Published — 7/27/26
The AMC Javelin screeched to a halt inches from the police tape. Harry Hughes stepped out. He was wearing his signature corduroy suit and had an empty tobacco pipe perched in his mouth—a quirk he had recently picked up in Denmark after traveling there to investigate a jewel heist a distant cousin of the royal family had hired him to solve. He ducked under the police line.
“Hey buddy, police only, can’t you read?”
“Private Detective, Harry Hughes,” he said, “I’m here on official police business. Order of the mayor.”
“Oh I’ve heard of you. After what happened during the Bachelor’s investigation, you think I’m going to let you in?”
Just then the police chief walked up. “It’s ok, Jergens. I don’t like it either, but the mayor asked for him specifically. Let him in.”
Jergens walked away grumbling.
“I appreciate the warm welcome,” Harry said, taking the pipe out of his mouth, “But time is of the essence. Let’s get on with it, shall we?” The police chief reluctantly led Harry inside.
“Don’t tell the mayor, but we can’t find a fucking thing. No DNA, no fingerprints, no signs of forced entry, not even a goddam shoe print. As you already know, the mayor’s up my ass, I got half the department working overtime, and we don’t have a single lead to show for it.”
“Right, right,” Harry said absent-mindedly fake-puffing his pipe, only half listening to the chief.
They walked past a large fountain, down a driveway lined with hedges, and into what looked like—other than the swarms of policemen teeming around— a relatively normal house. The only thing that stood out were the cultural artifacts stuffed in it from every corner of the world. The police chief led them into the center of a big room and gestured with his hand.
“Well, there it is.”
Harry blinked. “Uhm, excuse me, but there what is?”
“The thing we’re here to investigate.”
Harry looked again. There was nothing but a small glass table. “It looks like a table.”
The police chief grumbled.
“It’s what’s not there that we’re investigating. The stolen vase. Didn’t you read the brief?”
Harry had in fact not read the brief. Harry didn’t believe you could learn much from reading someone else’s experience. He was more of a boots-on-the-ground sort of detective.
“Right, right, the brief…” he said, looking around the room.
He walked over to a wall which had a crack running down the middle with a strange fuzzy, brown thing growing out. “Interesting,” he said, holding up his hand to the wall, almost touching the growth.
“Don’t touch that,” the police chief nearly shouted. “This is a crime scene. You can’t just go fingerfucking the walls. Besides, what we’re focused on is right here.” The police chief once again gestured at the empty table.
“Right. The empty table.” Harry looked back at the wall. “I’m going to need to speak to the owner,” he said, eyes glued to the fuzzy brown. “As soon as possible.”
“That’s not going to be poss—”
“Or I can call the mayor and tell him this case is simply unsolvable with this department’s technical skills.” He inspected his empty pipe while the police chief stewed.
After a moment, the chief relented. “Fine. Follow me.”
That’s how Harry Hughes found himself sipping iced tea across from Beverly Bonston. She wore an emerald ring on her right hand and a jade ring on her left. Her hair was just starting to turn silver, and from the lines on her face, Harry could tell when there wasn’t a horde of policemen tearing up her house, she wore a warm smile. She sat facing away from the empty glass table.
“And so that’s what happened. I heard a noise, walked into the room, and it was gone.”
“Hmmm, interesting, interesting,” Harry said, draining the last of his iced tea. He made a show of getting every last drop in hopes that Beverly would offer him another. When she remained silent, he put the empty glass back on the coaster and sat back to think.
“So there was nothing else you noticed? Nothing, strange?”
“Well, yes, actually. The wall. I’ve never seen anything like it. Plus, when I walked in here, the room smelled damp and musty. I opened the windows, but every once in a while, I still get a whiff. I tried to tell the police about it, but they seemed to think I was crazy. They said I must’ve had a leak or something and just hadn’t noticed. They said it was just too odd to be part of the crime.”
“That’s very policey of them, ignoring the odd things.” The police chief looked uncomfortable.
Harry took out a small journal and a pen. “So tell me about the vase, what’s so special about it?”
“I was in Italy, decades ago, in a small town looking for antiques when a friend of a friend told me about a local man who had found something in a nearby ruins. It was a vase with a Roman god painted on it. The god’s name was Robigus.”
“Hmmm…” Harry said, his pen scratching away at the notepad.
