Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  I saw no reason at all to exempt the other three Etlingers. Willem’s wife Kate and his parents, Eleanor and Rodney, were less than crazy about me, and I couldn’t seriously believe they’d been crazy about Ryan either, whatever surface noises they made. They’d created a toney image for the Garden Center, the “we may cost a little more, but we’re worth it” sort of thing. The effects of Ryan’s penny-pinching were starting to strain the credibility of that claim. At staff meetings they always managed to say something positive about how he was putting their financial house in order. Beneath the surface, though, had it reached the point where one or more of them decided Ryan’s cheapness could be expurgated only by expurgating the man himself? Or had it come to seem all too likely he was on track to end up literally owning the store? Since they didn’t really want me around, either, why not two birds with one stone?

  Clete Donnelly was a man with a genuine appreciation of business bottom lines. His by-marriage connection with the Etlingers had not inspired him to cultivate a toney image or to adopt his in-laws’ style of papering over delicate subjects with pleasant words. Officially, he’d recommended his distant relative from Watertown to the Etlingers; the common wisdom was they’d had no choice in the matter. Willem’s marriage to his daughter, together with his subsequent guaranteeing of two sizable loans the Garden Center could not have obtained on its own, had given him a legitimate interest and plenty of clout.

  Clete’s own financial picture was probably a work in progress since he’d launched Hudson Heights, by far his largest and most ambitious project to date. The financing was from a consortium of county investors, abetted by a low-interest state loan and some nice perks extracted from the county development agency. In most people’s minds, though, Clete Donnelly was Hudson Heights. He gave every appearance of thinking so, too. Modest, Clete is not. Or indecisive. And if he were a less tenacious man, Hudson Heights would never have gotten off the drawing board.

  For most of its length Patroon County, which is on the southern fringe of the Capital District, is bordered on the west by the Hudson River. A little farther south the river frontage, much of it nicely elevated, was bought up during the nineteenth century by families for whom the American dream had come true beyond their wildest imaginings. They transformed their land into country estates with extensive grounds and lavishly appointed mansions. A number of these estates are still intact, the majority in one form or another of public ownership.

  That sort of development didn’t happen here, though our river frontage is just as dramatic in places. We were a little too far from Manhattan, and back in that era Riverton, our only city, was a lively, raucous, anything-but-elegant port. Its famous red-light district drew customers from within a hundred-mile radius. The rest of the county has always been primarily agricultural, though mills did have a few decades’ worth of heyday; a dozen or so of their massive redbrick shells are still around.

  The land along the river north of Riverton was too hilly to be considered good for farming, nor did it afford promising sites for mills. A scattering of residences, some affluent, some ordinary, gradually accumulated along the narrow, flat valley plain just beyond the riverbank and the railroad tracks that parallel it. The heights remained largely untampered with until Clete started buying up parcels of land in the area. People watched—some with amazement, others with outrage—as he literally sliced off the summit of Crane Hill, the highest elevation on his property—in fact in the whole county—to create a much larger top surface. The general assumption was that he planned to build himself a house up there. Clete’s castle, people started calling it in advance. His idea, when announced, was quite different and much grander: a tour-quality golf course, winding among two-acre-plus upscale residential properties, tied together by an elegant clubhouse and inn on the hill he had reshaped, overlooking the river: Hudson Heights.

  At first glance the project had a lot going for it. The people of this county, though acknowledging that some sort of development might be desirable, are picky about which types are suitable. Only the lightest of industries need apply, and these days you can forget your large middle-income housing tract. Since I’ve been here a utility company identified a potential site for a power plant and a farmer wanted to turn his cornfields into a speedway. The level of general distress was amazing, and both projects died quick deaths.

  So you’d think a concept like Hudson Heights—designed to look nice, not make much noise, and bring some serious money into the area—would breeze right through the planning boards. Who was there to object? A decade or so earlier, the answer would probably have been “no one.” Unfortunately for Clete and his backers, by the time they’d gotten their act together, so had all sorts of environmental groups.

  There were the water people, concerned with what the golf course runoff—all those turf-management chemicals— would do to the river. There was the topography focus group, maintaining that changing the contours of the land to the projected extent would have a detrimental effect on interior farmlands. The habitat environmentalists got busy compiling lists of birds and plants whose territory would be made unlivable; the infrastructure folk documented projected strains on local resources. Claims were put forth that there were several Indian burial grounds in the marked area. Another group researched previous usage and found that in the mid to late ’40s part of the land had been rented out to Albany Univers, an industrial conglomerate, for dumpsites. Given the firm’s diversity even back then and the minimal record-keeping requirements of the era, heaven only knew what might be in them.

  Mariah, to whom I owe most of my historical background on this region, had a major role in the protest scenario as it unfolded. She insisted her opposition stemmed from the conviction that natural beauty should be preserved: what Clete had done to Crane Hill before the project even got under way was an ominous portent for things to come. I’m sure she believed that, but I suspect her fondness for a good argument and her dislike of Clete Donnelly factored in, too.

