by David Downie
When she finished, almost expiring from breathlessness, I realized I’d been gritting my teeth, and my neck and jaw were sore. I’d broken a sweat and felt dizzy. It was all so outrageous, something from some South American dictatorship forty or fifty years ago, except it wasn’t. I’d seen the cage and the bones myself. I’d been cut into ribbon pasta by razor wire. “Who were they?” I blurted out. “Rival drug gangs?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “I couldn’t tell. It was dark. I didn’t hear everything they said. I couldn’t swear on the Bible that I saw two sheriff’s vehicles in front of the resort in the lot, or that the license plate of that flatbed truck and the registration number of that helicopter were the same as today.”
“They were?”
Beverley nodded. “These guys were pretty sloppy,” she said, “sloppy or very confident. They left the running lights on, thinking no one was around to see them.” I could hear her gasping for breath. It sounded like she might pass out. “Those helicopters aren’t operated by the good old Coast Guard we knew, James, you realize they privatized and outsource? If you look up those registration numbers the way I did, they’ll lead you to two local Carverville businesses. One of them is a garage, the other a helicopter services company. You know what they do?” I shook my head, fearful yet fascinated by Beverley’s story. “They take people like our sheriff hunting for feral hogs and deer. They are so damn lazy or obese they can’t even walk anymore when they hunt, they just lean out of the ’copter and shoot. Plus, they’re always transporting stuff and personnel out to the offshore installations. You want more? I have more.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s stay calm. Let’s assume I believe you and that what you’ve told me is accurate.” My mind raced. I couldn’t think straight. “How come there’s only one skull in the cage, a thighbone, and no hog bones—these pigs have huge heads and the hog head wouldn’t have fallen out if the human skull hasn’t?”
She stared at me and coughed with something like rage. “I never said it was that cage, who knows how many they dropped. I heard it was dozens. That cage wouldn’t have been big enough for two grown men anyhow. Maybe that’s why they sawed up the people in it, why else is that blade stuck in the wires? Anyway, there are only a few big bones and part of the skull left inside. The others must’ve fallen out, unless the body parts were never put in.”
I winced remembering the rusty handsaw blade. “Why would they bother?” I asked, trying to figure out the motives for the crime. “Why not just drop them from the helicopter into the ocean, and why put them in a cage with a live hog, that’s got to be hard to pull off.”
Beverley nodded gravely. “To scare people,” she said, “because they know word will get out that this is what happens when you come to this county. Why do those damn terrorists and mafiosi do what they do? To terrify people!”
I unclenched my jaw again. “You said you heard about dozens, from whom?”
“Yes, I heard, and if you think I’m going to tell you who told me you’re wrong, I never will, not even under torture.”
“Now wait a minute,” I protested, “we’re on the same side. I’m just trying to digest all this.”
She waited two long beats then laughed a sardonic laugh in a hoarse, guttural voice. “Speaking of digestion,” she continued in another tone, trying to sound normal, “I’m starving, we should have some dinner, that wouldn’t be suspicious, they’d expect that. Just don’t say anything in the house, in case they bugged it this afternoon.” She released her grip on my wrist. “No one else knows that I know, believe me, I’m a tomb. But I am not ready to wind up in a tomb yet, especially if it’s a cage, it’s just too awful to contemplate. Imagine being trapped inside with a live hog, it would tear you to shreds before the cage even sank.”
“Beverley,” I started to say, “you’re going too far—”
“Too far?” she cut me off. “I should have left when I could. I should have warned you off the minute I saw you, but how was I to know? And I thought, well, it’s over now, they got rid of the undesirables, they built their damn pipeline and dumped their waste in the woods, and now the political climate is changing, best to let it slide, best to forget it and bump along, and I always wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. But now, seeing that cage . . .”
