The Bear Mountain Secret

by Gayle Siebert

  “Don’t be an idiot, Trent,” he tells himself. “Mrs. Reardon didn’t raise no idiots. They don’t build roads that don’t go nowhere.”

  He’s drunk half the rye, polished off the donuts, smoked half a dozen cigarettes careful not to set the grass on fire, and actually does have to pee desperately before he sees the truck coming down the long driveway and out onto the road. A check with his binoculars confirms one person in it. One big person that has to be the dude. Then a second smaller head appears.

  “Fuck me,” he mutters. Then the head turns and bobs around. It’s a dog! He breathes a sigh of relief. “A fuckin’ dog!”

  Now he just has to wait for her hatchback, and he can do that from the truck. He’ll pull up onto the road, ready to go. If she looks to her right and sees him, it’s just another vehicle and she won’t think anything of it.

  He gets up, wobbling a little. He’s got a buzz from the rye. Good. Des always says it’s a good idea to take the edge off your nerves before a job. He trots back to the Beast and stands just behind it to pee.

  There’s a grasshopper bigger than any he’s ever seen before next to the tire, and he aims his urine stream at it. It launches at him, hits his thigh and clings there, startling him so he splashes piss on his boot.

  “Goddamn fuckin’ shit!” he yelps. He swats at the insect but it takes to the air again, this time spreading its red wings with a clattering sound. He regrets trying to piss on it. He should’ve let it alone so it wouldn’t have grabbed on to his jeans with its clingy little feet and looked at him with its bulging demon eyes. This is a bad sign. He curses under his breath some more, cleans the urine off his boot by rubbing it on the back of his calf, and zips up.

  It’s at least half an hour before she usually leaves, but he wants to be ready. He slides in behind the wheel, starts the engine and pulls The Beast up onto the road, before turning it off to wait. Like Des says, hurry up and wait.

  “Des says. Des ses. Dez sez. What sez Dez?” He sings tunelessly along with the radio, trying to organize his thoughts so he can plan what to do with all the money, but when he pushes the Dez sez out of his mind, his thoughts keep turning to the dog in the truck. He didn’t know she had a dog. Didn’t care anyway. What is it about the dog leaving with the dude that stirs his thoughts? Something is niggling at him. He can’t quite make sense of it. Dez sez.

  Then he experiences a eureka moment. He doesn’t need to wait for her to take her sweet time coming out and then chase her down. He can do her in the house and be long gone before anyone even realizes she’s missing! No car off the road with a body in it to get the cops going! She won’t be missed at work until at least nine. That gives him plenty of time. It’s totally fuckin’ awesome luck the dude took the dog!

  “Fuckin’ Arnie should of gave me a gun,” he mutters, “Could of just popped her. Would of solved all this bullshit.”

  But Arnie didn’t, so he had to come up with something else and this is a better idea anyway. He’ll grab her and take her out into a field because when she doesn’t show up at work, her house is the first place they’ll look and right away they’ll know. If he does her out in a field it’ll take them days to find her, if they ever do. The Beast will have no trouble going through a field. It farts at worse than that! Better a missing person than a dead person, Dez sez.

  There’s a shovel in the back with the tangled cables and that greasy old camo jacket and other crap the bikers didn’t bother cleaning out. He can plant her right where he does her and no one will even miss her until long after he’s gone, with $9.5K in his jeans.

  In fact, there might even be time to have a little fun with her before he does her. Or after. Whatever. Imagining what he might do gives him a woody. He wishes he had time to rub one out, but what if she leaves the house while he’s doing it? With some difficulty, he pushes the idea away.

  Why didn’t he think of this plan in the first place? Of course if he’d tried to grab her out of the house before he knew there was a dude, he would’ve been there. So God was looking after him yesterday when he showed Trent his target was living with someone! And again today, when he showed him the dog. Running into either a dude or a dog wouldn’t be good! Maybe the incident with the grasshopper wasn’t a bad sign, after all, when he thinks about the other favours God did for him. He clasps his hands together and raises them up as he says to the sky, “thank you, God!” He starts the engine, shifts into second gear, drives the short distance to the driveway and turns in.

