Her Brother's Keeper

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  “Fred, let’s get out of here. This guy may be in Pontiac for all we know. He can’t hurt Dave, but he knows where he lived, and he sure scares me.”

  The phone rang again. Her hand trembled when she picked it up. But it was only Pete, checking on them.

  “Pete! Good you called. We’re packing up Dave’s personal things. And we need to figure out what to do with his post office box. You still have the key?”

  He did, he said. He’d give it to them. He started to give her directions to the post office, but she passed him to Fred. All that food was mellowing her.

  They packed Dave’s papers in the suitcase, loaded it into the back of the car, and covered it with a green trash bag full of his clothes, looking like nothing. Just in case, though, she tucked his will and the directions to his woods into her shoulder bag with the key to his apartment.

  By the time they got back to the print shop, it was hopping again. They had to wait for Pete to find time to hunt through his desk drawer for Dave’s other key. Eventually he came up with it.

  “Sorry it took so long. Everything takes longer without Dave, you know?”

  She could think of worse epitaphs.

  In the post office, they had to stand in a long line. No question about it, all the cost-cutting measures were affecting service. A twenty-something clerk missing an arm–a vet? she wondered–was flinging pieces of mail around as swiftly as the man next to him with both sleeves filled. And he was the one who called “next!” when they finally reached the front of the line.

  Fred stood back, and Joan held the key out to the clerk. “It’s my brother’s key,” she said. “He died, and we need to forward any mail that comes to this box.”

  He didn’t touch it. “You’ve got the key–you can pick it up.”

  “I don’t live here.”

  “So you want it sent to you? Don’t think I can do that.”

  “No, to him. The executor of his will can deal with it.”

  “Right. And you have the court document?”

  Oh. “No,” she said. “We just found his will.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “If he’s not here to do it himself, the court has to authorize you. We can’t have just anybody messing with people’s mail. Even dead people’s.”

  Joan’s shoulders sagged. She should have known better. “But can we close the box?”

  “Sure, but you’ll want to check it first.”

  She sighed. He was right, she thought, but the line was as long as when they’d come in.

  “Let’s go do it,” Fred said, and she followed him out to the row of boxes in the lobby.

  Dave’s key fit one of the smallest size, and inside they found an envelope and an oversized postcard from a car dealer with a car key attached to it. She handed the card to Fred, who smiled.

  “Care to try your luck?” he said. “We still have a little time to kill. There’s a car we can drive off in if this key fits.” For a moment she thought he might be serious, but his eyes gave him away. “What’s the letter?” he asked.

  “Something from a timber company. I’d better keep that.” Feeling awkward about opening it right there in the post office, she tucked it into her shoulder bag and was amused to see Fred tuck the card with the key into his coat pocket.

  “You sure you want to close it?” he said.

  “We can’t, can we? Not if they won’t forward his mail. We’ll have to ask Pete to keep the key for now.” At least they could turn their backs on that line, which was still growing.

  Finally finished at the post office, they went back to the print shop. It was close enough to five.

  Pete came out from behind the counter to meet them, looking less harried than before. “You like pizza?”

  “Oh, sure,” Joan said. On top of pecan pie, no less. Following his directions, they waited for him in the pizza place, which turned out to be surprisingly peaceful. Over a vegetarian pizza and a crisp green salad, they returned the key to Pete, who promised to keep checking the box.

  “I go there every day anyway, for the business.”

  Joan offered to reimburse him for forwarding Dave’s mail to her, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Then they asked him about the apartment and the furniture.

  “It’s his stuff, except the stove and icebox. When he got out, he bunked with me a week or so. Then he found that place. Bought secondhand stuff—at best. From junk shops or wherever. He picked up some things off the street.”

  “You know anyone else who could use it?” Joan asked.

  “Matter of fact, the guy who took Dave’s job is looking for a furnished place in town. I know it’s cheap enough for him, and if you don’t want the furniture . . .”

  “Call it Dave’s legacy.”

  “I know the landlord. And you’ll get some rent money back. Dave paid January, just in case he wasn’t back in time.”

  “Then he could move right in. Dave’s treat.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “That’s great. We’ll fix it after supper.”

  Pete was right about Howard, Dave’s replacement, who was delighted with the whole arrangement. When Joan called the landlord, he dredged up a couple of words of sympathy, but mostly he was worried about finding a new tenant in January and coping with the junk his dead tenant would have left behind. She put his mind at rest by providing one who would take the place as it was.

  “He’ll be Dave’s guest in January and take over the rent himself the next month,” she said. “So you won’t have to refund January.”

  “You know this guy?” the landlord asked, though he didn’t sound particularly worried.

  “No, but his employer can recommend him. I’ll put him on the line.” She passed the phone to Pete, who took care of the rest.

  Still sitting in the restaurant, she had to ask again. “Pete, when I phoned, you sounded as if you couldn’t think of anyone who’d want to kill Dave. Are you sure about that? You knew him from way back, and he must have talked to you things that happened in prison.”

