A couple days ago I happened to find myself in Port Orchard on the Kitsap Peninsula. Don’t worry, I’ve found myself there before. As you should know by now, I also lost myself there and ended up in Florida some years ago. I have only been back to my former hometown once, the place where I ran a business, ran for office and was eventually run out of town.
My mission was quite simple: To revisit the places I had lived to see if they had changed in the intervening years. The first house I ever owned on Firefly Court was exactly the same. It was still a garish bright blue, the same color that we had loved so much and never planned to change. The only thing that had changed was the row of boxwoods that lined the street were gone. That and the fact that I, my son and my ex don’t live there anymore. O.K., so some things have changed over the course of the last nine years.
Before heading out of Port Orchard I passed through downtown. Not much there has changed. Empty business shells line the streets, new businesses have dropped in for what promises to be a relatively brief visit and Myhre’s restaurant is still boarded up, though it was still open and serving the worst coffee on earth when I lived there last. They even bragged about the bad coffee on their menu. I am pretty sure someone spilled some of it on the floor and it spontaneously combusted, starting the fire that gutted the place.
In a last minute decision, I decided to climb Cline Street and see the house we had rented for a time, which was just past the county jail. It too hadn’t changed. It had become a bit seedier, as the same paint job was on the house. Well, parts of it had fallen onto the ground around it, too, peeling away like the remnants of a nasty sunburn in need of lotion. Or a trip to Lowe’s.
And this brings us to our story.
The home had a long and checkered history. It was originally the fire chief’s home, but burned to the ground at one point. Poetic, huh? Upon its ashes a new house rose. The brickwork on the exterior and the stonework on the fireplace (well, an entire wall that had a fireplace in it) — exquisite in form and execution — were added by the new owner.
Now, the story bounces around here a bit between past and present, so stay with me. At one time, the city’s police chief also lived in the home. His claim to fame was the investigation of a heinous crime that involved a mysterious murder behind the bowling alley. There were no solid clues, only a set of footprints leading to and from the body.
The rumor in town was that it was the police chief who committed the murder, as they were his footprints. He claimed that they were made at the time of discovering the body of the gay man who was stabbed multiple times with a knife.
I wouldn’t usually introduce a person’s sexual orientation into a story, but it has some relevance in this tale. Just before we rented the house, Fern (our landlord) did some renovation. In the joists of the old basement, upon which the house was rebuilt, were sex magazines and we’re not talking Playboy here. She was actually having them hauled out by the garbage bag when we first toured the home as a potential renter, only we didn’t know what was being taken out until the well came into the picture.
O.K., it wasn’t so much a well as an old cistern. Long ago it had been bordered up in the corner of the backyard and forgotten, a small rise of dirt covering it and its memories.
We didn’t know about it until a writer called us out of the blue one day. He wanted to know if we knew about the cistern and its rumored role in the grisly murder. We didn’t, of course, but were instantly fascinated.
The home had already come with its own ghost who liked to smoke and play the piano in the middle of the night in the area we used as the dining room. Now it had a sinister cistern. In researching a book on the murder and the police chief, the author had learned that the murder weapon was never recovered. It was assumed the police chief had disposed of it somewhere. That somewhere was believed to be our long forgotten cistern.
For a time, there was talk in the town of reopening the case and the cistern. It would have been a big “to-do” in a small town. We would have to be there as would Fern the owner; the old chain of evidence thing. They would need to bring in a backhoe and carefully dig around the cistern, providing access to the forensic team.
Port Orchard had a backhoe. But unfortunately they didn’t have a forensic team. Or enough officers to watch the big dig for a couple of days around the clock. When the final estimate came in at something like $12,000 to do the work, the city quickly lost interest in the cold case, saying that they didn’t think it was worth warming up again.
For all we know the murder weapon is still in the backyard. Perhaps that’s why Roger never leaves the house, feeling that he must watch over it until that fateful day down the road when the city finally ponies up the money to see what evil lurks in the well of 537 Kendall Street.
If it ever happens, I suppose I will hear about it. I’d have to come watch it – yes, that chain of evidence thing again. Long days watching someone dig a hole in a backyard I once roamed, unaware that it could have been the centerpiece of a horrific, scandalous crime of passion involving a police chief, the object of his affection and a long lost murder weapon, cast down a well on a dark and stormy night in the small, once peaceful town on the Port Orchard.
Who says small towns are boring, eh?
– Robb