Death in the Pines (2 page)

But he wanted to talk to me. Still a hundred feet from the cabin, he roared, “I know you're there, Oakley Tyler!” His voice carried a full load of gravel. “They say you're some kind of hermit, but I think you'll wanna see me.” Once he reached the stamped-down snow that was the record of my coming and going on firewood errands, he made better time, and stopped just short of the steps up to the little porch, slightly stooped, chest heaving, getting his breath back.

I pushed the front door open, stepped out onto the porch, and said, “I'm not buying any.”

“I'm not sellin' any.” He wore a beard, mostly gray and neatly clipped at two inches long, and he had pulled back his half-gray, half-brown hair into a ponytail that fell six inches below his shoulders. The afternoon light made his wrinkled skin look like furrowed cropland seen from the air, his face weathered and his forehead pocked with small, angry pink welts as if he'd been careless frying up a big pan of bacon and had been spattered and burned. The outer edge of his left eyebrow had been heat-frizzled, too, and was much shorter than his shaggy right brow, giving him a kind of off-balance look. Spidery capillaries lent the only vital color to his nose and cheeks, a faint red web under yellow-gray skin. He stood about four inches shorter than my six foot two.

He took in a long breath, then looked from me to the door behind me. “That's not the original door, is it?”

“The original was rotten. I made this one of old barn wood,” I told him, surprised that his eye could spot the difference. I had tried for a close match.

He grunted. “Thought you'd be living in a fancier place than this,” he said. “This's just an old huntin' camp. Nobody's used it in twenty, twenty-five years.” His blue eyes sparkled, although the whites were faintly yellowed.

“It suits me just fine,” I said, feeling a touch of self-righteous pride in my simple one-room home, furnished with things I'd bought at the Salvation Army or found at yard sales. “Keeps the taxes low.”

The old man chuckled and said, “‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.' That it, Tyler?”

I might have pegged him as an old hippie. “I'm not Thoreau,” I said. “And this ain't Walden Pond.”

One corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked smile and he snorted, a half-laugh. “Maybe not. But a famous detective like you, I figured you'd have a big house. You been wrote up in all the newspapers, even in
Time
magazine, some of the cases you and John Lincoln cracked.” He pulled his head back and looked at the forest around us, then back at me. “Although you might have somethin' about the taxes at that. What you got here, about three hundred acres?”

“I don't discuss American literature or my real estate holdings with strangers,” I told him, sending him into a spell of guffawing.

“OK, I'm sorry,” he said. His blue eyes squinted at me shrewdly. “You're being more hospitable than I expected, at that. Half thought you might meet me with a rifle in your hands.”

“Shotgun,” I told him. I'd bought one five weeks earlier and had fired it on only one occasion, not killing a thing but just trying the weapon out. “I only bring it out when missionaries come to call.” That was a lie, because none ever troubled with the climb up to my cabin, though the fleeting fantasy of sending them packing with a shot over their heads did make me smile.

“Well, I'm not peddlin' Gospel either, son,” he told me, glancing down at his splattered black lace-up work boots. “I can understand your being sort of stranger-shy, so let me tell you who I am. Name's Jeremiah Smith. Actually related distantly to Joseph Smith. He was born just about ninety miles from here, you know. Nearly two hundred years ago.”

“So you're a Mormon? Maybe I should have picked up the shotgun.”

He stepped up onto the porch, and then I could smell his yeasty breath. He looked irritable, no longer the twinkly-eyed ex-hippie. “I ain't no Mormon, and ain't here to bother you with anything like that!” He straightened up, as if reaching for dignity. “I come up to hire you.”

“You wasted your time, Mr. Smith. I'm retired.”

He cocked his head to one side and squinted his left eye. “The hell you say! You ain't a day over forty.”

“Good pension plan,” I told him, and turned to go back inside.