  His eyes filled with tears. “Not much. He hated the place. And it’s not like you couldn’t hear the other people talking when I visited. That means they could hear everything we said, too.”

  Fred was nodding.

  “But after he got out? After he came to work for you? When no one was listening?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think he trusted anyone enough to tell that–stuff. Not even me. Not that he thought I’d tell. But if someone came after me, the less I knew, the safer he’d be. I didn’t argue.”

  “Oh, Pete.” Now her own eyes were stinging. She reached for his hand.

  “Sorry.”

  “And nobody you knew in Ann Arbor?”

  “We were just kids back then. Who’d want to do that to a kid?”

  Joan looked at Fred. She was sure he knew plenty of answers to that question, but none he’d say now.

  Nothing else to hold them in Pontiac. They thanked Pete, handed Dave’s key to him, and were in the car, ready to leave, when Joan remembered the phone message.

  “We’d better cancel Dave’s phone,” she said. “Not only to clear up their records, but so old Elmer Fudd won’t bug the new guy.”

  Pete laughed. “Scared you, did he? I’ll tell him about Dave. I’ll get the electricity changed to the new guy, too.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah. ‘Elmer’ used to work for me, too. A souse and nothing like Dave, but they hit it off. And he’s a softie. One of the good guys.”

  “It’s not really Elmer Fudd.”

  “Well, no, it’s Jeff, Jeff Axsom. He’s a big kidder. He’ll be sorry about Dave, though. Might show up at the funeral.” She shivered.

  “He won’t hurt a fly. I’d trust my life to him.”

  “If you say so.” She wasn’t reassured. She’d still be sure to cancel the phone. “I’d just as soon you didn’t tell him how to reach me.”

  She saw the look Pete swapped with Fred. Tha
t was all right. Let him think she was a wimp.

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  It was late by the time they made it home. They hadn’t talked much on the trip back. Joan had tried to nap, but sleep had eluded her. She would be tired at work the next day. Or maybe she’d take another day off.

  Fred insisted on carrying the suitcase full of Dave’s papers and the bag holding his clothes into the house. “Where do you want this stuff?” he asked.

  “Up in Rebecca’s room. I’ll worry about it tomorrow. And I ought to ask Ellen for the things he left at her house. Should have done it when we were there before.” She’d sort through his clothes. Check out what Andrew could use.

  So little, for a whole life. She sighed.

  “You okay?” Fred asked.

  “I will be.”

  He didn’t tell her she found what she went for, and she blessed him for that.

  “Come to bed, woman,” he said instead, and she crawled gratefully into his arms.

  * * *

  In the morning she checked the phone messages. Nothing that couldn’t wait. She called the senior center and told them she was taking another day, or part of it, anyway.

  For a change, it wasn’t Annie Jordan who answered, but Margaret Duffy, her old teacher.

  “How’re you doing?” Margaret asked.

  “Okay—sometimes,” she said. “We drove to Illinois yesterday to bring back Dave’s things. Found his will, which simplified life.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Only I kept feeling so sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t expect to feel like this.”

  “Oh?” Margaret waited. She always had listened well. It was part of what had made her such a good teacher. And what made her a good friend now.

  “I hardly knew him. My own brother.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Margaret, he’d saved all my letters. I mean, all of them.”

  “Well.”

  “And practically nothing else, except tax junk. I had no idea. If I’d known, I would have written more often. Invited him to visit. Maybe made a difference in his life.”

  “Sounds as if you already had.”

  “But look how he ended.”

  “And that was your fault?”

  “Oh. Well, no.” Was that how she’d been feeling? That it was somehow her fault that he’d been killed because he came to Rebecca’s wedding? “So why does it feel that way? He had nothing, Margaret, and I have everything.”

  “Uh-huh. And you could have done what to change that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Margaret waited while she thought about it.

  After a bit, she said, “Thanks, Margaret.”

  She still didn’t want to go to work, but she could face her day now. If it weren’t for the snow, she’d like to try going out to Dave’s land. Could she anyway? She had no idea how rough the roads would be out there.

  She proposed it to Fred.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “If you’ll let me drive.” His eyes smiled down at her.

  “You’re on.” She’d counted on his driving, as she knew he knew.

  She packed a survival kit anyway—hot coffee, sandwiches, matches, and toilet paper, just in case they got stuck out there. Fred always had blankets in his Chevy, she knew. And she dug a couple of stout walking sticks out of the mess in the hall closet, as much for checking what was hidden under the snow as for support.

  “How far do you think we’re going, anyhow?” Fred asked when he saw her preparations.

  “You’re the one who looked at the map. Where’d you put it?”

  He patted his jacket pocket. “You want to take Andrew?”

  “Oh.” Andrew might like that. Maybe he and Fred both would. So why was she dragging her feet? “I suppose.”

  “But?”

  “I don’t even know but what. Sure, ask him.”

  He gave her a dubious look. “Maybe you’d better do it. If you’re sure.”

  Had she been that touchy? Probably. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Andrew around. More that sharing her emotions with one person at a time was about all she could handle today.

