Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  He was currently working on the dirt-lot parking area for a mini shopping mall in Devon, a hamlet a few miles east of the Pinehaven town line. My arrival was not well-timed, as it turned out. The larger of his two backhoes had broken down earlier in the morning and on-site repairs were not holding. Skip doesn’t panic about things like that, but he takes them very seriously. Skip takes life, period, very seriously. I’ve often wondered how he came by his nickname.

  How it ended up was, I asked my questions to his disappearing and reappearing, usually prone body. Not that he was noticeably impatient or inattentive, but I do believe I’d have engaged a higher level of his mind if less of it had been devoted to machine repair.

  Not wanting to clutter it with too many preliminaries, I started off by telling him about the now-buried caves and my educated guess as to their location. I wanted to know what would have happened to them, besides being buried, in the course of Clete’s remake of the hill. Would the tops have been staved in?

  “Most likely,” Skip thought. “The rock structure is weaker there than on the river face of the hill. There’ll probably still be air pockets, though. If one of any size collapses, we’ll see the effects up top in spite of all that concrete.”

  “Like a big hole opening up and swallowing a few cars?”

  “A sizable depression, maybe, measured horizontally. I doubt you’d get anything close to car-swallowing depth. It could mess up the surface of the lot, is about all.”

  Scratch easy disaster theory number one. “Might the big cave, the one where the bats used to live, have been suitable for use as a dumpsite?”

  “Suitable? I suppose, if you’re thinking purely in terms of storage area. Assuming the entrance was big enough to drive into. And you said there used to be a passable road up that high. There’d be the advantage of an easy close-off when it was full. But I can’t see it would make much sense to truck stuff all the way up the hill when there were plenty of places to dump down below.”

  “Right. But let’s just say that fifty-some years ago somebody did turn the big cave into a dumpsite and what they were dumping was toxic waste. How might this manifest today?”

  The next time his body reappeared from under the backhoe it stayed a while. “We’ll assume there was a way for this stuff to leach out, which could mean seepage if the right area was exposed. Are you thinking plateau surface or the side of the hill?”

  “Either. If you could see it, how would it look?”

  “That’s a variable. With a mature leach-out you get ooze, and it can be bubbly. Maybe there’s vapor rising. Have you ever seen the surface above a leaky old landfill? Or smelled it?”

  “Sounds like you’re describing a mini thermal area.”

  “Something like, but there wouldn’t be nearly the force involved, and that’s important here. This stuff would be a fair distance from both the side and the top of Crane Hill now. Also underneath a thick concrete cap up top. Even if it got to leaching pretty good, I’d be surprised if much of anything showed. I worked most of that area last summer and didn’t see indications of anything going on. How about you?”

  “Nothing,” I conceded.

  “Of course if there is some sort of toxic leakage it might manifest a lot less dramatically in soil corruption. Are there any areas where you’ve had unusual die-off?”

  “Our die-off’s been within normal parameters. And the soil tests out healthy enough.”

  “Did Cooperative Extension just do the pH, or did you send out to Cornell for the full analysis?”

  I stared at him. “Oh, wow! Skip, I’ve got to run. I do thank you.”

  He looked up at me sharply. “You’re welcome to stick around and tell me for what.”

  “I’d best wait a little on that. Trust me. It would also be a good idea to keep any guessing to yourself for the time being.”

  • • •

  My next level! Why did they drive Skip away? Because he had damn good eyes and they couldn’t risk him spotting something he’d insist be investigated. I’d figure to be a lesser danger in that respect, since I didn’t personally move any of the ground. But what if I began wondering why plants were dying? How would these people know what might look to me like a normal problem and what a suspicious one? Thus Thurman and all his reassuring soil tests.

