If a Tree Falls

by Robert I. Katz

  “There are rumors about a casino being built at the Greenbrier. If they do it, the place will be more popular than ever.”

  Casino gambling had been legal in West Virginia since 1994, but such facilities were only allowed at racetracks, hence the name, Racinos.

  “I thought that was illegal.”

  “There’s a bill before the legislature to get it changed.”

  “Okay. So, what does that have to do with us?”

  Gary Kurtz grinned. “The proposed new law would allow casinos to be built at resorts, and only for guests of the resort.”

  “So?”

  “So, you can build a resort anywhere.”

  Kurtz blinked. “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  Jessica Hurst lived in a small house in a small suburb outside Pittsburgh. It was a nice neighborhood. The lawns were well tended, the houses in good repair, most with white picket fences and neat gardens in the front and the back. Not a lot of money here, Bill Harris thought, but there was obviously pride in the neighborhood. It looked like a nice place to grow up.

  Jessica Hurst was a good-looking woman. She was slim, with an oval face and big, dark eyes. She didn’t look happy, though. Probably had a sense of what was coming. Her husband, a big, chunky guy, hovered over his wife, looking concerned. The three kids played in another room, occasionally peeking in with wide eyes, apparently intimidated by Bill Harris and his uniform.

  “Can I get you anything?” Jessica asked. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” Bill Harris sat on one end of a loveseat in a comfortable looking den, with pine floors, wooden bookcases and kids’ toys scattered across the floor. Jessica sat across from him in a recliner, clutching her husband’s hand, who stood behind her and a little to the side.

  No easy way to say it. “I have some bad news for you,” Bill Harris said.

  She winced and just looked at him with those big, dark eyes. “The body of a young woman who has been tentatively identified as your sister, Faye Lurie, has been discovered, in Clark County, West Virginia.”

  Jessica sighed and blinked back a tear. Her husband patted her shoulder. She cleared her throat and finally said, “How?”

  “We’re not sure. Some bones were recovered from a stream. The DNA shows a partial match to your mother, Allison Lurie. The skull is that of a teenaged girl. Forensics indicates that it was under water for less than a year.”

  “Clark County, West Virginia…”

  Bill Harris nodded.

  “That’s what? About ninety miles from here?”

  “Give or take.”

  “A year?” Jessica sighed. “Faye vanished a little over two years ago.”

  Bill Harris nodded. There had been some slight etching of all the bones, typical of being buried in acid soil. “Could you tell me about it?”

  She looked at her husband. “Hon, could you maybe bring in some tea?”

  Allen Hurst patted her shoulder and went into the kitchen. Jessica sighed, looked down at her folded hands and shook her head. “Faye was always a wild one,” she finally said. “I tried to keep her under control, but Mama…” she sighed again. “There was no way. We always had food on the table and a roof over our heads but there wasn’t much extra money, that was for sure.

  “Faye wasn’t stupid exactly, but she sure acted stupid. She started doing drugs when she was barely thirteen. I don’t understand it. I really don’t. She had this little gang of teenaged jackasses she liked to hang around with. They did nothing but listen to music, play video games and smoke pot. I suppose they were having sex but I don’t really know for sure.

  “I was married. I tried to get her to move in with me. Momma wouldn’t have cared. Truthfully, I’m not sure she would have even noticed, but Faye probably figured that I wouldn’t let her run around the way Momma did, not if she was living here.

  “Then she met some guy and suddenly, she was in love. It was ridiculous.”

  Allen Hurst came back into the den, carrying a tray with a pot, three cups, cream, slices of lemon and a canister of sugar. He set the pot down on the low table. Jessica poured herself a cup and looked up at Bill Harris. “You sure you won’t have some?”

  “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind, I could do with a cup of tea.”

  “Sugar?”

  “Please. Just one. Nothing else.”

