Death Climbs a Tree

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  Fred spotted the tree and turned the map. “Got it.”

  “The dotted line is where I saw the lights. Where it stops, in the middle of the map, is where they suddenly disappeared. If there’s a meth lab, that’s where it’s hiding. It was so sudden, like a cave.”

  “That’s great. I’ll see that it’s followed up on. Probably by the sheriff.” Andrew was thinking like a cop. He might do more. Couldn’t hurt to ask. “Any chance you’d be willing to watch the construction equipment tonight, in case the vandals return?”

  “Why would our side want to help their side? I mean, I wouldn’t do that myself, but you can’t expect me to be sorry someone else did.”

  Fred scuffed his toe in the leaves. “Think about it, would you? If I could tell Walcher you were keeping your eyes open, he’d be a lot less likely to come after us to get you down.”

  Silence in his ear. He wished he were close enough to read the expression on Andrew’s face.

  “If you put it that way…”

  “Call 911. Or me.”

  “Maybe. If I get enough sleep today. I sure didn’t get much last night.”

  “Good enough. How late were you awake last night, watching those lights?”

  “I didn’t shine a light to check my watch—didn’t want them to notice me—but it must have been two or three by the time I fell asleep.”

  “And you didn’t hear anyone in the clearing during that time?”

  “No. If they were trying to be quiet, though, I might not have heard them.”

  “Maybe not, but you’d probably have seen lights around the equipment. Odds are good they came after you fell asleep. I’d go with the odds, Andrew. If you can, watch for them during the second half of the night.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Better than he’d expected. Fred waved at him and walked back to the clearing.

  “Anything?” he asked the two techs.

  “We took scrapings of the black paint,” one said. “Sorry to disappoint you, but it looks like the kind of stuff you can get in any hardware store.”

  Probably was. “Prints?”

  “Nothing by the graffiti. They’re wiped clean. Otherwise, the machines are covered with ’em.”

  “Mostly just smears on the fuel lines, but we got a couple of partials.”

  And they had partials from the Petoskey stone. Not likely to match, but worth checking.

  “About a million footprints. Some in the diesel on the ground.”

  They’d do their routine, but Tom Walcher’s crew had been tramping all over that ground this morning. Any recognizable boot prints were bound to belong to them. Fred didn’t hold out much hope of finding the saboteurs by any physical evidence they’d left.

  * * *

  On the way to the station, he wondered, Would whoever merely cut some fuel lines be likely to kill as well? And why Sylvia? Unless they planned to blame her attack on the construction people? It was a stretch. Worth keeping in the back of his mind, though.

  Even if they hadn’t gone after Sylvia, what if Andrew asked the wrong person about EFF? Had he put his stepson at greater risk?

  Or was he already at risk from watching the lights in the woods? Is that what Sylvia had done? If people cooking meth out in the woods realized they had a spy in the sky, had they also cooked up a way to get rid of her? And wouldn’t they monitor the tree for the next sitter?

  Back at the station, he called Andrew’s cell phone again. “I was wrong, son. You’re not a cop. It’s too dangerous. Come down.”

  “No.”

  “What you’re doing—”

  “What I’m doing is peacefully protecting these fragile woods. I’m not hurting anything.”

  “You’re watching bad guys who don’t want to be watched.”

  “I told you, I won’t turn my flashlight on.”

  “People know you’re up there. Come down, Andrew. I shouldn’t have asked you to stay up there and keep watch. It’s not worth it.”

  “I’ll watch EFF, the way you asked, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’m staying until they drag me down.”

  Or knock you off, Fred thought.

  “Then promise me you’ll let me know the minute you see anything suspicious, no matter who’s doing it.”

  “I promise.” He said it almost too quickly.

  “That means anyone, Andrew. Even if it turns out to be a friend of yours.”

  “I don’t have friends cooking meth in the woods!”

