Stalking Throckmorton

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3“Debbie . . . Debbie!” Throckmorton tried to get the clerk’s attention for the third time early Monday afternoon. Only a few feet away, eighteen-year-old Debbie didn’t respond. He was usually easygoing, but today he drummed his fingers at the checkout counter of Rockburg’s drugstore. For a transplant from the Twin Cities, life in the rural Wisconsin village flowed as slowly as the La Crosse River that meandered below it. He’d had two years to get used to it, but today time seemed motionless. Debbie, the cashier, fussed with something on shelves a few feet from him. He couldn’t tell whether she was engrossed in her work or ignoring him.

Throckmorton was civil to everyone. What he saw as good manners, his ex-wife Jen had seen as weakness and called him a spineless milquetoast for it. That made waiting for Debbie to do her job a lose-lose situation for him. If he resisted the urge to yell at Debbie, he’d hear Jen’s voice question his manhood. If he barked at her, he’d feel like a heel. He set a bottle of aspirin onto the counter with a clatter, cleared his throat, coughed, and waited. He wasn’t in a rush, but it was a beautiful day, and damn it, there were limits. “Debbie . . . Debbie!”

“Chris,” said a familiar voice, and he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned to face a white-haired attorney. “Al, how’ve you been?”

“Fine, now that I’ve found you.” The wizened old man drew a letter from the pocket of his his white, short-sleeved shirt. “I have a letter for you from Otto Kessler.”

Throckmorton searched Al Huss’s face for signs this was a joke. “You can’t be serious.” He accepted the proffered envelope. Crisp and yellowed, it wasn’t addressed or stamped. “Kessler died in 1935. That’s what, eighty years ago?”

“Eighty-two. Long story.” Al nodded toward Debbie and retrieved the envelope from Throckmorton’s hand. “I saw you here as I walked to my office. Perhaps we should go there now to discuss this.”

Throckmorton followed Al’s gaze. Debbie leaned against the cash register. Her work abandoned and her head buried in a copy of Teen Vogue, she had an ear c****d toward him. The magazine was upside down.

Typical. In Rockburg he could pose a question to a friend on the street, stroll three blocks, and have a casual acquaintance volunteer the answer. If humans had developed language to allow them to gossip, as anthropologists speculated, the tradition remained robust in Rockburg. He paid for the aspirin and left the store with Al.

“How’s that boy of yours doing?” Al asked as they jaywalked across the street. “Is Mrs. Heath still living in, keeping an eye on him?”

“No. We thought Ben’s leukemia was in remission, but the last PET scan found malignant cells. He’s on a maintenance dose of chemotherapy. It’s enough to slow the replication of the cells, but it wasn’t enough to prevent a recurrence. They want to use a new treatment that’s been successful in curing cases like Ben’s.”

Throckmorton turned to look at something on the other side of the street in case he teared up. “The poor kid went through hell on the chemotherapy. He’s only nine, and he suffered through oral ulcers, monthly intra-spinal shots, and septicemia. Once he was delirious for a week, jabbered away without making any sense.”

“Sounds awful.”

“They call the new treatment biotherapeutics. It’s like an anti-cancer vaccine. They’ll inoculate Ben and let his immune system do the rest—if I can pay for the treatment. My insurance won’t cover it. They claim the treatment is experimental.”

“Damned insurance companies. How much will it cost you?”

“Two hundred and thirty thousand.”

Al let out a whistle. They walked in silence the rest of the way to his office.

A single-story blond brick building, the office was sixty years old according to the date chiseled in a cornerstone. That made it forty years younger than any other commercial building in the three blocks of Rockburg’s business district. Al unlocked the front door. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

Throckmorton followed Al into the building. “I’ve taken out a second mortgage on the house to pay Ben’s current medical bills. I don’t know where I can dig up another $230,000. The doctors said they have to start the biotherapeutics by December fifteenth or start the hardcore chemotherapy again. I don’t think he can go through that again. He’d rather die. I haven’t had the heart to tell him about the last lab report.”

Al turned on the lights. Empty bookcases against the far wall, an empty wastebasket, and the bare surface of a large walnut desk gave the room a deserted atmosphere. Squares of pale-yellow paint on the cream-colored wall marked where diplomas and bar association memberships had hung.

Al relaxed into a well-padded swivel chair behind the desk. “I’m retiring, but I’d be happy to do what I can for you. Send me the information on the test, and I’ll see if I can lean on the insurance company a little. Odds of success are low, but it’s worth a try.”

