Death in the Pines (23 page)

I plowed ahead: “Not long after that he drove to Jeremiah Smith's trailer, entered it illegally, and went through it pretty thoroughly.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have a good eyewitness.”

“He must be in trouble, doing stuff like that.” She shook her head. “Damn. Look, will you help him? As a favor to me?”

“Not if he helped kill Jeremiah.”

“That was an accident.”

“No.” I grinned without mirth. “It was no boating accident. And it wasn't a shark. It was someone committing murder, and the weapon was a vehicle with out-of-state plates.”

“Huh?”

I said, “Pop culture references are lost on you. But what I said is true: someone killed Jeremiah. I thought so at the time, and now I'm positive. Caleb Benson's in on it somehow, and Bill Grinder. And Darryl.”

“Darryl's scared,” Wanda said. “I called him after I heard about the shooting. He wouldn't talk to me. He still tries to get me to take him back, but I can tell something's bothering him, something big. Maybe Bill got him involved in something crooked, I don't know. Darryl's worked part-time for Bill off and on for years, but a part-time mechanic doesn't get the kind of money Darryl's been spending around town. He paid Bobby Dominey cash for that truck of his. He never had that kind of money in his life.”

“He smokes pot. Does he deal it?”

“I'd have heard, and he'd have had to get half the town stoned to make the kind of money he seems to have. I thought he might be smuggling something in or out of Canada, but I don't know what.”

“It would be a stupid racket for him to try.”

“Yeah, well, he hasn't won any Rhodes scholarships.” She got to her knees, then to her feet. “I'd better go. The neighbor lady is watching Marie. Walk me to my car?”

I picked up the flashlight. On the way down I studied the snow, but the warming weather had reduced it to slush that wouldn't hold a good footprint. As Wanda backed out to the road, I considered going into town and renting a motel room. But if someone sincerely wished me dead, I'd be no safer there.

I turned off the flashlight and gave myself a moment for my eyes to adjust, then made my way back uphill. Outside the cabin, I paused. “Thank you, Grandfather,” I said loudly.

The great night brooded silently.

I went inside and closed the door. I was down to my last bottle of wine.

As I opened it, I saw that the corner of the blanket on my bed had been thrown back. The files were missing.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice had said. I would have to do something about this.

But first I had to do something about that last bottle of wine.

T
he phone shrilled me out of sleep. Thinking it was still night, I fumbled for it, and then as I registered the leak of daylight around the blanket covering the front window I realized the sun was well up. “Tyler here.”

“Mr. Tyler.” The voice was familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. It had the Vermont accent. Then it clicked.

“Mr. Benson,” I said. “I tried to reach you at your office.”

“I was checking some land,” he said.

“See anyone tied to a tree?”

He grunted. “I don't want to talk on the phone. Can we meet this afternoon? Do you know Burlington?”

“Just where it is.” It was an hour west of me, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain.

“There's a place there called the Five Spice Café.” He gave me the street address. “You can Google it,” he added.

“No, I can't. No computer.”

“Oh?” He sounded surprised. “Well, just stop and ask. You can find Church Street easily enough, and anybody along there will know where it is. Meet me there at one-thirty.”

“I could just come to your place, or you could come here.”

“No. People talk. I don't want locals to see me with you.” He paused. “You're wondering if I killed Jeremiah Smith. I didn't.”

“Then who did?”

“That's what we can talk about. At one-thirty.”

“What time is it now?”

He sounded irritable. “God's sake, you don't have a computer, don't you even have a watch? A clock?”

“No.”

“Seven thirty-seven
AM
,” he said, and hung up just as I remembered my phone would tell me the time.

I climbed out of bed and took the blankets off the windows. The slug had left a spider-webbed round hole in one pane. Outside, the sky was making the change from rosy pink to china blue. High cirrus clouds brushstroked it like a delicate painting. Through the window I saw rivulets of water running. The eaves wore beards of dripping icicles.

The cabin was cold enough to make me hurry to get the fire going. A quart of lukewarm water remained in the cast-iron snowmelt pot atop the stove. I used it for a sponge bath. Then I dressed and went back to the spot where the bullet had buried itself in a two-by-six roof joist. I pulled my sturdy table over and stood on it, eyes level with the hole in the wood, and sighted through the hole in the window. The shooter had been near the edge of the clearing east of the cabin, unless he'd been hiding sniper-fashion in the treetops farther downslope.

When I stepped out the air was crisp, not freezing, and it smelled fresh with pine sap. A lot of snow will melt today, I thought. The temperature probably was right around forty and might climb into the fifties with full sun. I couldn't make anything of the tracks, not even in daylight. Too much slush.

I walked as far as the rock outcrop, half expecting to see Sylvia, but only an outspoken chipmunk waited there, chittering at me from a cleft in the rocks to go away and leave him alone. I wondered if she'd be up Route 12 near the tree I was supposed to visit this morning.

I drove out there in the Jeep, through a fair amount of traffic. A guy tailgating me slammed on his brakes when I slowed to make the turn onto the abandoned logging trail. This time no deer were there to direct me, and maybe my turn was a little abrupt. I found the spot where the Subaru had parked. From the ruts in the muddy slush, it looked like someone had driven in and out several times in the last few days. I found the spot where I had first seen Jerry tied to the tree, then in the daylight saw I had missed an easy descent that I could have taken in the darkness.

As Sylvia had instructed me, I stood at the tree, facing east, and raised my right arm out to my side. I took off on foot, following the rolling terrain. Far ahead one dead tree towered above the rest of the forest. I caught occasional glimpses of it. My path was taking me more or less straight toward it. It served as an aid to navigation. I hit the overgrown old logging trail again and saw more fresh tracks. Hard to tell, but it looked like two different vehicles, the deeper tracks from a tire tread with a diamond pattern.