  “You don’t know.” Skirv had been helping him—Skirv, whose store catered to college kids and maybe sold drug paraphernalia. If he wasn’t cooking meth in the woods, that didn’t mean he wasn’t picking some up there to pass on to the age group that used it most. Skirv was worth keeping an eye on.

  “All right, I promise.”

  Fred hoped he would. Had Sylvia recognized someone and kept a silence she should have broken?

  12

  The mystery of the EFF attack on Walcher’s construction equipment was only slightly less mysterious by the time the senior center’s board of directors met that afternoon. Most of their meetings were held during the ordinary workweek, but Alvin Hannauer, their president, had asked to postpone this week’s meeting to Saturday. With no one else in the building, Joan felt free to attend in jeans.

  The noon radio news had read a statement by Earth Freedom Fighters, a new organization, it seemed, that claimed credit for “stopping the forces bent on destroying our fragile environment in their Caterpillar tracks.” The overnight damage at the construction site was only the beginning, EFF asserted. It promised to do by stealth whatever was necessary “to free Earth’s environment from the terrorist ravages of greedy capitalism.”

  “I’d like to give them greedy capitalism!” Annie Jordan, newly elected to the board, said. “If they met Cindy’s grandchildren or Diane’s Bert, they’d have to think twice.”

  “Who are they, anyway?” board secretary Mabel Dunn asked. “The announcer said they took responsibility for messing up those machines, but I don’t hear them taking any responsibility at all. Seems to me they’re just hiding behind speeches.”

  Mabel generally wasn’t so outspoken. For her, this amounted to a passionate outburst. And Joan had to agree with her.

  “They want the credit, not the responsibility,” Alvin Hannauer said. “You’re not going to see any of them coming forward in person, not like the tree sitters. Whatever you think of that protest, those kids let you know who they are. I have to respect them for that.” He smiled at Joan.

  Joan thought he was probably right about EFF, but she was particularly grateful for what he’d said about the tree sitters. Did he know Andrew had taken Sylvia’s place? When Joan’s old teacher, Margaret Duffy, had proposed her to the board, Alvin had voted to hire her. A retired Oliver College professor, he was an anthropologist, as her father had been. They’d even worked together briefly. Alvin probably had fatherly feelings toward her, but she didn’t think they’d cloud his judgment in this case. Still, he didn’t need to say anything. And the smile gave him away. He must know about Andrew.

  “You’re right,” Mabel said. “And they don’t damage other people’s property.” She, too, smiled at Joan.

  The whole board probably knew, or soon would. Andrew might want them to, but Joan felt shy about telling the group, especially after what Mabel and Alvin had said. She’d thank them later for their support.

  Alvin called the meeting to order then, and the subject was dropped as they dealt with the center’s business.

  Joan caught her mind wandering to the things that concerned her far more than the persistent discoloration of the center’s roof, even after they’d installed zinc strips to prevent that staining. But she tuned back in again when the subject changed to kids who chose their smooth parking lot and ramps for skateboarding.

  “They look like freaks,” Annie said. “And have you heard what comes out of their mouths?”

  “We all know those words,” Alvin tol
d her. “They won’t hurt you, Annie.”

  “Maybe the words won’t, but the boards can,” Mabel said. “The boys jump off when they’re about to fall, and the skateboards go right on. I couldn’t dodge if one of those things flew at me.”

  “But we have to have ramps,” Joan said.

  “Suppose Oliver built those kids a skateboard park of their own,” Alvin said.

  “How much would it cost?” Annie always got to the nub of things.

  Alvin pushed his wire rims back up his nose. “More than most people want to spend on what Vernon calls ‘a bunch of fool kids,’ but if we put it to the mayor as a safety issue for the rest of us, we might get somewhere.”

  “It’s not just about old folks, either,” Mabel put in. “Little children and babies in strollers are at risk, too.”

  “We need an advertising campaign,” Annie said.

