I wrote in my book some more, telling myself all the whys about my belief that there was no sexual assault. Scribbling quickly, I drew out her hand and noted where something had been chewing at her fingers. There were tracks of bird’s feet on the arm too. Probably a crow had walked through her blood and then perched on the arm to peck at the fingers.
“You can turn around if you want,” I told Clare.
“I’d just as soon not,” he answered. When he spoke you could hear a thickness to his voice that had not been there before. My estimation of him went up a few points.
“I have a granddaughter about her age,” he added.
I wrote it down that he said her and not that. Then I noted he had no visible blood and he had called it in and waited maybe an hour for someone to show up. At the bottom of that little column I wrote, Clarence Bolin, not very likely.
“When I get home, I’m gonna call her. I get annoyed sometimes, thinkin’ that she oughta call me. I’m her grandpa, after all. I don’t think I’ll worry much about that anymore.”
He still had his back to me and I heard him blow his nose. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a handkerchief. In my little notebook I circled the word not in the last sentence I had written.
“I know your Uncle Orson,” he said. “Been fishing with him more times than I can remember.”
I crouched to be close to the ground and kept poking around the body with my stick, then sketching things in the pad. Clare’s talk was actually soothing to hear. Normal, even though he was doing it to keep his mind off of something not normal in his life at all.
“Your daddy too. Way back when.”
I think I nodded, reacting more to the sound than his words. Tossing my stick aside, I stood, then circled the body. Each time I stopped I added to my sketches. I had to force myself to look into the face. Into where the face had been. I sketched. Then I looked away. I sketched her hair. Then I looked away.
“There are monsters in the woods,” Clare said, his back still to me. I was listening then. “It used to be a joke. When I was a kid, people talked about Momo, the Missouri monster. It was like a local Bigfoot. But the real monsters are people, aren’t they?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Perverts.” He spit the word out. “Monsters that do that to children. There isn’t hate big enough for them nor a hell deep enough. This will rile some people up. He lives in one of those piece-of-crap mobile homes in that big development off of F Highway. You know, over by the McKenna farm.”
“Who does?” I had stopped writing and was paying very close attention to Mr. Bolin at that point.
“The guy. The rapist.”
“Turn around and look at me, Clare.” He did. “Tell me what, and who, you are talking about.”
“He’s on the sex-offender site.”
I let my breath out slowly.
Clare went on talking. “One of those Web sites with the names and addresses of all the kiddie guys. He’s listed on it. Lives just a few miles from here.”
I hated those listings. Someone thought it would be a good idea to let everyone know where the sex offenders lived. Problem was in some places you were prosecuted as a sex offender if you stepped into the woods to urinate because toilets in the park were broken. Most of the bad ones, the ones you really had to worry about, didn’t hang around with a big neon sign pointing at them. I’d check the guy out but it already felt like a waste of time.
“Clare,” I said, “I don’t think this girl has been sexually assaulted.”
“No?” he asked. I could see the certainty drain out of his face. It wasn’t pretty. That’s the thing about certainty: It makes everything easier. When it goes, you’re left with a wide-open landscape of horrible possibilities and it’s hard to find any comfort in doubt. It seemed to hit Clare pretty hard. “Who . . .” he started, then faded out. Then he drew up his breath again. “Who would do something like this unless it was for . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m going to find out.” I tried to sound certain.
“I hope so,” he said. “But I don’t see how.”
“There’s always something. Evidence or witnesses. Usually criminals do something stupid or they’ll be like your sex offender. Part of the system. I’ll check him out and anyone else in the area who stands apart from the crowd. Anyone new who might have been hanging around the girl or even around here.”
Clare was starting to look a little deflated and sick. He swallowed hard and looked back off into the green again. The grip on his fishing pole had turned to a hard white. As much as I wanted to ask him what was wrong, I didn’t. He wanted to say something; that was clear. I wasn’t going to push.
Just let it come.
I looked away to give him some thinking room. When I did, I noticed something that had escaped me before.
Leech.
The word was freshly carved in ragged letters on the trunk of a white oak.
“This mean anything to you?” I asked.
Clare came closer but kept a wary distance. He had changed in the last few moments. Change was something good in witnesses; it means a connection; it means they know something or they think they know something. Whatever it was that Clare knew bothered him. I didn’t have any doubt it bothered him enough to spill it. The question was how much line he would take before letting himself be reeled in.
He was looking hard at the carving. Harder than it probably deserved. I almost asked him if it was my badge or my big ass that was making him uneasy. He wasn’t ready to have the mood lightened up.
“No. Kids carve all kinds of shit on the trees around here,” he said.
“Sure,” I agreed and I ran my fingers over the lettering. “But why Leech?”
“Who knows?”
“It’s an odd word. Capitalized like a name.”
“What about bikers?” he asked.
“What about them?” I kept my gaze and my fingers on the carved letters.
“You think bikers could do something like this? If there were any around?”
“Oh, there’re always some around. Some good ones and some bad ones—mostly they all try to look bad. Makes them hard to weed out, but if I have a reason, I’ll sure look into anyone who needs looking into.”
