“When did this happen, Sparky?” Nick said.
“Like I said—”
“Here’s something,” Lance said. He was standing by the driver’s door and looking down at the ground. “It’s blood.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” said Sparky. He hurried to Lance. Denny and Nick followed. Lance waved them all back. He was squatting over a small red patch in the snow. He rose and cast his gaze around.
“Guess I wasn’t seein’ things after all,” Sparky said, a hint of injury in his tone.
Nick muttered something and looked up the face of the sloping rock above the pickup. “If she fell, she could have been unconscious when you saw her. Then she might have climbed out . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked back and forth between the rock face and the truck. Denny was puzzled. Did Nick believe Marge had fallen from the cliff into the truck?
“Here’s a piece of fabric.” Lance picked up something dark and shook the snow off it. “Gore-Tex.”
“The snow’s disturbed here,” Nick said. He swung wide of Lance and walked a path that paralleled a groove in the snow. Sparky, hunched over, moved along behind him, then jumped forward.
“It’s a bear,” Sparky said with authority. “He drug her. He grabbed Marge and took an’ drug her into the woods. See the paw prints?”
“A bear?” Lance stood upright. It wasn’t his idea, so how could it be a good one?
“You betcha.” Sparky, in his element, thrust his skinny chest out. “Everyone knows you never play dead with a black bear. He’s likely to start chawin’ on you. And Marge wasn’t just playin’. Ol’ Black’s a carry-on eater, and that’s exactly what Marge was—carryon. This time a year, fresh outta the den, he’s gonna be a Hungry Jack. And I do mean Jack—not Jacqueline. It’d take a 300-pounder to hoist Marge outta the bed of the truck. She ain’t no peanut.”
Lance stared at the marks in the snow. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly.
“You want to find her, you follow this trail,” Sparky said. With their eyes the four men followed the furrow in the snow until it disappeared into the woods. “Shouldn’t be too hard to track with him makin’ a big groove like that. He ain’t gonna pick her up like King Kong. Gonna drag her.”
“Sonofabitch,” Lance said loudly, not in wonder this time, but in reference to the bear. He drew his pistol from its holster and checked its magazine.
“Whoa,” said Nick. “Let’s think this over.”
“It’s an abomination,” Lance said.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Sparky said. “Ol’ Mr. Bear’s just doin’ what comes naturally to him.”
“So am I,” Lance said. With his jaw leading the way, he stalked off into the woods. Nick seemed unsure whether to pull rank or chase after him. He finally took out his own pistol and followed.
“Hope you know where to put that slug,” Sparky called after him. “How many bear you killed, Nick?”
Nick threw his answer over his shoulder. “Fuck off, Sparky.”
Grinning, Sparky turned to Denny. “Hell, we know where to shoot ’em, don’t we, Homer? Pretend he’s wearin’ a bib—that’s what Big Timmy always said. Just like a little baby wears. You shoot him right in the bib.” His head bobbed enthusiastically, then stopped. “Shit. If I’d a knowed Marge was gonna come up missin’, I wouldn’ta called the cops.”
Denny said, “But they would want to know what you saw. You couldn’t keep that information from them.”
Sparky pointed a philosophical finger skyward. “Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.” Denny noticed that trouble must have already troubled Sparky: the little finger of his right hand was missing.
“I need to know what you’ve told them so far.”
Sparky’s face, which ordinarily belonged to the category of goofy, suddenly went tragic. “Hope that bear didn’t take an’ scratch my truck.” He walked over and began to examine it. Denny followed. Sparky said, “Looks like he clawed it some on top. I got a little vial a touch-up.” He swept his eyes over the yard jumble. “Where did I put it?”
Denny was suddenly aware of a strong tobacco smell surrounding Sparky, though he wasn’t smoking. “What did you tell them about Marge?”
“I said I figured she fell from the ledge.”
A dozen or so objections vied for supremacy in Denny’s head. He looked at the top of the cliff. “What would she be doing up there?”
“Not my job to explain that,” said Sparky. “Their job.”
