by Tom Bouman
The store carried new and used firearms. I reviewed the weapons lined up behind the counter and saw no muskets. Irving eyed me as if waiting for an explanation. When he didn’t get one, he said, “Help you, Officer?”
“Wonder if you can. I’m curious if you’ve sold any flintlocks lately?”
Irving stared at me and made no response, so I asked again.
“Don’t carry them anymore,” he said. “Not unless we get one used.”
“No?”
He shrugged.
I pointed to the ammunition on display. “How about musket balls? I see you still carry them.”
He gave another shrug.
“Tell me something,” I said, “how about .38s?”
“Let’s see,” said Irving, running his eyes over the handguns in the glass case below. “Come back with a court order.”
“Listen,” I said, “later today you’re going to find out why I asked. If you change your mind and want to share, give me a call. That’s if it doesn’t offend your principles too much.” I gave him a card. “Right now I need a list of all the muzzle-loader and flintlock tags bought here this season.”
“Talk to the Game Commission.”
“We are talking to the Game Commission. Me and the goddamn sheriff’s department. Right now I need your list because I don’t have time to sort through their fuckin list. Do it now, Irving.”
“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”
He stepped out from behind the counter and edged past me. In the back of the store there was a desk surrounded by plastic child gates. He stepped in, slumped into a swivel chair, and contemplated his ancient state-issued computer equipment. I leaned in to try to look over his shoulder, and was startled by a girl, about three, seated behind the partition. She was combing the hair of a doll that had one eyelid shut. I waved, and she looked blankly back. After some muttering and tapping on the keyboard, a printer on the floor made a bleat and churned out three pages of data. I took them, nodded thanks, and left.
GEORGE ELLIS’S brother in Florida, name of Tim, turned out to be the least of my worries. My grief training came through for both of us. I let a handful of bare facts and boilerplate do the work. Tim was incredulous at first, then enraged at the killer, and then angry at us for not finding him yet. By the end of our conversation he had quietly accepted his brother’s death, even to the point of wondering how much of the burial would be paid for by the township (not any). He asked would I see to his cremation, and he’d find the time in the next few weeks to arrange a small service. It wasn’t a big family and I hung up with the impression George wasn’t tight with them.
I closed George’s personnel file—which contained one sheet—and filed it. In one of his drawers I found a bottle of bourbon with two inches left. I set that on George’s desktop. John Kozlowski came in with a look in his eyes that told me the news was out. He shook my hand, took the whiskey bottle, and made to leave.
“John,” I said. “We’ll get it done.”
“I should hope.”
“I don’t want you to worry.”
He kept his back to me. “You think we don’t know who you’re after?”
“No, I think you think you do. That’s why I’m talking to you now.”
“Well, Officer. I’ll do what I can to help.” He took a drink. “At this point, the race is on.” He pulled the door shut behind him when he left. I cursed quietly.
Before me sat an electric typewriter and a small pile of blank incident reports. Tough to separate the events of the previous day into distinct moments with beginnings and ends, but I did the best I could, leaving out my encounter in the swamp altogether. One, Aubrey Dunigan’s alleged assault on Daniel Stiobhard with a shotgun; two, the discovery of John Doe on Aubrey Dunigan’s land; three, George Ellis. I struggled over the last one most, and not just because the letters kept rearranging themselves and going unfocused. In the process of writing it, I composed a sentence on a separate sheet of paper—As I surveiled the property of Michael and Roberta Stiobhard, Daniel Stiobhard disarmed and held me at gunpoint—and left space for it on my incident report, but didn’t add it in just then. You’ve got to write these things up basically as soon as they happen. It’s not only the litigious era we live in. As ever, the Sovereign would be looking for a way to call me on the carpet, and whatever it was going to be, he could get me for the paperwork as easily as the thing itself.
I filed the reports deep in a desk drawer and examined the printouts from Irving Sporting Goods. There were about eighty names on there, mostly regular tag holders including the muzzle-loader season, and not the flintlock. Fourteen people bought tags for the flintlock season at the local store; two from over the border in Apalachin, New York; several from as far south as Scranton; three or four from nearby townships had bought them. Mike Stiobhard had bought one for himself and one in his wife’s name, though it was reasonable to assume he’d be the one out in the cold. Danny Stiobhard had one, too. Of the eighty or so names, three more caught my eye: Grady, Nolan, and Bray. All of them lived in the township. Grady had only bought the standard tag, which made him less interesting. Bray and Nolan both had flintlock licenses, and in fact, Nolan had bought two—one in his son’s name. All three men were neighbors, and all three had land abutting Aub’s.
I opened the weapons locker. A uniformed policeman is asked to carry many things on his person, I say on his person, but it’s his belt, really; try a day of carrying around the .40, two extra magazines, the Maglite, pepper spray, jackknife, telescoping baton, two sets of cuffs, and so on. I never carried all that. It reminded me too much of lugging around a ten-pound rifle and sweating through my gear in Somalia. The thing about Somalia was the dust, everywhere. If you took your rifle out, you had to clean it when you came back. Every time. It wasn’t an empty exercise, and I got in the habit with all of my weapons back home. If I took something out in the field, I cleaned it. In my quiet township with minimal supervision, I often left everything in the locker and carried only a set of handcuffs and the Maglite. The mousegun had been my wife Polly’s to ward off bears while camping. It was far too small to bother a grizzly, but it had made her feel better, and I always took it along on the off chance I would need something in a pinch. Never had until last night. Now I contemplated all that standard-issue equipment and it almost looked like not enough.
