pauld2leo.wordpress.com (Book 60 ‘A High Sierra Mystery’ Fiction) By C. Paul Di Tullio
Chapter 1 – ‘Long Live the Sierra King’
‘I used to wonder about living and dying – I think the difference lies between tears and crying. I used to wonder about here and there – I think the distance is nowhere…’ ‘Boys of Summer’ Roger Kahn
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The king of the Sierra Nevada was dead… There always had been that remote possibility a conspiratorial anti-environmentalist combine or psychopathic terrorist might one day do violence and end Carl Fields’ zealous mission.
However, the shocking reality now of what had happened traumatized the world corps of the renowned Sierra Club, as no calamity, ever, since founding of the do gooders around turn of the century…
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Fields” assassination boomed across TV screens like the shot heard around the world reminiscent of a day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered on a Crystal crossed day in Texas, decades ago..
Only this time, the killer had used deadly and excessive force, by explosion, as Fields’ body unceremoniously launched into an early grave.
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Factions of the environmentalist world, enthusiasts for special causes, convened now for Fields’s wake in idyllic southern California. Anti factionist groups, representing air pollution and acid rain other water contaminant soldiers in ceaseless battles to free, suddenly were present and accounted for at the funeral service in Irvine.
It was time to honor posthumously the memory of a Hall of Famer. Their celebrated leader was gone, cut down by an unknown assassin or cadre of killers.
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“Hon, I will call when I get to San Francisco,” the dynamic crusader in the world of ecosystems, had promised Crystal, his youngest daughter, in the last seconds of his life.
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“Ok, daddy!” Fields’ darling teenager, smiled as she waved to bid him adieu. She was going to miss him for Crystal loved him so much, especially, since the untimely death of mother Nell Fields in a tragic mountain road accident years ago. It was so easy for Crystal whenever she was around daddy.
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Crystal knew how much her daddy doted and how he loved her whenever she wrapped her arms tightly around him, especially, when he returned from another Sierra adventure. And when Fields wasn’t around, he loved to buy his daughters special gifts from wherever he happened to be over the years. Sky and Brook , Crystal’s sisters, had said their good-byes, earlier that afternoon, before driving to a movie in Woodbridge. Crystal, of the trio, basked in daddy’s charm.
She kissed him lightly on the cheek and, to her delight, dad gave Crystal one extra squeeze and hug.
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She watched him walk briskly to the curb in front of their huge Woodbridge home in Irvine California toward his bluish gray Mercedes. Fields had to be a very special man in his daughters’ lives. Crystal loved how he championed underdogs, even in a losing cause, how her dad never gave up in his Sierra Club wars.
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“We’ll get ’em next time, honey.” Fields, a stocky man in his mid forties, had playfully chucked Crystal under her chin last time the Sierra Club lost a battle. Fields had a fiery glint in his amber brown eyes, a lantern jaw set in resolutely, willing to take on all comers.
Crystal,, like the other daughters, knew daddy was a pushover, whenever they wished extra money. Or to go to a movie as Sky and Brook got permission to do, hours before he was scheduled to fly into San Francisco. That was the way daddy was, devoted and supportive, in his unique role as sole survivor in the girls’ parental corps.
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Nellie, his beautiful bride of two decades, had been fatally injured in a Sierra Nevada mountain range accident two years ago. His daughters suddenly became Fields’ only light at the end of his grief tunnel. He had wanted to be the best dad he could be before Nell’s death and now with his wife dead the Sierra Club chief decided he would do his best to fill in for Nell, too.
Now as Crystal waved goodbye in her dad’s direction, he turned to smile and wave back. Crystal remained in front of the ivory double front door at the rambling two story manor.
“See you, dumpling…” Crystal’s father inserted key into ignition before pulling away from the curb with three brief toots of the brassy sounding horn.
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It was then all hell broke loose and nothing would ever be the same again for Crystal, her two sisters and the Sierra Club movement. Aghast, Crystal’s bluish green eyes, looked on, disbelievingly. There had been such a violent explosion. It was a moment of infamy, indelibly marked, into the 15-year-old’s horrified psyche.
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“Oh, no! “Daddy! Oh…daddy!” Crystal rubbed her eyes, hoping against hope, not wanting to open them again. Perhaps this was a nightmare. However, it was no nightmare for the Irvine teenager. She had just witnessed a violent explosion as she cried in anguish glancing toward what used to be Fields’ car, .her disoriented mind reeled now, whirling as a dervish of windmills.