His voice stopped me: “Wait! Tyler, listen to me. I need a private eye, or whatever the hell you are, 'cause they're planning to kill my grandson. Now, I know I don't look it, but I got money. I can pay you. It's my grand-boy, Tyler. My only livin' relative.”

So maybe the wine had mellowed my mood, or maybe I was tired of sitting indoors for days on end without seeing
another human being, only going out to get firewood or to collect snow to melt for water or to use the outhouse.

For whatever reason, I pulled the door open and said, “Come on in out of the cold.”

Jeremiah Smith stepped inside and closed the door behind him, stomped the snow off his boots on the rough pine floorboards, and followed me over to the two rocking chairs on the coiled-rag rug in front of the woodstove. I gestured him into the plainer one.

“Ain't really cold,” he said conversationally as he settled in. “Gotta be above freezing. Maybe thirty-four, thirty-six degrees. Thank you for hearing me out.”

“Glass of wine?” When he nodded, I got an extra glass from the cupboard and filled it and my own. I set the bottle on the floor, next to its empty brother.

As I settled into the other rocker, the bentwood one that I favored, Smith leaned forward, both hands holding his glass, and asked, “How long you been drinkin'?”

“About three hours. Since lunch.”

“You don't seem drunk.”

I realized Smith had assumed I'd knocked off most of two bottles of wine. I didn't bother to tell him that the first bottle had been emptied the day before. Actually, I drank slowly, just keeping a soft buzz on, reading my book as I alternated glasses of wine with glasses of melted snow-water. I shrugged and said, “I hide it well.”

He finally took a sip, tilted his head thoughtfully, and nodded his approval. “Now,” he said with an air of getting down to business, “before I tell you about my problem, what is this crap about being retired, Tyler?”

“When the senior partner of my firm died, I packed it in. Decided to leave Georgia and come up to Vermont. I had some savings. I can stretch it out by living simply.”

“Simply, yeah,” he said, tilting back his glass.

“Or maybe I wanted to front the essential facts of life, Mr. Smith.” I completed the quotation from Thoreau that Smith had started outside: “‘… and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.'”

He chuckled, though his blue eyes held no amusement. “Or maybe you're just brushing me off because they got to you already. You working for Caleb Benson?”

The sharp way he asked it showed that he was trying to startle me into reaction. I shook my head. “Never heard of him. Who is Caleb Benson?”

He stared down into his Merlot, in a crystal-cut juice glass that I'd found at a yard sale for ten cents, and then took a long drink. “It don't matter. Look, let me tell you what's on my mind. Then you decide whether you're retired or not.”

“Fair enough.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. I couldn't tell whether he was gathering his thoughts or fighting his suspicions. “Senior partner'd be Lincoln, I suppose?”

“Died last spring,” I said. “Heart attack. That's as much as you need know.” I didn't go into the details. John and I had finished a case for a national corporation, ferreting out the disgruntled employee selling trade secrets. We'd written a hefty report, and then John had turned in early. I'd gone out to a show and dinner with a lady; John had told me he would hand-deliver our report the next morning. He got as far as the lobby of the corporation's headquarters before collapsing. A guard did CPR, the paramedics showed up within minutes, everything that could be done had been done. The hospital cardiologist later told me he'd never known anyone to survive that particular kind of heart attack, unless the patient had already been hospitalized when it hit.

You play the sad, sorry games of guilt with yourself. John had been taking his medications and had been exercising, watching his drinking and his diet. Still, they told me at the hospital, his potassium level had dropped so low that it triggered the heart attack. I should have noticed he looked bad those last few days. I should have talked him into a doctor visit.

I became aware that Smith was reading my expression, or trying to. “Go ahead,” I said. “You've got till the end of the bottle, that's all.”

He raised his glass. “To retirement,” he said. “Nothin' like it.” He sipped and then said, “I'm retired, too, you know. I'm seventy-two years old, and I been retired for twenty-two of 'em. Worked for the town of Montpelier for thirty years, starting when I was twenty. Did forestry work for the state on the side, that was always my first love, but for my full-time income I drove the snowplows and repaired streets and put up signs and all kinds of crap. Glad I got out before they brought that damn freeway through. Traffic has gone all to hell.”

