The sharp way he asked it showed that he was trying to startle me into reaction. I shook my head. “Never heard of him. Who is Caleb Benson?”
He stared down into his Merlot, in a crystal-cut juice glass that I’d found at a yard sale for ten cents, and then took a long drink. “It don’t matter. Look, let me tell you what’s on my mind. Then you decide whether you’re retired or not.”
“Fair enough.”
He was quiet for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell whether he was gathering his thoughts or fighting his suspicions. “Senior partner’d be Lincoln, I suppose?”
“Died last spring,” I said. “Heart attack. That’s as much as you need know.” I didn’t go into the details. John and I had finished a case for a national corporation, ferreting out the disgruntled employee selling trade secrets. We’d written a hefty report, and then John had turned in early. I’d gone out to a show and dinner with a lady; John had told me he would hand-deliver our report the next morning. He got as far as the lobby of the corporation’s headquarters before collapsing. A guard did CPR, the paramedics showed up within minutes, everything that could be done had been done. The hospital cardiologist later told me he’d never known anyone to survive that particular kind of heart attack, unless the patient had already been hospitalized when it hit.
You play the sad, sorry games of guilt with yourself. John had been taking his medications and had been exercising, watching his drinking and his diet. Still, they told me at the hospital, his potassium level had dropped so low that it triggered the heart attack. I should have noticed he looked bad those last few days. I should have talked him into a doctor visit.
I became aware that Smith was reading my expression, or trying to. “Go ahead,” I said. “You’ve got till the end of the bottle, that’s all.”
He raised his glass. “To retirement,” he said. “Nothin’ like it.” He sipped and then said, “I’m retired, too, you know. I’m seventy-two years old, and I been retired for twenty-two of ’em. Worked for the town of Montpelier for thirty years, starting when I was twenty. Did forestry work for the state on the side, that was always my first love, but for my full-time income I drove the snowplows and repaired streets and put up signs and all kinds of crap. Glad I got out before they brought that damn freeway through. Traffic has gone all to hell.”
That made me smile. Montpelier, the state capital about twenty miles away from my cabin, has a population of some ten thousand: it’s the smallest state capital in the country, and the only one without a McDonald’s, a source of pride to the townspeople and no doubt a cause of angst among the captains of the fast-food industry. Rush hour means it takes eight minutes to drive from one end of town to the other, instead of the normal four.
I shrugged. “I decided not to wait until I’m fifty or sixty. Instead I try to retire as often as I can. Work for a while, make enough money to retire for six months or a year, then work a while again.”
“I guess it makes a kind of sense,” he said. He watched me pour another glass for myself. “But tell me straight, you on the bottle? You an alcoholic?”
“That’s not one of my demons.”
“Be careful with it anyway, son. It can sneak up on you.” He set down his glass and leaned forward, taking a deep breath. “All right. My demon right now is that I’m pretty damn sure they’re gonna kill my grandson, Jerry.” His voice sharpened. “Don’t ask me for any kind of proof, because I ain’t got that. Gettin’ it would take your help. Right now, I just know it in my gut. I know that kind of men.”
Telling me even that much had cost him effort. He had my curiosity up. “What kind of men?”
Smith leaned back in his rocker then, stretching his neck like an old turtle come to the surface after a winter of hibernation. He stared up into the corner of the ceiling over the door, but his eyes had an unfocused quality, as if he were searching for something far in the distance. “The kind of men,” he said slowly, “who think they got the right to play God. Son, you got no idea how big this is.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Help me. You watch out for my grandson, work with me for a few days. I can’t tell you how to do your job, but you’ll see what needs doing. Unless I miss my guess, give a week, ten days, you’ll have all the proof we need. You’d know how to use it to stop them. See, Jerry’s too young to know what he’s gettin’ into. He tried talking to them, thought he could pry into their business because he works for the newspaper, freedom of the press and all. He don’t understand men like that, but I do, and I expect you do too. He don’t realize they’ll kill him before they’ll let him print a word of any story he puts together. Now before I go any farther, how much you charge?”
