by Tom Bouman
Before heading to the county lockup, I drove the dirt road up to the Heights to visit the Stiobhard homestead, where Michael and Bobbie Stiobhard lived, parents of Jennie Lyn, Danny, and Alan. Last I knew, Jennie was still living with Pam Maddox in Wild Thyme, Danny was probably in a long-term motel somewhere, and Alan was likely out in the woods. But none of them got too far away from their folks for too long. In the front yard was a rabbit hutch with two checkered giants nestled in whorls of hay within. A vegetable patch took up the side yard. Bobbie emerged from between two rows of corn, raising a meaty arm in my direction.
“They’re out and about,” she told me. “Been over a week since they’ve visited. They never tell me where they go. The boys don’t, anyway.”
“How you been?”
“We’re managing. Less weeding without the rain. Less of everything, but still we do all right. What do you hear from your folks?”
“They don’t use the phone much,” I said. “Neither do I. Mag tells me they’re doing fine, though.”
“Tell them hello. Not many of our people left out here,” she said. “I know Michael would send his best to your father.”
“If you can get word to Danny or Alan, or Jennie, whoever,” I said. “I know they’re often scouting game out to the swamp. We’ll need to get in there on county business, next week or two. So to avoid a misunderstanding . . .”
“I’ll let them know,” she told me.
The county courthouse basement had one row of six cells for men and an annex for women, and this had served as the lockup for decades. It had never been intended as a permanent deal: sleep one off, think about it, wait for your hearing if you can’t afford bail. This was distinct from the multitudes taking plea deals and getting short sentences in the new century; those folks ended up in the county jail proper, south and east of town. People not bad enough for state prison, but not good enough or rich enough to be free, wound up in the newer facility.
They had given Coleman Tod a temporary cell in the courthouse basement, at the far end where nobody ever went anymore. Sheriff Dally’s people took extra shifts to keep watch on him, and I’d seen them bleary-eyed and cranky from having stayed up to do so. Deputy Jackson met me in the fluorescent hallway and repeated what Dally had told me earlier: “You won’t have any reason to open his cell door. If you think you do, call me first, then the ambulance, then go ahead and open it if he’s dying or what.” Jackson demonstrated the lock to the main door and a lock on a cell door in the middle of the row; inside were two cots with clean, stained sheets and a toilet between them. “Your bunk, if you want it,” he said. “Usually I hang out somewhere in the office and check him every fifteen or so.”
Suppertime, I microwaved Tod a frozen dinner from the department’s freezer and slid it under his cell door. He looked up at me from his seat on the bunk as if to say something, but I beat it down the hall.
Around midnight, after a dozen trips down the hall to unlock the main door and check on Tod, who was either sleeping or pretending to, the open cell two doors down began to appeal to me. I stretched out on a bunk in there. The cell lights were out, but the hall lights stayed on all night; it was bright enough that I thought I would stay sharp. Still, I fell asleep and jerked awake what felt like thirty seconds later. It was after three.
I took off my boots and walked silently down to Tod’s cell. A fluorescent glow reflected from his eyes in the dark. He reclined on his cot, one leg crossed over the other.
After a moment I said, “You good?”
He raised his eyebrows and said, “Pull up a chair.” I did so. He hitched himself up in the cot to where he was almost sitting. “Do you think,” he said, “when the time comes, you’re going to believe it? How are you going to handle it?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Why am I asking you that, or why am I asking you that?”
“Pick one.”
Tod exhaled a sigh that reached me in stale sweet breath. “I want to picture how you take it when it comes,” he said. “When, not if. That’s why.”
“What did I ever do to you?” I said, smiling in his face.
“Oh, you didn’t do nothing to me. I’m just passing through,” he said. “But I hate leaving work undone. And now that I’m in here, I don’t know who’s out there to pick up the slack.”
“Well, whoever they are,” I said, “I hope they leave a good-looking corpse.”
SUMMER WAS drawing to a close. Most cottagers would be spending a final week or two out in Wild Thyme before they shut their places up and drifted away for the year. I had been promising to spend some time with Julie and her people on Walker Lake, and with the weekend, that time had come.
