Death in the Pines (17 page)

“Brothers?”

He nodded through the streamers of blue smoke. “Three boys, Darryl the youngest. Other two left home before Darryl and his mama moved to town. I don't know much about them. Both of them out of state, so far as I know. Now, mind, I don't know Darryl personally. He never comes into the store. I don't think he's the kind of person who likes to read.”

“Bill Grinder ever come in?”

“No. I've spoken with him. They say he's a good mechanic, but he's no reader, either.”

“How about Jerry Smith?”

“The college boy that writes for
This Week?
Yeah, he was in town a lot because of his grandpa. I special ordered some science books for him, pretty damn expensive—wait a minute, his grandpa was Jeremiah Smith, the old guy who got hit by the car. You investigating that?”

I grinned. “I could tell you, Bernie, but then I'd have to kill you.”

He laughed so hard that his body jiggled, and then he started to cough. He gasped, “I get it. You're looking into the hit-and-run but you don't want to make a big issue of it. So why all the questions? What's the connection between Grinder, Garret, and Jeremiah?”

“I don't have evidence of any connection. Anybody else ask you about any of them?”

“No.”

“I wouldn't say a lot about them if anyone does. I wouldn't even hint that anybody at all in town could be linked to such an unfortunate death.”

“Gotcha,” Bernie said.

“How about a Native American woman named Sylvia? Know her? She lives somewhere around here.” I described her.

Bernie shook his head long before I finished the description. “Never heard of her, and a woman like that would be noticed around here. Sorry.” He gave a couple of final coughs. “Now, I knew old Jeremiah. He'd drop in and shoot the breeze, buy a book once in a while. Most of his book shopping, though, he did in Montpelier. And I'd see him now and again leaving the library with a stack of books a foot high.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about Caleb Benson?”

“Jesus on a pogo stick! Those two are about as different as two men could get.”

“Did Benson grow up around here?”

“He was another Northeast Kingdom boy. He was only around during the summers, and those he spent in Montpelier. I'm a little older than he is. His parents shipped him off to three or four different prep schools, but he usually managed to get himself expelled. Smart kid. Mean as hell, though. Money ruined him. His parents had so much of it, he was immune.” He stubbed out his latest cigarette and reached for another, but paused before lighting it with his Zippo. “Tell you what, Benson's smart and he's rich. You don't want him for an enemy.”

“How did Jeremiah feel about him?”

Bernie got the cigarette going. “Hell, Jeremiah didn't care who liked him, who didn't.” He frowned out the window as a woman walked past and then said, “Jeremiah kind of thought of himself as a one-man forestry police force. Over the years he's made trouble for two dozen loggers or more. He caught them skidding logs across creeks, clear-cutting a stand without a permit, stuff like that, usually in remote areas where they figure nobody will notice or bother with them. But he was always out patrolling the woods.”

“Benson's in the timber business. He owns a big spread of land.”

“Yeah, but he's no logger. He hires that done. I never heard he had any kind of run-in with Jeremiah.”

“Or Jerry?”

“Couldn't tell you. Benson supports politicians, Smith writes about politics. They're of opposite persuasions, but I don't' know of any feud.”

“Seen anybody driving with out-of-state plates?”

“I don't drive. Walk from here to home and back. You don't notice license plates so much when you're on foot. You want to take one of those books on John Lincoln off my hands?”

“No thanks, I have a copy already.”

He went back to his book, but said, “You might not know, but Wanda and her daughter have been living all on their own since the night she went bowling with you. She's not seeing anybody.”

“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. No secrets in a small town, none at all.

With a possible exception for murder.

M
y Jeep was parked outside the pharmacy. I sat in it and called Information on my cell phone. Though 411 had a listing for Darryl Garret, when I dialed the number I got his recorded voice telling me to leave a message. I didn't.

It was almost closing time. I walked to the phone company and asked if I could see a directory. The receptionist looked surprised, but gave me one and told me to keep it. I found Darryl's address, a number on High Street, a paved street that runs from downtown and becomes a county route along the crest of a ridge overlooking the town. I went back and tossed the phone book into the back seat of the Jeep.

