Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  “I said, we thought you did it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Had started backfilling before the fire. We didn’t touch it.”

  “Oh God. Then who—?” Then it struck me. “Oh Pauline,” I whispered. I sat down, hard, on the trampled, bleached grass. The sheriff squatted next to me, straining to pick up my words.

  “It was Tichnor,” I said. “He came out to the site with his damned metal detector and started digging, looking for buried treasure. Maybe he was even trying to look for artifacts we might have missed, and I’ll bet he made extra sure he destroyed our work in the meantime. He saw no car in the drive. It was raining, and we weren’t around, so he didn’t have to worry about being seen. But then Pauline came home and surprised him, and—”

  My voice caught and Dave Stannard continued for me. “And when she confronted him, he killed her. Then he recovered the pits to cover his tracks and burned the house down to try and make the murder look like an accident.” He nodded. “It makes sense to me. He probably just couldn’t resist grabbing those things—artifacts—after he got her into the house. I suppose he might even have recognized the value of that statuette…” he said slowly. Things seemed to fall into place.

  We walked back up to the Jeep, and he pulled another plastic evidence bag out of the glove compartment. “This one of your tools?” Inside was a rusty gardening trowel with a peeling green-painted handle.

  I shook my head numbly. “No. We only use mason’s trowels, the ones with flat, diamond-shaped blades. You can’t keep a good, flat surface with something rounded like that. You find it around here?”

  “Yeah, in that vandalized trench,” Stannard said. “It was partly covered by dirt. We weren’t able to lift any clear prints off of it. Do you think it was Ms. Westlake’s?”

  Again I shook my head. “She would never let any of her gardening things get out of repair like that. She was meticulous about putting everything away, taking care of them. Besides, she used a lot of fancy, expensive tools she ordered from England.”

  I stared at the trowel in his hand, torn between abhorrence and curiosity: It was a mute witness to Pauline’s encounter with Tichnor. Then the sheriff hit me with something totally unexpected.

  “So why don’t you tell me about your little to-do with Billy Griggs?”

  I did a double-take. Why was he bringing that up now? “There’s nothing to tell,” I stalled. “Deputy Sheehan took down everything…”

  “No, you know what I mean,” the sheriff said confidently, and I knew immediately he wasn’t talking about yesterday’s scene in the parking lot. “I saw his priors on his sheet when we booked him. Why don’t you tell me what happened back when you were seventeen?”

  Chapter 15

  “WELL,” I SAID, STALLING, “IF YOU SAW HIS SHEET, then you also saw my statement.”

  “Humor me this once more, why don’t you?” Stannard suggested.

  Why do you care about this? I wondered. I took a deep breath and began.

  “The last day of my summer vacation Oscar, my grandfather, dropped me off up in the woods on Cape Mary. I was going to finish checking out a parcel of land that we had been walking over, and he was going to meet me by the road at lunchtime; he had some business to wrap up before we left the next day.

  “Conditions weren’t too bad, it had rained the night before, so I was fairly sure that I would be able to see any sites that had been eroded out of the surface. The weather was clearing up, so the mosquitoes weren’t dreadful in the open areas, but they were going crazy, whining in the wooded-over patches; between them and the late morning crickets, you could hardly hear the birds. I was concentrating pretty hard too, so I suppose that’s why I didn’t pick up on the crying and shouting coming from a clearing until I was almost in the middle of it.”

  I paused, almost feeling myself back there again. Stannard gestured for me to go on. Easy for him, I thought. I continued.

  “It was two kids, not much older than me, I, arguing. There were beer bottles all over the place. I later found out his name was Billy and his girlfriend was Amy. She was the one who was crying, and he smacked her a couple of times in the head, sort of offhanded. Without thinking too much about what I was doing, I yelled to them, to see if I could help.”

  Dave Stannard winced.

  “My life up to that point had been pretty sheltered,” I explained sheepishly, “I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I expected that people could be, well, reasoned with.”