  “We could sponsor one,” Joan said. “Maybe together with the hospital. Do they keep statistics about that kind of injury?”

  Alvin promised to do some checking and report back to them. “I kind of doubt it,” he said. “But even a few horrid examples would say more than bare statistics.”

  “Nobody’s going to tell you anything these days,” Mabel said. “It’s all I could do to fix it so my doctor can talk to my family.”

  Alvin twinkled at her. “You’re forgetting my powers of persuasion. I know some of those nurses pretty well.”

  “And I could ask Fred,” Joan said. “The police might have better luck with the privacy regulations.”

  When the meeting broke up, she called him, but skateboards were the least of her worries.

  Fred picked up on the second ring.

  “You all right?”

  “Hassled, but yes,” he said.

  “I heard what happened out there this morning.”

  “Andrew’s okay.”

  Bless him for answering what she hadn’t asked.

  “I enlisted him to stand guard tonight,” Fred said.

  “You what?”

  “He slept through it this morning—that’s another story. But if he’ll be a pair of eyes for us from now on, maybe I can keep Walcher off his back.”

  “I don’t know, Fred.…”

  “I don’t want to run him in. You have to know that. And EFF sounds like outsiders. I suppose it’s possible they don’t even know he’s up there.”

  Was he whistling in the dark? He didn’t sound convinced. “You don’t think they’d hurt him.…”

  “Nobody wants him hurt, least of all me. You can’t even see the ropes that support him unless you leave the clearing and go into the woods. Besides, so far EFF hasn’t shown any tendency toward violence. Not to people.”

  He was worried, she thought when she hung up. And she’d forgotten to mention the skateboarders. How could she think about skateboarders with visions of Andrew staring into the darkness like a cop? She hoped Fred was right. Andrew’s an adult, she told herself. Other mothers’ sons are cops at his age. Why was it so hard to let go?

  On her walk home the sun was warmer than when she’d left. Here and there daffodils still bloomed in people’s flower beds and in the middle of the grass, many tulips were out, and Virginia bluebells were showing color. Her spirits lifted.

  When she walked into the kitchen, she flipped on the college radio station for Prairie Home Companion but heard the end of a local call-in talk show. Community reaction to the EFF sabotage was both lively and mixed. Then the show’s young moderator announced excitedly that Herschel Vint of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources was going to make a statement.

  Joan turned the radio up. Was the DNR going to get involved?

  Vint spoke passionately about the need to preserve the forests, even while using their resources wisely. “We are often criticized for cutting any trees at all, but good forest management requires harvesting mature trees to allow the young trees beneath their canopies to grow. It’s essential, though, to choose wisely what to harvest. There’s a critical difference between such wise selective timbering and clear-cutting wild areas that should be protected for the common good. The construction in Yocum’s Woods has no business in this fragile area. Its streams, sinkholes, and underground caverns make it totally unsuited to development, even if its wildlife were not at risk. Although the DNR doesn’t own the land, and the landowner has the legal right to develop it, we must strenuously object to such an inappropriate use of our state’s precious natural resources.

  “That does not mean, however, that we endorse the destructive tactics of the organization that calls itself Earth Freedom Fighters.” He went on for some time about EFF.

  Presumably he’d also be against shooting tree sitters, Joan thought. Actually, the DNR hadn’t forced down the ones in Yellowwood State Forest a few years ago. But as Vint said, this woods was private land, where they had no authority. Even so, he’d come out on the side of the angels as far as Andrew was concerned. She wondered whether Andrew listened to the radio. Maybe someone from the group supporting the tree sit would tell him. Did those people even know one another? She felt totally isolated from the others who had backed Sylvia, except Birdie, of course, and she had no idea whether Birdie would do anything to help Andrew. She couldn’t see herself asking the orchestra for help, as Sylvia had.

