Andrew Welsh-Huggins is the Shamus, Derringer, and ITW-Award–nominated author of the Andy Hayes Private Eye series and editor of Columbus Noir. Kirkus Reviews called his latest crime novel, The End of the Road, “A crackerjack crime yarn chockablock with miscreants and a supersonic pace.” His stories have appeared in many publications, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, and Mystery Tribune, and multiple anthologies, including Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir volumes 1, 3, and 4, Paranoia Blues: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon, and the 2021 Bouchercon anthology, This Time for Sure.
My father left for good the first week of my junior year in college. As horrible as it sounds now, I was glad to see him go.
It wasn’t the first, second, or even third time he walked out on my mom and sister and me. I was so accustomed to his disappearances by then that I felt almost nothing when my mother mentioned his latest abandonment in a letter that arrived, now that I’m doing the math, almost two weeks after his departure. “Oh, and your father’s finding himself again,” she wrote near the end of the note in her always-exquisite Palmer-style script, a missive in which she spent more time ruminating on Reagan’s recent appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court than her husband’s desertion. “I suppose he’ll be back at some point.”
Finding himself, I knew by now, was not code for what you might think. Or not exactly. Without question, my father had multiple affairs during our parents’ fitful twenty-three years of marriage. My sister, Holly, was in therapy for months just to deal with the day that, at age eleven, she answered the door to find a young, bellbottoms-wearing woman in tears as she begged to see our father and make him deliver on the promises she said he made. Naturally, it was my mother who dealt with that particular mess and eventually sent the poor girl on her way. But such straying was a symptom of my father’s illness, not the disease itself. In this case, “finding himself” meant once again pursuing his dream of being a writer—a real writer, not some part-time hack—which apparently entailed forsaking his responsibilities and, with my parents’ meager pile of savings in hand, holing up in a cottage someplace to hammer out yet another manuscript destined to go nowhere.
And sure enough, three weeks after my mother’s letter arrived, a postcard bearing a picture of the Old North Church showed up in my college PO box from my father postmarked Boston, bearing three short sentences in his equally familiar—though nearly indecipherable—handwriting. “Taking a breather out east. You probably already heard. Working on something that’s the best yet—excited to show you.”
And that was that. Because it was always the best yet. Except it never was.
*
The autumn passed in a rush and soon enough I arrived back from college in Ohio to my hometown of Winter’s Falls for Thanksgiving. Once at the house, the absence of my father at the holiday table dominated the short visit even though it scarcely came up in conversation, in the same way I expect that people who live near eye-popping wonders like the Grand Canyon or Devil’s Mountain go about their lives, managing the routine matters of existence in the presence of sights that make first-timers gasp at the enormity of what they’re seeing. My mother hardly spoke of him at all, murmuring, “Nothing new, like always,” the one time that Holly brought it up, the morning of Thanksgiving as we sat around in pajamas watching the Macy’s parade on TV while the house filled with the smell of turkey. If my mother felt anything—anger, relief, exasperation—it was difficult to tell through the inscrutable mask of her Midwest upbringing. Of the tiny scar on her left cheek that hadn’t been there when we both left for college in August, she said nothing at all. I do know this: despite that blemish, her face seemed softer—more relaxed—than I’d seen in a while. Living with our father couldn’t have been easy for her, with as much as she tolerated. And yes, that included the occasional push, the random shove, probably even a slap or two—obviously—that fell short of chronic physical abuse but still constituted part of the price of existing within the orbit of his volatile personality.
For one fleeting moment I thought she was ready to talk about the elephant in the room, late on Saturday morning as we worked outside, raking leaves in our enormous backyard, puffs of breaths punctuating our conversation in the cold, western New York State autumn air. But then our neighbor appeared around the corner of his small barn, his own rake in hand, and my mother went quiet. He gave us a wave, and we all waved back, and then he walked back the way he came without a word. It seemed odd that he hadn’t approached, and when I asked my mother about it, she replied, simply, “He misses your father,” and went back to raking.