  Clete scored the first points. The Indian group’s claim of having discovered some artifacts in the quarry pond area of the site he shot down by producing a video of the very same people burying the alleged finds.

  After that things got serious. In its required Environmental Impact Statement the Hudson Heights group addressed the possible environmental threats one by one, either showing that no significant problem would be created or modifying the original scheme’s grading, drainage, housing density, maintenance program, and road routing to lessen negative impact.

  Some of the EIS claims were disputed, especially regarding the golf course’s impact on its surroundings. What evolved was a “green thinking” approach to course maintenance that the environmentalists grudgingly accepted. Clete grumbled that he hoped the grass would listen to his entreaties to grow, the weeds and bugs to his pleas to go away, because those were just about the only weapons he’d been left with.

  The hardest area for the Hudson Heights group to address in the EIS, and the one on which opponents to the project came to pin their hopes, was the dumpsites. Of Albany Univers’s five plants in the region back in the ’40s, one was known to have produced paint thinners, another assorted plastics; both had used chemicals whose waste products were classified today as hazardous. If the dump contents had come from either of those two plants, there was a real possibility parts of the area were contaminated and should not be built on.

  Working from what Albany Univers had on record plus a ledger and crude maps provided by a man named Toby Babcock, who had owned the bulk of the land Clete bought, Thurman Haynes and his land-management crew identified the general locations of the three dumpsites Babcock had collected money on and compiled a partial list of the materials that should be in them. A few were mildly undesirable, none was a major toxin. To this research they added extensive soil testing in the site areas, which pretty much confirmed what they expected to find and gave no indication of a serious problem. They estimated that everything in the dumpsites had
come from two of the conglomerate’s more benign plants and posed no environmental hazard. As an extra precaution, however, they proposed to leave the sites forever green.

  Without Clete’s involvement, that might have satisfied the project’s opponents, but he did have a reputation for bending facts to suit his purposes. A challenge was posed: open the sites to impartial testing—let the public find out was really underneath that ground.

  To some people’s surprise, Clete agreed this would be the responsible way to go. Not only did he accept the challenge, he made a weekend party of it—free hot dogs and soda, clowns for the kiddies. Thurman marked the general outlines of the three sites and had visitors choose random sections of them to uncover. Anybody could watch, check out the contents, take his own soil samples. The makeup of all three sites turned out to be pretty much as estimated.

  So it finally came down to there being no good reason why the Hudson Heights project should not go forward. That’s all you need; the neighbors don’t have to welcome you. This spring the clubhouse and the first nine holes of the golf course had their gala grand opening. At least thirty of the proposed eighty-two houses were scheduled for completion by the end of the summer; a few were already occupied. Hardcore opponents like Mariah remained unplacated, but most of the environmental activist leadership was not local and has moved on.

  The golf course, designed by a landscape architect with an international reputation in that specialty, was being installed by a large Westchester County architect-engineering firm. It was much too extensive a project for the Garden Center. The contract the Etlingers won was for the landscaping on the enlarged top of Crane Hill, which came to be know as the plateau, where the clubhouse and a still-uncompleted inn were located, as well as the two main entrances to the development. In addition, the firm was made the first referral for residential landscaping. It was far and away their biggest contract ever.

  As it turned out, neither Clete nor Willem was much of a physical presence on the project. Details and follow-ups aren’t really their thing. From the beginning, Clete pretty much left the day-to-day management of Hudson Heights to his son Kyle; to Matt Conroy, whose construction savvy he’d relied on for many years; and to Thurman. Willem, though he came around now and then, gave me full responsibility for the installation. Both principals had definite, not necessarily compatible, ideas on how things should go and felt free to intervene at any time. It had been a tipsy umbrella to labor under.

  Where Ryan got into the act was scheduling the Garden Center work, which he took over from Eleanor on the grounds that a more efficient deployment of crews was needed to pare down labor costs. He’d been out there a lot this season, consulting with Kyle, Matt, or Thurman when he wasn’t hounding me. Clete was given to coming up and clapping him on the back. It seemed unlikely Ryan would want to antagonize his patron. Still, he was both observant and opportunistic—maybe he’d found an exploitable flaw in the Hudson Heights operation. Confronted with that sort of problem, Clete and/or one of his lieutenants might have written me into their scenario for a solution.

  So? It seemed pretty likely both that Ryan had made himself a perceived threat to someone and that this person wasn’t fond of me either. I didn’t lack images to paste into that blank space. Narrowing the field would require digging out some particulars, a job the sheriff probably considered belonged to him. Did he deserve an uncluttered shot at it? I should at least wait and see how strong a suspect I turned out to be.

  That business about watched pots not boiling? The dishes were rearranged, my personnel list was assembled, although I hadn’t much notion what to do with it, and where the hell were the kids? It was pushing three-thirty—how long could it take to extract a simple account of a few hours’ time? It wasn’t like much had been going on indoors last night. That wasn’t holding true today. The phone had already rung a week’s worth of times, all but one (Vicky) from media people. After the second “There’s nothing I can tell you,” I’d let the answering machine take over.

