by Tom Bouman
A few sturdy men in work gloves volunteered to remove the gilt from its spit. One of them was Nate Hancock, a high-school-educated military veteran like myself who was a new part-owner of a couple of Willard’s gas stations in the area. We’d met because some of the businesses lately robbed were his, Willard’s, or both. After thunking the pig down on the carving table, he pulled me aside.
“Women like her don’t come along every day. I don’t know how you pulled it off. Well done, brother.”
“Thanks,” I said, put out, looking for escape.
“I hate to talk shop,” he said. “Any news?”
“I’ve had today to deal with,” I said.
“No doubt. No doubt.” He stood there, waiting for me to say more. “How about Willard, how’s that old savings and loan?”
“Willard’s fine, far as I know.” In fact, it was a poorly kept family secret that he was fighting lymphoma. Willard was a good-natured operator who drew a lot of people into his orbit. It wasn’t easy to see him closed off and weary as he’d been. I searched Hancock’s face for signs that he knew, and couldn’t tell. “Ask him yourself,” I said.
We ate. We drank some beer. I pulled out my fiddle. My old-time group was called the Country Slippers, after the tall rubber boots you wore November through April to step outside for a quick chore, or simply to get through the mud to your car. Ed Brennan on guitar, Liz on clawhammer banjo, and we’d added a percussionist named Ralph who mostly played a box called the cajón. We played a short set of tunes, ending with “Going to the Wedding to Get Some Cake.”
Father appeared, wearing his good denim shirt, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Haw,” he said. “You got good.” This was the man who’d ground me down since I first could talk and understand. I told myself not no more, but something in me still wanted to please him. I was taken aback by how he had changed from a tall narrow man into a bent, slower one. Ma, her long white hair in a bun, clasped her hands and said nothing. She was all the time saying nothing but meaning things. When you don’t see your folks in years, of course they’ll be older.
At my first wedding, there was no pleasing Father and Ma. Polly and I married in Wyoming with guitars and poetry readings. Sneaking looks at my folks, stiff and outraged in folding chairs out in the sagebrush while they realized Jesus had not been invited, had given me something of a thrill. I was free, vengeance was mine. At the party they drank nothing and said less. The folks had never said much about Polly’s death, either. They were in North Carolina with my sister Mag’s family by then.
This time, with Julie, there had been some religion. Father’s Father had not only given up the real spelling of the Farrell name—Fearghail—but the Catholic faith traditional to our family back in Ireland. He turned instead to Northern Bible Presbyterianism, which as far as I can tell was a vestige of plain Bible Presbyterianism, yet again a version of a version, all them Presbyterianisms particular in their beliefs. Northern Bible folks had dug their heels into a belief that Jesus would return very soon, very possibly before the Millennium of Righteousness. Too late now, assuming that’s where we are. Anyway, we grew up being told He would show up any day, and that we could encourage Him with behavior.
The sky got dark and the night got late. I had conversations I can’t remember now with relatives I never knew I had. Guests began to leave. I’d forgotten about Uncle Derek until I heard his truck cross the yard.
Julie and I rode to a hotel in a town car. The next morning we took airplanes to Key West, where we lay on the beach by day and ate conch fritters and whole snapper at night. During that week away, autumn had settled over Wild Thyme, and Crabapple had eaten a man.
When we arrived back home from the airport, I’d expected everyone to be gone. But soon as we bumped up the driveway to my little farmhouse, I saw a blue and orange tent in my yard. Whoever pitched it had put it in the western shade of the big maple where the sun wouldn’t blaze down first thing in the morning. There was a familiar minivan with North Carolina plates.
“What the …” I said. I stepped out, circled the tent, zipped it open, and there was my nephew Ryan, propped up on an elbow, reading a comic book. “What’re you … what are you doing out here, Ry-guy?”
“I volunteered,” he said, and shrugged, embarrassed.
I stood up, and on my porch had gathered Ma, Father, and sister Mag, with Carter in her arms. Mag handed the baby over to Ma, walked out to the yard, and took me by the elbow. We headed out toward the field. “Dennis is gone back to North Carolina with Brit. Ryan, take Aunt Julie’s bags in,” she called over her shoulder. She turned back to me. “We’d like to stay with you awhile.”
