Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  “We can just keep detouring around them,” I said. “Those lights are pretty well spaced out, and the front yards-to-be have already been graded along that stretch. Who cares if somebody bitches about the tire tracks tomorrow?”

  Baxter’s “Go for it” sounded tentative. It couldn’t be the easiest thing in the world for a law officer to be a party to willful property damage.

  We rode in silence across the tract-house property and along the short spur that connected to the main residential road. There we turned left and cruised along toward the first street-light. Just before its oval of illumination Calvin cut sharply right, making a half circle around it through terrain that turned out to be more roughly graded than I’d thought. It was the bumpiest part of our ride so far, and we must’ve torn out a survey marker or two in the process. They would notice tomorrow.

  Three more such detours and I directed him onto what would someday be a paved walkway over and up to the pool/tennis-courts area. The vegetation needed pruning; Calvin’s Blazer was going to wear some scratches from this part of our excursion, but the cover was excellent. As soon as we were in past where we could be spotted from the road, I had him stop, not wanting the backout—which would be the diciest part of the driving if we still couldn’t use lights—to be any longer than necessary.

  Everything we needed for the sampling was stowed in the two backpacks Baxter and I put on. The load was light and compact going in. You need at least a half-cupful of soil for a proper sample. Many people put it in plastic bags, in the field. I’ve found that once you get more than a few of these, spills and tears are almost inevitable, so I like to collect in pint-size freezer containers. You’re not adding that much weight, there’s plenty of room for the soil, the lids fit tight, and you have a surface for writing the necessary identifying information as you go.

  Besides the neat stacks of empty containers and their lids, each backpack contained a package of disposable cleansing sheets (so we wouldn’t transfer elements of one sample to another), a dry-off towel, and a trowel. I’d also brought a core sampler and a collapsible spade, too light a tool for major job use but handy for spot situations.

  Our plan called for us to walk in the rest of the way to the pool/tennis-courts area, take our first samples there, and then make our way up to the plateau, paralleling the new steps for most of that distance. Baxter didn’t know if the motion sensors called for in the master security plan were installed along the steps yet, but we couldn’t take the chance. It was an easy climb, getting a little steep only toward the top when we veered north away from the steps so we’d emerge onto the plateau into a stand of spruce trees. None of this terrain was visible from inside the country club, but anyone assigned to watch from the parking lot could monitor our progress all the way.

  After stopping several times en route to take soil samples, we scrambled onto the plateau in the area I had chosen. The nearest corner of the country club building was a good 150 feet to the northwest of us, the inn maybe 100 feet to the southwest. The southernmost wall of the parking lot stood roughly 30 feet north and a little east.

  When completed, the plaza was going to be quite pleasant, I thought, but it had a way to go. Sections of the paving had been laid, and part of the lighting system was in, but its individual components were always getting accidentally knocked out and most of them shone on bald spots or stacks of construction materials. Where the fountain circle would be was presently a roundish excavation. Diligent though they were prodded to be, the contractors often failed to secure their litter before the wind got hold of it. In daylight the area wasn’t remotely pretty yet. After dark, it looked like the remains of somebody’s failed civilization.

  To our relief, only night-level lights were showing from the visible sides of the country club; the inn looked totally dark. From the spruce grove we moved on into a staggered double-row forsythia hedge just south of the crossing road. After waiting several minutes, with no indication that anyone was approaching, Baxter and I jumped the low wall on our side of the road, dashed across the road, and jumped the other wall into our first sampling area. The drill was for Calvin to keep lookout from the forsythia hedge while we dug. No reason to put three bodies at risk.

  My backpack was still pretty light, I remember thinking, though we were deliberately oversampling. It wasn’t like we could come back any old time for seconds. The range of the motion sensors covering the country club’s windows and doors, Baxter knew, had been shortened to ten feet. The original twenty-foot band tripped so many alarms it was driving the monitor nuts. They’d partially compensated by mounting a battery of three floodlights well up on the side of the building. Knowing where to look, we could make out their dark shapes as we approached. When they were turned on, I guessed they’d light up most of the garden area.

  I could rattle off a complete list of its shrubs, perennials, and bulbs. Having started off with mostly oversize shrubs for immediate effect, Willem’s planting already provided quite a few good patches of cover for a couple of cautious soil samplers. We were nonetheless at our closest point to the most likely source of danger, our farthest from the escape route. Each time we changed sites, we had to judge the angle of view of those damn moving cameras, then react to it.

  I think the lights came before the voice—I retain the impression of being blinded before getting shouted at. No matter. In that degree of illumination, there was no way to take cover.

  What the voice said was “Either of you moves, I shoot.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Normally, I don’t put somebody else in charge, but in this case, it was instinctive. I looked toward Baxter, who responded with a slight nod. With the light in our faces, we couldn’t see the person behind the voice. Neither of us needed to.

  “Take it easy, Kyle,” Baxter said calmly.