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She tried to close her eyes and keep them closed, but reality refused to be blocked out. In that instant, Crystal had suddenly remembered last summer when she toured Europe with a cheerful band of teenage naturalists. How they had crossed one day into the lowlands of Holland. But reality, the reality of the present moment, reared it’s head again.
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Only this was no tilting windmill in her path, near Amsterdam or Rotterdam, that preoccupied Crystal in Irvine now. The instantaneous chamber of horrors had returned. Crystal remembered the violent explosion at the edge of her lawn and she began to cry uncontrollably at what had happened to her father. She gazed at a smoldering metal hulk, what once had been her daddy’s pride and joy Mercedes.
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Only, this misshapen metal outrageously reminded her of how too many times in the kitchen when a faulty toaster did not pop like it was supposed to and sourdough toast blackened She looked skyward, in feverish prayer, directly asking God for a miracle.
Inwardly, in her heart and soul, Crystal despaired. “Daddy’s dead!” her troubled mind told her what she did not want to accept. Crystal tried hard not to remember immortal lines oft remembered from Charles Dickens, about being ‘deader than a doornail.’ Somehow, nothing was working for her. She was paralyzed by the explosion into outright inertia. She could not move her arms or legs and her eyes wanted to shut and stay shut.
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Again, Crystal cried out, wringing her hands, desperately, praying again for a sign of life, a miracle, that her daddy was okay, that everything was going to be okay, as always. Perhaps her daddy, Crystal, in sheer desperation, had played a weird trick on her. Maybe, he would suddenly emerge from in back of the mammoth oak tree by the sidewalk..
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She pushed some strands of soiled hair, out of her tired eyes, waiting for her daddy to run up the sidewalk so she could once more hug him close to her. Her daddy would sweep Crystal into his arms and console her, please dear God, please, let daddy hold me close to him, again. She remembered how her father used to like playing hide and seek with her when she was not yet nine years old.
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Daddy would bound from behind that huge tree towering so high above their magnificent, love filled house.
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“Oh, dear God…Please…please…let this be just a nightmare! Oh, God! Please…help me…wake up! Let this be, only, a bad dream..!!” Crystal pleaded, feeling utter confusion, on this ugliest day in her life.
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She remembered how her father oft times visited with Jim Feathers, a prime time player, with the local birdwatchers’ Society. Feathers espoused causes for the protection of aviaries for the past decade and had been a frequent visitor at the Fields manse. Feathers and Fields bothered to care, dared to travel, volunteered countless hours, not caring while pressing on for victory in popular, even, sometimes, unpopular causes.
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The two men had waged titanic battles siding against relentless commercial developers, unorthodox corporations, even the federal government’s sprawling octopii.
She stood in the framed doorway of the Fields’ home, unable to move a finger, her tender mind traumatized in a semi-coma. She refused to believe what had happened to her father or his devastated car.
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Crystal accepted her chaotic denial, knowing no other choice in her fragile mind, paralyzed by the sheer agony of what transpired, a searing pain that would not go away. Her head felt like it was splitting now in two or three pieces yet she didn’t know what she could do about anything.
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Momentarily, Fields’ youngest daughter, returned to a trembling state of reality. Yes, she did remember her father, indeed, turned the Mercedes ignition. She did wave a spirited goodbye. There had been a frightening explosion, then a mushrooming orange red fire ball, amid baby streamers, eerily, reminding her of a favorite Fourth of July celebration. However, this was no firework display in Woodbridge in the city of Irvine even at not too far away Disneyland.
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Crystal felt so suspended in time, not able to move forward nor back up either. Fire ball tails scorched too close now, by her lithe body, amid that ear deafening blast. Crystal felt so very helpless, frozen in her worst nightmare. There she was, all alone, trapped, no way out, in a labyrinth of despair, praying and praying, but with no apparent relief, nobody to help her.
Fields had flown home for a special weekend with his three daughters. It was, always, a renewal of best of times in the family, especially. since the miraculous return of his prodigal son Wolf’. His given Christian name had been Jack. However, he insisted on being called Wolf, after
his difficult adolescence into a troubled manhood induced by years of deprivation and daily survival, day by night, in the hard times and sordid conditions of depravity in an unbelievable dog eat dog Mexico odyssey. Fields had been so happy to return home.
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A few days and nights with his brood at the manor he loved always did wonders. Than he would fly to San Francisco to a strategic convention and plot the ‘good fight’, as he fierily called it, at the Hyatt Regency. But San Francisco would never come for Fields. He never knew what hit him as his torn body ghoulishly scattered, in bits and pieces, across the Irvine terrain.
