Hours later, when he opened his eyes to the morning sun, he saw the opossum. It was perched six feet away on a fallen tree trunk, staring down at him. It studied him the way a sobered woman studies a stranger in her bed the next morning, trying to remember who he was. In the slanting glare, the creature’s nostrils flared in and out. It reminded him of a sophomore he dated in Chapel Hill undergraduate school, whose rabbit nostrils always quivered. It made her appear suspicious of everything, even the choice of dinner vegetables in the cafeteria. At the other end of the opossum was that odd-looking tail, just as naked and pink as a human umbilical cord.
Teagarden’s head gradually cleared while regarding the strange animal. He understood that he was back, that it was Sunday morning, and that his personality had re-assimilated from its fugue state.
He stood, stretched, rubbed his eyes, and scratched his mosquito bites. He couldn’t remember much of the night, but he recollected everything about the previous day, right up to the moment the man’s voice came through the phone. Then he pictured Billy Carney’s dead body and he began to cry.
Who would want to harm that boy? And who would want a college mathematics professor dead so badly they’d kill an eleven-year-old boy just to get to him? It makes no sense that an embittered former student would be that demented with anger, that consumed with vengeance.
The opossum remained on the log, staring at the human intruder of his home. Teagarden turned his cellphone on. It quickly vibrated with an incoming call, yet the stubborn animal did not move. He pushed the connect button, but did not speak.
“Hello? Hello?” the voice said. “That you, Mr. Teagarden?”
Teagarden knew it was not the same voice that accused him of murdering Billy Carney. He would never forget the sound of that particular voice. Still, he did not speak.
“Okay, this is Sheriff Curt Klumm,” the voice continued. “Listen, we’ve got a real mess out here. Now, you need to come on in Mr. Teagarden. There’s no point in trying to get away after all this. As a college professor down there in the big city, you’re smart enough to know that. Anybody as smart as you knows better than to play the odds on this thing.”
The opossum shifted slightly. Its pink rat-like tail wrapped around its body in the way of a house cat when it settles down for prolonged surveillance. Teagarden remained silent. He cradled the phone in his neck for a two-handed scratch of his worst mosquito bites, including three large bumps on his neck.
“Talk to me, Mr. Teagarden. I’m ready to help you on this. But you do have to come in so we can figure this thing out. We’ve got a bad mess over here at your house.”
“Are the men in the truck with you?” Teagarden said, breaking his silence.
“Truck?” Klumm asked. He paused to think. “Oh yeah, now look, Mr. Teagarden, I’ve heard your nine-one-one call. I understand you’re not feeling too good. You need help, and we’re going to get it for you. I promise you that.”
“So the drone men are not with you?”
“Mr. Teagarden, I’m at my office up the road from your house in Bethel. I’ve got a couple of state troopers with me and my deputy. And when you come in, we’ll take you down to the courthouse in Monticello. I’ll have a doctor there waiting to help you. So you just tell me where you are, and I’ll come on over.”
The opossum’s black eyes held steady. Teagarden looked beyond the creature, to the woods.
“I don’t know where I am.”
“I understand,” Sheriff Klumm said. “Now that’s not at all surprising. You just tell me what you see. Give me a street sign, a number, or a landmark. Whatever you’ve got, and we’ll work with it.”
“Opossum.”
“How’s that?”
“There’s an opossum. That’s what I’m looking at. A Virginia opossum. It’s odd looking. Did you ever stop to think how strange looking the opossum really is? It’s like a cross between a house cat and a rat.”
He could hear Klumm muffling the phone in his hand to speak to someone in the room. He couldn’t hear every word, but he did hear “…worse than…fuckin’ brain snap…p-h-d….helicopter drones…goddamn opossum…” He made a throat-clearing noise as he put the phone back to his ear.
“All right now, Mr. Teagarden. I just need to ask you to look around and give me a little more than that. Now, I know you can do it.”
Suddenly, the opossum twitched defensively for no apparent reason. An instant later, it turned and scurried down the fallen tree trunk where it jumped into thick undergrowth and disappeared. Teagarden strained to see what had spooked the animal, but there was nothing. He listened. There were no crunching noises in the woods, nothing to indicate the approach of another animal, or of men.
“Hello?” Klumm’s voice called out.
A moment later, Teagarden heard what panicked the opossum, though not from any direction in the woods. It was coming from the sky. There were two of them, and this time, they were not drones. They were helicopters. Real helicopters. They were flying low, just above the treetops. Teagarden put the phone back to his ear.
“Hey, Klumm.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Teagarden?”
“It’s a setup. You hear me, Klumm? They killed Billy and they’re trying to kill me, too. Some man named Harry.”
“Now, Mr. Teagarden, I know you’re not feeling very—”
But Teagarden did not wait to hear the Sheriff’s response. He disconnected the call and turned off his phone. Afterward, he dropped back into the V-shaped alcove formed by bluestone slate and watched as the helicopters, having lost his cell signal, wandered out of sight.
Chapter Twelve
It made sense to wait, but not long.