“Misses the whiskey, more like it,” my sister whispered when we were out of earshot.
His name was Doug McCurdy, but to Holly and me he was always just “Farmer Doug,” our juvenile dig at his unruly two-acre plus spread on the edge of town, only a small part of which contained an actual garden. Retired early from driving a school bus, and in fact not a half-bad looking man, he nonetheless made an easy target, with an unkempt backyard full of dilapidated patio furniture, cracked ceramic pots, and even a car engine leftover from some ill-advised repair. You saw his ilk a lot in small Finger Lakes towns in those days, harmless loners—he was widowed and childless, with only a sister in town—padding along on their own quiet, eccentric paths.
Despite my sister’s snarky aside, McCurdy and my father had in fact been unlikely friends, dating from the moment my father discovered that McCurdy had shelf after shelf of novels and biographies and history volumes not just in his house but spread into the barn itself, which functioned on the weekends as a kind of combination flea market and used book stall. McCurdy was not just a collector but also a great reader, and he and my father bonded over mid-twentieth-century fiction and tumblers of Dewar’s for hours on end. McCurdy always invited our mother to join them, since she was as much a reader—if not more—than my father. But she almost always demurred, limiting her interaction to shuttling over occasional pies or bread loaves or tubs of soups to McCurdy when she made too much. As far as my sister and me were concerned, he was the oddball guy who drove our school bus and we had relatively little else to do with him growing up. The only real attraction for us was McCurdy’s pond, where we occasionally fished as kids in the summer and often ice skated in the winter. Until our father indirectly ruined those small pleasures for us as well.
And that was that for the first post-disappearance Thanksgiving, and on Sunday morning I headed back for the remainder of fall classes. I should probably pause and explain the irony of my destination. I attended Kenyon College, a small liberal-arts institution perched on a wooded hill in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. Despite its rural locale, however, the school had bona fide prestige when it came to the arts, and especially literature—I was an English major—and chief among those was its famous literary magazine, the Kenyon Review. And it was that journal, a year before my birth, that started my father on his downward path by, ironically, accepting one of his first stories.
Appearance in a publication of that standing meant something in those days, and even came with a little money—not a lot, but enough to leave you hungering for more, as was the case for my father. He was just finishing his dissertation at Binghamton University and parlayed the minor fame of that short story achievement into his first teaching job, at Oberlin College. There he met my mother, a junior who took one of his advanced English courses, and who fell prey to his charms in a time-honored student-professor fashion. In reality, given their relatively minor age difference—she was twenty-two, he had just turned twenty-six—the liaison doesn’t seem all that scandalous now. Or at least compared to the subsequent family ruckus caused by her decision to leave without a degree to help my father “follow his dreams.”
And then—then it all gradually slowed down until it stopped. The Kenyon Review success wasn’t the beginning, as it turned out, but the beginning of the end. Almost three years passed before my father published another story, this time in a small Illinois literary journal so obscure and hence impoverished that it required he pay for contributor copies out of his own pocket. He struggled to finish his first novel, Wonder Falls—a labored allusion to our village’s name—and while, to his credit, he eventually managed the task and even found a small—very small—New York publishing house willing to put it in print, it landed in the literary world two days after Nixon defeated Humphrey with all the impact of a single autumn leaf dropping to the floor of an Adirondack forest. I suspect the copy I have is one of the only surviving in the world. His star already faded by his early thirties, my father moved from college to college across the Midwest and then back east, my mother’s secretarial gigs providing much-needed financial support at every stop, until we ended up, to his great, secret shame, back where he began: in a small Finger Lakes town.