  Once in the farm yard, he parks at the gap in the hedge, turns the engine off, and gets out. He should have gloves. Those assholes called him a fuck up for leaving prints at the motel. Again, not his fault. How was he to know anyone would come along? But he won’t make the same mistake again. He has no gloves now, of course, because he hadn’t planned to go into her house. He’ll just make sure not to touch anything.

  He pulls his sleeve down over his hand and opens the gate, then trots the short sidewalk, up the steps and across the verandah to the door. With his sleeve still over his hand, he turns the knob. Locked.

  “Fuck!” he grumbles under his breath. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” He’ll have to kick it in. It’s not a great idea because it will make a loud noise and alert her, but he doesn’t have a choice—or does he? Should he knock and wait for her to come to the door?

  He stands puzzling it out for a moment. Would she open the door? She might look out that little window at the side of the door and decide not to let him in, and then he would have to kick it in anyway. Might as well just surprise her. Always have surprise on your side, Dez sez.

  He rears back slightly and puts his boot to the door next to the knob as hard as he can. With a loud crack the jamb splinters and the door crashes back against the wall. He darts in. Where is she? Upstairs getting ready for work? He’ll check out the main floor first.

  He is scurrying along the short hall next to the staircase checking the rooms on either side, when a grey-haired woman in a bathrobe appears where the hall opens into what looks to be the kitchen. This is so unexpected he is momentarily paralyzed. Then she utters an ear-splitting scream.

  “Shut up!” he yells, and sprints toward her. “Shut up and you won’t get hurt!”

  But the woman keeps screaming. He leaps to grab her but she’s surprisingly quick and eludes his grasp, shrieking like a banshee the whole time, loud enough to split his brain. He makes another lunge but catches his foot on a chair leg, sending the chair skittering away. He gets a handful of her bathrobe. She pulls away, her loosened robe coming open. She’s almost successful in shedding the robe as she makes a dash for the open door to the outside, but he catches her easily. She stumbles and they both fall to the floor. The old woman’s head strikes the stove with a loud metallic bang and his hundred and ten plus kilos landing on her expels the air out of her lungs with a whoosh. At least she quit her screeching.

  Trent leaps to his feet, wondering how to tie her up while he searches for the target, but realizes it won’t be necessary. The old lady is out cold. Is she hurt? He doesn’t have time to worry about it. Another fuckin’ contingency! He has to find the target, grab her and get out.

  He confirms there’s no one else on the main floor, then takes the stairs two at a time to the second storey.

  No one there either. His forehead creases in a frown. Unless she left before he got there, like really early, she must be here. Did she hear the racket the old lady made, and hide? He’s in no mood for hide and seek. He checks under the bed and in the tiny closet, then does the same in the other bedrooms. Nowhere to hide in the bathroom. “God fuckin’ damn it!”

  He races back downstairs and takes another look at the woman while he puzzles out what to do. She’s still exactly as he left her, hairy legs, veiny and white, spread open immodestly. He averts his eyes from her holey panties and, careful not to touch the stove because that would leave fingerprints, pulls her away so her head flops down on the floor and she’s lying flat.

  He p
okes at her neck, but can’t feel a pulse. That’s not surprising. He’s never been able to find even his own pulse. He can’t tell if she’s breathing, either, but her eyes are closed so she’s not dead, just unconscious. He’s seen enough movies to know dead people have their eyes open, plus those dudes he and Des took out were staring at the sky. So she’s okay even though she’s in an uncomfortable position.

  She’s old, maybe as old as his grandmother. Old people shouldn’t fall. Look what happened to his grandmother when she fell—broke her hip and was never the same again. But it’s not his fault this old lady fell, it was her own stupidity. She shouldn’t have kept on screaming like that, and if she hadn’t tried to run away, he wouldn’t have accidentally knocked her over.

