Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  I didn’t like it at all.

  I walked slowly all the way around the little house. By peering into the windows, I saw that the ell on the right side held a pair of bunk beds and the one on the left was a kitchen. There was a hand pump beside the sink, a gas stove, and a small refrigerator. Steep narrow stairs at the back of the middle room climbed up into what I assumed was a loft or maybe just an attic, which had a tiny square window on each end. There was a back door off the kitchen. A well-worn path led from it into the woods, where I could make out the shape of an unpainted plywood-sided outhouse.

  A big propane tank on the outside of the kitchen end provided fuel. But no electrical or telephone wires came into the house.

  No electricity and no plumbing and no telephone. Spartan living. I wondered where Charlotte Gillespie had lived before she moved to this place, and why she had come here. I wondered if she had chosen to live here because it was where she wanted to be, or if she’d been trying to escape from the place she had been.

  It struck me as lived-in but abandoned.

  The more I thought about it, and the longer I spent peering into her dark, empty little house, the more ominous it felt.

  I circled the house twice. When I again stood by her front door, I shaded my eyes and scanned the meadow. It was knee-high in grass and weeds, punctuated here and there by big boulders and juniper bushes. It sloped away down to the stream, which glinted through the trees and brush that lined it and marked its course through the valley. Beyond the riverbed the ground rose again to Noah Hollingsworth’s orchard.

  Where was Charlotte?

  I wandered out back and followed the path into the woods where I had seen the outhouse. It was shielded from the main house by a clump of scrubby pines, and when I turned the corner and saw it clearly, I stopped.

  A large red swastika had been painted on the outhouse door.

  CHAPTER 8

  I CLENCHED MY FISTS against a sudden surge of emotion—a strong dose of anger, mingled with sadness and profound apprehension.

  I wanted to hit somebody.

  I wanted to cry.

  I took a deep breath. It was one thing to paint a hate symbol on the sign at the end of the roadway. It was quite another thing to come into Charlotte’s yard with a can of spray paint and leave what was clearly a message on the outhouse, less than fifty feet from the house itself.

  This was purely evil.

  I went up to the outhouse and touched the bright red paint on the door. It was dry. Perhaps it had been there the previous day when I was there. For all I knew, the painter had just finished his work when I arrived, and he’d doubled back while I was looking around calling for Charlotte, and when he—or she—spotted my Jeep, he’d decided to practice his artwork.

  I’ve spent plenty of time in outhouses. You don’t visit remote fishing camps in Maine and Canada without accepting—and even welcoming—outdoor plumbing. I’d done enough camping to appreciate the comfort of an outhouse when compared to hanging onto a tree and squatting in the woods.

  Some outhouses are decidedly utilitarian. The holes cut into the bench are rough and misshapen, and you sit on them gingerly lest you fall in or get splinters. An old Sears Roebuck catalog serves double duty as reading matter and toilet paper. Other outhouses are comparatively elegant, with actual toilet seats nailed onto the benches, a roll of real toilet paper hanging in front of you, a bucket of lime on the floor, and a few old magazines in a rack within reach of the seat. After you finish, you toss a scoop of lime down the hole. The lime is supposed to keep the odor under control.

  I was never able to determine that the lime did much good. Regardless of how comfortable—or painful—an outhouse might be to one’s bottom, they all smelled the same. No one I have ever met actually enjoys the distinctive odor of the inside of an outhouse.

  It wasn’t the anticipated aroma, however, that made me hesitate to open the door to Charlotte Gillespie’s outhouse. It was the omen that had been spray-painted on it, and what that swastika made me fear I might find inside.

  It opened with a creak. It smelled as I’d expected. And I saw instantly that it was empty.

  It was a two-holer with store-bought seats nailed to a slab of thick plywood that hinged against the back wall so that the whole bench could be raised. A nearly full roll of real toilet paper sat between the two holes, and a month-old copy of Yankee magazine lay on the floor. At the top of the back wall was a rectangular screened opening for light and ventilation. The light was dim, and the ventilation was ineffective.