“I’d appreciate that.” Throckmorton didn’t get his hopes up. It would be a small-town lawyer against a clutch of insurance company attorneys. He took a chair beside the desk.

Al pushed the old envelope across the desk toward Throckmorton. “My grandfather was your great grandfather Otto Kessler’s attorney. Otto wrote the letter a week before he died and left instructions to give it to his descendants living in Rockburg after the Depression ended. Gramps gave it to my dad when he started the practice, and he gave it to me when I passed the bar exams. I only learned you were a Kessler when I read the news about your cousin in La Crosse. You have my sympathy.”

“I talked to the lady once on the phone. She was a corpse at our first face-to-face meeting. That was a shock. She was the last living relative I knew of.” Throckmorton turned the envelope over in his hands. Fine lines spread across its surface with a crackle. A musty smell reminiscent of old books rose from the envelope. “I’m almost afraid to open it.”

Al handed him a letter opener. “I hoped you’d do that here. I’ve wondered what it held for fifty years.”

Throckmorton sliced open the envelope, and pulled out a letter. A key, four inches long, dropped on the desk with a clunk. He read the handwritten letter.

MAY 12, 1935

My doctor says my heart is going. The canning factory won’t survive long after my death. No one can save it in thiseconomy. You will need resources to restart the brewery when this business slump ends. What remains of my assets are in a foreman’s office off tunnel number 4. My attorney can guide you to it. The key to the office is enclosed. The safe combination is 10R-30L-22R.

My prayers are with you, Otto.

“The ink is faded, and Otto’s handwriting looks shaky,” Throckmorton said. Then he read the letter again, this time out loud. Puzzled, he glanced at Al and back at the letter. “I’m not sure what to make of this. You said Otto died shortly after writing this. Could he have been hallucinating?”

Al shook his head. “According to my grandfather, it sounded like Otto was pretty much aware of things right up to the end.”

“To restart a brewery would take a fortune, even back then.” Throckmorton estimated it would have taken a chunk of seed money, a hundred thousand or more, to attract investors to restart the brewery in the late thirties. Depending on what they were, assets that were that valuable in 1935 could be worth millions now, or nothing. Millions would save Ben’s life—if he could get to it in time.

He wondered how the brewery and canning factory were related and asked Al if they were in the same building.

Al nodded. “Every small town in Wisconsin had a brewery before Prohibition, and they all converted to canning factories in 1920. Most went bust.” He turned the key over in his hand. “I would’ve thrown this letter away if I hadn’t misfiled it in the seventies. I found it when I was cleaning out my office. You’re the first Kessler descendant I’ve ever met. Any idea why others haven’t returned?”

“There aren’t any others. My grandmother and her brother moved to the Twin Cities after Otto died in ’35. Mom was an only child, and her uncle Bill died a bachelor in Normandy on D-Day. Mom said we might have distant cousins in upstate New York, but she wasn’t sure.”

“They’d be irrelevant, vis-à-vis the letter,” Al said. “Otto’s instructions specified his descendants living here.”

“Mom didn’t talk about either side of the family.” He looked down at the envelope and noticed a logo that said: “Kessler Brewing, Rockburg, Wis.”. “I wish I’d seen the brewery.”

“You came to town a couple of years too late.” Al leaned back in his chair, a faraway look in his eyes. “It looked like a medieval castle at the end of Main Street. I hated to see it go, but it was in bad shape by 2014—bricks were falling off, kids getting in trouble exploring the place. The demolition was the biggest thing to happen in Rockburg in my lifetime. The executive office building and the tunnel under Main Street are all that’s left of the Kessler complex.”

“Why the tunnels?”

“You can’t brew lager beer if the temperature gets over sixty degrees. They had to go underground to brew beer in the summer before refrigeration. There were tunnels and caverns under the brewery, but those weren’t supposed to survive the demolition.”

“Any idea where tunnel four is?”

“Not a clue. Best guess is that it and the foreman’s office were under the brewery and filled in or collapsed when the building dropped.”

Throckmorton turned the letter over. “Nothing here, either.”

“If they were under the brewery, you’ll have less than an acre to search. Gert at the Coffee Cup might know something about it.” Al looked at his watch. “It’s two. She’ll be relaxing after the noon rush. Good time to talk to her—catch her before her afternoon nap.”

“She’s no older than you, is she? Otto wrote the letter years before she was born.”

