Death in the Pines (16 page)

I jotted down my cell number for her. She had already opened a file on her computer and was assaulting the keyboard. I wished her a good afternoon. She grunted around the blue pencil, which she now had clenched sideways in her teeth.

N
ewport is sixty-odd miles north of Montpelier, located at the south tip of Lake Memphremagog. There is a spot where the lake pinches off a bay. On the east shore is a country club. On the west shore is an unpretentious brick building, modern but drab, that houses the main office of Benson Consolidated Inc.

Benson was not on the premises, I was told. He currently was surveying some part of his land by helicopter. He was not expected back. I left my phone number.

With Benson unreachable, I thought I might try finding Darryl. Grinder had seemed oddly protective of the kid. There was a possibility that Darryl was another loose end, so I drove back to Northfield to check it out.

The social center of Northfield is a blinking stoplight in the middle of town. Nearby is a small park that boasts a statue, and at the far end of the park is an old train station, now converted into a library. Running along either side of the park are storefronts dating back to the nineteenth century, none still occupied by original businesses. A hardware store, a pizzeria, the phone company, a moribund travel agency, and a drugstore constitute the major enterprises, all but the phone company locally owned.

Opposite the park and the main commercial district, on the other side of Main Street, there's another strip of old buildings with similar businesses housed in them, a barber, a bank, a deli, a florist, a bookstore, an antique shop, and a realtor. Just around the corner is the police station, located conveniently across the street from a doughnut shop.

At the four corners close by the Northfield police station, Delilah's Café faces the park diagonally. It's a standard American menu. Wanda works weekdays while her daughter is in school, and on the two busier afternoons she pulls a longer shift, so as to have weekends free.

I walked in to the strains of Johnny Paycheck singing “Take this Job and Shove It” on the jukebox that never seemed to acquire any tunes from this century. It was late for lunch, a little early for dinner.

Eight men dressed in hunting gear and army surplus sat at a table and booth in the back, swapping stories and raucous laughter. A young couple sat in one of the other four booths along the wall with the two small windows, blinds slatted to ward off the western sunlight. Right behind them a woman in a red business suit sat opposite a middle-aged couple, a three-ring binder with real estate photos and descriptions open on the table. A solitary old man sat at the counter, reading a paper and nursing a cup of coffee.

Wanda, on counter duty, gave me an unreadable glance before vanishing into the kitchen in the back. I sat on the stool at the end of the counter nearest the door and cash register. Debby, the pleasant middle-aged woman who owns the place, asked, “What'll it be, Oakley?”

It had been nearly four hours since lunch with Jerry. “BLT,” I said. “But make it a CLT, cheese instead of bacon.”

She squinted. “Cheese sandwich, lettuce and tomato. Here or to go?”

“Here if you can get Wanda to come out and talk to me.”

“I'm not sure I can do that. What kind of cheese, Cheddar, Swiss, or American?”

“Cheddar, extra sharp. And a Coke, no ice.”

Debby called the order back, then stood in the doorway to the kitchen and said something in a voice too soft for me to catch. She went on over to freshen up cups among the hunting party in the back.

After a minute Wanda brought out a tray laden with burgers and sodas. She took them to the realtor and her clients. Watching her walk, I remembered what it had been like to hold her and felt a twinge of loss.

The first time I'd seen her had been late the previous summer, the week after I moved into the cabin. I'd needed some hardware and had come into town for it, then stopped at the café for lunch. Wanda served me. She's what John Lincoln always kidded me about, one of my skinny little blondes. She thought her ears stuck out and covered them with a poufy hairdo that made her face look wide across the cheekbones. We flirted a little that first day, and the next time I came in, this time for breakfast, I'd asked her out.

Wanda said she wanted to go bowling, of all things. She had bowled in high school, but not since. She held a BA degree and was a year into a master's program in English literature when she got pregnant and dropped out to find a job and be a mom. She still dreamed of eventually teaching English.

She wasn't a great bowler, and I wasn't much better, but we rolled balls down the thundering lanes, drank beers, and talked. She told me she'd thrown her boyfriend out the day
before I first met her. He was, it seemed, a no good son of a bitch who didn't care enough about his future to hold a job.