On the way back up the hill to the Eden Resort’s kitchen, Beverley asked me if I’d ever heard of “midnight dumping,” and I said it sounded vaguely familiar, something to do with illegal dumping of polluted water from fracking, happened in Pennsylvania during the first natural gas boom. She said, “Yes, and it happens at three or four a.m., not at midnight, believe me, I know from being in the waste disposal business. It isn’t just toxic water from fracking that people dump. It’s also heavy metals and leftover PCBs and radioactive hospital waste, a hell of a lot of stuff from hospitals. And if you were looking for a quiet, remote, unpopulated place to do your dumping, Sherlock, where might you find that? I’ll tell you where. Drive inland toward Narrow Rocks, or drive up north twenty miles on the highway, and poke around the woods where they laid the pipeline. People up there watching the territory have itchy fingers, they’re trigger happy, as we used to say. There’s a special posse of vigilantes and if you mess with them you wind up looking like one of my colanders, full of holes, in a hog cage at the bottom of the ocean.” She waved her pudgy hand and gasped for breath.
“You should write detective novels,” I said. Neither of us laughed.
“I might just do that,” she retorted, finding her footing, “and put you in one, but I’m not sure about the happy ending.”
Gulping visibly because my throat was so dry, I wondered aloud how long it takes for a body to decompose entirely, leaving only bones behind. Remembering my long-ago experiences working with the district attorney, I wondered if any genetic material would be left on the bones, in the marrow, for instance, or around the teeth, and whether the forensic team would try to identify the person, possibly using the dental records as a means, or merely pretend to and purposely fail, if Beverley’s conspiracy theory was right.
She kept muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t want to know.”
When I floated the idea that maybe I should knock out the blocks and leave tonight, she grabbed my arm again and gave it a yank. “If you do that, they’ll come right after you and arrest you,” she said in an urgent, outraged whisper. “That’s the perfect pretext. They’ll say they wonder why you left all of a sudden, and wonder what you know and who spilled the beans and spooked you, don’t you see? We’ll all wind up in cages somewhere.”
I did see, and had no intention of leaving, but I had to float the idea to get her reaction. “All right,” I said, “I figured as much. Don’t fret, I won’t go.”
“Pretend like nothing has happened,” she wheezed, “keep taking your walks and working in the garden. For god’s sake, don’t go up north to the pipeline, maybe it’ll all blow over, and then you can go, and I might go, too, not with you, but I’m not sure I can stick it out to the bitter end after this.”
Beverley drank little with dinner and the conversation was stilted. She forgot to serve dessert. Everywhere she turned as she reheated the veal stew and then washed the dishes, she lifted objects, looking for microphones, bugs, and other listening devices. She pointed to the landline telephone and the old switchboard and made a face. She even checked behind the colanders and Baker Street sign and under the cookie jar. At one point she put the AM radio on and picked up the local news and whispered a few words to me, but I had trouble hearing what she said—something about a big plastic container and ziplock bags, if I needed them, to hide my things. Before I left the resort office, she handed these to me in silence.
Looking back on the events of this and the days that followed, it may have been rash of me to write this entry. On the other hand, if anyone is looking for my buried treasure, the game is up already. I will be more than tired by the time I dig the hole and bury these pads. With them I
will include my final report to the state ethics committee, annotated with sources, in cipher. Even here in these pages I cannot reveal the kind of cipher or the key. If my suspicions are correct, the committee has been infiltrated, so it is worse than pointless to contact them. The fate of whistleblowers and leakers today is well known. Hence this report will almost certainly never be sent, but I might, using an alias and a secure server, post it one day on the Internet, if I can find some way to get it and me safely out of the country first.
FOURTEEN
Wound up like a whirligig, James slept fitfully for a few hours then gave up at three in the morning when the raccoons began dancing on the RV’s roof. Showering military-style, he dressed in a set of clean clothes, brought some instant coffee to life, and hesitated in the moonlit, shadowy garden before following the orange extension cord uphill to Sea Breeze. The old clapboard cottage had not been used in a long time, he guessed, by the state of the weathered white paint and the cobwebs, and the sand and tree litter accumulated on the narrow porch. Trying the door and finding it locked, he shined his penlight through the window, tracing a path into the past, a Milky Way of dust motes raised by his furtive activity. Dazed by lack of sleep, he imagined Maggie moving toward the cottage, floating across the summer sky, the sunlight in her hair. A reprise from a rock classic started up and played relentlessly in his head. Sunlight in her hair . . .
