by David Downie
On three sides, the beach was roped off with phosphorescent yellow tape twisting and flapping in the wind. James could make out the words POLICE AREA: DO NOT ENTER. The surf formed the fourth side and, with the waves pounding, was complicating the task of the flailing police crew. Deputy Smithson and several other law enforcement officers stood back above the tide line, waving and shouting, keeping the onlookers at bay. Other officers posted in the parking lot seemed to be doing the same, judging by the commotion. James could hear them barking into their transceivers. One was using a bullhorn to beat back the crowds. The TV crew rushed backward and forward. Floodlights were on, and the satellite dish stood erect as they filmed scenes of the beach, parking lot, and flatbed truck.
“Did you get our message?” James asked, striding up behind Beverley. She did not respond. He repeated his question, shouting this time over the increasing noise of the helicopter’s rotors.
Beverley started, clutching her pearls and blanching. “My god, you scared me,” she blurted. “There you are . . .” She took his hands. He could feel her trembling and told her concisely what had happened. But Beverley seemed to only half listen, her face averted, turned toward the beach, her eyes fixed on the helicopter approaching slowly from the south, as the drone had earlier. Within seconds the noise was deafening. The sucking vacuum effect of the rotors as the ’copter slowed, dipping then rising, pulled at their clothes and hair with unexpected force. The skids hung no more than fifteen feet above them. Then the ’copter moved forward like a dragonfly, positioning itself over the cage, and dropped a thick steel cable with a hook on the end. The three divers in wet suits leaped in turns out of the waves, one finally catching the hook. Scrambling to slip it through the tackle on the cage, they signaled with a thumbs-up and retreated to safety.
Rising with a ferocious roar, the helicopter yanked the steel hog trap out of the water, hoisting it until it swung free, directly in front of the staircase where James and Beverley stood. She began to swoon, but he propped her up. Reviving, she stiffened with embarrassment, then apologized with a silent sweep of her hand, clearly angry at herself for showing weakness. He could not hear what she said because of the roar of the rotors. They watched the helicopter rise, repositioning itself a hundred feet north this time, above the flatbed truck. Then the cage began to sink and dropped out of view behind the trees.
Trotting uphill along garden paths plunged in darkness, James and Beverley saw the scene illuminated from the side by the floodlights of the TV van and the headlights of the trucks and police cars. Breaking into a run across the resort’s parking lot, along the highway and into the beach parking lot, James realized Beverley was no longer by his side. As he swiveled to look for her, he tripped, falling forward and blundering into Tom, the deputy, and a tall man standing near him wearing blue overalls.
“Watch your step, for chrissakes,” Tom snarled, heaving him away like a medicine ball. James felt himself lifted and flying, and when he landed he saw the glowing yellow police tape on the edge of the highway. “This area is off-limits,” the deputy shouted at him. “Get back behind the tape.”
The man in blue overalls climbed into the driver’s seat of the flatbed truck, started it and revved the engine until clouds of black diesel exhaust filled the air.
Backing off, his beard and hair blown wild by the rotors, James retreated into the twilit garden and found Beverley leaning against the fence, peering through the knothole, panting and wheezing. She shushed him before he could speak. Just tall enough to see over the fence, James shuffled through the sawdust of the sawed cypress trunk and stood under the thick foliage of a bay tree, a branch across his face, hoping not to be spotted.
By now the cage had been lowered onto the flatbed and was being roped down and cinched tight with movers’ belts. The TV cameraman followed the procedure from various angles, scrambling onto the bed of the truck then sweeping the parking lot as the crew moved toward the sheriff’s deputy in charge. The helicopter lifted higher, circled once and roared south following the line of the beach.