“But why did you change the story? We agreed on a story.”
Sparky shook his head. “I decided to use that story as a backup. See, if my truck is sittin’ here the whole time, they’re not gonna suspect DLS. If they end up decidin’ Marge couldn’t of fell into the truck from up there, I’ll have a sudden idea and say she must of fell into it the night you drove me down to the Ethan Allen. Why start off with the truck movin’ if I don’t have to?”
“So why am I here now?”
Sparky frowned. “Because I called you, big guy.” He spoke with patience, as if Denny were dimwitted.
Denny said, “I mean why am I here from their point of view? My presence only makes sense if you summoned me to confirm that I drove you to town. Why would you call me if you thought she fell from up there?”
Sparky stroked his jaw. Denny could not tell if he was mulling over a repair to his obvious oversight or if he utterly failed to understand Denny’s point. If the latter, as Denny began to suspect, the jaw stroking was possibly a delaying tactic while the wheels turned. What would it be like to be Sparky, Denny wondered. What would it be like to have that brain, to live life in discrete, unrelated moments?
“When did you see Marge anyway? You called me about an hour ago. Did the bear grab her between then and now?”
“Actually I seen her yesterday. I been wonderin’ what to do about her.”
A noise from the edge of the woods made them both jump. It was Nick, storming out with his cell phone in hand.
“He ain’t gonna get a signal,” Sparky said with a chuckle.
“It’s a dead zone, Nick,” Denny called out. Sparky threw him a disappointed look.
Nick forced them toward the house with outspread arms, already cordoning off the area. When he made contact with Sparky, he more or less pushed him forward. “I’ve got to use your land line, Sparky. Let’s go.”
As they hurried along, Denny said, “What happened?”
“We found her. Most of her, anyway. I left Lance guarding what’s left. He’s praying over her. It’s the damnedest thing—he gets down on one knee to pray.” Nick seemed to go somewhere in his head, then came back. “We’re going to need six kinds of experts. Pathologists. Fish and Wildlife, God knows who else.” His face changed again. “Marge. Jesus, I never want to see anything like that again.”
TEN
WHEN DENNY STEPPED OVER SPARKY’S THRESHOLD, THE odor of neglect swept across his face like a stale curtain. A gray film on the windows encased the house in a nicotine winter. Sparky, leading the way, jabbed a finger at the kitchen wall by way of directing Nick to the phone. As Nick reached for it, Denny turned to Sparky, hoping they could coordinate their stories while Nick was occupied, but Sparky opened a door and disappeared down some stairs, apparently kicking his dog ahead of him. The animal had declared a new level of displeasure with the visitors from behind that door as soon as they had entered the house, and after a moment he was back at it, scratching at the door and barking. Nick’s response was to put a finger in one ear and shout into the phone. Denny’s was to backpedal onto the front porch. There he hunched his shoulders against the cold. The house and porch, shaded by pines that lashed the roof, felt thirty degrees colder than the sunlit driveway.
A few minutes later, Nick came out, looking haggard, but he managed a fleeting smile for Denny. He said, “What in the hell are you doing here, Homer?”
“Sparky asked me to help him with his taxes.”
Nick nodded. “Be sure to disclose his weed revenue.�
�� He leaned on the porch railing and looked down the driveway toward the road. “I’ve got people coming. We’ll have Marge checked out and try to make sense of this.” He shook his head. “There’s something squirrelly about the whole thing.”
Sparky came out of the house, his lips curled around a cigarette and pursed as if suppressing a smile over some secret accomplishment. “Found ’er,” he said.
“Yeah, we know, Sparky,” Nick said, still looking down the driveway. “You found her and lost her and we found her again.”
“Not Marge. My touch-up.” He whipped the tiny bottle of paint from his jacket pocket. “Found ’er.”
Nick glared at him. “Christ, Sparky. Have pity.”
“Huh?”
“Go look at Marge. Just go look at her.”
Sparky threw his hands up. “Hey, I didn’t ask no lady to take a swan dive into my truck.” He strolled off, shaking the little bottle of paint.
