The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  After ten minutes, Davie joked, “D’you think that first squirrel could have told the other squirrels?”

  Alex considered this. “Either that or the crows.” They were getting bored.

  A few more minutes went by, and then Alex crawled about twenty feet beneath the brambles to get a better view of what lay ahead. A few seconds after that he hissed at Davie and motioned for him to move forward.

  Alex pointed to something through the trees. “What’s that?” he whispered.

  A long, dark shape seemed to protrude from the side of an oak about twenty yards away. The brambles kept them from seeing it clearly.

  “Maybe a branch’s leaning against the tree.”

  Alex sighted his pistol with its barrel resting on his forearm. He fired. The pistol made a noise like “Pffft!”

  “Did you hit it?” asked Davie.

  “I think so.” Alex inserted another pellet and began pumping his pistol.

  Then Davie fired. After a moment, he said, “I hit it for sure.”

  Alex aimed again and fired. Pause. “So did I.”

  Then Davie fired again. They went on firing for another couple of minutes. There was no sound of the BBs or pellets hitting anything.

  “Let’s get a little closer,” said Alex.

  They crept forward and stopped. The object was clearer, but it still seemed part of the tree. Davie saw a white growth at the bottom. He aimed at it and fired. Then Alex fired and Davie fired again.

  “What is that?” asked Alex.

  “Some kind of fungus.” Davie fired and pumped, fired and pumped.

  Alex fired a pellet and then another. “I got it for sure.”

  “Like shooting pigs in a barrel,” said Davie.

  Once more they crept forward, and for maybe half a minute the dark shape vanished behind the brambles growing above them. Then they saw it again and stopped. Neither spoke. It wasn’t a fungus after all. Alex dropped his pistol.

  The dark shape hung from a branch. The white growth was two bare feet dangling about three feet off the ground, but they had been chewed. Some animal, surely more than one, had leapt up, tearing at the feet and calves, ripping the jeans, so the feet were ragged, a big toe was missing. Once their first shock began to diminish, Alex saw where his pellets had pocked the white ankles. The boys realized they had been shooting at somebody’s feet and at the dead body that rose above it.

  Davie shouted, leapt up, and began pushing his way back through the brambles. He hardly felt how they tore at him. Alex was right behind him. The more the vines grabbed at them, the harder they pushed. Their hands and faces were scratched. After a minute Alex saw he didn’t have his brother’s pistol. He sure wasn’t going back for it.

  • • •

  Woody Potter and Jill Franklin had agreed to meet at the Brewster Brew at eight o’clock Monday morning. From the moment he got out of bed at six, Woody had been telling himself he was being foolish. He arrived fifteen minutes early. Jean Sawyer said later he’d had a hangdog expression.

  He had a cup of coffee and picked up the Providence Journal. Then he recalled Nina Lefebvre, and he asked Jean if she remembered seeing Nina in the coffee shop last week with an older man and two women. Her response was so eager it was as if Woody had invited her to sing at Carnegie Hall. She pushed back her hair.

  “Why, yes, I did see Nina with two older women and a man. Of course, by older I only mean they were older than Nina. I’m sure the man was in his thirties—handsome in a rather coarse way. He wore a black shirt, which drew my attention, and he had black hair. He had a double espresso. Of course, I love Brewster, but not many people drink espresso, so I’m always glad when they do. And the two women had cappuccinos. They were quite fit. One wore capri pants, dark with an athletic stripe down the side. I believe she had short blond hair. The other wore solid knit gray pants with a drawstring. Her hair I think was brown, sort of a pixie cut. She wore a tank top, dark blue or green. The other wore a light-colored V-neck. Both were too thin for my taste. I prefer Rubens. Do you know Rubens?”

  “I’ve never met him.” Woody immediately saw that was the wrong answer, and he stopped before saying, “Does he live here in town?”

  “Anyway,” added Woody, “you’ve a good memory for clothes.”

  Jean gave a little laugh. “I always remember their clothes better than their faces. I suppose it’s because I’m so fashion-conscious. They certainly weren’t wearing anything expensive, more like workout clothes. I’d thought they’d all come from a class at You-You.”

