The Case of the Vanished Lover
a Stealthboxxer Mystery



Chapter 5




Sunday morning came and found me hung over again. I woke up around 10am and rolled but of my bed. I decided that it would do me good to clean up a bit and spent the rest of the morning bathing, shaving and cleaning up my place. I had some coffee, eggs, bacon and fried potatoes and left my apartment by 12:30.

The drive down 99 to Chehalis usually takes about an hour. Today it took almost two. Too many Sunday drivers and a slow train at the crossing in Tenino. I arrived at my grandfather’s old homestead at about a quarter to three.

Berdevo, Buddy, Stealthboxxer had been many things in his 82 years of hard and laborious life. He had been a farmer, camp cook, carpenter, choker setter, log scaler, steam donkey operator, steam train engineer, and farmer again in his later years. He was a son of a Greek immigrant and was born in Boston in 1856. At the age of 17 he came out west to Seattle to find work in the logging business. He found work as a cook with a logging company near Everett and eventually moved to Chehalis to continue his career in the logging industry around 1885. He tried various jobs in the logging business and eventually moved up to engineer on a logging railroad that ran from the hills around Mt. St. Helens to the mills of Chehalis. After an accident that ended his career as a railroad engineer at the age of 57 he settled down to raise dairy cows at a piece of land southwest of town close to the railroad tracks.

My grandmother, Andrea, died of scarlet fever in 1902. Together they had one son, Logariazo, Logie Stealthboxxer, my father. My father died in France during the Great War in 1915 at the age of 33, I was 13 years old. My mother died the next year apparently of a broken heart and I moved in with my grandfather, he was 60 at the time.

Buddy (like every other person who knew him I just called him Buddy) was a great man to live with while growing up. He was as tough as a leather biscuit but he understood what a boy needed to learn to make it in the world on his own. He let me explore the world and experience a lot of mischief but he made me stay in school and encouraged me to go to college. I left Chehalis at the age of 19 and enrolled in the University of Washington as a business major. I dropped out two years later and drifted around for about ten years and had various jobs before getting into the private detective field.

Since the time I had left my grandfather for college I had visited him several times a year. His rough life had aged him early on so that he already seemed quite old since I had known him but he never seemed to age any more in all those years. And he always had some wisdom to impart to me whenever I saw him. He was a rock of stability in my maelstrom life and I had come to count on his advice whenever I had a tough decision to make. He was old but strong and still took care of the farm on his own. I had told him many times that he should think of selling the old farm and move into an apartment in town so that he didn’t have to work any longer. He had a small pension from the logging company that would support him if he would live within his means. He would not hear of it. He just kept on working and said he would probably die with a hay fork in his hand or at the milking stool and that’s the way he preferred it.

It had been several months since I had visited him. My slim case book had limited my traveling money so I wasn’t able to make the trip down as often as I had wanted. He was very glad to see me when I found him in the barn loading hay bales onto a wagon attached to an old John Deere. “Enigma, my boy! I am so glad you came to see your old grandfather! You are just in time. You can help me finish feeding the herd and then we can repair the south fence.“ He always had work to be done and never missed an opportunity to take advantage of my labors when I was there.

“Buddy it is good to see you. Sorry it has been so long.” He hugged and squeezed the breath out of me.

“Come, help me with the hay.” I helped him feed the cows, repair the fence, cut some scotch broom from the south pasture, repair a window shutter, and split and stack enough firewood next to the kitchen door for about two weeks complete with a big pile of cedar kindling. After the chores we sat down in the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a bowl of beans and ham next to the Franklin at a small wooden table he built himself. Buddy subsisted mostly on beans, bacon, eggs, flapjacks, butter and milk, a high calorie diet that was a throwback to his logging days. 82 and no sign of slowing down in either activity or eating habits.

“Well my boy, how is the private detective business these days? Are you solving many crimes and making lots of money?”

“Actually things have been very slow lately, Buddy. The detective business is not very glamorous. Not like the movies. I haven’t had a lot of cases lately and have been having a tough time just paying the rent.”