“The man who found it told me Robigus was known to protect crops from disease or something. I instantly took to it because the painting was so vivid.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” the police chief said.
“You said yourself, you have no leads. So how do you know this doesn’t pertain to the case?”
The police chief made a strange noise and turned away as if he had stopped listening.
“Please, go on.”
“Ok, so I got the vase and some other things on that trip. And when I got home to get everything appraised, I found out the vase was extremely rare. I had a museum offer me tens of thousands to buy it. But I turned it down because I had just fallen in love with it. So I made it the centerpiece of this room.”
“And how many people knew about the value of this piece?”
“Oh nearly no one. My husband. The appraiser who I’ve known for years and still work with. The museum curator, but it couldn’t have been her, I already wrote it into my will I’d donate it when I’m gone. I’m sure they’re the only ones who knew about this at all.”
“Right, right, I’ll need all their names and contact info.” Harry stood up, beginning to look more closely at the artifacts in the room. There was a large Buddha statue.
“That’s a medicine Buddha I got in China. Praying to it is supposed to bring a prosperous rebirth.”
Harry walked over to a colorful mask hanging on the wall.
“That’s an authentic Dogon mask. It was worn as part of memorial services that they believed ushered the dead into the afterlife.”
Then he arrived at a painting he was surprised hadn’t struck his eye before. It was on the opposite wall of the one with the growth. It was medieval in style and showed a scene of people on the street screaming in agony. Phantasmical creatures ran about. Fires burned everywhere.
“Oh, you have real taste. That painting depicts a rather bad case of Saint Anthony’s Fire, a disease that inflicted brutal burning pains on those it infected.”
Harry looked at Beverly in a new light. “Right,” he said, “Brutal burning pains.”
Beverly smiled.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Harry was washing his hands when he noticed a faint brown line running over the sink. “Strange.” He followed it to the bathroom window. He looked outside and saw a hose bib dripping water. He followed it back in, behind the toilet, over the sink, around the corner, down the hall, all the way back into the room with the vase. When he walked back in, he was stooped half over, tracing his finger against the wall.
“Is everything ok?” Beverly asked.
“Oh yes, just following something—strange.”
He followed it behind the Medicine Buddha, under the mask, lost it behind the painting and found it again on the other side and found that it led to—just as he suspected. It led right to the crack in the wall. He got on his hands and knees and started sniffing the floor.
Beverly looked at the police chief, who looked like he was about to have an anneurism.
“Hmm, it smells damp. That’s strange,” Harry said to himself. He got back up and walked back to the crack in the wall. “Do you mind?” He asked Beverly. Before she had time to answer, he had put his hands into the crack and was pulling the wall apart.
“What is he doing? Stop him, stop him!”
The police chief jumped up and grabbed Harry a moment too late. He had already torn a chunk of the wall apart and had seen what he needed to. The brown growth connected to the black line. And presumably led all the way back to the bathroom window and leaky hose bib.
“All right, all right, I’m out,” Harry said when the police chief gave him a final shove out the front door.
“The mayor will be hearing about this,” the police chief grumbled.
Harry dusted himself off and looked around. It was good fortune that no one was around at just that moment. So he ducked around the side of the house to the leaky hose bib. He knelt down and looked at the water. Nothing looked obviously off, but it was the only lead he had. And since he didn’t have anything else to put it in, he scooped some of the water into his hand and walked quickly back to his car. When he got to his car, he emptied the water into the cupholder and wiped his hand under the seat.
The radio turned on, and reggae blared from the speakers.
Harry tried to turn it down, but the volume didn’t budge. “Ok, ok, I know it’s not the cleanest thing,” he said, seemingly to the radio itself, “But this is a good lead and there’s a lot of money in this case. I’ll get a car wash with the money I earn, I promise.”
The radio quieted to a comfortable level.
Ok, Harry thought as he pulled down the driveway. I couldn’t get that contact info from Beverly, so there’s only one lead to follow up on.
He looked at the water.
He tried to change the station to cool jazz as he drove away, but the radio kept turning back to reggae. He fake puffed his empty pipe and tuned out the sound.
45 minutes later, he was parked in front of a large, unmarked industrial building. In his line of work, it paid to know people with unique skills. And he was going to see just one of those people. He scooped as much of the water up as he could from the cupholder and walked across the parking lot.