  She poured, and placed his tea in front of him. He picked it up and sipped. Frankly, Bill Harris preferred coffee, but it always helped to display a little empathy and understanding. Sharing a cup of tea couldn’t hurt.

  “So,” Jessica said. “It’s an old, old story. By this time, we were barely talking. She never told me his name or what he did for a living. And then she was gone.” Jessica shrugged. “I reported it to the police. I’m not sure how hard they tried to find her but nothing came of it. I called almost every day for a month. They told me they were continuing to look.” She shrugged.

  “I never saw her again.”

  Allen Hurst, who had said nothing, cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his wife’s neck.

  A gang, Bill Harris thought. A gang of drug addled teenagers. Stupid kids sometimes grew out of it, and even if they didn’t, most of them didn’t disappear and many of them stayed in the neighborhood they grew up in. Also, the local cops might be able to shed at least a little light on the subject.

  “How old was she when she vanished?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Who were her friends?” Bill Harris asked. “This gang you mentioned.”

  “I only met a couple of them, but she talked about a few more. I do have the names.” She gave a bitter smile. “I wrote them down, so I wouldn’t forget.” She rose to her feet. “Let me get them for you.”

  “How about the guy she was in love with?”

  She shook her head. “No idea.”

  There had been many great forgers down through history, men and a few women who could fake the work of the great masters so convincingly that even the most discerning critics and scholars were fooled. None of these, however, were great artists. Oh, they had technique, alright, but they didn’t have that touch of creativity that separates the artist from the mere craftsman. If one wishes to be an artist, a real artist, not a forger, not a hack, it was important to develop a style of one’s own, a distinctive way of seeing and depicting the world.

  From time immemorial, the task of the artist had been to depict life, as realistically as possible. Of course, the task of depicting life had on occasion required just a touch of exaggeration, of elongation, even of abstraction. Witness El Greco and William Turner and certainly the French Impressionists.

  And then the camera came along, the greatest forger of them all. Very, very few artists could hope to compete with a camera. Suddenly, the goal changed. Reality, simple mundane reality, was too, well…mundane. The artist was now free from such simple, superficial pursuits. No, now the artist must depict a higher reality, an inner truth, a truth that the eye of the non-artist could only perceive through the works of the (drumroll, please, and a brief pause for a round of applause) artist.

  And so the birth of the camera spawned Picasso, and Braque, and Salvadore Dali (hack though he was) and Jackson Pollack, and a thousand others.

  Once, in a sixth-grade art class, one of Lenore’s teachers had firmly stated that Norman Rockwell was not an artist, and his works were not art. Lenore had squinted down at the book they were studying. It looked like art to her.

  Oh, a little impressionism was alright, a touch of misdirection to fool the eye, but after much soul searching and long reflection, young Lenore Brinkman had decided that abstraction was mostly a con job. A lowbrow conviction, perhaps, but one that she shared with most of mankind, if not the majority of so-called artists.

  Lenore preferred the classics, but with a contemporary eye and esthetic: “classical realism” as it was often called, a style that had been looked down upon by the commentariat during most of the 20th Century but now had enough practiti
oners that it could no longer be ignored. Ted Seth Jacobs, Richard Lack, William McGregor Paxton, Jacob Collins…these were the artists that Lenore admired and wanted to be like when she grew up.

  And now, here she was, painting real landscapes in West Virginia, but with her own twist, her own style, her own vision. How cool was that?

  A lot of mountains in West Virginia. A lot of forest, with lakes and waterfalls and rivers with white water and clear, rushing streams. Almost anywhere Lenore looked, she saw something worth putting down on canvas.

  She spent most of every day painting, most of it outdoors, only stopping for lunch and then, a half hour or so before Richard was due home, she would quit for the day and help Lisa get ready for dinner.

  It was a quiet, peaceful life, and with surprise, almost with wonder, she realized that she could get into this.