“It varies,” I said. “But—”
He pulled a handful of folded bills from his jeans pocket. “Call this a retainer?” he asked, handing the money over to me.
He gave me four twenties, a ten, and two fives. I started to tell him that Lincoln and Tyler specialized in big jobs, working for corporations that would pay us more in a day than most people earn in a year, but I never got the chance.
Because at that moment the bomb went off.
3
It sounded as if an artillery shell had exploded in my front yard, rattling the windows and jangling the plates by the sink. Smith sprang up and beat me out the door. From some atavistic instinct—this is my house, I must defend it—I snatched up the shotgun and pelted after him. He was already wading through the break he had made in the deep snow, and beyond him I could see flames licking up into the trees about a half-mile down the mountainside.
“My truck!” he bellowed, not slowing a step.
He was still ahead of me, but not by much, when we reached the blazing vehicle: an old red Chevy pickup, rusted out along the sides, dark green paint on the right front fender. The front driver’s side sported a faded bumper sticker that said WE WERE ALWAYS HERE with some smaller type along the bottom that I couldn’t read. Flames licked out from beneath the chassis, and the cabin boiled with black smoke that scrabbled like a frantic living thing at the closed windows, seeking escape.
Smith turned toward me with a grim expression. “It’s a warning.”
I wasn’t buying it. Fires happen. “You leave a cigarette burning inside? Anything flammable in the back? Flares, dynamite, anything like that?”
“I don’t smoke,” he said, “and the bed was empty.” He stood about ten feet from the driver’s side door and pointed. “Look.” The gas cap was missing and the area around it had burned black. The snow and dirt under the truck looked like the tank had exploded downward. “They lit a wick of some kind. It would blow off the fumes in the tank when it burned down low enough. Give somebody time to get away.”
“Teenagers,” I suggested.
Smith shook his head, ponytail swaying, his face pinched together in a way that accented the frown wrinkles and made his eyes look sad and his mouth angry. “Way the hell out here? That kind of stuff kids do at night, in town, after a few cases of beer.”
“Want me to call the police?” I said, pulling my cell phone out of my shirt pocket.
He grunted and spat on the ground near his feet. “No. I’ve been trying to tell you, Oakley. This’s bigger than the little town of Northfield, and, besides, they come out here and it just ends up in the paper and I look like a fool.” He swept a lean hand down his face, over his beard, and heaved a sigh. “Lemme call Bill Grinder, he’s got a new wrecker. Tow this thing in and see if anything can be done.”
I handed him the phone, and as I stepped back, a flicker of motion out in the forest caught the corner of my eye. I looked hard, but could see nothing besides trees. Maybe it was a deer, holding still and now invisible in the underbrush.
After Smith finished his call, he handed the phone back to me and said, “You gonna take this case now? You see what we’re up against?”
Both rear tires of the truck had deflated, but they hadn’t ignited, and the flames were dying down. I do
ubted that Smith could use the truck for anything but scrap, but he hadn’t asked my opinion on that. I said, “Smith, I’m not even licensed in this state.”
“Can’t you do a favor for a friend?”
I had to grin at that. “You’re a friend?”
“Other than that waitress in town, I expect I’m about the best friend you’ve got in this state.” He returned my grin, though he still had a sick expression on his face.
Somehow he stung me into indiscretion. I protested, “Wanda’s a hell of a lot more than just a waitress.” That much was true. She had dropped out of grad school to work as a waitress so when her daughter got home from school she could be there for her.
“Speaking as a man who’s lived a lot of years and seen a lot of places,” Smith said evenly, “don’t you think most waitresses are a hell of a lot more than a waitress?”
Mousetrapped by an aging hippie. “It’s not like that with Wanda and me.” I wondered if everybody in town thought we had something going.
