by Tom Bouman
“What?”
“You don’t get over to Josh Bray’s place much anymore, do you. She’s hanging from a tree out there.”
“When?”
“Just yesterday.”
“I’ll look into it,” I said. Hearing all this gave me a queasy feeling. I hadn’t seen Bray since my wedding, and that was how I liked it. But I couldn’t ignore this. He was not one to communicate directly, and the sow may well have been a message.
“I don’t care what you do,” said Danny. “You got what you need?”
“You spend much time at Red Pine Road as a kid? The Freefall, the ravine there?”
Danny snorted. “Seen you on the news and I thought, he’ll be by to talk about this murder. Officer, you stopped splitting. And no, we ain’t been there lately.”
“Danny, a bear—”
“Come on, now.”
“I’m just asking did you go as a kid.”
“We had other places.”
“There were kids that may have got placed for trespassing up to the Moores’.”
“To Tiernan, for trespassing?”
“I believe so, can’t find the records now, can’t find anything.”
“That rings a bell, but I don’t know. You could ask my brother’s so-called lawyer at the time. Noonan couldn’t keep a fuckin newborn baby out of Tiernan’s Gap.”
By this time Mike and Roberta, known as Bobbie, had appeared on their front porch to lean on the railing and watch me work. Mike was short and squat, with hair growing longer in the back, Bobbie in a sweatshirt that read I JUST WANT TO DRINK WINE AND PET MY DOG. She waved, and I handed Danny the maul and walked over.
“How’s your wife?” Bobbie asked. “She needs anything, you call.”
“Thanks, we got it covered.” We hadn’t made news of Miss Julie’s pregnancy ourselves; I blamed Ma.
“We’re so happy for you. I don’t have any grandkids!”
“How’s things up here?”
“State your business,” said Mike.
“I had some questions for Alan, or maybe someone else can tell me. About Tiernan’s Gap.”
At that, Bobbie’s face fell and she went inside.
“What do you want to upset her for?” said Mike.
“Sorry.”
“Anything I had to say about that, I said to whoever would listen at the time. You can ask Dally, or the fuckin lawyer, or the judge. Christ, not even the Stokes brothers wanted Alan to go down. But I said it already. Back then.”
“All right.”
“Good,” Mike said. “Be safe. We see any bears, we’ll call your daddy.”
“Hey, now,” I said. “If I’d had my rifle …”
“Let the old man have a win. Shit, I don’t know what I’d have done. You pulled your knife. That’s all anyone can do. What I don’t get is, why’d you lay your rifle down in the first place?”
“To get the dog out of the trap.”
“You had no idea a bear was on your ass?”
I CALLED UP Shaun Loughlin and asked him, “What’s the highest fine for bagging a bear out of season?”
“Three large,” Shaun said. “Where we going with this?”
Joshua Bray had hung the sow from the maple tree of his dooryard. She was dirty black, with a clump of burs on her haunches, streaks of blood through her fur, about a half dozen bullet holes in her, including one to the head. Shaun took photographs of the bear, and we knocked on the door, but nobody was home.
“He works in town,” I said. “The kids will be in school. He may have cameras going—watch yourself.”
Once I had thought that Shelly Bray, Josh’s now-ex-wife, was my last chance. We had our time together. She hated her husband Joshua, and I hated myself. So there was balance, and the stakes were low. Yes, she was married. I hadn’t had morals in a hard-and-fast way since I’d stopped going to church in the army, but still, I didn’t cast the commandment aside lightly. Once I did, I did it all the way. And I’ll tell you that I still remember that time with a warm, illegal feeling. Summer midmornings together in the spare bedroom of the Bray family’s house, meeting out in pretty places of the woods to enjoy ourselves and our lives again.
It came with a price. Shelly’s marriage exploded and she lost the kids, my boss found out, I nearly lost my job, and I had to keep all this from Miss Julie, because when we first got together, Shelly and I had yet to split apart.
