Five

"Lee and James close in on the mystery"

               Lee and James had decided to go back to the house. There had to be some connection, James kept saying so. The revelation from Harvey Aikley was astonishing. Indeed neither James nor Lee believed it upon first hearing. The story was so bizarre James said that in his entire career he didn’t think he’d ever been as shocked. According to Harvey his daughter had never been missing. In fact she’d been a very happy girl, but he on the other hand was buried in debt. Then one day, as if by magic, there was a knock on the door. This was where the story became harder to believe for the two officers. According to Harvey the man on the other side of the knock was an FBI agent. He had heard of Harvey’s troubles and offered a solution. The man said that if he allowed them to stage his daughter’s disappearance they would pay off the debt and set Harvey and his daughter up nicely in San Diego. The explanation the agent had given as to his motives was vague, something about bureaucratic red tape and needing men to search for something. However, Harvey assured them that this man had all the correct credentials. So, long story short, Harvey took the offer, managed to lie to Tina about the whole move and was then rewarded for his troubles as promised. Both men found this to be a farcical explanation but Harvey had insisted,

‘So...’ Lee had taken to recapping while James drove ‘What do we know. Sometime in the 60’s the owner of this oil company is killed. The murder is never solved. Then 50 years later some FBI agent needs to come up with this elaborate plan, to hide the fact that he’s searching for something in the very same place. What the f**k?’. James took over

‘The question is, if we do believe Harvey, what’s so important to require this kind of secrecy to search for, what could it be that the rest of the country could have no inkling of what it was? Were they trying to investigate the murder?’, the question was clearly self-addressed but Lee felt the need to answer anyway,

‘I don’t know. But if we go by sheriff Beady’s account they never found what it was they were looking for. How could that be?’,

The two both let the question hang in the air. They were eager to check out the house, desperate to try and unravel this mystery. Lee no longer had that burning boredom, this kind of excitement and puzzle was what he thrived on. The two approached the house at around 5pm, with the sun still shining. They walked up to the now abandoned front step and looked back towards their car. The house had a gothic feel, and was surrounded by trees and grassland. It felt like a small paradise, an escape from the engrossing nature around it. More so it seemed as though one day " not far from now - the house would be swallowed up by the nature it was intruding on and the place would be returned to equilibrium. Lee pulled out a cigarette from his pack, placed it in his mouth and twisted the pack around in his fingers. He read the bold black letters on the front ‘SMOKING KILLS’ and thought of the house crumbling to dust " and the brick with which it was built returning to the Earth from which it had been born. He thought this to be a fine reflection of human life as he twiddled the cigarettes in his fingers and surveyed the area. From the account they had collected from the sheriff this was where they had searched.

‘So where’s the one place you wouldn’t search if you were looking for a missing girl?’ James asked, almost half-heartedly. But this sparked a wave of thought in Lee, who put back his cigarette to answer,

‘The f*****g house!’. He rushed into the dwelling, barging through the now rotting door. On entering the house he felt its spooky nature. All the carpets had been lifted to reveal bare greying wooden floorboards. Lee felt the urge to explain his thought process as he scoured the insides of the house. ‘The problem with faking the girl’s disappearance to search for something’ he began ‘is there are places no one would bother to look’. James did not interrupt, so he went on. ‘If you’re searching for a missing girl, how are you supposed to explain why you’re searching the dad’s house unless he’s a suspect’, James nodded and followed Lee frantically around the crumbling abode.

‘We don’t even know what we’re looking for!’ James said exasperated.

‘Something you wouldn’t find unless you knew where it was’, Lee replied. The two searched the house for a long time, pulling up floorboards, smashing cabinets, finding nothing but old keys and dust. They returned to the ground floor deflated. But as James walked toward Lee he noticed a creak - a hatch leading to a basement. On entering the basement the two were disappointed once more. It was completely empty. Lee fell and rested his head against the grey wall.

‘F**k! I really thought we’d find something here’. The two stayed like that for a moment as Lee bumped the back of his head on the wall on which he was propped up against and went to pull back out his cigarette. Some dust fell over his head and he noticed James look over at him. James suddenly took out his gun and started tapping it on the wall. ‘What are you...’

‘Shhh!’ James silenced Lee and continued tapping, listening for the slightest change of sound. Then around two thirds of the way around the basement they heard it, the sound of hollow. ‘Here’. James said confidently as Lee stood up,

‘Hold on!’. He raced back into the house and returned within a couple of minutes holding a large sledge hammer.

‘Stand back...’ He began to swing the hammer against the portion of wall that had made the sound. Once, twice, three times. It seemed as if the thing would never give, but then in an explosion of dust, it crumbled and along with pieces of the wall a huge chest slid out. Lee could not help but smile, even while coughing and spluttering, then with the remnants of his pant left he remarked ‘F*****g bingo’.

