Death Qualified (4 page)

    Something else, he thought. Something else. He looked around, as if looking for the something else. He saw the open garage door and closed it, hoping Miranda would not notice anything amiss before Dr. Brandywine returned.

    "Tom, listen to me. Did you touch the disks? Did you move them? Answer me, Tom."

    "No."

    He didn't search for a direction when he started to walk again, around the back of the house, into the woods on a path that had not become overgrown even if Dr. Brandywine no longer used it, not since Emil's death. Emil, he thought as if from a great distance. Dead. Emil was dead.

    His vision blurred and he wiped tears away. Emil Frobisher was dead.

    "Tom, listen carefully. He can't ever come out again.

    He did terrible, terrible things. It isn't your fault. You are innocent, but you have to keep him buried. That name is forbidden. Everything associated with that name is forbidden.

    You will never think of him...."

    He came to a stop; almost directly ahead was a small barn. Emil Frobisher's property had once housed a stable;

    the barn was still standing. He did not look beyond the barn at the house, did not consider who might be living there now, if they were home. He looked only at the barn.

    There was a loft with miscellaneous lumber and some old casement windows piled up in it. Behind all the stuff, back in a dark corner where the side wall and roof joined in a sharp angle, there was a plastic box of computer disks. He moistened his lips and moved toward the barn.

    He cut his hand on a broken windowpane when he scrambled over the piles of stuff in the loft. The box was there. He pulled it out, tucked it under his arm, and went back down the ladder and outside. A little boy was standing there, watching Lucas soberly.

    "Hi. You got hurt."

    Lucas looked down at his hand. All that blood. Good Christ, all that blood!

    He hurried past the child, back into the woods; on the path there he began to run.

    FOUR

    some summer days the river resembled a sleeping exotic snake, hardly moving, hardly breathing; those days it shone green with silver scales. Sometimes it was liquid silver flowing around quiet patches as blue as cornflowers;

    or, mirrorlike, it became luminous and as dazzling as fallen sky. Earlier in the season it was pale gray, its spring-fed, lake-fed water mixed with ice water fresh from the glaciers in the Cascades, racing, running deep and swift as if its mission then was to cool the ocean, and it was an overly conscientious servant intent on carrying out its duty.

    In winter it often turned black and looked deceptively sluggish. Now and again a raft of snow escaped from the banks, bobbed, spun in a delirious pirouette, rose and fell, dwindling, always dwindling, finally to drown in a frenzy of tumultuous death throes.

    Logs twisted and twirled their way downstream; they often got caught on rocks and thrashed like living creatures trying to shake a trap. The river toyed with the logs;

    it sometimes held one end fast and let the other rise higher and higher only to crash it down eventually like a thunderclap.

    Other objects tumbled their way downstream: a canoe paddle, a float from fishing gear, an elk, a coyote, a black bear once, Styrofoam remains from picnic packaging, cups.. ..

    The river laughed, it whispered, it roared. It had songs of its own. And secrets. It knew silence and sighs. The dawn sun cast silver on the water; at evening it spun gold.

    Here at Turner's Point was the last stretch of untamed water in the river. Ten miles downstream was a dam;

    around the point the river widened and became ever calmer until it turned into a brilliant blue lake that was so cold whole trees had been preserved upright in its water.

    Trees and water. Water and trees. Fir trees with shadows so dense that only creatures and plants that thrived in near darkness lived there. The ground was a mat of needles, deep and resilient; weathered lava rocks erupted through it here and there. After the fall rains, and again in the spring, mushrooms appeared in exuberant abundance.

    On the far side of the river, opposite Turner's Point, a cliff rose thirty feet. Downstream, the cliff became one of the boundaries of the lake, and upstream, a hundred feet high, or even higher, it was a sheer vertical barrier to the river. On this side of the river the land rose less steeply;

    there was room for the highway, for Turner's Point with its several dozen buildings, the general store and gas station, and fishing camps with cabins so close together that, unless seen straight on, they looked like one long structure.

    Behind the store, fifteen feet above the river, was a gravel parking lot with a paved drive to a boat ramp. The cabins stopped at a boulder forty feet high, double that at the base, moss-covered, encrusted with pale green and red lichen, with two straggly fir trees sticking out awkwardly over the river.

    If the boulder had not come to rest right there, Nell Kendricks could have walked the half mile from her riverfront yard to the store at Turner's Point, but the boulder had tumbled and rolled and finally lodged at that point, and she had to drive, first on a private road, then almost a mile on a county road, and finally half a mile on the state highway. At Turner's Point the highway veered away from the river to start its tortuous climb to the mountain pass, and on to the eastern slopes of the Cascades.

    Today Nell was one of a dozen regulars who gathered every Thursday when the bookmobile chugged into the parking lot, throwing gritty dust, grinding the gravel down in the summer, churning up a slurry in the winter. Nell had collected books for herself, a few for her daughter and son, although now in the first week of summer vacation, neither child had expressed any interest at all in reading.

    Travis had regarded her with unfeigned astonishment at the suggestion. Nell also had picked up some books for her neighbor Jessica Burchard. Mikey, the driver for the mobile library, walked to Nell's car with her, both of them carrying armloads of books.

    "Like I said," Mikey was saying, "one more budget cut and we go belly up. That damned bus can hardly climb even this high anymore, and they're wanting us to go on up to the scout camp. Can you imagine! That's some twisty little road, and steep!" Mikey was a tall, gangly woman not yet forty, with unmanageable red hair that constantly escaped the various berets and clips and hair pins and scarves she wore. She towered over Nell, who always said she was five two and lied a bit about it, giving herself nearly an inch that nature had not.