I spent a little while filling magazines and tucking everything back in its place on the belt. I checked and cleaned a second .40 and strapped it under my left arm in a cowhide shoulder holster. Armed to the teeth, I sat at my desk in my sleepy station and listened to the garage on the other side of the wall and thought.
I had always sought rural postings because something in me needs the wide-open space and the boredom. Some people need to be surrounded by other people. Some love talking; I don’t. That was one thing I liked about George, he never required conversation. And the station, the station itself was just the kind of place I could keep neat and functional; it had never asked much of me beyond that. Now things were getting worse by the hour and it felt like I was dragging my heels in the dirt, getting pulled after a train.
When the knock on the front door came, I knew it meant trouble. Usually people know to walk right in as if they own the joint. I Indian-crept to the window adjacent to the door and stuck a finger in the venetian blind. The TV reporter standing there looked shorter and older than he did on the five-thirty news. He was from a local station over the border in Binghamton; Holebrook County didn’t have enough news to warrant a daily paper, let alone a TV station. Behind him stood a cameraman fiddling with a digital camera, a long fuzzy mic tucked under one arm.
I opened the door, cleared my throat, and before the reporter could start talking, I held up a finger as if I’d be right back. Then I closed the door on him. After pulling on my coat I stepped through the inside door to the garage and found Kozlowski.
“John,” I asked, “where can I find a girl named Tracy Dufaigh, do you know?”
He n
odded as if he knew why I might be asking. “Don’t know exactly where she lives, somewhere in the Heights. Last I knew she works up at the horse farm that used to be the Regans’s.”
That gave me a little shiver. The Bray place was on my list already.
“She and George were on the outs, just so you know,” John continued. “Even if someone’s told her, she may appreciate hearing it from you all the same.”
I glanced out of a portal in one of the garage doors and was dismayed to find the news team between me and my truck. “Listen, you got something for me to drive?”
Kozlowski loaned me a three-quarter-ton diesel pickup from the eighties that the township had bought from the National Guard and painted red; you could still see camouflage paint on the insides of its doors. There was no tape deck but someone had bungee-corded a little boom box to the dash; cassettes were scattered about the cab, some good ones, an Alan Jackson. As the truck roared to life, John opened the garage door for me and I drove away without a second look from the news reporter, who last I saw was still at the station door patiently waiting for me to emerge.
After a deafening ten minutes on 189 I turned up a dirt drive at a sign that read BRAY STABLES and showed a silhouette of a prancing horse. Didn’t know the Brays, but I had known the Regans a bit. Did odd jobs for Philly Regan one summer in high school, clearing trees and splitting wood. I’ll always remember the advice he gave me the first time he handed me a chain saw: “Try not to cut your dick off.” He keeled over with a heart attack two years ago and his grown kids finally sold the place a year later, just before natural gas started handing out lease money.
As I pulled into the yard, I saw that the Brays had kept the farmhouse much the same, white with hanging flowerpots on the porch, now empty. Up the hill they had kept a one-story structure that used to be part of the dairy operation, and converted it into stables. The rest of the post-and-beam barns had been replaced by two colossal windowless buildings made of corrugated steel.
I stepped out of the truck still feeling the vibration of its huge engine through my body, my ears ringing in the sudden quiet of the farmyard. Figuring nobody could have missed my arrival, I just kind of stood in the mud, looking around, until a screen door creaked open and slapped shut, and a woman approached me from the house. I summoned a smile and waved. She couldn’t have been over five-two, with dark hair clipped back and blue jeans tucked into high boots. She smiled in a way that gathered her whole face around her eyes; I guessed she was in her forties. I found her attractive, and that made me awkward and shy.
“Wondering when we’d meet,” she said, extending a hand. “Shelly. Bray,” she added, gesturing about her.
I nodded and shook her hand and fumbled through my own name and title. “Sorry to come by unannounced,” I said. “We’ve had some trouble up here on the ridge and I thought I ought to visit.”
Her smile grew wary. “Please come in.”
We passed a small sign on the lawn that showed the word FRACK crossed out. The house we entered was furnished with antiques. The walls were white, and plastic kids’ toys had collected in the corners and on the staircase. Shelly led me to the kitchen, where she offered me a glass of water and we sat at the table.
“I do kind of wish my husband was here for whatever it is. It’s not too serious, is it?”
“What’s he, at work?”
“He’s an engineer. BAE Systems.”
“We’ll need to talk to him, too. And you have kids, I gather . . .”
“Yeah, boy and a girl. At school now, of course . . .”
“Ah.” I looked around the kitchen at the ornate flatware on display, probably from Italy or France. “Listen. Yesterday we found a body. A young man up on the ridge, on Aubrey Dunigan’s land.”
“My god, what?”
