Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  “I’ll go,” said Sleight.

  The BCI detective looked sour, and said, “You clean him up and then he’s ours. I don’t want to find out you’ve been talking to him.”

  And we didn’t talk to him, not really. PSP patrol cars ran silently front and back, their lights bringing the trees up close around us, at least from what I could see out the back windows. A hospital administrator met us at the ER doors, and conferred briefly with Sleight and a PSP corporal before leading us past sad and bewildered old faces in the waiting area to a secure room at the end of a quiet hall on the second floor. Two nurses, a DNA tech, and a doctor went inside.

  Cops began to gather now by the nurses’ station, bringing cold air in on their jackets and bad coffee on their breath. “Dirty motherfucker,” said one, to nobody and everybody.

  I pulled Sleight aside. “I know he’s headed up north. I want him back,” I said. “I want him for Penny Pellings. At least to talk to him.”

  “One dead junkie over the state line won’t get you much,” Sleight said. “We’ll send you what we can, samples, information. You can work from that.”

  “It’s not just her,” I said. “A guy just tried to kill O’Keeffe’s alibi witness, Sage Buckles. This guy shows up same area, same time. And I don’t know for sure, but I think Buckles went on the run.”

  “Somebody’s been trying to kill Buckles all his life. Find out who he pissed off lately, and there you go. It’s not necessarily this guy. But noted,” he said, not unkindly. “Now, you get with your friends up in the hills, impress upon them the need to talk to us about tonight. Us, you, somebody. I assume they won’t be too hard to find. The reward’s waiting.”

  Come four a.m. I decided that there was nothing left for the Wild Thyme Township Police Department of one to do or hear at the hospital, and hitched a ride with a New York State trooper back to the scene at the quarry. From there, I walked to where I left my truck on 37 and drove home.

  A compact car was parked in my driveway, and a person was behind the wheel, face buried in the collar of a too-big coat. I tapped the window with my knuckle and the driver started, put her hands over her face, and cursed. Seeing it was me, Jennie Lyn relaxed, opened her door, stood, and stretched.

  “Where you got him?” she asked.

  “Fitz. They’ll move him before too long,” I said. “Out of this county, anyway.”

  “Good.”

  “So next step, we’ll need to get you three together for a statement—”

  “I don’t think so. They’re on the road.”

  “What? Why?”

  “They don’t want to be on the news,” she said, as if to an idiot. “Neither do I.”

  “But you want the money. If you want the money, you have to show up for it.”

  “More than that, we want your assurances,” she said. “I ask for my brothers, not myself, you understand.”

  At my kitchen table Jennie Lyn pulled a black-and-white map of Holebrook County, the kind you get free at the gas station. On it were circled three areas I knew to be Stiobhard hunting grounds, junkyards turned shops, trailers running off generators, whatever served as their infrastructure. We were looking at a map of black market auto parts, small-time marijuana farming, maybe a lab or two. Of particular note was a swamp fanning out from a valley bordering the Heights. Rumor had it that a lowly dealer from out of town had been killed and buried near it long ago. Forgotten now, almost. “Nothing goes on at any of these places we don’t know,” she said. “This guy up to the quarry is nothing to do with us. He killed that cop, I get that. But remember who found him, and who told you.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Damn right,” said Jennie. “Now, how do we get our ten thousand smackers?”

  EARLY THAT week I had a summary proceeding at the courthouse, late afternoon before Magistrate Heyne. Some poor dumb juggins had driven his truck halfway over a guardrail, got it stuck, and then fled the scene. He blamed it on prescription medication, but I had witness statements from a tavern in Great Bend that put him on a barstool just prior. After the hearing, I paid a visit to the sheriff’s department to learn what I could about the stranger.

  “He’s already gone,” Dally said, sounding partway relieved. “New York State and Binghamton PD took over. Welcome to him. I’ve never known a guy to stay dead silent as long as he did. His prints weren’t in the system, so we didn’t even have a name. Still don’t. We called him ‘You There.’ They matched his blood to the scene up in Schuyler County, and he had a closed-­circuit hearing with a court-appointed lawyer and a judge down here yesterday morning. Judge read him the charges—assault in the first degree, kidnapping in the first degree, endangering the welfare of a child, driving an unregistered vehicle without insurance, fraud, first-degree felony murder. Did he understand the charges? ‘Yes.’ That’s it, and he was shackled to a gurney and shoved in an ambulance.”

  “We still have blood evidence from the Pellings scene,” I said, recalling the droplet I’d pulled from the trailer’s kitchen linoleum. “It’s untested. I didn’t think we’d need it because of the phone, but—”

  “Send it in. That’s the best we can do.”

  I thought about the stranger’s silent leer during the ambulance ride. “So even if we had a chance to dig into him in an interview room . . .”

  “No way he’s talking.”