AT THE scene, Terry Ceallaigh was still idling in his pickup on the side of the road. I got in the passenger side so we could talk.
“Well, that’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Sorry you had to be the one to find him.”
“What can you tell me?” he said.
“It’s a head-scratcher,” I said, hearing the words out loud and wincing. “I can’t tell you anything, except it looks like an animal was involved. I assume we’re okay to use your land if we go looking? Maybe camp out tonight?”
“Please,” he said. “Hunt, whatever. Listen … you don’t think … Goldwing?”
“No,” I said. “No, it looks like a bear. You don’t have any reason to think …”
“She’s a lady, I’m telling you. She wouldn’t. If it’s a bear, please hunt, camp, whatever. I’ve got kids. I want it gone.”
“So,” I said, “if I have it straight, you were out early morning looking for Mark’s dog, and you came upon the scene. Goldwing with you?”
“No. If it’s Goldie keeping Puffball away, I don’t want to scare her off.”
“What’s really puzzling me,” I said, “is where did the guy come from? I know he was missing a head, but he look like anybody you know?”
“No,” said Terry. “You got me.”
“You have people over to your place lately?”
“Not last night, but the night before. We had friends out, had the bikes out, grilling, drinking beers. Lately, since our thing with the Moores, we tend to shut it down by nine, ten. We wouldn’t want you bothered.”
“So unlikely you’d have heard anything down by the Freefall while your friends were out.”
“Unlikely, yes. We tend to make noise.”
“So your guests all left around nine, ten, then you, what? Went to bed?”
Terry gave me a suspicious look, but nodded as if he understood. “No, Carrianne and the kids did. I followed some friends out. To the tavern, then to the Blind Tiger up in Endicott. Must’ve got home around one? Two?”
“You got names? I’ll make some calls, check in, make sure everyone’s accounted for.”
“I’ll get you a list,” Terry said, annoyed. I got out of the truck and he drove off.
While the bear biologist gathered her gear, I went to see Mark Moore and his wife, Frieda, on whose land the victim was actually found.
The Moores lived on the ridgetop in a white farmhouse with the trim painted black. They had a one-story shed with a rusted metal roof. It leaned, threatening to tumble down the slope. Far as I could tell, it was the only remaining outbuilding from the original dairy farm that the Moores had bought from the Ceallaigh family in the eighties. In a nearby maple was a boxy treehouse made of pressure-treated lumber and particleboard, with no way up to it that I could see. And to my amazement, a huge old elm tree in the yard that was still healthy, just starting to shed its leaves for the season. As I approached the front porch, I stopped to read the plaque that said it was a heritage tree, an Ulmus americana. The lawn was neatly mowed and early autumn had certainly arrived up there, on the hilltop where the maple canopy was edged in scarlet. The next lot over, through a thin barrier of woods, I could hear the Ceallaigh kids’ high-pitched voices in the yard, oblivious. Mark was already standing out on the lawn where it began to slope down to the Freefall, hands on his hips.
The techs worked quietly but their voices bounced around the ravine, their words lost.
Mark was about my dad’s age, sixty-odd, and had lived in Wild Thyme for about thirty years, but I doubted they knew each other. I hadn’t known Mark until I was grown, back home from my travels, and had begun dealing with him in my job. He was a handsome, sporty man who was often seen riding his bicycle in colorful tights. He had been an investment banker in New York City in the eighties, but had changed his mind and moved to the area for a job teaching economics at SUNY Binghamton, bringing with him, I’d say, a nothing-is-quite-good-enough vibe from the big city. His wife Frieda was a sweet lady with a loud laugh who had volunteered on the rescue squad in years past, and donated a lot of money now. As well-to-do Wild Thymers, they were friends with Miss Julie’s parents, and had been guests at our wedding.
Mark met me with a tight smile and led me into a cluttered kitchen with a huge old farm table in the middle of it. He offered me coffee, and when I said yes, he began rattling with a contraption on the counter. From one of the living rooms Frieda came in, her finger keeping place in the pages of a book. “Such a sweet wedding,” she said, as if we’d been talking all the while since and never stopped.
