The Forest Prime Evil

by Alan Russell

  I live in a rental on Potrero Hill, a subdivided frame house on Carolina Street. When giving directions to my place, I always instruct visitors to look for the thorn between two roses. My house is nestled between two Victorians, but that’s not to say the area is a museum piece; the Potrero district hasn’t gentrified nearly as much as most of the other hills. It’s a polyglot working neighborhood, at least for now. I keep watching for extensive renovations, for telltale signs of encroaching espresso roosts, or bubble-bath dens. Luckily, I’m not the only one. The Neighborhood Watch isn’t only for criminals; I think most of us are on the watch for developers.

  I took a suspicious look around my neighborhood and didn’t see any new construction, so I decided I could enjoy the view. Swiveling my head around in Linda Blair fashion, I saw the bay to the east, the city to the north, and Twin Peaks to the west. Then, I took a deep breath. The aroma was courtesy of Hills Bros. Coffee. They do their roasting down the hill. Whenever I sniff for very long, I can always pick up some of their wafting scent. My senses told me I was home. My mind wasn’t as accommodating. The case stayed with me.

  The telephone awakened me from a reverie that had me back in Humboldt County. Like Archimedes, I kept looking for the opportunity to shout “Eureka.” Norman Cohen was a welcome interruption. Norman’s a psychoanalyst. Most of his patients have too much time, and too much money. As I often remind him, he’s not afraid to help them waste both.

  Norman wanted to know what I was up to, and whether I was busy for dinner. I briefly told him about the case, which prompted him to pick our dining spot: Greens.

  The vegetarian restaurant is at Fort Mason. Norman was waiting for me inside. Greens’ association with San Francisco’s Zen Center might also have entered into Norman’s decision for us to dine there. A few weeks earlier he had announced, in typically dramatic fashion, that he was becoming a Zen Buddhist. Norman was always becoming something or other.

  As usual, Greens was full. Most people remember the food at Greens, and the wall of windows that look out to the berthed boats, San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin headlands. I had forgotten about the huge redwood burl that divided the restaurant and the waiting area. The natural sculpture had been burnished to a brilliant burnt sienna. I got to admire it up close, because we were seated next to it. Redwood country, and the case, kept following me.

  We stuck our noses in the menus and had to do some deep stomach searching. One of the problems with Greens is that there are too many choices, but we were hungry enough to do plenty of ordering. I had the jicama-orange salad, and Norman had the lentil salad with mint, roasted peppers, and feta cheese. We both ordered a cup of black bean chili with olive oil bread, and for my main course I settled on the rosemary linguine with caramelized onions and walnuts, and Norman had the eggplant gratin with saffron custard.

  Norman started talking about all the inner discoveries he was making through Buddhism. I figured the similarities between Norman and Buddha started and finished at their waistlines—Buddha is usually portrayed with an ample belly. But while Buddha’s stomach would have evolved from sedentary thinking, Norman’s came from a love of eating. I didn’t see him with a begging bowl and robe any time soon.

  We talked about my case. My hand kept unconsciously reaching out to the redwood. Norman thought I had done the right thing to come back to San Francisco. “Your mind will sort things out here,” he said. “Give it a little time. Examine your dreams.”

  His birthday was the next week, so I gave him an early present. I told him about my green dream. That seemed to make him happy.

  Then it was his turn to talk. Usually, I’m a better listener. I vaguely heard him go on about his ashram and some of the wonderful things he was learning. He turned philosophical, talked about his zazen training, and then, with a dramatic whisper, asked me one of those ancient Buddhist unanswerables: “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a noise?”

  My preoccupation showed through. I had my own deep thinking to do, but it didn’t involve falling trees so much as falling branches. “If a man falls in a forest and never gets up,” I countered, “and no one was there to see him fall, was he murdered?”

  Norman didn’t like his philosophical toes stepped on. He asked for the check from our green-aproned server.