It seemed at first that I could simply creep away from it all. Then came signs from Joshua I could not ignore. One day when their divorce had yet to be finalized, one of Shelly’s beloved horses had supposedly lamed himself. Joshua had gone out there and used it as target practice with his assault rifle. It was an ugly act, and one that had felt directed at me as much as at her, a threat. Shelly had asked for my help and I couldn’t find a way to hold him to account, and that was the last I’d seen of her for some time until her visit to my station. Now here I was again.
Shaun tacked a citation to Bray’s door, and we knelt by the trail of blood and matted grass that led up the hill. “He wouldn’t have done this on his own,” Shaun said. “It looks like they dragged her out with an ATV.”
The Bray farm was no longer home to any horses. In the stables was a Polaris four-wheeler, framed by an open barn door and in plain sight. We found smears of blood on the grips. Shaun took photos and physical evidence. I glanced around the interior of the barn looking for cameras, finding none. Still, I couldn’t be sure. Of the crates and tarped-over machinery there, I touched nothing.
The trail led straight through the empty pasture and into the forest. At a certain point the blood drew us off the path and into a rocky pile where generations ago farmers had quarried blue shale, now grown around with beech and maple. Shaun held up a hand, and we lay down quietly behind a log and waited. Squirrels chattered, then ignored us and went about their business. Noise of mankind barely reached us that high on the ridge. A sweep of a car on 189, a machine struggling somewhere. Around us and above us, tree branches scraped, and a black scent got my heart beating faster. Shaun became still, focused through his scope on the old quarry. A bear cub, invisible a moment earlier, swung its sweet face left and right, and scampered up the nearest tree.
“WE’LL KEEP THEM UNTIL JULY,” Mary Weaver said. The two of us stood side by side, watching Shaun and another CO each carry a limp cub in their arms, down the hill to a truck in the driveway. “So they have a fighting chance once we set them free. But we can’t let them bond with us, so you know what we do? We blast noise at them, spray them, beat them if we have to.” The biologist turned her head to gaze unhappily down the hill at Joshua Bray, who had returned home from work with his kids only to find a number of state and local vehicles crowding his driveway. He looked none too happy himself. “We ought to just shoot them. They can’t win.”
Bray stood in the yard, a cell phone pressed to his ear. You understand this is me talking—he was a little nothing of a man. I don’t mean physically, though sure he wasn’t too tall or strong; he just never seemed to me to have any kind of presence. Quiet and neat, the guy who’ll go along with whatever the bigger, louder guy says. But my experience with him revealed a hidden mean streak that corresponded with what his ex-wife had told me. And he had me in a grimy little trap. He had never said anything about it, but it was clear: do him wrong and Julie Meagher Farrell, great with child, might get emailed movies of me and Shelly in bed, or told something worse, I don’t know what.
I had not wanted to be there when he got back, but the cubs had us running around longer than we’d planned. I was standing with Mary Weaver pretending I had something useful to say to her, waiting for Shaun to get done with the four cubs and handle Bray for me. But then Mary marched down the driveway to her truck, saying to Bray as she passed, “Good job, cowboy. Your kids must be so proud.”
Bray didn’t answer, and I pretended not to have heard, but I could feel him looking at me. Then up he came and stood beside me until I turned to him. He waited a m
oment before speaking, and then held out the citation that Shaun had pinned to his door and said, “Can you take care of this for me?”
“Not my deal.”
“But you could talk to them.”
“Well,” I said.
Bray shrugged and turned to go. “I’ll have my lawyer handle it.”
“You shoot that bear all by yourself, Bray?”
“It doesn’t take an army,” he said. “Why do you ask, Farrell?”
“I never knew you for much of a hunter.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
TWO PSP detectives called the sheriff, and set a meeting to take possession of the Dentry murder investigation. One morning we gathered around a whiteboard in the sheriff’s department to share impressions and the files we’d been able to build on our own. The detectives, Collyer and Garcia, were narrow, gym-strong men who exchanged looks and often seemed to know things they didn’t share with us. I was more than happy to hand off to them, curious as I was about the dead man.