  Outside, I found some progress. My Bronco was back together, in a manner of speaking—its contents were a jumble. Only two men were left now, standing out toward the end of the driveway. Recognizing one of them as Frank, I walked on out.

  “Would it help if I put a sawhorse across the end of the driveway later?”

  “Couldn’t hurt, I guess,” Frank said, without observable enthusiasm. He took a small notepad from his shirt pocket, scribbled on the top sheet, tore it off, and handed it to me. “This is the number of the cellular phone we’ll have out here. If somebody manages to outflank us later, give us a buzz. We have your number inside, if something comes up.”

  I tore a piece off the bottom of the sheet, appropriated his pen, and produced another sequence of numbers. “Call my cell phone. It was getting to be nonstop noise, so I turned the ringer turned off my regular phone and started funneling everything through the answering machine.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Walking back toward the house I tried see things from a trespasser’s perspective. There was plenty of outflanking room if you knew the territory. It wouldn’t be such a hot prospect if you didn’t, especially after dark. I decided not to worry. Communications seemed adequate, and I’d keep the kids indoors.

  Finding the Bronco unlocked, I tentatively opened the back and leaned in. When nobody seemed to object, I set myself to restoring order, which was going to take a while. Long before I was finished, garish hot pink CRIME SCENE, KEEP OUT! signs arrived, to be suspended at intervals from the rope. They were barely in place when Channel 8’s people showed up, driving me to cover. Forced to shoot their footage from a distance they couldn’t have found promising, they made quick work of it and left.

  Finally, Donna’s Honda appeared. She stopped to talk briefly with the deputies, then, detouring around the roped-off area, drove on back to where I was standing.

  The boys spilled out of the car. “Can we go see, Aunt Val?” Galen asked.

  I shot Donna a questioning look. “The deputies said as long as they stayed beyond the rope.”

  “Check it out, then.” We watched them race back along the driveway.

  “I did have to tell them, Val. When we finally got out of the school, Alex planted himself in front of my driver’s side door and demanded to know what all that had been about.”

  “How did things go? It took long enough.”

  “Galen isn’t into concise plot synopses,” she answered dryly. “And Alex had to demonstrate his superior understanding from time to time. I thought it went well. We were all satisfied that you were indeed inside in the house with the boys last night from the time you got home until one A.M. Mrs. Judson may not have approved of such late hours, but she did believe.”

  “How did the boys hold up?”

  “Galen was in his glory. Alex? Part worried, part bored. A little cranky because his brother remembered more than he did.”

  “What about after you told them?”

  “Not many questions, but they couldn’t wait to inspect the place where it happened. It’s probably just as well. That outline they’ve drawn inside those ropes doesn’t seriously look like a body to me.”

  “Maybe you had to see the real thing first. God, I hope so. They were just starting to once in a while feel this is their turf. Hard to argue now that it’s safer than a South Albany street.”

  “Or the interior of a South Albany apartment. We both know it is, though. You and Vicky made the right decision in not whisking them away.”

  “I hope. What did Sheriff Dye have to say?”

  “I bear messages. First, you’re free to drive the Bronco. Second, let me get the exact wording … He can’t offer official clearance yet, but you shouldn’t deprive yourself of a good night’s sleep. Val, I get the strong impression he doesn’t think you killed that man.”

  “This morning I didn’t have a clue what he was thinking.”

  “He’s on the quiet side. Seems to have a way with children. As we were getti
ng into the car he came over and told Alex he should renegotiate his television privileges, whatever that might mean. For maybe half a second Alex looked puzzled— then he started grinning.”

  I found myself grinning, too. Mr. Nice Guy or no, it hadn’t been a bad little cross-check.

  When Donna left, promising her continuing availability on what she proclaimed was the off chance it might be needed, I had the boys come on in the house and explained, trying to keep it low-key, why I wanted them to stay inside the rest of the day. I got two incredulous faces. Summer evenings they’re usually in and out till dark. Still, their protests were brief enough that I suspected the boys were kind of relieved to have the restriction.

  Both had gotten to the bottom line on the afternoon’s questioning: “We alibied you, didn’t we, Aunt Val?” Galen put it.

  “That’s about it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us first so we could’ve done it better?” Alex demanded.

  “For one thing, I didn’t know there was a dead man out front until after you left this morning. For another, what you want to put in an alibi is the truth. From what I hear, you guys did just fine.”

  “So who was it got killed, anyhow?”

  “A man I worked with. You never met him.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Not much. But I surely didn’t want him dead, either. Especially in our front yard.”

  Galen, I could see, believed unconditionally. For Alex it was not that easy. It was already part of his take on the world that people did rotten things to one another sometimes. Even the people you happened to love. He’d give me the benefit of the doubt, but he could not manage the larger gift of absence of doubt.