  Later that night, I called Miss Tuntland. I started the conversation by saying, “I keep thinking I’m barking up the wrong tree.”

  She laughed, and I felt better. I wondered if she looked forward to my voice as much as I did hers. Miss Tuntland is a year older than I, and maybe a few decades wiser. The month before she had turned thirty-nine, and, as she was quick to point out, that “wasn’t a Jack Benny thirty-nine.” Guile wasn’t in Miss Tuntland’s nature. She had once told me she had a Norwegian face, a French bosom, an Italian backside, and, above all, a Yankee sensibility. I knew about the last but couldn’t help but be beguiled by the rest of her United Nations description. For two people as close as we were, it was damn strange we’d never seen each other. We both knew that, but both of us were also afraid of a face to face. I wondered if it was easier for me to accept her as a ghost, a vibrant voice in my ear, rather than as a person.

  “Maybe I can offer you a few more trees,” she said.

  “Woof.”

  “Ruth Sawyer,” she said, pretending she hadn’t heard, “isn’t a local girl. In fact, two years ago she came straight from Mombasa to Ferndale and married the Reverend Reginald Sawyer. Her parents are missionaries, and, from what I could gather, they arranged her marriage. They were old friends of Sawyer, having served with him in an African mission about a dozen years ago.”

  “An arranged marriage,” I mused. “Not exactly a modern practice.”

  “Ruth was apparently quite willing. Mombasa didn’t offer much in the way of marriage material.”

  I’d heard the same thing said about San Francisco, but I didn’t see that many single women jumping to marry men twenty years their senior. But it wasn’t the age factor that bothered me so much as something else, something I still couldn’t pin down.

  Miss Tuntland assumed my quiet was a desire to hear more, so she briefed me on Reverend Sawyer. His background surprised me. She said he had never been an activist until the past year, had toiled quietly in the fields of the Lord throughout his ministry. Even his first few years at Ferndale had been quiet. But that had changed. He had started speaking out from the pulpit, warning against the evils of pantheism and tree worship. Less than a year ago he had formed the Third Day. Miss Tuntland said there were no public documents on 3-D’s funding, but it was commonly assumed that it was “generously supported by lumber money.” Harold Dozier, in particular, was a prominent attendee at many of their functions.

  Don McLellan was Miss Tuntland’s final subject. I had forgotten that I had asked her about him and couldn’t even remember why I had thought him important to the case. She said that McLellan hadn’t always stayed in his woods. He had enjoyed bicycling and often rode as far as Eureka. Although he didn’t wear his silver hard hat while he cycled, McLellan was easily identified by the long black coat he wore. It flapped as he rode, a banner almost as identifiable as his flags. The hermit apparently hadn’t liked living in the open as much as the Green Man had. Miss Tuntland said McLellan had installed thick redwood doors in his goosepens and locked those doors with steel padlocks.

  “One time he took a bicycle trip,” she said, “and stopped in Scotia, where he demanded to see the head of the Pacific Lumber Company. No underling would do. When the executive presented himself, McLellan handed him the keys to his goosepens and said he was entrusting him to hold them until his return.”

  He had probably been good for a lot of laughs, I thought. The local eccentric in the woods handing over his keys to the forest. But something sounded a little off.

  “Keys?”

  “Three of them” said Miss Tuntland. “One for each of his three goosepens.”

&
nbsp; “Does Goldilocks enter somewhere into this story?”

  “The goosepens served different functions,” she said. “He lived in one, kept his bicycle and his climbing equipment in another, and the third one he used as a smokehouse.”

  The Green Man had only had one goosepen, I thought. But then McLellan had lived in the woods for more than a year, and Shepard had only been there during the temperate summer.

  “I even did a little research on giant Leucaenas,” said Miss Tuntland, “today’s miracle trees.”

  “And here I’ve only heard of the burning bush.”

