The Root of All Evil

Written by Laird Long, Published on 7/17/2009

Corporal James Prescott of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police leaned back in his chair and looked out the window of his tiny office, located in the rear of the small station house. He almost went snow-blind just glancing at the brilliant white scenery outside.

A weekend snowstorm had blanketed the surrounding countryside in another twenty inches of the white stuff, and the bright sun in the cold, clear sky reflecting off the crisp snow dazzled the eyes. Corporal Prescott blinked and turned away, took another sip of coffee from the steaming mug on his desk. He jumped when Constable Marchildon suddenly stuck her head in the door and said, “All four of them are here now, Jim.”

“Right,” Prescott snapped, his break now over.

The door closed again, and the corporal reopened the thick file in front of him. Investigative information pertaining to the murder of the miserable hermit ‘Red’ Tembeck and the theft of the Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins the recluse had hoarded away in his root cellar.

Tembeck’s battered and bloodied body had been found behind his ransacked shack of a home out on Rural Route 21, at the entrance to his underground root cellar. The grisly discovery had been made Tuesday morning by the rural mailman. He’d become curious when Tembeck hadn’t been waiting by the side of the road to angrily wave his fist at him as he drove by, as usual.

The postie had stopped on the freshly plowed road and eyeballed the hermit’s property from the safety of his truck—and had spotted what appeared to be a body lying in the snow back by the root cellar. He’d then radioed the local RCMP detachment in town.

The battered nature of Tembeck’s body and the torn-apart nature of his home seemed to indicate that the murderer had been searching for something, trying to force Tembeck to reveal something—like where his treasure was hidden. Corporal Prescott and Constable Marchildon had found snowshoe tracks running from the road into Tembeck’s property and snowmobile tread tracks running alongside the road. This indicated to the RCMP officers that the murdering thief had wanted to catch Tembeck by surprise by quietly snowshoeing onto the man’s acreage rather than roaring in on a snowmobile.

As all of the tracks were still clearly visible, and the frozen body was only covered with a trace of snow, it was safe to assume that the murder and theft had taken place after the snowstorm ended on Sunday night, but before the roads were cleared Monday night.

The snowshoe tracks were unique in no way other than their actual depth in the snow, which was rather shallow. And the snowmobile tread tracks were even less revealing—they merged with a popular snowmobile trail through the woods farther down the road, which had already been heavily used again by Tuesday morning, leaving that trail cold, in every sense of the word.

Still, the RCMP’s investigation over the past three days had quickly narrowed the suspect field down to a likely four candidates. The small population of the town and surrounding area had helped considerably to narrow the search. It would’ve been extremely unlikely that some random stranger to the area would have been out snowmobiling shortly after a major snowstorm, with a pair of snowshoes conveniently handy, and the knowledge of Red Tembeck’s hidden stash of gold coins.

Corporal Prescott scratched his bristly red mustache and thumbed through the investigation file until he came to Grieve Collier’s statement. Collier was an old-timer, slight and sprightly. His property directly bordered Tembeck’s. The two had once been friends and then become mortal enemies, after Tembeck had chased Collier’s young grandchildren away with a loaded shotgun when they’d inadvertently strayed onto his land. Collier admitted that Tembeck had once shown him his gold horde in the root cellar, back in the days when they’d been pals.

The RCMP officer blew his nose, flipped over some more pages to Bryan Durell, physical education teacher at the local school and all-around outdoorsman. A trim, athletic man of thirty-two, he’d only come to town about six months earlier—after leaving behind some serious financial troubles in Toronto.

Durell had no known grudge with Tembeck. But he did admit to hearing rumors about Tembeck’s gold, although he claimed to have no idea where it had been hidden.

A series of expletives in angry Quebecois French suddenly burst from the other side of Prescott’s office door. The Corporal smiled. That would be Jacques Bourbonne, murder and theft suspect #3. The burly, three-hundred-pound lumberjack/fisherman had a fearsome temper that could explode like an axe blade crashing into a tree trunk and then pass just as quickly as a snow squall.

Bourbonne had recently been logging in the timber just behind Tembeck’s isolated property. Tembeck had ferociously denounced the man for cutting so close to his land and for making so much noise with his chainsaw.

Bourbonne had just as fiercely denounced the other man, before shrugging it off and going on about his business. Until a couple of days later when he’d been ripping into a tree and hit a metal spike with his chainsaw blade. The high-speed metal-on-metal impact had blown the blade apart and sent shrapnel flying everywhere; the big lumberjack only narrowly and luckily avoiding serious injury. It had taken four RCMP officers to pull the furious logger off of Tembeck, who he was sure had deliberately spiked the tree.

Corporal Prescott shook his head and flipped to the last few ‘suspect’ pages in the file. Ruth Majick was the owner of the Backwoods Café in town. She was the one-time wife of Red Tembeck, before Tembeck had withdrawn from the world into his bitter ball of hate. The fifty-eight-year-old woman knew all about the gold coins, and it just so happened that her café was facing foreclosure from the bank at the end of the month—unless she could somehow come up with the money to pay off her three missed mortgage payments.

Prescott closed the file and stared out the window again.

And this time the dazzling scenery didn’t blind the officer. Instead, it enlightened him. He pushed back from his desk and jumped to his feet, resolutely strode to the door and flung it open.

Ruth Majick gaped at the big, mustached man. She’d been painfully making her way down the narrow hallway towards the last remaining empty chair along the wall, where Grieve Collier, Bryan Durell and Jacques Bourbonne were already sitting.

“How’s the lumbago, Ruth?” Prescott asked good-naturedly.

“Terrible—my back’s been acting up all week!” the woman replied, limping along the corridor, a crutch clutched under her right arm.

“Well,” Corporal Prescott addressed the group, rubbing his huge hands together with satisfaction, “I want to thank everybody for coming in. But I’ll only need to detain one of you from here on out.”