Death in the Pines (15 page)

He shook his head. “No forests. Trees take too long to grow. Companies are interested in this year's profits, not some potential gain in thirty years.”

“So what did the two guys who tied you to the tree want to discuss?”

“Thanks for lunch.” He reached for his jacket.

“You still want to pretend it never happened.”

“Nothing happened. Don't bring it up again. If you think you're working for me or my grandfather because some of this stuff happened around you, you're not. I hereby officially fire
you, as the representative of the estate. Stay out of my life, OK?”

“Calm down, cowboy.”

“Don't patronize me. I don't need you to save me from anybody. There's nothing I can't handle. You're off this case, got it?”

I pulled one of Jeremiah's twenties from my pocket and dropped it on the table. “Jerry, it's crystal clear. But just one thing: even if I was willing to work for you—you couldn't afford it.”

He turned and walked away. I picked up the envelope and pulled out Jerry's article to learn more about gene-jumping and Superman. At the moment, I felt low on invulnerability.

J
erry told it better than he wrote it, I thought as I considered my next move. I didn't know enough about Caleb Benson. He said old Jeremiah hadn't feared him, but feared change. Personally I wasn't too happy with the kind of change that turned a benign, useful bug into a killer bacterium, and wondered if Benson had wandered from lumber into cattle or something that might involve bugs that Benson's associate Frank would make sure were killed off. I wanted to find out if Benson's enterprises might have anything to do with gene-jumping.

It did not take the skills of a licensed PI to find Benson's house. I asked a random person on the street and got precise directions. It wasn't the kind of place you'd expect a man of Benson's attainments to occupy, but it was substantial, an older house that at second glance had undergone more face-lifts than the average TV talk show host. As I walked up and rang the bell, two wall-mounted video cameras eyed me.

A blonde woman, probably the third wife that Jerry had mentioned, answered the door. She wore a gray wool sweater and tan slacks and let me into a foyer that somehow reminded me of a small display room in a museum. I introduced myself
and asked if I could see Mr. Benson. She gave me a mildly shocked look. “Oh, he's not home. He's at his office in Newport.”

“It's hard to catch him there without an appointment,” I said. “What time will he be back?”

The question seemed to offend her. She reopened the front door, crafted of antique walnut and cut-glass. It was probably worth more than my whole cabin. “I'm not his secretary.”

“Are you his wife?”

The sun slanted in through the open door. She replied oddly: “He's my husband.” She had good coloring, a baby-doll sort of face, but I could see that in ten years she might run to flesh.

I said, “Then you're Eva.” The name had appeared in the newspaper story of the confrontation Benson had been involved in, though the photo showed only him, not his wife.

“I'm Eva. And you're Mr. Tyler, and whatever you want with my husband, he isn't here.”

“What I want is to talk to him for a minute about Jeremiah Smith.”

She closed the door, and we stood in the foyer facing each other. Behind her a grandfather clock taller than she was clacked off the seconds. “Jeremiah Smith?” she asked, her blue eyes showing surprise. “The old man who—that accident?”

“That's him.”

“But he's dead.” Her lips, which she had colored with some kind of cantaloupe-colored gloss, compressed. “He was walking beside the highway and a car hit him. Sad.” She blinked twice, rapidly. “Why do you want to talk to my husband about Mr. Smith? I hardly think they knew each other, and if you're thinking my husband was the one who hit him—”

I shook my head. “I'd prefer to ask him the questions, Eva.”

“Then it's not a business matter.”

I shrugged and took a wild shot. “I do have an interest in forestry and genetics. So did Jeremiah. Someone thought our interests might have something in common with Mr. Benson's companies.”

“Who?”

“Jeremiah's grandson, Jerry.”

Eva Benson blushed and half turned, blurting, “But Caleb—” and then she recovered and took a deep breath, as calm as a professional actor. “I know Jerry. We were in high school together.”

“Oh, you were friends?”

“No, he was two grades ahead of me.” She seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then gave me a patronizing smile. “I'll tell my husband you called, Mr. Tyler. Do you have a card?”