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The detonative device, rigged by a terrorist, had not chanced nor brooked a possible survival for the chieftain. “Whomever planted it,” Lt. John Searcy, one of a host of investigators, “obviously, knew what he was doing. Fields had no chance, none, at all,” he concluded. “Apparently, the bomb was rigged late Thursday night,” Searcy tried to fix a time for the act of terror, “after Fields parked his Mercedes.”
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As for his daughter, the bomb knocked Crystal, as if she was a rag doll, helplessly, to the lawn, about 30 yards away. Metallic fragments of her father’s auto hurtled through the air like shrapnel, straight from one of her unfavorite war movies.
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She had never liked war movies, especially, this frightening horror staged in the theater of her perplexed mind. The twisted metal, roughly torn away from Field’s vintage car, had almost decapitated her. Miraculously, Crystal escaped critical injuries. Carl’s daughter had been thrown to the lawn by sheer force of the blast. That, as much as anything, had led her out of harm’s way.
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“Oh, daddy! Daddy! I love you so, daddy…” Crystal mumbled, over and over, realizing there was so much pain. It wasn’t so much what had happened to her, but suddenly she had no father and there was no bigger hurt in the world since her mother’s tragic passing. Crystal’s eyes, reddened now, to a near crimson.
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She couldn’t help but lovingly treasure all the love her daddy had given her, Sky and Brook, Crystal reminisced in her deep grief. She remembered how her daddy picked her up when she was a tiny girl.
She loved the way father hurled her in midair, as if she was a unique baton, only daddy knew exactly how to safely twirl. How she had missed father all those lonely nights and days, too, when the Evergreen Society leader, was out of town on important business that took him around the world.
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Fields loved to defend and organize environmentalists in worthy causes, passionately championing every underdog, or so it seemed, especially, to his three daughters and new found son Wolf.. It never mattered, Crystal reminisced. Her daddy fought for animal causes, sheltering dependent and injured aviaries, guaranteeing safeguards against extinction of any endangered species while major developers aggressively intruded into virginal lands, formerly protected under the federal constitution.
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Fields stood for whatever was intrinsically good. Crystal couldn’t think of one enemy her daddy had, albeit, she had not traveled extensively nor seen the angry eruptions by powerful land icons and vested interests.
Her dad was not loved, by all, she was to later learn during the extensive inquiry into his murder. Crystal learned how land barons worshiped almighty green instead of God.
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She, also, had not known that her dad had been threatened with bodily harm along with other members of her family in recent years. Carl Fields had tried to shelter his youngest daughter. He had succeeded, until his death. Crystal refused to believe daddy was gone, forever. She was horrified, being the only one to know . If only Sky or Brook were there, her disorientation persisted. Crystal wished she was withthem, far away, laughing, not crying. They liked to joke with each other while munching buttered popcorn. However, the youngster had not wanted to see ‘Soylent Green’ or ‘West World’.
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She had preferred to be home with daddy, instead of at a cinema by Woodbridge Lake. “Oh, someone…please, please…help me!!” she wailed, but so far still no sign of neighborhood life in a community that liked to leave Irvine on weekends for destinations unknown.
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“Daddy, daddy! “Please…come back…to me!” for the first time, she was out of denial, admitting tearfully daddy was dead. she rubbed her eyes again than stood haplessly near the front door of her afraid like no other time in her life. She gazed toward her daddy’s demolished car. “It’s so unreal!” she said, aloud. Fields’ Mercedes was grotesquely twisted.
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There were loose metal strips, contorted scraps, everywhere. It looked like a pick your part junkyard, an auto graveyard, Crystal used to visit on infrequent occasions with her dad when Fields scavenged for needed equipment to fix Nell’s family car when she was still alive.
Fields had been not only Crystal’s father, but the young teen’s mentor and prime confidant, especially, since Nell’s untimely death during a family outing. Fields had been all he possibly could, as a father and friend, to the girls, especially, to impressionable Crystal, than on the threshold in leaving an awkward stage of pubescence.
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She was beginning to blossom into another Fields’ masterpiece, like her two striking sisters, so much like their beautiful mother Nell.
“Daddy! Daddy!” She was still mystified. What had happened to daddy? Moments ago, her dad had been laughing and saying ‘Goodbye.’ Now, she realized, her daddy was forever gone.
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She hated to give in, to believe, what her eyes and grieving mind unmistakably told her. However, bits of flesh, shattered bone fragments, strewn every direction, dictated, otherwise. The massacre of Fields had immediately desecrated the day of infamy, bathed in sparkling afternoon sunshine, filtered in apricot orange tincture amid a powder blue and serene marshmallow Irvine sky.