I left my truck squeezed between the tree line and the side of the dirt road, took my bag and my fiddle. Far below on a dock, a half dozen or so people lounged in the late summer sun, and I picked out Julie among them. A pontoon boat was tied to the dock.
Off to my right, Willard Meagher sat in an Adirondack chair smoking a small cigar. He tapped ash into a standing brass ashtray beside him, held up the cigar, and said, “You know how it is.”
I followed the stone wall over to him and stuck out my hand, which he shook. He wore a magenta tennis shirt, cutoff jeans, and no shoes. A battered plastic cooler stood beside him on the ground. He reached into it, found a can of pale ale, and placed it on the arm of an empty chair beside him. I sat and snapped it open. We sat and listened to the people teeming below at Walker Lake.
“You from here?” he said suddenly. “Originally?”
“Yessir. Then the service, then back here, then Wyoming for a while.” For some reason I needed this family to know that I’d been other places.
“I’ve been to Wyoming. I like it better here.”
“If you say so,” I said.
“I’ve been a lot of places and here’s better,” he said, flapping a hand as if I didn’t know my own mind. “You served where?”
“Somalia, tail end of it, just out of high school.”
“I was Coast Guard. In the seventies, drug enforcement off Florida? Chasing smugglers in yachts and fishing boats. Waste of time. Waste of money.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, you of all people can see it didn’t do a bit of good. Fun, though.” He twisted his cigar in the ashtray. “For a while I thought: Florida, why not? That’s where I met Tina, she was on her spring break with her parents. Here’s better. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
We left my bag on a creaky old bed in a second-floor room with nobody else’s things in it. He told me to put on my bathing suit and I did while he waited in the hall. It felt strange to be staying over at a house not twenty minutes from mine, but I guess that was the point. I had forgotten flip-flops, so I just slipped my bare feet back into the work boots I wore every day. Willard showed me the cottage. His paintings were sprinkled throughout: glacial shards of blue, green, and white competing for space. Hints of other, sharper colors, tailings from a strange mine. Many of the pieces featured scraps of burlap or threads sewn onto the canvas. He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. The living room had a wall of novels whose spines had been bleached from the sun.
He and I each took the handle of a large cooler full of beer, ice, and a bottle or two of white wine and walked straight to the shore. There, four women lolled reading by the dock, wearing swimsuits and wraps on this last hot day of a turning season. Julie had two sisters, one younger, Dierdre, who went by Dee, an unmarried asset manager in New York City. The elder sister was Georgia, a schoolmarm at a private academy up the Hudson River. She was married, with two boys ages five and seven. Her husband had not come, claiming too much work as a consultant or lobbyist up to Albany. And with the sisters was Julie’s mother Tina, a slow-talking, eyebrow-arching, silver-haired lady in an elaborate beach wrap.
With predatory patience, Tina roused herself from her lounge chair, stepped into the family’s pontoon boat, and rearranged herself on a bench seat exactly as she’d b
een on the dock, except with a life preserver around her neck as a kind of pillow. I understood through the course of the day that Mom’s drawling fanciness was a kind of running family joke, that she had never quite adjusted to the rough-and-tumble of her husband, and knew it only too well. She handled herself like a lady from olden times, fallen and making the best. And her daughters were happy to play along, the more ridiculous the better, waiting on her, offering a beach blanket every time there was a breeze, and regularly inquiring after her condition as we cruised the lake. Mom answered only in murmurs and almost never cracked.
But the pontoon came under fire from neighboring boaters armed with water balloons. As the rainbow of blobs pelted our boat, it was down to me, Julie, and Georgia’s boys to defend us. I went so far as to dive down under the attacking boat and make a grab for their bucket of balloons as I surfaced on the other side. I took a hit to the face for it. But when Tina got blasted, Will had the good sense to surrender and flee. I heard her say, “Ugh. It isn’t funny.”
