Chapter 6
The Grand Tour
The noisy old pickup truck made its way down the sleepy streets of Willowe, leaving a wake of toxic fumes, crying babies and cursing parents trailing behind it like a curse. Wherever the truck went, people peeked out their windows, shook their heads, and shot indignant looks after it as it woke up yet another block. Kenneth realized he should have asked Lou to take the long way via the highway around town this early in the morning, but he couldn’t really complain as the guy was doing him a huge favor here.
It was another gray Saturday morning, rain just around the corner. The weather almost seemed foreboding to Kenneth, as if it was mimicking his dream. Enough. No more silly crap.
“Anyway,” he continued as he smiled and waved to another sullen looking woman in her house coat, “we’re going to have to be very careful today and just plug in the fuses room by room. God knows what shorts and crap could be lurking inside those old walls.”
Lou looked at him. “Whatever you say, man. After all, you’re the expert here.” Then he threw his head back and honked out his signature Lou-laughter like a goddamn donkey.
“I know. I should shut up, right?” Kenneth chuckled. “Fuck you too.”
Lou was a good guy. They weren’t exactly the best of friends, but he was his next door neighbor and, as such, they had gotten to know each other over the years. Their personalities didn’t exactly match. Whereas Kenneth was a little reserved and stiff, Lou was loud and happy most of the time. He was one of those guys who are just genuinely nice and has room for everybody and their mother in their big old hearts. Raccoon in the garage at 3AM? Call Lou. Flood in the basement on New Year’s Eve? Call Lou. Need a human shield to protect you from unspeakable evil as you entertain your selfish little interests? Lou is right there for you. And the damn thing was that you could never offer him payment of any kind. He actually liked helping people. Imagine that. Just when you thought chivalry and generosity was extinct in the western civilization; here’s Lou!
Lou’s excessive good qualities made Kenneth painfully aware of his own lousy personality. What the hell did Theresa see in him anyway? If he was her he would have moved on to greener pastures a long time ago. Then again… he was the resident asshole and she was not. He reminded himself to buy flowers for her on the way home.
Another hard bump as the truck bottomed out knocked the gloom out of him.
“Jesus Christ, man! Does this thing even have shocks?”
“Pothole,” Lou grinned. “Goddamn streets are full of them.”
Kenneth looked around as they drove. Willowe really was a pretty little town. The street they were going down, he believed it was Acton Street, was lined with oak trees, majestically rising on both sides to meet each other halfway up above, creating a green cathedral for them to ride inside. Old red brick town homes lined the street on either side. Black iron fences separated their tiny, almost pointless, front yards from the sidewalk. It wasn’t hard to imagine the front steps populated by the next generations of Acton Street dwellers, hanging out on a lazy Saturday summer day, shooting the shit over a beer while discussing worldly matters like the Red Sox’ latest pick and how today’s school system sucks, just like their parents and grandparents did before them. Most people stayed in Willowe. It was one of those rare communities that had yet to give in to the standardized structural blueprint for New England small towns. All the other towns looked the same - the Wonder bread suburbs, the generic strip malls and the unfortunate ghetto (often politically labeled “Historical Downtown”). No, Willowe still had its original charm. Of course there was the obligatory evidence of Corporate America in the shape of Mickey Dees and Blockbusters, but they blended into a picturesque small town dream, offering so much more than just another non-descript place to live. Willowe had soul. Maybe it was just because he had grown up here, but there was definitely something about this town that made you feel right as rain. Willowe was home. Simple as that.
And now money had started to flow into the old community.