  “You know you’re trespassing.” Somewhat modulated, the voice still carried easily over the maybe fifty feet that separated us. He was standing a little beyond the front entrance to the building, not as well-lit as we were but recognizable once your eyes adjusted. So was the rifle pointing out from mid-chest level. “I bet I can get away with shooting a couple of trespassers, even if one of them does turn out to be a sheriff in civvies.” The voice kept dropping off volume until it was almost his normal, reasonable one. Something had been added, though, or was it subtracted? Too much control? Not enough? “A tragic mistake. Understandable, though, in this tense atmosphere our incompetent sheriff let get out of control.”

  Baxter sounded unruffled. “Do you really think we’d be reckless enough to come out here without taking precautions?”

  “You’re not here officially, I’d bet the store on that. Dad’s got you boxed out too well. And your companion’s reckless enough for the both of you. My sister may have lost it, but I didn’t for a minute believe those vague threats Val made to Willem yesterday. There couldn’t have been much meat to them—it wasn’t till this afternoon she called Chauncy.”

  “And it wasn’t till after talking with him that I faxed an update to my lawyer.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “You should believe her. Clete likes to go first-class— there must be a state-of-the-art computer somewhere in the club, with all the add-ons. Let’s go call Val’s computer and check it out. You can read exactly what she faxed her lawyer.”

  “You’re telling me she had names? Not mine, I don’t think. I’ll worry about lawyers and faxes later. Right now it’s what she asked Chauncy that we need to do something about.”

  “What did he do—get off the phone with me and right back on it with Thurman?”

  “Chauncy was very upset by your implication. He called me for reassurance.” Thurman had come out of the building to take up position a little behind Kyle and to his left. His was a handgun. In an odd way, I was glad to see him. When Calvin said they couldn’t find him that afternoon I’d wondered uneasily if the disappearance had been of his own choosing. Thurman as killer was still hard to believe. “Naturally we wor
ried how you’d handle what you’d learned. It seemed too hypothetical at that stage to cause much damage, so I assumed you’d try to establish some sort of corroboration. It wasn’t hard to guess how. Then when Kyle didn’t see either of you at the wake …”

  “It took you a while to show up,” Kyle said smugly. “Must be half an hour Thurman’s been sitting in there with his finger on the switch for those floods.”

  So maybe they hadn’t monitored how we’d arrived, merely set up shop where they knew we’d be bound to come. If so, they had no idea Calvin was with us. “Did you manage to placate Chauncy?” I asked conversationally.

  “I could at least assure him Mariah’s answering-machine tape no longer exists. With that, he’s willing enough to deny talking to you. Chauncy would abhor being dragged into a scandal. I’ve lost the friendship, of course. Along with … Val, it never had to get this far. All we ever wanted was for you to stay away from here. Every time those azaleas started acting up I was sure you must be suspecting—”

  “Maybe I would have, if I hadn’t left the soil analysis to the expert. You figured killing somebody in my front yard and setting me up for it would keep me away. Like in jail?”

  “The evidence was too circumstantial for you to be convicted.” He sounded like I’d just wronged him.

  “I damn well might have been indicted.”

  “Not with your alibi.”

  “But you weren’t expecting me to have one. You—” Now that there were specific targets for my anger, I felt like a volcano unplugging. The extent to which these two men had been casually willing to screw up my life …

  “It was two birds with one stone,” Kyle said matter-of-factly. “And I owed you one, for messing around with my brother-in-law. We had to make our move. How long was that little asshole going to be satisfied with five thou a month, even assuming we were willing to go on paying? And we couldn’t let you keep poking around out here. If you’d told Eleanor and Rodney to eat their contract this spring like Skip Boyles did, you wouldn’t be having this problem.”

  “Oh, right, it was all my fault. Jesus, Kyle. If that’s an example of your life view, no wonder your wife split.”

  Baxter gave me a little shake of his head. Like we really want to go around provoking people with guns trained on us. “What did you do, give your security force the night off for the wake?” he asked calmly.

  “Our gate people are right where we pay them to be,” Kyle assured us. “Hank, who’d normally be at the monitoring board, has been complaining of a cold. Thurman didn’t feel up to the wake, especially with your men wanting to talk to him, so he came out here about seven and told Hank to go on home. He was happy to.”

  “You’ve got us to yourselves, then. Until you fire one of those guns and attract the men from the gatehouses.”

  “Their instructions are to wait to be summoned, no matter what they hear. All things considered, I’ll test that out some other time. After we shoot you I’ll rush in and call them up here. We wouldn’t want there to be anything suspicious about the timing.”

  “Not with so much else to be suspicious about,” Baxter agreed, matching his confident tone.

  “Aren’t you lucky that’ll be my problem, not yours?” With that the rifle, which had been pointing at a sort of all-purpose position between the two of us started swinging around to Baxter.

  “Kyle, wait!” I yelled.

  “For what?”

  Damned if I knew. Anyhow, the shots that broke out came from the opposite direction. Calvin wasn’t bad. One shot, one floodlight. There came a flurry of shots after that, in the midst of which a second light exploded. The third remained functional but at a different angle; now it harmlessly illuminated the wall.