“Thanks.”
“Honeymoon?”
“The Keys.”
“Do any marlin fishing down there?” said Mark, still rattling.
“No, lazing, mostly. Swimming. We rented a boat some days.”
Frieda touched my forearm and asked me what restaurants we went to. I didn’t remember names. With a spurt of steam, the espresso machine trickled coffee into a cup. Mark added hot water from a kettle and handed the cup to me. They waited.
“Well,” said I, “I don’t know what to tell you. You got a man down there dead.”
They sat there stunned for a minute, then Frieda said, “What kind of man?”
“What kind?”
“I mean, what happened to him, did he drown?”
“No.”
“What, then?” she said.
“We’re trying to figure that out.”
“He’s … You don’t know?” said Frieda.
“I can’t really talk about it. Right now I’m trying to figure out how this guy ended up where he did. You’ve got the trespassing signs, and he doesn’t quite look the type to go stumbling on someone else’s property.”
“No,” said Mark. “And people around here, they get it now. Signs weren’t doing the trick, so we had to press charges. People got fines, I think one kid even got sent to juvenile hall, which we’d never have wanted … it didn’t win us friends. Our kids caught hell for it.”
“We had to send them to the Catholic school in Binghamton,” put in Frieda.
“We had our reasons, though,” said Mark.
“It’s the liability,” said Frieda.
“Yes,” I said. “Liability is everywhere.”
“ ‘The Freefall,’ ” said Mark, quoting with fingers. “Someday some kid was going to break their neck jumping. Still may happen. And we’d have felt responsible. It took some effort, getting them to understand we can’t have them down there. They do, now. Which is why this whole thing is … what’s it got to do with us?”
“Usually, do you hear when someone is down there?”
“We do. We were here all last night, didn’t notice a thing,” said Mark.
“And the weekend?”
“We were in New York, visiting my son and his girlfriend.”
“Ah. What do they do down there?”
“What would you say Miller does, honey?” said Mark.
“He’s a brand consultant, don’t be snotty.”
“Anyway, that’s where we were. So imagine, you know, we get back and there’s the first sign we had of Puffy in over two weeks. You remember, she was gone.”
“Oh, but Mark,” said Frieda, suddenly horrified.
“Jesus,” said Mark, catching on. “Jesus.”
“We had some blood on the door,” Frieda said. “On the knob. It was the same place Puffy always scratched to get in.”
“Show me,” I said. “The front door, was it?”
“Well, we cleaned it,” Frieda said. “We scrubbed it, it’s gone.”
All the same, I walked out to the porch and looked around with new eyes. Their driveway made one switchback down the hill and passed through a narrow strip of trees to the road. Somewhere in their tree line, a logging road led to the creek.
“When you’re gone for the weekend, you lock the door?”
“Yes,” said Mark.
“And you leave a light on or two?”
“Yes, on a timer.”
I turned to the door itself. The white paint had been stripped to wood by the dog scratching to get in. The knob was clean. Still, if I put my eyes right to the surface of the wood around it, I thought I could see pink. “Any blood around here, on the floor?”
“A bit,” Frieda said. “Gone now. We thought it was our girl. This is so much worse.”
“We don’t know anything,” I said. “But don’t touch the door, don’t use the porch until we get back here and make sure. You got a side door, back door?” In my mind, here was the guy we’d found, a ghost of him, going for the closest light he could see from the road. Finding nobody home, moving on. On foot, by car, the shape he had been in was all unclear. “So as far as you know, here’s Puffy come home.”
“We thought she was dead, by this point,” Mark said. “But yeah, what else could it have been? So we called over to the Ceallaighs’, tried to mend some fences, see if they’d seen anything. Terry said he’d look.”
“Okay. Listen, you have any notion, however small or …”
“Of course,” said Frieda. “If we think of anything, we’ll call.”
“One thing I’ve got to do is figure out who even knew about the Freefall anymore,” I said.
“It’s well known,” said Mark.
