Tales of the Star Republic by Terence Faherty

Author:Terence Faherty [Faherty, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Terence Faherty
Published: 2017-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Quarry

Ralph Stillwell was a confessed murderer with a unique relationship to his victim. He also had a problem getting anyone in his hometown of Indianapolis to take him seriously. He called the Star Republic one day to complain about the performance of the city’s police and to see if we would help him confess his crime. We’d provided this service for others in the past, so E.N. Boxleiter, my editor, agreed to an interview. Boxleiter thought the business so important that he pulled me off a story about a Plainfield woman who’d dreamt for fifteen nights running that she was Eleanor Roosevelt.

I started by calling a contact I had in the Indianapolis Police Department. He went off to look for the report of the investigating officers and came back on the line laughing. Ralph Stillwell was eighty-two years old. He wanted to clear his conscience of a crime he’d committed in 1916. In the opinion of the officers, the incident described by Mr. Stillwell had really been an unfortunate accident. They recommended no further action.

My contact’s last comment was intentionally enticing: “The police force isn’t interested in ghosts.”

Mr. Stillwell lived on the near south side of the city, not far from Garfield Park. His house was a neat, white frame with a tiny, manicured lawn. The inside was also neat, but there was something of the acrid smell of a nursing home in the air. Stillwell received me in the parlor. He was a thin man with thick white hair and deep lines in his face. The lines helped create the illusion that his narrow head was being squeezed by his large ears. A housekeeper made noise in the kitchen while we spoke.

“I didn’t mean to be hard on the police,” Stillwell began. “They were none of them even born when I murdered Otis. They think it’s ancient history. Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t help thinking of it these days. I’ve lived with it all these years, but now it seems to be taking me over. I guess it may be because my own time is about up. I have a cancer, you see.”

I waited without replying. We both listened to pots banging in the next room for a moment. Stillwell made an effort to straighten himself in his chair, but he looked down at a spot on the floor as he began again.

“It was just this time of year when it happened and just this hot. Maybe it’s the heat that’s got me thinking back. We had a swimming hole then, a bunch of us boys from the southwest side of town. It was an old stone quarry, old in 1916 even. We called it McQuade’s, but I can’t remember where we got the name. It was all closed up, of course, because it was flooded. They’d hit an underground stream with their digging and their pumps couldn’t handle it. The pit flooded so fast that all their equipment was trapped at the bottom, including a narrow gauge railroad locomotive.

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