If you enjoy this ebook excerpt, please order a complete copy in any e-reader format here.***November 26, 1963Dr. Brady Bernard grimaced as he knotted his bow tie in his small deco tiled bathroom. A breeze blew in over his shoulder from the window above the bathtub. He always kept it open “just a crack,” since a faulty gas heater in the bathroom nearly asphyxiated him and his wife a few months ago. The heater had been repaired, unlike the marriage. He slipped the burgundy tie ends together as he had thousands of times before. A jaunty bow formed around his neck as sagging skin fell around the tie. Bernard adjusted the wire frame glasses on his ruddy face, slipped his suspenders over his shoulders and ran a comb through his thinning, pomaded hair. He switched off the light, glancing quickly at the headlines of the two-day-old newspaper crumpled on the floor beside the toilet: KENNEDY SLAIN ON DALLAS STREET Bernard liked President Kennedy. The assassination had a surprisingly strong effect on him, though not for the reasons anyone would think. The stairs creaked and groaned under his 260-pound frame. From the landing, he saw gentle snowflakes fall through the leaded glass window of his front door. Bernard slipped into his jacket, then his overcoat. He dimmed the lamp on the end table. He opened the front door and stepped one foot outside before stopping. “Oh, yes,” he said. He turned quickly and marched across the living room to a seven-drawer oak desk. For the first time in months he noticed a framed motto he had hung over the desk years ago: An Indian scalps his enemy; a white man skins his friend. He sighed, removed a key from his pocket, opened the center drawer and pulled it out an inch. Grunting as he folded his heavy body over, he reached to the bottom left-hand drawer and opened it. Bernard scooped up something heavy from the drawer, stood upright and closed it gently with his cap-toed shoe. He locked the center drawer again and walked into a snowy world on the campus of a small teachers college near the banks of the Missouri River. # Dottie Mostek sat ramrod straight at her desk, her eyes red-rimmed from tears she had cried since the funeral of President Kennedy the day before. Her dark hair, styled as it had been the past three years just like Jackie’s was a careless mess today. She just could not force herself to style her hair as usual. She touched her hand to her chin as she glanced at a newspaper with photos from the funeral. Bobby looked so devastated and John-John’s salute was heartbreaking. School had been closed to students for the week out of respect for JFK; but today administrative staff were expected back to work. Dottie was relieved there would be no students. She could use a quiet day. Earlier, Dr. Walker Keillor had quietly slipped in. He saw her stricken expression and said “Sad day for us all, Dottie. Try to get a hold of yourself.” She nodded at the other chief executive in her life, the president of Cross College; and sat up straighter in her chair. Dottie began to type a memo as President Keillor disappeared behind his office door. She liked Dr. Keillor, a reserved and thoughtful man who had been in education most of his 62 years. Downstairs, Dean Gareth Kennedy had just talked for a few minutes to his secretary Grace Willis about the time he met John F. Kennedy on a train right after the war. He regaled her with the tale of borrowing a newspaper from the rail-thin, nearly-crippled Navy hero. “He said ‘showr’ and handed it to me in that Boston accent of his,” Kennedy said. “I introduced myself and that’s when he told me he was John Kennedy. That’s why I remember meeting him. We had a laugh about being related or something like that.” He paused a moment, tapping his finger on the Kansas City newspaper that lay open on his desk, plastered with photos of the slain president’s funeral. “I uh…” his voice trailed off. Grace looked at the steno pad in her hands. Kennedy shook his head, wiped his glasses and told Grace to tell the two typewriter salesmen in his outer office that he would be with them in a few minutes. She closed his door quietly and returned to her desk. # Walter Mackey of the Westside Typewriter and Office Company waited patiently in Dr. Kennedy’s outer office in a worn wooden chair. Next to him sat Thomas Guthrie, his new trainee. Mackey was entering his twentieth year in the sales game, and this week he was showing the freshly-discharged-from-the-Army kid Guthrie the ropes. On the way over from the city he had filled Guthrie in on the sad story of Cross Township. He told the rookie how Cross once rested close to the banks of the Missouri River until the Great Flood of 1943 rerouted the mighty Missouri and quashed Cross’s ambitions of economic glory. Now it was a small, anemic college town a mile from the river and two miles off the beaten track of state highway nine. But, they still had a college and they still needed office equipment. “Dr. Kennedy will see you in a few minutes, gentlemen.” “Thank you, ma’am,” Mackey said. Guthrie smiled a little too big, Mackey thought. “If you’re in a hurry you might want to go upstairs to the commerce office to handle the past billing,” Grace said. “Then you could come back about the new typewriter order.” “Aw, that’s okay, we can wait,” Mackey said. Guthrie nodded assent, sliding his beat-up leather satchel on the floor beside his chair. Grace sat down. “He has an appointment with one of our professors at 8:15, but it shouldn’t take long,” she said. The men nodded. They knew the drill. A few awkward minutes passed after the campus bells rang 8:15 a.m. Mackey looked at his watch, then at Grace. “Terrible what happened in Dallas,” Mackey said. Guthrie nodded, his face grim. “Yes.” Grace said. She was the