  I DIDN’T SEE Julie Meagher again until one early morning the following Friday, when I got a call to Maiden’s Grove. I wouldn’t waste a chance to haunt the place, and I got there in a hurry. A line of bystanders stood on the shore, and Fitz­morris EMS had wedged an ambulance onto a cottage lawn. There was Julie, looking sleepy. She waved to me from the bumper. I wondered why they’d been toned out too. Shaun Loughlin’s Game Commission truck was parked in a nearby driveway and I pulled along beside. Out in the middle of the lake, a group of kayaks, canoes, and rowboats moved through curls of morning mist. A breeze lifted some of the gray cover, and I saw moving across the lake’s surface a stag’s head with a huge basket of antlers. Even from shore I could see the animal’s tongue hanging red from the side of his mouth, and his neck straining forward and back with the motion of his body beneath the surface. Then it was gone in the fog.

  Rhonda Prosser approached me, a coil of dreadlocks teetering atop her head. “He’s been out there at least since five this morning, poor guy,” she said. “At first he was just wading. By the eastern shore? But then something spooked him and he won’t come back. They’re out there now trying to, I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think it’s helping.”

  “I saw Shaun’s truck,” I said. “He out there too, or?”

  “He’s getting patched up,” Rhonda said, nodding in the direction of the ambulance.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, the ambulance isn’t for the deer.”

  Shaun sat shirtless on the unit’s rear bumper, staring at his right forearm, which was wrapped in bloody gauze. He was a military veteran, like me, but still in his twenties. He’d been to Iraq.

  “Hey, pal,” said I. “Looking mighty green.”

  “I had a hand on him, and he tagged me.”

  “That’s what you get.”

  “That and some stitches. He’s all yours now.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Shaun said. “I’d of shot him by now if there weren’t so many kids watching. And Rhonda.” He dangled his head between his thighs, and sweat dripped off his nose. “I’d have made him into chili. Wait.” He puked between his shoes, then glared at the wound on his arm. “What the hell.”

  “Let’s just let the poor bastard sink or swim.”

  “That’s been tried,” he said. “He just keeps in circles like he’s in a giant shitter. And the people have spoken: no drowning in their lake.”

  “It’s a lake, it’s full of dead things.”

  “They’re beyond reason at this point. They’re involved. It’s a dog dow
n a well; you’ve got to get it out.”

  Father raised me with the belief that game wardens existed only to make money off of honest, self-reliant men, and as such their authority was illegitimate. To wit, he quoted Psalms, “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?” No, was Father’s belief. It helped him put meat on our table. I liked Shaun. Father would, too.

  In the dinghy Shaun had borrowed from a cottager, there was a length of rope tied in a noose. I quickly retied it as a taut-line hitch and shoved off. Four heavy pulls on the oars, and I was adrifting toward the buck. I came in at an angle to the animal, his eye wide and white around a rolling black hole. I shipped the oars and took up the rope. As soon as I got within range, the buck stilled, shuddered, tossed his antlers once around, and sank. Where he had disappeared, I looked through a mass of air bubbles into the dark.

  Back ashore, the onlookers headed back to their cottages with an air of defeat. I don’t think anyone ever found that stag.

  As I was getting in my truck, Julie beckoned me over. “Come here a minute,” she said, and steered me around the side of the ambulance, out of view. “About last week.”

  “I can’t say much,” I told her. “They moved him already.”

  “So it was him.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “It was him. I looked online.”

  “It was him, yeah.”

  “I still keep my lights on all night.” She gazed across the lake, then turned to me. “Fuck him anyway. Want to pick apples tomorrow?” She said it plain enough. But there was a challenge in her eyes, a riddle of some kind.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. I couldn’t really say no without a good reason.

  “You can come over to my place around nine,” she said. “Can you bake? Never mind, I can.”

  That night I took down my sky-blue Joy of Cooking and read what there was to read on the subject of pies.

  Next morning I arrived at the address Julie gave me: a white carriage house with black shutters in the town of Fitzmorris, at the foot of where the wooded hills rose out of the river valley. A wind chime clunked, hanging from her porch, and in the side yard there were three raised beds, two of which had been turned over for the fall, while the third ran riot with pumpkins and winter squash. A line of dwarf peach trees marked the edge of her yard, each leaning at forty-five-degree angles and propped up by pitchforks. Julie answered the door in jeans, a sweater, and hiking boots. She carried canvas sacks.

  “Morning,” said I. “Ready?”

  “Yessir,” she said. “I thought Anderson’s.” This was the main u-pick-it orchard in the area.

  “We could,” I said.

  “What, what’s wrong with Anderson’s?”

  “Why pay money when I know a place that’s free and nobody’ll be there?”

  The noise of my truck’s engine made talking nearly impossible as we crossed Holebrook County and headed toward the Heights. I stopped at the edge of a dirt track that bisected the main road; it had been fenced over and branches crowded the intersection. The road we stood on had only ever been a little detour from one paved route to another, and the lone place on it, a dairy farm, had been abandoned for years. I knew a path through the woods that would take us there.

  Leaves rattled overhead and fell in glowing sheets around us. Once we hit the acre of grapevine claiming second-growth trees, I knew we were close. Julie swung on one. Before us, the shape of the house waited, the ground floor shot through with multiflora rose, still green but no longer in bloom; beside what was once a barn, the remains of a silo was supported by an oak tree growing through its middle and up to the sky. What was left of the farmhouse was surrounded by several acres of brown scrub, with a layer of green above it: an orchard living on, becoming wild.