  “Most people can—it’s hard lesson when you meet those who can’t,” the sheriff said.

  “Billy told me to butt out,” I continued. “Amy shouted to me to get the cops, and Billy hit her again, really hard. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Amy’d started to bleed, from a cut over her eye, so I went over to help her. Of course I didn’t think that he would hit me; we didn’t know each other, right?”

  I shook my head, wondering again at my naiveté. “Billy shoved me, hard, and I fell back and smashed my head against a rock; he turned away to slap Amy again for egging me on.

  “I should have just left at that point, but after my head stopped spinning, I just got so mad. I wasn’t even thinking—I’m surprised to this day I did what I—well, I picked up my walking stick and whacked him across the shoulders. Amy, the girlfriend, screamed again, and I thought I must have about killed him because my hands were stinging like hell; later Grandpa told me I should have hooked him in the, ah, nuts, instead—his word, not mine. Anyway, Billy turned around and came after me; I hadn’t even fazed him. That really put the fear of God into me.”

  Sheriff Stannard grimaced pityingly.

  “This time I didn’t hang around. I dropped my stick and ran faster than I would have believed I was capable. It could only have been fear that that made me move so quick, but it became clear pretty quickly that that was not going to be enough. Billy was right behind me. I could just see the road ahead of me and I could practically feel him, a foot behind me, when I barely missed being hit by a pickup. I swerved at the last minute; it must have been the adrenaline.”

  I paused again, remembering. I could hear the squeal of brakes, see the sudden blur of the truck, and feel how warm the hood was, feel just how close it had come to hitting me.

  “Billy wasn’t so lucky; he ran smack into the side of it, and flew across the hood. Lucky for me, it was one of the rangers going to work into the state park up that way, and he radioed for an ambulance. Funny thing was, I needed five stitches where my head hit the rock, and Billy got off without a scratch. Not a mark on him except for a little road rash on his hands, when he landed. It was like a bad dream, where nothing slows down the monster that’s chasing you.”

  “That turned out to be the first time that he was actually charged for assault. But I was the one who filed the complaint, not Amy, his girlfriend. She didn’t say a peep against him, and worse, later said that I had picked the fight with him! I couldn’t believe that she would’ve let herself get mixed up with a guy like Billy in the first place, never mind pull a stunt like that after I’d tried to help her! And when I even found out that she married him the next year…well, it was my first big lesson in the apparent perversities of human nature.”

  The sheriff nodded, encouraging me without interrupting. He would have made a good ethnographer, I thought.

  “I also got a few lessons in dirty fighting from Grandpa. He was able to convince my mother that I had fallen and cracked my skull on the deck of the sailboat that we sometimes rented. I had this big shaved spot on the side of my head, just in time for senior pictures, so Mother decided that there would be no more summers with Oscar. Too much roughhousing for a young lady. But that didn’t matter, because college started that next fall and, well—”

  I realized I was getting off the subject. “Anyway, that’s my side of things—” A thought hit me from out of the blue, jarred loose by my own memories. “Hey, wait a minute! Didn’t Dr. Moretti, the medical examiner, say that Augie Brooks had a cracked skull?
And that maybe it wasn’t an accident he fell off his boat?”

  Sheriff Stannard looked thoughtful. “You been eavesdropping on private conversations, Professor Fielding?”

  I blushed but stood my ground. “No one needed to strain to hear that conversation. All I’m saying is first Augie Brooks, then Pauline…she had a fractured skull, didn’t you say?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “But you have to admit, even if Augie’s death wasn’t an accident, the two situations don’t compare, not for motive, not for execution. I mean, someone set that house on fire and tried to make it look like an accident. And there’s a world of difference between the amount of planning between them.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  We walked up the slope toward where the Cherokee was parked. I hoped we were going to head back into Fordham. “Why are you so interested in this ancient history anyway?” I asked, getting back to our previous conversation.