  Mariah. All right, so she couldn’t have known about the cave. She’d taken a different route, one Willem and I had unwittingly pointed her toward in our Monday night reminiscences. My client with the yen to pave things over and the deception we’d pulled could have put her in mind of Clete’s big concrete parking lot, which so many people thought was in the wrong place. Then we’d fed her the idea that you’re only guessing what’s more than a few feet under a surface until you dig down, and told her about Thurman’s phony genius in locating the dumpsites. I’d mentioned his insistence on doing his own soil testing. Willem and I had half-kiddingly revived our argument about those Cornell Pink azaleas, which I’d bitched to her about often enough before, too hung up on my conviction of their temperament to consider other possibilities.

  Mariah must have been moved to do just that. She came up with an intriguing “what if,” figured out a way to research it, and wanted to shore up her argument before springing it on anybody. And then she sprang it on the wrong person? Surely not Thurman. By that time she’d have realized, as I did now, that he must be involved.

  To the extent I’m a researcher at all, I’m a cut-to-the-chase type. What I kept thinking, driving on home from Devon, was that nobody would pay much attention to such a convoluted theory unless I produced objectively valid soil tests to back it up. The impulse to go get the samples right then cooled before I could point the Bronco in the appropriate direction. Relationships being what they were, I’d need a court order nobody was about to issue. And my foolhardiness does have its limits. Unauthorized, this was not an operation I’d want to try unless surrounded by sturdy escorts. I’d give Baxter first dibs. If he passed—wouldn’t he have to?—maybe the Yardley brothers would be open to branching out.

  Why hadn’t I thought sooner of hiring myself some bodies, I wanted to know, looking down my driveway at the borderline-amazing activity taking place over by my house. Or, more precisely, on it. The angle at which Kate Etlinger had parked her car suggested she’d muttered, “This is far enough,” yanked the keys out, and stormed ahead. Kate herself looked like she was having one hell of a good time swinging a sledgehammer golf-club style against the wall. From inside, Roxy was barking like crazy.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled scrambling out of the Bronco and striding toward her.

  She didn’t break rhythm. “What the hell did you think you were doing yesterday, telling Willem somebody in his family was a murderer? I warned you to leave us alone!”

  “Like you’ve left me alone? Was that your sign I painted over?” Her swings were connecting up into the lower part of my blue rectangle, making jagged, ugly dents. I tried to think how close she was to any pipes. “Kate, stop that!”

  “You should have taken it to heart.” She delivered another thunk. “You’re not wanted around here.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you want, or your asshole father, or the whole lot of you, up to and including Willem at this point. You butt out of my life, I’ll steer clear of yours—that’s the message I wanted him to deliver. Waste of breath, obviously.”

  I’d been watching long enough to see at what point in her swing I should make my grab, but I mistimed it a little. Or maybe it’s that Kate, though much smaller than me, is a very strong woman. Though I kept the sledgehammer from connecting, her momentum was strong enough to topple the two of us backwards, me landing heavily on the ground with her partly on top of me. We both managed to retain our grips on the sledgehammer handle.

  We got right into wrestling for sole possession, her kicking and elbow gouging backward, me trying to bull her over, facedown into the dirt. She managed to angle her head over into my bare right forear
m, and I felt a sharp pain as her teeth sank in. It was enough to break my grip, but my outrage was such that I made a fist on the injured arm and slammed it into the side of her head. Hands slipping off the sledgehammer, she rolled away from me, onto her back. She looked a little dazed but not the least bit calmer.

  Hefting the sledgehammer in both hands, I heaved it beyond both our reaches. Kate’s eyes followed, her body tensing. I rolled over on top of her, pinning her down. It was a lesser struggle, this second one. She delivered a few more kicks but couldn’t get much leverage on them. When I managed to twist one of her arms at an angle that it must’ve felt on the verge of breaking, she went abruptly limp. I’m sure she could see in my eyes, only inches from hers, that I wouldn’t mind carrying through. For what seemed like a long time I enjoyed the fear I read in her expression; then I let go of her arm and pushed off and up onto my feet.