  “You’re behind the times, as usual. In the tropics, a giant Leucaena can grow more than twenty feet in its first year. Its seedpods are excellent nutrition for people, and the leaves are exceptional fodder for livestock. Even its roots fertilize the soil. And Leucaena wood is as good for furniture and building as it is for burning.”

  I thought about that. Then I said, “Tell me, Miss Tuntland. Does it make a good cross?”

  22

  I WAS UP BEFORE the sun and on the road a little before 5:00 a.m. By driving hard, I made it to Ashe’s cabin in about four hours. I hadn’t shaved, hadn’t slept much, and looked like hell. There was a sharpness to my rapping, an impatience. She came to the door dressed up, ready to leave. She also came with a .22 in her hand.

  “When I left your place here the other night,” I said, “someone else pulled a gun on me.”

  “The other night was a mistake, Stuart.”

  “But holding a gun on me isn’t?”

  She remembered the gun and tucked it discreetly into her purse.

  “Worried about something?”

  “There have been a few death threats,” she said. “I don’t carry a pistol because of its designer look.”

  “Since you feel you’re in danger, why don’t you stay in a safer spot?”

  “Because I like it here. Because I don’t like having my lifestyle dictated to me. Because it’s convenient to Sweetwater.”

  “And it’s far enough from Lofield and your stepfather.”

  She didn’t comment. We sat in the same chairs as we had on my previous visit. I wasn’t the only one thinking that. We leaned away from each other, afraid to be close, afraid to remember.

  “Shepard was seeing a woman,” I said. “She was visiting him in River Grove the night he died.”

  I told her about his babe in the woods. Ashe was a good listener. When I finished, we looked at each other for a long time.

  “You have questions, I suppose,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Your story doesn’t surprise me. Christopher was that way. As far as I know, he only made love out of doors.”

  “That was your experience?”

  She nodded. “He said that walls were constraining, that they kept emotions in check. Outside, in the groves, he said you were free.”

  “I thought you told me he was attracted to inhibited women.”

  “I did.”

  “By description, this woman was about as quiet as a heavy-metal concert.”

  Ashe blushed. “Maybe she was partially that way—for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Christopher’s desire was for emancipation of the spirit. If he could get a woman to say things, and do things, and experience things, that she had never done before, then he was excited. The exhilaration of freedom, of breaking out, can be quite heady. Christopher would have been cheering her on, encouraging her.”

  “So you’re saying she was screaming for herself, and for him?”

  She nodded. The silence between us grew. Abruptly, she kicked the dirty hardwood floor.

  “Ask the question,” she demanded.

  I did. “Were you his lover that night?”

  “No.” she said. “Disappointed?”

  As an investigator, or as a potential lover? “I’ll live. Shepard didn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean he was murdered either.”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Ashe. You can’t privately tell me he was done in by a widow-maker and publicly associate with groups who all but say the lumber interests killed him.”

  “And you can’t say the timber industry is innocent, even if they didn’t actually kill him. They’re the killers of nature.”

  “That’s not the case I’m working on. I was hired to try to find out how a man—or should I say a myth?—died.”

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “I imagine that was a trite saying even back in the sixties.”

  “Do you like snooping in dirty doorways, or do you like taking a stand?”

  “I like bringing murderers to justice.”

  “Is that what this is? Murder?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Too many people have too many secrets.”

  “That hardly qualifies as a smoking gun.”

  “No. But I find it more interesting than the smoking limb theory.”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “Shepard has proved more valuable dead than alive to your cause. He was a liability while he was alive. What you described as naiveté could have been interpreted by others as something much more insidious. Then there was the matter of his meeting with your stepfather in late August and getting a personal tour of the Trans-Mississippi tree-planting operation. The word is that Shepard might have been soft on the old-growth issue. Or more than soft.”

  Almost imperceptibly, Ashe nodded.

  “You and your stepfather have a virulent dislike for each other,” I said. “Your attitudes go beyond familial discord. I’d like to know why you hate him.”