  It didn’t matter. Andrew wasn’t in the house. For all she knew, he might not have been there when they arrived home from Illinois. She wouldn’t worry about him.

  “Not here,” she told Fred.

  “Okay, then.” And they were off.

  Joan’s spirits lifted when the sun made the snow crystals glisten. With very little wind, even branches and twigs were still coated with the dusting of fresh snow they’d had overnight. She soaked in the beauty.

  On this unfamiliar back road, they passed ramshackle frame houses, mostly small, and elderly trailers. The snow gentled them and hid the trash likely scattered around them. Watching for animals, she felt vaguely disappointed at not seeing so much as a line of deer tracks. Beside one house, a long line of laundry was freeze-drying. Much as she loved the smell of sun-dried, wind-blown bedding, she didn’t envy the poor woman who would have to break these frozen sheets into folds she could carry.

  Fred didn’t even look at the map before turning off to the south and crossing a little bridge. About a mile farther, he turned again, and the road narrowed to a one-lane track untouched by plows or vehicles since the recent snow.

  “You sure?” Joan asked.

  He nodded. “Almost there.” Soon he pulled over to the side of the road, such as it was. “This is it.”

  “Nobody will be able to get past us.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This road is almost your driveway. It dead-ends into your land.”

  It was her land, she reminded herself, or would be as soon as the will was probated. “How big is it?”

  “On the map it looks like almost a quarter section.”

  A fragment of junior-high math came back to her. “A section is a square mile?” She couldn’t remember it in acres.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So this could have a lot of timber . . . if it has timber at all.” What she saw at this point hardly looked like anything to excite timber buyers.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Joan pulled the backpack and walking sticks out of the car and smiled when Fred automatically shouldered the backpack. A path of sorts led into the scrub. As they climbed over a rise, the scrub gave way to trees of a size that explained the phone calls.

  “Uh-oh.” Fred was pointing at one of them.

  “What?”

  “The paint.”

  She followed his pointing finger. Sure enough, the tree was marked with a line of paint at about shoulder height and another down near the ground. Ahead, she saw another marked tree, and then another. In the winter woods, with trees bare of leaves and the sun behind them, it was easy to see a long way ahead. “What does that mean?”

  “Someone’s marked those trees for harvesting. The paint down near the ground is so they can check the stumps afterward, to be sure the right ones were cut.”

  “You mean Dave already sold them?”

  “That, or it’s timber thieves.”

  “People steal trees?”

  “You bet they do. But if he was looking into selling timber, he may have paid someone to mark the ones he wanted timber buyers to bid on. These have certainly been marked systematically, stumps and all. Timber thieves would be more likely to come in and clear-cut everything. You can’t tell by looking whether he’s signed a contract with a consultant to mark them, or he’s actually sold them.”

  “We didn’t find anything like that in his papers, but I wasn’t looking for that kind of thing.” Without a contract, how would she ever know?

  “No.”

  “I’ll have to look when we get back home.”

  They trudged on. Joan stumbled on the uneven ground as her feet gradually lost sensation in spite of her warm boots. Even though her nostrils were sticking almost closed in the cold, she could smell the promi
se of more snow in the air.

  Fred pointed out some marked trees he said were particularly valuable. Huge white oaks he said were veneer oaks. And black walnut and cherry, all big trees, all very straight. It made sense. In these woods, side branches would have been shaded out by nearby trees. She supposed straight trees like these would be worth more.

  “Fred?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I was thinking of Andrew. What will he say if I let them cut down trees?” Andrew, who’d risked his life sitting seventy feet above the ground to protest just such tree cutting.

  “It would wipe out his college loan.”

  Somehow she didn’t think that would cut any ice with Andrew. “Would he have to know?”

  Fred raised his eyebrows at her. “I suppose you could let him think you robbed a bank.”

  “I wonder how much it would come to.”

  “Depends. So far, I’d guesstimate they’ve marked about ten trees an acre. Maybe a little more, or less, depending on how much of the area is this good. If you have a quarter section and they’re planning to cut that many on the whole property, that’s 160 acres, so say 1600 trees. I can’t turn that into board feet, and of course it depends on what kind they are, but half that many trees worth marking would be a goodly pile of change.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Oh, even Illinois has timber. Not so much, up where I grew up, but I dealt with timber thieves years ago. People who know can look at the stumps and estimate the value of what’s been stolen.”

  “What do we do now?” Go home, she hoped. Her numb feet were screaming for relief.

  “Wienie roast?”

  She laughed. In fact, with all this snow on the ground, it would be safe to risk a fire, and there was certainly no lack of twigs and dead branches to burn. “You want to stay awhile?”

  “Up to you.”

  It held a certain appeal, especially with a fire. “Maybe another day soon. We could invite Andrew.”

  “You’re going to let him see it.”

  “Oh, sure. I couldn’t really keep it from him. But Fred, if these trees are as valuable as you say, we know Dave didn’t sell them. Not yet, anyway. He was almost broke.”

  Chapter 21

  On the way home, she said little, mostly welcoming the gradual return of warmth to her feet.