  I clamped my mouth shut, lifted the hinged wooden bench, and looked down into the pit. In the dim light, I could see that it held nothing except what one would expect to see in an outhouse pit, and I let the bench slam down.

  I felt vaguely foolish, half expecting to find a body in the outhouse. But I’d had to look. I stepped outside, took a deep breath of clean air, turned, and followed the path around to the front of the house.

  I tried the knob on the front door. It turned and the door opened inward. I stood there for a moment with the door half open. Yesterday I’d felt that I shouldn’t go inside. But that was before I knew about the swastika on the outhouse door.

  I stepped inside.

  Except for the hum of a motor—the propane-powered refrigerator—it was dead quiet inside.

  I cleared my throat. “Charlotte?”

  I expected no answer, and when none came, I called louder. “Charlotte? Are you in there?”

  I closed the door behind me. I admitted to myself that I was still looking for a dead body.

  There were no bodies downstairs, so I climbed the steep wooden stairs into the loft, which turned out to be an open attic that Charlotte had converted into her sleeping quarters. A box spring and mattress lay directly on the plywood floor. The bed was neatly made, with crisp sheets, a plaid blanket, and two pillows at the head. A low dresser crouched beside it. There was a rack where a few dresses and shirts hung on metal hangers. A wind-up alarm clock, a flashlight, a kerosene lamp, a stack of books, and a battery-powered radio sat on the floor beside the bed. The clock, I noticed, had stopped at nine-fifty. Whether it was A.M. or P.M., and what day, of course, I couldn’t determine.

  I picked up the flashlight and shone it on the books. They included novels by Alice Walker and Tolstoy, worn old Modern Library editions of Plato’s Republic, The Federalist Papers, and Machiavelli’s The Prince, a thick Thoreau anthology, and several volumes, mostly by unfamiliar authors, on animal rights and nature and environmental politics.

  You can learn a lot about a person from the books she keeps beside her bed.

  I swept the flashlight around the dim recesses of the attic. There were several cardboard boxes and a few piles of folded clothes, but no bodies. I poked through the drawers in the dresser, feeling vaguely voyeuristic and perverted, and found only socks, underwear, and sweaters.

  I went back downstairs and looked around again. The small bedroom on one end was pretty much taken up by the two sets of bunk beds, all of which had bare mattresses. A tiny dust-coated desk was jammed in between them under the window. A narrow straight-backed wooden chair was wedged into the kneehole of the desk. I sat in the chair and pulled open the drawers. They were all completely empty.

  On the table in the kitchen was a glass, a bare plate, a dog-eared paperback novel, and a pewter candle holder. The candle had burned all the way down, leaving a hard puddle of orange wax that had spilled onto the tabletop. The glass was about one-third full of milk. I sniffed it. It had gone sour.

  I picked up the novel. My Antonia. Willa Cather. I’d read it in high school, and remembered only that I’d found it tedious.

  I opened it to Charlotte’s place about halfway through, which was marked by a bookmark. She had stopped reading in the middle of a scene. Her bookmark was an old business card. Harrington, Keith & Co., Certified Public Accountants, with a phone number and address in Portland, Maine. The card was old and smudged and wrinkled, as if Charlotte had been u
sing it for a bookmark for years.

  I slipped it into my pocket.

  A couple of bowls sat on the floor next to the refrigerator. One contained a few nuggets of dry dog food. Poor Jack would never eat from it again. The other dish, which I assumed was for water, was empty. The refrigerator held half a loaf of bread, an unopened package of hot dogs, two cans of Diet Coke, a jar of mustard, four eggs, a stick of margarine, a container of cottage cheese, and a half-empty carton of milk.

  I opened the cabinets, which held a few cans of soup and baked beans and dog food. The kitchen drawers yielded stainless-steel flatware, woven potholders, and a few cooking implements.