Here, where Holly and I grew up, he cobbled together community college teaching gigs while pounding out a series of increasingly dense and perpetually unpublished books. My father, the literary traditionalist, insisted on hand-writing his first drafts with a fountain pen he purchased with some of that Kenyon Review money. Then, it was up to my mother to decipher his cramped handwriting—she was one of the only people who could translate his penmanship—and type up the results. When he wasn’t writing or teaching, he conducted a series of not-all-that surreptitious affairs with older female students and younger faculty members, and passed weekends with glasses of whiskey in Farmer Doug’s barn. And then, one day, he was gone for good.
*
Well, not entirely gone. My wife had a cousin who simply vanished one day, on his way to a suburban Cleveland mall one moment, never heard from again the next. It wasn’t exactly like that. It’s true that I never saw my father in person after the fall of my junior year. But from time to time postcards would arrive, usually from around Boston, occasionally from New York City, or once, oddly, from Chicago, with scant updates on his life. Finally buckled down and read most of Peter Taylor, as I expect you already have … Feels like life is looking up … The writing’s going well, for a change … And so on, and so forth. Years later, married and with a family of my own, it would take numerous sessions with my own therapist to work out the anger that accumulated over his abandonment and refusal to have anything further to do with us—with me—than those notes. But at the time, I dismissed him as an insensitive kook and tossed the cards almost as soon as I read them. Obviously, I wish now more than anything that I had saved them instead.
Meanwhile, our mother moved on with her life. The following summer she accepted a new job as secretary at the high school serving our little village and three others. Within a year she was promoted to secretary to the superintendent, a post she held for twenty years until her retirement. Her pride in landing that position was evident the Christmas after my college graduation, when I arrived home from New Haven with my new girlfriend in tow, and we toasted the accomplishment with a bottle of the finest Finger Lakes sparkling white. Certainly, it was a pleasure to see my mother smile that week, her sweet grin like a sliver of sun peeking through a bank of gray clouds. The only thing that marred the visit was something not of her making, but which for years soured my girlfriend—later my wife, then my ex-wife—on my hometown.
My mother had driven up to Rochester for some last-minute Christmas shopping, making it clear with good humor it was an expedition we weren’t welcome to join. We were perfectly happy with the time alone, as it gave us the opportunity when she was scarcely out of the driveway to make love first on the living room couch, gasping like teenagers, and then on my narrow childhood bed. Afterward, as snow fell in the rapidly graying late afternoon, I suggested a trip next door to ice skate; after all, I’d been extolling this bonus of my childhood to Eva for weeks. Bundled up, skates in hand, and bearing a thermos of peppermint schnapps–laced hot chocolate and two mugs, we tramped to the edge of our long yard, already snow-filled from a previous storm, and cut through the bank of lifeless lilac bushes to the path that ran along the back of Farmer Doug’s property and toward his quarter-acre pond. It was cold that week, with overnight temperatures well into the teens, and thick ice beckoned. Youthful memories of better times, my father still around, flooded my mind as we laced up our skates. And then we heard him.
“… for you,” Farmer Doug shouted from a good fifty yards away, tramping toward us from the barn that served as his makeshift bookshop and antique store, the distance cutting off the full sentence. Misunderstanding the situation, I waved with a grin, which fell from my face as he approached and I saw the anger in his eyes.
“This isn’t for you,” he said, much closer now.
“Mr. McCurdy?” I said, uneasiness in my voice. Beside me, Eva grabbed my right arm and whispered, “What’s going on?”
“This isn’t for you,” McCurdy repeated as he arrived at the pond, caught his breath, and stood before us in heavy tan boots, worn corduroys, and a padded vest over a flannel shirt that couldn’t have been nearly enough protection against the December cold. He wore neither hat nor gloves, and it occurred to me he must have been inside the barn when he spied us through the back window and rushed out.
“I’m sorry?”
“There’s no skating,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Oh,” I said, not certain what to say. “I thought …”
“You’ll have to leave. I’m sorry.” Though these words, put to paper, imply his tone had softened, in fact his face grew even harder as he spoke.