picture of efficiency. Any grief she had for President Kennedy was only for her husband and dog to see. “Just awful. I’m glad they got that bastard Oswald,” Mackey said. Grace jumped a bit at ‘bastard’. “Oh sorry, ma’am, pardon my French, but this was just so upsettin’.” Grace stood. “Yes. Perhaps Dr. Kennedy could see you since Dr. Bernard is late.” She knocked quietly at his door and slipped in. Mackey and Guthrie stood up and took a step towards Kennedy’s door. The office double doors rattled as a tall, portly man in a snow-adorned overcoat barreled into the outer office. He eyed the two men for a second, and said: “I’m first. I have an appointment.” Grace returned from Kennedy’s office. “Oh, Dr. Bernard,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “Dr. Kennedy is ready for you, please go in.” Bernard nodded and walked past Grace and the salesmen. He quietly closed Dr. Kennedy’s door behind him. Mackey whistled. “Friendly fella,” he said. Grace looked at her desktop. “Dr. Bernard has been…well,” she cleared her throat and leaned forward towards the men, who in turn leaned forward in the creaky old chairs to hear some rare gossip from the usually Sphinx-like Grace. She opened her ruby red lips to speak when the air in the room crackled with an explosive series of five sounds. Mackey froze. Grace jumped. Guthrie launched from his chair. “Those are gunshots,” he said. Dr. Kennedy’s office door opened and Bernard calmly strode into the outer office, closing the door behind him with his left hand, holding a distinctive German Luger pistol partially obscured under his coat with the right. A sickening sulfurous smell followed him. Guthrie started towards the professor a step—Bernard raised the gun at the veteran. His left hand went to his eyeglasses, which had faint red specks on the lenses. Everyone froze for a pure, bizarre two seconds before Bernard walked past them into the hallway. Grace rushed to Kennedy’s door and saw him splayed like a marionette with clipped strings on the floor beside his desk. His head rested at an odd angle against a radiator on the wall. He had a small, almost bloodless hole above his right eye. In contrast, a jagged crevasse where his nose was supposed to be bled like an open floodgate down his face and the white starched collar of his shirt. His right hand was also bloody and mangled. The bullet tore through it when he tried to cover his face in self-defense. Droplets of blood covered the photo of President Kennedy on the newspaper lying across his desk. “He’s shot!” Grace choked out. Mackey burst into the room, saw Kennedy and threw up on his own shoes. “I knew they was gunshots,” Guthrie said, whistling and patting his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. # Dottie heard what sounded liked a series of thumping sounds from downstairs, but thought little of it. She continued typing her memo until she was interrupted by Dr. Bernard, who had calmly slipped into the room and up to her desk. She noted he wore his overcoat and was wiping his eyeglass lenses with a monogrammed handkerchief. “Oh, Dr. Bernard, you startled me.” Bernard didn’t look at her; he continued to clean his glasses. “He in?” “Um, yes, he is. You can go in if you’d like,” she said. Keillor always had an ‘open door policy’ with faculty; even faculty whose contracts had been terminated effective end of semester. Bernard grunted, put his glasses back on and stepped toward Keillor’s office. He stopped. Without turning around, his voice monotone, he said “They shoot presidents these days.” He jammed his right hand into his pocket and went in. Dottie shivered and looked back to her typewriter. She glanced up a second later and noticed that Bernard had not closed the door as he normally would. She craned her neck to peer into President Keillor’s office. In a split second she told herself that her overwrought emotions from JFK’s assassination had made her eyes unreliable. There was no way Dr. Bernard was pointing a pistol at the head of Cross College President Walker Keillor. The chain reaction of cartridge ignition rocketed the bullet from the barrel into Keillor’s right eye socket. Dottie screamed hysterically as Bernard took his leave, walking silently past her desk and out the door. #
He unlocked the center drawer just as he had earlier then opened the bottom left-hand drawer, grasping a box of cartridges. He dropped the spent shells from the Luger’s magazine into a wicker wastebasket beside the desk. He paused for a moment, looking at the weapon he had personally taken from the stiff dead hands of a German officer in a crumbling Berlin tenement. The officer’s face had a hole in it not unlike Kennedy’s. He methodically loaded the pistol, then set it on the desk and removed a piece of paper from the center drawer. It was his last letter, already typed: Mr. Benton, He signed it with his fountain pen and placed it in front of him on the desk. He read it carefully; then wrote a postscript under his signature. P.S. Wally tried to fire the wrong person. Bernard rose from the chair, walked across the drab hooked rug and placed the letter in its center. He capped his fountain pen and placed it on top of the letter. Bernard removed his eyeglasses and put them in his jacket breast pocket. As absently as he had tied his bow tie that morning, he placed the warm, acrid barrel of the German gun in his mouth and squeezed the trigger. # November 29, 1963Grif Nathaniel tapped the ashes from his cigarette into the open cardboard cylinder on the desk in front of him. The cigarette ash was finer and darker than the mortal remains of Dr. Brady Bernard, which had the appearance of fireplace ash mixed with chips of rock. The chips were not rocks at all, of course, but instead the remnants of