That made me smile. Montpelier, the state capital about twenty miles away from my cabin, has a population of some ten thousand: it's the smallest state capital in the country, and the only one without a McDonald's, a source of pride to the townspeople and no doubt a cause of angst among the captains of the fast-food industry. Rush hour means it takes eight minutes to drive from one end of town to the other, instead of the normal four.

I shrugged. “I decided not to wait until I'm fifty or sixty. Instead I try to retire as often as I can. Work for a while, make enough money to retire for six months or a year, then work a while again.”

“I guess it makes a kind of sense,” he said. He watched me pour another glass for myself. “But tell me straight, you on the bottle? You an alcoholic?”

“That's not one of my demons.”

“Be careful with it anyway, son. It can sneak up on you.” He set down his glass and leaned forward, taking a deep breath. “All right. My demon right now is that I'm pretty damn sure they're gonna kill my grandson, Jerry.” His voice sharpened. “Don't ask me for any kind of proof, because I ain't got that. Gettin' it would take your help. Right now, I just know it in my gut. I know that kind of men.”

Telling me even that much had cost him effort. He had my curiosity up. “What kind of men?”

Smith leaned back in his rocker then, stretching his neck like an old turtle come to the surface after a winter of hibernation. He stared up into the corner of the ceiling over the door, but his eyes had an unfocused quality, as if he were searching for something far in the distance. “The kind of men,” he said slowly, “who think they got the right to play God. Son, you got no idea how big this is.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Help me. You watch out for my grandson, work with me for a few days. I can't tell you how to do your job, but you'll see what needs doing. Unless I miss my guess, give a week, ten days, you'll have all the proof we need. You'd know how to use it to stop them. See, Jerry's too young to know what he's gettin' into. He tried talking to them, thought he could pry into their business because he works for the newspaper, freedom of the press and all. He don't understand men like that, but I do, and I expect you do too. He don't realize they'll kill him before they'll let him print a word of any story
he puts together. Now before I go any farther, how much you charge?”

“It varies,” I said. “But—”

He pulled a handful of folded bills from his jeans pocket. “Call this a retainer?” he asked, handing the money over to me.

He gave me four twenties, a ten, and two fives. I started to tell him that Lincoln and Tyler specialized in big jobs, working for corporations that would pay us more in a day than most people earn in a year, but I never got the chance.

Because at that moment the bomb went off.

I
t sounded as if an artillery shell had exploded in my front yard, rattling the windows and jangling the plates by the sink. Smith sprang up and beat me out the door. From some atavistic instinct—this is my house, I must defend it—I snatched up the shotgun and pelted after him. He was already wading through the break he had made in the deep snow, and beyond him I could see flames licking up into the trees about a half-mile down the mountainside.

“My truck!” he bellowed, not slowing a step.

He was still ahead of me, but not by much, when we reached the blazing vehicle: an old red Chevy pickup, rusted out along the sides, dark green paint on the right front fender. The front driver's side sported a faded bumper sticker that said W
E
W
ERE
A
LWAYS
H
ERE
with some smaller type along the bottom that I couldn't read. Flames licked out from beneath the chassis, and the cabin boiled with black smoke that scrabbled like a frantic living thing at the closed windows, seeking escape.

Smith turned toward me with a grim expression. “It's a warning.”

I wasn't buying it. Fires happen. “You leave a cigarette burning inside? Anything flammable in the back? Flares, dynamite, anything like that?”

“I don't smoke,” he said, “and the bed was empty.” He stood about ten feet from the driver's side door and pointed. “Look.” The gas cap was missing and the area around it had burned black. The snow and dirt under the truck looked like the tank had exploded downward. “They lit a wick of some kind. It would blow off the fumes in the tank when it burned down low enough. Give somebody time to get away.”