  “And when was this?”

  “A week ago, and it must have been Saturday, otherwise Nina would have been in school.”

  “Had you seen them before?”

  “One of the women was familiar. The blond. And I might have seen the man before. I’m really quite fortunate You-You is so close. Many people who work there or take classes often come here. And after a class, they’re quite hungry. I sell far more pastries than I ever thought I would. And croissants! I hardly knew what a croissant was before I opened up. I’d always called them buns. But so many of them come here it’s hard to keep track of them. And they all look alike, you know, like sailors.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “They’re all fit and are dressed for yoga or some jumping class. Most are between, oh, twenty-five and forty. Of course, there’re older people—yoga for seniors, Pilates for seniors. I really think they need to be more careful. Some of them come in after class all red-faced and breathing hard. It’d be terrible if one of them keeled over before paying their bill.” Jean gave her little laugh. “But seriously, last spring an ambulance had to come for one of them. It was only palpitations, but it could have been worse. Her friend called nine-one-one. My friend—she’s a librarian—said I should keep a nurse on hand. She was joking, but still . . .”

  “Can you say anything more about the ones you recognized?”

  “You mean with Nina? The blond was about Nina’s height. That’s not very tall, is it? Maybe five-five or five-six. Very fit, not an ounce of fat. Maybe a pointy face. Do you ever look at someone and think he or she looks just like a cat or a bird, even a fish? This girl reminded me of a greyhound, a blond greyhound. And the man? He had a little gray in his hair and needed a shave. He might have been about six feet, certainly taller than the blond. A squarish face—he reminded me of a bulldog. Or maybe a pug—his eyes were wide apart in that pug way, and his chin and mouth were mushed.”

  “Mushed?”

  “A square chin and thin, downturned lips—you know what I mean.”

  Woody didn’t. “And what was their mood? How did they behave?”

  “Oh, they were quite jolly. Laughing and telling jokes. Quite noisy.”

  “Nina, too?”

  “I don’t know if she said much, but she laughed as much as the others. . . .” Jean stopped and looked at someone over Woody’s shoulder. She had glanced in that direction two or three times, but now she frowned as if an intruder was trying to eavesdrop. Woody turned and saw Jill Franklin looking at him with a slight ironic smile.

  “Mixing business with pleasure?”

  Each person in life has a cross or two that he or she must bear. An annoying cross of Woody’s was that he blushed—not much, but always at moments of slight embarrassment with a woman.

  “I’m at that table over by the window,” he said, “with the paper and coffee.” He spoke somewhat brusquely to counteract the blushing.

  “Your coffee must be cold.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Perhaps a minute.”

  He felt a twinge of irritation. “Have you been getting good information for another article?” Then he remembered that she had lost her job.

  Jill’s eyes lost their humor.

  “I’m sorry,” said Woody. “That was a stupid thing to say. Let’s sit down.”

  Jill ordered a cappuccino; they both ordered bagels with cream cheese. Jill also got an orange juice. They said little
during these transactions. Jill had on jeans and a black leather jacket; underneath she wore a maroon tank top. She also wore a silver chain with a lapis pendant in a silver setting.

  “Nice necklace,” said Woody.

  Jill understood this was further apology for his remark. Perhaps it was in his nature to be brusque. If so, then it was too bad. On the other hand, he’d blushed, so maybe he was just your typically conflicted male. So she smiled.

  “Yeah, I know you told me you were fired,” said Woody, hanging on to the subject. “A whole lot of people have been asking me questions, reporters from Providence and Boston, TV guys, people who’ve no right to be asking me questions.”

  The humor again went out of Jill’s eyes. “I simply asked if you were mixing business and pleasure. Did you think I was grilling you?”

  Woody realized he had again said the wrong thing. He liked her eyes when they grew serious, although the expression wasn’t in his best interest. He glanced out at the street. The clouds had moved in with a hundred varieties of gray. It would rain later. He looked back at Jill and raised his hands, holding his palms up toward her. “Let’s start over,” he said.

