Death in the Pines (5 page)

“Here you go.”

One thing I missed about Atlanta: there the waitresses have a pet name for you the first time they see you.
Freshen your coffee up, Sugar? Want a li'l more pie, Honey?
Lucille, like the tables and the chairs and the plates, had no air of nonsense about her.

I pretended to scan the front page of the paper. It had taken me three calls to learn what Caleb Benson looked like and where and when he was likely to have breakfast. I wasn't about to start anything, but I wanted a look at the man Smith thought was going to kill his grandson.

At six-forty he came in with one other man. Benson proved easy to spot. He stood six-two with the shoulders of a lumberjack. I guessed he carried maybe 210 pounds, and he carried it well. Jeans, brown cowboy boots, a flannel shirt in a green-and-black plaid. He carried a folded-up orange
Financial Times
in his right hand as if it were a machete. The man with him was forty-something, dark hair, clean shaven, dressed in new jeans and a custom-made white cotton shirt with a thin blue stripe. He had the aura of an academic and the swagger of a businessman who kept in shape.

Benson apparently had a regular booth, given the way they went right to it and Julio himself came out to take their order.

I jerked my head at Lucille. “I'm giving up on my appointment,” I told her. “I'll just take my coffee back there to a table where I can spread out my paper. If you could do me two eggs over easy, hash browns, and a double order of wheat toast, I'd be a happy man.”

“You got it,” she said.

Enough early customers had seeped in so that I was not particularly conspicuous. I meandered back, sipping my coffee, looking down at my folded paper, until I got to a table for two not so far from Benson's booth. I tossed the paper down and pulled out a chair. Then I spread the paper out and began to read. The president said we needed to tough it out a little longer in Iraq and Afghanistan. A study group was trying to discover why bees were dying. It had begun a couple of years before. It is to bees what the fundamentalist Christians think
the Rapture will be to them: whole colonies of bees vanish overnight. If any are left in the hive, they are vitiated and weak and guarding a dwindled queen.

Someone once estimated that if the honeybee, which pollinates the majority of the foods we eat, ever goes extinct, humankind will follow in four years.

I turned the page just as Lucille brought my breakfast. While I ate and appeared to read, I was eavesdropping, with difficulty. Benson and his guest did not speak loudly or boisterously. Benson was saying in a calm voice, “But I have to be a hundred percent sure, Frank, that all that stuff is dead. Not ninety-nine. You need to think this through again.”

“I've got everything covered,” Frank said in a near whisper. “We clean it up, we take it as a loss. We don't want to try this again, even if they're certain it'll make a fortune. There's way too much goddamn risk.”

“Do what you can on your end,” Benson said. “And I'll wrap it up on mine.”

Frank got up and walked out without another word, just as Benson got his breakfast. Benson ate quietly while he read his copy of the
Financial Times
. I finished my food and got a refill on the coffee. The cat in
Mutts
was playing with his little pink sock. The first word in the Jumble puzzle turned out to be
toque,
which gave me a hard time. And then Benson cleared his throat loudly, and when I looked up he crooked a finger at me.

There is a time and a place for machismo. Julio's at a little past seven in the morning is not it. I pushed back my chair and walked over to Benson. “Sit down, please,” he said.

I sat on the empty bench opposite him.

“I assume you wanted to see me, Mr. Tyler,” Benson said. “Here I am.”

I frowned. “I was having my breakfast and reading the paper. I don't know you. I've never met you, never seen you before this morning. Why should I give a damn about you, mister?”

“What did old Jeremiah Smith tell you last night?” Benson asked.

He was good. He had a high forehead, dark hair crinkling up from it in a widow's peak. I couldn't read his eyes, nor quite name their color: dark, nearly black, but whether blue or an unusual dark gray, I couldn't say. His face was not a handsome one, but it held weight and authority. You saw faces like that on old Roman sculptures. And he exuded something, a sense of contained power. Sitting opposite him was a bit like having a picnic on the shoulder of Mount St. Helens.

“Jeremiah's a friend of mine,” I said. “He helps me drink my wine.”

“I am sure you have some mighty fine wine,” Benson said without cracking a smile. “Jeremiah Smith has some odd ideas about me, Mr. Tyler. I trust you have the sense to question anything a prospective client might say to you. Please rest assured that I have no ill-will against the old man. If he has hired you—”

I laughed. “You look as if you know a few things, or ought to. Feel free to check and see what sort of fees Lincoln and Tyler charged, and what sort of clients we took on.”

“It was a small fortune,” he said. “A corporate clientele. And very discreet service. Mostly you guys did international industrial espionage or recovery of stolen goods.”

I nodded. “And so you will know that I sold out and retired.”

“I heard you got a cabin outside of town. Why live so poorly when you musta cashed out well?”

“I always loved Thoreau,” I said. “Wouldn't want to die without having tried a simple life.”

“For how long?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. So far it's surprisingly fulfilling.”

He nodded. We nodded at each other. It began to feel like a Japanese tea ceremony. To break the stretching silence, I finally said, “Now if I may ask an equally personal question, who the hell are you?”

“Don't insult my intelligence, Mr. Tyler.”

I grinned. “All right, Mr. Benson, I will not. Jeremiah implied you were a dangerous man whose activities ought to be looked into. He more than hinted that you could have inconvenient people removed.”