“The department is not making statements at this time,” Tom Smithson said into a bullhorn when the noise had subsided, facing the camera and lights and holding up his left hand aggressively. “You know from social media that guests staying at the resort here saw the object this afternoon and reported it. The sheriff’s office responded immediately. We are now able to confirm that it is a feral hog trap. A forensic team will examine the items in the trap in due course and we will provide information to the media when appropriate,” he shouted, his left hand still in motion. “The consensus at this time is that this is a hoax. Its perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I have nothing further to say at this time. Now go on home, there’s nothing to see and I don’t want to have to tighten the curfew or round you up.”
Clustered a few feet from the fence where James stood, the TV crew cast rapidly around, the reporter calling for eyewitnesses. Someone started talking loudly about Graveyard Beach, saying the spot had always been cursed and full of bones. James felt fingers tugging at his beard and looked down to see Beverley, terror in her eyes, motioning for him to pull his head down. She led him painfully by the beard, bent in a crouch, away from the fence, then let go and beckoned him through the garden down to the RV.
Whispering and pointing, she hurried him to open the door and climb in. “We don’t have much time,” she said hoarsely, her words barely audible. “They’ve been through the garden and the shack once and came into the resort office and poked around. I think they’re suspicious. I watched, they didn’t get inside your camper but they will. If you’ve got anything to hide you’d better get it out quick before they come back in daylight. If I were you, I’d change out of those wet, smelly, bloody rags, take a long walk and come back after nightfall, unless you want to see the inside of the new county jail.” She handed him a fistful of keys. “At the end of the access road you can climb down into the ravine and take the beach to the harbor. Then come back on the beach. Rap three times on the kitchen window once you see the cars and trucks are gone and I’ll let you in. And stay out of range of that damn spy camera on the highway. Now get while the getting’s good! I’ll explain why later.”
THIRTEEN
There’s no need to synchronize watches, but let’s get our stories straight,” Beverley whispered, leading me through the moonlit darkness into the center of the lawn. “Tell me exactly what happened and what you said at the hospital and doctor’s office.”
Shushing her in my turn, I cupped my penlight in my hands and switched it on, pointing the beam down so only we could see it, then I found the path Taz and I had cut through the orchard into the abandoned rose garden. Crabbing sideways, Beverley followed me and once we’d found a flat spot among the rose stumps, I switched off the light and in a low, even voice gave her the blow-by-blow account.
Eventually my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, but it was too dark for me to see her expressions. I could tell from the negative energy vibrating through the clammy air that she was frowning, and I could hear her huffing and wheezing like an asthma sufferer. The last thing anyone needed was for her to keel over now. I’d have to take her to the hospital, and then what?
“First,” she said, sounding exasperated and impatient, “I turned away a bunch of rubbernecker types who swamped me with requests to stay tonight. They’d seen everything on social media and the TV news. People are strange, and I am not feeling great warmth toward mankind just now, and furthermore, I’m also getting cold standing in the fog in the middle of winter in this wind. So, let me shift into high gear and get to the second and more important point. Why in god’s name did you make such a scene in the emergency room? I know, I know, you were trying to get their attention so they’d call Taz faster, but it wasn’t smart, it was not smart, they may already have reported you.”
“What for?” I demanded, unable to hide the incredulity in my voice.
Beverley scoffed. “W
hat for? What for? They report everyone for anything these days, and bleeding all over the desk and throwing dirty tissues around and just looking the way you two did in those wet, filthy, bloody clothes, and talking like an educated person and being from out of town is plenty, plenty I’m telling you. I’m hoping they were too busy, what with that bus accident.” She paused, raising a finger, the pink nail catching the moonlight. Then she added, “Maybe Harvey-Parvey won’t make the connection.”
I told Beverley that I frankly didn’t see what the worry was and couldn’t make the connection myself. We hadn’t done anything wrong, we’d just seen the cage and pulled it onto the beach because it seemed the right thing to do, and she’d called the authorities, end of story. Why the cloak and dagger routine?
Again, I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was glowering at me. I felt a cold sweat break out all over and bundled my windbreaker tight.