 

    Lee had no idea how heavy the thing was, all he knew was that it had taken a monumental effort to drag it up through the hatch and out to the car. Once he had pulled up to the right rear wheel he slumped against the car himself sweating and heaving. James had said that his back didn’t allow him to do heavy lifting. In a kind of pathetic fallacy, as Lee sat there the sun came out from behind the clouds, illuminating the house, trees, car and chest in dazzling sunshine. Suddenly the place that had seemed at one point dilapidated now had a hopeful air to it. Then the burning desire hit Lee. He looked at the chest, staring intently into it as if transfixed in some sort of trance. James couldn’t help but notice;

‘Don’t do it Nemo’, Lee heard but ignored the statement, ‘You know we can’t open it until we’ve taken it to be tagged in evidence’. Lee couldn’t stand to not know a second longer,

‘F**k that’, he whispered, ‘we earned this James, get me the crowbar.’ James pleaded one last time ‘Nemo, please’,

‘Just get the damn bar will you?’. With that James also gave into his own curiosity which until then he had been keeping under wraps and went to the boot of the car. Grabbing the crowbar he chucked it to Lee who anchored it into the lip of the chest while whipping the sweat off his brow. With an almighty sound it gave way and opened its secrets. Both men were at first disappointed. The chest held nothing but papers and documents. No treasure or money. The men looked at each other before each grabbing handfuls of the documents and started reading. James was the first to notice anything

‘Geological survey conducted by the West Texas Oil Company, 1953’. The two men scanned through the documents in silence for a good five minutes. Lee struggled to make sense of the data, trying to input it into his head and come to a conclusion. Then suddenly James dropped all the documents but one, holding it close and reading.  ‘Our professional estimate is that while Oil will still be available for the foreseeable future this Oil will in fact become UNUSABLE within a maximum of 65 to 70 years’. Lee looked up, not quite comprehending what he had heard.

‘What?’.

‘These documents, they say that in a maximum of 5 to 10 years from now, all of our Oil will become unusable.’

‘What? How can that be it’s been there for millennia?’

‘Something to do with contamination that hasn’t previously been there, I don’t know I’m not a geologist!’

‘But what about the more recently found wells surely…’

James cut him off ‘It doesn’t matter - the percentage that this applies to…. You know what this means? If people knew this, it would mean the collapse of the economy. The government, the entire country would fall in months’. The statement hung in the air. Neither could quite believe what James had said " it sounded ridiculous. Even James didn’t know how to react to what had just come out of his own mouth, as if a part of his mind had reached the conclusion without allowing the rest to catch up. Lee chose to break the silence,

‘Who… who knows about this?’

‘I don’t know. Something tells me the guys behind this whole charade, this is it. This is what they know’, the two men stopped. Both looking at the chest and the piles of documents that lay down there " if they had found this in less than a minute what else might be hidden beneath the layers of paper.

‘So this is what they were trying to find. But why all of a sudden?’

‘Maybe they decided that it was safer to destroy it’

‘But they forgot where they’d put it? It doesn’t make any sense….’. Lee was getting frustrated. He wasn’t used to being so out of the loop, so incredibly unknowing. He couldn’t decide if it was more or less frustrating that James seemed to be able to piece the puzzle together better than he could. It made Lee wonder just what James was doing down there - he clearly belonged in some sort of Mensa camp.

‘It makes perfect sense’ James smirked, and Lee realised his jealousy, for that was really all it was, was being overwhelmed by his burning desire to know. ‘Think about it’ James continued, ‘If there’s something you can’t destroy, or won’t destroy, but need to hide from everyone, anyone even, what’s the safest way to do it?’, Lee caught up to James’ train of thought.

‘To not know it’s there yourself’ Lee finished. James was right, the best place to hide something is somewhere even you can’t find it " that is until one day you need it. The men stood a little longer until James closed the lid, his face suddenly looking drawn and sad.

‘We shouldn’t have seen that’, he remarked, an almost desperate tone emanating.

‘What do you mean? There are questions to be asked, we need to figure this out…’

‘Nemo, this is bigger than us, this is not an issue that we are paid to deal with. The government in their best estimate decided to keep this thing hidden and now we’ve undone that. Nothing good can come of this’

‘What are you saying? The people up top don’t always know best. We have an opportunity to affect the world’

‘What if the only way you can affect the world is by destroying it?’, that shut Lee up for sure, ‘Put it in the car and let’s take it back to evidence. This isn’t our job any more’, Lee did as he was told. It was easy to forget in moments of anger that James was still effectively his boss. So Lee packed up the car and got in, with James’ words ringing in his ears, haunting him. As the car pulled away and Lee stole one last glance at the house, now gleaming in the sunlight, even with its chipped paint and smashed windows, he couldn’t help but wonder just what kind of world that house would crumble into and if Lee wanted any part of it.

Author's Note

I'm trying to convey how good a detective James is here...