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The Sierra Club leader had taken that fatal and final decisive step. Fields had so many fights to battle in the name of a world renowned environmentalist membership he faithfully championed, but he was gone, forever.. Fields had vowed early in his presidency never to be intimidated by identifiable and foreseeable forces.
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There had been predictable threats, accusatory fingers aimed at him like invisible poison darts. Or a gun, some chambers, deadly loaded. Yet Fields understood it was part of the game. “It comes with the territory!” Fields said. Carl had accepted the fear factor, grudgingly, as a price one had to pay, to risk, in a never ending battle with vested money interests, such as unscrupulous business center profit makers, worshiping only the almighty dollar, as if a dollar and the pursuit of that dollar was the true God in their perverse universe.
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In the beginning, Fields had been strongly supported and heaped with praise by scores of well intentioned followers. They backed popular campaigns of Fields’ beloved Society. In the midst of early tumultuous years,
Fields had been threatened as he persisted in turning down bribe attempts from out of line political officials, misguided state lobbies, assorted anti-environmentalists. There had never been a doubt as to Fields’ integrity. He had reigned as
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undisputed champ, especially, to the legions of eager Society members. As to Fields, he always had been a quite generous man. He ranked as a hero that environmentalists felt good about with empathy for any worthwhile cause. The circle of life, all the birds and animals inhabiting it, indeed, had lost a true champion.
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Fields was a man of character who put up, didn’t shut up, who fought a ceaseless battle for improved wildlife refuges. It didn’t matter the odds. What Club could not do with firearms, it did, ruggedly, in the world of public relations. The Sierra Club had been blessed with an active membership, one that did, as requested by Fields, signing petitions and writing to congressmen.
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Crystal Fields now groped for some way out, but with no apparent answers. She screamed, hoping this time someone would hear and come to her aid. But there was no one there to help her. Her mind wandered, again.
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She remembered hearing from classmates at Woodbridge High along the campus grapevine Fields had enemies. Stubbornly, she had refused to believe anybody.
Instead, Crystal delighted in seeing her daddy as the charming and caring daddy she loved so much. Crystal’s fingers felt something wet, oozing across her mint green silk blouse. She shuddered at the ghoulish thought intruding her already confused brain center that it had to be either Crystal’s blood or her daddy’s.
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Her left hand plunged into a crimson dampness, as , in a trauma, followed the wisp of warm red streaming across the shirring under a dovish bosom. There seemed no way out of her grim dilemma. She looked around again for help. Then she suddenly remembered how this was the weekend of Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
Many of her neighbors and friends had flown to watch Irvine clash for a world championship against defending champion Taiwan.
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She glanced at her wristwatch then realized it would be perhaps another hour before the cinema let out as tears streamed anew when she grieved about how Brook and Sky would be so mortified to learn her shocking news. She tried to break the unshakeable disaster by thinking , exclusively, about her sisters.
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Crystal had waged an inner battle not to follow Sky and Brook’s example, however, not always successfully. Sister Brook scored high as a people lover. She was unafraid to take a stand or speak her outrageous mind, even if it meant lively discussions with her daddy.
Brook prided in taking anybody on when it came to matters of public speaking. Brook Fields was like a piece of flint that everyone knew had a sharp cutting edge, and she was, oft times, abrasive, too.
There were times even Sky stayed out of Brook’s way as the former champion of the debating class at Woodbridge who now was attending USC. Brook followed Sky’s lead, in deference, to Sky being her older sister.
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But even with Sky, it was look out, as Brook took on all comers, even daddy, at times, with her penetrating and incisive logic. Brook had a fiery manner taken on the best in the state of academia while earning prizes as top debater and, also, carrying her school to team honors with scintillating performances, courtesy of her silver tipped tongue.
Brook seldom picked on sister Crystal Fields.
The youngest sister got along with everybody. She stood out like a shining light, a candle in the wind whose flame flickered at times, but never died. It was Brook, who was boy crazy, Crystal suddenly felt some little comfort in thinking about her missing sisters. It was just that Brook had a hard time discriminating against any boy who tumbled for her good looks. There were plenty of would be swains who rallied for her charms, if Brook permitted, but so far she hadn’t given in. Brook’s always apparent problem was how to get rid of too many boys who liked her.
That’s where Sky, a tad more experienced in a world of teenage hearts, served as guardian in Brooksie’s world. To Sky , it was obvious, most of Brook’s boy friends were not interested, specifically, in her debating abilities. They preferred Brook in some secluded corner.