“Do you recall, when you were running trespassers off, who they were? Any of them?”
“You could look that up.”
“But do you remember? Would your boys?”
“We can ask,” Mark said. “It was a long time ago.”
“We’ll have to be around the place until we get this sorted out,” I said. “You’ll hear us down in the ravine, mostly.”
I stopped at the site and told the techs to work the Moores’ door and porch, take the knob itself if they had to, take the whole door.
The Ceallaighs owned about fifteen acres to the Moores’ hundred fifty. Originally, Mark and Frieda had bought their place from Terry Ceallaigh’s grandma, and then Terry had bought this piece back from the Moores. It would have been an undertaking to clear their hilltop and tame it. In the Ceallaighs’ yard stood a Japanese maple sapling, lonely and small. A dirt track wound around their cleared land, past boulders, down to the edge of the ravine, bouncing over short steep knaps. Their house was boxy and green, not too big. There was an octagonal piece built off of the main structure, all windows, where the kids kept their inside toys. Behind the house stood a corrugated metal garage, also green. Beside that, a chicken coop with a fenced-in patch of dirt. The kids had gone running at my approach. As I got out of the car, I could hear them in the woods, whispering and crackling leaves underfoot. Their dog Goldie, an amiable pit bull the size of a hippopotamus, came bounding over to me.
“Kids, you got to head in now,” I said. “Nobody’s in trouble. I’m just visiting.”
Silence. Terry’s wife Carrianne stepped out of the front door, took hold of the dog’s collar, and called to the kids again. She was slim, pretty, broad-shouldered. Two boys and a girl shot out of the woods and back behind the house, ducking as if under fire.
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “Come on, he’s inside.” Carrianne led me to the kitchen, where Terry sat at the table, staring, hands on his knees.
He managed a smile. “You all taking care of it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t give her th
e details,” he said, tilting his head toward Carrianne, who stood against a counter with her arms folded. “She knows enough.”
So, leaving out the missing head and the torn-open belly, I went through the same questions that I had with the Moores. Pretty much. They had been around all weekend. I put some of the same questions to Carrianne as I had to Terry, and the story didn’t change in any important way.
“Like I said, we were doing what we usually do,” Terry put in. “Riding, grilling, drinking beers. Kids making a mess, sleeping late. We had everyone clear out by ten on Saturday night. It’s better we don’t start friction,” he said.
“But the Moores weren’t home this weekend, so …”
“No? I heard a car go up the driveway. I saw a car. I think,” Terry said.
“What time?”
“During the day? Midday? Maybe again at night, I can’t be sure.”
Carrianne stood up and left. She called from another room, “Let me know when he’s gone.”
Outside, I whispered to Terry, “I do something wrong?”
Terry looked at the ground, then into the distance. “Carrie is close with Shelly Bray. Our kids and them are school friends. We used to take ours over there for horseback riding, they’d come here to use the track and whatnot. Still do, not as much, and not with Shelly, of course.”
“How is she doing?”
“Oh. You know.”
IT WAS A cold night camping, with condensation rolling down the inside of my tent. Dr. Weaver and I had no fire. We didn’t talk. We weren’t even near each other. The sound of the creek flattened the sound of the forest. Still, I heard in the water, or maybe in the woods, the stuttering rhythm of footfalls, branches snapping, the spiraling whines of coyotes gathering, the secret freedom of the animal world.
Mary had gone ahead and set her tent up on the same rock where we’d found the body, and left mesh open on all sides around her. She’d hung her motion camera from a nearby tree, up, with a view of the entire creek bend. I’d brought her one of my walkie-talkies, told her to press the button to make it chirp once, lightly, and I’d hear. Me, I’d perched on the other side of the ravine, on a nice piece of earth covered in red pine needles, with a view down to where a bear might come up from the swamp below. I was without bug spray, not wanting to put the animal off with a strange odor if he meant to visit. I didn’t plan to sleep. But even I am not immune to the music of a running creek, and as the temperature dropped and sent the last of the mosquitoes back to wherever they go, I sank down into the vinyl nest of my sleeping bag and my eyes closed.