Death in the Pines (12 page)

“If I ever have another lucid dream, I'll try.”

Sylvia picked up a twig and ran her fingers along it. Her nails were short and smooth, her hands young and strong. “When the First People came to live here, they fought, but then they rediscovered the Great Laws. They lived in balance for ten thousand years.” She dropped the twig. “Then came the Europeans, people who were lost in their dream. They dreamed they were gods, that the world was theirs. They could do anything they wanted to the world and to the First People, because they believed there would be no consequences. But that was part of the dream.”

“More like a nightmare, the way you tell it.”

“They raped Mother Earth, murdered the First People, enslaved their own people. Now the richest and most powerful live as gods. Even the slaves in your culture believe that if they fall into the same dream they will become as gods themselves, or their children will. But that is part of the nightmare. Most of the First People who survive have adopted that dream, too. And when they fail to become like the Europeans, they escape into other dreams, fueled by alcohol, drugs, and violence. But a few have not fallen asleep. The world around them has changed, and though they are still awake, they at least know they are living in the dream world.”

“You're telling me that I'm asleep too.”

“Only if you believe the nightmare. But you know you are not a god. The others think they are the center of the world and they can interfere all they want without consequences. You do not share that madness. Nor did Jeremiah Smith.” She closed her eyes. “His wife was awake. She knew. She wakened him.”

“She was an Abenaki.”

“Yes, one of the ones who stayed awake while the land fell into the European dream. Jeremiah used to walk in the forest. He talked with my people.”

“With you?”

“I was there. I have heard his voice. He was a good man.”

I hesitated to ask the question, maybe afraid that it would wake me or put me to sleep, but I did: “Can you tell me who killed him?”

“Dreamers,” she said. “Ones who know in a way they are dreaming and who will kill to keep from awakening.”

“Give me a name.”

“I cannot.” She turned the top half of her body toward me. “If I did, that would be interference.”

“And if I find the murderers myself?”

“Predators look forward,” she said simply. “It is not interference. It is what they do.”

Before I could protest that she hadn't answered me, she raised her right hand in a sudden gesture of warning. Her nose wrinkled as if she had caught an unpleasant odor.

“What?” For some reason I whispered.

She leaned forward again, turning her head side to side. The motion pulled her deerskin shirt tight, showing me she wore nothing under it. The cold had made her nipples erect, and her left breast showed in a contour under the deerskin. And then food, prey, came at last into my vision, and I felt ludicrously relieved that we would not starve after all: a pair of deer came crashing uphill from the river, bounding through the brush below us, on the fringe of the heaviest forest. They crossed and vanished into the shelter of the woods, a six-point buck and a doe that looked as if she might be heavy with young. They were running from something.

“He is coming,” Sylvia said.

W
ho is it?” I asked.

Sylvia tilted her head in the direction from which the deer had come, so still that I thought she was holding her breath. I looked down, through brush and scattered trees. I caught a glint of light on metal and then two figures resolved out of the background, two men wearing camouflage. Both carried rifles. They might have been halfway between us and the river. I took the Police Special from my jacket pocket and held it between my legs, folding a corner of the blanket over to conceal it.

The two halted fifty feet away, as though they had just noticed me sitting there so still. They both wore caps that shadowed their faces, but the larger one was Bill Grinder and the other was slighter and, from the way he moved, younger.

They paused only for a moment, and then as they toiled up the last, steepest part of the climb, I saw that the other man was probably between twenty-five and thirty, skinny and sallow. Wispy blond hair escaped from his hunting cap at the temples, and as they got even closer I could see the craters of ancient acne across his cheeks.

“You're on my land,” I said loudly when they were close enough.

The kid looked startled, as though he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't.

“Hell, Tyler, we're huntin',” Grinder said. His tone was defiant, confrontational. He had taken the point, and behind him and to his right the kid shifted his rifle. I thought he had just thumbed off the safety.

