The Mystery of Parish House
As a young boy growing up in Cedar Park, Massachusetts, Kiefer Redding often stood in front of the old Parish house, staring at its forbidding façade in fear and awe. So many stories had been told about the old abandoned place and its missing owners over the years. Unimaginative people claimed that the Parishes simply moved away. Those with a taste for the macabre told blood-curdling tales of Mr. Parish having murdered his wife and son. The truly imaginative ones hypothesized that all three Parishes—father, mother and child—had been abducted by aliens.
The truth was that no one really knew what happened to the Parish family; they disappeared sometime in the middle of October 1962. Wherever they may have gone, the Parishes went empty-handed because all of their belongings remained in the house, presenting a good argument for the alien abduction theory.
A year after the Parishes went missing a moving van carted all of their furniture and personal belongings away. The following day the windows of the house were boarded up, and padlocks were placed on the outer doors. These precautions, however, did not deter vandalizing teenagers and curious youngsters from venturing inside.
Kiefer himself had gone into the deserted house on two occasions. The first time was on the evening of October 30, Halloween Eve—what his New Jersey-born grandmother called "Goosey Night"—when he was nine and his best friend, Trip Wakefield, dared him to enter. The second was eight years later when, as seniors in high school, he and Trip entertained two young ladies with a six-pack of Budweiser and a large pepperoni pizza. The following spring Kiefer went off to college, and Parish house faded into the dim corners of his memory.
Fifteen years passed before Kiefer Redding returned to Cedar Park. He had said goodbye to the town as a young, inexperienced college freshman and came back a prominent architect, one of the most successful and sought-after in the state.
"So, this is where you grew up?" Sage asked from the passenger seat of Kiefer's Porsche.
"Yes, ma'am. I went to grammar school in that brick building across the street. And that," he said, pointing toward a stately colonial home, "was my paternal grandparents' house."
"It must have been wonderful growing up in a small town. I'll bet you knew everyone who lived on your street."
Kiefer chuckled and admitted, "I knew everyone's name within a five-mile radius. Cedar Park isn't like New York or Boston where people come and go and pass like strangers on a train. These families have been here for generations."
"You mean this is such a wonderful place in which to live that no one ever leaves?"
"Well, almost no one. I moved to Boston, first to attend school and then to open my own architectural firm. The Griffins moved to Florida when they retired. They couldn't take the cold winters anymore. Mrs. Brookes went to live with a friend in Pennsylvania after her husband was killed in a car accident. And then," he said after a few minutes of reflection, "there were the Parishes."
"Where did they move to?"
"No one knows. They disappeared without a trace."
Sage's eyes widened with interest, and Kiefer laughed. He had known this particular childhood memory would register at least a seven on the Richter Scale of Sage's writer's imagination.
"In fact," he continued, "they lived in one of the houses that will be torn down in order to clear the way for the medical building I designed."
"Do you think I could get into that house before the demolition crew starts?" she asked with mounting excitement.
"Sure, but I'm afraid there's not much there to see. Everything was removed long ago, and even though the police thoroughly searched the place for clues to the family's whereabouts, nothing was ever uncovered."
"I don't care. I just want to see the inside, take a few pictures and get a feel for the place."
"You're not planning on calling in any psychics, are you?" he groaned. "The last thing I need is to have this project turn into a media circus."
"I promise, darling: no psychics or paranormal investigators. This isn't the Amityville Horror house or the Winchester Mansion. Besides, there might not even be anything out of the ordinary in the Parishes' disappearance. Just because a family picks up and leaves without a word to anyone ...."
"That's just it. They didn't pick up; they just left. Everything they owned was left in the house: clothes, family photos, birth certificates, driver's licenses ...."
"Okay," Sage conceded. "It's odd, very odd, but it still doesn't mean that the father killed the family, buried them in the back yard and is now living somewhere else under an assumed name."
"I can't think of one good reason why a man, his wife and their eight-year-old son would disappear off the face of the earth without even taking a change of clothes."
"Maybe they went into the Witness Protection Program. Who knows? One of them may have seen a mob hit."
"Oh, come on, Sage! There are no mobsters in Cedar Park."
"You might be surprised. I always say, 'Scratch the surface of any Mayberry, and you're bound to find a Peyton Place beneath it.'"
* * *
Kiefer was right. There was nothing left inside Parish house. Faded carpet, torn linoleum and peeling wallpaper were all that remained to bear witness to the fact that the house had once been a home.
"See," Kiefer teased, "no telltale blood stains."
"It doesn't rule out the ET theory, though," his wife replied, winking at him playfully.
Later that day, Sage went to the local library, but the newspaper accounts of the Parishes' disappearance were not very helpful. Hector Parish, she learned, had grown up in Cedar Park and graduated from the local high school, the same one Kiefer later attended. After graduation, he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Korea. When the war ended, he returned to the U.S., married his childhood sweetheart and took over his father's hardware store. An honest, hard-working family man, Hector had no criminal record—not even a parking ticket. He didn't drink, smoke or, as far as anyone knew, cheat on his wife.
Sage sighed and closed the notebook she had been scribbling in.
"He wouldn't be the first clean-cut, all-American, church-going Boy Scout to suddenly turn into Mr. Hyde."
"This is Cedar Park," Kiefer reminded her when she later told him about her research. "Trust me, honey. There's no Peyton Place lying beneath the surface."
