Because Stepford had missed his Wednesday night poker game, the only ritual in which he’d ever regularly and willfully engaged, his buddy Freddy Gaithers had called the sheriff’s office to report him missing. The Duster was here at Stepford’s house, and not much of anything was within walking distance of the property, so it seemed likely that Stepford might have taken a ride with someone. Given the mysterious deaths of his buddies Cole Buchanan and Darnell Absher, no one could really blame him for skipping town.
Or he could be lying dead behind the front door. Littlefield hoped against hope that he’d just gone off somewhere, and that he’d stay away for a while. It would help things settle back to normal if one more hot-blooded Matheson was out of the picture.
Who the hell are you kidding? There’s no such thing as “normal” in Pickett County. Just days spent bouncing between the extremes of abnormal and paranormal.
Besides, Stepford would never abandon his Duster, not with relatives and other assorted thieves hanging around. According to Freddy, nobody had heard from Stepford in three days. If the man’s corpse had been trapped inside the stuffy cabin that long, in the rising heat of May, Littlefield would have been able to smell it from here on the steps.
Littlefield knocked and called again, and then tried the door handle. It was locked. Stepford didn’t seem like the door-locking type, even considering the loose company he kept. Circling to the side of the house, Littlefield climbed onto a corroded oil barrel to peek in a window. Through a gap beneath the towel that hung as a curtain, all the sheriff could see was a stretch of plywood flooring and an empty couch. All the lights were off.
Littlefield considered driving back to the courthouse to secure a warrant, but that would kill half the morning, easy. What if Stepford was inside suffering from a heart attack or stroke, barely clinging to life?
Glancing around, Littlefield found an empty dog-food bag in the weeds. He folded it into a sodden square, climbed back on the barrel, and used the pad to protect his elbow. He was about to smash the glass when he realized what was missing, and why the silence was so unnerving.
Dogs.
Every time I’ve been out to issue a summons for child-support payments, those ugly old fleabags moan and howl like firecrackers are tied to their tails.
Even though it wasn’t deer season, Stepford might have gone out for a good old coon hunt and camping trip. Coon hunters did it for the fun, not the meat—or, more likely, as an excuse to get away from it all. That made sense, although he wondered why Freddy wouldn’t have been invited. Littlefield relaxed a little, eager to accept a logical explanation based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.
He stooped to climb down from the barrel, a tinge of arthritis flaring in one knee. But a smoldering ember of fear pulsed in his chest, stopping him in his tracks. He knew he was so eager to accept the easy answer because he was afraid of the truth. If this returning McFall was bringing all the past malevolence back with him, Littlefield was the only one who could stop him.
Because Littlefield knew more about the McFalls than anyone alive.
To hell with it.
Littlefield flung the makeshift pad away and drove his fist into the window, large shards of glass tinkling to the floor. He picked a couple of slivers from his knuckles, licked the minor puncture wounds clean, and then knocked out the larger wedges of remaining glass before hoisting himself inside.
He scrambled over the kitchen counter, plunging one foot into a sink full of sour dishwater. Stepford apparently did as little cleaning inside as out. Littlefield pushed aside a skillet that featured a mysterious mound of fuzzy green mold. The stench didn’t disguise the fact that the air inside the little cabin was stuffy, suggesting that doors and windows hadn’t been opened for days.
After turning on the lights, he performed a perfunctory search of the living room, although there was nothing to indicate a struggle. The bedroom door, which bore a peeling bumper sticker that read “Don’t Tread On Me,” was closed. Littlefield gave it a knock before trying the handle. Bracing himself for anything, he entered.
“Hey, sheriff,” came a drowsy voice from the bundle of blankets piled on a mattress on the floor.
Littlefield flipped the light switch and the bundle twitched, then a thin pale foot emerged from the blankets. “Who’s there?” Littlefield boomed in his law-enforcement voice.
Stepford sat up, the blankets sliding from his shoulders to expose his bony frame. His chest was crisscrossed with old scars. He appeared to be naked beneath the covers, and Littlefield hoped the man didn’t suffer a sudden urge to use the bathroom or get dressed. “Did I do something bad again?”
“Nuh-no, we just had a report that you were missing,” the sheriff said, feeling foolish now.
Stepford cleared his throat and spat into a Coke can beside the mattress. He missed, and a dirty stream of saliva streaked across the lettering. Littlefield could have sworn there was blood in the drool, but maybe Stepford had some kind of gum disease. “Good to know I still got friends.”
“I broke your window,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get Lloyd from maintenance to come out and replace it.”
Stepford gave a wave of dismissal. “Hell with it. It’s getting to be the time of year when a man needs some fresh air anyway.”
“I apologize for barging in on you like this,” Littlefield said, hoping he wouldn’t be asked for a warrant. “I knocked and hollered first.”
Stepford was groggy, but it seemed to be from sleep rather than booze or drugs. “Sounds like you were just doing your job.”
Damn. Is Stepford being conciliatory? This is something new. He usually pisses and moans when I deliver a legitimate warrant, and here I am without a leg to stand on, and he’s acting like I dropped in for a beer.