I could smell wood smoke on the afternoon air, air that was coppery fresh from having crossed two thousand miles of Arctic tundra and Canadian forests. They'll tell you in Vermont that lately the winters have been mild, the growing season longer, hard on cold-weather plants that now mature too early, rough on hibernating animals. But the heart of winter is still cold, and the crispness of a fading Vermont day reminds me that I'm alive.

I drove to Bill Grinder's place. The afternoon had become warm enough so that the streets streamed with meltwater from the heaps of snow scraped to the sides. Grinder's garage looked busy: a dozen cars clustered around it, and his new tow truck was parked almost as far back as his house. I went in through the office, which smelled of oil and gas, and found it empty. I heard Grinder's voice from the garage bays and found him there yelling at a young man who held a pneumatic lug wrench as though it were a weapon. Grinder was red in the face, spraying spittle and gesturing with a cigar butt. “Goddam, you flip one more bolt like that and hit the paint job on this car, I'll dock you a week's pay!”

“I didn't mean to do it!” The young mechanic looked like a high school junior or senior, with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a blotch of acne on his cheeks. His posture and tone reminded me of a whipped dog.

Grinder caught sight of me. “Now what the hell do you want?” he demanded of me, his voice a snarl. He wasn't in hunting togs now, but green work pants and a long-sleeved thermal T shirt. Red and white striped suspenders held the pants up.

I approached him as the kid scuttled around the Lexus. “I'm looking for Darryl.”

“You got a hell of a nerve! Take up with his girlfriend so she dumps him, then you run out on her. If I was Darryl, I'd kick your worthless ass.”

“That happened months ago. This isn't about that.”

“So you gonna post your land, you warnin' him off?”

Across the back of the bay stood a bank of computerized diagnostic equipment, shiny and new, spread out and looking expensive. “Maybe I don't need to talk to him if you tell me what you and he are doing for Caleb Benson.”

Grinder took three quick steps to the wall and grabbed a tire iron. He came toward me with it over his shoulder, squinting one eye like the old spinach fancier. “This is private property. I got a right to defend myself. Davey will swear he heard you threaten me.”

Davey, the kid with the ponytail, stared at us over the hood of the Lexus.

Grinder didn't attack, but he growled, “Get the hell out of here or I'll break your skull open.”

He'd given me the answer, so I left. In the level light of sunset, I drove to High Street and followed it out of town, watching the numbers. The pavement was beaten all to hell by the weather.

The change in Grinder troubled me. He and Jeremiah had seemed amicable enough, but since Jeremiah's death something had curdled him. His threat didn't bother me—I still had my Police Special in my jacket, and even without it I suspected I could take the older, slower man without serious trouble— but I didn't need to spend any time in the local jail. What was making Grinder so edgy? Either he didn't want me talking to Darryl, or else he was more cunning than I thought and had found this way of sending me on the wrong trail.

I saw a mailbox ahead with the number that the phone book had given as Darryl's address. It was at the end of a drive leading thirty feet back to a little saltbox house, wearing shabby gray siding. The snowy yard held a crisscross of tire marks, and in the backyard I could glimpse a jungle gym rusting to oblivion.

The house looked dark, and no car stood in the driveway. No one answered my knock, so I tested the door and found it locked. Evergreen shrubs hid the house from the neighbors. I walked around the place, looking for an open window. They
were all secure, and the back door was locked as well. I didn't have a pick set with me, and I needed to learn more before breaking and entering.

Not far from the dilapidated jungle gym I saw a black smear against the lingering snow. It looked like the remnants of a bonfire, a pile of gray ash and the charcoal fossils of burned trunks. A pile of pine trimmings, needles brown and desiccated, lay near the ashes. Pine saplings, I saw, all cut in three- or four-foot sections, the largest an inch in diameter at the base.