  Ashe didn’t immediately answer. “Maybe because I think he’s a murderer,” she said.

  “Of the Green Man?”

  “No. Of my mother.”

  “Explain.”

  “My mother has ovarian cancer.” Ashe made the statement like it should explain everything.

  “I can sympathize, but I still don’t see—”

  “Have you heard of the drug paclitaxel?”

  I shook my head.

  “To make a kilogram of paclitaxel, you need twenty thousand pounds of yew bark. My stepfather’s company, all logging companies, have long considered the Pacific yew a waste tree, a weed if you will It grows in the old forests from the south of Alaska to northern California. It’s an understory tree, not the kind of tree people ever even notice. The yew isn’t a fast-growing tree. It has a thin, purplish bark. It takes time to get substantial amounts of bark, hundreds of years. Logging companies don’t have that kind of patience—for either trees or humans.”

  A tear ran down her face. She struggled to keep talking. “Clinical trials have shown that paclitaxel reduces melanoma tumors. There have been promising results, especially with ovarian cancer. But the doctors don’t even have enough paclitaxel to continue these studies. And they don’t have enough paclitaxel to give to my mother.”

  I wanted to wipe away Ashe’s tear. I wanted to comfort her. But I guess I wanted answers more.

  “Does your mother blame him?”

  “No. But he thinks she does. She pressed him on the yews, and the paclitaxel. It made him angry. He couldn’t lash out at a sick woman, though, so he blamed the messenger. He blamed me.”

  “That’s why he hates you?”

  She nodded. “He’s a control freak. My mother always toed his line before, and now, in the end, she’s become her own woman. She’s questioning things. He doesn’t like that.”

  “What’s she questioning?”

  “Everything. Tin gods can’t stand losing their true believers. He can’t tell her to have faith in him and everything will be all right.”

  It was all very neat. It explained why daughter and stepfather couldn’t stand each other. But I didn’t think it explained enough.

  “I’m late,” said Ashe. “I’m supposed to be in Sacramento this afternoon.”

  We both
got up from our chairs at the same time, touched by accident, and felt the electricity spark up once more between us. Again, she stepped back, either afraid of me or afraid of herself.

  “When you think of flailing limbs,” I asked, “do you only think of trees?”

  23

  ASHE DIDN’T ANSWER the question. She drove one way, and I drove the other. I had the feeling she wouldn’t have approved of where I was going.

  A computer search provided me with Harold Dozier’s home address. The residence was listed in his name. There was no entry showing the home was owned by Harold and Anne Dozier. There was just Harold’s name. I wonder about married men who list their names alone, and I wonder about the women who let them.

  The Dozier residence was a five-minute drive from Lofield’s Trans-Miss plant. The house was set well back from the street, in the middle of several acres. Most Lofield residences used indigenous trees and plants in their landscaping: redwoods, and oaks, and madrones, and scrub. Dozier, or his gardener, preferred the imports: Japanese maples, pink dogwoods, cider gum eucalyptus, and shrubbery dominated by lilacs and gardenias.

  I walked up the long path and rang the doorbell. Anne Dozier surprised me by opening the door herself. I saw hints of Ashe in her, but only hints. It’s difficult finding resemblances between the very sick and the very healthy. Mrs. Dozier had a consumptive thinness and a pallid complexion. Her funereal appearance contrasted with her dress, a pastel floral pattern. Mind and body were clearly not yet in accord.

  I identified myself, said I had been hired to look into the death of Christopher Shepard, and offered her my business card. For a few seconds the card and my hand hung in the air. But Mrs. Dozier wasn’t interested in the card. She stared at me, finally nodded, and motioned for me to enter.

  “You’re in luck, Mr. Winter. I actually dressed and got out of bed today, and told Marian to go shopping. She’s my nurse. If she had been home, I wouldn’t have answered the door. Marian would never have let you see me. Our timing was right. I consider that an omen. I’m considering lots of things omens these days.”