Nick stared after him, then gestured to his car. “Let’s go where it’s warm. I’ve got coffee.” They stepped down from the porch. “Three-legged economic stool, my ass,” Nick muttered. “You know how many acres he’s got left from the original three hundred? About twenty-five. Some plan—selling off your ancestral land until there’s nothing left but your dooryard.” When they reached the cars, Nick asked Denny to pull the Rambler around to a small parking area along the side of the house. He said he would do the same with his car to free up the driveway so that the forensics van could go all the way to the edge of the woods. Denny backed his car into the parking area, just fitting it between the house and a pine tree. Nick backed his car in close, and Denny joined him inside.
Nick poured coffee and began talking about his son Connor’s youth hockey team. He abruptly stopped talking and took a deep breath and blew it out. “I feel like I should be doing something more right now. But Lance is with Marge, and I’ve got to wait for the troops. There’s nothing more I can do, right?”
“Right.”
“I hate the feeling that I should be doing more than I am.” Nick stared into space for a moment, then suddenly reached both hands up and rubbed the crown of his head, mussing his hair. “Maybe Lance makes me feel that way. We have a top-dog, bottom-dog relationship, but it switches back and forth. He’s on top lately—I can’t say why.” He sipped his coffee. “Marge. Jesus. I’ve seen dead bodies, but she was just meat. The bear scooped out her belly and her guts, all the soft stuff, like the rest of her body was a bowl that he was eating out of.” He looked through his side window. “Now the woods creep me out.” He set his cup down on the console and gripped the steering wheel. For a moment, he looked like a little boy pretending to drive. “You probably heard about me and Millie.”
“Yeah,” Denny said. Affirm, then catch up—this was his strategy.
“We’re back together now. Things are looking better.”
“That’s great, man.”
“The thing is . . .” Nick took another deep breath and blew it out. “Okay, I’ve gotta get this out. You’re likely to hear some talk about me and Sarah. I dated her while you were gone.” He turned to Denny. “It was at least a year after you left. I was on my own, and so was Sarah, at least from what I could tell.”
“She said that?”
Nick looked pained. “Not in so many words. Whenever I asked how you were doing, she said she had no idea, and I’d say aren’t you guys in touch, and she’d say no.” Nick looked at Denny expectantly.
“I understand.” Denny nodded solemnly.
“Nobody knew what happened to you. I mean nobody.”
“That’s the way I wanted it.”
“Rumors were flying all over. One theory was that you owed people some money, that you had run up some debts.”
Denny laughed.
“Anyway, I said to Sarah, ‘We should do something,’ and she said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So we went out for a while.”
“How long?”
“A couple of months.” Nick shifted in his seat. “It felt funny. Like there were three of us all the time—her, me, and you. I kept thinking how you and her had been together since you were kids. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The whole thing felt wrong.” Nick squirmed. “I was a trespasser. So . . . forgive me my trespasses?”
“Done.”
Nick stared out the windshield. “There’s such a thing as loyalty, you know?”
Denny waited for elaboration. At first he understood the words to refer to Nick’s loyalty to him as a friend, but then it occurred to him that Nick might have been talking about Sarah’s loyalty.
“I don’t know, Homer. With Millie, I go from honor roll to shit list at the drop of a hat.”
A succession of thuds made them look to Sparky’s house. A load of melting snow had slid from the roof and crashed onto the porch, right where they had been standing.
“Hey, we caught a break,” Nick said. “Millie would make something of that. Karma or some damn thing.” He grunted. “Now I’m being disloyal.” He leaned forward over the steering wheel to look as far as possible down the driveway for the expected reinforcements.
Denny found himself wondering if Nick and Sarah had had sex. They went out for a couple of months, he had said. Was that enough time?
“I guess the last dead person I saw was Millie’s mom.”
Denny nodded automatically, then wondered if he should have. Did Homer know about Millie’s mother dying?