He guessed he was on the phone with Sheriff Klumm long enough for them to ping only his general location. It meant that men would be canvasing the woods on foot, possibly with dogs.
After a few minutes, Teagarden left his cozy alcove, took a reading on the sun as best he could, and began hiking north. It was the direction he felt confident would eventually lead to Route 17, the main state highway that cut through the lower Catskill Mountains. If he got lucky, maybe he could hitch a ride out of the county.
The first of two favorable encounters along the way was a flowing stream filled with clean, ice-cold mountain water where he washed and drank. The second was a tractor path that led to a decaying apple orchard. Judging from the amount of deer and bear scat, and the visibly poor health of the trees, the orchard was long untended.
“Okay, let’s go pick breakfast,” he said, talking to himself for the comfort of hearing a friendly voice.
His casual brown shoes looked more like the dirty leather of a hobo, still he took care not to soil them further with animal dung. Finding one tree brimming with life, he pulled at the branches.
“You’re a happy survivor of a dead New York State industry.” He plucked two red apples that looked like passable McIntosh.
While eating the fruit, he returned to the wooded tractor path. It was overgrown, brimming with prickly bushes, but the bluestone had been bulldozed, which made for easier hiking. When the wooded path finally emerged at a road, the result was not a four-lane highway as hoped, but a short dirt road that dead-ended in one direction and T-boned at a narrow paved road about two hundred yards in the other direction.
He stepped from the tractor path, onto the dirt road. It was flanked on both sides by ramshackle huts hiding behind bushy undergrowth and dilapidated fencing. There were two signs nailed to the old fence. The first one read: Zabłudów Boulevard.
Teagarden took it to be someone’s idea of a joke, probably a sentiment pertaining to the old country, either Poland or Russia, maybe Ukraine. A few feet beyond there was a second sign in Hebrew and English: קיץ שְׁבָט - Keep Out.
A third sign farther up was nailed to an arching birch tree: Camp Summer Shevat - Parking to Right.
That explained it. The wooden sheds were a summer getaway colony where Hasidic Jews v
acationed. The Catskills were once known as the Borscht Belt, where the famous Jewish resorts were located. They’re all gone now. Even that movie Dirty Dancing, about kids at a Sullivan County resort, had to be filmed in North Carolina. Many say the resorts were killed by television and affordable airfare to Miami and Vegas. But none of that stopped the ultra-Orthodox. They were coming to these small, privately owned religious camps in Sullivan County before anyone ever heard of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield. And they’re still escaping to their homestead hideaways to beat the summer heat of Brooklyn. He’d never seen or heard of this particular camp, but that was no surprise. Neither had he ever been down this dead-end road, wherever it was.
He walked to the intersection at the opposite end, eyeing the late morning sky for more helicopters and the ramshackle bungalows for movement. There was nothing. Not a soul in sight. Except for noisy crows in the tree limbs, there wasn’t a sound. The small parking area at one end of the bungalows held only a single vehicle, a rusting Toyota Sienna van with two flat tires.
“No. It can’t be.” He stood in the lonely intersection shaded by arching greenery. “It’s not possible,” he shouted.
What alarmed him loomed a half-mile in the distance. It was a giant parking lot. What’s more, he knew it was just one of many giant parking lots linked by a circular road that looped farther in the distance. It meant he was only about a mile from the Bethel Woods Arts Center, where the amphitheater and museum now stood on the grounds of the old Woodstock Music Festival where he was born while Country Joe was on stage in 1969. And that meant he was only a half-mile from his own split-level A-frame house.
“Very odd,” he said aloud.
Teagarden could practically see the hillside where he was prematurely born in a makeshift tent to a mother laying on her back in the muddy earth as if she were a member of an enormous tribe of hunter-gatherers. He was never certain of the precise spot. His mom could say only that it was halfway up the hill and to the right of the stage.
“But how?!”
There was only one explanation. It was the simplest, yet most complicated shape in all geometry—the circle. While semi-conscious the night before, he must have wandered south, not north. He sensed that he’d walked several hours in the dark. But however long or far, he’d basically retraced that same distance since sunrise.
Circles will do that. As simple as they are, they’re the stuff of legendary mystery. The great mathematician Archimedes died while trying to understand them. When the Romans came to kill him, he pointed to his chalk etchings and told them, “Do not disturb my circles.” A soldier accommodated the demand by running him through the gut with a sword.
“My own nighttime circle around my birthplace is going to be the end of me too, if I don’t get off this road,” he mumbled.
He rounded the fence and ducked into the bushes fronting the nearest bungalow. Being that close to his own house meant Sheriff Klumm and his men were nearby and possibly patrolling every wooded pathway. It likely also meant that Harry was nearby, doing the same.
Moments later, when two vehicles careened down the paved country road, he raced to the nearest bungalow, found the rickety main door unlocked, hurried inside and closed it behind him. Crouching behind a window, he watched with grim disappointment as neither vehicle drove on toward the huge museum parking lot. They both turned onto tiny Zabłudów Boulevard to enter the ramshackle compound of Camp Summer Shevat.