“Deer season ended in November.”

“Rabbit season runs to April,” Grinder said.

As if that inspired him, the kid said, “We're hunting rabbits,” reminding me irresistibly of Elmer Fudd.

“Maybe so, but this is private property,” I told them.

Grinder laughed, a liquid, phlegmy sound, and the kid gave me a weak, oddly apologetic grin. Grinder spat and said, “Maybe it's different down in cracker land where you come from, but here you gotta have permission to stop me. You don't want hunters, you have to file a request with the town and pay a license fee, and you gotta post the land with signs in your name.”

“I've lived here long enough to know that rabbits aren't plentiful here. So why'd you pick my place to hunt?”

Grinder didn't meet my eyes. “Saw tracks here when I came for Jeremiah's truck. Lot of 'em. Rabbits all over the place.”

“I don't care if they're having the North American rabbit convention here. I don't want hunters on my land, Bill.”

“Yeah, but you can't stop us. Law's on our side.”

“Bill, I'm telling you to get off my land.”

“You can't order us off. We're hunters, and hunters can go wherever they want in Vermont and shoot anything in season. Only exceptions are inside town limits or where the land's been registered and posted. Your place ain't either.”

“I put up N
O
H
UNTING
signs during deer season. They were all torn down inside a week.”

“'Cause you ain't registered with the town. I checked. So the signs wouldn't have counted anyway. You don't like it, take it up with the NRA.”

The younger man was shifting from foot to foot, looking increasingly edgy. I asked, “Who's the kid, Bill?”

“Darryl helps me in the shop sometimes,” Grinder said. “Darryl, this here's Oakley Tyler. They wrote stories about him in the magazines and all.”

Darryl relaxed and muttered, “Pleased t'meetcha.”

I nodded at him. “You didn't happen to be in the woods out here the other day, did you, Darryl? With that rifle?”

“No, sir!” He took a step back and his rifle barrel, pointed vaguely at the ground three feet in front of his feet, rose toward me fractionally. “No, sir,” he said again. “That wasn't me.”

“What's your full name?” I asked.

Bill stepped sideways, cutting off my view of Darryl. “That's enough, boy,” he said without looking around. “OK, Mr. Tyler, you don't want us to hunt, we won't hunt—this time. We'll head out the same way we came in. But if we see a rabbit, well, you might hear a gun go off.” He kept the tone easy, but it held an edge of threat.

The two of them went down the slope, moving faster with the pull of gravity helping instead of resisting them. Beside me Sylvia exhaled noisily, and I realized she'd said not a word, that she'd been absolutely still, the whole time.

“Funny they didn't speak to you,” I said.

She ran her right hand across the top of her leg, over the deerskin. I could see now that she was shivering. “If you keep very still, you become invisible.”

I laughed, but she didn't smile at all. “You're serious?”

“Sometimes it doesn't work,” she granted, taking a deep breath.

I shook my head. “They seemed surprised to see me,” I said. “I think they just didn't get around to noticing you. I wonder what they're looking for.”

She flared her nostrils and sniffed the air. “That is not for me to know. It is your matter.”

I took the Police Special from beneath the fold of the blanket. She looked away as if it were obscene, and I dropped it back into my jacket pocket. I asked, “Did they frighten you?”

She gave me a flat look that said,
Of course they did
.

“I'm sorry.”

“I am not used to being so close to hunters.” She pronounced “hunters” the way a devout peasant in the Middle Ages might have mouthed the name of a demon—fearfully.

“They're gone now,” I said. “Or well on their way. All right. Are you going to take me to meet your people?”

“Not now. They do not like hunters. They have gone.”

“I don't think those were really hunters.” I got up and stretched my legs, numbed by the position I had been sitting in and by the cold. I walked down to the spot where Grinder and Darryl had paused and studied the tracks. Generic hunting or winter boots. Only Grinder's were large enough to belong to the shooter, but he couldn't have been. He wouldn't have had time to return to his garage and get to my place so soon after taking Jeremiah's call.