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“Brook, you’re so…pretty!” Brook listened to another admirer. It seemed whatever the boys had to say, it never failed to turn her head in the direction of the boy with a compliment. Brook, two inches shorter than willowy Sky, decided at the last moment to go to the movie theater.
“It’s great, Brook…” Sky said, “I saw both movies off campus in Westwood…”
“Why do you want to see them again, Sky? “Why don’t we go and see ‘Shoot To Kill’… “I hear it’s a smash. My friends saw it last week. It’s about this psychopath…he kills eight hikers, up in the mountains. Then he gets ready to kill this girl who he forces to lead him with a bag full of money into Canada…”
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“No, Brook…we’ll see it next week, ok!!” Sky insisted. “The one called ‘West World,’ Yul Brynner, the macho man with the bald head, is in it… “It’s about this weird amusement park, not..like Disneyland…”
“People go to West World to live out fantasies. Robots take over. It’s strange, Brook, like you,” Sky laughed, “Bet you like it…
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“The other movie is something called ‘Soylent Green.'” Sky promoted her choices. “It’s about too many people, not enough food! It’s strange, too, Brook…
“What the people do, how they have to feed the hungry. “I’d like to tell you the ending, but that would spoil the movie, Brook, wouldn’t it?”
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“That’s ok, Sky ! Spoil it, for me…then we can go to my movie…instead,” Brook tried to influence Sky’s decision making. “No, you don’t, sis! It’s my turn, remember?” Sky claimed rank has it’s privilege status again.
“Don’t worry! We’ll see your picture next time, Brook!” Sky reiterated as Brook relented. Brook really didn’t mind. She wanted, most of all, some time to whisper about some of the dumb boys she recently met, what to do with fumbling fingers, groping hands.
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Whether she should have a dress, Brook smiled, designed with hidden zippers so she didn’t find herself spilling out again of her mode of the day garb while another opportunistic boy searched for more of Brook than she permitted.
Sky was experienced in ways and means of over eager boys. Brook knew that much about Sky. She would know what to do with guys who came on too strong. Brook and Sky had said goodbye to dad before noon. Meanwhile, there was this hollow shell of a bright eyed sister, too alone, at the scene of a crime.
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Meanwhile, Crystal stood watch in a time warp she didn’t want to be stuck in, not knowing how to cope or what to do, a basket-case in the violent game of life. Her salty tears spilled once more as Crystal suddenly kneeled and prayed, directly, to God.
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“Please, help me! Please, God…wake me…out of this bad dream,” the young beauty implored as her wistful eyes turned heavenward, ” God…please…let daddy be alive…for me…Sky, Brook…Wolf, too…
The only real life around Crystal Fields loomed now amid the greenery around her. There was, also, a scent of mown grass the gardener had cropped ever so close to the ground. Crystal placed open palms across her face like, as a temporary mask, to protect her from a too black, white and grey world reality. Where once there had been a technicolor movie, a family tapestry, in an unparalleled rainbow of unity and purpose, now there was a befuddled girl.
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She blocked out any sunlight trying to filter through her slender fingers. She needed some way, immediately, to forget and leave this so hideous nightmare, but Crystal didn’t know how to find a door out of her misery, even if there was a way out now.
There was no one else at home in the spacious colonial house. Crystal Fields struggled to unsteady feet, suddenly realizing she had somehow fallen asleep. It still looked like the same day, however, she couldn’t be sure.
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She heard the melodic sparrows, sundry meadow larks and robins even chattering of a scolding blue jay. Crystal Fields glanced to her right then saw a tipsy cardinal fluttering toward a towering eucalyptus, near the battered hulk of what once was her dad’s sleek Mercedes.
Perhaps it had been someone else in the car, maybe, it wasn’t her handsome daddy, Crystal hoped against hope! However, the wreck scattered in their Woodbridge expansive street gave Crystal evidence daddy was dead.
Yet she persisted in utter denial, refusing to believe what had transpired in broad daylight in security minded Irvine California.
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Fields had always been so kind to his youngest daughter, all his daughters, so patient and caring. It never mattered how busy his life had been as one of the leaders and policy makers in the Sierra Club.
Daddy had always been there for Crystal, Sky and Brook. The environmentalist scion had experienced a very happy family life rather late. He had been too busy.
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Carl Fields, however, decided he had to settle down if he was going to raise a family despite his never ending struggle for noble causes.
His iron willed campaigns took him far and wide, from California to New York, conferences in Chicago and New Orleans, to world capitols such as Amsterdam, London, Paris and Rome, meeting every challenge, fighting a never ending good fight…
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