“End of story? Try again, Your Honor, it’s more like the beginning of the story.” She paused and I heard the click of a safety catch being lifted, then I saw the glint of a revolver in her hand. “Forget Perry Mason, maybe I should be calling you Hamilton Burger on a bad day? I’m glad you’ve made me so mad, I’m no longer scared to death. And I’ve got a gun and know how to use it. Quiet! What was that?”
“What was what?”
“That noise . . . someone’s coming, walking down the trail, it sounds like Harvey, limping, using his stick. We’d better duck and hightail it. I can’t shoot Harvey, not yet anyway.”
Gripping her by the arm so she could not bolt, I cocked my ears like a spaniel or a cat stalking a bird. Then I saw the red rings of the raccoons’ eyes, breathed freely and wiped the sweat off my brow. “It’s the raccoons, never mind them, they won’t bother us. Now put that gun away.”
“Just what we need,” she said, gulping, “getting bitten by rabid coons, and back to the hospital we go.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. You shoot that pistol or have a heart attack and back to the hospital we go. Please hand over that gun,” I said firmly.
“I will not,” she said. “Now how do you like that? You’re always saying ‘I will not.’”
I held my hand out the same way she held hers out for Taz’s smartphone. She huffed and muttered. The pistol’s safety clicked back on. She opened her palm. I pocketed the handgun. It was a small-bore pocket pistol, a kind of derringer.
Suddenly Beverley stooped and scrabbled in the darkness, found a rock and hurled it at the family of raccoons, hissing at them. “Now get!” she cried in a suffocated voice. I turned the penlight back on for a few seconds and watched the startled animals moving deliberately away from us, a pair of strange, dangerous beasts known as human beings. Then whispering and wheezing and coughing to clear her throat, she told me her side of the story, working backward in time.
“They wanted to know how the cage got so far up the beach, above the tide line,” she said, “and I told them I had no idea. Then they asked me where that scruffy-looking guest of mine was, the old man with the beard, and did he see anything? And had he dragged that cage around? And why hadn’t I or he called the authorities immediately? I said you’d borrowed the truck and went into town with Taz, but I didn’t say why, and they didn’t ask. I said you didn’t drag any cage from my property to the beach—that’s what they were claiming—and that you couldn’t have called them if you’d wanted to, because you don’t have a phone, as far as I know, and besides, Taz needed immediate attention, he’d cut himself on the coil of barbed wire, at least I thought it was there he’d done it, but I couldn’t be sure. I showed them the wire from the shack and the shred of his pant leg I’d draped over it, so they gave up and went away, thank god.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Beverley, this is making no sense to me. Why are they asking all these questions, and why did you try to make it look like we got cut in the garden instead of on the beach?”
“Hold your hogs,” she snapped, “and don’t be obtuse. They might pretend to think you dragged that cage from here down to the beach in order to incriminate you.”
“Pretend?”
“Yes, pretend. Don’t you see?” She paused to underscore her exasperation. “I also showed them the rebuild kit and that poor old chainsaw all taken to pieces.”
“Did you mention the drone and that we’d wrestled with the cage?”
“Quit interrupting me. No, I didn’t, why would I?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Well, stay quiet a minute, Mr. Hamilton Burger, let me talk and maybe you’ll understand,” she snapped. “Rewind a couple years, to when Number Three died, that’s when this nightmare started, at least for me.”
Then Beverley told me what I still find to be an inconceivable and absurd tale of cruelty and horror. If true, we are all in danger now, Beverley, Taz, and I. I am not known for obtuseness or naïveté, but I suppose I’m capable of both, or guilty of both. I will try to give a close rendering of what she said but, having reread my words just now before hiding this pad, I still can’t credit most of it.
