The St. Antler's Day Murder

 

 

1.   Community Uproar

 

 

Pamela Lafave finishes putting a week’s groceries from the Pineville IGA in her blue Ford. It’s a cold, rainy Tuesday afternoon two days before the opening day of deer hunting season. She’s glad it’s not one of her bridge group’s nights. The weather forecast is calling for falling temperatures and snow. That will make the deer hunters happy but it means bad roads. Pam doesn’t like driving on snow-covered or icy roads even though she’s had plenty of experience driving in winters in northern Michigan. 

Pam grew up on a small farm outside of Pineville, married Billy, the boy across the road, and returned to his family farm after he died of a heart attack in Grand Rapids. Billy’s death at 54 led Pam to retire from her detective job with the Grand Rapids police department and return to Pineville. Dealing with the tragedies of police work without having Billy to talk to was something she didn’t want to face. She’s been back nearly five years and has settled into a happy routine of drawing and painting with an art group, playing bridge with three good friends, and her two volunteer activities.

She and Billy had no children. Now she’s experiencing some of the love she missed by volunteering to mentor kids at Pineville Elementary School. It’s a joy when the kids smile at her and hug her when they come out of their classroom ready for her help with reading or new math. Dawn Reiner, the second-grade teacher, usually sends two delightful little girls out for Pam to mentor.

Pam also volunteers as a board member of Doc Arra’s museum. Doctor Arra, the county doctor for decades collected memorabilia from America’s frontier days and left his collections, his home, and the attached medical clinic to Pineville. Pam enjoys the tedious task of cataloging the doctor’s collections of old things. Pam’s love of old things is one of the reasons she chose to live in the Lafave family farmhouse still filled with Grandma Lafave’s antique furnishings. 

It was at the museum she met Rev. Joe Penny, the elderly Rector of St. James Episcopal Church who introduced her to the Pineville Art Society and suggested she become a mentor to the elementary kids when she began to miss serving others, as she had as a policewoman. Peter Brown, the husband of Sarah, another member of the Art Society was a friend of Dr. Arra and an original museum board member. Sam Weiss and Mary Anderson, two of the other board members are part of her biweekly bridge group. The fourth for bridge is her friend Erin O’Shea, the owner of the Cut and Curl salon on Main Street in Pineville.

Pam decides to stop in the Coffee Mug cafe for a mocha before driving back to her farmhouse on a hill fifteen minutes west of Pineville. She’s wondering about Dawn’s strange behavior earlier that afternoon when she went to Dawn’s classroom to get her mentees. Dawn usually has a smile and a cheerful greeting. Not today, she looked drawn and didn’t say anything other than a brief comment about the reading problems one of the girls is having. In hindsight, Pam is sorry she didn’t ask Dawn if something was bothering her. She’ll be more attentive next Tuesday afternoon.

She orders her mocha and sits by the window. She wants to make sure it doesn’t start sleeting or snowing before she leaves for home. The group of retirees sitting around the big table is engaged in noisy gossip. Today’s topic is the Pineville High School football coach.

Pineville’s team is having a poor year and Blaine McNeil, the coach is getting the blame. Mary Jane Bloom, the reporter for the Weekly Journal wrote a scathing column about the coach in today’s paper. One of the old retirees has a copy and is sharing Mary Jane’s complaints with the others. If it wasn’t such miserable weather outside Pam would take her mocha and leave. Instead, she puts up with the gossip.

One of the reasons the team has lost the last two games is the coach benched the two star senior players. He caught them vaping, which the coach had promised would cost them three weeks suspension from playing. Half the town agrees with the coach and the other half feels he is too hard on the kids. Carl Townsend, the quarterback and Norm Brady, the team’s best running back and best receiver are the two players benched. Without their two best players the team lost the last two games badly. The final game is scheduled for this week against the Oscoda Hawks, the Pineville Lions' main rival. A retiree wearing a Detroit Lions sweatshirt is arguing the coach should let the two stars play since it’s the last game of their high school days. A woman in the group disagrees; she argues the coach must teach the boys a lesson. 

Another retiree, wearing a camo hunting cap says the coach should be sacked and replaced by Assistant Coach Jerry Day. Mr. Day is also the popular woodshop teacher all the boys love. The retiree in the Lions sweatshirt agrees. He says Coach Day would let all the boys play, not let some sit on the bench the whole season without playing in a single game. He says he knows some parents are furious with Coach McNeil for not letting their sons play.

Pam is still drinking her mocha when the retirees switch to discussing Thursday’s opening day of deer hunting season. The retirees are speculating on how many hunters will come north this year. Lions’ sweatshirt guy gripes that the younger hunters are reckless. He says they are likely to shoot without making sure there’s no one in their line of sight. He fears there will be accidental shootings by these reckless hunters.

In Pineville opening day is called St. Antler’s day and school is closed so the older boys and girls can go deer hunting. Pam isn’t a hunter but she remembers how excited her classmates in high school were if they got a deer and their picture was printed in the Weekly Journal along with the dead deer. There is a special season for younger kids to hunt accompanied by their dads or mothers. She wonders how kids as young as nine can handle the recoil of the high power rifles used for deer hunting. She remembers wishing her dad was a deer hunter so he would take her hunting. She wanted the time with him in the woods more than she wanted to kill a deer. 

Noticing the rain is starting to change to snow Pam quickly finishes her mocha and leaves for home. She thinks, ‘If the roads are bad tomorrow, I may skip the Wednesday night session at Doc Arra’s museum’. As she drives, she can’t stop thinking about the town’s outrage over Coach McNeil. He’s in a no-win situation. If he relents and lets the two stars play he’s undermining the discipline of the team. If he doesn’t play them the team will lose and the boy’s parents will be furious as well as half the town. Both boys will lose any opportunity for football scholarships to college. Pam played basketball in high school and believes there are important life lessons to be learned from participating in high school sports. She’s convinced she would not have succeeded as a police detective in Grand Rapids without the discipline she learned from playing basketball. She turns the car radio on to distract her from dwelling on Coach McNeil’s problems. She hears the weather report call for three to five inches of snow for Tuesday night and two to three more for Wednesday night. She’s glad she has a week’s groceries in the trunk. She can stay in. The deer hunters will be delighted to have fresh snow on Thursday morning when they take to the woods.