Clare looked away, casting his gaze to the creek bank and up the little trail that ran alongside it. Then he looked at me and quickly looked back to his feet. “Okay if I get on out of here?”
“Thought you were going fishing.” I nodded to the rod he still carried in his hand.
“Not with all the cops that’ll be around here. Who needs that?”
I almost said “the little girl there,” but stopped myself. It would have been needlessly cruel in more than one way. Shaking my head, I went back to stand close to the body, maybe a little possessively. “No. I’ll need you to stick around for a while.”
The girl was close enough to me now that I could feel her presence without looking. Death has a gravity and Angela Briscoe was pulling at me. Even so, I didn’t move any closer. I didn’t want to cause any contamination to the scene. Each step I took in proximity to the girl was where I had carefully stepped before.
I looked at Clare and caught him looking at the girl. He was trying to see a face where there was just red and splinters of white. Even her corn-silk hair was fanned out away from the face as though in surprise at the violence that had erased it.
Clare walked toward the creek bank and the sound of running water.
I had to pull myself away from the girl too, or orbit her tragedy forever.
It was full summer and everything along the riverbank was green and dappled yellow with sunlight. Within the banks were flat stones and smooth-tumbled gravel from black to white with colorful scatterings of pink and molted greens. The water that ran over it was so clear, if it were not for the ripples, it would be invisible. There was an empty space in the mud where a stone had lain, half in and half out of the water. At the edge of the space were the marks of
fingers where the stone had been lifted. Small fingers.
A woman’s? Or could Angela have been forced to choose her own murder weapon?
Water tinkled where the shallow flow ran over stones.
“Why were you up here?” I asked Clare.
“Like I said,” he raised up his pole to reinforce his point. “I was sucker grabbin’ .”
I nodded and then reached up to push aside a strand of hair that had fallen with the movement. For the sake of my pale skin, I usually keep my hair under a hat when outdoors. No matter how hard I try though, every summer my nose burns and my hair goes from a deep reddish brown to summer red. Unconsciously, my finger found the scar that started in my left eyebrow and followed the crescent of the orbital bone. It was a small scar. Small wasn’t the same as meaningless. As soon as I realized, I pulled my hand away. It was a bad habit. The slight discoloration barely showed to anyone but me. When I touched it, though, when I was aware of touching it, the ridge of skin seemed like a jagged, red wall I had yet to climb over. No one else has climbed over it, either. A couple have tried. Only a couple. Both had made the mistake of saying it gave me “character.” It was as much of my character as they ever got to see.
When I lost myself in thought, or when there was a puzzle, I had the habit of touching the scar like a little talisman. Just then I was puzzling about sucker grabbing. Sucker were big, carp-like fish. Bottom feeders, they were hard to catch on a bait hook. They’re mostly caught by weighting a line with a big treble hook and dropping it into a congregation of fish. Then you jerk the line and grab them with the naked hook.
I carefully stepped back from the water, checking the ground for any other evidence of the girl’s last moments, and then started hiking downstream.
“Follow me,” I told the old man. He did, but he set his own path and pace. Slow.
The woods were thick with wild grapevine and poison ivy running under the mantle of oak, walnut, and hawthorn. The ground was lumpy with softball-sized hedge apples. Along the bank, just skirting its edge, was a path. Bare dirt littered with cigarette butts, beer, and soda cans.
Kids come to party and drink.
Down in the streambed, the water deepened. Here it had eroded more than gravel. Large, flat slabs of sandstone were all along and under the water. They were the remains of an ancient shallow sea that now defined the shape of a spring-fed stream. Here the water was silent. Another two hundred yards down, the cold flow dumped into the deeper, swifter water of Bear Creek.
“I mean, why were you up there?” I almost had to shout to be heard, Clare had fallen so far behind.
“What?” he hollered back.
As I stood waiting on the old guy, I caught myself fingering the scar again. There’s another reason it’s a bad habit. Every time I touch it, even when I don’t realize it at the time—especially if I don’t realize it—I get pissed off. That little scar is kind of a trigger. When things don’t add up or they start to churn in my head just a little too much, I reach up and pull it.
“Get your old ass down here, Clare.” This time I did shout. I was getting tired of the waiting game with him. And I’m usually such a patient person.
As he picked his way through the path, I was rubbing the rubbery pucker of skin around my eye and thinking, not for the first time, how everyone seemed to have lies that had to be worked out of them. Watching Clare work his way forward, like if he moved slowly enough I would forget about him, made my dark mood churn.
“Now, I want to know why you were up there,” I said emphatically, “where the water’s way too shallow for sucker grabbing. And not down here at this pool, where I can see at least thirty fish just waiting on you to pull them out.”
Clare opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. There was something there. It was impossible to miss. I decided he just needed a little more pressure at his back.
“That’s good, Clare. Saying nothing is better than lying. But saying nothing won’t let me know you had nothing to do with this.”