There were the disappearances, Beverley said. People just up and disappearing. Poof! She likes that word, “poof,” and has used it in conversation before. They had started a few years before her arrival, from the evidence she pieced together, but Beverley did not learn of the disappearances until much later, when her husband died. Tramps and hobos and druggies and gangland dealers and tree huggers and troublemakers—whatever that means—suddenly vanished from the streets of Carverville and the county, the crime rate falling by half overnight. Had they been rounded up and dumped in another county? No one knew. Worse, no one cared. Transients, vagrants, and other drifters by their nature disappear from towns and cities by the hundred every day, everywhere in the country, as they move from place to place. But some of the people snatched from Carverville left things and connections behind, including friends or traveling and drinking companions, and then some of the friends and companions disappeared after reporting the disappearances. Why the FBI wasn’t called in Beverley did not know, but she suspected it was Sheriff Harvey Murphy’s influence: He is the bureau’s liaison for the county.
So, the missing persons were drug dealers, addicts, and other felons? That’s what the grapevine said, plus maybe a couple gangland types from south of the border trying to stir things up and move the action north, and maybe a few of the violent pipeline protesters, too—they were all druggies and troublemakers anyway. The sooner such people decamped, the better.
“How did they purportedly disappear them?” I asked.
“Easy, they were dropped from boats or helicopters in old cages Wildlife and Fish used for trapping feral hogs and raccoons and whatnot. When they shut down operations in the county, there was a mess of traps left behind. That’s where we figured the ones on the property came from.”
“No,” I protested, “those cages were here, they were Mr. Egmont’s, I saw them nearly forty years ago.”
“You knew Egmont and you never told me?”
I nodded and explained about my family’s stay at the old Beachcomber Motel, and how I used to jog from home to here every morning and say “hi” to Egmont when I was in high school. “Besides,” I added, “the traps at Wildlife and Fish didn’t look like that, my dad worked for them. I saw a million of their traps. They weren’t welded together as shoddily as this one was.”
“That was decades ago,” she snapped. “Maybe they changed the traps, or the way they made the traps, had you thought of that?”
I scoffed and lowered my voice. It sounded preposterous, I started to say, but stopped myself. I thought of the cage and the skull and I shook my head in disbelief and confusion. “Who was in charge?”
“You don’t want to know,” she whispered.
“How did you find out?”
She hesitated. “I saw it happen through the knothole,” she said at last, jabbing her finger toward the fence. “I heard a kerfuffle in the public lot and came over fro
m the resort because I was turning on the alarm and about to leave—I was late and was going to have to drive in the dark all the way to the city for a meeting the next morning. I saw two men arguing with each other. Then some guys who must’ve been waiting in the dark nabbed them from behind, right there in the lot where you parked your RV. They were cuffed and dragged away and put in a car, except they didn’t go far, they circled right back and whoever it was driving the car had a gun on them when they stepped out. A long flatbed truck drove up, and the men with guns made the others crawl into a big cage on the back of it.” She paused, gulping air and grabbing my wrist for support. “There was a giant hog in that cage, and it tore into the men, and the screaming and shouting and crying was horrible, it was just too horrible to describe even now. The next thing I knew, a helicopter was overhead with searchlights on and people were shouting and the cage was in the air right above me, and blood was raining down onto the trees and dripping on my hair. I could hear screams and wild laughter and swearing and someone shouting, ‘Scream all you want, assholes, ain’t no one gonna hear you,’ and then the ’copter flew west out to sea.” Beverley paused, her body shaking with uncontrollable sobs. I waited, letting her regain composure. My hair was standing on end. I, too, could barely breathe.
“See, they thought I was gone,” she began again, “and there was no surveillance camera back then. I’d parked my old blue pickup behind the garage where no one could see it, not to hide it but because I was loading it up with my suitcases and laptop and I’d put up a ‘closed for the season’ sign but I was late, it took me way longer to close the place than I expected. I had to deal with Number Three’s estate and was going down to the city to see the lawyers, and I’d told Harvey and Tom and asked them to check on the property now and again . . .”