    "Why don't they let the scouts hike down here, if they want books? It's only a couple of miles, good trails," Nell said as they dumped the books on the passenger seat of her pickup.

    "And be sensible about it? Why start now? Come on, buy you a Coke or something." She waved to Lonnie Rowan, a short, broad woman in red pants who had just driven into the parking area.

    "Hi, Lonnie! Got that new mystery you wanted."

    "Go on," Nell said.

    "I'll bring drinks out to the back."

    Mikey nodded and walked toward Lonnie, as Nell headed for the general store. She nodded to people, spoke to several, but did not pause. She knew everyone here, met them all regularly shopping, or at the library, or some where in the area. They held meetings at the grange, talked endlessly about how to slow down the logging trucks be fore they reached town, how to attract tourists, who was marrying or divorcing whom.. ..

    There had been a Turner at Turner's Point at one time;

    he had built the general store that had cafe seating attached Chuck Gilmore owned the establishment now, the store, the gas station, most of the cabins. The store featured cold sandwiches in a case, fruit priced scandalously high, fishing tackle, worms and salmon eggs in a cooler, beer, soft drinks, bread that always seemed to be day-old.

    Strange, how the bread never was fresh; you couldn't get to the store early enough.

    Nell made her way through the clump of people inside the door. Thursday was social hour, time for the locals to catch up, time to gossip a little. As she passed people in twos and threes, she heard snatches of ongoing conversations:

    "Don't know why they always have to have the roads torn up soon's the weather gets nice. Took Maud more than two hours to drive out."

    "Way I see it, if they spend all their time and money on the highway that don't need fixing they can keep right on claiming they just can't get to Old Halleck Hill Road."

    "And it'll get so bad they'll barricade both ends and that'll be the end of it."

    Nell reached the cooler and pulled out two Cokes, then held them up for Louise Gilmore to see. They exchanged smiles, nods; if Chuck had been there, Nell would have walked over and plunked down cash without a word, but Louise was okay. She nodded and made a note in the book.

    Nell edged past Dolores Lutz and Sarah Sedgewick, out the back door to the deck. A few tables were out here, rough-hewn and full of splinters, with attached benches.

    No one from the area ever used them, only tourists who realized too late that their clothes would be snagged and made gummy with oozing sap. Nell went to the wide rail at the end of the deck and put down the Coke for Mikey on it, then opened her own, facing the river.

    Below, some men had set up a table and were playing cards; someone had started a smoky fire on one of the grills; a few boys were turning over rocks and staring intently at the exposed ground. The smoke from the grill drifted into Nell's eyes; she turned away as Mikey and Stu Hermann drew close. Stu had a beer in one hand and a string bag filled with books in the other. He was seventy or more, walked like a young man, and read a book a day and had for years.

    "

    "Lo, Nellie. How's things?" He grinned at her and eased the bag to the deck floor.

    "They just get heavier," he said.

    "Have to cut back one of these days."

    Before Nell could speak, Mikey caught her breath in and expelled it again in a scream.

    Farther down on the deck someone yelled, "Someone's in the river!"

    Nell twisted around and saw her. For a second or two the river held up the body of a naked woman, head bowed, arms dangling, long hair like seaweed wrapped around the upper torso. Then the figure was drawn back under the water.

    The pickup threw gravel as Nell took the curves too fast, but she did not slow down until she suddenly braked hard at her own drive, a continuation of the gravel road that finally dead-ended at her house. She slammed on the brakes and even skidded a little.

    Pulled off the road was a truck with a chipper; two men were standing by it, regarding her now, but they had been looking at the tall noble fir tree that marked the beginning of her property.

    "What are you doing?" she demanded, her head stuck out the side window.

    One of the men grinned at her. It was an insolent smile, the kind of smile some very large men reserve for small women, children, or cute animals.

    The other one said, "Going to take out that fir. Any minute now." He looked like a college boy, cheerful and happy.

    "What are you talking about? That tree's on private property. My property. You can't touch it!"

    "Honey, we got orders to take it down. Reckon that's what we aim to do."

    "Wait here," she said, after drawing in a deep breath.

    "You're from...." She peered at the truck. Clovis Woods Products.

    "There's been a mistake. Just wait a minute."

    The one with a grin shrugged, reached inside the truck, and pulled out an open can of beer. He finished the beer and set the can on the hood of the truck, then glanced at his watch.

    "Five minutes, honey, then we go to work again."

    Again? She looked up at the fir tree and saw that one of them already had been up there. A line dangled from the first branch, fifty feet up. It hadn't been secured yet. She nodded, engaged the gears, threw more gravel, and raced to her house at the end of the driveway, a quarter mile away.

    At the house she tore through the living room, upstairs to her bedroom where she unlocked the gun cabinet and yanked out her old Remington. She was loading it as she ran through the house, back to the truck. Then she sped to the end of the drive where the two men were still lounging, gazing up at the fir tree. It was old growth, six feet in diameter, two hundred feet tall, so regular in form it could have served as a model for all other aspiring firs.

    When she jumped from the truck, one of the men, the college boy, took several steps toward her.

    "Look, lady, here's our work orders, all signed, all in good shape. Mrs.

    Kendricks said take that tree down, and we're the guys who do the work. Don't give us a hard time, okay?"

    Paying no attention, she walked around the truck and opened the passenger side door, pulled out the rifle. She kept it pointed at the ground.

    "Back off," she said to the man approaching her.

    "Just back off."