“I called ya, didn’t I? I brought you out here. Why would I do that if it was me that hurt the girl?”
“Happens all the time. Lots of people get the bright idea to throw off our scent by being the first to report. It pays to consider the motives of the person that calls. Especially when that person is not completely forthcoming.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His words said one thing but everything else about him said another. It was an interesting change. I wondered what he was protecting.
Who?
For a long moment I stared at him and then turned away to point downstream. “I bet the kids have a name for their little party spot, don’t they? That clearing by the fork.”
“Whiskey Bend.”
That says something.
“When I was seventeen we called it Budweiser Corner.” Clare looked like he was trying hard to remember seventeen. “Kids been coming here for years. For a while I heard they were calling it Coors Corner. Course, back when I was a kid, you couldn’t get Coors this far east. You ever see Smokey and the Bandit?”
“Why whiskey, Clare?”
He stopped smiling and his eyes got that same caught-in-the-crosshairs look. “Huh?” was all he managed to get out.
“Whiskey. Kids like beer. It’s what they usually start with. What they can get away with. My old man kept a refrigerator in the garage filled with the stuff. He never noticed when a couple disappeared.”
“So?”
“So, now they call it Whiskey Bend. I have to wonder where the whiskey comes from.”
Clare was thinking. He had the look of a man weighing options. Heavy ones. I kept watch on him from the corner of my vision as his face squirreled around itself. He had nothing to do with killing the girl; I was sure of that. But the girl was dead and that left no room for anyone’s secrets in my tally.
Leech.
There it was again, carved into another tree. This time the word was more than written, it was stylized like a logo or brand. The capital L was formed with arrow points at each termination and the rest of the word inset within the angle.
“I don’t want no trouble,” Clare said. “And I don’t want to start nothin’ where there ain’t nothin’ .”
I just looked at the man and nodded. He needed to know I was listening, but interruptions had a way of derailing even the smallest of confessions. To give him a little thinking room, I turned away again to examine the carved graffiti. This time I pulled a pen and notebook. Both the word and the style went onto the paper.
“I don’t give it to ’em or sell it, either. But they’re kids. Kids get into things.”
When I finished my rendering of the carved mark, I wrote the word whiskey beside it. I added the phrase kids get into things as well. Then I lowered the pad and looked right at him again. I didn’t speak; silence did the talking.
“It ain’t me you gotta worry about anyway. I just make a little for fun. For me and friends and I only sell to the old-timers.”
“I think it’s time you spit it out, Clare. This is one of those only-the-truth-will-set-you-free moments.”
“My mama used to say, ‘It’s time to come to Jesus.’ You kind of remind me of her.”
The old man’s eyes wandered down and, for a second, I wasn’t sure if he was falling into memory or checking out my shape again.
“Clare!”
“There’s another guy that’s been coming around here. He busted up my rig and he’s been telling me to shut it down. A real badass-biker type.”
“By rig, you mean a still?”
He nodded. “Small-time. Just for fun and to make a few extra bucks. I never believed it could cause things like this.”
“What are you talking about, Clare?”
“The biker. He said if I didn’t stop, someone was going to get hurt.”
Chapter 2
“Bootleg whiskey?” the sheriff asked me. “You think that’s what the girl was killed for?”
/> Sheriff Charles Benson—Chuck to his friends, and everyone in the county seemed to be his friend—was an elected official. Like a lot of elected sheriffs, he was better at what he considered his real job—making the citizens feel confident in the department—than he was at actual law enforcement. In his favor, though, was his own understanding of the two roles. He was a Vietnam veteran, a former farm insurance agent, and a Mason, but he hired people with training and experience and listened to them. He was a good man and I tried not to roll my eyes at him when he tried to fill in the blanks with obvious answers.
“Who knows?” I asked him. “I’m just telling you what the old guy told me. Still, we have bikers, bootlegging, and a dead girl. There’s probably some connection, even if it’s bad luck.”
“Why would bikers try to muscle into a small-time still operator? Where’s the money in that?” the sheriff asked. It sounded like a conversational averting of the eyes. Easier to talk about the bikers than the girl. “Besides,” he went on, “bikers run more to meth these days. It’s a lot more money and easier to transport. Whiskey just seems too much work.”
“And killing, this kind of killing, doesn’t make sense. Yet.”
The sheriff nodded like he was agreeing, then said, “Clare’s not so old. He was a grade behind me in school.”
“You know him?”
“Of course I know him. Known him all my life. We’re in the same lodge. If he said there was a biker snooping around I believe him.”
“I believe him too and I’ll check it out. I’m just letting you know there’s no one waiting, all trussed up in a bow, to be our killer.”
“Yeah,” he said, waving his hand like he could clear some horrible thoughts. “I get it. No easy answers. And almost as bad, nothing to tell the parents when I go back to see them.”
“Sorry, Sheriff.”
“Me too,” he answered sounding tired. “But you understand, easy or not, there will be answers. We won’t have an unsolved child murder in my county—on my watch. You get what I’m saying?”
A Living Grave Page 2