  “I went here when I was little,” I said. “You paid fifty cents to an old lady who dipped snuff, and she gave you a brown paper bag. Nobody was working the farm even back then.”

  Julie pulled a yellow apple off a tree next to her. “I couldn’t even tell you what to call this,” she said.

  “Me neither. Too old, some of these varieties. The names get lost. I saw that you grow peaches.”

  “The trees came with the house. I do what I can.”

  “Before they clear-cut most of the hills for pasture, you could walk through the woods and find wild peach trees everywhere,” I said. “They used to be called Indian peaches because the whites thought the Indians had planted them, before we moved them down the line. But actually it was Spaniards who brought them to Florida. They migrated north. When we were kids, Mag—my sister—and I used to want to find one. Never did.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Julie said.

  It felt great out in the sun and cold air, and the orchard was full of fruit like pirate treasure. At one point I boosted her up into a tree so she could shake down a branch of deep red apples. I felt her thigh flexing against my chest and a sensation of flight as she stepped off my clasped hands and into the tree. Where the apples dropped, deer sign was everywhere. This place would draw them all winter, and I made a note to return and hunt next month.

  Back at Miss Julie’s we pried our boots off, she got the oven heating, and made us strong coffee from a ceramic dripper. Her kitchen was light-drenched and centered around a chopping-block island. Public radio murmured from a device. I rinsed and sliced apples, while Julie heaped flour on the clean countertop and first drizzled water into it, then scooped out a mysterious substance from a jar from the freezer. Bacon fat, it turned out. It being a carriage house, there wasn’t much room in the kitchen, and so we slipped around each other as the place warmed from the oven and ourselves. At one point Julie disappeared and returned without her sweater, just a tank top on her and a film of sweat on her shoulders. At one point as we moved about I found myself looking down right into her face, which showed amusement and mischief. She brushed by with a hand on my arm. Another man would have done something brave and found himself in a new life. But we kept talking, and the conversation turned to the places where our shops met.

  “I worked down in Asheville, North Carolina,” Julie said. “It’s about the size of Binghamton. We had homeless, addicts. Some violent, mostly not. Some kids came to us with gunshots, lacerations, bloody, calling for their mommy. I don’t know, it’s not right to say, but there’s something sweet about a hood who thinks he’s going to die. It takes him out of himself, shows you who he really is. So you’ll save his life, I guess. Now, the guy we picked up last weekend, he wasn’t dying, but . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “There was nothing in him beyond what he showed us. Not that I could see.”

  “I don’t guess he cared one way or another about dying.”

  “If he ever talks, I wonder what he’ll say,” she said.

  We fell silent. “How’d you like Asheville?” I said. I imagined barbecue, coffee shops, and guitars in open tunings.

  “Asheville’s a long story,” she said evasively. “You ever been to a place before?”

  “I have,” I said. “A long story.”

  For lunch we ate good cheese and fig bread she’d baked in her Dutch oven, and apples. I left her in the afternoon, reluctantly, with a lattice-crust pie in my hands.

  I KNEW I was in trouble when I arrived at the work site after my shift, saw Miss Julie’s car there with the crew’s jalopies, but no Miss Julie and no Ed. I asked a fellow prying siding off the barn where was everyone, and he told me they’d hopped in Ed’s truck to see about another frame in Bradford County. Well, I thought, never mind he’s married, of course it’s him she likes. It’s all over before it even began. I contemplated the already eaten pie, the dish waiting to be returned on my passenger seat. Before it got dark, before they returned, I made myself drive home.

  ONE DAY without any warning, the stranger’s face appeared on the local news: the mug shot beside artists’ renditions from the Schuyler County incident. The anchor tiptoed around the facts o
f his capture, leaving me, Holebrook County, and anyone else out of the picture. Authorities were baffled, said the reporter, and cut to a brief interview with a New York State investigator in plain clothes asking folks for any information about the man. Him and his 1994 Cadillac de Ville with New Jersey plates, his white Olds. The pictures disappeared from the TV screen just as they started to mean something else to me. I looked the report up on the Internet and stared at the images awhile. Then I picked up the phone to Lieutenant Sleight.

  “So,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s the grand total of what we know. Except we have a lead on a first name. I can’t give it out yet.”

  “He started talking?”

  “No. No, someone else did.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who, Mr. Dizzy up there in Mid-State Correctional.”

  “He getting out early for it?”

  “He’s not getting dog-dick for a first name and ‘maybe I’ve seen him around.’ A definite ID, known associates, something more, maybe. But that—”

  “Could get him killed,” I said.

  “And he knows that. So it’s up to him,” Sleight said. “I think what’s-his-name will plead to the Jelinski thing and to the deputy in Schuyler County and try to disappear. It’s what he seems to want to do already.”

  “Got anything else for me?” I said.

  “DNA profile, prints, tests from his clothes, report on trace evidence from his car, that’s about all I got. He’s left no presence online, no credit cards, nothing. Nobody in town seems to know him, so.”

  “If I were to try to get up to see him . . .”