At some point Wanda managed to bowl a strike, and I kissed her. She responded. We didn't even finish the game. Part of me knew how stupid it all was, shooting fish in a barrel. Wanda told me to drive her home, told me her daughter was away, spending a week with her grandparents down in Brattle-boro. Instead of taking Wanda directly home, I drove to my cabin. We fell into bed and she clung to me through the night.

I told myself that the evening was therapy for her, for me, a little bit of mutual fun that left us both feeling better. No harm done.

I shouldn't lie to myself. The next morning Wanda was broody, accusatory, telling me I'd taken advantage of her after plying her with four beers. She didn't normally drink that much, she didn't sleep around, she wasn't a loose woman. I began to suspect that her problems with the husband and the boyfriend were not as one-sided as I'd heard. I found myself not liking her as much, and when I dropped her off at her house later, we behaved with icy formality. It took another couple of weeks for me to realize we had both been acting like victims. That made us good Americans, I supposed. We talked, now and then, when I saw her on the street or came into the café, but I still had made no apologies, mended no fences.

She finished with the testosterone crew, vanished again into the kitchen, and came out with my sandwich. Her mouth was tight as she brought me the cola and CLT.

“Here,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

She wore no makeup, but she didn't need it. She had one of those fresh faces that was attractive enough without window dressing.

“It's been months,” I said. “Can't we be friendly?”

She frowned. “It's hard for me to forgive myself. I was stupid.”

“For what it's worth, I'm sorry,” I said. “I took advantage of you. That was wrong.”

Then she gave me a rueful smile. “I don't hold a grudge. But I do hold a job. You've got maybe five minutes before I have to make the rounds again.”

“How's things at home?”

“Fine, now that Darryl's out of our lives.”

I paused with my sandwich halfway to my mouth. “Darryl?”

“I told you about him, way last summer. I kicked him out, remember?”

“I don't think you told me his name back then. Is he a tall guy, blond?”

“Yes. He's never finished a thing in his life, including school. He wanted to get back together with me last fall, but I've had enough of him.”

“I think he showed up at my place this morning, armed with a rifle.”

“I'll be back.” Wanda went around the room leaving checks, freshening drinks, and then returned to me. “Darryl came after you with a rifle?” she asked in a low voice. “You're not kidding me?”

“He had a rifle. He didn't exactly threaten me. Do you know where he's been, where he was last night or this morning?”

“I don't keep tabs on him, and I haven't even seen him in a week or more. Look, I don't want to talk about that bastard.”

“OK. It's good to see you again. Did you by any chance tell Darryl about us?”

“I don't tell Darryl anything, and I don't want to talk about him. Do you have any other subject in mind?”

“How about us?”

That was the wrong thing to say. A new customer came in and sat down at the counter. Wanda leaned forward and said shortly, “Ask Darryl about Darryl. Read about me in the papers.” She went to wait on the new guy.

I finished my sandwich in ten minutes. Wanda acted as if I had become invisible. Neither she nor Debby brought me the bill, but I left the cost of the sandwich plus a three-dollar tip on the counter. Wanda came to collect it and muttered, “Thanks.”

The jukebox was playing Leonard Cohen's “Tower of Song.” I said, “Look, can't we start over? I mean, just as friends?”

“Maybe some time. Not now.”

The old man with the paper was watching us. “I'll be around,” I said.

Darryl and Wanda. A possible reason for Darryl to hold a grudge against me. Patterns in chaos.

I crossed the intersection and went into the Backwoods Bookshop, a store that buys and sells used books, DVDs, and computer games. They also have three shelves of new books, a few bestsellers, a lot of religious, gardening, and hunting titles. Bernie, the owner, usually sits behind a cluttered desk at the front, reading and chain-smoking. Bernie is in his late fifties with pink skin, a thin white beard, and longish hair. I'd guess his weight as somewhere between two seventy-five and three hundred. He looked up as I came in, making the bell above the door tinkle. “How ya doin'?” His voice had the rasp of a longtime smoker.

“Fine, Bernie. How are you?”

“Got the goddam gout, can you imagine? I'm getting old. Gout!” He took a deep drag on a filter cigarette.