  I went into the living room. Worn sofa, a couple of rocking chairs, braided rug on the floor, and a wood-burning stove built into the fireplace, with a few chunks of cordwood stacked beside it. A mounted rack of antlers hung over the mantel. A bookcase held some old novels, several Reader’s Digest condensed books, a few old copies of Field & Stream and Sports Afield, and an ancient set of the World Book Encyclopedia. Not the sort of literature that a Willa Cather fan would likely read. I figured this stuff had come with the place.

  A kerosene lamp sat on an end table. I picked it up, held it beside my ear, and shook it. It was empty.

  I sat on one of the rocking chairs. I didn’t know what I was looking for or, indeed, whether it made any sense to look at all. This was not my home, and I had no business being here.

  There was no evidence of a break-in, no sign of a struggle, nothing to suggest what—if anything—had happened to Charlotte… except for that burned-down candle, the unfinished glass of sour milk, My Antonia marked at a place where one would not normally stop reading, and the empty kerosene lamp. It was as if she’d been sitting at the table in the evening, sipping her milk and reading by candlelight, with the lamp burning in the other room, when she was interrupted. As if she’d marked her place, gotten up, and never returned. As if someone had come for her and taken her away and done her harm.

  Maybe the explanation was simpler and less malign. Maybe I just wanted to invent a story to explain why Charlotte wasn’t there. I sat there, rocking and thinking about it. But nothing else occurred to me.

  After a few minutes, I went outside and took one more turn around the house. But I saw nothing new. So I headed back for my car. I had to talk to the sheriff.

  Just as I came within sight of my Wrangler, I spotted a large animal standing in the roadway. A moose, was my first thought. Alex and I had seen moose several times while driving the back roads.

  Then I saw that it wasn’t a moose. It was a horse. And then I saw Susannah Hollingsworth leaning against the side of my Wrangler. She was wearing jeans and sneakers without socks and a man’s blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows and the tails knotted over her belly. Her blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and big silver hoops hung from her ears.

  She held up her hand, and I waved. When I was close enough to speak without shouting, I said, “I thought your horse was a moose.”

  “His name is Arlo,” she said. “We do worry about Arlo during hunting season. A lot of out-of-staters carrying thirty-ought-sixes don’t know the difference between a horse and a moose. Some of them,” she added with a shrug, “don’t care.”

  “I know the difference,” I said.

  She smiled and patted the side of my car, inviting me to lean beside her.

  I accepted and lit a cigarette.

  “So what are you doing here?” she said.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “I came to see the swastika,” she said. “It’s hateful, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “There’s another one on her outhouse.”

  She touched my arm. “No,” she whispered.

  “Yes.” I told Susannah how I’d searched the outhouse and the cabin, looking for a dead body. I told her about the burned-out candle, the paperback book, and the glass of sour milk.

  She peered into my eyes. “Do you think…?”

  I nodded. “It feels bad.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Call the sheriff. I talked to him this morning. He said he was interested in swastikas.”

  Susannah pushed herself away from the car. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “I want you to show me that swastika. We’ll take Arlo. He can hold both of us.”

  “I really want to get home and call the sheriff,” I said. “I’m very concerned about Charlotte.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “Maybe I’ll notice something you missed. Come on. It’ll only take a couple minutes.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Maybe you can tell me I’m crazy to be worried about her.”

  Arlo had no saddle. Susannah slithered up on his back. I handed the reins up to her and then took her hand and managed to scramble awkwardly up behind her.

  “Hold on,” she said over her shoulder.

  There was nothing except Susannah Hollingsworth to hold on to. I placed my hands tentatively on her hips.

  “If you don’t want to fall off and break your neck,” she said, “you’d better put your arms around me.”

  I realized she was right. I was a long way from the ground up there on Arlo’s back. So I circled Susannah’s waist with my arms and hitched myself forward until I was pressing against her back. I could smell her hair in my face. Violets.

  She laughed. “Don’t be afraid of me. I can’t bite from this position. Relax and hold tight. Arlo’s a good old horse, but it’s a bumpy ride.”