“Hard to believe, I know. He’d been up there some time.” I waited but she stayed silent. “No, no sign of him on your end, nothing?”
“Um. No.” I watched her move from shock to something like bewildered acceptance. “What happened? Who is he?”
“We’re looking into that, of course. There’s some we still don’t know.”
“I’m—I don’t know what to say.” She stared into her water glass, unseeing.
“Can I ask you something, you see much of your neighbors? Aubrey Dunigan, I’m mainly curious about?”
“From a distance. We lead trail rides up on the ridge. Not in the winter, of course. Sometimes you see him puttering around his house. It was on his land?”
“Yeah, but it was near enough to your plot, and some others besides. Felt it best to let you know.”
“Naturally.”
I had been watching her for signs of prior knowledge, nervousness, deceit. There was nothing like that. “Mrs. Bray, have you seen or heard anything unusual this winter, had any trespassers, maybe trying to come in from 189?”
“Officer—”
“Henry.”
“Henry, how did this man die?”
“We’re trying to figure that out.”
She nodded, a tentative, unconscious motion. “We’re not in danger here?”
“I don’t think so. Couldn’t hurt to lock your doors at night.”
“Jesus, he was murdered?”
“Like I said, we’re determining that.”
She looked at me in silence for what felt like a long time. “Did Aub do it?”
“No. I highly doubt it.”
“Well, no. I haven’t seen or heard anything.”
I gave her a description of John Doe. “Does that sound familiar, maybe someone who had been riding out here?”
“No,” she said. “Of course, we have more day-tripping riders than regulars, people who come out for a onetime experience, so I might not remember. Or I might not have even been here.”
“You have regulars?”
“Yeah, little girls taking lessons and a few rich old ladies. I stable several horses that aren’t mine. Listen, is there . . . is there someone out there?”
“We’ve had state troopers on the ridge. Actually, part of the reason I’m here is to ask your permission to walk your land.”
“Yes. Of course. Please.”
“Shelly, I don’t think you or your family is in any real danger. The man died for a reason. Nothing to do with you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And there’s something else, a separate matter.” I took a deep breath and looked away and wished that I didn’t have to say it. “I had a deputy, George Ellis, who was shot and killed last night.”
“Are you . . . my God. I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t anywhere near here. It . . . but Tracy knew him, Tracy Dufaigh works for you?” You could see the nearness of all this violence affect her. I expected she was ready to gather her children and run to the nearest civilized county.
“When she shows up, yes. She’s here now, out at the stables.”
“This will be on the news this afternoon but I want her to hear from me as soon as . . . as soon as can be managed.”
“I understand.” Shelly led me to the front door and pointed to the stables.
“You didn’t know George?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“He never came here to visit Tracy, or . . .”
“Not that I know of, Officer, sorry.”
“It’s Henry.” I left her a card.
Shelly made me promise to stop and see her once again before I left, in case she thought of anything. I strode up the hill to the stables, my boots slipping in the muddy driveway. Over top of the hill, I was taken aback by something I hadn’t seen from the house—a silver compact sedan, its sides splattered with mud, parked in a dirt patch. I made a note of the license plate. The interior was strewn with cracked CD cases and fast-food bags.
By the stable door, you could feel the horses inside, a thick presence almost like sound, almost like scent, separate from the smell of their hay and shit, and the gentle explosions of their breath. I have never been
big on horses since a nag, drunk on rotten apples, bit me on the stomach when I was a boy. When I slipped through the partway-open door I heard a woman singing, but couldn’t make out the words; it was a nice, alto voice that avoided blue notes, the kind you hear in sixties folk records. There were about six horses tucked in shadowy stalls. I could feel their big eyes on me. Soon as I saw Tracy, I recognized her from the bar, a brawny girl with a lip ring, and short hair dyed jet black. She was brushing a chestnut mare. She startled when I called her name, spooking the horse a bit. After soothing the horse she held a hand to her heaving breast in a theatrical way.
“Sorry,” I said. “Tracy Dufaigh, right? You got a moment?”
“I got a choice?”
I smiled and knew it looked false. “I can come back in a few.”
She tilted her head forward and gave me a look from under her brow that said it all. This was not the first time she’d spoken with a cop. There was a hint of defiance in her that suggested a hard upbringing, like she mistrusted authority not taken by brute force. And a ready resentment of the world because it works that way. I know; I’m a little like that myself. She being younger was nearer to it, and it showed fresh in her stance and in the look in her eye. I’d have hated to be her high school teacher.
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “What’s up?”
I filled her in on John Doe first. She stood staring up at me in the semi-dark. When I’d said my piece she blinked twice and said, “That’s unusual. We don’t get many murders around here.”
“I didn’t say it was murder.”
She rolled her eyes at that and said, “Well, I sure didn’t do it and I don’t know who did.”
“Good. But you’re up on the ridge a fair amount with the horses, aren’t you? Seen anything I should know about?”
“Not this winter, haven’t been taking them on the trails much. Snow’s too deep and crusted over; they bloody their shins punching through the ice. Looks like they might finally get some trail work, though.”
I nodded. “That your car out there, the silver sedan?”