“Gert’s been a waitress since . . .” Al looked at the ceiling and closed his eyes. “About 1965. A few old fossils used to tell her stories about the early days. She’s heard more gossip than all the bartenders in town.”

“That’d be a lot. Rockburg must hold a record for bars per capita.”

“Six bars for nine hundred people should put us in the running.” Al stood, pushing off from the chair armrests with his hands. His knees and back creaked as he did. “Gert acts like a grouch. She might give you a hard time, but she’s all bark.”

“I don’t want this all over town,” Throckmorton said cautiously.

“You can trust her. She’ll bend your ear about the old days, but she can keep a secret. She griped once about feeling like the town’s unofficial confessor. In the fifty years I’ve known her, that’s the closest to gossip I’ve heard from her.”

Throckmorton returned the key and letter to the envelope, thanked Al, and walked down the block to the Coffee Cup Café, a single-story, white, wood-frame structure squatting between two brick buildings. The first building he passed used to be a grocery store. It was now a*****e selling dubious antiques. The building on the other side of the café was the town’s beauty parlor. Time hadn’t been kind to Rockburg’s business district. The windows of empty two-story brick buildings stared across Main Street as he headed to the café. The scene fit Throckmorton’s mood.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Wilbur Woodside wave at him from the window of the antique shop. He pretended he didn’t notice. Talking to Wilbur, a local horse trader and con artist, could call a man’s sanity and integrity into question. A certified public accountant, Throckmorton wouldn’t risk his reputation for either.

A breeze pulled at the envelope in his hand, and he tightened his grip. Otto’s letter was consistent with a letter he’d found in his mother’s things, a letter addressed to his grandmother and postmarked in 1936. The letter claimed substantial assets were missing when Otto’s estate went through probate.

But why this treasure hunt? Why didn’t Otto leave his assets to his son and daughter? Was resurrecting the brewery that important to him?

A bell above the door jingled as he walked into the Coffee Cup. He stood next to a jukebox from the 1960s and looked down the length of the café. It wasn’t far. The place could feel cozy or cramped depending on how many people were there. A row of four booths sat on the right behind the jukebox. A white Formica counter and eight red vinyl and chrome stools stretched along the wall to his left. Beyond the counter and booths were the kitchen and a single restroom. A white-haired gnome of a woman relaxed in the third booth, stirring a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper.

She looked up from her paper. “Chris Throckmorton. My heavens, what brings you here to disturb an old woman’s rest?”

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Gert motioned him to sit while she got another cup of coffee. He slid onto the cracked vinyl seat across from her. The brown vinyl shaded to purple and the original red around the edges.

“How’s your son doing?”

He didn’t want to go through that again. “He’s doing well, for now. Al Huss suggested I talk to you. He had a letter for me from Otto Kessler.”

“A letter for you?” Gert’s eyebrows rose. “You’re pretty well preserved if Otto wrote you a letter.”

Throckmorton explained the letter’s history and its contents.

“Why’d you move back to Rockburg?” she asked. “Couldn’t you stand living with sensible people?” She sipped her coffee. “If you were looking for the eccentric and peculiar, Rockburg is the mother lode.”

It took effort for Throckmorton to keep a straight face. “Aren’t you a little hard on Rockburg?”

“Do you know any other town that’s had an attempted armed deposit?”

“Ah, what?”

“An attempted armed deposit. Back in the eighties, a young guy kept his stash of pot in his safe deposit box. He made a big purchase one night and was the first one through the door when the bank opened the next morning. The time lock on the bank’s vault wasn’t working, and nobody could get to the boxes.”

Throckmorton leaned back and prepared for a story. He hoped it would be short.

“The kid got paranoid—thought it was a plot to steal his m*******a. Got so worked up he pulled out a gun. They talked him down, told him to come back later, but by then some i***t had hit the silent alarm.”

“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?” he asked.

“Not if you want to keep it quiet that you can’t get into your own vault.”

That would be Rockburg. “Every town has somebody who’s a little goofy,” he said.

Gert relaxed into the booth’s padding. “You weren’t here the year the townspeople got into a fight over whether to shut down the whistle that blows three times a day. Any idea what that whistle’s for?”

“Nope. Farmers tell me they can hear it two miles from town.”

“You can hear the damned thing in every bedroom in town too. It marks the shift changes at the canning factory that closed eighty-two years ago.” Gert looked at him over her glasses. “Still think this town is normal?”

He had to agree. Commonplace events took absurd twists in Rockburg.

“Now, what about the letter?”

“If the canning factory went bankrupt, would Otto have had any assets left?”