“I didn’t realize,” I said, trading an awkward glance with Eva. “Mom didn’t say anything.”
“This has nothing to do with Genevieve,” he said, glancing in the direction of our house with a fierce expression, as if she had long ago poisoned his cat or pulled up his tomato plants or knocked over his flowerpots with the mower, and then never apologized for the deed. At the time, I was so shocked by the encounter that his use of my mother’s full name—everyone else knew her as Jenny—didn’t register.
We waited for more explanation but none came. As an awkward silence settled over us, we removed our skates and slipped our feet back into our boots, not bothering to lace them, and made our way back to my house, our tracks already blurring beneath the snow that was coming down even harder now.
My mother paled a little that night when I told her what happened.
“I should have warned you,” she said at last, taking a larger-than-normal drink of wine. She stayed quiet for a while, as though wrestling with what she had to say.
“Warned me about what?”
She took several more moments to compose her reply.
“The fact that he blames me for your father leaving.”
“What?”
Another drink of wine. “He doesn’t think I was supportive enough.”
“Supportive enough? You typed out his novels, for Chrissake.”
She shook her head. “More like, if I hadn’t said certain things, perhaps he wouldn’t have left.”
“Certain things like what?”
“Never mind that. I’m just telling you how he feels. Doug, I mean.”
“Did he say as much?” Eva asked, curled up on the couch beside me with her own glass of wine.
I could tell my mother was put off by the question, which was fair, though perhaps not one she wanted to hear from a stranger to the family dynamic. But after a few seconds she said, looking at me and not Eva, “Not in so many words. But I could tell. Your father was over there a lot. Doug doesn’t have many people in his life. Claire’s pretty much it.” Claire—the sister down the street.
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“I should have warned you,” she said once more.
And there it was. Another consequence of my father’s betrayal of our family: the loss of a beloved childhood activity. In the grand scheme of things, a minor calamity. But yet it was symbolic of so much—the stripping away of a memorable part of growing up in western New York State in the sixties and seventies, when that era’s epic winters provided a snowy playground for months on end. And now thanks to him, and to Farmer Doug, that was gone too.
*
The cards from my father continued sporadically over the years, though at some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s they stopped and I had to face the fact he was probably dead. Unlike my father, though, I saw McCurdy again. Many times, in fact. As the years went on Eva and I moved often while I grew my teaching and writing career—four published novels compared to the singular Wonder Falls, thank you very much. I traded up one assistant professor job for another before, fully tenured, I settled us in Cleveland where we bought a house in the suburbs, had children, and then endured the long, slow dissolution of our marriage. But before that train wreck, we returned often to my hometown to visit my mother and many times would see McCurdy entering or leaving his barn, puttering in his garden, or a few times staring in our direction across his lawn. Once or twice, coming back from a jog on the nearby country roads, I waved at him, but while he might wave back, he never warmed to an actual conversation.
Though both my sister and I were long gone from Winter’s Falls, my mother resisted all entreaties to leave her house and move closer to either of us. At first, she used her job for the superintendent’s office as an excuse. And of course fondness for her friends, a sparse collection of like-minded readers, occasional cardplayers, and companions on the charter bus circuit. She’d always been a big one for travel, and one benefit of her husband’s abandonment was the ability to finally indulge the pleasure to her heart’s content. Later, in retirement, she said she simply preferred where she was too much to consider leaving. Before her health faded it was easy to see her point. Every season was special in the Finger Lakes, whether the greening springs, the temperate summers, the spectacular falls with riots of autumn colors painting the hills, or the cold, snowy winters. I always enjoyed my visits, especially with the kids, before and even after the divorce.
“I just like it up here,” my mother told me more than once. “It’s like the Midwest without all the hate.”