Oddly for such small trees, the sticks were branchless, except for a couple that sprouted a few sprays near the very top. If I assembled the top and bottom section, I had an eight-foot tall, nearly branchless pine tree, something Charlie Brown might see in nightmares at Christmas time.

Something else odd: each tree had been marked with a splotch of blue spray paint. I broke off a sprig from one of the trees with brown needles, seeming as fragile as three-thousand-year-old papyrus, walked back to the Jeep, and set it in the back seat.

The sun had gone down. I drove a little further on High Street, getting a sense of the ridgeline area. The road twisted like a snake, making it hard to see more than a hundred feet ahead. The houses got further apart, except one stretch where three houses clustered together, parts and chunks of about twenty junked cars sharing their collective yard.

I turned around there, but before I could pull back into the street my cell phone rang. I expected Gina, but I heard Jerry Smith's voice: “Tyler?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I'm sorry. I blew it there in the diner. Look, I've
been under strain, you know? That's not an excuse, but, well, for what it's worth, I apologize.”

“Thanks, kid. Say, while I've got you on the phone, where did Jeremiah live?”

“In a trailer park north of Northfield.”

“What's the name?”

“What does it matter?”

I didn't press it; Jeremiah had told me about the trailer park, but I hadn't noticed it when I drove up Route 12. “Jerry, why did you pretend you didn't know Eva Benson?”

I heard his breathing. I suspected he was mentally replaying our conversation. “Did I say I didn't know her? We went to the same high school, that's all. I didn't really know her.”

“But you must have recognized her when Jeremiah took you to Benson's place.”

He grunted. “Oakley, I called to apologize. But I'm serious about firing you. If you want to do something for Jeremiah, honor his grandson's request.”

“Don't you want to know who killed him? Or who tied you to that tree, and why?”

“The police will find the hit-and-run driver. My business is my business.”

“Jerry, it wasn't a hit-and-run accident. It was deliberate murder.” I wondered what would happen if I stirred the pot. “I have an eyewitness.”

“Who?”

“I could only give that information to my employer.”

“I could tell the police you're hiding information.”

“You could. But it wouldn't solve anything. It wouldn't help you find out who killed your grandfather.”

“Look, just drop it.”

“Then tell me about Bill Grinder.”

“It's late, and we're on a tight deadline. Sorry.” He hung up.

I turned off the phone. I dislike phones, dislike e-mail and instant messaging and all the other forms of communication that seem to be replacing face-to-face discussion. You can't see the other person's expressions or body language. You can't judge when they begin to lie. You can't punch them in the nose.

I pulled out into High Street and drove back toward town, and not long after I had passed Darryl's driveway a red Dodge muscle truck swung around the curve ahead. My headlights were on, and thanks to them and the dying light of sunset, I recognized Darryl at the wheel. The truck bed had been loaded high with pine saplings. After he had vanished behind me, I made a U-turn and drove back to his house. The truck was in the drive and lights were on in the house. I checked the safety on my Police Special, but left it in my jacket pocket.

Darryl opened the door before I could knock. “What do you want?”

I pushed forward, bumping his shoulder as he made a halfhearted attempt to block me. “We need to talk.”

He hadn't shaved in a day or two. From close up I could see the ghost of a blond beard on his chin and upper lip. His skin was sallow and blue veins showed through it. He wore faded blue jeans, a gray-green flannel shirt, and brown lace-up work boots. I smelled stale beer, pizza, cigarettes, and the faint reek of pot.

“I'm not talking to you except to tell you to leave. You ain't welcome, Tyler.”

We were in a poor man's living room, dark wood paneled walls, a ceiling painted yellow but peeling here and there,
a brown shag rug at least twenty years old and matted with spills. The couch and recliner were shabby, the pine coffee table scarred and cigarette-burned. But against the far wall a brand new big-screen TV stood on an improvised entertainment center made from scavenged milk crates.

Beside the jam-packed ashtray on the pine table lay a corncob pipe. I picked it up and sniffed it. “Smoking a little dope, Darryl?”