An Accidental Death
By: Arthur Fontaine
Tags: Crime Fiction, Mystery, New Hampshire, Fiction, Short Story

The Worker house was a former convent, a big white clapboard building that originally housed the nuns who taught at the adjacent Catholic school, long since closed and torn down. The building was large but not fancy; the nuns had been an austere order. Its 16 bedrooms and six shared baths made it perfect for housing the extended Worker clan, which currently numbered 30; they’d ranged a handful in either direction over the five decades they’d lived there.

The Workers were well known throughout the Seacoast Region for two defining characteristics. First, as their name would suggest, they were excellent workers, reliable and polite and productive. Second, they perished regularly in random accidents.

The first characteristic caused Workers to be in high demand for businesses throughout the 18 miles of New Hampshire Seacoast. They were beloved by their employers, not just for their outstanding work ethic, but because they were just happy people; they never complained or contributed to the workplace negativity that creates problems for managers. Further, Workers gravitated to the types of jobs that were hardest to fill — the dish washers and chambermaids and construction laborers the tourism-dependent region typically burned through.

The accidental deaths, well, they were the reason Cooney was involved, and why he had scheduled time with Robert Worker this morning. For the prior seven years it had been Cooney’s job to find sense in that deadly pattern.

The trend predated Cooney by several decades. A total of nine — now ten — Workers had died accidentally since the first Workers had appeared in Rye. The last three of those deaths had occurred on Cooney’s watch.

Upon examination, each Worker death had every appearance of being an unfortunate confluence of events. These were the types of accidents that happen every day, somewhere or other. If you heard about any one of them, you’d regard it as simply someone’s number coming up, and say a little thanks that it wasn’t you.

The causes of death were varied, and typically fairly gruesome. Workers had fallen off ladders or were electrocuted. One tumbled off a small sailboat in the ocean off Godfrey’s Ledge and drowned. Another was killed by a falling branch, and another, riding a bicycle, hit a tree. A car jack failed and fell on one Worker; the last one before Cooney arrived had tripped and become impaled on a spiked iron fence. Cooney’s first investigation was when David Worker died from an anaphylaxis when he mowed the grass over an underground wasp nest and was stung hundreds of times. Three years later, Adam Worker slipped and fell in a bathtub, suffering a broken skull. Now Charlotte on the stairs.

The problem was the frequency of these events, defying all logical probabilities. Cooney knew that with the next one — this one — the odds would officially be ridiculous… longer than hitting Powerball on an average week. Any rational person would look at this and have to say, “There’s something going on there.” Yet no evidence of any crime ever presented itself, and no motive either.

And the Workers, though happy, were definitely an odd bunch. They were always pleasant when someone engaged them, but their default state was silence. And work. This could come across as a bit antisocial, but as Cooney had gotten to know the family he saw that it wasn’t intentional; he didn’t think they were even aware of it.

Cooney had never seen them conducting an ordinary conversation, even among themselves. It was as if there were a separate, non-verbal channel through which they could communicate. In fact, Cooney was the only person who saw them all together. Nobody else ever visited the Worker house, again not because they were antisocial, but because it was unnecessary. The household was a self-contained system that needed nothing external.

What struck Cooney the most, seeing them all together, was their sameness. He came to understand that they were all animated by a specific Worker gene, which made them think with one mind. The household operated almost like a bee colony, with every individual fulfilling his or her role and contributing to the greater interests of the hive.

This sameness bred a remarkable consistency in all things. Workers all dressed plainly. None of them drank alcohol or smoked, or got so much as a parking ticket. There were no televisions or computers in the house, which was always dark by 9 PM. They didn’t go on vacations. When they were not at work, they found something to work on anyway.

They had maintained this same brand of Worker oddness over five full decades, through a strange but effective system that Cooney termed “regeneration.” When a Worker child reached the age to marry, he or she went away, within a few months returning with a mate who was exactly like the rest of the family, and who possessed the Worker gene.

Workers came from all across the US, but never outside the US. As far as Cooney could identify, there was no prior contact between the matching couples, and no prior connection with the place they found each other. It was as if they knew they could go anywhere on the map and find someone with the Worker gene, and they always did.

It had ever been thus, as Cooney discovered in his exhaustive research. He had studied every Worker death from the original case files, and every piece of information he could find on the Workers, including the people who joined the clan through the years and the families that produced them.

After seven years, Cooney had collected all the data there was to be had, and concluded that there was simply no answer in it. He believed now that an explanation for the deaths, if there even was one, would come from the family itself, not from the facts. For this reason he made it his goal to know the family, studying their attitudes and behaviors in an effort to decode the distinctively odd DNA of the Worker gene.

But despite his efforts, Cooney had simply been unable to suss out anything behind this unlikeliest of situations. This failure represented a large problem for Cooney, and one which decidedly worsened this morning with Charlotte’s death.

Of course, the lack of any official explanation for all the deaths only fueled gossip and speculation. Many Seacoast residents bought into the rumor that the Workers were a cult, the deaths some form of human sacrifice. Yet, Cooney had never seen any sign of particular religious or philosophical interests among the Workers. There was no charismatic leader, only a strict hierarchy based on age. Charlotte, whose husband had died of cancer a dozen years before, had been the leader of the clan, and Robert, her oldest son, would now ascend to that position.

Others whispered that the Workers were secretly rich, with bundles of cash hidden in the house. But Cooney had combed through their finances and determined no basis in fact. The salaries of the Workers were uniformly modest; their expenses were, too. They pooled their money and used it for food and transportation and upkeep of the big aging house.

The only unusual expense, he’d discovered, was when a new person joined the Worker clan. There was always a one-time payment made to his or her families, almost like a dowry. Its value, over the years, had been about $50,000 in current currency, and was paid for both men and women. There was never any contractual framework. When Cooney questioned him about it, Robert Worker characterized it as a simple gift to thank the families for producing an individual who wanted to join their clan. But there was little familial interaction afterward, as a Worker’s world was always centered on the Worker house in Rye.

Cooney’s conclusion, after all that studying and analysis? Nothing. They were simply an odd clan — in a happy, inoffensive but definitely weird way. If it weren’t for the dying part, nobody would think much more about them.

The hallmark of strict consistency even extended to the accidental deaths. They never died at work, and never suffered any non-fatal accidents. They only perished in each others’ company, yet no one else was ever hurt. They always died on the spot. And they were always men — or had been, until now. That’s why Charlotte’s death surprised Cooney.

In fact, that was only the second major inconsistency Cooney had identified with the family. The other was Mary, Robert’s wife and Emily’s mother, who had left the house and returned home to Missouri when Emily was six. This was just after Cooney arrived in Rye, and shortly before David’s encounter with the wasps. Mary was the only one who had ever joined the Worker clan and subsequently left alive. When she left, she left Emily behind.

And that made Emily different too — something that Cooney sensed early on. To be sure, she had the Worker gene. She was quiet and happy and polite, and worked just as hard as her cousins around the house and at school. Still, as much as she was like the others, there was just something different about her too. Something that wasn’t the Worker gene.

Cooney often thought about this as an area of potential investigative insight. He attributed Emily’s difference to her mother, who also displayed all the Worker traits, but ultimately decided not to be one of them. Even Emily’s crying was a departure from family traits; after the two previous deaths Cooney had experienced, there was certainly no joy among the Workers, but no crying either.

Considering all of these curious facts, Cooney suddenly felt that his answer was close. A strong feeling came over him — call it a good old fashioned hunch — he felt certain, in that moment, that Emily was the key to understanding why Workers died so much.