Death in the Pines (18 page)

He convulsively grabbed for the pipe, and I let him take it from my hand. “None of your damn business!” He started to drop the pipe into his pocket, hesitated, and then turned and tossed it into the fireplace. A fire had been laid out but not lit. “Get out of here,” he said. “Or I'll call the police.”

“Call them. I'd like to talk to them.”

He lowered his chin and glowered at me. I didn't think he'd start a fistfight that he knew he'd lose. He was younger and taller than me, but in sloppy shape, with a little bulge of belly and slack muscles. Maybe hoping to needle him into trying me on, I said, “Are you this way with all Wanda's friends?”

His face turned red. “I've got a shotgun in my bedroom!”

“And I've got a thirty-eight Police Special even closer. Want to play cops and robbers?”

He looked uncertainly at my hand stuck down into my jacket pocket. “Like hell you've got a gun.”

So I pulled the revolver out and casually aimed it at the center of his new TV. “I could show you how it works.”

“Put it away,” he said.

I sat down in the recliner with the gun in my lap. “Just remember I can use it quicker than you can get to your shotgun. What did you do with your hunting rifle, Darryl?”

His face took on an assumed expression of stupidity. “I don't know what you mean.”

“How long have you had that TV? High def, is it? I hear they're pretty expensive.”

“I had it a while. Look, I got stuff to do. OK, you got the gun, you're the man. You made the point. Leave, OK?”

“Nice boots. What size are they?”

“Huh? Nines.”

“Did you take a shot at Jeremiah and me on my land a couple of days ago?”

“What? No! Get out of my—”

“Shut up. If you and Bill Grinder are up to something illegal, more illegal than smoking dope, say, if you've been doing something for Caleb Benson and being paid in cash, you really haven't left yourself many options. Between the police asking you and me asking you, which would you prefer?”

He was a chameleon, this Darryl boy. Now his neck and ears reddened. “I won't answer no questions. If you try me on, I'll beat the living shit out of you. I'm telling you, get the hell out of my house.”

“Why are you burning the pine saplings out back?”

He opened the door and said, “Get the hell out!”

I walked past him and paused a step in front of him. “Ever been hit by a stun gun, Darryl?” I poked him in the stomach with two fingers, and he thrashed like a gaffed salmon.

I drove back through Northfield. The early night had come on clear and colder. I headed up Route 12 to the EZ Living Mobile Home Park and pulled in. Four streets forked off from the main entrance, and alongside them huddled mobile homes ranging from rusted and elderly models to fancy new almost-a-house ones. They had practically no yards, but the place seemed to have been kept up well enough. I got out of my Jeep beside a rack of mailboxes and used my halogen flashlight to find one marked J. Smith. It was for trailer 2-23.

Figuring that 2 was the street, I took the second street from the left. Odd numbers were on the right, and halfway down the street I found Jeremiah's place. The mobile home wasn't new, and I guessed it was a two-bedroom one, judging from length and the arrangement of windows. It was a faded blue, and Smith, or someone, had built a wooden porch that ran half the length of the trailer. It also had a steeply pitched roof built on peeling, weathered two-by-four pillars that kept the heavy Vermont snow from accumulating on a flat roof.

Nobody was about. I parked and went up on the porch as if confidently expecting Jeremiah would be home. My flashlight showed a wood plaque mounted on the trailer just to the right of the door. It looked as if a kid had made it with a wood-burning set: WELCOME
TO THE
RESIDENCE
OF
J
EREMIAH
S
MITH.

The storm door and front door were both unlocked, saving me the bother of forcing them or going back to my cabin for a lock pick set. I stepped inside Smith's living room and my flashlight beam showed me I wasn't the first to visit. Someone had tossed aside the cushions from the sofa and recliner. All the cabinets in the kitchen stood open, pots and pans and canned goods lay where they had fallen, and even the trash bin had been upended.