“You okay?” Littlefield asked, anxious to be out of the room, which smelled like beer farts, old socks, and a mildewed decay, as well as a sweeter kind of rot that underpinned the room’s fetid concerto of odors.
“Yeah, sure. Just slept a while. What time is it?”
Littlefield checked his cell phone. “1:30.”
“Day or night?”
The dark towel thumbtacked over the window admitted little light, but the sun was clearly out. Now Littlefield wasn’t sure about the drug use, but he didn’t want to rummage through the surrounding piles of clothes to test his suspicions. “It’s afternoon. Well, Stepford, since you’re okay, I’d best be getting on with my work. Call my office about that window repair when you’re ready.”
Stepford rubbed a hand over his scalp and then stared down into it as if surprised he still had hair. “Sure thing, Sheriff.”
“Say, what happened to your dogs?”
“The varmints run off. I tell you, ain’t nobody got any gratitude any more, not even ‘man’s best friend.’”
“While I’m out here, do you mind if I look around the woods a little? I’m still working on the Cole Buchanan case and … ”
Littlefield expected Stepford’s rage to boil over at the mention of his dead friend, but he merely scratched at his hairless, scarred chest and nodded. “I’m all eat up inside over it, but you got to let these things pass.”
“I’m not saying there was anything suspicious,” the sheriff said. “I just haven’t gotten a look at the backside of the McFall property yet. Since the two of you were at the church that night with torches … well, it just seemed awful odd when he was found dead in that fire.”
Littlefield was uncomfortable even having this conversation. Stepford either seemed to have forgotten the incident entirely or he’d already resigned himself to a new reality—one in which the rich folks with their attorneys made all the rules of the world while Stepford’s kind hid in their bedrooms and kept their mouths shut. But Stepford was barely interested, much less angry. He didn’t seem to have a thing in common with the man Littlefield had been arresting for thirty years.
“Do what you got to do, Sheriff,” Stepford said. “I’m just going to sleep a l
ittle bit more. Lock the front door on the way out, will ya?”
“Be glad to,” Littlefield said. “I’ll put out word that you’re okay.”
Stepford collapsed back on the mattress as if he’d expended all his energy on the conversation. “G’night,” he mumbled, followed by something else Littlefield couldn’t make out.
Back outside in the inviting fresh air, Littlefield checked the dog pen. Wire mesh was nailed to narrow hardwood planks extending eight feet into the air. Even the most determined dog wouldn’t have been able to jump or scramble out, and the gate had three hasps to keep it secure. Checking the latches, Littlefield saw old brown spatters on the wood that might have been blood, along with small swatches of fur.
I’m staying away from conjecture. I don’t need to feed my paranoia. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that there’ve been two mysterious deaths in less than a month, and McFall’s return is completely unrelated. After all, there’s no proof of any wrongdoing.
Unfortunately, McFall was all the proof the sheriff needed. He headed up the woods along a trail that opened up on the side of the yard. Stepford had obviously used the path for hunting. Perhaps the dogs really had broken free and taken off up the mountain. The blood spatters could be another coincidence.
Maybe. Littlefield was killing himself with maybes.
Here and there he saw paw prints, and even a few boot prints that were faint from the rain. No one had used the trail in days, but this was probably the route Cole Buchanan, Sonny Absher, and Stepford had taken the night they’d intended on vandalizing the church.
Littlefield was short of breath after a few minutes, gasping and cursing his age. He pulled out the map he’d photocopied in the deed office and calculated his location based on the highway, Stepford’s house, and the distance he’d walked. The McFall property extended to the ridge and included most of this side of the mountain. Stepford’s property was a puny twenty acres in comparison, and on the other side of the ridge, the land was divided between the Days, the Abshers, and the Buchanans, bordered by the river and encompassing a mix of pasture and woodlands. A strip of designated national forest ran along the road before opening into a much larger parcel to the west.
While the Absher land had been subdivided among multiple heirs, the Buchanan property was consolidated into one large tract. Apparently the Buchanan heirs worked out their property rights and disputes within the family, with half a dozen residences and a Christmas tree farm tucked into a rocky hollow. David Day’s property was thirty-six acres, much of it in pasture that he leased to local cattle producers, but he also had a garden and some forest land. From the map, Littlefield estimated that the ridge was maybe five hundred yards ahead, and he wasn’t sure he could make it that far.
Littlefield was just about ready to give up and turn around when he reached the fence. It bisected the path with the clear intention of halting foot traffic. It was constructed of new, pressure-treated wood, a series of four-by-four posts with three wide planks suspended between each. It would be easy enough to clamber over the fence and continue along the path, but the message was unmistakable: Trespassers not welcome.
Back in Littlefield’s youth, the land in Pickett County had more or less been open for public hunting, hiking, and camping. Local landowners generally didn’t post their property or prohibit access, and those who did were considered “contrary.” But with more and more outsiders buying up the land for investment, outdoor recreation was now severely limited. Aside from a few designated hunting grounds and the adjoining national forest, only the undeveloped rural sections still offered places where people could get away from civilization.
And now McFall had walled off a little more of the world.