  “Go home,” I told her, panting, backing away little to give her some room. She lay there for a minute, then got slowly, warily up, rubbing her arm. “Please don’t ruin it for him,” she said tonelessly, eyes averted.

  I did not answer, watching her walk slowly at first, then with increasing briskness, toward her car. The way my insides were roiling, it would not be safe to start anything up again.

  Not wanting to give Baxter any more reason to move me off the premises, I wasn’t going to report the encounter. I could disinfect and bandage my bleeding arm and think up an excuse for nailing some boards over the abused wall, work off the adrenaline. It seemed unlikely Kate would be any more eager to show and tell than I was. What screwed it was that as she was getting into her car, Baxter’s patrolman, apparently having gotten a good enough look from the road to warrant a closer one, pulled into the driveway, blocking her exit.

  The man who emerged from the car and approached us in a classic, laconic cop swagger was one I’d seen around but couldn’t put a name to. Kate could. “Jimmy,” she said, her public smile looking good as new except maybe for the smudges of dirt around her mouth.

  “Hey, Kate,” he acknowledged. He glanced slowly from her disheveled figure to my hardly spiffier one, to the damaged wall. “Was something going on here we need to know about?”

  “No,” I offered, unable to immediately come up with any helpful amplification.

  “Kate?”

  That really was a damn effective smile she’d taught herself. “I just stopped by on my way to a lunch date to tell Val something. I do have to run, and I know Val wouldn’t want it to be over her, uh, lawn, so if you wouldn’t mind backing on out—”

  He looked around hard, then again more slowly, and shrugged. “Sure.”

  It wasn’t until both of them had gone that I thought to wonder which “him” Kate didn’t want me to ruin something for.

  The Yardley brothers, I learned from Sue’s voice delivering the last message on my answering machine, were up in the Adirondacks on a fishing trip, due home that night or maybe sometime Sunday, or they might stay over till Monday— neither of the wives seemed to have definite expectations. They would call Denny, whenever. Swell, I thought, jabbing the rewind button. I physically ached for someone or something to unload on.

  Slow it down, I told myself. As far as the Yardleys went, what was the rush? I’d be around, mostly, over the weekend, and there’d be Baxter’s patrol, not to mention Baxter himself, some of the time. It seemed unlikely Kate would come back, or that the rest of them would be dumb enough to make another move right away. Or that there’d be many outsiders to pester me. While the rest of that tape with Sue on it had been taken up by hang-ups and media calls, the voices were sounding both less urgent and less hopeful. Give it another day or two, that component of the stress ought to vaporize of its own accord.

  Meantime, Baxter might hit some or other payoff. Surely he was due. I couldn’t see what he wasn’t chasing that he should. So many people must have ideas, and concerns, about what was going on—wouldn’t it stand to reason one of them might let something slip? Someone on the fringe, most likely. The people at the core must be buzzing like hell among themselves by now, but they had awfully good reason to invoke damage control, not to mention lots of practice. Though if Kate was core, you’d have to speculate things were starting to spin loose even from them.

  So maybe Baxter or one of his men would overhear something useful. Or rattle someone enough they’d make too candid a remark. Maybe somebody with a conscience would volunteer. Who did I suppose that would be?

  Personally, I, like Baxter, had more faith in the physical sort of breakthrough: convincing soil test results, Steve tracing Mariah’s line of research. Or maybe the list of calls to and from her phone would point the way.

  Baxter expected to get his hands on that by afternoon. He’d said if nothing obvious showed he’d bring it out and let me have a look. I pronounced that good enough reason to hang around. If it turned out I wasn’t needed, fine. And if nothing showed to me either, there would still be the potential of a late-night excursion to Hudson Heights. Maybe even, knowing that one particular area as well as I did, a solo one.

  The boarding-over didn’t take long. I was running short on energy-intensive projects and flat out of housework. The garden, then. On principle I object to working there for any motive except pure pleasure, but times were tough. So I loaded up on tools and got going.