I closed the curtains and turned on the lights, then walked down the hall. The first bedroom was fixed up as an office, with a desk, an old Underwood Standard portable typewriter, and a wall full of thumbtacked photos and mementoes of his years with the city. I pulled the drapes closed and turned on the lights. On a four-by-six foot corkboard hung black and white and faded color pictures of a younger Jeremiah Smith. One showed him and several other men around a huge snow-plow. Yellowed newspaper clippings commemorated record
blizzards. Newer articles about forestry, logging, and the passage or repeal of various laws overhung the older stuff.

Here, too, the place had been ransacked. The desk drawers hung open, one actually standing on end on the floor. A tumble of rolled-up white-and-blue survey charts and topographic maps had fallen out of the open closet door.

The bathroom next door had been searched. At the far end of the hall, the bedroom had suffered, too: the mattress of an unmade bed lay half-on, half-off the box springs and the dresser drawers and closet had been plundered. Whoever had made the search hadn't been looking for something small or easily concealed: the cushions had not been slashed, the coffee and flour packages hadn't been dumped. None of the framed pictures, mostly of Vermont wildlife, had been taken from the walls. Whatever the searcher had looked for was small enough to fit in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, but too large to hide behind a picture or in a box of cereal.

I gravitated back to Smith's office. The old metal desk with a gray rubberized surface probably dated from the 1950s— town surplus, I guessed—and the top was clear except for the typewriter and three shriveled things that turned out to be dried mushrooms, one black, one brown with small white and pink spots, and a long, thin one that was the pale gray color of a body three hours dead. They seemed in pristine condition. I didn't pick them up but stooped to examine them closely. What had they meant to Jeremiah? Edibles he'd picked in the forest? Somebody's gift to him? Rare specimens? In the living room, I had noticed a shelf that held a collection of old bottles, some with faded labels still on them, all neatly arranged so they could be seen. It appeared Smith was interested in mushrooms.

In the open desk drawer on the left I found a stack of typing paper. There was also an organizer with pencils, pens,
rubber bands, and paper clips in separate compartments. Jeremiah had been a man who took care of his things, gave each one its place. In the old photos the men around Jeremiah stood close to him, threw an arm over his shoulder. I got the sense of a decent and caring human being, one who knew things most people didn't, one who loved the long history of the area and his knowledge of the secrets of the forest, of the Abenaki.

But something hit me. None of the photos showed Jerry, none showed Jeremiah's deceased daughter or wife. I held my flashlight close to the walls and scanned them with a flattened beam. On the wall were five nails with small heads, one centered right over the desk. A faint tracing of dust showed me where five eight-by-ten frames had once hung. I wondered if Jerry had come to get the family photos. I didn't think Jeremiah would have taken them down. I had the feeling that he would have treasured the reminders of his family, particularly of Rebecca, the wife he'd spoken of with an obvious, lingering love.

I checked the large desk drawer underneath the one that held supplies. Hanging folders were in perfect order, a series of tabs slanting left to right in a diagonal line. The front folders had been labeled with years, starting in 1981. Tax records, I guessed after a look at one folder. Behind them were alphabetically-arranged folders: A
BENAKI
, and behind that B
ILLS
, C
ORRESPONDENCE
, F
ORESTS
, J
ERRY
, N
ATURAL
R
ESOURCES
A
GENCY
, R
EBECCA
, S
USAN
.

The J
ERRY
file was full of letters, report cards, medical records, and the general detritus of life, as were R
EBECCA
and S
USAN
. N
ATURAL
R
ESOURCES
held brochures about hunting seasons and regulations, a guide to wild animal tracks, a half-inch-thick government publication summarizing the state laws concerning the use of resources in Vermont. The F
ORESTS
file included a clipping of Jerry's article about gene-jumping, and
another of his story on genetically modified foods, plus roughly thirty pages of what looked like taxation boundaries superimposed on topographic maps. In the lower right corner of each was the word T
RACT
followed by a hyphenated number. I put that file on top of the desk.