Littlefield bent for a closer look at one of the posts. It bore the same brown spatters as the one in the dog pen. Littlefield considered taking out his pocket knife and shaving off a section, but he couldn’t justify the expense of running a test to determine if the blood was human. The fence had obviously been constructed after the two men’s deaths, anyway, so the blood couldn’t belong to Cole Buchanan or Darnell Absher. Littlefield contented himself with the thought that Stepford’s dogs might have trapped a wild animal here and mauled it before dragging it into the woods.
Littlefield walked the fence line for a while, heading downhill. He caught his second wind by the time he neared Little Church Road. Through the trees, he could see the blackened stone foundation of the red church. A bulldozer on a long trailer was parked beside it, ready for action. Littlefield was reminded of how quickly things could change, even for someone as old as he was. Even for a mountain as old as this one.
When he reached Stepford’s cabin, he didn’t bother knocking to tell Stepford he hadn’t found anything. He climbed into his Isuzu Trooper and drove away, relieved that he hadn’t added a third corpse to McFall’s ledger.
Not yet, he mentally reprimanded himself. Not yet.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What about the tree ordinance?” Heather Fowler addressed the planning board that was gathered around the conference table in the courthouse. “And the line-of-sight distances required by the Department of Transportation for entrances and exits? This many homes will generate a lot of traffic.”
Heather had the unsettling feeling that she was the only one of the five members of the county planning board who had actually read the permit application for McFall Meadows. Her copy of the twenty-two-page document was covered with yellow highlights, scribbles in the margins, and brown circles from coffee cups, while everyone else’s copies were pristine, without even an indentation near the staple to indicate that the first page had been turned.
“It all looks good to me,” said Wally Kaufman, who owned a local grading company. His copy of the document was sitting in front of him at the conference table—still in its mailing envelope.
The county commissioners had appointed people who were designed to represent a broad cross-section of the community, but with the exception of Heather, all of them had a hand in land development. Heather was the commissioner representative on the board, which met the third Thursday of every month, and she was pretty sure she’d been dumped here so that her voice would be drowned out by all the men who profited from unchecked growth.
“I’ve visited the site,” she said, catching the eye of Larkin McFall, who sat at the table beside the county attorney, Francisco Baldemar. McFall gave her a smile of encouragement as she continued. “The narrow road around the property isn’t even paved, and this projected traffic count of nineteen vehicles per hour would double the load on it.”
“Little Church Road is on the state’s Transportation Improvement Plan,” said committee member Bill Willard, a renowned wildlife photographer who’d parlayed his wealth into several large land holdings. Willard especially irked Heather because his developments were damaging the very wildlife on which he had built his fortune. He was representative of the hypocrisy and corruption of the planning board, and, by extension, the entire local development community.
Heather shuffled through her paperwork until she found the state’s list. She scanned it and shook her head. “I don’t see it on here.”
“Emergency approval,” Willard said. “It was a rider on a local bill that was passed two months ago by the state legislature.”
Heather didn’t recall any discussion of such an action, which would have required a good deal of local support. The Republican representative and the Democratic senator for the region wouldn’t waste their limited political capital in the General Assembly unless substantial payback had been promised. “But we hadn’t even received an application for the proposed development at that point.”
Willard shrugged and glanced over at Francisco. The curly-haired attorney cleared his throat. “The state must have identified the road as a future growth corridor,” Francisco said. “Just like my client did. Even if McFall Meadows never became reality, other developments would have popped up soon. Despite the poor economy, the area is
still a popular destination for second-home owners and real-estate investors.”
“Okay, even if the state grants the line-of-sight variance, the county still doesn’t allow lot sizes smaller than half an acre. This plan somehow squeezes five hundred and eighty houses, twelve condominium complexes, and four townhouses onto two hundred acres of land. I don’t even see how it would be possible to squeeze enough septic tanks onto the property.”
“May I?” McFall said to Logan Extine, the chairman of the board.
“The chair recognizes Mr. McFall,” Extine said, going through the formality for the transcription benefit of the county secretary, the only other person in attendance even though all meetings were open to the public.
“Miss Fowler, the first phase of the development will be near the top of the property, where the slopes—as you well know—are pretty steep,” McFall said. “We’ll need to clear a lot of trees to install the required septic lines, which is why we’re asking for a variance on the tree ordinance.”
“But those are old-growth hardwoods,” Heather said. “And I understand there are some rare high-altitude bogs along the ridge as well.”
“‘Old’ is a relative term, Miss Fowler.”
“What about the proximity of national forest lands? I’m sure there are federal laws that protect the viewshed and prevent that kind of drastic clear-cutting.”
“We’re focusing on local approval, Miss Fowler,” Extine said, with barely suppressed exasperation. “This board can barely handle what’s within our own borders without worrying about a billion other rules and regulations.”
“We’re sworn to uphold our own rules, though,” Heather said, forcing herself to remain calm even as her blood rose to boiling. The last thing she needed was for the other board members to accuse her of hysteria—not that it would change her reputation any. “Squeezing that many residences onto that mountain will create an eyesore. It will also violate at least half of the Unified Development Ordinance.”
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