I browsed the N
EW
A
RRIVALS
table—the N
EW
meaning they were new to Backwoods Bookshop, not to the world. In a
pile of hardcovers I picked up an oddity, a book from the '50s called
Inside the Space Ships
by George Adamski. It was a true-life UFO adventure, complete with actual photos of pie plates in the sky.

“Helluva book, that one,” said Bernie, whose eyesight was still keen. “Read that when I was a kid. I tell you, it changed my life.”

“Ever been abducted?” I asked him.

“In my dreams.” He chuckled. “Adamski seems pretty damn foolish now, but hey, the book got me interested in science and hooked on reading. Say, if you're interested, I got in two copies of
L.A. P.I.,
found them on the Internet. Here ya go. One's a library copy, the other a good first edition.”

I picked up the good first edition of the bad book written by a hack, basing it on the lousy screenplay from the movie they'd made about John Lincoln solving the case of a kidnapped California senator's daughter. The movie itself was creaky with age, twenty-five years old or more now. Lincoln hadn't written the screenplay or even had any opportunity to comment on the script, but he had suffered. The movie made California law enforcement out to be totally venal and corrupt—and inept and incompetent.

After it came out, Lincoln began to be regularly stopped, ticketed, and once even arrested: changing lanes without using turn signals, having a minute crack in a taillight lens, parking an inch and a half too far from a curb. In disgust, he'd packed it in and moved to Atlanta, where a major airline had some security issues they'd wanted his advice on, and there I'd met him ten years ago. John didn't like the movie, didn't like to be reminded of it.

“It's lousy,” I told Bernie.

“True story, though,” Bernie replied.

“Only in the sense that some people with those names lived in California at the time. John didn't save the attorney general from assassination. Half the information the book has him turning up came from stuff he'd read in the papers.”

“Yeah, but it reads well.”

“Maybe if you like dime-store detective stories.”

“Yeah, actually I do.”

“Then it's your sort of thing. Hey, Bernie, do you by any chance know a tall blond kid in town named Darryl?”

He stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ash tray. “Guy that lived with Wanda for about six weeks? You and her making up?”

“This isn't about Wanda. This morning Bill Grinder and a kid named Darryl came onto my property, rabbit hunting they said, and I chased them off.”

“Yeah, that'd be the same Darryl. He works for Bill now and then, when he feels like it or needs some cash. See, what you need to do is register and post your land—”

“I know.”

“So do it. You can't fight the system. Hunting's big business around here, draws in eighty-odd thousand people every November. Tourist hunters, bringing money. Tell you, though, those out-of-state yahoos are a pain in the ass, raising hell, trashing the place, shooting people's dogs and cows.”

“You don't hunt, I take it.”

He lit a cigarette. “Hunted Charlie in Vietnam. Had enough of toting a rifle to last me the rest of my life. I don't like the taste of venison, and killing just for fun is sick.” He blew out a cloud of smoke. “You ever kill anybody in your line of work?”

“That's classified,” I said, and he wheezed out a laugh. “Tell me about Darryl.”

“Killing is a hard thing,” Bernie said as though he hadn't heard me. “I got to return to the world thirty years ago next year, and I still wake up in the middle of the night thinking I'm in the jungle and Charlie's just ahead.”

“Tell me about Darryl,” I prompted again.

Bernie coughed. “Darryl grew up in the Northeast Kingdom. You know where that is?”

“I know.” The Northeast Kingdom was a nickname for three counties of Vermont, and it had been dreamed up by US senator George Aiken around 1950. It's border country, hard up against Canada.

“OK,” Bernie said. “When Darryl was a teenager his mama moved down here. She'd broken up with his old man. That was Billy Garret, a mean son of a bitch, doubly mean when he was drinking. Last I heard, he's in prison for dropping a tree with a chainsaw. It landed on a guy's house, nearly killed the man's wife. They charged him with attempted homicide. He had a grudge against the guy over some stupid shit, money owed or money borrowed.” Bernie paused to feed his nicotine habit and then added, “Billy was bound for prison, one way or the other. He used to beat the shit out of Darryl and his brothers.”