Jeremiah's C
ORRESPONDENCE
file went back a little more than ten years. At random I pulled out faded carbon copies of letters Jeremiah had sent to state and local politicians. He advocated the passage of laws to protect Vermont's wilderness areas. He argued that hunters should be restricted to pre-serves—that areas where hunting was legal should have been posted, not areas where it was prohibited.

I pulled out one carbon that had been stapled to a reply. It was a couple of years old. The address was in Massachusetts.

I read Jeremiah's letter first:

Dear Genotypes Consolidated,

My old friend Caleb Benson often speaks highly of your products and services, and I may be doing some work similar to his research. Could you please send me a copy of your most recent catalog? Also, could you confirm that Caleb is your customer—I may have mixed up the companies in my addled old head, and don't want to embarrass myself by telling him I can't remember which company he'd so highly recommended when he's probably mentioned them (I think it's you) a dozen times over the past year or two.

Sincerely,

Jeremiah Smith, PhD

Research Forester

The company's response letter had been done on a laser printer. Beneath a well-designed logo that incorporated a microscope and an Erlenmeyer flask, the response said:

Dear Dr. Smith,

Thank you for your interest in our products. As you can see from the enclosed catalog, they are among the most advanced for their price in the industry. We've outfitted hundreds of small labs around the world, and some have made significant breakthroughs in their particular areas of research. We help them keep their budget focused on research and personnel by supplying basic equipment at a reasonable price, and offering a comprehensive leasing program for more specialized equipment such as our SQ-10L Spectrographic Sequence Analyzer.

Please pass along our thanks to Mr. Benson for his recommendation. As I'm sure he's told you, his associate Frank Lauser has been a regular customer of ours for years, so no doubt we are the company he referenced. I'll thank him for the referral the next time I hear from him as well.

If I can be of any service to you, our toll-free number is above and my extension is 3134.

It was signed by Deborah S. Colledge, Associate Director of Marketing, Scientific and Laboratory Products. I looked back in the file and found the catalog she had sent. I could recognize beakers, test tubes, and Petri dishes, but I could only imagine what their comprehensive list of special products and services was about—transcription in vitro, mutagenesis, DNA
sequencing, gene screening and purification, and something that sounded comically ominous: mouse knockouts.

Nothing else in the C
ORRESPONDENCE
file seemed meaningful, but I stacked the catalog atop the F
ORESTS
file. B
ILLS
was empty, but the A
BENAKI
file was fat with years of newspaper clippings, flyers and donation receipts from the Dawnland Center in Montpelier, and a batch of historical and contemporary literature from the Abenaki tribal headquarters up north. I added it to the pile.

Then somebody banged on the trailer's door. I didn't realize how edgy I had been until I found myself flubbing a quick draw from my jacket pocket. I grabbed the files from the desk and switched off the lights as I headed toward the door. I put the gun back in my pocket and began to run my story through my head. To my immense relief, the person standing on Jeremiah's porch wasn't a lawman. It was a little old lady, hands cupped around her eyes as she peered in through the storm door.

But then, I've known little old ladies who were harder to face down than a cop.

I
took a second, and the woman and I just looked at each other. I made no effort to hide the files I held, or to reach for my weapon. I was in my client's home, doing work for him. I opened the storm door to a woman in her seventies, graying hair pulled back in a severe bun. She looked upset, and when I stepped onto the porch she took three quick steps back. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Oakley Tyler. I'm a friend of Jeremiah's.”

“Somebody really tore up his place,” she said, staring past me at the couch cushions.

“Not me. Have you seen anybody over here in the last couple of days besides me and Jerry?”

She frowned, pulling her gray eyebrows together. She had the look of a nineteenth-century schoolmarm. I could picture her marching between rows of desks with a ruler ready to slap knuckles. “I knew I should have called the police,” she muttered.

“Tell me about it. I'm working with the police,” I said, stretching a point to the limit of its capacity.

“A man came by this morning. I didn't recognize him. Young man.”