Afternoon blurred into evening and we returned to shore, baffled on too much sun and beer and ready to put our feet up. I washed under a showerhead the size of a Frisbee. When cocktail hour arrived I headed to the living room. Just keep smiling, I told myself, and think twice before you open your damn mouth.
Dee sat cross-legged in a wing-backed chair in ripped jeans, scrolling through her BlackBerry. She looked up, smiled, and looked down again. “I hate this thing,” she said. “It’s a desert island and still there’s email.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, thinking of my radio.
Willard swept in, went to the bar, and placed a lowball glass in my hand: scotch. Tina followed, carrying what looked like a vodka tonic.
“I snooped,” she told me, “in your room. To make sure you had everything you needed. Lo and behold, you brought your violin. I hear you’re good. You’ll play for us. A private show!”
“Leave him alone, Mother,” said Dee.
“Oh, please, you’re no fun, Dee.”
“Let him be, Tina,” said Will. “Come on out to the smoking lounge,” he said.
Outside, the boys were playing manhunt. Their bird voices carried all the way up the slope. From my Adirondack chair, through a mare’s tail of Willard’s cigar smoke, I caught a glimpse of Julie down the hill, sneaking from under some pine trees and across the lawn to the lee of a moss-covered boathouse.
“You got any young ones in your world?” Willard asked me.
“My sister’s got three kids. But they’re in North Carolina. One of them I’ve never even met yet. I’d like to. She’s one year old.”
“I know Julie’d like to have kids. Not with you! Necessarily. I mean . . .” He shifted in his chair. “What I mean is, she left it a little late, but it’s not as if she’s got a career in the way.”
“You don’t think?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Will abandoned his empty lowball for a cold beer. He tossed me one, too. “What do you think?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Thinking is dangerous,” he said. “I’m going to retire from it. You don’t retire from working, you retire from thinking, did you know that? Maybe I should retire from talking too.” He put an ankle across his knee. “You’ll get used to us.”
After supper, Julie fetched up beside me where I sat on a stone wall. The scent of her sweat pulled at me, quickened my heart, cut into the buzz and flower scent of ironweed and aster left to grow against the deck, almost wild. I wondered would she sneak into the guest room and see me later. The lake reclined below us, and above us was a field that had yet to be mowed, with a trail leading up to the work site. She caught me eyeing at the escape route and said, “Come on.”
Up to the field we went with my fiddle, a blanket, and what remained of a bottle of rosé wine. The lightning bugs were out again, looking for love in the tall grass. The night deepened and our little branch of the galaxy locked into place above me.
A series of high-pitched screams sat us bolt-upright. Close by. I caught two sets of green eyes low to the grass. They dropped out of view. The creatures screamed again, sounding like women in anguish except for the tone that threatened, that marked territory.
“Fishers,” I said. Black little foxlike animals, long like weasels, and fearless. They move like water pouring from glass to glass.
“Tell them to go away,” Julie said.
“Greedy little things. They just kill and kill, stash what they’ve got and move on, leave food on the table. They’d bury us in a second if they could.”
“I’VE BEEN wandering seventeen years,” Tod said to me, and to the world.
It was high noon. He and I were standing side by side in a ravine that ran under 37, through rocks and a six-foot culvert, and continued east. He’d claimed there was a deer trail on the uphill side. If we took it through the red pine, we’d find a girl buried by a car-sized boulder with coins hammered into its layers. Sleight stayed with us while the ID Services team searched the forest.
“Seventeen years beyond the pale,” Tod said. He shrugged as far as his shackles would allow. “Who in life can say they did that?”
I moved up the hill, as far away from him as I dared get. I heard a few steps and I thought at first he was following me, and I turned. I felt the shot pass before I heard it: a high-caliber rifle from a distance. Tod’s head burst into a red cloud, and pieces of his skull scattered into the creek. I slid down the way I came. For an instant Tod remained standing, and then fell over dead. Sleight removed his glasses, and wiped the killer’s blood and brain from his face. He pointed back up the hill and I ran.