The once rural farmlands were nowadays dotted with some of the most fantastic golf courses in America, and the parks and nature reserves attracted tourists from all over the country. Lately Willowe had also become a haven for the rich and spoiled. They met at the exclusive spas for ‘conventions’ and fell in love with the Old Money charm that their New Money couldn’t buy them where they were from. Some magnificent mansions had been built in the last couple of years just up the hill from where Kenneth lived. Yet, with all the outside attention Willowe seemed to draw, it still managed to maintain its small town charm by locating all the big corporate businesses and franchises in the giant mall town several miles outside of town. New England Plaza…
They were coming up on Jacaranda Drive now. Gone was Kenneth’s sense of foreboding. Instead he was eager to get in there and look at the place from a factual point of view. No more letting his mind run away with him again. Besides, this time he had Lou with him to help keep his head screwed on straight. “Make a left here.”
Lou turned into Jacaranda and started down the hill. As usual, this part of the neighborhood was quieter than the other streets and Kenneth felt they were almost defiling the serene silence with their rumbling engine. Lou seemed to feel the same because he clutched the truck and gently rolled, letting gravity do the job for them. As he slowly eased forward, Lou looked at the old houses around him, whistling softly under his breath. “Whew! Those are some old crow’s castles. They must have been here since forever.”
Kenneth looked at him with surprise. “You mean you never came here? Not even as a kid?”
Lou shook his head, still eyeing the surroundings. “Nope. Never came. All my friends did at one time or another. I know that. I guess I was just never that interested, you know?”
Never interested! How could you not be interested in the one thing that had put Willowe on the map all those years ago? Kenneth didn’t know anybody who hadn’t as a kid been dared to climb the wall or throw a rock through a window. Not that anybody had ever managed to do one or the other since the place had been securely locked up and the boards had kept the windows safe, but still… The Cromwell House had been the stuff nightmares and legends were made of, and in the minds of kids it had become even more than that. It had been like some evil wizard’s fortress just sitting there, smack in the middle of their world, with a promise of death and darkness for all. Now, what kid didn’t live for crap like that? He knew that he himself had been to this street many times, peering through the bars of the iron gate up at the house and making up fantasy scenarios of all the horrible things that had taken place inside.
His mind quickly revisited a beautiful Sunday afternoon, many, many years ago, when Michael O’Malley had dared him to scale the gate and knock on the door. He couldn’t have been more than eleven or so. He remembered Luke and David ushering him towards the house saying things like, “You have to do it!” and, “For the Skull Club man!” Yeah right. Just like everything else was for the good of their little secret club. Throwing dog shit on old Mrs. Jenkins’s front door, putting Luke’s brother’s glass eye in Sarah’s glass of soda… It was all for the Skull Club.
He had climbed that gate with the help of his friends, scared as all hell, and had jumped down on the other side… Only his feet had never touched down on solid ground. The waist line of his jeans had gotten caught on one of the big iron spikes and he was stuck like a pig on a spit. He had to hang there while his panicked friends raced their bikes all the way home to get his dad to get him down. He gazed upon the dark house that half hour they had been gone and imagined Samuel Cromwell watching him from between the gaps in the boards nailed over the windows. He was sure Samuel was getting ready to come out and take him down and carry him inside to eat him. By the time his dad arrived and cut him loose he had his eyes clamped shut so hard he couldn’t see straight for the whole car ride home.
Kenneth smiled to himself. The good old days, when kids could play in the streets and make up fantasy worlds to inhabit with anything they wanted. Before 24-7 TV and video games killed that part of their brains. He missed being a kid sometimes.
“You never went? C’mon man! It’s the Cromwell House for crying out loud! People in Japan have heard about it and here you have lived right next door to it for all these years and still never went?”
Lou laughed and shrugged. “What can I say? I guess I was busy kissing girls back then, while the rest of you dorks gathered around the Ouija board asking the ghost of Samuel who was to die next.” He honked his donkey laugh again. “You should have asked him who was to get laid next instead and when he said ‘Lou’ you would have realized how little that whole Cromwell thing mattered really.” He gave Kenneth a big grin. “No offense buddy. I know you have the hots for the house and all.”
