie whispered. “Say his name—for her.”

“Yeah.” Allison whispered. “Yeah, for Suzanna.” Then she raised her head to look at the crowd. “When I was twenty, I married Calliope’s drummer, Oliver Quigley. And I have the marriage license and photos to prove it. Unlike this fraud,” she pointed at Jaini, “who claims to know everything there is to know about Calliope, including everything there is to know about my friends Timmen and Nick. She knows nothing. She’s a liar. She’s always been a liar.”

Then Allison swiveled her pointing finger at Pearl McGregor and Smugs, now cowering in the same doorway. “Years ago, those two ransacked the farmhouse where Calliope lived in Carding, stealing everything that was not nailed down. They’ve sold that stuff off bit by bit ever since, both of them parasites living off the work of Calliope. And,” Allison raised her voice, “Pearl McGregor never, ever, ever married Timmen Eldritch. Never.”

By now, the sound level in the auction hall had reached five out of ten so Timmen had to shout to make himself heard. “Wait, there’s more you need to know. A few years ago, Smugs Gallagher and an accomplice took control of the Calliope farmhouse in Carding, turning it into a fraud factory. They forged my art, they created fakes of every sort—fake song lyrics, fake lists, fake autographs on photos—that they sold to duped collectors around the world. My life has been systematically looted by Smugs Gallagher. And that makes everything for sale in this auction fake.”

Timmen’s thundered that last word through the hall, leaving a trail of silence in its wake. Then he smiled and bowed his head at Allison. She returned the gesture. Jaini Haskell’s face was now the color of a bruised tomato, and she turned away from Allison with a throaty epithet. Edie stepped in front of her, making herself once again an obstacle in Jaini’s path. She was the recipient of a venomous glare for her efforts.

“Out of the way, old woman,” Jaini growled.

Edie raised her phone to her face, pressed her camera button, and let the flash do the rest. In fact, most of the crowd watching the interaction raised their cameras to do the same.

“Ma’am, if you would come with me.” A young man in the uniform of the Vermont State Police called from the end of the row. “We have a few questions to ask you.”

“What? No,” Jaini said, turning away. “I’m not answering any questions.” She raised her hand to push at Allison but Dex got there first.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ve done enough pushing for one day.”

“They just want to know how well you know Smugs Gallagher and his accomplice, Lester Miller,” Allison said. “So why don’t you go along with the nice man, and tell him your story.”

“Oh, I’d say she got to know Lester quite well,” Edie said. “They spent two nights in adjoining cells in the Carding jail. I understand they talked a lot.”

“Ma’am, this way,” the policeman called again.

Allison grinned, not too nicely, at Jaini. “I think you’d better go with him, and tell your story before Lester’s version is the only one they know. I’ve heard he enjoys throwing people under the bus.”

Jaini huffed and puffed for another minute or two but then her shoulders finally sagged with defeat. To make matters worse, from Jaini’s perspective, no one noticed her plight because they were too busy baying at Timmen. He closed his eyes and stepped away from the microphone, letting Henry Yates take over once again. Ignoring the raised hands and shouted questions, Henry took a kazoo out of his pocket to serenade the crowd with the theme song from the game show Jeopardy. For the next few minutes, Yates moved closer and closer to the microphone in order to increase the hummy music’s volume until the crowd finally fell silent.

“Thank you,” Henry said.

“Timmen, how did you disappear?” a woman called from the audience, raising her camera to eye level. At a nod from Henry, a man from the ring protecting Timmen stepped forward, took the questioner firmly by the elbow, and propelled her out the closest exit.

“Any more questions?” Henry asked in a tone that everyone understood to mean that questions were not welcome. “Good. You should all know that this is being recorded, and the video will be available for viewing on the Vermont attorney general’s website by tomorrow morning. Now I am going to read a statement from the man once known as Timmen Eldritch. This statement, with more details and relevant documents, will also be available on the website tomorrow morning. We will not be taking questions after this statement is made.”

Henry cleared his throat, looked down at the papers on the podium, and began to read. “I was once known as Timmen Eldrtich, lead singer for a band called Calliope. The band was a joke started by three friends—myself, Nicholas Kelvey, and Oliver Quigley, our dearly lamented friend and drummer. It was never meant to be taken seriously.

“We thought it was funny when people bought our first album, and never planned to make another. But then Smugs Gallagher, whom I’ve known since elementary school, muscled in to make Calliope a foursome. He never understood that Calliope was a joke. To him, Calliope was a way to make money, lots of money. And that’s how everything went wrong.

“I freely admit that the adulation showered on the band frightened me, and Gallagher took advantage of my vulnerability to gain control over myself and the band. The combination of Gallagher’s emotional abuse and the fans’ adulation nearly drove me to suicide.”

That’s when Allison started to quietly cry. Edie and Ruth wrapped their arms around her, and Dex smiled. His work with Allison was now complete. Soon he would assume a new mentoring position for someone else in substance-abuse hell. Maybe Allison could be persuaded to be a mentor too. He believed she could do it but it remained to be seen.

Henry continued reading Timmen’s statement. “With the help of three extraordinary friends, I found resurrection in a hospital outside this country. It took a long time but I can now proudly say I have been sober and sane for almost five years.

“I have no intention of reviving Calliope. That period of my life was a dark place and I promise I will never return to it. But I am very interested in preserving the copyrights to my personal artwork, and prosecuting Smugs Gallagher, Pearl McGregor, Lester Miller, and a corrupt attorney named Oscar Augusto Octavio Smith for their part in the fraudulent reproduction and sale of it.

The large man with the beard and too many gold chains on his chest started sidling toward an exit. When his escape was blocked, he turned his malevolent stare in Lester Miller’s direction.

“Much of the evidence that will be used in this prosecution was discovered at the farmhouse owned by a trust set up by Oliver Quigley. I never owned that farmhouse, and I have been reassured by Ollie’s heirs,” here Yates nodded at Allison, “that the misappropriation of that property is a matter of future litigation.

“One more additional and very important point: I never wrote any of Calliope’s songs. With the exception of two that were penned by Nicholas Kelvey, all of the band’s music and words were created by Oliver Quigley, and the copyrights to those works are owned by the heirs of his estate. This ownership was stipulated in a contract signed by all of the members of Calliope, including Smugs Gallagher, before we abandoned the farmhouse in Carding.”

Edie stole a glance in Gallagher’s direction, and was glad to see him in handcuffs. Judging by the ugly twist to his mouth, she could understand why Timmen had feared him. She hoped his prison sentence would be unnaturally long.

Harold Yates folded the statement he’d been reading, and slid it into a folder. The only sound in the room was nervous coughing. “In addition to what I have just read, Timmen has asked me to say the following—he will not speak in public about Calliope or his life. He is a private person, and intends to guard his privacy with a vengeance. In the future, anything he has to say about Calliope will be in a court of law. Good afternoon everyone.”

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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 LAST chapter.

The entire book will soon be available here as an ebook and in a PDF. 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