That was his cue. “Enigma, you should have stayed in college. You are a very intelligent young man. You should be bank president by now. You should have listened to your grandfather.” Buddy had a fantasy of me finishing college and being a business giant. Without fail he would remind me of my dropping out at every visit. It had gotten to the point where I just let it go and I didn’t even bother to argue about it anymore. It was our routine, he telling me how much he thought of my potential and then how disappointed he was that I didn’t live up to his long failed expectations. He would usually end his monologue after a big sigh. “ Ah, such a smart boy you were. So much potential. Oh well, we all make choices we regret. Tell me about what case you are working on now.”

Many times when I would have a tough case I would come and visit Buddy and talk about it. He had fresh outside and objective perspective that could sometimes see the not so obvious things that I was too close to see myself. He seemed to have a way of finding the simple and underlying truths in the complicated messes that I sometimes got involved in. For such a simple man he was very wise.

“I recently took a missing persons case. A man has disappeared and his lady is paying me to find him. I don’t have much to go on but I have found some very interesting things that I am not sure are even related to the man’s disappearance.” I told him all about the case and what I had uncovered so far. When I spoke of McCaw and the logging company his ears perked up. I figured that he would have been familiar with the McCaw Company being in the logging business for so long himself. Since he seemed familiar with McCaw I asked the obvious question, “So, Buddy, tell me what you know about the McCaw Logging Company and their operations.”

“I know a few things about the McCaw company. They started up back around ’95 up in Bordeaux. I knew a few good men who left to work for them. A friend of mine, Davis McPhetridge, went to work for them in fact. He left his job here at the railroad and was the fireman for their engine for a while. His wife stayed here in Chehalis working at a laundry while he worked for McCaw and he would visit her on Sundays. He told me of some strange things going on with that company. “

“What kind of strange things?”

“He said that a lot of good men had been killed in accidents in the McCaw operations. Accidents happen frequently in the logging business, most men don’t get through their career without at least one accident. But this was different, he said that men were dying more often than usual. He even said that one time 12 men died at one time in one accident. Most of the men were not married and had no family out west so nobody seemed to care. He also mentioned that they were doing other things than just logging up there in the Black Hills. He never told me what but whenever I asked him he would just smile and laugh a little and say, ‘It won’t be long before I will be moving my wife to Olympia and she will be living in style. No more hard life of a fireman’s wife for her.’ He never did move his wife to Olympia. She was killed when a log car derailed and crushed her as she was walking home from work along the line. After she died he stopped coming to Chehalis. I never saw him again.”

“So did you ever find out what was going on up there besides logging?”

“I heard lots of rumors. But rumors are just that. When men are afraid of something they don’t really know about they make up stories to justify their fears. Since so many good men had died in the McCaw operations word spread fast and soon no one wanted to work for them. However, they were paying more than most companies and some men found that tempting enough to conquer their fears. I recall that several men had left the Centralia coal mine to work for McCaw. About a dozen men were hired right out of the mine and left their homes and families, those that had families. It was told that they were hired to carve a tunnel thru a hillside for McCaw’s railroad but the rumors were that there was really a mining operation going on. A few months later those families were told that there had been an accident in the tunnel and all the men were killed. Those families who were left behind in Centralia were paid a sum of money as a compensation and they soon disappeared mostly moving away to Seattle or Portland. However, I heard a story that one of those men was seen in Centralia several months after the supposed incident and the next day his wife disappeared. Story is she left all of her personal possessions at her home and never showed up for work. Even left her wash on the clothesline. Some said it was his ghost come back to kill his wife for cheating on her after he died. Others say McCaw was secretly moving those men and their families to another town or another state to keep them quiet about their operations. I think its just a bunch of bunk, myself. I think the McCaw Company was just a very shoddy operation and lots of men got killed because of it. “

“So you don’t know of anyone who worked for McCaw who ever came back to Chehalis after working for them?”

“Nope. It was said around here that working for McCaw was like signing a death contract.”

“Hmm. I’d sure like to find someone who worked for McCaw and lived to tell about it.”

“Well, Enigma, you would need to be some kind of detective to find someone like that. Enough of this talk. Come, it is time for the evening milking. You will help your grandfather.”

I helped him with the milking and then with several other chores before I said goodbye and drove back to Olympia. Some kind of detective, I wondered at that point if I would get anywhere with this case.



To be continued . . .







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