miss fortune mystery (ff) - body in the bog in the bog (3 page)

The muscles in her arms and legs were weak and spasmed constantly. She must’ve been in constant, horrendous pain. She took dozens of pills everyday, but I’m not sure they helped her much, if at all.

She had to wear both glasses and a hearing aid because her sight and hearing degenerated at a frightening speed. Although her mind wasn’t affected, her speech was slurred, so at first glance, she seemed mentally handicapped.

It broke my heart that there was nothing the doctors could do for her, and the irony didn’t escape me that we were attending a fair dedicated to the future of science.

She tried to be strong, even as the disease ravaged her body. Any physical exertion put extra stress on her heart, so she and Dan moved slowly and told us to go about our activities and they’d join in when they could.

Dan doted on her, trying to provide for her every wish. They’d brought along the live-in nurse who cared for her at their home in Edmonton and we all tried to include her. I don’t remember her name, but she was young even then, only a few years out of nursing school and she treated Alma like a beloved big sister.

I’ve thought about that nurse a lot in the years since. She had to have recognized Dan in the sketches on the FBI most-wanted posters and she knew for a fact that he’d disappeared and never returned. She never came forward though. I’ve always thought maybe she understood why he did what he did.

Fortune couldn’t take anymore, “Did what? What happened to him? This ‘Dan’ is the body in the bog, right? He doesn’t sound like a bad guy. He sounds like one of the good guys!
What
did you Ladies do?”

“Just keep reading, dear, we didn’t do anything to him, except try to help,” Gertie calmly replied. “You’ll understand everything soon enough.”

Exasperated, Fortune picked up the next page and read on:

Wilma told me the nurse had been with Alma for a few years, even before her marriage to Dan. Dan had wooed Alma for over a decade, but Alma sincerely loved him and wanted him to find someone he could have a future with.

She tried to push him away for years, hoping he’d move on without her. Alma knew she’d never have children and probably wouldn’t live to a ripe old age, or even old age. He never gave up on her though, and they were both well into their thirties when she finally agreed to marry him. His world revolved around Alma. I’d never met a man so in love.

I didn’t see Dan or Alma after that trip, but Wilma kept me informed about them through letters she faithfully wrote me every other month or so. Dan’s job kept him busy and Alma’s disease progressed slowly for a few years.

I can admit now I had mostly forgotten about them, the way one often does with acquaintances you barely actually know. I thought of them occasionally because of Wilma’s letters, but that was the extent of it.

I hadn’t heard from Wilma in a few months before the Saturday night in November of 1971, when she and Dan appeared on my doorstep. She looked exhausted and he looked horrible. He had bruises everywhere, it seemed his skin color was black and blue, and he looked shrunken somehow.

He was distant and withdrawn. Lost... As if he wasn’t sure of where he was, or even who he was, and he didn’t seem to care either way. Not at all the same man I’d met at the fair a decade before in Seattle. I barely recognized him.

We put Dan to bed in one of the upstairs rooms, and then I hustled Ida Belle over to see if she could do anything for him. He looked like he’d injured every part of his body.

Wilma filled me in on what had happened in the last few days while Ida Belle tended to Dan. What had happened to turn Dan into the broken, fragile man he’d become.

Of course I’d heard about the hijacking. It had been in all of the newspapers, and I’d watched the evening news on Thanksgiving night when Walter Cronkite introduced reporter Bill Curtis.

The reporter conducted a detailed report from Reno, Nevada with local footage from both KIRO-TV, a local CBS station in Seattle, and KOLO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northern Nevada, covering both Reno and Lake Tahoe.

The report had included interviews of the plane’s Captain, William Scott, and one of the plane’s Stewardesses, Tina Mucklow. Harold Campbell, one of the FBI agents on the scene, had also been interviewed. For all of that, no one knew much about the hijacker or what had happened to him.