  Jean Sawyer arrived with Jill’s cappuccino and the toasted bagels, one plain and one multigrain. Woody’s was plain. The interruption eased the tension.

  “Did you leave your dog in the truck again?” asked Jill.

  “Ajax? He likes it. He always knows I’m coming back.”

  Gradually they moved to other subjects. She liked to kayak in the salt ponds along the coast, and so did Woody. They calculated that at some point they had been kayaking in Trustom Pond at the same time. It seemed a benign coincidence. Woody liked hiking; Jill went running, usually along the beach at low tide. Woody said he’d have to get back to running. Then they talked about movies.

  Someone overhearing their conversation would have found it dull. But it was the subtext that was important, their gestures, how they glanced at each other and were unable to look at each other for too long. Doesn’t it seem foolish that someone is reassured when another person likes the same—often very silly—movie? They both liked The Lord of the Rings, the movie and books. Jill had read the trilogy three times and had read The Hobbit out loud to Luke. The connection gave them a sense of comfort. Neither would have been outraged if the other had disliked Tolkien, but it was better they did. Woody wasn’t much of a reader, but he’d read The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men, both of which he’d liked, as had Jill. She had read quite a few mystery novels. Woody hadn’t—they were too much like being at work, a preposterous and exaggerated work—but he’d read The Shining and Cujo and The Dark Half. This, for some reason, led Woody to look at his watch. It was ten minutes after nine. He leapt to his feet, and his chair tipped over with a crash.

  “Holy shit, I’m late! I’ve got a briefing! D’you mind if I call you later?” Here he blushed again, only a trace of pink, but Jill saw it. Then he rushed out the door, leaving it open behind him.

  I guess I’m paying, thought Jill. She took out her wallet. She didn’t mind.

  • • •

  Woody was the last to arrive in the conference room in police headquarters. The same men and women from Saturday were there, as were a detective from Westerly, another from Charlestown, a detective from the Violent Fugitive Task Force, another from the criminal investigation unit, a lawyer from the attorney general’s office, and several Woody didn’t recognize. No more room was left at the table, though a place had been saved for him. Six people were squeezed into chairs against the wall. Everyone looked up when he entered. This morning there were no coffee and doughnuts.

  “Glad you could make it, Corporal,” said Captain Brotman tonelessly.

  Bobby Anderson winked at Woody from across the table.

  On Sunday there had been further interviews with people in and around the hospital in regards to the missing baby. Neighbors reported seeing vehicles on the streets or arriving at the hospital after midnight, but nothing was particularly suspicious about this. In no case had the descriptions been detailed enough to lead to an identification, except for a black Mercedes belonging to one of the doctors. Woody’s arrival had interrupted this report. It resumed once he sat down.

  A South Kingstown detective, a DEM investigator, and a CIU detective described their progress in and around the swamp. Again a number of people and vehicles had been seen, but none appeared necessarily suspicious. However, detailed descriptions—as much as possible—had been gathered and the people and vehicles were being sought. Seven had been located, but either they weren’t in the swamp at the right time or it seemed absurd to suspect them—two nuns from St. James had gone for a walk. Thirty officers and volunteers were attempting to search the entire swamp, but they hadn’t finished. Where they had found footprints, the footprints had been photographed and casts had been taken. They had also collected a number of bottles and beer cans. A trooper had fallen into the water.

  Nina Lefebvre had not been found, but reports of her being seen were coming in from all over the state, as well as from Connecticut and Massachusetts. Some could be discounted; others had to be investigated.

  “Why were they discounted?” asked a South Kingstown lieutenant. His name was Joe Doyle. Red-faced, oversized, and a thirty-year veteran, he was known as Joe “I do things by the book” Doyle. To Woody’s mind, Doyle never contributed to a meeting; he simply lengthened it.

  Two had been African American, one had been Hispanic, and one Polynesian. Of the others, either the age difference was too great or they lived too far from the scene.

  Several at the table glanced at Doyle as if he’d asked a silly question. He resettled himself in his chair and looked belligerent.