“Shut up, man. There it is.” And there it was. Same old house, same old feeling, as if he was seeing it for the first time again. Now in the gray light of morning the house looked to be sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Well, they were about to rouse it alright. “Pull up right in front. Maybe we should back up all the way to the gate so we could just off load right away?”
Lou nodded thoughtfully. “Sure. Does it open inward or outward?”
“Inward, so you can back all the way up.”
They had brought everything you could possibly need for today. The house had been built in the age before circuit breakers, and since Kenneth didn’t know exactly which fuses to bring, they had brought all of them. They had ladders, tools, flashlights, a fire extinguisher, a radio, wires, outlets, and a whole bunch of landscaping equipment such as shovels and rakes and other things Kenneth didn’t even know what the hell to do with.. Again he thanked his lucky star that Lou was with him. If it came down to only him, he would have been lost in this initial stage, as far as the basic engineering went. One thing was certain; Mr. Fixit he was not. “Lou…, thanks again man for coming out here with me. You have no idea how much I appreciate it.”
Lou smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. It will be like an adventure, right? I never did it as a kid so now I’m doing it as an old fart instead. Just dare me.”
After Lou backed up the truck nice and easy, Kenneth jumped out and unlocked the gate. Only it wasn’t locked… The padlock and chain was hanging off one side of the slightly ajar cast iron gate. That’s right! He had been too busy running from his brain spooks to actually secure the place the day before yesterday. God, he hoped no kids had been in to mess around with anything. He swung the wrought iron halves open, mowing down weeds and flowers, and opened the back of the truck to start unloading all their stuff.
“How about you give me the grand tour first?” said Lou, walking around from the other side of the truck.
“Of course,” Ken said, feeling like an idiot. “What was I thinking? OK, I am going to bore you to death though, but let’s go.” As a matter of fact he was kind of relieved he could approach the house from his angle, by walking Lou through its history. Demystify it a little before they started shaking it awake. “If you would come with me, Sir. Please save all questions till the end of the tour and remember serial killer memorabilia makes an excellent Valentine gift and can be bought in our souvenir boutique on the first floor. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a Charles Manson baseball cap.”
Together, they stepped through the open gate and looked around. “The Cromwell House, as it has been unofficially named, was commissioned by George C. Cromwell and built in 1876.. He was a rich iron and whisky merchant from Glasgow, just arrived in the land of the free and chose the rural Massachusetts town of Willowe to settle down in. His business was in Boston, but he had managers running the warehouses and offices and rarely needed to go into the city himself.
The house is built in 19th century two storey mixed Colonial Revival/Federal style in yellow brick and had a modified basement. These Federal styled houses were more popular in the South as the Georgian style-biased Brits felt it looked too simple to house prominent citizens such as they. As you can see, the windows are larger on the second storey, since this was the major floor of the house. Here were the sitting rooms and parlors, and in our case also George Cromwell’s study, from where he oversaw his businesses.” Ken led Lou up the gravel path to the back of the house. “We will take a closer look inside after I show you the surrounding garden.” As they turned the corner Ken continued, “George died in 1934, at which point he left everything to his supposedly only son, Robert Cromwell. You see, there were rumors he had other children back in Scotland with women other than Robert’s mother, but it was never proven or investigated. Robert stayed in the Cromwell House and carried on with the family business, but he was not the savvy entrepreneur his father had been. As he realized he was not making the same figures as his father, he sold first the iron company to Stetler & Johnson in 1940, and later the whisky stills and distribution companies to Nova Era Inc. in 1942. These two sales secured a substantial fortune in cash for the Cromwell family and Robert invested the funds wisely on advice from the family attorney. When he died, his two sons, Angus and Samuel, split the inheritance down the middle. Both sons lived and worked in Boston; Angus as a successful banker, owning and operating four big high roller banks, and Samuel as a manager in one of those banks.”