  The story that Richard’s father had told Richard, and Richard had told her, actually made a lot of sense. Lakes, forest, streams and woodland. Scenic beauty and things to do. A resort. Why not? The forests were dense and full of game, the streams were full of fish. The lakes were clear and cold. Everywhere she looked, a view of the mountains, or a mountain lake glimmering in the distance, took one’s breath away. Add fine dining, maybe build an amusement park or two and Clark County, West Virginia could turn into the next Orlando. Or at least the next Dollywood. How had Pigeon Forge, Tennessee turned into a vacation destination, anyway?

  It was an amusing conceit…not, of course, that Lenore actually cared. A few more weeks, and it was back home to New York.

  She smiled to herself. This wasn’t bad, though. It wasn’t bad at all. Maybe next summer, they would do it again.

  Chapter 7

  “How long have you worked here, Maggie?”

  Maggie Callender gave Kurtz a wary look. Evidently, she knew what was coming. “Fifteen years,” she said.

  “I’ll bet that Dr. Mandell was a little different fifteen years ago, wasn’t he?”

  Maggie Calendar almost glared at him, then her shoulders slumped. “Yeah,” she said. “He was.”

  “So, what do you think we should do about it?”

  “We?” She sniffed.

  Kurtz grinned. “It’s ‘we’ for another few weeks, at least, and who knows? Maybe, I’ll come back.”

  Not likely, Kurtz thought. Maybe to visit.

  Maggie looked skeptical but didn’t say anything.

  Kurtz had been given temporary possession of the deceased Dr. Stewart’s office. It had been cleaned of Stewart’s personal possessions and Kurtz, intending on being here for only six weeks, had brought in few of his own, primarily some reference texts and a picture of himself and Lenore, smiling happily on their honeymoon. The picture now perched on one of the shelves, where Kurtz could see it.

  Kurtz sat behind the desk, Maggie on one of the two visitor’s chairs, her arms folded across her chest and a mulish expression on her face.

  “How bad has it been?” Kurtz asked.

  Maggie sighed and seemed to deflate. “He used to be bright and cheerful. The past year or so…” She shook her head. “He’s been saying less and less. He doesn’t joke with the staff, anymore. He sees his patients, then goes into the office and closes the door.”

  “Has he been making mistakes?” This, of course, was the key question. Anybody’s mood could change. All sorts of reasons for a man to grow distant or glum. It wasn’t a crime to be distant or glum or depressed, but mistakes were different. Mistakes were not allowed.

  “Small ones,” Maggie said. “Charting errors. Once, he confused two patients. He put the notes down on the wrong charts. A couple of times, he wrote down the diagnoses but not the recommended treatment or the follow-up. Once, he started talking about an inguinal hernia when the patient had a spermatocele. Another time, a patient came in for a hernia on the left, and he put down in the chart that the patient didn’t have a hernia. Turned out, he was examining the right side, not the left.” She shrugged, looking defeated.

  Kurtz grimaced. “Oh, boy,” he muttered. For a long moment, they simply sat there, Maggie looking down at the floor, Kurtz mulling it all over, not that there was much to mull. The situation was clear.

  “Has anybody talked to him?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Maybe somebody should.”

  Maggie sniffed. “You want to volunteer?”

  “No.” Kurtz shook his head. “I’m a stranger. He has no reason to feel comfortable with me or to confide in me. I’m not the right one for the job.”

  Every state that Kurtz knew of, and West Virginia was no exception, had strict requirements for reporting impaired physicians. Usually, the mechanism was simple, easy and anonymous. You picked up the phone and called the Impaired Physicians’ Network, or the Physician Health Program or the Medical Professionals’ Health Service, or whatever euphemism they used in your particular state. The name didn’t matter and they all worked the same. They were all divisions of the State Medical Licensing Board. They all tried to balance the needs of the physician against the need to safeguard the public. They would investigate. If there was anything to it, they would discreetly remove the physician from his practice, keeping it all as quiet as possible, evaluate and treat, if treatment was even an option. If the physician refused to cooperate, then his license would be suspended or even revoked. For alcoholism, the most common cause of physician impairment, the success rate was good, over 80%. For drug addiction, not so good but still better than half went through the program and returned to their practice. For old fashioned senile dementia, not good at all. There weren’t many causes of actual deterioration of the brain that could be fixed.