Benson spread his hands. “Did he tell you how many people I employ? How much of the area's economy depends directly upon me or upon one of my companies? I doubt that very much. I am a businessman, not a murderer, Mr. Tyler. Any money-making activity takes a small toll on the environment. My businesses do. But we operate within the letter of the law. We harvest trees, true, but we replant when we do. We produce materials that are toxic, but we detoxify them or dispose of them so they are no threat. The simple truth, Mr. Tyler, is that people like Smith despise me because they think I am despoiling their world, changing it for the worse. But whether I am here or not, the world will change. It is change they fear, not me.”

“I'll tell him so,” I said. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment.”

Benson nodded, and looked back down at his
Financial Times,
dismissing me. I got up, dropped a couple of dollars on my table as I walked by it, then went up front to where Lucille
was working the register. “He's paid for yours,” she said, nodding back toward the booth.

“No he hasn't,” I said, handing her one of the bills I had received from Smith. “He's just given you an extra tip, that's all.”

She didn't argue. I took my change and walked out into the clear-aired morning.

I could have gone straight from Julio's to Smith's place. He'd given me the address the night before, a trailer park outside Northfield, when I was driving him in to the bar. I should probably have done that, but I felt the need to think about things for a while. And I told myself that it could wait.

So I drove back out of town, out to the logging road, and as far up it as I could, just past the blackened spot where the truck had burned. The newspaper said it would be another unseasonably warm day, but then an arctic blast was due out of Canada in a day or two.

To be on the safe side I stopped at one of three woodpiles and got an armload of firewood. Toted it to the back of the cabin and dumped it in the sheltered lee near the plywood trapdoor. Went back down for another armload, and another. Kept at it for three or four loads past what felt necessary, until my lungs were heaving and my shoulders aching. Then, feeling righteous, I went back into my cabin and checked my phone. There are solar panels on the roof that charge a 12-volt marine battery. The marine battery provides enough power to keep my cell phone charged through a little Radio Shack 12-volt-to-110-volt inverter, and to run the radio when I decide to turn it on, which is pretty much never.

I built a fire and took out my book. Somehow something would be settled, or my subconscious would settle it. It is a kind of faith I have.

A solitary lunch, a solitary dinner. Night came on, and I stepped outside to see what the air tasted like. It was a thick darkness. Around the cabin, the forest was that kind of deep, deep black that comes with a heavy overcast on a winter night. No stars, no moon, and out here in the mountains, not even the lights of a nearby city. I walked down to the Jeep, more by instinct than vision, wanting to be out just to keep my ears open. Absurdly, I had the feeling that there were eyes in that darkness.

I reached the Jeep, a barely discernible block in the gloom. The wind was getting cold. I stood there breathing it in for ten minutes or so. Nothing, no sound. Somehow I did not relish the climb back up to the cabin through the darkness, so I opened the Jeep and found the small kerosene railroad lamp that I kept there for emergencies or the darkest of nights. I lit it and in its ruddy glow headed back toward the cabin, the swinging light causing shadows to move and flicker as if the trees were dancing.

Unexpectedly, I smelled wood smoke billowing down the hillside. When I had left, the fire had burned down to a bed of red embers. I broke into a faster step, following the trail through the snow that Jeremiah had stamped out the previous day, and my heart beat fast, apprehensive that I had done something spectacularly stupid and that the cabin was on fire.

But it wasn't. It stood there square and solid as ever, and yellow light, lantern light, streamed out the windows. I knew damned well that I had extinguished the lantern inside before I left, to allow my eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.
I flipped up the globe on the railroad lamp I was carrying and blew out the wick: the forest expanded around me in the sudden blackness as if the land had exhaled.

Fifty feet to my right I heard a mournful hoot as an owl surveyed the slim pickings of a winter forest where snow protected the burrows of the field mice. I took careful steps, watching the windows closely for signs of movement within the cabin, but also scanning the area around me for any evidence of an ambush. If the light in the cabin was bait, I didn't intend to walk into the trap. I wrapped one hand around the Police Special in my pocket. It had been there all day, ever since I had decided to have breakfast at Julio's.

I saw through the front window a flicker of motion: somebody was sitting in one of the rocking chairs, moving gently back and forth. My space was being violated. With a self-righteous sense of indignation, I marched up to the door and threw it open.

The woman I'd seen the day before—Sylvia—was sitting in the straight-backed rocker. She smiled at me, a juice glass full of my wine in her hand. “Welcome back from the world of the forest spirits,” she said, raising the glass in a salute. Her smile was warm and friendly, her speech still careful and precise. She was wearing the same tight-fitting buckskin pants, shirt, and moccasins.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, relaxing my hold on the pistol in my pocket.

“You had a request,” she said simply. “You wanted to know what to do with the rest of your life.”

That threw me. To hide my confusion, I poured myself a glass of wine, noting that she had stoked the stove and trimmed the lantern, adjusting the wick so it gave a clear, smokeless light. I sat in the other rocker. “I think you have the wrong guy.”

“This is excellent wine. A good drug to keep a populace docile.” She smiled as if we had just shared a private joke and took another delicate sip.

“Beats nicotine,” I said. “So, for the sake of argument, what would you recommend I do with my life?”

“You could save the creatures of the world,” she said, face and voice utterly serious.

I stared at her. “Are you a missionary? From some religious group?”

“It is not necessarily a religious effort, is it? You don't consider yourself very religious, yet you try to save people.”

“I've tried now and again,” I said, and drank half my wine. “I've also hurt people, some very badly.”

“Killed some?”

“Yes.”

“But always to save others. The weak who cannot help themselves.”

“The rich weak,” I corrected, wondering what the pitch was and when it was going to come. Join us, my brother. Come to our compound in beautiful Belize. Have a cup of Kool-Aid.