*
But eventually the house became too much for her. Two weeks after her eightieth birthday she took a tumble coming downstairs. That led to six weeks in a skilled nursing facility, and from there a forced move to an assisted living home two towns over. She was never truly happy there—and why should she have been, really—but she did her best, joining the book club and taking trips up to Rochester to the art museum and attending weekend musical concerts in the lobby. My sister, living in Buffalo with her own divorce behind her, did her best to visit, as did I, though not as often as I should have.
The day came when the transition from an assisted living apartment to a single room on the nursing home side of the facility took place, and from there our mother’s health declined rapidly. Two months after we moved her into that room, we received a call that she had taken a turn for the worse. Holly arrived before me, and when I finally walked in, I misinterpreted the funny look on my sister’s face as anger that I hadn’t made good enough time.
“What?”
She looked at our mother, someplace between sleep and drugged unconsciousness.
“The weirdest thing happened.”
“Weird how?”
“Someone was already here when I walked in this afternoon. Just for a second I thought it might be a chaplain, sitting by her bed. But then I realized the person was crying.”
“Who was it?”
She held my eyes with a directness I hadn’t experienced in years; ours had not been the best sibling relationship.
“It was Farmer Doug. And he was holding her hand.”
I was so taken aback I couldn’t speak for a moment.
“You’re kidding.”
“God’s truth. I didn’t know what to do at first. Finally, I cleared my throat and he looked up. He wiped his eyes, nodded at me like we were old friends or something, and walked out of the room without saying a word.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
My mind reeled with the idea that my mother and McCurdy had reconciled.
“Maybe he had a change of heart?”
“A big one, apparently,” Holly said.
“What do you mean?”
“I checked with the charge nurse. She said he visits every day. That got me to thinking. While I was waiting for you I walked over to the reception desk on the assisted living side. The lady there said he was always around. He often had dinner with her. She seemed to think they were a couple.”
I leaned against the door, staggered, looking at my mother, her features wan and drawn, her wasted, shrunken body almost childlike. “She never said anything.”
“Maybe she didn’t want us to know?”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. But what other explanation was there?
We pledged to ask when we next spoke to her. But we never had the chance. We were both asleep in the hotel room down the road we were sharing for a night or two when the call came that our mother passed away a few hours after we bid her supine figure goodbye.
*
We saw Doug McCurdy one last time, at her memorial service a week later. I tried speaking with him, but by the time I crossed the room, he’d signed the visitor’s book, gazed briefly at the rotating display of digital photos commemorating our mother’s life, and slipped away, walking slowly and stiffly with the help of a cane.
Three months later, I had a text from Holly, who heard from an old school friend that McCurdy, too, had passed away. Unlike my mother, however, he went out with his boots on. Literally: he was found by a weekend tourist looking for a flea market bargain slumped in a chair in his barn, a book in his lap. And then three months later, we heard the inevitable; his house had been sold to a local developer with plans to subdivide the property, tear down the barn, drain the pond, and put up two additional houses. Though we had no claim to any of this, and McCurdy’s banishment of us from his home years earlier largely put to rest our childhood nostalgia for our hometown, it was still a shock.
But nothing compared to the phone call from my sister two months after that.
“How soon can you get to Winter’s Falls?”
*
Understand, we weren’t allowed near the pond. Everything was taped off when Holly and I drove up, and a gruff sheriff’s deputy—the son of someone we went to school with—waved us off and directed us to the justice center in Geneseo. And it was there, in a windowless conference room, that a plastic bin was pushed across the table to us and we looked inside to find a pair of muddy leather shoes, a belt, a watch, a pair of thick black eyeglasses and a fountain pen that even forty years on was as familiar to me as the sight of my own face in the mirror.
“Yes, that’s all his,” I said, my voice catching. “They were … ?”
“They were on or near the remains,” the detective confirmed, a middle-aged woman with hard hazel eyes.