Heading north on the beach, the earworm devouring his brain, James tried to drive it out by counting the plastic bottles, floats, broken surfboards, lengths of rope, and other detritus appearing in his flashlight beam. Would he find another animal trap? he wondered. How long would it be before the Tom Cat and Harvey Parvey showed up to question and possibly arrest him?
The wind and tide were as ferocious as they had been the day before. His path wandered from the tide line to the top of the beach, and a few times into the stable sand dunes clotted with saw grass and ice plants and choked by skeletal driftwood from super storms.
Having had the presence of mind to charge his cellphone during the night, he switched it on now and watched the screen glow as the antiquated, disposable “burner” came to life. He had only one bar of connectivity and, checking the time, realized it was far too early to send Taz a text message.
The beam fading, James’s penlight died as he approached Five Mile Creek a little before six A.M. Standing knee-deep halfway across, he stared up at the ghostly silhouette of the mansion, glad to see all was quiet and dark. An owl hooted, fluttering overhead. The creek rushed into the rock pool where he had skinny-dipped with her that summer, when the sunlight had shone in her hair, when blood had run in the streets of the city, and he had decided the best way to save the world would be the law, and not a career in journalism or the military.
Bustling along, the creek once beloved of the Yono spilled itself out of the rock pool and down between the sand banks to the beach, disappearing into the infinitely bigger, noisier, wilder waves. They beat with a rhythmic roar. James felt strangely elated. Squinting into the void stretching between him and Japan, far out to sea, he could see the glow of the white and red lights on the oil rigs, a string of luminous beads floating on the inky darkness, and, for each rig, the garish orange-yellow flares of burning gas. They transformed the scene into a watery infernal funeral procession. The distant thrumming rumble of a helicopter came and went with the wind, its running lights a migratory constellation. Were they looking for traps, he wondered, or for him?
Hitching up his pants as high as they would go, he forded the rest of Five Mile Creek, then walked swiftly north, the semaphore winking and foghorns moaning ahead. “To the lighthouse,” he said to himself. The words made him think of Clem Kelley, mayor of Carverville and editor of the newspaper, and of finding Maggie. Both could wait. He would have to lie low and leave when the opportunity arose, the sooner the better, then circle back when the coast was clear—“Meaning, in another thirty years,” he said to himself, scoffing aloud.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, three times blessed, the name made his heart race. The last time he had been inside the old mill compound was with Maggie those many years ago. Back then, when things ran 24/7, there had been no surveillance cameras, and no smartphones or Internet. Employees and security guards watched over the precious timber and equipment. Maggie had dared him, he had said no, it wasn’t right, and what if they got caught, and she had said, we won’t get caught, and if we do, we’ll make up something silly, we’ll say we saw a stray cat trapped inside, a pussy pussy pussy, and we wanted to save it. She had tugged and laughed in that wild woman-child way of hers, provocative, lusty, her tendril arms and long strawberry hair lashing as she ran toward the fence, tossing her head and beckoning. “Goody Two-shoes,” she had sung, her wet bathing suit clinging to her pale, shivering body, “you’re such a goody-goody-two-shoes, JP. Will you ever do anything fun?”
Before the scene had finished playing in his head, James found himself standing below the escarpment at the Headlands, staring up at the perimeter of the mill property. The razor wire glinted. There were no overhead lights anywhere until you reached the highway, a half mile inland and blanketed now by yellowish, sulfur-scented fog blowing in from the offshore flares. The place had been abandoned not years but decades ago, James knew. He put on his boots and laced them tight. Patrolling the edge of the fence atop the escarpment looking for an entry point, he tripped over the saw grass, then tripped again, and then a third time, his boots catching in the long cutting leaves of grass. The sky was already liquefying into melting layers of pink and orange topped by scoops of pale blue. The fog blowing in from the ocean amplified the light, blurred and muted it into a swirling kaleidoscope sunrise. Looking west to the ocean, he watched a solitary figure heading north in the distance by the tide line, a runner in jogging clothes with a hood drawn up. “Crowded place,” James said to himself, “especially at dawn.”
