Our story so far …
Tom Cutchin is a private investigator in a bustling Southern town, his family’s home for generations. He specializes in mundane things: missing persons, arson, insurance fraud, the occasional wayward spouse. It’s a typical practice in a tobacco town still fighting the Depression, where bootleggers still do a good business, even after the end of Volstead’s Prohibition.
One day, a frightened young woman comes into his office, searching for her missing husband.
With his assistant Belle, a federal agent named Malcolm who doesn’t always follow the rules, a man named Charlie with a tragic past seeking a second chance, a saucy little moppet named Carolann, and a redbone hound named Plug, Tom finds himself hip deep in a mystery stretching back more than a decade — a mystery that’s intensely personal.
A mystery that can only be solved in Dorothy’s Book.
The Butler building wasn’t the oldest in New Lisbon, or the newest. The street wasn’t the best downtown, nor was it the worst.
On one corner was a men’s clothing store where you could get a bottle if you asked the right way. Even though liquor was legal again, some preferred the stuff secretly made up the river, then brought to town in boxes of canning jars carefully hidden under crates of chickens and produce.
Opposite the clothing store was a stolid, imposing brick bank with white marble cornices, a bank that was born in Reconstruction, grew with the steamboats and then the railroad, and now thrived on tobacco money. The town wasn’t a town anymore, indeed it had been a city for years, even though the steamboats no longer ran. If you went to the muddy riverbank, a half-dozen rotting hulks lay across the way. Downstream was the area called The Flats, where wide mudbanks were exposed at low tide, or when the river was short on rain upstream.
All along the banks on both sides were signs of those who were here before. At your feet you might find glass shards, bottles, rusty nails, even some Indian arrowheads and pottery from before the town was even a town, much less a city.
Tom Cutchin could look past the roof of the bank and see the old riverboats from his office window. His grandfather’s boat, sold to a traveling preacher at the end of the 1890s, was one of the rotting hulks across the river. The view was one reason he was willing to pay more for his three rooms on the corner of Scott and Market, over the Butler drug store. He liked looking out at the river his grandfather had known when it was still wild, when you could shoot a turkey from the wheelhouse and have a special dinner for the crew hauling tar, pitch, turpentine and hogs to Wilmington. A time when men settled disagreements with large knives carried on rough leather belts, thick calloused feet slapping on oiled deck boards or splintery docks in the dark of night.
Tom had never known those times, but reveled in the stories told by his grandfather on the porch of the now-shabby two story almost-mansion, five blocks up from his office, two blocks from the river, an easy walk from the dock where his grandfather berthed the trim sidewheeler known as the Mudhen.
That had been before the new brick courthouse, and the new buildings south on Front Street that replaced the shacks, taverns and warehouses that burned in 1902. There was a bedraggled half-alley, half-street paralleling the flats behind the riverfront commercial buildings, while the street side boasted macadam paving, concrete sidewalks, gutters and fire hydrants. At night, graceful black iron streetlights with necks like huge swans illuminated the plate glass windows filled with clothing, kitchen and dry goods, bicycles, and groceries. Here and there were offices — lawyers, doctors, and others who had flocked to the new part of the growing city.
The drug store building with Tom’s office was a couple decades older than the new money part of Front. The druggist had married into a doctor’s family, and opened up shop on the bottom floor of the four-story brick building just before the rail spur to the riverboat docks was built.
The old judge and his sons had the entire fourth floor for their law offices; Tom shared the third floor with a bookkeeper who wheezed and smoked Cubebs, while the second floor was split between a young doctor and a dry-drunk dentist, both struggling. They shared a sweet chestnut redhead receptionist named Sonya whom Cutchin knew was a holy terror on Saturday nights out of town.
He heard Isabelle’s heels on the wooden stairs, then they went quiet as she made the turn on the carpeted landing. Isabelle greeted Sonya the receptionist, then her heels began clicking on the stairs leading to the third floor. The fifth step from the top squeaked, as it always did.
“Good morning, Belle,” he said as the door with its frosted glass opened.
“Good morning, Boss,” she said, unpinning her hat and hanging it on a deer antler peg. She had tawny eyes, a bright smile, and unfashionably long hair that she piled like her Gibson girl grandmother had, years before Belle was born. She had a lovely figure, not skinny like some of the post-flapper girls stuck on Depression rations, and she always dressed to the nines. She was also utterly devoted to her husband, which was one reason Cutchin liked having her around. Some married women didn’t like to work, or their husbands forbade it. Belle was the kind to do as she wanted, within reason, and her husband Frank encouraged her independence. On top of that, Belle and Frank were his friends. Their son and daughter called him uncle. Frank had a land title office, a one-man operation on down Front.
Belle slid smoothly behind the desk, and as if on cue, the phone jangled.
“Mr. Cutchin’s office. How may I help you?” Tom could barely hear a female voice on the other end of the line.
“May I ask how you found out about Mr. Cutchin? The newspaper advertisement. Thank you.” She made a note on her desk blotter, beside the massive Underwood typewriter. “May I ask why you need his services? Just generally. I wouldn’t ask for details over the line.” The woman hesitated, then gave an answer that caused Belle to frown. “I understand. Discretion is our policy.”
Belle caught his eye.
“Let me check his calendar,” she said sweetly, as if she didn’t know better than he did when he had to do what. Tom shrugged and nodded.
“Can you be here at ten, Mrs. Britt? Excellent. Third floor, Butler building at Front and Scott. See you then.”
Belle shrugged as she hung up the phone.
“She was on a public phone, and didn’t want to say too much.”
“Husband trouble? Tom asked.
“Not sure. Her voice sounded like it was husband trouble. First name is Dorothy.”
Oh, and that’s three calls in the past two weeks from the Dispatch ad.”
Tom opened the ivory and silver cigarette box on Belle’s desk, slid the shield on his lighter down, then turned the wheel. The old windproof had served him well in France, like the watch that had been on his wrist since he left for France in ‘18, and the Colt .32-20 he occasionally carried under one shoulder.
“You gonna smoke my cigarettes as well as your own, I want a raise,” Belle grinned.
“You get a raise when I get one,” Tom chuckled. “Maybe we need to go to work for the WPA. I hear the Conservation Corps needs axe men.”
“And ruin my nails? No, thank you. You want some coffee? Mrs. Britt sounded like a lady who might need a cup.”
“Please,” Tom said.
“I’ll put a pot on.”
Chapter 2 — A missing man is found, a harrowing tale related, and more questions than answers.
