Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  “Just let me take a poke at it, though,” said Ellie, seeing my expression. Balancing easily, she stepped out along the metal culvert pipe’s length, nearer to its plugged-up opening. Small ripples slopped right up over the corrugated pipe’s top. “If it doesn’t start breaking up right away, I promise I’ll …”

  “Ellie,” I said cautioningly, because I’d heard enough tales of kids who’d ventured too near a flooded culvert, got sucked in, and drowned.

  She hopped onto a smooth, flat rock and perched there while poking repeatedly at the culvert’s blocked end with one of the crowbars we’d brought. Every so often she pulled away a solid mass of grass and mud with the tool’s curved end, and in response a blurp of water burst from the other end where I was stationed.

  Then suddenly the blurps connected into a thin trickle that turned to a steady gushing. And even with that deck on my mind, I couldn’t very well stop her when she was making good progress.

  The gush became a torrent. “All right!” Ellie shouted, and started to give a fist pump. But then she froze, her eyes on the water flowing from the far side of the pond, toward the culvert.

  A lot of water. Something had given way upstream, the pond was suddenly rising very fast, and what had been a rivulet atop the road became a flood. Ellie scrambled back to stand beside me.

  “Jake? Do you see what … Oh, my God. Is that …?”

  “Yes,” I said. The road was already awash, a thick torrent of pond water carrying away great swaths of gravel and even some sizable stones.

  But the flood itself wasn’t what had captured my attention so completely. Or hers, either. She stared, her look changing from startled disbelief to frank horror as she aimed a shaking finger. “Jake, I think that’s a …”

  Words failed her. But I didn’t need anyone to tell me what was floating swiftly toward us, shifting and turning as the fast current rushing toward the newly unblocked culvert sped it along.

  It was a body.

  CHAPTER 5

  By the time Eastport police chief Bob Arnold arrived at the culvert, it was nearly four o’clock and the pale autumn sunshine was deepening to the color of old sherry. He’d called the Calais cops, too, because the land around the flooded pond lay in that town’s jurisdiction, not Eastport’s.

  So while Ellie and I stood watching, two unhappy-looking Calais officers made their way along the beaver pond’s muddy bank to where the corpse lay. Between us and them, a gully a foot deep and a couple of feet across now cut diagonally across the road, with water still running through it.

  Bob stood on the far side of the flood-dug trench, where his squad car was parked. “Looks pretty soft,” he said, meaning the soaked roadbed. “You could probably still drive across, but …”

  But if not, then my truck was stuck on this side of the gully, over here with me. “Yeah,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe.”

  Pink and plump in his blue uniform, black shoes, and a black leather duty belt loaded with Mace, handcuffs, a whistle, his nightstick, and his service weapon, Bob had thinning blond hair and a pink rosebud mouth that did not look as if it belonged on a police officer. Any crooks who were fooled by his appearance, however, soon found out that looks weren’t everything.

  “But it’s probably a better idea for you both to just jump across and ride back to Eastport in my car,” he finished.

  I looked up past the pond’s far edge to where the stream that fed it vanished among the reeds. “Why’d it stop?” I wondered aloud.

  Because it shouldn’t have; if the high-water condition of the lake was any indication—and it was—there were tens of thousands of gallons of water still up there, in a stream that was also near to overflowing its banks. So why wasn’t the flood still raging?

  One of the Calais cops heard me as he slogged up out of the marsh; he’d been back there to see if he could find where the body had been, before it washed out.

  “Big log dammed it off,” he reported. “Must’ve floated down from upstream somewhere; now it’s stuck hard across the stream.”

  Bob looked sternly at me. “Hear that? You two should come out with me. ’Cause if you decide later that you want to …”

  I got it. A big log lying haphazardly across a stream is not a reliable flood prevention device, he meant. If it floated free, that water could be roaring across the road again in a heartbeat. And if it happened to do so while we were driving on the road …

  “Six inches,” Bob reminded me very seriously. “That’s all it takes to float your tires sideways. Less, if the road dissolves, and this road is no great shakes in the solidness department.”