  “Not so ancient,” the sheriff pointed out. “It seems as if you’ve got a lot of history around here, that’s all. More, whatchacallit, context. Useful for me to know, given the present circumstances.”

  He got into the Jeep looking thoughtful, and didn’t say a word as we drove away from the site. Suddenly, instead of taking the road that headed back into town, he took a hard left and went west instead. I grabbed the armrest and just avoided banging my head against the passenger side window.

  “Hey, take it easy there!” I said indignantly. “You’re going to get us killed!”

  “Sorry.” He put that Enya CD back in and turned the volume up a couple of notches, acting as though I weren’t even there.

  “Where are we going, anyhow?” I asked, a little more subdued. We went up a steep dirt road riddled with potholes. “I’ve got to meet my husband soon.” As if that would make a difference to him.

  “This won’t take long. Relax.”

  When we reached the top of the hill, I saw a small one-story house, a cottage really, nestled in among the pine trees and hidden from the main roads below. It was a summer residence being fitted up for year-round use but not yet completed. Tyvek paper covered half of the house and new shingles covered the finished part. A small shed, now acting as a one-car garage, was crammed to the gills with rusting tools, paint cans, and other rubbish. It leaned precariously to one side and looked like the next winter’s snow would bring it down. The grass around front grew unchecked and unexpectedly dotted with wildflowers, but a small garden plot in back looked reasonably well tended, save for a couple of weeks’ worth of weeds. A yellow plastic police line ran across the path leading up to the doorway from a tree to the garage, and a notice was pinned up on the front door warning trespassers away from a crime scene.

  I looked around for a moment. “This is Tichnor’s place, isn’t it?”

  Stannard nodded.

  “I have never been up here before.”

  He nodded again. “None of the tire print casts we took matched any of the vehicles that you could have used. Right now I’m just forming some other impressions”—he grinned sheepishly—“and I’d like yours too.”

  By way of an answer, I wandered around outside, getting a feel for the place. It wasn’t tidy, but not completely rundown either. The house had been adequately repaired in stages, perhaps the garage would have been next. I peeked in there first.

  In around an old green Nova, stacks of magazines and newspapers were tied in neat bundles, but were mildewing all the same. I took a peek and the titles didn’t surprise me, given my personal encounters with Tichnor. A few stacks of Guns and Ammo, one of the local paper, a stack of Survivalist! were all interspersed with cheaply colored copies of Big and Bouncy and Milk Fight. An ill-spelled, angry, photocopied pamphlet warning against an imaginary “Zionist Conspiracy with Negroes” was tacked to the wall, with an assortment of aging tool company calendars. The newer tools bore the same label as the trowel that Stannard had showed me by the ruins of Greycliff.

  I sauntered around back to the garden, but couldn’t make much of that. I recognized the tomatoes and a compost heap, but that was about it. “What was he growing?” I asked.

  Stannard looked a little surprised—I guess I came off like a child of the suburbs—but answered politely enough. “Tomatoes, squash, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, some other stuff. Nothing fancy. Let’s go in the house.”

  It was small; we could see virtually all of the ground floor from where we stood. We walked in the back kitchen door and could see that the front room, a pine-paneled living room originally, had long sheets of plywood set up as work surfaces on sawhorses. A bedroom door opened beyond that and at the end of the kitchen, opposite where we entered, was a small bathroom. The place surprised me by being tidy—I’m always vaguely surprised when I find that not everyone likes my system of clutter—but I somehow imagined that Tichnor would have been messier.

  The kitchen was decorated in the same knotty pine paneling that had probably been put up when the house was first built. The sink was vintage from the late fifties or so, and the lineoleum on the counters and floor was dark red, cracked and worn. Greasy little smudges of gray and white spotted these surfaces, evidence of the investigation that had taken place.

  I walked into the former living room cum workspace and looked down at the objects on the tables. I looked over at the sheriff, who nodded. “Well, I guess we know who’s been digging those loot holes over at Fort Archer.”

