~ The Mystery Club And The Dead Doctor ~

by

Harley L. Sachs

Prologue

If it hadn’t been for the unpleasant surprise in her in-house mail box, Mary Higgins would not have thought about her pistol. No one would ever suspect that a woman in her eighties, living in a secure retirement complex in Portland, Oregon would own a military pistol. Why would they? Even if she did, it was nobody’s business, or so Mary Higgins thought.

Mary Higgins did not expect to be disturbed by anything in her pigeonhole when she stopped at the mail boxes behind the front desk at the Rose Plaza retirement building. Usually all she found, besides her monthly maintenance bill, were memos about the parking garage (she hadn’t driven in years), the restaurant menu (she did her own cooking), or some missive that didn’t pertain to her. This time it was the latest version of the rules for residents, newly enacted by the Board of Directors.

The tone of the manager’s cover note stapled to the rules set her off. ‘Residents of the Plaza will comply’--indeed. Hitchkock was playing general again. Mrs. Higgins did not try to conceal her irritation. She steadied herself with her gold-headed cane in one hand and the new rules in the other while she waited for the elevator in the lobby. She would read them later.

The residents’ rules were a formality that provided the Plaza board with a means of evicting someone who didn’t pay their bills, wandered the halls in the nude, or misbehaved in some other way that disrupted the friendly and comfortable lifestyle of the two hundred and fifty elderly and infirm.

In the past, Mary Higgins didn’t think any of those rules mattered much to her. She paid her bill on time, always dressed properly, and was a model of dignity. She didn’t think that anything in the Plaza rules could jeopardize her residency. She was in for an uncomfortable surprise.

Once up in her apartment, Mary Higgins settled down on her sofa and caught her breath before reviewing the new rules. Her view from the eighth floor took in a panorama of Portland, the sumptuous green of the forest on Pill Hill to the south, the metallic glint of sunshine on the visible strip of the Willamette river, the spread of suburbs beyond and, of course, the majestic classic volcanic shape of Mount Hood in the distance. Its snow-covered upper elevations were topped with a plume of cloud that looked like an eruption. Though Mount Hood did have steam vents, it was not expected to erupt as Mount St. Helens had back in 1980, literally blowing its top and covering Portland with fine ash. Some day it might.

There was only one significant change to the rules as Mary Higgins remembered them, but her memory was not good. Someone had decided that there should be no firearms in the Plaza.

That seemed entirely unnecessary. Most of the residents were women, and the few men who had lived long enough to move in--the average move-in age being eighty-two--were not the hunting type. One would think their days of traipsing through the forest with a heavy hunting rifle were in the dim past. If one of those old men should actually shoot a deer, none were capable of dragging game bigger than a rabbit out of the forest. No one in the Plaza needed a firearm or had any use for one.

But Mary Higgins did have a pistol.

Her firearm was a war souvenir, a memento of her brief marriage in those exciting days in the RAF in World War II. When the war broke out in Europe there were no women in the US Army Air Corps and no place for them, even as typists. The WAF-Women in the Air Force came later. Mary’s first love was flying. To join the forces, Mary had to go to Canada. She had flown every plane in the British and the American arsenal except the twin-hulled P-52. Once she had even been copilot on a Coronado flying boat.

Her brief marriage to Frank Higgins, a British navigator, had ended when his Lancaster bomber was shot down in a night raid over Frankfurt, Germany. She still had her old RAF uniform. A photograph of herself and Frank beside his bomber was displayed in a silver frame in her bedroom. How young they had been. The Brits had referred to their brave flyers as boys. They were little more than that.

She remembered vividly Frank’s last takeoff for that night bombing raid and the sinking feeling in her stomach when returning planes fired flares announcing wounded on board as they came in for a landing. So few of the boys came back, and Frank didn’t. That recollection of long ago burned like a vivid scar in her mind, yet because of fading short-term memory, she could not remember what she had for breakfast this morning.

Just before that final mission Frank had loaned Mary his Webley Mk4 revolver, in case, he said, the Jerries dropped parachutists as they had on Malta and she needed protection from the horrible Hun. Besides a couple of photographs and a gold wedding band Frank had bought at an East End pawn shop while on leave, the pistol was her only memento of love lost in a time of violence. It was somewhere in her Plaza apartment, but where?

She might not remember what happened yesterday, but she did remember Frank showing her how to load the pistol and taking her to the firing range to demonstrate it. It had made an awful bang.

Where had she put that pistol?

Aside from a single closet, Mary Higgins’ one bedroom apartment at the Plaza had scant storage space. The overflow was in flat, plastic boxes shoved under the bed. Her locker in the Plaza storage room contained some old books, clothes she never wore, and luggage she hadn’t used since she last visited her nephew. But where was the pistol?

She could just imagine Alexander Hitchkock bursting into her apartment demanding to inspect for contraband. What did he think the Plaza was, some sort of institution? His kind of personality was better suited for the job of warden in a prison.

Where was the Webley? She remembered it was an ugly, awkward weapon. She had wrapped it in an oily dishtowel along with the cleaning kit Frank had given her. Those tools and materials were in the original government issue box, but that was ages ago. Where had she hidden it?

Mary went through all her drawers. At the back of her underwear drawer, underneath neatly folded panties and slips, she found a box of .38 cartridges, missing only seven, but not the cleaning kit or the Webley revolver.

Instead of the weapon she stumbled onto a sweater she had put away with the cuff half mended, the needle and wool tucked in like an afterthought where she left off. Distracted from her search, she settled down on the worn plush couch to finish the mending job and lost herself in the task of making neat stitches. What had she been looking for before? She couldn’t remember.

Loss of short-term memory was a curse of old age. Mary Higgins wasn’t ninety yet. She had a few years to go before that, but there is no fixed timetable for life. Some people never lose their memory. Others, like roses caught in speeded up time lapse photography, fast fade in their fifties into a debris of memory fragmented.

Whatever it was she was looking for she would remember another time. It couldn’t be important. Could it?