“No. If I can't find Mr. Benson in Newport, I'll just stop by again later.”

She gave me a level look. “I don't know that you'll have much luck. He's rarely home.” Her eyebrows raised as if she were asking a question. But she didn't put it in words, and when she opened the door again, I left her in the big house. She closed the door slowly, so that all the way down the front walk I felt her gaze on my back. The door clicked as I reached the sidewalk.

I walked the three blocks from the Benson house back to Main Street. Montpelier hadn't had snow in two or three days, and the sidewalks were dry, though patches of dirty snow lay in strips along the shady sides of curbs. The town strings up tinsel and a giant fairy-light snowflake for First Night, and the decorations were still up, quivering in the breeze. I supposed they would be in place until spring.

In an investigation it's always good to look for loose ends, and now I had a small one. When Jerry Smith had told me about his grandfather's driving him out to the Benson place, he'd made it sound as if he didn't know Eva at all. That fact, and the way she'd reacted when I'd mentioned Jerry's name, made me wonder exactly how well they had known each other. Jerry had insisted that Benson had nothing to do with a couple of guys tying him to a tree and zapping him with several thousand volts of electricity. Eva Benson had impulsively mentioned her husband's name when I brought up Jerry. It was enough to make me wonder.

I got into my Jeep, parked at a curb midway between the diner and the newspaper building, and pondered. There is such a thing as pareidolia, the human tendency to see coherent figures in random shapes: New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain, a profile in granite, the Madonna in the scorch patterns of a toasted sandwich, a cloud that is very like a whale. I had to consider the possibility that everything that had happened was random, that there was no real pattern. Somebody putting a wick in Jeremiah's gas tank and shooting at us might be unrelated to anything else, a crackpot, a warped redneck prankster. Jerry's abduction might have been done by two guys who had no connection to the truck burning. Jeremiah could have been hit by a tourist bleary after too many hours behind the wheel. Genes might have nothing to do with anything.

But Sylvia had told me the car had deliberately swerved to hit Jeremiah. And her lesson in the forest, if that's what it was, seemed to tell me to look for unity in apparent chaos, for the pattern in randomness, and for something that was a danger to all life on earth, a pretty damn grandiose notion. What common factors did I have? The strongest was Jerry himself. And then Bill Grinder, who popped up in odd places at odd times.

I weighed the probable success of a trip to Newport. I had no leverage to force open Benson's office door. On the other hand, the newspaper office was half a block away. I left the envelope of articles in the car and went to see if Gina or anybody else there had any new ideas.

It was still early afternoon, but two of the three staff members I'd met had left the office. Only Gina Berkof was there, sitting at her desk and rattling her keyboard again. I walked across the echoing, open room and sat in the old wooden chair beside her desk.

She hit the Enter key and said, “That's the big problem with not having a private office. I can't close the door.”

“Sorry to bother you again. Thanks for the copies of the stories.”

“No problem. Now what can I tell you?” She swiveled toward me and picked up her blue pencil, as though she felt more at ease that way.

“Little more information. Eva Benson?”

“Oh, boy,” she said. “Look, this is a newspaper. We have no interest in rumors.”

“What rumors?”

“Ask the woman. She'll probably talk to you. If the rumors are true.” Gina lifted an eyebrow and smiled.

“At least tell me if she has any involvement with her husband's business interests.”

“I don't know.”

“And are either of them involved with the Abenaki?”

She dropped the pencil. “What? Listen, did Jerry tell you about—” Then she said, “No, he wouldn't have. He doesn't know. OK, have you been checking up on me or was that a lucky shot?”

“I haven't been checking on you.”

She said, “Because the Abenaki cause is kind of a hot button with me. I'm working on an article. The Abenaki got a royal screwing from the state, and from the federal government for that matter. All they want is recognition that they're an actual tribe, but the state claims they don't exist, that all the Abenaki were exterminated. That ignores the Abenaki who show up living and breathing, with birth lineages and family history and all that. The state seems to claim that the Abenaki can't still be around because Vermont was just so damned good at genocide.”