"What about other family members? Did the Parishes have any brothers or sisters that are still living here?"
"Mr. Parish had a younger brother, Isaac. He took over the hardware store after Hector disappeared."
"Do I smell a possible motive there?" Sage asked.
"Parish Hardware isn't Home Depot. I doubt any man would murder three people to own it."
When Kiefer and Sage drove down Main Street that evening, however, they saw that on the site of the former Parish Hardware, a barber shop now stood. Kiefer parked the Porsche and went next door to Wakefield's Pharmacy.
"Kiefer?" the man behind the counter asked with surprise. "I'll be damned! Look at you, a successful architect. What brought you back to this one-horse town?"
"I'm here to oversee the construction of a new medical building I designed."
"Really? I heard they were tearing down the old Parish place to make room for it."
"That's right. The demolition crew is going in tomorrow, as a matter of fact."
"I'll be sorry to see it go. It'll be like losing a link to our youth."
After several minutes of reminiscing, Kiefer asked Trip what had become of Isaac Parish.
"The hardware store just couldn't compete with the Lowe's in Whitewood, so Old Man Parish closed it and retired. He still lives over on Newport Street, though."
"Now we go talk to Isaac Parish," Sage announced as she got into the passenger seat of the Porsche.
Kiefer looked at his watch.
"It's eight o'clock already, and I'm starving. Let's go get something to eat and then head back to the bed and breakfast. I want to be at the site by seven tomorrow."
"Okay," she agreed, but the tone of her voice and the downward cast of her eyes indicated Sage's disappointment.
"Look, Isaac is an old man. He's probably getting ready for bed about this time."
"You're right," she said with a smile. "The Parishes have been missing for over fifty years. What's one more day? Besides, I don't know if Isaac Parish will have any answers for me anyway."
The following morning Kiefer and Sage had breakfast in the B&B's dining room. Then the architect kissed his wife goodbye and headed for the construction site. Sage did not want to show up on Isaac Parish's doorstep at 7:30, so she took an early morning walk around the town, stopping to window-shop along the way. Finally, at nine, she headed toward Newport Street.
* * *
Kiefer sat at his drafting table inside the trailer that served as the construction field office. He was discussing the placement of utility poles with the town engineer when the foreman of the demolition team burst through the door.
"You've got to see this," he cried, his face pale and his voice unsteady.
* * *
The architect left the construction site early and returned to the B&B where he opened the bottle of whiskey he had bought on his way back from the site. The door opened, and Sage entered the room. She stopped abruptly when she saw her husband.
"You're back earlier than I expected," she said, not noticing the troubled look on her husband's face. "I spoke with Isaac Parish. He told me his brother had been a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky soul until he went to Korea. He came back from the war a changed man. Hector was convinced that there would be a third world war, a nuclear one that would destroy the world as we know it. That's not so strange considering 1962 was the height of the Cold War era. Such beliefs were not uncommon then."
Kiefer remained silent, sipping his whiskey from a water glass he got out of the bathroom.
"I was just wondering if Hector Parish might have been even more worried than his brother suspected. What if he took his wife and son and went to live in one of those paramilitary survival camps. As a former marine, he was bound to know about such places."
Still, her words were met with stony silence from her husband.
"Kiefer? Are you listening to me?"
"The Parishes are no longer missing," he announced softly.
Sage's eyes widened with excitement.
"Are they alive?"
Kiefer shook his head.
"Old Isaac told you his brother was afraid of a nuclear war?" he asked rhetorically. "I'm surprised he didn't guess the truth. After all, the Parishes disappeared in October 1962, the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Americans were most fearful of a war with Cuba and Russia."
"What are you trying to say? What exactly happened to them?"
"Hector did what many Americans of the time did: he built a bomb shelter."
"Where?"
"Beneath his basement," Kiefer replied, choking back the rush of emotion he felt. "When we began demolishing the house, we uncovered the trap door that led to it. It wasn't much of a shelter, really nothing more than a small, windowless cellar stocked with canned foods and jugs of water. I'm surprised intelligent adults really thought such shelters were helpful. No one could have survived a nuclear war living in a hole in the ground."
Sage waited patiently for her husband to finish his story.
"Hector Parish must have been sure that with those Russian missiles so close to American soil, World War III was not only inevitable but that it was imminent. So, he took his wife and son down to the shelter, and they locked themselves in."
A heavy silence momentarily descended on the room.
"I don't know why they didn't come out. Maybe they just preferred the apparent safety of that hole to the imagined terrors in the world above them," Kiefer speculated. "Whatever the reason, all three of them suffocated in that shelter."
"How is it that in all these years, no one ever found the trap door?"
"It was in a dark corner of the basement near the hot water heater. No one would ever have found it without specifically looking for it."
* * *
The Cedar Park police conducted a cursory investigation, and after the county medical examiner ruled that the three deaths had been accidental, the bodies were laid to rest at Peaceful Pines Cemetery. The day after the funeral services a large group of youngsters and quite a few adults stood behind the temporary fence that had been erected to keep people away from the construction site. The spectators watched with solemn expressions as the last trace of the Parish house disappeared forever and along with it the mystery that had titillated generations of Cedar Park residents for over fifty years.
Salem, that bag won't be of much use in a nuclear attack.