  “We were wondering about that,” he said. “But why would anyone want these broken bits of pottery and nails?”

  I shrugged and picked up a piece of corroded strap hinge. “I’m not sure; I just thought he was one of those people who believed the old folktales of gold around the Point.” I put the hinge back in its place. “Maybe he was looking for buttons, maybe he was hoping to find a whole piece. Maybe he was looking for bottles; a lot of folks do, though it drives us professionals crazy. I don’t understand what drives some looters; sometimes it’s as though they want things only so other people can’t have them.”

  I picked up a piece of gray stoneware. German, by the looks of it. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be too much left to find. The fieldwork that was done during the 1930s suggested that most of the interesting areas, like the ditch or buildings, had been destroyed by later landscaping. Still, you never know. We’ll have to get this back to the site manager there.”

  Stannard nodded again. “I had something in particular I wanted to ask you about.”

  He led me back into the kitchen, to the one cluttered area in the whole room. A bulletin board by the phone was covered with scraps of paper, mostly notices of antique shows and gun shows and auctions in the area, with a fading list of phone numbers and a wad of coupons tacked to the bottom, obscured by the notices. The sheriff moved some of the more recent ones aside and untacked a piece of paper that had been partially covered by them. He handed that piece of paper to me.

  “This looks like it’s old. Is it?”

  It was a photocopy of a map, I saw at once, but not just any map. It took me a minute to make sense of the scant and faded lines, obviously hand drawn, no more than a series of linear squiggles that weren’t heavy enough to be reproduced clearly. A furry smudge darkened one corner.

  After I stared a moment at it, I suddenly felt my stomach lurch, as though I was standing in an elevator that has started down too quickly. “Holy sn—where did this map come from?” I turned to him, excitement mingled with dread. “Where did he get this?”

  The sheriff shrugged, hands spread wide. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “You don’t understand, I don’t have this one!” I insisted. “I’ve combed the state archives, local ones, every university and library that has any collections dealing with early settlements. I’ve written to repositories in England, contacted the best scholars who’ve worked on early sites like this, and applied every ounce of my training to finding everything to do with my site. So how is it that Grahame Tichnor, a pothunter
and class A nutcase, has a copy of a map showing the location of Fort Providence that I’ve never seen?”

  Neither of us had any answers for that. I stared down at the photocopy. It was very primitive, but it clearly showed the familiar coastline of the Saugatuck River and even had a few rectangles to represent the fort. These were marked in French, marked as “les ruines anciennes.” Another set of rectangles just down the coast was marked “le Fortin.”

  “‘Le fortin?’” Stannard repeated the term with a surprisingly good accent. “Is that Fort Archer?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding absently. “This is probably eighteenth century, judging from the hand.”

  “Then I guess maybe he had it because he was pothunting at Fort Archer—” Stannard suggested. “I mean, the map isn’t really of Fort Providence, is it? It’s just a landmark to show the location of the other fort.”

  “Yes, yes, but that doesn’t say where he got it!” I exclaimed. I began to pace back and forth across the small kitchen. “Where the hell did he get it that I didn’t look? What else might be there?”

  “Maybe they had it at the Fort Archer archive,” he offered.

  “No, I spoke with them about maps, because I was sure they’d have some showing the old ruins of Fort Providence that might be standing,” I said. “I stopped there first, it would be a landmark that any eighteenth-century cartographer would have included. But they had nothing like this, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have given it to Tichnor.”

  I stopped pacing and walked over to the sheriff and squinted at the paper. “Can you read that?” I asked, pointing to the blur on the corner of the photocopy. “I can only make out a d, and maybe that one is a B or an E.”

  Stannard looked at it. “I can’t even make those out; you’ve got sharp eyes. What is that?”

  “It looks like a library stamp to me. When libraries or archives photocopy holdings from their collections, they stamp the photocopy with their stamp to keep people from reproducing the picture in a book without permission. This is a photocopy of a photocopy and I can’t make out where he got it.”