On 37, Hanluain was leaning into his patrol car’s window to get to the radio. I sprinted along the shoulder, around a bend in the road, to catch a glimpse of any vehicle taking the shooter away. There was nothing, nothing, and then Hanluain raced past me at about a hundred in his car. I gave up and turned up the hillside on foot. Past the high-water mark of road dust and litter I moved into a world of deep green. I kept part of my focus on the position of the body as a point of reference, and the rest clung to what entered my senses from the woods: no birds singing, no footsteps moving away, the huffing of two or three cops approaching the hilltop. I met Mason and Riva in an open space, lightly trampled, with a view into the ravine where the world had caught up with Coleman Tod.
I paced farther north into the forest, away from 37. Eventually I came to an electric fence strung around a paddock of several dozen cows. Skirting it, I came to a farm with its farmhouse long gone, in its place a double-wide dwarfed by the barn next to it. A long dirt driveway led to what I eventually recognized as Tanner’s Hill Road. A sagging farmer of about fifty emerged from the barn to stare at me as I placed my hands on my knees and sucked air.
NOBODY IN Wild Thyme claimed to have seen or known Coleman Tod. We had been followed or someone had leaked our location; that was plain. But who would have risked the kill and why—that was less clear. Of course Bobbie Stiobhard swore she hadn’t yet reached her boys, and I’d never given her any idea of our position out by 37. Still, when the hill had been combed over and nothing turned up but my tracks, and given the length of the shot, I had to take the absence of evidence as a meaning all its own.
Once again I called Louis Resnik out in Beaver to see if he’d turned up Sage Buckles, and to keep a watch out for Kevin O’Keeffe, both of whom were of interest in Tod’s death until I could rule them out. Resnik had nothing on Buckles, but he gave me some news: Hope Martinek had died a lonely death that early fall. Before a landlord had unlocked the cinder-block cottage she rented month to month, she had decomposed considerably. The universities didn’t want her and she was given a simple burial in the county graveyard out in Beaver. I pressed Resnik on the investigation, but he was steadfast: it was an overdose, nothing more.
It took two weeks to wind up Tod’s death with an inquest and an investigation taken over by PSP that is open to this day. I had some long conversations wit
h a state detective. Whatever suspicions I may have had about the Stiobhards, I kept them to myself, and turned the exchange toward Binghamton and the operation that Tod threatened to bring down every day he took breath and dredged up another body. Meanwhile, Alan did me the favor of staying out of Holebrook County, or at least out of sight. All good things in all good time.
I threw myself into timber framing once again. Working on the building, as the song goes. Willard’s studio took form, piece by piece, day by day, and the crew was drawn to the hilltop above Walker Lake. Ed was a month or three past the deadline, but Willard had been drawn into the process more so than end result, and had stopped looking at the calendar.
Bright blue sky, maples gone red and orange among the yellow and green hills surrounding the work site. A white puff of breath, cold morning water seeping into my boots from the tall grass. The air smelled like the timbers we’d worked, numbered, assembled, disassembled, loaded onto flatbeds, and secured with ratchet straps. Soon we’d raise the barn, throw a party, and shake our fists at the autumn already elbowing summer aside with a morning frost, a little chuckle at our earthly pursuits.
Some personal prayers were said as Ed’s aged Ford L8000 turned up the dirt track to the meadow above Walker Lake. It made the climb, and the crew unloaded and stacked timber, siding, and sheets of steel roofing around the site.
My cell phone rang: I recognized Andy Swales’s number. I didn’t answer it, and it rang again.
“Yeah?”
“He’s back.”
“Who?”
“O’Keeffe. He’s got somebody with him.”
“Don’t leave the house,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I had warned Kevin about going up there anymore, and he had not listened, and now I was being pulled away from my own life to deal with it. Damned if I wasn’t going to take him in for trespass and we were going to talk—Penny’s death, Coleman Tod, what he knew and wasn’t telling me, his future here in Wild Thyme. I got to my truck, reconsidered, pulled Willard aside, and asked for the use of his over-under. It would only be a prop, but better to have it and not need it.