“What's at stake?”

“What's always at stake?” Gina asked. “Money, of course. There's a core of state politicians who are afraid that if they grant the Abenaki claims, then the tribe will demand some of their land back to create a reservation. That will cut into the tax base, complicate land claims, stir things up. Better to keep them dead Indians.”

“So the Abenaki have staked a claim to land?”

“No, no, not that I've heard. At this point they just want the existence of their people to be formally acknowledged.”

“Benson is a big landowner.”

“Yeah, raw land up north, some right around here, too, but if you think he'd be involved in this because he's afraid of losing his land, think again. If the state did recognize any Abenaki claims to Benson's land, they'd compensate him.”

I looked at the pencil on the scarred wooden top of her desk. “But in eminent domain cases, when the state takes someone's land, the state itself decides on the price to pay for it. That might not be the same valuation that Benson would put on the land.”

“Well, at this point it's all academic. The Abenaki haven't made any claim. And besides, Benson is politically well
connected enough that he'd be sure to be handsomely compensated, even if smaller land owners got screwed.”

I was following the train of thought: “Might there be a possibility, though? Any Abenaki remains, any old Indian graveyards in Vermont?”

“Oh, sure, lots of them. I know of one case in which a burial site has been protected by the government, but really, I don't think that Benson, or his wife, or Jerry have any connection with this Abenaki business.” She gave me a speculative look. “Wait a minute. Jeremiah Smith's wife was part Indian, wasn't she? Was she an Abenaki?”

Reporters had the pareidolia bug, too. “That's right,” I said. Then after a pause, I added, “And I've met a woman who looks like a Native American, wears buckskin clothes and moccasins. She showed up at my cabin outside of Northfield. I'd guess her to be in her late twenties, early thirties, black hair, big dark brown eyes. Her name is Sylvia. Know her?”

Gina shook her head. “No. I might ask some of my Abenaki contacts, but she doesn't sound like anyone I know. Is she related to Jeremiah's wife? Was Jeremiah's death really accidental, or was he killed because somebody didn't like his Abenaki connections?”

“I don't know. What do you think?”

“I didn't know Smith well. I met him only a few times, but my reading of him was that he was totally nonpolitical, not like his grandson. Jeremiah's passion was trees, not Native Americans. With the exception of his wife.”

“OK,” I said. “Try this one: Do you know a kid in his early twenties, blond, tall, skinny, prominent Adam's apple, a guy who works for Bill Grinder in Northfield? His name's Darryl.”

“Oh, boy,” she said. “Look, it's a small place, but not that small. No, I don't know anything about a Darryl who works for
Bill Grinder. I have work to do, Mr. Tyler. If you can nail the bastard who hit poor old Jeremiah and didn't even stop, good for you. But I'll tell you, it seems to me you're trying to build it into some kind of conspiracy. I'm no expert, but I'd say you need to look for a car with a dent in its fender, not for Abenaki in the woodpile and little blonde wives thirty years younger than their husbands.”

“All right. But please do me one last favor. I'd like you to call the police department and check on something. Might even be a story in it.”

“Manipulator.” But she reached for her phone. With her hand on the instrument, she said, “Why don't you do it?”

“They didn't want me to involve myself with the case, and I don't want to draw their attention.” I then told the lie: “I have a witness who says there was a suspicious car in the area around the time Jeremiah was hit. It showed up later near town here, a dark Subaru wagon, apparently driven by a drunk. I know the police got a tip on it and were looking for it. If they found it, I'd like to know whose car it was. Police records are public. They should tell you.”

“But remember, we don't do crime news.” She took her hand off the phone. “All right, I know someone on the force, and I'll put in a call to him, but he won't be on shift until late this afternoon. I'll call you if there's anything. Right now I really have to get back to work. We're right up to deadline. In fact, half my staff is now at the printer's, having the plates for section one shot.”