Chapter 16: Snake in a Jar - Lucidity

MADDEN COULDN’T STOP STARING AT THE CONTENTS OF THE GLASS jar. A snake, remarkably well preserved, maybe three feet long, curled up at the bottom of the transparent container they’d pulled out of the ground. The jar was now sitting on the patio table next to the bagel and lox platter.

The snake’s name was Freddy. A kid named Darren Frankel had buried him in 1973. They knew this because Darren had also buried a note explaining who he was and how, not long after he put Freddy to rest, he’d created a time capsule as a part of a fifth-grade history project at Jordan Middle School.

In a separate jar Darren had buried some newspaper clippings, including articles about Nixon’s inauguration, the launch of the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, the Skylab space station, and the opening of the Sears Tower in Chicago and World Trade Center in New York. That time-capsule jar also held a dozen unopened Wacky Packs that contained a set of collectible product parody stickers and a stick of gum, a mangled Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, and an eight-page short story depicting his vision of the future circa 2073.

Two years after Darren buried the time capsule Darren’s father buried the animal who’d left the teeth marks on Evel Knievel. According to a short note found in a glass bottle, the dog’s name was Finnegan, an Irish wolfhound so big that Darren’s younger brother had ridden him on occasion. Finnegan had died at six of lung cancer, and now, much to Madden’s dismay, he looked across the yard to see his skull in J.J.’s hand.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” J.J. announced, taking a knee next to the hole they’d dug, Hal Shelby and the technician looking on: “I was in Hamlet in college but I played Horatio.”

He extended his hand out in front of him, the skull facing toward him. “Alas, poor Finnegan,” he projected in his best Shakespearean lilt. “I knew him, Hal. A dog lacking in intelligence yet most excellently loyal and good-natured. A giant for his species, he bore me on his back numerous times. How abhorred in my imagination it is. Here hung the tongue that licked me I know not how oft. Where is your ferocious bark? Your pricked up ears? Your frenzied, futile chase of the bushy-tailed squirrel?”

J.J. couldn’t hold a straight face any longer. He lowered the skull and started laughing. Hal Shelby, who’d been reading Darren’s short story, tucked it temporarily under his arm to give him a brief but rousing ovation. He then returned to the text.

“This is mind-blowing,” he declared after a moment. “He writes about self-driving cars. But they’re on tracks, like slot cars. I’m going to give this to Elon when I see him next week. He’ll get a kick out of it. Maybe he can use it in an ad. We have to find this kid. He’s gotta be fifty now.”

Now that he had a consolation prize he seemed less annoyed that the remains in the hole weren’t Stacey’s. Madden found it amazing that a guy who clearly had a sadistic streak always seemed to find the good in everything. What Madden wrote off as an adolescent’s mundane seventies sci-fi musings Shelby saw as potential marketing gold and a way to curry favor with Elon, whom Madden could only assume was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors. It became clear to him why Shelby was worth half a billion dollars and he wasn’t.

“So, what’s our next move?”

The question came from Dupuy, now fully clothed and standing behind him.

“We dig a few more holes and then put the yard back together,” Madden responded quietly.

“There’s nothing here,” she said.

“Don’t insult my friend Freddy. He looks great for his age.”

“I had a pet snake,” she said.

“Of course you did.”

“My older brother was afraid of snakes so I got one. I named it Scorpion.”

“Sounds like a bit of overkill.”

“We always named our animals with some other animal’s name. Kind of an inside family joke. Our dog’s name was Bear, for instance.”

“At least they were both mammals,” Madden commented.

“You have a dog?” she asked.

“For a little while. And then he got hit by a car. I remember being upset about it but I think my parents were more traumatized by having to tell me. It was my mother’s fault. It happened during the day while I was at school. I had a weird childhood. With the polio, I was spoiled in a lot of ways. I was treated like this special person. Every once in a while horrible things happened to me. Like my dog getting killed. Even the sexual abuse. That was an isolated incident. It wasn’t like I had a stepfather or uncle who was abusing me for years. The guy was my doctor. There was some lead-up. He tested the boundaries over a few visits, but when he really did it, when he raped me, it only happened once. I didn’t go back to that office. I didn’t tell my parents why I wouldn’t go back. I just refused to go back.”

Dupuy took a step forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Did you write that in your book?”

“No, I didn’t get to that part yet.”