  Arlo picked his way back up the sloping rutted road that I had just walked down. Every time he took a step, I bounced. I noticed that Susannah seemed to roll her butt in synchrony with Arlo. I couldn’t quite find Arlo’s rhythm. So I embraced Susannah from behind and concentrated on not getting bumped off.

  “What did the sheriff say?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Nothing, really. Just that he considers painting swastikas on other people’s property more than vandalism. I had the feeling that he wouldn’t blow it off.”

  We came to the clearing and circled behind the house. Susannah reined in Arlo by the outhouse, gazed at the swastika on the door for a moment, muttered, “Jesus,” then turned Arlo back toward the meadow, where we stopped. I let my hands slip down so they rested lightly on her hips, and we sat there that way up on Arlo’s back, looking across the meadow toward the hillside beyond.

  “You went into the house?” she said.

  “Yes.” I summarized what I’d seen.

  “I don’t think I want to go in there,” she said. She breathed out a long sigh. “What a world.” She pointed across the meadow. “That’s our orchard, over there.”

  Even from that distance I could see that the trees were heavy with red fruit. They had been planted in perfect lines, so that the orchard made a patchwork-quilt pattern on the hillside.

  “The river’s down there,” she said, indicating the valley between the meadow where we sat on Arlo’s back and the orchard on the hillside beyond. “It’s the boundary between this property and ours.”

  “That must be the same stream that passes under some of the back roads around here,” I said. “I’ve often wondered if it held trout. I’m interested in moving water.”

  “When I was growing up,” she said, “the boys used to catch trout from it. I don’t know about now. I’m not much for fishing. Let’s take a look.”

  Before I could tell her that I just wanted to go home and call the sheriff, she clucked to Arlo, who began to canter down the sloping meadow toward the stream. I had no choice but to hold tight. As we approached the line of alders and poplar trees that marked the streambed, I could see that it looked more like a pond. It had flooded the valley, so that some of the poplars stood knee-deep in water. They still held their leaves, which had begun to turn into their autumn yellow. A forest of gnawed-off stumps rimmed the flooded area.

  “Beavers,” I said.

  Susa
nnah nodded. “A hundred years ago it was dammed. There was a tannery over there, on our side of the river, and the water turned some machinery for them. A family named Cutter ran the tannery. My great-grandfather bought the property from Cutter after the tannery went out of business. He planted the orchard. Around here they call the stream Cutter’s Run. The dam blew out a long time ago. This is definitely beavers.”

  New beaver ponds, I knew, made prime trout water. I made a note to explore it sometime.

  We gazed at the water for a few minutes. Then Susannah leaned back against me. “Want to head back?” she said.

  “Yes. I’m anxious to get hold of the sheriff. Anyway, Alex is expecting me for lunch.”

  “Will you tell her about me?”

  “What about you?”

  She chuckled. “That I followed you here, took you for a ride, made you hug me?”

  “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Did you follow me?”

  “Of course not. I was just kidding.”

  “I’ll tell Alex, yes. Any reason I shouldn’t?”

  She patted my hand where it held her hip. “None whatsoever.”

  When we got back to my Wrangler, I slid off Arlo’s back and held my hand up to Susannah. “Thanks for the ride.”

  She gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Let’s do it again. There’s a lot of country around here you can see best from horseback.”

  “Sure. I’d like that.” I scratched Arlo’s muzzle and told him he was a fine animal. I started to get into my Jeep, then stopped. “How can I find Mr. Hood, do you know?”

  “I know how you can find him,” she said. “Getting him to talk to you might be another story.”

  “He’s not friendly?”

  She smiled. “Hoodie don’t take kindly to strangers askin’ questions.” Susannah’s Down East twang sounded perfect. “If you want,” she said, “I could introduce you. He likes me.”

  “I bet he does.”

  She laughed. “I’ve known him since I was a baby.” She shrugged. “I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. How about if I drop by this afternoon, take you over there?”