Chapter Thirteen
His luck, if it could be called luck, was holding out.
He watched from the window just long enough to see that it was not Sheriff Klumm with his state troopers who wanted to arrest him for the murder of eleven-year-old Billy Carney. Nor was it Harry in his truck with his drones and sniper rifle who wanted to kill him for reasons unknown and who did kill Billy Carney.
Oh Lord, why that sweet boy and not me?
Instead, the arrivals were residents of the camp, the actual owners of the bungalows. Between the two vans, there were seven or eight people, including at least one child, all dressed in traditional heavy black clothing of Hasidic Judaism. The men were carrying heavily laden bags from a shopping outing at Walmart and Home Depot.
Teagarden considered the risk. He guessed they were two, maybe three families. With twelve huts, six on each side of overgrown Zabłudów Boulevard, the odds were with him. There were three chances in twelve, or basically one in four that someone would enter the bungalow he’d chosen as a hideaway. That wasn’t bad. Just the same, he tip-toed to the small second room to see if there was a backdoor.
There was not.
Now what? If they entered this particular bungalow he had only one choice: Sorry, I guess I walked in the wrong cabin. No worries. I’ll be on my way now. Mazel tov. Have a good day.
That wouldn’t work very well. Neither would asking for their help if Sheriff Klumm had publicly made him a wanted fugitive.
He lingered in the doorway of the back room, listening anxiously as the arrivals moved on to other bungalows. There was little talk, except one man who spoke irritably in Yiddish to someone who did not respond. As the families separated, there were subdued farewells, mostly among the women.
Okay, that too is good. They’re not coming in here.
He turned again to the back room. There may not be a rear exit, but there was something else, something potentially helpful. It was an old Compaq computer sitting on the floor under a rickety corner table. He sat down and booted up the box and the ancient picture tube monitor.
He needed to risk logging on. While looking at the opossum and regretting his call to Billy Carney, he figured that whoever was trying to kill him with drones would try to communicate with him online. It meant they’d be monitoring his online address, hoping to pinpoint his whereabouts. Anyone with the sophistication to use deadly remote controlled drones smaller than a grapefruit and track his cell signal, must also be able to track his web usage. They’d probably try to stretch the communication by baiting him in some way.
The old desktop was not password protected.
Yet another break.
First he cruised news sites. There was nothing about him on the local or national news sites.
Nothing—yet.
That would change before the day was over. He knew because of what he found on the website of the local newspaper. It was little more than a blurb:
The Bethel Bugle has learned that Sheriff Curt O. Klumm is investigating the sudden death of 11-year-old William Carney, son of Terrence and Julia Carney, who work at Sullivan General Hospital in Monticello. No other details are known.
That said it all. He’d soon be a fugitive known to every law enforcement officer in the state.
Billy was a good kid. He wanted to cry again, but didn’t. He needed to learn as much as he could, as fast as he could. It was now apparent that he was not up against a pissed-off former Ph.D. candidate who couldn’t make the grade. Angry ex-students wouldn’t feel obligated to create a complicated cover such as “Harry’s Heating.”
Okay, I’ve established who they aren’t. That leaves me no idea who they actually are.
He stared at the dusty gray screen. It was about the size of the old black-and-white picture tube television his grandparents had through the ’70s.
Then he did it.
He logged in to his e-mail. He had no idea if just logging on was enough to initiate a GPS trace, but assumed it was, so he resolved to make it quick, and depart.
There were six e-mails in his inbox.
Three of them were bill notices: the power company, the phone company, and the bridge and tunnel agency that automatically charged his credit card on file to upgrade his toll pass.
There was one e-mail from his daughter in Key West, with a time/date posting just an hour old. The subject line read: Saying Hello. That was good. She normally had Sundays off from the naval air station. It meant that she and his granddaughter were home and that both were fine.
The other message was from Bruce Kasarian, the colleague from Columbia who’d introduced him to Cynthia, thinking they’d be a good match.
He was right. They were a good match. He’d had dinner with Kasarian the night after last week’s date. Kasarian wouldn’t let it alone, he wanted to know if his matchmaking hunches were on target.
“Cynthia’s nice, isn’t she?” Kasarian kept asking. “Did you like her? Did you take her back to your apartment? Did you have sex?”
Oh brother, it was like being a frat boy all over again. Yes, Bruce, the answers are: yes, yes, no, and, yes. The one “no” answer was only because they hadn’t gone to his uptown co-op apartment near the university. He’d spent no time there since Kendra’s death. Besides, it was sublet to a student couple. Instead, he and Cynthia went to The Argonaut Hotel in Times Square where he stayed during the math conference.
He guessed what the e-mail messages were about. Cynthia wanted to say “hi” and thank him for an enjoyable evening last week.
Hint, hint.
Bruce Kasarian wanted to say “hi,” and pass on some strictly confidential information that Cynthia was just as fond of him as he was of her.
Sorry, Bruce. Believe me, I’d like to see her again, but I’ve got more on my mind right now than praising your matchmaking skills.
Flight of the Fox Page 4