“Well, that’s a good way to say it. A good way to get into it. I don’t think you have to be that explicit. You just need to talk about how it impacted you.”

She was right, he thought. Ultimately, what he needed was to talk to someone like her and just record the conversation, then transcribe it. He was kind of doing that already some evenings. But he wasn’t talking to a person, just his phone.

“I’ve been kind of keeping a record of what we’re doing here,” he said after a moment. “I don’t write anything down. But I come home and put my phone on the kitchen table and hit the record button and talk about what happened. Sometimes it’s short, sometimes it’s longer.”

“That’s good,” she said, distracted. “It’s good to get something down. What are they doing?”

The radar technician was now taking a picture of J.J. holding the dog’s skull.

“I think I heard someone say something about an album cover,” Madden said.

“When you saw the bones, did you think about the money?” she asked.

“I didn’t, actually.”

“Me neither,” she said not altogether convincingly.

They sat in silence for a moment. Then he said: “At this point I think we have to shift our focus to finding Ross. He has close family members still alive. And a daughter.”

“They all think he’s dead, though. You spoke to them.”

He had. But their conversations had been brief. As far as they were concerned, the case was closed. They had moved on with their lives—or at least they said they had.

“I’m going to have to go see them in person.”

“And after that, what, you go to Vietnam?”

“Maybe. My wife and I have been talking about taking a trip. The only time I’ve been out of the country the last ten years is to Nicaragua, to visit her family.”

Shelby saw them talking and walked over, Darren’s story in hand.

“Nice little adrenaline rush there, eh?” he said, approaching the table. He made his left hand into a fist and banged it gently against his chest a few times. “Got the heart pounding, right? Digging up the pet cemetery while keeping the police at bay. Nice way to start the day. You look a little tuckered out there, Detective.”

Shelby was being polite. He was exhausted. He’d be lucky if his back was only half shot tomorrow.

“I’m alright,” he said. “Just sorry we didn’t find her.”

“Sounds like your boy Bronsky was misled.”

“When you got no favorites, you bet the long shot,”

Madden said. Shelby responded with what sounded like a cross between a snort and a laugh. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I’m an angel investor. All we do is bet long shots.”

Madden knew Shelby had a fund. Not a big one, but big enough. All these guys did.

“You want a bagel?” Madden asked.

“Nah, I’m out. Got a conference I need to pop into. They’re interviewing me. On stage. My landscapers will be here soon to start cleaning up this mess. Or they can keep digging if you want.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” Madden said. “But I was waiting to do it in person. You have someone following me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You sure you aren’t being paranoid, Detective?”

“You sure you aren’t lying to me?”

Shelby smiled. “Not about that. You mind if I take this?” he said, holding up Darren’s short story.

“You paid for it,” Madden said. “How ’bout the snake? You want him, too?”

“No, thanks. Freddy’s all yours.”

“I was going to bury him again along with the dog, although your friend J.J. seems to be quite attached to him.”

Shelby looked back at J.J., who still had Finnegan’s skull in his hand.

“He’s found his muse, Detective. If you’re lucky he’ll write a song about you. And you, too, Ms. Dupuy. Immortality beckons. But time’s a tickin’. I’ll give you another couple of weeks to make some progress.”

“But your contract says I have six months to find them,” Madden said.

“It does.”

“So why’d you say I only have a couple of weeks?”

“I have a chronic case of impatience. I take these pills to control it, but they don’t seem to work.”

“A contract’s a contract,” Dupuy interjected.

Shelby nodded in agreement. “But you can always write multiple contracts with multiple people. Last I checked, your contract didn’t include an exclusivity clause. And I believe that it would be your fault that it doesn’t have one, wouldn’t it, Ms. Dupuy?”

The comment left Dupuy looking a little dumbfounded, which wasn’t a good look for her.

“You realize he can quit at any time,” she said, recovering her composure. “And you still have to pay him.”

Shelby smiled. “You a quitter, Detective?”

“There’s been someone else on this from the start, hasn’t there? That’s how it works with you, doesn’t it? You guys put two competing teams on a project to double your chances of success.”

“Didn’t they tell you that in the Valley it’s all about collaboration? Working across teams. The free flow of ideas. Open offices. Flat org charts. Bah.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“My company had thirty-one employees when I sold it. There was only one team. But remember my background, Detective. I am an enabler. My mission is simple. I have faith in you. Your baby’s crying, Ms. Dupuy. I believe it’s feeding time.”