And then I emerged in a churned-up clearing. The vehicles, or at least one of them, had been in and out of here repeatedly and had turned around many times. Along the margin were boot tracks and drag marks. The boot tracks looked about size nine. I thought of Darryl and his truck and wondered about the tires he ran on it.

Brown twigs with brittle pine needles littered the pathway. I followed it along deeper into the forest. Then I came out in a
much larger clearing, an acre or more, and found an expanse of small pine-sapling trunks, all cut off about six inches from the ground. From the sawdust, it looked as though the trees had been trimmed off by a handsaw, not a chainsaw, which mostly only leaves chunks. Most of the stubs were between an inch and two inches in diameter, the same size as the brush Darryl had been burning.

I scouted around the clearing. On the far side I sighted back toward the trail I'd followed coming in, then across the forest in the opposite direction, more or less south. I came across some weathered boot tracks in the snow, not the same size as the ones I'd followed in. They seemed to belong to someone doing the same thing I was, scoping out the clearing. I made a complete circuit.

I saw another, smaller clearing below and walked down to it. More small pine stumps, but these were gray and weathered, not fresh. They bordered a small wash that in wet weather was probably a brook. I followed the gully for a hundred feet or so and found a few more stumps. Then fifty more feet brought me to a stand of small pines among the hardwood. There were only three, none more than three feet tall, and all were dead, needles a rusty brown, like the saplings I had seen in Darryl's pickup. I flexed a small branch on one and it snapped in my hand, with no give at all.

Something interesting. I climbed back uphill, then backtracked to my Jeep.

Back in Northfield I visited City Hall and found the town clerk's office. A soft-spoken middle-aged woman with a June Cleaver look told me it was indeed possible to discover who owned any given parcel of land within the jurisdiction. She took me into a room with a battered library table occupying most of the floor space and pulled out a set of plat maps that
she thought would show the area I described. As far as I could tell from distances and the landmark of a brook that had to be the one I had discovered, the land made up one parcel of something more than four hundred acres. It was owned by Benson Forestry Products Inc.

I went back to the Jeep and called the number for
This Week
. The guy with the ponytail answered, and I identified myself and asked for Gina.

“Oh, right, the gumshoe,” the man said in an exceptionally maladroit Bogart impression. In his normal voice, he said, “Hang on.”

Gina took half a minute to pick up, and then she said, “Hello, Tyler. Or should I call you the Casanova of Northfield?”

“I'd say that was an overstatement.”

She laughed. “Wanda's an old friend. She's written for the paper now and again, and I'd like her to do more of that. She's busy being a mom and waitress, though.” She laughed. “And news does get around. How did it feel having two wild women in your cabin at the same time?”

I had to grin. “Honest to God, I don't see why you even bother to publish a newspaper. By the time it hits the streets everyone knows everyone else's business anyway.”

“Well, there's only a half-million people in the state, lots of us are related to each other, and most of the others are friends. Look, we're a week from the next deadline, but that doesn't mean I have time to chat about this and that. What's on your mind?”

“I need somebody to tell me about genetic engineering.”

“Don't know anything about it except what I've read in the papers. It's either going to feed the world or end life as we know it, or maybe both. Ask Jerry, he's the one who wrote all the stories. But be aware that he's very anti-big business. I think he's sore because he didn't get a job.”

“I don't understand.”

“While he was still working on his dissertation. He interviewed in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but he hadn't finished that PhD and nobody wanted to hire him.”

“He told me he was going to finish his degree soon.”

“Maybe. He had a setback when his major professor at UVM died a while back. They thought it was some bizarre seizure, but it turned out he poisoned himself somehow, picked some toxic mushrooms or something. People do that all the time here—couple of times a year, anyway. Get some wild mushroom book and go out in the woods and try to make a gourmet meal out of something deadlier than blowfish.”

“I hadn't heard. Anyway, Jerry's touchy with me. I need someone else to bring me up to speed.”

“Let me think. There's Nigel Jameson. Retired UVM professor. Jerry used him as a source in some of his stories. British guy, old but sharp as a pin. I can find his number. Hey, would there be a story in this?”

“Not if you leave crime to the dailies.”

“We could make an exception. Jameson's asked that we not give out his number. Let me call him and then call you back.”

“That'll do, thanks.”

She called back in less than five minutes. “OK, twenty minutes from now, his place. Pick me up?”

“I'm on the road now.”

“How close?”

“Not long.”

“Meet you on Main Street in front of the building. Do you know where Jerry is?”

“Haven't spoken to him since yesterday. Is he missing?”

“I wouldn't call it that, but he missed a deadline and I had to throw something else into the space. He's not answering his phone.”

I didn't have any response to that. “See you soon,” I said.

A few minutes later I picked her up and she directed me to a house that looked as though it had been plucked from
The Arabian Nights
and plunked down in Vermont. It was a yellow Gothic on a hilltop just a little south of town, all steep rooflines and nine-foot-all diamond-pane windows. I stopped in the drive and we walked across a flagstone courtyard. Jameson met us at the door, a man with the rumpled, tweedy look of the absent-minded professor. His thinning white hair had been carefully arranged on the pink dome of his scalp. His face was dominated by a potato nose and framed by oversized ears. He had the droopy brown eyes of a basset hound. I gathered he was in his seventies, but he stood perfectly erect and gave me a firm handshake. Then he kissed Gina on the cheek.