Donald Strachey Mystery 01 by end user

Author:end user [user, end]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-04T16:03:45+00:00

"Close enough. I'm tired. I'm going to sleep."

"I'll join you."

11

IN THE MORNING I WENT TO THE ALBANY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND dug out the Times Unions for the late fall of 1970, a little over a year after Billy Blount and Chris Porterfield would have been committed to Sewickley Oaks. What I was looking for, or thought I was looking for, was not in the index, and I had to slide the microfilm around for thirty or forty issues until I found the short article in the Tuesday, November 24, edition.

ALBANY DUO ESCAPES MENTAL FACILITY

New Baltimore—Two teenage inmates at Sewickley Oaks, an exclusive private mental institution on Ridge Road, escaped from the medium-security section of the establishment late Sunday night. William Blount, 18, and Christine Porterfield, 18, whose families live in Albany, fled a residential building through a heating tunnel and are believed to have been driven away by unknown persons who apparently aided the two in other aspects of the escape.

According to the local police, a chain securing a door to the tunnel had been cut through from the tunnel side. Officials say the escape appeared to have been carefully planned and executed.

Blount and Porterfield were discovered missing Monday morning when they failed to show up for breakfast, and a search was undertaken. Later, an area resident told police he had been driving on Ridge Road just past midnight Sunday and saw five young people emerge from nearby woods and enter an older model Plymouth station wagon. Two of the five were bearded and "looked like hippies," the witness said.

Dr. Nelson Thurston, Sewickley Oaks administrator, described the escapees as "mentally troubled" but not dangerous.

State police are assisting in the search for the two.

I made notes on the article, then drove over to Billy Blount's apartment building on Madison. I wanted to check

something I should have checked before. I waited around on the front stoop until the sidewalk was clear, then felt my way through the lock. I still had my lobster pick in hand when I arrived at the door to Blount's third-floor apartment, but I didn't need it. The door had been jimmied open, crudely, messily, as if with a crowbar.

I stepped inside and listened. There was no sound except that of the traffic down on Madison. I checked the rooms and found them as I'd left them on Friday.

I knelt by the low bookshelves and pulled out the hardback copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Inside the front cover was a hand-written inscription: "Billy—This will explain some things—From your friend, Kurt Zinsser—December 15, 1970." I copied the words onto my pad.

Back in Blount's bedroom, I sat on the edge of his mattress and tried the phone. It was still connected and probably had another week or two before New York Telephone would be galvanized into frenzied plug-pulling by the unpaid bill. I dialed the Albany Police Department, and while I waited to be put through to Sergeant Bowman, I noticed it: Billy Blount's phone book was not where I had found it on Friday, and left it, beside the telephone.

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