  He pointed at the lower section of pond, on the far side of the road where the culvert drained. An empty muck hole hours ago, now it was brimful, the water in it at least eight feet deep.

  “You do not want to end up in there,” Bob said. “I mean it, Jake; are you hearing me?”

  “I hear you.” The water down there roiled wildly on its way to some larger stream, deep in the woods. Foaming and churning, it made thick, loud sucking noises as if smacking its lips at the thought of swallowing someone, pulling them down into its cold, strangling clutches and drowning them mercilessly.

  “Don’t worry,” I added to Bob, because he was right: we did not want to end up in it.

  The Calais cops turned the body over, at which point any idea that there might be life left in it vanished. Floating face-down, it had been merely a bundle of waterlogged clothing.

  Face-up, though, was another matter entirely. “Should they be moving him that way?” Ellie wanted to know.

  Ignoring her, the two Calais officers went through the dead man’s pockets, coming up with a wet wallet. “I mean, shouldn’t we wait for the …”

  One of the cops looked up. “Coyotes’re out here. Bobcats, too.” He gestured at the dead man, whose deeply gashed forehead made his face a meaty horror.

  “You want to tell his loved ones there’s no body for them to bury ’cause we let the wild things gobble it up?”

  He had a point. You never saw dead animals out here, or the parts of shot deer left by hunters who dressed out the carcasses in the field, either.

  Just scattered bones. Besides, this wasn’t a crime scene as far as I could see, only an unattended death. So they’d haul the body in, do the autopsy later in Augusta.

  The cop held up a driver’s license. “Harold Brautigan,” he read. “New York, New York.”

  After examining the money in it—a ten and a few singles—he slapped the wallet shut wetly and looked at Bob.

  “Tourist. Out here on a hike, looks like. But man, look at those shoes.”

  The dead man wore leather sandals over black socks, which in my opinion would’ve been a poor choice for any location. But they were especially inappropriate for the woods.

  “Slipped and fell, hit his head on a rock, tumbled into the water,” Bob theorized aloud.

  The guy’s face looked worse than that. But I guessed it was the likeliest explanation, especially if you added in the effects of bird or animal activity, after the guy drowned.

  The Calais cops dragged the body up the slippery bank and rolled it into a tarp. They’d driven here in a pickup truck with City of Calais logos on the doors; I winced as they hoisted the wrapped corpse into the truck bed and let it drop with a thump.

  Soon after that, both Calais officers drove off with Harold Brautigan’s body in the back of their vehicle; on that road full of potholes, it was going to be an awfully bumpy ride. But then, he wouldn’t care. Bob got ready to go, too.

  “You sure you both don’t want to come back to town with me?” he offered again. “Or I could ride you back to where Ellie’s car is parked?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m staying.” But then to my surprise, Ellie refused to be rescued, also.

  “I’ll stay the night, too, I guess,” she said. “George and Lee”—her husband and daughter, she meant—“are visiting my aunt in Damariscotta. They won’t be home until tomorrow, anyway.�
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  The Calais cops had said they would send a town truck full of gravel, probably tomorrow morning. By afternoon the dirt road would be repaired, so we could get out on our own.

  “Suit yourselves,” Bob agreed, not looking as if he liked it. But he could see we meant to stay, so a little while later he also took off in the squad car.

  Clearly, he didn’t think anything was strange about the corpse we’d found; other, I mean, than that we’d found one at all. But driving back to the cabin, Ellie said what we both were thinking.

  “Not much money in that wallet.” For a tourist, she meant.

  I pulled up by the cottage and parked. A bright pink sunset was spreading across the pine-notched horizon on the far side of the lake. “Maybe he used credit cards.”

  We got out. The air smelled like evergreens and cold water.

  “And that head wound,” Ellie added, ignoring my remark.

  Face, too, actually. It was a very extensive injury. We went inside, where deep bluish shadows were already filling the room. The fire in the stove had nearly gone out, and the chill in the air was palpable.