  Depression, though, often could be fixed, unless the depression was a symptom, not a cause—the physician realized that his faculties were failing him and he was depressed about it.

  “Has he been depressed?” Kurtz asked.

  “His wife died three years ago. He was pretty moody after that, but he seemed to cheer up after awhile.”

  “Any kids?”

  “A son and a daughter. They both live out of state.”

  Maybe he was lonely, Kurtz thought. The house was empty and quiet at night. Nothing to do except rehash old memories, old times. Maybe he just needed to get out of the house more. Maybe he needed to find some merry widow and get laid. Maybe, but that was the best case scenario. Just as likely, what was bothering him simply couldn’t be fixed.

  “What do you want to do about this, Maggie?”

  Kurtz did not want to browbeat poor Maggie and ordinarily, Kurtz felt an obligation to handle his own problems. This, however, was not exactly his problem. He had stumbled upon it but he knew that he was not the best person to deal with it. It would be far better for the people who knew Jerry Mandell, who maybe he trusted, to stage some sort of intervention.

  He was not going to ignore it, however.

  Maggie continued to look down at the floor.

  “No ideas?” Kurtz said.

  Finally, she sighed. “Not really.”

  “This can’t go on forever, Maggie. I think you know that.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I guess not.”

  The bones had been found in a stream but had apparently been buried in acidic soil for about a year before that. Unfortunately, most of the state was wooded and most wooded areas have acid soil from the decomposition of leaves and dead trees. Safe to assume that the two girls (and however many more there might be) had been buried in the forest but the forest covered thousands of square miles.

  No sense not to try, however. You never knew.

  Darryl Evans was the silent type. A small, slight man, he moved through the woods as if he was born there, which was almost the exact case. He never stumbled against a hidden root and barely brushed against the undergrowth at the sides of the trails. His ancestors had come to West Virginia over two centuries before and had been wood and mountain people ever since.

  Darryl Evans was the first generation of his family t
o go to college and he was now an investigator with the West Virginia Division of Forestry. Drew Hastings had worked with him before, tracking down a few tourists lost in the woods, never on a presumed murder case. Three dogs, bloodhounds, sat at Darryl Evans feet as he moodily surveyed the banks of Bradley’s Creek.

  Drew Hastings knew better than to ask stupid questions. Darryl Evans knew his job and he didn’t need Drew Hastings bothering him. Drew watched as Darryl squinted down at the bank. “A couple of black bears,” he said, and shrugged. “A few raccoons.”

  Drew nodded. He could tell that much, himself, and already had, but black bears wandering by in the past few days told them nothing about who or what might have deposited human remains in the creek over a year before.

  Bloodhounds truly were amazing creatures. They could tell if a man had passed this way over two weeks ago, but two weeks just wasn’t good enough. Still, those bones came from somewhere and the dogs were their best bet at finding it.

  These dogs, in addition to their almost supernatural abilities to follow the trails of missing people, had been trained to detect carrion.

  Darryl Evans squatted down and released the dogs from their leashes. Immediately, they put their noses to the ground and began to sniff. They ranged back and forth across the bank, never hurrying, then spread out and headed off into the woods.

  Drew stuck with Darryl. They followed one of the dogs. Two other teams of two men each, local boys deputized by Drew, followed each of the other two dogs.

  Their dog was named Bo, a two year old who loved his work. Bo stopped every ten yards or so, raised his head and sniffed the air. Sometimes, he would move in circles. Once in awhile, he would backtrack, always sniffing, before moving forward again. After an hour of this, they had followed Bo for perhaps a quarter of a mile.