“So this is what I’m hoping you’ll test,” Harry said inside the lab, holding out his hand.
“Your hand?” The lab attendant, George, asked.
“No, look closer. It’s what’s in my hand.”
“It’s wet.”
“I’ll tell you the story, but first let me put this in something.”
George handed him a clean beaker, and Harry proceeded to tell him about the missing vase, Robigus, the brown line, and the fuzzy growth coming out of the wall.
“So you think mold stole her vase?”
“I think it’s a possibility mold stole her vase. Or that someone stole her vase using mold. Can you please just look at it, see if there’s anything interesting?”
The lab attendant wanted to laugh. But Harry had a habit of bringing in things that were too strange to believe. And more often than not, Harry was right. So the lab attendant took a drop of the sample, put it onto a slide, and placed the slide under a microscope.
“There’s a lot of random bacteria and fungi in here. Some dirt. Probably mostly contaminants from being outside and being put in your cupholder.”
“Anything else, anything unusual?”
The lab attendant kept looking. “Well, there is something a bit strange here. You said this god, Robiguns or whatever, he protected wheat and other crops from disease?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s something here that looks a little like wheat rust.”
“Wheat rust?”
“It’s a fungus that infects wheat and other grains. It could wipe out entire fields and cause famine in ancient times. I’ll need to do some more tests to know for sure, but maybe it’s something.”
An hour later, Harry parked down the street from the police station, so no one would see the Javelin and figure out he was there. He put a newspaper up to his face and snuck around the corner of the lot, up the stairs, and into the building.
He knew where he was going and just needed to get there without anyone seeing him. He saw the police chief and the mayor, but luckily they were walking into the chief’s office with their backs to him.
Harry sprinted behind them and made a right, making it across the hall and down the stairs before anyone was the wiser.
“Hello, Barbara, lovely day isn’t it.”
“Hi, Harry, so good to see you. Are you here about the Bonston case? I’m just labelling all the evidence, come on back if you want to take a look.”
Harry breathed a sigh of relief. The chief hadn’t yet told Barbara about the incident with the wall. She still thought he was on the case. He followed her into the backroom where there were items laid out over the table, most of them in plastic bags.
Harry glanced over the items, and saw mostly pictures of the crime scene. But there was one thing that stood out. It was a business card that had water stains on it.
“What’s this?” He said pointing to it.
“Oh, that—they found that in the same room the vase was missing from. They said it was probably just dropped there by a guest or something, but you know how crime scenes are. You have to take everything, just in case.”
Harry took out a notebook and jotted down the info. It was a little hard to read due to the water smudges, but he finally copied down:
The Rustic Grain Co.
4255 Five Mile Way
Harry snuck out of the station using his newspaper trick, and not long after was pulling up to the address on the card with “Chase the Devil” by Max Romeo playing on the radio.
It was in a part of town Harry had never been to before. It felt a little old-timey and spooky. Almost like the mining ghost town Harry had visited with his family as a kid.
Harry turned off the car and got out. He looked up at the old sign.
“The Rusty Grain Co.” Harry read. “Must’ve gotten smudged on the business card.” He headed inside, the door hitting a bell that rang loudly inside the dark and dusty store. Bags of corn and wheat and rye were stacked haphazardly all over.
“Excuse me? Is anyone here? I’d like to, uhm, I’d like to buy some grain, please. A lot of it.” Harry waited a few moments until he heard large boots squishing in the back room.
A man walked in with jet black hair and skin that almost looked silver.
That’s when Harry realized something; the entire store smelled damp. The same smell as in Beverly’s house. And it was clear it was coming from this man.
“Can I help you?”
“I’d like to buy some, erm, grain?”
The man had dark black hair and skin that looked almost silver in the dark of the store.
“We sell grain wholesale. Call our number if you want to set up a delivery.”
The man began walking into the back room.
“Uhm, but I really need some grain… today.”
The man turned back around. “I don’t trust you mister, what are you really after?”
Harry panicked and said the only thing that came to his mind:
“I’m here investigating the disappearance of a valuable vase.”
The man paused for a second as if to weigh his options, before bolting through the door.
“Hey, stop, stop, I just want to talk.” Harry ran after him, through the back room, through an open door, into the bright sunlight, and what he saw next surprised him.
To be continued next week…