“Your note meant a lot to Millie. It was great that it was a telegram—old school, you might say. Yesterday she was on the back porch—we fixed it up since you left, and that’s where her mom stayed. It’s where she died. Millie was mopping the floor yesterday, and she felt her mom’s hand on her shoulder. So she says.”
“Wow.”
“It was prolly just a twinge. You get them all the time, but you have one in the room where your mother died and suddenly you’re in touch with the other world. I don’t buy it. It’s a problem between us. Millie says my attitude keeps her mom’s spirit away.”
“You’d think her mother would be big and rise above it.”
Nick smiled. “I miss our talks, Homer.” He poured the last of the coffee, alternating their cups several times to ensure fairness. Denny watched him do this. Nick sipped from his cup and shook his head. “The way that ledge is pitched, Marge would practically have had to take a running jump to land in his truck. I don’t get it.”
Denny looked into Nick’s face—his simple, puzzled face—and told him the truth, at least the truth that he and Sparky had created, which was closer to God’s truth than the story Nick presently struggled to believe. Denny said that Marge must have fallen from the hotel balcony into Sparky’s truck, parked on the street below, after he, Homer, had driven Sparky to town to meet with the Macalesters—more precisely, when he, Homer, had left the truck for a few minutes to relieve himself behind the hotel.
Nick took a long moment to absorb the news. “Well, hell, that explains a lot.” He had been tense behind the wheel, but now his body seemed to relax a little. He chuckled. “Lance’ll be pleased. It means his favorite suspect is still in play—the guy who stayed at the Ethan Allen. We nearly nabbed him yesterday in Burlington—came within a few minutes. Lance has some pictures of him on the way, and those should help.”
Denny barely heard this. He was busy thinking about a fatal flaw in what he had just told Nick. How could he not have seen it before? The timeline was off. Marge fell from the balcony the same night Denny—as Homer—supposedly arrived at the Burlington airport, and he told Nick he had arrived there late, so he couldn’t have driven Sparky to town. Nick was probably seconds away from realizing this himself.
“I actually got into town a few days before I saw you at the airport,” Denny said offhandedly. “I stayed at the Econolodge to sort some things out. That’s where Sparky tracked me down.”
Fortunately, Nick seemed preoccupied with the idea of Marge plunging into the truck from the hotel balcony. He asked Denny several que
stions about the particulars—the time of his and Sparky’s arrival at the Ethan Allen, the time between that and his leaving the truck to urinate behind the hotel (Nick didn’t seem to find this behavior surprising), and the time of Sparky’s return to the truck. He was silent for a while, and then he circled back to the new complication:
“So when we saw you at the airport and you were waiting for this friend from Hong Kong, you’d already been home?”
“Just a few days. And not home. At the Econolodge.”
Nick seemed on the verge of another question when the cavalry arrived—two cars and a police van chugging up Sparky’s driveway. Nick shot out the door and waved them on up the driveway to the edge of the woods near Sparky’s pickup. Denny got out and slowly followed. Sparky, returning from his urgent touch-up work, stepped to one side of the driveway. He waved at each passing police car, a cigarette dancing up and down between his lips as he called out pleasantries.
“Joint’s jumpin’,” he said to Denny after the last car had passed.
Denny said, “I gave Nick the other explanation for why Marge was in your truck. I told him I drove you to town and that’s where it happened.”
Sparky’s grin disappeared. “Dang, I sure didn’t get much mileage out of my ledge story.” He shrugged. “Oh well. Got to roll with the punches. Lord knows I been hit with ’em before.”
By the time Denny neared the police cars, the investigators were on their way into the woods—all but one, who was lifting a black case out of the trunk. As he slammed the lid, he spotted Denny and waved.
“I heard you were back, Homer,” the man called out. “A sight for sore eyes.” He was heading toward the woods but walking backwards, facing Denny. “I expect to see you out to your camp pretty soon.”
“In my mind, I’m already there,” Denny said.
The man laughed hard and long. Denny had no idea what his “camp” was. It seemed strange that he could get a laugh under these circumstances. Back home, his most carefully wrought jokes never produced laughter like that.
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