  Only in spring is there very much I actually need to do, now that the garden is established. But I can always find something—a little pruning here, a transplant there. Or a bigger project like path-making. That day seemed good for attacking an overly dense clump of lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal, getting some air and space into it. Neither of these plants comes out easily when crowded. I use an ax, myself, though not around people with delicate sensibilities.

  I was chopping away, well splattered with mud and leaf bits, when I heard a car turn in to the driveway. Such was my level of trust at that point I took the ax along to see who it was.

  Baxter was staring at the boarded-over section of the wall. “Kate?” he asked.

  “You heard.” I made a show of shrugging it off. “She got a little crazy.”

  “She’s always been a lousy loser. Apparently the patrol timing wasn’t much of a challenge.”

  “In her state of mind, your guy could have followed her right into the driveway.”

  “There will be a car parked down the road from now on. Let me see under that bandage on your arm.”

  “No need.” I stuck it behind my back. “She’s a dirty fighter, but surely not rabid. Forget Kate. I’ve got things to tell.”

  “So do I. How about a soda—you look like you’re ready for one, too. Let’s sit down somewhere.”

  “I’ll bring them out to the porch.” Which I did, along with the pretzels from the other night and the fruit bowl. He’d planted himself in one of the wicker chairs. “Want to go first?”

  I certainly did. So I told him about Skip’s take on the cave, the soil-test trigger. “Baxter, it fits! It explains everything I couldn’t before.”

  “Most everything,” he conceded. “Except the incentive to haul the stuff all the way up the hill.”

  “Damned if I know—” I frowned, briefly. “Wait a minute, of course I do. It was the bats! Toby Babcock wanted to get rid of them because they’d swarm out whenever a hunter started firing and most people get nervous being under a sky full of bats. It was cutting into his income. What if he told Albany Univers they could dump up there cheap, or for free, if they’d just fill the cave and seal it off?”

  “There should be records.”

  “The only records we have from Toby Babcock are the ones Clete’s people produced.”

  “Albany Univers records, then. One of the things I came to tell you is Steve got a hit at the Commerce Department this morning. A clerk remembers seeing Mariah. I’ve set him to printing out data on what the waste shipments from all five Albany Univers plants contained—where they’re supposed to have gone and when.”

  �
�You can abort that: it’s already been done. During the hearing stage the Save the Earth Committee had their people match Toby’s record of deliveries to his dumpsites with Albany Univers’s, just like the Hudson Heights folks claimed to have done. They combed for undesirable components and looked for discrepancies in dates or load listings, where those were available. I was reading about it this morning. All their paperwork is in one of these binders.” I dug through the stacks and handed it to him.

  He flipped pages frowning. “Any chance I’ll hit a summary?”

  “You can have mine. They carry on about how sloppy the record keeping was, on both parts. Dates didn’t always match, Toby Babcock usually didn’t bother to note down what materials had been delivered—only how much he got paid to accept them. Albany Univers was more conscientious, but hardly thorough. This was in keeping with the period, and the discrepancies didn’t look major. The best they could do was to declare that the only way to be sure what those dumpsites contained was to open them. Which Clete obligingly did.”

  “Mariah would have been familiar with this, right? Well, what if there was dumping beyond the assumed time frame? What if Toby Babcock had another contract with another firm? The Save the Earth group couldn’t have checked every company that ever dumped anything anywhere in the Capital District.”

  “How could Mariah have done that either, in just a couple of days? And outside the time frame wouldn’t work because the road was blocked by ’47, when Mr. Kanser came back from the Army. She wouldn’t have known that, of course.”

  “But we have to presume she came up with a successful approach.”

  I thought hard. “Okay. Mariah had educated herself on toxics, and Willem and I inadvertently got her wondering what might be hidden under the Crane Hill plateau. She knew the delivery records had already been scrutinized and compared with Toby Babcock’s. So she must’ve thought of a new approach that involved other parts of the Albany Univers data.”