According to the report, on November 24th a man calling himself D.A. Cooper had boarded Northwest Airlines flight #305 in Portland, Oregon at 2:50 pm PST. The flight was scheduled to land in Seattle, Washington.

He handed the stewardess a note and then showed her what appeared to be a bomb in his suitcase. She recognized dynamite with wires attached. He told her he was hijacking the plane, and demanded two-hundred thousand dollars and two parachutes upon arrival in Seattle.

The airline had collected the ransom and thirty-six passengers were released when the plane landed after circling the airport for a few hours. It was then re-fueled and four crew members and the hijacker took off, planning a lay-over in Reno, Nevada to get more fuel for its final destination in Mexico.

The flight from Seattle to Reno had taken longer than usual. The hijacker had instructed the crew to stay in the cockpit and to fly the plane as low and slow as possible.

The hijacker, and the briefcase full of money, weren’t on the jet when it landed in Reno at approximately 10:15 pm PST. By most reports, D.A., Dan, or D.B. as he was variously called by all of the different media outlets covering the story, had parachuted alone, somewhere over Washington or Oregon with the money. The massive man-hunt covered four states, but no one knew for sure where he’d jumped.

Wilma knew. And, although she was exhausted, both mentally and physically, she spent the next two hours telling me all of the details.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Fortune deeply inhaled and then slowly exhaled. “Some old Army friend of Marge’s was the... The what? Cousin of an infamous hijacker from the seventies?”

“Keep reading, dear. Marge wrote it all down so it would be in her own words,” Gertie said softly and then chuckled. “I think she always knew someone would need that documentation. I don’t imagine she could’ve possibly guessed it would be you though.”

“I
have
heard of D.B. Cooper. I guess I always thought he’d died out there in the mountains somewhere. I mean, someone would’ve heard if he was still alive.”

“Some people did just disappear, dear,” Gertie said. “Especially in the age before computers took everything over.”

“I guess. I need a shot of cough syrup. Would you care for some while I’m getting it?” Fortune stood up and stretched. She’d had her legs curled up like a pretzel in the chair, and the blood rushing back to her limbs made her legs tingle. She carefully shook out each leg before heading to the kitchen.

“No thanks, but I’d take some coffee, if there’s any left.”

“It’s cold,” Fortune yelled back.

“Iced would be nice. I don’t suppose you have any lemon?”

“Nope,” Fortune answered. “Do you actually keep lemons in your fridge?” she asked out loud while grumbling something under her breath about old ladies.

“Of course dear. How could I make lemonade or lemon meringue pie, or even lemon bars, if I didn’t have lemons?” Gertie innocently asked, ignoring Fortune’s tone.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” Fortune’s tummy rumbled as she brought Gertie her iced coffee. “I don’t suppose you have any of that pie handy, do you? Breakfast was hours ago.”

“Not lemon, but I did make a chocolate cream pie yesterday!” Gertie smiled, and then just as quickly, frowned. “But, it’s at home and I promised Ida Belle I wouldn’t leave you until she got back.”

“I’m not going anywhere. At least not before I finish this… confession, report, whatever it is,” Fortune pointed at Marge’s document and put on her best puppy-dog face, “Please?” She knew she was whining, but decided to just go with it.
Who knows, it might even work,
she thought. “I’m hungry!”

“I guess we did miss lunch…” Gertie wavered, and furtively glanced back and forth between Fortune and the door, like she was ready to stand up and go to the door.

“Please, please, please? With sugar on top… I promise I won’t move from my chair until you get back…”

“Okay, fine!” Gertie laughed. “But stop making that face, you look like Bones when you scrunch up your lips like that.” She narrowed her own eyebrows, “I’ll make you a sandwich too, so no pie till you eat a decent lunch. And, don’t move from that spot. I’m trusting you.”

“Yes ma'am,” Fortune purred, happy to hear her empty, noisy tummy would get filled soon. “I won’t move and I’ll eat every bite, I promise.”