  Acting chief Bonaldo and Bobby described the search for Nina Lefebvre within Brewster. Everyone in her eleventh-grade class was being interviewed, as were her other friends and people who lived in the vicinity of her mother’s house. These interviews were still going on. Nina had been presumably picked up in a vehicle on Water Street, where the dog had lost her scent. People in the area were questioned—including Jean Sawyer at the Brewster Brew.

  Woody mentioned talking to Jean that morning. Perhaps he made it seem as if this was why he had been late to the briefing. The descriptions he received from Jean were similar to what had been learned before, although the earlier interview hadn’t disclosed the information that the vaguely familiar man looked like a pug dog and the vaguely familiar woman looked like a greyhound. Woody hadn’t wanted to mention this, and then he did. There was a certain amount of coughing and harrumphing. Unvoiced wisecracks hung in the air like dissipating smoke. Woody then asked if the people at You-You had been questioned. Captain Brotman said it would begin this morning.

  “I’d like to be part of that, sir,” said Woody.

  A forensics criminalist said the mud on Nina’s shoes and clothes had a similar consistency and mixture of organic matter as that found on the nursery floor and in Great Swamp. This caused a slight stir. It seemed connections were being made between separate elements of the investigation.

  Nina’s bedroom had been searched. A few additional names had been found but no address book. Neither had there been a journal or diary. On the other hand, an unused pregnancy kit had been discovered.

  The FBI agent described what the agency had done to locate the missing baby, mostly out of state. A number of leads were being investigated. He spoke of cases of babies being sold for adoption. There was also much cross-border abduction from Mexico. He also mentioned reports of clandestine clinics in Tijuana and Juárez that performed transplants of kidneys and corneal tissue from abducted Mexican children to the children of wealthy Americans. He went on to describe other Mexican clinics that harvested organs from abducted children.

  “I don’t see how any of that affects us in Brewster,” said Captain Brotman. “We’ve enough problems without dealing with Mexico’s.”

  A Massachusetts state police detective said that people who knew Ha
rtmann were still being sought, especially those who Hartmann had dealt with in the previous two weeks, to see if they knew why he might have driven down to Brewster.

  Lieutenant Aaron Hammond, head of the area detective unit, had talked to Carl Krause’s doctor in Oswego and to doctors at Benjamin Rush in Syracuse. It had been difficult to get information because of privacy issues, but Hammond had been helped by several calls from the governor’s office. Carl had been in Benjamin Rush on three different occasions, the most recent being a little more than three years ago. Each time he had had a course of ECT treatments: twelve treatments, three times a week for four weeks. He had greatly benefited from these visits, but if they hadn’t seemed to last, it was because he had stopped taking his medication. Carl said the pills made him feel stupid. Each day he had been taking, or should be taking, 900 mg of Lithobid, a slow-release form of lithium, and 300 mg of Lamictal, an anticonvulsant used as a mood stabilizer. His doctor in Oswego said he hadn’t talked to Carl since April, when Carl had told him everything was going great. He had a new doctor he liked, had a great wife and a good job. Everything was fine.

  “I asked the Oswego doctor what happened when Carl went off his meds,” said Hammond. “He was reluctant to talk about it, saying it was a matter of privacy. Then he told me Carl tended to ‘act out,’ that he had ‘violence issues.’”

  Bobby rolled his eyes.

  Still to come were reports on Alice Alessio and Peggy Summers, and discussion on the subject of coyotes. At that moment, however, the door slammed open and a Brewster police officer burst into the room. Seeing acting chief Bonaldo, he ran to him and whispered something. Bonaldo reacted as if he’d been slapped.

  “A girl has been found hanging from a tree in the woods.” The chief could hardly keep his voice steady. “It might be Nina Lefebvre. Some kids with BB guns were using her for target practice.”

  • • •

  The rain that threatened earlier had now begun with a vengeance, one of those cold fall rains whose purpose seems to be to tear the last leaves from the trees and flush the grime from the earth. Wind rushed through the branches and the whole forest was in motion, a moaning and creaking nothing like language but full of protest nonetheless.