About to return to the beach, he caught sight of a sag in the chain-link fence under a faded signboard warning KEEP OUT: POSTED, NO TRESPASSING, VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Another sign wired to the fence shouted TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN. Shuffling and sliding toward it, he found the fence had been undermined, and wondered if humans or dogs or feral hogs and raccoons were responsible. The ground dimpled. Testing the terrain with his boot, he felt the loam cave in, forming a funnel spilling sand and dust and dead leaves down a narrow ravine hidden by the saw grass.
Why go in? The question seemed rhetorical, pointless. “Maggie isn’t here,” he said to himself. “No one is here but me. There’s nothing to see. There’s no reason to risk it. There might be cameras. There might be guard dogs. What if they catch me? With what’s going on it’s not just stupid, it’s idiotic even to contemplate.” Goody Two-shoes . . . the refrain rang in his head, Maggie’s haunting, taunting smile hovering in the fog.
Before he had finished thinking himself in a circle, the earworm had started up again, and the words “lashing” and “lighthouse” had joined in with “sunlight” and “hair” to form new lyrics. On remote control, James crouched down and began wriggling on his elbows and stomach up the narrow ravine through the saw grass and under the sagging fence. Panting and sweating, his head and shoulders sticking out like a gopher’s, he placed his hands flat on the weedy asphalt and pushed himself up and out of the hole on the other side, remembering the horse and the rings and the torturous floor exercises he’d done in high school, and the wriggling and rolling and wrestling in ROTC, and how Maggie had teased him about that, too, saying he would wind up a muscle head like Harvey Murphy, good for curls and push-ups and bullying but nothing else.
Dusting himself off, then moving in a crouch, he followed what looked like a path through the weeds toward a set of ramshackle Quonset huts, the cubist jumble of half-ruined mill buildings in the glowing east, swathed in morning mist.
“Maggie,” he whispered, “Maggie?”
Had he taken her, or had she given herself, or had she taken h
im, here, he struggled to remember, here behind the last hut, in the sheltered, hidden secret spot cut off from the beach by the top of a tall, tufted sand dune? Yes, he’d said, yes. Lifting her gently he had curled her, his hands cupped under her buttocks, until her sweet, salty lips had met his. Heels locked in the crooks behind his knees, her breasts crushed against his chest, her nipples erect, she had found him, had pulled the crotch of her swimsuit to one side and taken him in, raising and lowering her lithe young, wet salty body slowly, rhythmically, squeezing and releasing, her breath catching, her eyes half closed, her whispered words a yes, yes, yes merging with the moaning of the foghorn.
Rustling saw grass and a gust of wind brought James back to the present. He opened his eyes now to find himself standing behind the Quonset hut, lost in thick fog, listening to the foghorn, waiting for Maggie’s words. Peering up at the rusted, helter-skelter light poles and dangling insulated wires, he tried to work out whether the yard was still electrified and if it was monitored by security cameras. Why would they bother? If his theory was correct, it might backfire on them one day.
Crouching again, he moved swiftly along the edge of the yard where the biggest raw logs had always been stacked, until he came to a dilapidated hangar, like the one at Alioto’s Hardware. Strewn around were broken wooden crates and rusted machinery untouched for years. “Why am I here?” he asked himself, his mind suddenly blank, the vision of Maggie coming back to him. “What am I looking for?” Then he knew, and he crouched and moved forward to another hangar hovering in the mist a hundred yards away.
This one had been used more recently, he guessed. There were smudged tire marks and half-filled ruts and flattened weeds outside, and black sticky pools of spilled engine oil from months or years ago. Inside, James found the burned-down nubs of welding rods, lengths of baling wire, and hunks of rotten leather belts, the castoffs of warehousing activity, he guessed, or the making and binding of something metallic, a cage or trap for instance. He picked up a nub and slipped it into his pocket. In one corner stood coils of razor wire, the same weft of wire that topped the fence. Was this where they stored it? They would need plenty to maintain miles of fence around the promontory.