  He pulls her nightgown down so her old granny panties are covered and settles her arms across her body so she’s more comfortable. It’s okay. It’s only hard things like doorknobs and furniture and such you have to worry about leaving prints on.

  She will be out cold for a while, so she’s not the problem. Where is the target? Not here, goddammit. He’s going to have to go somewhere to figure out what went wrong, and the sooner the better before someone comes along. But there was that jewelry box on the old lady’s dresser. Easy pickings. He might as well get something out of this.

  He goes back upstairs and paws through the jewelry. It looks like there’s some good stuff there, even a little bundle of bills, but he’s not stupid enough to look at it now. He stuffs the cash in his jeans and will sort through the rest of the loot later.

  He pulls the case off one of the pillows, dumps the jewelry into it and tosses the empty box on the bed. Using the end of the bedspread he wipes the jewelry box to get rid of fingerprints, then purses up the pillowcase, trots out into the hall and thunders down the stairs. He’s out the door and back at his truck, by his estimation in less than five minutes since he got there.

  But before he’s settled in his seat, he’s overcome with a desperate need to defecate. It’s past his usual time for a dump or as Des calls it, a kip. Des explained it means a poop caused by coffee, or something like that. It doesn’t really make sense because coffee doesn’t start with a K but when he told Des that, Des just snorted and shook his head.

  Coffee does seem to move things along in the morning, but besides that, he often has to kip when he’s doing a job. Des razzes him about it and has even gone so far as to push him over when he’s in the middle of it, but when they boosted the computers and stuff out of that lawyer’s office, he joined him on the lawyer’s desk, didn’t he! They still laugh about that. Two steaming piles of shit right in the middle of the guy’s desk! Wish they could’ve seen his face!

  It’s so urgent he’s not sure he’ll be able to hold it in. He’s learned his lesson about that! Should he go back inside and use the toilet? What Des calls dropping the kids off at the pool? Or maybe just squat somewhere, like at the lawyer’s office?

  He looks around. There’s no sign of movement anywhere. He remembers seeing a bathroom quite close to the door. He decides to drop the kids off at the pool and goes back into the house. Anyway, it’s always better to give the ol’ cornhole a nice wipe so you don’t get skid marks in your shorts. In a matter of seconds it’s done and he congratulates himself on remembering not to touch the flush handle.

  He’s back in his truck heading out to the highway, and still hasn’t seen another vehicle. This road must not go nowhere, he thinks. Why did they build a road that don’t go nowhere? He’s almost at the intersection when a pick-up truck turns off the highway and onto the road heading his way. So the road does go somewhere. That makes sense.

  But wondering about the road is only a stray thought, and his mind quickly turns to the folded bills in his pocket. He roots them out and holds them up on the steering wheel to riffle through them. Looks like foreign money mixed in, but even so, with the fifties and hundreds, this by itself is a good haul. And the heavy bag of jewelry! “Woot! Woot!” he hoots, and stuffs his new bankroll back in his pocket. He can get the target another day. No big hurry to get paid at least for a while, if that old jewelry is worth as much as he hopes.

  It’s puzzling the little twat wasn’t in the house this morning, though. It’s a contingency. Where did he go wrong? He’s certain that’s the driveway he’s seen her go up, no mistaking that. He must have done something to piss God off, so he only gave him that little bit of help. He’ll pray on it.

  He was so sure she lived in that house. But maybe it’s that dude’s place and she lives somewhere else. Maybe she went home after he left off surveillancing. That must be it. He’ll need to put some thought into it and after his meeting with Mr. I’m So Fuckin’ Smart Briggs this afternoon, he’ll go back to her office at quitting time and follow her again. This time, he’ll surveillance long enough to find out where she goes.

  In the meantime, he’ll call his new buddy Arnie at the auto wreckers and find out how to fence the old lady’s jewellery. He’s got all day to figure out how to explain to Mr. I’m So Fuckin’ Smart Briggs what went wrong.

  He wishes his brother was here. He’s good at puzzling these things out. He grins, then laughs out loud. The old bag was a contingency, that’s true, but it hasn’t tanked the job and he made a big score out of it besides! If Des was here, he would tell him he’s a genius and High Five him.