She wouldn’t tell us more that day. But it all came out eventually. As the water ebbed out of Farmer Doug’s pond during the initial phase of construction and redevelopment, a rusted hunk of metal emerged—an old engine, the excavator operator told police. And strapped to that engine with several loops of copper wire, what was left of the body of our father, whose flight from our family turned out to have consisted of just a few hundred yards. The depression at the back of his skull implicated a single, powerful blow from a blunt object in his death, but in truth there was no way to know for sure. There was no one left to ask.
Though we never received all the answers we so desperately sought, McCurdy’s sister provided one piece of the puzzle in the end. The day after we saw our father’s belongings in the sheriff’s conference room, Holly and I drove back to town for a final drive past our mother’s house, which still stood mostly in the same condition but to our amusement now sported a large climbing fort and swing set in the backyard. We stopped at the village diner afterward where, as we picked at soggy club sandwiches, an elderly woman approached us. It was Claire McCurdy. She greeted us by name, told us how sorry she was, and then said she had something to show us. Curious, we followed her back to her small cobblestone two blocks away. Excusing herself, she went inside, and then emerged with a book and a paper grocer’s bag.
“These were in his house,” she said, handing me the bag.
Wordlessly, I pulled out what I immediately recognized as two pairs of our mother’s socks, along with a bra, a blouse, and a favorite necklace. Before I could respond, Claire handed me the book.
“And somehow I ended up with this,” she said. “It was with Doug when he died. I didn’t know what to do with them.”
“Them?”
She opened the front cover and handed me the volume, but not before I realized what I was holding in my hands. A copy of Wonder Falls.
“Your brother was reading this when he died?”
“That’s right,” she said. “He so admired the fact your father was a writer.”
Biting my tongue, I stared at several scraps of folded paper tucked inside the cover. Opening the first, I saw three sentences written in a familiar scribbling.
The writing’s going well, for a change.
Again, in slightly different form. The writing’s going well, for a change.
And one more time. The writing’s going well, for a change.
“That’s Mom’s handwriting,” Holly said.
“No,” I snapped. “It’s Dad’s.”
“Look closely. It’s supposed to look like Dad’s. See how she practiced to get it right?”
And after a moment, I did. It was my mother’s handwriting but almost perfectly mimicking my father’s chicken scratch. And in a rush it all became clear. A practice document, ahead of the actual fabrication on a postcard—on postcards—of her choosing. Mailed, no doubt, on all those trips that my father’s death opened the door for. Our mother and Doug McCurdy, hiding the deed that allowed their relationship to persist with the simplest of literary subterfuges.
Questions leaped into my mind. Had they become lovers before or after his death? For the first time, I saw those pie and bread and soup deliveries in a brand new light. Had the blow that left the scar on my mother’s face, the one I spied that first Thanksgiving after his disappearance, been the final straw? Who raised whatever object was used to protest his brutality once and for all?
And then of course the ultimate irony, like a trumpeter’s note rising above an orchestra’s collective sound: My mother, the sacrificing secretary, had manufactured a fiction more convincing, and long-lasting, than anything my father, the ersatz novelist, ever managed.
“Do the notes mean anything?” Claire said, interrupting my reverie as she looked at me with weary, rheumy eyes.
“No. Nothing at all.” I thanked her and asked if I could keep the book.
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing.”
After all this time, that copy is still with me on the shelf of my office back in Cleveland. I would say, without exaggeration, that I pick it up at least once a week and run my finger across the cover, like a blind man reading braille, to trace the letters of my father’s name. And each time I do, I pledge to myself that one day, one day soon, I’ll make the time I need, pour myself a tumbler of Dewar’s, sit down in my favorite chair, and finally read Wonder Falls.
*Although I’ve lived in Ohio for nearly thirty years, I grew up in New York State’s Finger Lakes region in a small town reminiscent of the one where I set my story. Home was an idyllic burg where I ran free the way you did as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s and where I first put pen to paper and summoned the courage to call myself a writer. Drafting “Wonder Falls,” I channeled that upbringing as I tried to re-create fond memories of place, mood, and personalities, with a fictional murder thrown in for good measure.