Smith laughed once, a sharp, abrupt hoot like a disturbed owl. “Oakley, you’re more like me than you wanna admit. You afraid of that? Afraid of turnin’ out like me in thirty years? You—God damn!”
I heard the bullet ping off the hood of the truck in the same instant that I saw his head jerk and a puff of blood and tissue explode from his ear. The report came maybe a tenth of a second later, and by that time I had grabbed Smith and pulled him to the ground. As we rolled into the ditch, another shot shattered the driver’s side window, letting the pent black smoke gush out.
“You OK?” I asked over the soft gurgling of the roadside stream.
“Damn. Just tore up my ear,” he said. “Hurts like a beesting.”
“Stay here and lay low.” I moved off in a crouch, shotgun at port arms, heading downhill, where the shooter had to be. Same direction where I’d noticed the flicker of motion. My instincts were not as sharp as they used to be.
I kept to the edge of the logging road until I could duck into the cover of the evergreens, where the going was a little easier. I felt seriously outgunned: I had the shotgun, but whoever had ripped a chunk out of Smith’s ear had a rifle capable of firing a slug at supersonic speed.
No sounds. Maybe the shooter thought that Smith was dead, that the job had been finished. I froze and listened. Back up the hill I could hear the tink and creak of the cooling truck. I could see Jeremiah Smith through the trees, but only because I knew exactly where he lay. At any distance, he would look like a boulder shouldering through the snow cover at the edge of the road. Smith was a disciplined man. He moved not at all.
I crouched over and zigzagged from trunk to trunk, looking and listening for any sign. Nothing.
I emerged from the woods at the point where the town-maintained road joined my old dirt logging road. Having covered a quarter of a mile from the truck, I had seen only rabbit, deer, and coyote tracks. Now, looking around, I spotted a place where a hawk or owl had snatched something, probably a chipmunk, and hit the snow with its wings. Deer scat lay where the running snowmelt had broken through into a frigid water hole. The droppings looked like rough, round brown marbles melted into the snow. The delicate tracks of a fox, crisscrossing the area. I spent about a half-hour scouting around without turning up anything more deadly or threatening than that.
Just as I was about to turn back, I heard a splashing in the river on the far side of the road. I followed the sound and picked up the tracks of a man: boots with a deep tread, heading down toward the river.
I walked alongside his trail, keeping a wary scan of the forest ahead. Came to a slight rise, and then there was a steep drop, perhaps a hundred feet, down to the forest floor ten feet this side of the Dog River. I could see where he’d climbed down, where his tracks resumed in the snow, and where they vanished into the shallow water. He could have gone downstream, in the direction of town, or he could have turned the other way, toward the crossroads and the old wooden bridge. Three miles or so by road, maybe a third of that if he followed the river.
Either way he was gone, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. Whoever had taken the shot, he had to have seen me coming—hell, I had spent thirty minutes outside of cover just across the road, casting back and forth for his trail. Whoever it was could have shot me before I had even caught sight of him. And the fact that he was willing to wade the frigid edges of the Dog River suggested the man had certain reserves of endurance.
By now I could hear the low growl of a truck coming up the town road, probably Bill Grinder in his wrecker. Dusk was coming on fast, so I crossed the road and headed back to the truck, walking the shortest way toward where the sky was darkest, the northeast, where I knew I’d find my own trail worn into the snow over the past few days, the distinctive scrape marks of snowshoes. I came to a rise, gray slabs of ancient shale stacked untidily, as though God had thrown down a losing poker hand, and climbed the hillside in its lee, where the snow was relatively thin.
And stopped with a jerk when I saw a woman ten feet away from me, sitting on one of the slabs.
She looked at me as if she’d expected me. She must have heard me coming. Small details registered: she was probably ten years younger than I, with long black hair, shiny and clean, a strong-featured face, knife-blade nose, heavy black eyebrows, a smiling mouth, and big, dark smiling eyes. Something, though, was out of kilter, out of focus. Her gaze had an ancient air. She might have been sculpted from the stone.