  “Do you think a rock could really open a gash that big?” she asked. “And beat up the rest of his face so badly, besides?”

  “Well. He could’ve been in the water awhile, I guess. That might make a wound look a lot worse. Predators would, too.”

  Like Cheezil, for instance. We thought the weasel was cute, but to a prey animal, he wasn’t, and I doubted he’d turn up his nose at a piece of fresh meat just because it was human, either.

  “I guess with the nighttime temperatures so cold lately, he might’ve stayed in decent shape otherwise for a while, especially if he’d been in a shady spot,” said Ellie. “Then when the water started moving so fast, the current washed him out at us.”

  “Could be. Guy’s from New York, doesn’t know how challenging the environment is here.” I looked out at the granite boulders studding the area around the clearing. “So he takes a fall, lands on his face. I mean, come on. Sandals?”

  No wonder he’d turned up dead. Kneeling to feed the stove embers a handful of kindling, Ellie nodded. “You’re right, maybe I shouldn’t look for any worse trouble than he really had.”

  The last of the light outside was fading fast now that the sun had set, the nearly bare tree branches black scrawls against the deepening sky. Soon it was going to be dark enough to turn on our solar lamps, whose glow I always regarded with the glee of a child witnessing magic tricks: look, Ma, no electric bill!

  But the thought of the coming darkness still wasn’t welcome. “Maybe we should’ve brought along one of the dogs,” I said as I gazed out at the gathering night. “Or even both of them.”

  Suddenly I was lonely for home and, although I didn’t like admitting it, feeling anxious as well.

  But Ellie shook her head. “We’d just have to take care of them, on top of all the other things we need to do.”

  Hearing that “we” made me feel better. Ellie was a brick, never whiny or moody, always ready to tackle a project. Also, she was a fine cabin cook, able to turn plain camp fare into meals tempting to the pickiest eater.

  She pulled her cellphone from her satchel and plopped onto the daybed, looking as comfy as if she were surrounded by luxury instead of stuck at a rustic lake house where the only hot water available came from a kettle on the stove.

  “Hey. Thanks for staying,” I told her, touched. “I really—”

  She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just call home and leave a message for George on the machine.”

  It was one of the reasons why the cottage wasn’t really a dangerous place, despite its isolation; good cellphone reception here meant that even if someone did have an accident or any other kind of trouble, help was just a dial tone away.

  “You go on out and finish arranging the lumber to suit you,” Ellie added. “I’ll get things going inside, tend the fire, and get something to eat started and so on.”

  It was a more-than-acceptable division of labor, especially since I’d been planning baked beans on toast for dinner; with her in charge, it was more likely to be something involving homemade biscuits. Anticipating these, I went out into the chilly evening, where the sun sent a few last deep red streamers across the lake and a loon’s laugh rang eerily in the stillness.

  On the lake side of the cottage, I began arranging the deck flooring into two piles, long ones and short ones; cut that way, they could be laid out in a more attractive pattern than if they were all the same length. Above, the back door that used to lead out to the old deck now opened onto thin air, four feet off the ground, but soon—or so I told myself encouragingly—we’d be able to set chairs out there again.

  Half an hour later I’d finished my prep work, and stars had begun prickling the sky. Inside, a warm fire puttered cheerily in the stove and lamplight the color of honey picked out the red curtains, sewn long ago out of remnants from a nearby woolen mill. Also, the place smelled delicious; whatever Ellie had found to cook on the kitchenette’s gas stove, it wasn’t beans on toast.

  “So who do you suppose that poor guy was?” Ellie wondered aloud as we ate dinner a little later. From half a roast chicken out of the cooler, she’d made chicken à la king; with it we were having a bottle of good Cabernet, not what a wine expert might choose to accompany a chicken dish but delicious nonetheless.

  I looked around at the fire glowing behind the woodstove’s window, and the solar electric lamp diligently shining out light collected from the sun. Puffs of steam huffing companionably from the kettle’s spout promised plenty of hot water for doing dishes, and later for washing up before bed.