  She fixed supper automatically, throwing her leftover broccoli into leftover chicken vegetable soup with no idea whether Fred would come home to eat it or be stuck at work. People who sneered at leftovers mystified her. Fortunately, Fred wasn’t one of them. He always said homemade soup improved with age, like fine wine and beautiful women.

  He rolled in while she was finishing her coffee.

  “Smells good. Any left for me?” His kiss landed on her ear as he pulled a chair up to the place she’d set at the old oak kitchen table that had been her Grandma Zimmerman’s.

  “If you sweet-talk me like that, how can I resist?”

  She drank a second cup of coffee and waited while he ate. Eventually, he began to talk.

  “We’ve been sifting through the evidence we brought back from the EFF tampering, but it hasn’t helped us at all. The work crew walked all over any footprints before we got there, and either they smudged or EFF wiped off pretty much all the fingerprints around the damage. We didn’t find much else, either. Talk about a contaminated crime scene.” He sighed.

  “You said ‘pretty much all’—does that mean they found some fingerprints?”

  “Couple of partials. They’ll probably turn out to belong to the work crew, though not to anyone who stayed around Oliver today. I sent someone out there tonight to check the guys who drove up to Indianapolis after parts. They’re working overtime on repairs.”

  “They don’t match the partials from the rock, do they?”

  “No. I checked that, but it was a long shot. These guys won’t stop, and we’ll catch them on something. It’s just a matter of time.”

  They were settled on the big couch together when the phone rang. “Damn,” Fred said. “Probably for me.”

  Joan slid out of his arms and reached for it. But she shook her head at him and mouthed, “Alex.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “We’ve lost another one!” Alex roared in Joan’s ear.

  “Another what?”

  “First violin. Birdie Eads just called me in tears. Says she can’t bear to play the concert. We’re in big enough trouble without Sylvia. We can’t do it without her, too!”

  “Alex, she and Sylvia were very close. It’s understandable.”

  “Doesn’t she know we need her now more than ever?”

  And don’t you know people have feelings? No, of course not. Joan kept silent, prepared to let her roar. But she wasn’t ready for what came next.

  “Joan, you have to go talk to her. She wants someone to hold her hand, and I can’t do it. When I told her why not, she cried even more.” Alex’s voice turned from angry to coy. “She was probably jealous. I’m going out with Jim.”


  “Jim?”

  “You met him. Jim Chandler, the narrator for the concert.”

  “You’re dating Jim Chandler?” Amazing. She’d never known Alex to be interested in any man. But what did she know?

  “Oh, yes,” as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. “He’ll be gone all day tomorrow, visiting his mother in Tell City, but tonight we’re going dancing at Mike’s.”

  “Mike’s?” Joan felt like a broken record.

  “Mike’s Music and Dance Barn, over in Brown County. I’m going to learn to line dance.” The coy voice returned. “Jim says I’ll be good at it.”

  Your natural sense of rhythm, Joan thought. “Okay, Alex, I’ll do it. You and Jim have a good time.” She hung up before her laughter erupted.

  “What on earth?” Fred asked.

  Joan managed to stop laughing, but she felt it bubble just below the surface. “It’s Alex. I think she’s in love.”

  “Really?” His eyebrows rose. “Alex, the tyrant?”

  “Oh, Fred, I don’t know. It’s great, really, if she’s found someone. Or even if she’s just having a good time. Might make her act more human to the rest of us. But I can’t imagine what Jim Chandler sees in a grouch like her. He’s taking her line dancing tonight, and he’s already telling her about his mother, for heaven’s sake—he’s going down to Tell City tomorrow to see Mom. If he’s talking to her about Alex, too, that could be serious.”

  “I assume she didn’t call just to share girlish confidences with you.”

  “No.” Remembering the problem sobered her. “She says Birdie Eads is so upset she wants to quit the orchestra—well, for this concert, anyway. We can’t afford to lose her, too—she’s one of our best violinists. I promised to go over and see her.”

  “Want me to come along?”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing her, without my cop hat on.”