the departed Bernard’s bones. “All men are cremated equal,” he said aloud. Grif’s father Martin liked to say that. Nathaniel leaned back in his chair, swinging his feet on the desk of the funeral home, a pre-assassination issue of Life magazine resting on his knees. He knew Dr. Bernard from his psychology class. Bernard was a boring lecturer who would intentionally drop pencils so he could sneak peeks up the front row of coed skirts. Grif always thought it was funny that the strangest prof on campus taught psych. The old bird’s wife had left him a few months ago, and word around campus was that Bernard’s boss Dean Kennedy had the okay from President Keillor to fire him. Grif leaned forward, exhaling smoke and stubbing the cigarette out in a small pan spirited from the embalming table. Life flopped to the morgue floor as he reached for the town’s twice-weekly newspaper, the Cross Courier. He scanned the paper. Accounts of the Cross College President’s murder had even bumped the United States President’s murder off the front page—at least locally. President Keillor and Dean Kennedy dead on the scene, Bernard found dead in his living room, killed by his own hand with the same Kraut gun. He left a peculiar suicide note and the fountain pen he used to sign his name that last time. The newspaper did not print the contents of the note, but Grif knew. Sheriff Scovill had told Martin Nathaniel that the letter left strict instructions for cremation and how to dispose of Bernard’s effects. Scovill intimated that there was a bizarre postscript but would not say more. Grif had asked his high school buddy Morgan Scovill, a member of the “social club” called the Cross Cavaliers, what he knew; but he was as tight-lipped as his Dad the sheriff. “Come on, Morg—we’re Cavaliers. We have no secrets,” Grif had said, trying to revive the camaraderie of the gang from high school. Morgan Scovill just shook his head and said, “Yes we do, Grif. Be glad we do.” “Crazy sumbitch,” was all Sheriff Scovill had allowed Grif beyond the press accounts. After observing firsthand Bernard’s handiwork on the heads of Keillor and Kennedy, Grif had to agree. Even with Martin’s artistry with mortician’s wax and makeup, closed caskets were the order of the day for both funerals. In his 22 years growing up in the family business, Griffin Nathaniel had seen his share of dead bodies—none worse than those mangled by combines or car wrecks. However, there was to him something even more gruesome about a bullet hole and the blown-out back of a skull. “Griffin?” Martin Nathaniel called to his son from the stairs. “Son, you down there?” “Yes Dad,” Grif said, waving at the smoke in the air. Martin descended the stairs, looking pale. Though he admittedly looked right out of Central Casting for a mortuary director even on his best day, today he looked flushed, perhaps ill. His thin fingers nervously smoothed his black frock. “Where’s Dr. Bernard?” he said, in the way they always referred to the deceased—whether they were whole or ashes. “Right here,” Grif said, glancing down at the open cylinder before him. “Oh good,” he was sweating. “Dad, you okay?” Grif said, unused to seeing his father’s studied reserve shaken. “Oh yes, I just went a little too fast down the stairs,” he said, his face morphing into the mask of disengaged kindness he usually saved for the customers. “Do me a favor, son. Uh, I need you to go to the bank and deposit this check from the Harrisons. I have a feeling we shouldn’t hold onto it too long.” Grif thought that was unusual, as the Harrisons were a farm family here since the days before Moses, and they always paid their bills. “Sure Dad,” Grif said, pulling his jacket on and carefully nudging the Life magazine under the desk with his foot. He took the check from his father’s bony hand. “Thank you. I’ll uh, I’ll seal up Dr. Bernard.” “His wife gonna claim him anytime soon?” Grif asked halfway up the stairs. “No,” Martin said without turning away from the open cylinder. “No, I don’t think so. We’ll hang onto him a while in case she changes her mind. On your way.” Grif hurried up the stairs to find his overcoat for the chilly walk to the bank. Martin’s hand shakily fished into his frock coat. From a buttoned interior pocket he retrieved a small brown ledger, held together with a fat rubber band. He fingered the rubber band a moment and looked at the crematory oven on the other side of the room. It had been fired up early yesterday for Dr. Bernard and was still quite warm. Martin took a step toward the crematory until he was stopped by Grif’s shout from upstairs. “Dad? The mayor’s here and wants to see you—he says it’s urgent.” Martin started. His shaking hands worsened. The ledger suddenly seemed as hot as a coal from the oven. He hurriedly dropped it in the cylinder with Brady Bernard’s ashes and sealed it with packing tape. “I’ll be right up,” his voice quavered. The cylinder of ashes was still warm to the touch as he carried them to a small closet in the basement. He felt in the dark for the light chain and pulled it. Martin slid Dr. Brady Bernard’s ashes onto the shelf next to rolls of toilet paper and some dusty plastic flowers. He pulled the chain again to turn out the naked light bulb and closed the door. As he climbed the stairs to the parlor, the unmistakable voice of Mayor Ollie Olafson greeted him. “Marty. We need to talk.” |
Bernard trudged across the snowy oval in front of the Administration building. The Luger was warm and nice in his pocket against the chilly air. The campus seemed deserted to him. The carillon bells played a Christmas carol just as he reached his own front door. He shed his overcoat, hanging it on the banister; then carefully removed the Luger from his pocket and walked to the desk.