“Ah,” I said, standing there holding my shotgun, feeling foolish.
She inclined her head a little, smiling more broadly, absurdly beautiful in the fading light, and I realized she wore buckskins, shirt and pants. Her long-fingered hands lay one on top of the other in her lap, and she sat cross-legged, like an idol. She wore moccasins, odd boot-like ones that laced up to where they vanished beneath the pant legs. I could see the soles, and they were not only dry but absolutely clean, as if the woman had been dropped down from outer space.
I gestured, stupidly, with the shotgun. “Who are you?”
She blinked her large brown-gold eyes and took a long, deep breath. Her skin was a warm, deep golden-brown. She had high cheekbones and a faint gauntness to her cheeks, as if she’d been eating lean during the winter. When she spoke, her voice was so soft that I had to lean toward her to hear it at all. “My people call me a name you could not pronounce or understand. You might call me … Sylvia.” She seemed to work at making each syllable and word come out perfectly, as if maybe she’d grown up with a speech impediment or stutter and had overcome it by sheer force of will. Her tone held no apology. Instead, she made me feel obscurely as though I were the intruder, as though an apology might be in order.
But I was thinking like an investigator, too, at some level. We were downhill from where the truck had burned. She might have fired the shot—except she had no rifle, and her moccasins had not left the boot tracks that I had followed.
“You see somebody around here with a rifle?” I asked.
She shrugged, then pointed toward the river with her chin. “There was somebody farther down the hill. I heard two shots. He was hiding in the ditch across the road when you turned toward the town, and then he got up and ran down the hill to the water.”
I was wondering how the hell she had planted herself on that rock without leaving tracks herself. The snow uphill from her was thin here in the cover of the woods, but it lay absolutely unmarked. “Did you get any sort of look at him? What he was wearing?”
She held her right hand up and waved it from side to side, as if she were saying “no” with it instead of shaking her head. “It was a man, but I did not see him. I only sensed him.”
“And what are you doing here?” I could not keep an edge of frustration out of my voice.
“Just sitting.” She smiled, the kind of smile that comes from the stomach and ends up on the face, that moves from one person to another. It touched my irritation like warm wind on snow. “You don’t need your weapon,”
she added. “A bit of food to leave for Squirrel would be better.”
“How’d you get here? Why are you here?”
She moved her head, as though indicating the jumbled pile of slate slabs. “My people live near here, and this site was once a holy place of friends of ours. I come here sometimes.”
That told me something, anyway. “Are you Abenaki?” I said. Just a week earlier there’d been an article in the paper about an Abenaki burial site being dug up by a developer. The Abenaki Indians had once ranged from Maine to Michigan, but by 1700 few remained alive after repeated encounters with Europeans. By 1800 the census had counted only about a thousand; since then their numbers have increased, and now Abenaki are scattered all over Vermont and in the Adiron-dacks of New York.
The woman tilted her head, as if considering what she was. “No,” she said. “Not Abenaki. My people were here before the Abenaki.”
The sun had set, turning the forest into a black-and-white sketch of winter. I heard men’s voices and the rattle of a chain, and looked away through the trees, trying to see what Smith was doing. When I turned back, the woman was gone.
I walked all the way around the little hill formed by the stone slabs, but found no trace of her, and no tracks indicating her arrival or departure. Stumped, I hurried back to the logging road.
Jeremiah Smith was standing now and he half-turned to look at me as I came out of the woods. The shiny tow truck had backed up just downhill from the rear of the pickup, headlights throwing yellow cones down toward the road. Somebody was going through the business of getting a chain around the rear axle, probably a difficult job with two flat tires.
From down the slope I heard a kind of hurried clatter and turned just in time to see a doe break from the forest edge and rush in great rocking-horse leaps down the slope toward the road and the river. I couldn’t image raising my shotgun.
In the twilight, she was simply too lovely to shoot.
Death in the Pines Page 2