  No sir, like Dez sez, Mrs. Reardon didn’t raise no idiots.

  Twenty-five

  Run-Run-Run

  RYAN TURNS UP the driveway and drives through the yard, passing between the farmhouse and the horse barn to Rick and Kathy’s house on the other side of the grove. He parks near the back door, turns the engine off and is about to go up to the door to see if Kathy is ready to go, when she comes out, her purse in one hand and a travel mug in the other.

  “Good morning,” Kathy says as she climbs into the truck and sets her coffee in the console cup holder.

  “Good morning!”

  “Clear skies this morning. Looks like it’s going to be another hot one.”

  “Yup. Can’t complain, though. Good harvest weather, and it’ll be forty below before we know it.”

  “That’s the truth. Hey, thanks for picking me up.”

  “No problem. It’s practically on my way.” Ryan starts the engine. “Maybe we should just check on Mutti, though,” he says. “Her front door was open when I drove past. I didn’t think anyone ever used that door.”

  “You’re right, that’s odd. We’ll just nip in and see what’s going on.”

  Ryan pilots the truck through the grove and back into the main yard to park at the gate in front of the farmhouse, where they both get out.

  “Gate’s open, too,” Kathy says. “That’s really unusual.”

  They go up on the verandah to the door. “Oh my god! She’s had a break-in!” Kathy exclaims, pointing to the broken jamb and wood splinters on the floor. She darts forward but Ryan grabs her by the arm.

  “Stay back,” he commands as he pushes her behind him. “He might still be here.”

  He eases his way in, quietly making his way down the hall, glancing into the living room, dining room and bathroom on his way to the kitchen, with Kathy right behind him.

  They find Mutti on the kitchen floor next to the stove. Kathy pushes past Ryan and rushes to her, dropping to her knees and clasping her hand. “Oh, my god! Mutti! Mutti!” She turns to Ryan and says, “She’s so pale! Call 911!”

  Ryan kneels down next to Kathy and pulls out his phone.

  The operator answers with: “Nine One One, what’s your emergency?”

  “Someone broke in and there’s an elderly woman unresponsive on the floor.”

  “Okay, sir. Where are you located?”

  Ryan rattles off the address and adds his phone number. He says, “This is a cell phone but I’ll stay here…”

  “Good. Stay with me, sir. Just repeat your address for me please.”

  He does, and the operator says, “Okay. I’m dispatching ambulance and
police now. Is she breathing?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ryan says.

  “Is there anyone there who knows CPR?”

  “I might…I can give it a try.” He sets the phone on the floor and tells Kathy to go out to the road to flag down the first responders, then pulls Mutti clear of the stove and begins chest compressions. He keeps at it, taking only a short break every few minutes, until he hears sirens and the paramedics come in. He sits back on his heels and tells them quietly, “I think she’s dead.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  THE YARD IS overflowing with vehicles: a Jeep with “CKCK NEWS” emblazoned on it; a cube van with the RCMP logo; several RCMP cruisers; a gray sedan marked “Coroner”; Jeanie and Sarah’s cars and of course Ryan’s truck; Rick’s truck and an ambulance. When the ambulance pulls away, followed by one of the RCMP cruisers, Sergeant Neufeld comes to join the group clustered around the side yard of the farmhouse. “I told the news reporter you won’t be speaking with her, and that it looks like a home invasion gone bad,” he tells them. “Ryan, you didn’t see anything? No vehicle?”

  “No. Nothing. We wouldn’t have gone in except when I drove into the yard I noticed the door was open. No one ever uses that door.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Maybe nine? About nine, Kathy?”

  Kathy says, “Yes, a few minutes before nine.”

  Sergeant Neufeld turns to Rick and says, “and you said you left a little after seven. Do you think you might have driven through the yard without noticing the front door was open?”

  Rick’s brow creases and after a moment, he says, “I don’t think so. But I suppose it’s possible.”

  “What about the dog. He didn’t make any noise?”