Gert rubbed her forehead. “The canning factory declared bankruptcy months after Otto died. I heard wild tales when I started waitressing, mostly from old river rats and layabouts who met here to swap stories and nurse a cup of coffee. A couple of ’em claimed the Kesslers bought jewelry as an investment when the brewery was in its heyday. I wouldn’t have believed those old fools if it weren’t for one story they all agreed on. Kessler’s daughter lost a diamond brooch at a church picnic in the park in ’32 or ’33. Half the church helped her look for it.”

“Then the assets in the safe might be jewelry?”

Gert shook her head. “I doubt it. It would take a lot of jewelry to rebuild a brewery, and what a sick, old bird thought was valuable in 1935 might not be worth a leaky spittoon today. Whatever it is, it won’t be easy to get your hands on it. The tunnels were supposed to collapse when they dropped the brewery, and the village owns the site.”

“Think the mayor would let me search for the office?”

“Unlikely.” She shook her head again. “The mayor doesn’t want people exploring. Big liability for the town if somebody gets hurt. Mucking around in what’s left of the tunnels might make your son an orphan.” She raised her eyebrows and looked him in the eye. “You know, the assets might not be jewelry. Mice or mold could have turned cash or bonds into confetti by now.”

Throckmorton rested his chin in his hands and considered the word orphan. The thought of Jen getting her hands on Ben turned his stomach. He and Jen had been married for seven years, but neither he nor Ben had heard a word from her since she walked out three years ago. He’d tried to reach her through her attorney, but he hadn’t been able to do even that once the divorce was finalized. She would ignore Ben and have her claws on the life insurance payout within a week. But this treasure hunt might be Ben’s last chance.

“Do you think the Kessler murder in La Crosse is connected with the assets you’re after?” Gert asked.

“I doubt it. We were fifth cousins. I looked it up: our last common ancestor would have been six generations ago. Any ideas where I can get information on the tunnels?”

Gert sipped her coffee. “Your best bet is the Rockburg Historical Society. They’re only open on Tuesdays, and they’re shorthanded. The staff is all volunteers, most over sixty-five. Try it Tuesday, and bang on the door if it’s locked.”

“Is there anyone I can contact to get in earlier?”

“Alice, but don’t press your luck. Best not to start off by irritating her. The town constable thinks that’s his job. And you may have bigger problems. The town board wants to get rid of the brewery lot, and Wilbur Woodside is sniffing around, looking to buy it cheap.”

Throckmorton leaned back in his seat, a knot in his gut twisting. “Wilbur buys and sells farms and livestock. What would he want with an empty lot in a dying town?”

“We’re talking about Wilbur, remember? Do you know anyone else who’d have the balls to sell a gelding for breeding or forty acres of swamp for farming? The buyers were blowhards who bragged all over town how they’d screwed Wilbur on the deals. When they realized he’d taken them, both of ’em kept quiet rather than admit they’d been played for fools.”

“I’ve heard rumors about Wilbur but never details. I won’t associate with a character like that.”

“Rockburg doesn’t have enough angels to be that picky. You’ll get farther working with what good you find in people. I don’t think you’ll be a target for Wilbur, though. Buying, selling, and trading is a game for him. Pros don’t play amateurs.”

He glanced at his watch. “Time to pick up Ben. Thanks for the information.”

Throckmorton left the café, got into his car, pulled onto the street, and swore. He was in Rockburg’s daily traffic jam. School was out, and every bus the school district owned was on Main Street. Buses loaded with students celebrating the end of the school day bracketed him.

He Googled “Kessler” on his phone as he waited for the traffic to clear. There were thousands of hits. He added “New York” as a search term. There were still hundreds of hits. Near the top of the list was an unsolved burglary last month in Utica. Someone stole the letters and papers of Wolfgang Kessler and his heirs from a local historical museum. Wolfgang had made his fortune in brewing after the Civil War and died in 1891.

So there were Kesslers in upstate New York, and there’d been a break-in and theft of their papers. Rooms in the Kessler mansion in La Crosse had been ransacked the night of Adele Kessler’s murder. There were thousands of Kesslers. Two break-ins might have been a coincidence. Otto wrote the letter in 1935, long after Wolfgang Kessler died. Still, whoever killed Adele was looking for something, maybe the same thing as the Utica theft.

The hunt for Otto’s assets was loaded with unknowns. No one alive knew where the office or tunnel four were, but Throckmorton would never forgive himself if he didn’t try to find it for Ben.