In the meantime, let nobody accuse me of not doing my job. I spent a couple afternoons and evenings parked in my personal truck in Hallstead, near Kyle Mylnarz’s apartment. Hallstead was like Fitzmorris, but smaller, and the next county over. A little river town with farms in the hills and a bright oasis of fastfood joints and gas stations near the highway. Kyle lived in a third-floor apartment on Main Street, above a closed Chinese restaurant. Out behind in a dirt lot was a rusty Dodge Neon registered to his mother. I parked in an alley to watch the lot exit and a set of wooden stairs down the back of the building. I took license plate numbers of visitors. Kyle drove everywhere; the chain restaurants down the way, the vape shop, and a gym called Pure Power, where I couldn’t follow him in or see inside. Once at night I saw Mylnarz leaving his home to find a haggard man waiting by the stairs, seeming like he might be asking for money. From a distance I couldn’t tell. The man reached out and took Mylnarz’s sleeve. Mylnarz shook him off, cocked a fist back, and the stranger crouched into the shadows. I chose to let Kyle drive away that time, got out and looked for the beggar, but he’d disappeared.
And Mylnarz still worked at the HO Marts, of course, second and third shifts. Nate Hancock had given me his schedule. In the darkness, I stayed close to my radio and kept one eye on the bright squares of gas station interiors with my scope, one eye on the road, waiting for a strange car with no business in the township, or for any vehicle I’d come to associate with Mylnarz. If Kyle knew he was being watched, he gave no sign. He just stood at the counter, drinking a soda big as his head, not a care in the world.
I also haunted the valley between the Moores and the Ceallaighs, not really working the case anymore, mostly waiting and listening to normal life righting itself. Goldie and Puffball carried on long, echoing conversations from their yards, and early evening dirt bike engines scrounged for speed around the Ceallaighs’ track. I didn’t expect to find anyone out there, not with my truck parked on the shoulder for all to see.
Days passed with no word, and I began to wonder whether the death of Carl Dentry was getting the attention it deserved.
Andy Swales, a lawyer based in Scranton with a lake house up here, one of the slick operators I’d run into before, called me twice and left messages about Joshua Bray’s citation. I waited until after work hours, called back, and left a message referring him to Shaun Loughlin. Swales and I had some history, too, and I had no desire to speak to him directly.
We had a dinner at Aunt Medbh’s house with my folks—pasta with venison meat sauce. The food was good but of course things felt a bit wrong, with what Mag’s family was going through. To end a long silence, I committed the sin of asking Ryan how school was. He froze, shrugged, and said nothing. I didn’t know then that he’d already been to the Vice Principal Simms’s office twice, and that Simms had been pinning him to the wall with questions about his home life. I also didn’t know that Ryan had started playing hooky. At the table, I only sensed the awkward anger of a kid, which I well understood. So I turned my attention to Father, and asked him where he got venison this time of year, anyway. He froze, shrugged, and said nothing.
Later, I caught up with Father on the porch, where he leaned on the railing, looking out across the field.
“Hey,” I told him, “I never told you thanks. For the bear. Thank you.”
“Oh, sure,” Father said. He took a drink of beer. “Let me know when you’re going out in the field again. Two of us, like old times.”
“What old times?”
“With you, growing up.”
“ ‘This is the only round you’re getting. Don’t come back without dinner.’ And you stayed home with your feet up, those old times?”
“You wound me, boy. You think I stayed home?” He shifted away from me. “What’re you so mad about.”
On the drive home, Miss Julie was tickled about something.
“What?” I said.
“Henry.”
“What?”
“Henry, look.”
I took my eyes off the road for a moment and saw my wife’s sweater pulled up and her breasts hanging free, each one covered with a bright green cabbage leaf.
“Guess whose idea this was.”
“Ma’s.”
“It’s amazing.”
I CAME BACK FROM patrol the next day to find a gleaming muscle car in the township lot. I parked and unlocked the station door, and was in the process of putting my .40 in the gun safe when in walked Andy Swales, tall, bald, and tan. A few years ago the lawyer had built a small castle above one of our lakes. A local family had lived as caretakers in a trailer on his land, and had come to terrible grief there. He had been involved with the young lady who died. Because of that, I assumed, I had not seen much of him since. Then came the phone calls about Joshua Bray’s citation, but I didn’t think he’d have the sand to come see me in person. Yet here he was across my desk, measuring me with unblinking eyes, always looking for angles.