“In July 1954 the two brothers must have had a fallout of some sort because Samuel upped and left Boston with his family, wife Anna and two twin daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth, and moved into the vacated family estate in Willowe. He did not take up employment with any company here but rather seems to have developed a sudden interest in medicine and biology, purchasing books and instruments by the truck loads.”
The two of them entered the backyard. Ken once again noticed how perfectly still everything was here. Like the whole garden was holding its breath, waiting for something… Without realizing it, he lowered his voice a little. “And this is where our story begins.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand over the mounds and pits in the overgrown backyard. “On August 3rd 1957 John Spindel lost control of his dog while walking it along Jacaranda Drive. The dog took off down the street and snuck in between two bars in the gate to the Cromwell House. Mr. Spindel ran after it. By the time he got to the house he could hear his dog barking excitedly at something. He opened the unlocked gate and followed the barks to the back of the house. Actually… exactly to where we are standing now. His dog was standing at the edge of a deep hole, barking at something on the bottom. Mr. Spindel approached the dig and flinched at what he saw. Down in the hole was a haggard looking man with a shovel, surrounded with what could only have been human remains laying all over the floor of the pit. The man in the hole looked up at him and the barking dog and snarled, at which point Mr. Spindel turned his heel and fled the ghastly scene to get the police.”
Lou whistled under his breath, obviously feeling the looming silence as acutely as Ken did. “Whew man! This was that hole?” he asked, pointing to the collapsed ditch at their feet.
Ken shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe. Hold on and I’ll tell the rest.” He walked over to another mound closer to the far hedge. “By the time the police got here Samuel had apparently barricaded himself in the house and did not respond to the policemen’s knockings. It took the police half an hour to dig up the pit so they could verify Mr. Spindel’s story before they brought such serious charges to a prominent citizen as Mr. Cromwell. Once convinced it was indeed the remains of a body down there, they broke down the door and stormed the house. Inside they found Samuel cowering in the basement, face buried in his hands, crying violently. There was no trace whatsoever of either his wife, Anna, or the two twin girls.” Ken made a dramatic pause. When the silence freaked even him out he quickly continued, “Samuel was taken to the station and a search warrant for the house and the backyard was immediately issued. After everything was said and done they found 38 bodies, including the wife, buried all over these grounds. The little girls were never found. The bodies were all hacked up so the identification process took the law enforcement authorities quite some time. It turned out to be all the missing people of the last three years, 1954 to 1957, in the county. Some were traveling through, some were runaway kids, some were hobos, some were night wanderers, some were anybody’s neighbor. There was no pattern. No common nominator for these victims.”
“You see, there are basically two types of serial killers. I will get to them later, but the point is that Samuel fit neither profile. He seemed to just have killed anybody he got his hands on. There were no souvenirs taken and put on display in the house. There was no journal kept to describe his thoughts… All bodies were sloppily hacked up and buried hastily in the backyard. As if he was in a frantic hurry to get rid of his sins.”
Lou nodded thoughtfully. “Yup. I remember my dad telling me about that. 38 people. Can you imagine? Nobody ever saw anything or heard anything up until that day. I just find that so hard to believe.” There was an incredulous air to his statement, and in all fairness it was an argument that often came up.
“Well you have to realize that this neighborhood was different back then. Most of the surrounding houses were in bad shape since the rich families that used to live in this neck of the woods were all in a state of financial limbo after the war. It is only now that the block is up to par with what it once was. The two houses on either side of this were not occupied for the last two years of the Jacaranda Murders, and the other ones up the street were lived in by once rich folks on the decline who minded their own business.” He kicked some dirt down into the pit at their feet. “Wanna go inside and complete the tour?”
Lou shook his head. “Nah. I think I have had it for now. Let’s go unload the truck and you tell me the rest once we’re inside. I would like to work some of these bad feelings off first. This place creeps me out more than I thought it would.”
Ken patted him on the back. “Sure thing bud.” You don’t even know half of it, he thought to himself.