I turned to ask Sylvia what she knew about those two guys.

She was gone. She had faded into the wilderness as if she had never been there at all.

I
found the offices of
This Week
on the second floor of a brick building on Main Street in Montpelier. I arrived at eleven-thirty by the newsroom clock and stood in the doorway, watching three people busy in the huge open room that must once have been warehouse space for the stores below.

Five chipped and splintered wooden desks stood haphazardly around the room, like cows that had strayed into a pasture too large for comfort. Against the arched front windows a light table and drawing table stood side by side, and the whole far wall was lined by filing cabinets and stacked cardboard file boxes. I guessed that the reception area was where I stood, marked by a frayed orange sofa leaking stuffing from the corners and three uncomfortable-looking chairs.

Across from me a young man with a sandy ponytail sat at the drawing table, aligning computer-generated text and ads on tabloid-sized sheets of bluelined, wax-coated layout paper. It struck me that this production method was for all practical purposes as outdated as the Linotype machine.

Past the young man, at the farthest desk, a shorthaired woman in the nebulous territory around thirty-five leaned
forward, staring intently at a computer screen and typing with a machine-gun rhythm. She wore jeans and a vivid red sweatshirt, and from her expression she hated whatever news she was typing.

The last staffer was an Asian woman midway between the others, talking on the phone. She held up a finger to tell me she'd be with me soon. The other two noticed her, gave me a quick glance, and returned to work. I didn't see Jerry Smith.

“No,” the woman on the phone said loudly. “No, we only mentioned two of your brands. We didn't dis the company itself. No—that's nuts! We can print anything we want about a politician, but if we mention a corporation, you try to come down on us like a piano off a third-floor balcony! No retraction.”

She listened impatiently and said, “Don't tell me about the Supreme Court. Maybe they have ruled that corporations have the same rights as citizens, but no, this is way past that. We'll treat them as public figures, but they have to live by the same rules as the politicians they buy and sell every day.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You do that. Let us know.”

She hung up the phone so emphatically that I thought she might have broken it.

She came toward me pushing her black hair away from her eyes. “Can you believe that? Threatening to sue us because we mentioned their products! Same company that contributed money to that damn PAC that ran ads in a dozen papers claiming the president had a secret gay relationship with the Speaker of the House.”

“Audacious of them,” I said.

“Hell of a lot worse than that. Death of the First Amendment, that's what it is. Free speech in this country is dying. The corporations have their hands on its throat and they won't let go.”

“Tough time to be a journalist,” I agreed. “I came to see Jerry Smith.”

“I haven't seen him this morning, but I didn't get in until ten. He mostly works from home, though.”

“The editor or the publisher in?”

She threw a thumb over her shoulder at the woman on the computer. “Gina Berkof. Editor and publisher.”

I went over to Gina's desk and, detecting me with peripheral vision or internal radar, she muttered, “Just a sec, just a sec.”

She bent back from the keyboard like Ray Charles hitting a good melodic run, rattled the keys for another minute, then struck the Enter key with a flourish.

“Done.” She smiled at me, a medium-large woman, her light brown hair cropped in a unisex cut, her face the cherubic kind that brought to mind good times and old friends. I gave her an appreciative look that I think she noticed. By fashion-model standards she was at least thirty pounds overweight, but her body had a lushness that probably had become that way after a childhood of baby-fat loveliness. Warm brown eyes, straight nose, slightly dimpled chin, and full, smiling lips. Rubens would have taken one look at her and reached for his palette.

She tilted her head. “Now tell me you're a corporate lawyer,” she challenged.

“Not guilty. You the boss?”

“Editor, publisher, and I also sweep out the place on Fridays.” She looked straight at me with those strong, soft eyes. “Sit down and tell me what I can do for you—as long as you're not selling anything.”