  This was an after-the-fact assessment of his shooting; when all the noise erupted I dove for cover. A patch of grass kicked up very close to where I’d been standing, and I felt something almost like a shove as I ducked behind a tight grouping of rhododendrons. The gunfire kept coming, but soon from only one gun and one direction. Either Calvin had gotten hit, or he was afraid of catching us in the crossfire. I’d lost track of Baxter, and I kept wondering why Thurman’s gun wasn’t joining in. If either he or Kyle had brought a semiautomatic weapon, they could have methodically sprayed us to death, but as it was, the action took on a stop-and-go quality. Working farther from my original position, I quickly learned to love Kyle’s pauses for reloading.

  My intention of heading back toward Calvin was abruptly torpedoed when Thurman—I could see the shadow of the long pole he’d used—managed to get the remaining light angled around again. It didn’t illuminate the whole area, but no way could I get from where I was to the relative safety of Calvin’s clump of forsythia without making myself a prime target. There were only three ways off the plateau: the stairs we’d come up, the access road, and the golf course tunnel. The first I couldn’t reach and the second and third would be death traps even if I managed to get there.

  Baxter had ended up well to my right, almost to the parking lot—I finally noticed his arm waving me over there. Thurman’s handgun was in business now. Could it do much damage from such a distance? I had no idea, or any craving to find out. Crawling when the cover was less than wonderful, trying to move while at least one of the shooters was reloading, I worked my way toward Baxter. It felt wonderful to have company.

  “Now what?” I whispered. “We break for the parking lot, crouch behind the wall, and work our way over toward the stairs?”

  “That way’s out—the cover’s too poor on the slope. They could stay up here and pick us off before we got far enough away. No, what we’re going to do is run like hell diagonally across the parking lot, then jump onto and off that wall and into the quarry pond.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “It’s plenty deep. We always used to make it.”

  “You were a bunch of dumb teenagers. And not as high up. There’s no way I can do this.”

  “You have to, Val. They assume they’ve got us pinned in this area. If we stay up here it oughtn’t to take them more than twenty minutes, tops, to flush us, and I plan on knowing you a lot longer than that. So before they can work their way any closer we make a break for it—” He gave me a none-too-gentle shove. “Now!”

  We created enough motion to draw a shot, which turned out to be the incentive I needed to embark on that crazy run. Once into it, stopping was even more unthinkable than our destination. If there should come a time in my life when I want to invoke how it feels to be terrified, all I’ll have to do is roll that scene.

  Technically it must have been over quickly, even at my running speed, but my memory insists on playing it footfall by footfall. Baxter, with a fractionally later start, easily overtook me. Surely he could’ve been off the wall before I got there but he hung around waiting to give me a hand up. “Jump out as far as you can, exhale when you hit the water. Don’t fight it when you go under—you’ll pop back up.” I clearly remember his instructions.

  Eyes glued shut, I jumped. It’s the kind of thing you’ll never volunteer to do if you think about it, so I didn’t pause to get set, just went with whatever momentum was left from the run. With the backpack giving my hunched-together body an extra dimension, I must have become an instant legend to whatever wildlife happened to be looking up.

  I have no idea how long the descent took. When you figure it constitutes the rest of your life, you’re in no great hurry for even the most appalling experience to be over.

  It did end, of course, I presume with a mighty splash, though I don’t remember that. It was just suddenly very wet and incredibly cold. In my panic I forgot about exhaling and had no idea whether I kept going down, down, down or if I was purposelessly roiling around somewhere below the surface. Why was I still wearing the damn backpack; hadn’t I better shed it? Underwater, I couldn’t make my shoulders and arms execute the right motions. Because, contrary to instructions, I was fighting it. I had to stop, had to make myself as straight as p
ossible, hopefully on an up-down orientation, and …

  I wouldn’t describe what happened after that as shooting to the surface, but the sensation did definitely become one of rising. And then suddenly, wondrously, I was taking in air, not water. Maybe ten feet away Baxter’s head was showing. “Make for the nearest shore where there are trees” came his terse command. “We’ll need cover. And ditch that damn backpack—it’ll slow you down.”

  Not enough to matter, I thought as I oriented myself and started swimming. In water, as on land, my assets are strength and endurance. I won’t win races, but I will finish them. Making good, steady progress, I’d covered maybe a third of the distance when the first shot sounded from above. I turned to look for Baxter, who I supposed had been right behind me. He was not far from where he’d started out. Treading water to watch, I could see why: his left arm was not working.

  I started back toward him. “Why didn’t you tell me? Are you shot, or what?”

  “Keep your voice down. One of them got lucky and clipped my shoulder. Val, turn around and keep going. I’ll take a while but I’ll make it.”

  “Right.” It felt longer, going back—the coldness of the water, maybe. “I don’t remember the damn lifesaving carry. I think if the victim resists you’re supposed to knock them out or choke them or something. So why don’t you just grab on to that side strap on the backpack? I steer, we both paddle.”

  He didn’t argue, and after getting the feel of the extra resistance, I didn’t have to keep looking if he was still on board. For a while, the shooting kept up at a sort of leisurely pace, like every minute or so there’d be a report. At a couple of them, I could see the water kick up not far away. Then there was almost a fanfare of sounds, a fusillade, echoing into stillness. “We’re still afloat?” I turned to ask Baxter.