Amos Shaw's house¶
Amos Shaw's house is the priest's home in Marblehead, which Huell finds standing open with its bathroom wrecked and soaked in blood, a shelf of Lemuria books and ten pounds of crystal spheres in the nightstand.
| Type | Location (private house; crime scene) |
| Aliases | The murder house; the priest's house |
| Region | Marblehead, on Huell's route to the McDonald's, near a payphone |
| Owner | Amos Shaw |
| First appearance | Summer Service 03 |
Description¶
The house is on Huell's route to McDonald's and is near a payphone. Its door has stood open for days and the mail has piled up around the front door. Crucifixes hang throughout, and the decor is that of a bachelor, suggesting a single resident (Summer Service 03).
Notable places within¶
- Living room and kitchen. A lamp is tipped over onto the floor, the couch is knocked out of place, fixtures are toppled and there are holes in the drywall. A burner is lit under a pan whose bottom has melted out. Next to the pan are medical tweezers, a roll of gauze with bloody fingerprints and other debris of someone treating an injury. A smear of blood leads from the base of the stairs into the kitchen and ends.
- Upstairs hall. A long gouge runs through the wall as if a crowbar had been shoved in and dragged, with blood along its length.
- Bathroom. The door has been burst outward from inside, its hinges partly torn from the wall. Blood fills the tub and sink, rags of skin hang on the taps, the mirror is broken and half pulled off the wall, a wrenched tub pipe drips into the carpet and the window is smashed.
- Bedroom. Untouched. It holds a shelf of academic biblical books beside fringe material on Lemuria, clerical garments in the closet like those worn at the church (some missing), and in the nightstand an improvised plastic grocery bag of about ten pounds of clear crystal spheres like those Jester carries.
History of events there¶
Summer Service 03¶
Late at night, Huell, restless after about forty-eight hours without sleep, knocks on the door (the GM insists he do so in character) and it swings open. He turns off the burner, then rolls Read a Bad Situation, which tells him that nobody present means him harm. He investigates the kitchen and bedroom, then calls the FBI switchboard from a payphone and has the team paged (Summer Service 03).
Donald McManley arrives in his mobile-home lab. He reports that the amount of blood is about a human body's worth, mostly lost in the bathroom, so the victim is dead, and because the bathroom door was broken outward a second party may have been present. He accepts Huell's "wellness check" story, bags the marbles, has his tech print the house overnight and means to keep the local police out of it. The mail on the porch is all addressed to Amos Shaw. McManley reasons that the blood is three or four days old and that Andrew met Shaw alive within that window, so the victim is someone else (Summer Service 03).
Summer Service 04¶
At the selectmen's meeting Shaw is present and smiling, with early signs of the bloating seen in other members. Dante (as Kurt) refers to him as the man "whose house looked like somebody fucking exploded in it". The team discusses arresting him for murder or searching the house again, but does not resolve it (Summer Service 04).
Trivia¶
- Shaw is missing from the 7 a.m. service in Summer Service 03, where the mayor preaches in his place, but is alive and at the table in Summer Service 04. The identity of the person who died in the house is never given. See Amos Shaw.