He didn’t speak right away, so I said, “What brings you up north?”
“Closing up the lake house for the season.”
“I’m surprised you still use it.”
He sighed and said, “Yes. It’s been hard to enjoy. But try selling a place like that. Who around here could buy it? So I rent it out. People take it for a week or two at a time and it’ll probably pay my property taxes.”
“Good for you.”
“Henry, Josh was out walking the trails. He happens on this bear. Can I get you to see reason?”
“Talk to Shaun Loughlin.”
“He sends me right back to you. Says he wouldn’t have known a thing about this except for you. And the thing is, he doesn’t know how you knew. I told him, and I’ll tell you, I think you got a raft of problems with this ticket. My guy’s willing to drop it if you are, but he’s upset.”
“And we all know what happens when Bray gets upset.”
“What does that mean?”
“Tell him to keep his fuckin gun in his pants, that’s what it means.”
Swales cocked an eyebrow at that. “Haven’t you taken enough away from this family?” He stood to go. “Listen, if three thousand dollars will do it, here you go.” He tossed a manila envelope on my desk. “But I don’t want you harassing my guy. There’s another two thousand in here, for his next expensive mistake. You just hang on to it.”
“I’m not taking this. I’m not touching it. Pick this up,” I said.
As Swales walked to the door, he said, “If the citation goes away, we’ll take that as a good sign. If it doesn’t, we’ll take it amiss.”
“Swales.”
But he was already gone and I was speaking to a closing door. “Jesus Christ,” I said, and put the envelope in the safe.
BY OCTOBER, the High-Thyme Tavern had not opened its windows in many weeks, and the smell of grease and spilled beer had taken over. One surly barfly, still shedding dust from the sawmill, sat at the bar and drank Jägermeister, feeding the jukebox dollar a
fter dollar to play Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” on repeat. I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do. By the tenth repeat and the eightieth minute, I could see that the drunkard, whose name was Colin Yardley, was heading toward an ejection. He could see it too.
The song ended. Another man walked over to the jukebox and pulled out his wallet, but Yardley met him there. He put one hand on the machine, the other on the man’s chest, and said, “Life’s been good.”
Four strong men frog-marched Yardley out of the bar as he screamed curses. In the process, someone wrangled his car keys out of his pocket and gave them to the bartender, a fortyish man. I heard what sounded like fighting outside, and turned to the bartender, who shrugged. When Yardley tried to reenter, he had a bloody scrape on his cheek.
“You’re barred for two weeks. Two this time,” the bartender said.
“I give a fuck.”
“Come back in two weeks. You see Henry right here. You want to keep at it?”
Yardley glanced at me, then at the floor, and muttered, “I need a ride home.”
“Call your wife.”
“She’s at book club.”
Eventually someone steered him back outside, and I ordered myself a Flower Power. I was not at the High-Thyme to keep the peace, but to play a show with my band the Country Slippers. I had been the first to arrive, dressed in one of my thrift-store suits, according to our stage presentation. Dress like an album of old family photos. Our percussionist Ralph was usually late, and Ed and Liz often had trouble getting out the door, with their two kids and babysitter. I couldn’t interest Miss Julie in going out to the tavern; the oily smells and loud voices got to her anymore, with the baby the size of a plum, growing daily and causing trouble with her stomach.
And it was a good thing. As I looked up and down the bar I caught unfamiliar faces, and flattered myself that word had spread. There were two unaccompanied women about my age, each seemingly apart from the other. One I didn’t know, but her jeans and sweatshirt did nothing to disguise that she was a professional of some kind, an outsider, and I almost thought cop, as she easily deflected a wobbly advance from an older man. The other woman was pretending to look at her phone, but taking in the scene, and glancing at me. She was alone and pretty, with dark hair pulled through the back of a baseball hat in a tight ponytail. Her, I knew well. Though she avoided my eyes, there was a reason she was in the bar that night. It was Shelly Bray, returned to Wild Thyme.