Chapter 4

After Gertie left, Fortune grabbed the next page.
This really is a book
, she thought as she counted the pages remaining. She estimated she had about two hours of reading ahead of her, so she pulled an ottoman up to her chair and stretched out on it.

Then she glanced at Gertie’s forgotten glass of iced coffee and decided she needed some iced tea. She hoped that sweet old lady would be back with her lunch soon, so she didn’t have to get up and make it herself. She had promised not to move, after all.

She started to read:

In the summer of 1971, Alma’s health had reached a breaking point. Dan had taken an unpaid leave from his job and Wilma had given him money from her ‘rainy day fund’ so he could stay home and care for his dying wife. They’d let the nurse go earlier that year because Alma was now completely bed-ridden and there was nothing anyone could do for her anymore.

She was almost completely blind and Dan wasn’t even sure if she could hear his voice when he read to her. She did respond when he touched her though, so he caressed her face all the time and tried to hold her hand or her arm whenever he was near her.

Dan was beside himself, he couldn’t just sit and watch his beloved wife waste away. He took to researching her disease and contacting any doctors or medical centers working on a cure. He spent every minute his wife slept on his pursuit of information and it finally paid off.

In mid November, he discovered a small medical center in Argentina which seemed to have a viable course of therapy for people with her disorder. Dan immediately called and found out the therapy would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He only knew of one person who might have that kind of money.

He knew Wilma still had some money tucked away, so he contacted the nurse to stay with Alma for a few days and he drove down to Seattle to see her face to face. Asking for that amount of money couldn’t be done by phone.

He was devastated when Wilma told him she didn’t have enough to cover the full expense, she barely had half the funds he needed.

Wilma told me she knew he was distraught when he left to go back home, but never in a million years did she expect him to act on his desperation. She thought he was headed home to Alma when he left her.

A few days later, she got a call from the nurse with the sad news that Alma had passed, and the nurse couldn’t locate Dan. Alma had willed her body to be used in research, so there wouldn’t be a funeral, but the nurse had remembered Wilma, and thought maybe Dan was with her or had at least contacted her.

The nurse wanted him to hear the news as soon as possible, so she had decided to try and call Wilma long distance. Wilma explained to her about Dan’s visit and told her she hadn’t seen or heard from him since he left her house that day. As far as she knew, he was on his way home when he’d left her, on his way back to Alma.

Wilma reluctantly hung up the phone and contacted the operator to reverse the charges on the call. She knew the nurse didn’t have much money and felt it was the least she could do.

Later, that same evening, Wilma heard the news about the hijacking. The plane had just landed at Sea-Tac and was being re-fueled. The media was all over the story. The reports mentioned the ransom money and the request for multiple parachutes. They were speculating that the hijacker would force one of the remaining crew-members to jump out of the back of the plane with him. It all sounded very suspicious to Wilma.

The plane was a Boeing 727 aircraft, and even Wilma knew it was ideal for parachuting. The hijacker had done his research. It had an air-stair in the back of the plane, which could be lowered manually from the inside of the plane.

All three of the jet’s engines were located high above the stairs, which meant someone could safely jump off the stairs without a severe risk of being burned alive by the jet’s exhaust.

She knew for a fact that people had jumped from those planes and lived. She and I had talked about the secret missions carried on by the CIA during the Vietnam war. Wilma knew what I really did during the war, that I hadn’t been simply a supply clerk. Anyway, she knew the US government had dropped agents and supplies out of 727’s quite a few times.

And, she just knew it had to be him. Her cousin, Dan. Especially when she heard the name Cooper. She’d been afraid he’d attempt something desperate but was stunned to believe it could really be him… It couldn’t be a coincidence though.

Wilma explained to me how the cousins had both laughed when his real name, Paul Marlow, had been used as the name of the main protagonist in a science fiction novel, ‘A Far Sunset’ written by a man named Edmund Cooper.