  Victor, the thought came suddenly to me, would’ve liked all this. Especially the fancy wine.

  Ellie raised her glass in a toast. “To absent friends,” she said with a smile, as if she’d caught my thought, and I smiled, too.

  She was stretching it, but what the heck; he was absent so her toast was at least half true.

  And maybe more than half, I admitted grudgingly to myself; he’d been gone for a long time. What I did know for sure, though, was that right now Ellie and I were here: warm, safe, and happy.

  Or at least that’s how I imagine we must’ve looked to Dewey Hooper, who I later learned was at that very moment standing just outside the cottage, in the darkness of the clearing, staring in at us through one of the windows.

  • • •

  Back in prison they’d told Dewey Hooper to reflect on how he’d gotten there, and what he might do to avoid ever being in that situation again. They’d advised him to think about his good traits and his less good ones, to identify his strengths and weaknesses.

  But Dewey had already known what they were. Patience, that was the first of his strong points, and the next was the ability to plan out a course of action and stick to it, no matter what got in his way.

  Such as, for instance, the plan that had gotten him out of prison a good thirteen years earlier than his scheduled release. Now, three days after his escape from the medium-security facility in Lakesmith, Maine, he stood outside a cabin in the remote rural area very near where he’d been born, and where (with a few short breaks for sentences in juvenile facilities) he’d spent his life.

  So: Patience. Planning skills. More than enough wilderness know-how to allow him to survive out here in the woods for a long time, and—well, even Dewey knew he wasn’t very smart, or anyway not book smart. But he was cunning and adaptable, and able to zig instead of zag on an instant’s notice.

  And that, he thought, was a much more useful talent to have than a knack for, say, arithmetic, or the ability to make sense of a newspaper article. He was loyal, too, when he got a chance to be, which wasn’t very often; most people didn’t deserve it, he’d found, but when they did, there was no truer pal than Dewey. Hey, just look at what he’d done for poor old Bentley Hodell.

  As for his negatives, he saw no point in dwelling on them. “Think positive” was his motto,
although if pressed he might have conceded that his temper had bollixed him up occasionally. Since his escape, he’d noticed also that he was having trouble making decisions; out of practice, he supposed, after so long pretending to go along with other people making them for him. Also, a lot of folks might say he was too superstitious.

  But he didn’t agree. To him, habits like avoiding black cats and not walking under ladders were only the beginning. Under the common run of so-called old wives’ tales lay another whole realm of reality entirely, he knew: signs and portents, omens and premonitions, sixth-sense perceptions he couldn’t describe but that he trusted completely.

  So that as he peeked through a cottage window and saw the women inside—and especially that one, the sight of her like a lightning bolt to his brain—he knew he’d been drawn here for a reason. The window was open a crack, whiffs of woodsmoke and the delicious aroma of chicken stew escaping through it. The smells made his stomach growl hungrily, but it wasn’t the food that held his attention.

  It was her. Not Jake Tiptree, whose big mouth had helped put him in prison: slim, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a dark green sweatshirt … the mere fact that she’d testified against him at his trial was more than enough reason to hate her with a passion, and he did.

  Oh, he definitely did. But it was her companion he couldn’t tear his gaze from now. Tall and slender, she had red hair pulled back into an elastic from which a few softly curling tendrils escaped, framing her fine-boned features. Her brows were wing shaped, her lips pale pink and curved in a smile.

  She looked like an angel … or a ghost, he thought with a faint shudder. It was what she must be, even though the Tiptree woman called her Ellie—

  But it wasn’t her name. Calling her that was just some kind of trick, meant to fool him. That face … lightly freckled, with perfect features and large, light colored eyes. Beautiful, and so familiar—

  It was her. It was his dead wife, Marianne. Impossible, but there she was. Glaring up at him the last time he’d seen her, she’d spat at him, then sworn with her last breath that he would pay, that she would come back to make him pay.…