Death in the Pines (3 page)

“Teenagers,” I suggested.

Smith shook his head, ponytail swaying, his face pinched together in a way that accented the frown wrinkles and made his eyes look sad and his mouth angry. “Way the hell out here? That kind of stuff kids do at night, in town, after a few cases of beer.”

“Want me to call the police?” I said, pulling my cell phone out of my shirt pocket.

He grunted and spat on the ground near his feet. “No. I've been trying to tell you, Oakley. This's bigger than the little town of Northfield, and, besides, they come out here and it just ends up in the paper and I look like a fool.” He swept a lean hand down his face, over his beard, and heaved a sigh. “Lemme call Bill Grinder, he's got a new wrecker. Tow this thing in and see if anything can be done.”

I handed him the phone, and as I stepped back, a flicker of motion out in the forest caught the corner of my eye. I looked hard, but could see nothing besides trees. Maybe it was a deer, holding still and now invisible in the underbrush.

After Smith finished his call, he handed the phone back to me and said, “You gonna take this case now? You see what we're up against?”

Both rear tires of the truck had deflated, but they hadn't ignited, and the flames were dying down. I doubted that Smith could use the truck for anything but scrap, but he hadn't asked my opinion on that. I said, “Smith, I'm not even licensed in this state.”

“Can't you do a favor for a friend?”

I had to grin at that. “You're a friend?”

“Other than that waitress in town, I expect I'm about the best friend you've got in this state.” He returned my grin, though he still had a sick expression on his face.

Somehow he stung me into indiscretion. I protested, “Wanda's a hell of a lot more than just a waitress.” That much was true. She had dropped out of grad school to work as a waitress so when her daughter got home from school she could be there for her.

“Speaking as a man who's lived a lot of years and seen a lot of places,” Smith said evenly, “don't you think
most
waitresses are a hell of a lot more than a waitress?”

Mousetrapped by an aging hippie. “It's not like that with Wanda and me.” I wondered if everybody in town thought we had something going.

Smith laughed once, a sharp, abrupt hoot like a disturbed owl. “Oakley, you're more like me than you wanna admit. You afraid of that? Afraid of turnin' out like me in thirty years? You—God
damn
!”

I heard the bullet ping off the hood of the truck in the same instant that I saw his head jerk and a puff of blood and tissue explode from his ear. The report came maybe a tenth of a second later, and by that time I had grabbed Smith and pulled him to the ground. As we rolled into the ditch, another shot shattered the driver's side window, letting the pent black smoke gush out.

“You OK?” I asked over the soft gurgling of the roadside stream.

“Damn. Just tore up my ear,” he said. “Hurts like a beesting.”

“Stay here and lay low.” I moved off in a crouch, shotgun at port arms, heading downhill, where the shooter had to be. Same direction where I'd noticed the flicker of motion. My instincts were not as sharp as they used to be.

I kept to the edge of the logging road until I could duck into the cover of the evergreens, where the going was a little easier. I felt seriously outgunned: I had the shotgun, but whoever had ripped a chunk out of Smith's ear had a rifle capable of firing a slug at supersonic speed.

No sounds. Maybe the shooter thought that Smith was dead, that the job had been finished. I froze and listened. Back up the hill I could hear the tink and creak of the cooling truck. I could see Jeremiah Smith through the trees, but only because I knew exactly where he lay. At any distance, he would look like a boulder shouldering through the snow cover at the edge of the road. Smith was a disciplined man. He moved not at all.

I crouched over and zigzagged from trunk to trunk, looking and listening for any sign. Nothing.

I emerged from the woods at the point where the town-maintained road joined my old dirt logging road. Having covered a quarter of a mile from the truck, I had seen only rabbit, deer, and coyote tracks. Now, looking around, I spotted a place where a hawk or owl had snatched something, probably a chipmunk, and hit the snow with its wings. Deer scat lay where the running snowmelt had broken through into a frigid water hole. The droppings looked like rough, round brown marbles melted into the snow. The delicate tracks of a fox, crisscrossing the area. I spent about a half-hour scouting
around without turning up anything more deadly or threatening than that.

Just as I was about to turn back, I heard a splashing in the river on the far side of the road. I followed the sound and picked up the tracks of a man: boots with a deep tread, heading down toward the river.

I walked alongside his trail, keeping a wary scan of the forest ahead. Came to a slight rise, and then there was a steep drop, perhaps a hundred feet, down to the forest floor ten feet this side of the Dog River. I could see where he'd climbed down, where his tracks resumed in the snow, and where they vanished into the shallow water. He could have gone downstream, in the direction of town, or he could have turned the other way, toward the crossroads and the old wooden bridge. Three miles or so by road, maybe a third of that if he followed the river.

Either way he was gone, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. Whoever had taken the shot, he had to have seen me coming—hell, I had spent thirty minutes outside of cover just across the road, casting back and forth for his trail. Whoever it was could have shot me before I had even caught sight of him. And the fact that he was willing to wade the frigid edges of the Dog River suggested the man had certain reserves of endurance.

By now I could hear the low growl of a truck coming up the town road, probably Bill Grinder in his wrecker. Dusk was coming on fast, so I crossed the road and headed back to the truck, walking the shortest way toward where the sky was darkest, the northeast, where I knew I'd find my own trail worn into the snow over the past few days, the distinctive scrape marks of snowshoes. I came to a rise, gray slabs of ancient shale stacked untidily, as though God had thrown
down a losing poker hand, and climbed the hillside in its lee, where the snow was relatively thin.

And stopped with a jerk when I saw a woman ten feet away from me, sitting on one of the slabs.

She looked at me as if she'd expected me. She must have heard me coming. Small details registered: she was probably ten years younger than I, with long black hair, shiny and clean, a strong-featured face, knife-blade nose, heavy black eyebrows, a smiling mouth, and big, dark smiling eyes. Something, though, was out of kilter, out of focus. Her gaze had an ancient air. She might have been sculpted from the stone.

“Ah,” I said, standing there holding my shotgun, feeling foolish.

She inclined her head a little, smiling more broadly, absurdly beautiful in the fading light, and I realized she wore buckskins, shirt and pants. Her long-fingered hands lay one on top of the other in her lap, and she sat cross-legged, like an idol. She wore moccasins, odd boot-like ones that laced up to where they vanished beneath the pant legs. I could see the soles, and they were not only dry but absolutely clean, as if the woman had been dropped down from outer space.

I gestured, stupidly, with the shotgun. “Who are you?”

She blinked her large brown-gold eyes and took a long, deep breath. Her skin was a warm, deep golden-brown. She had high cheekbones and a faint gauntness to her cheeks, as if she'd been eating lean during the winter. When she spoke, her voice was so soft that I had to lean toward her to hear it at all. “My people call me a name you could not pronounce or understand. You might call me … Sylvia.” She seemed to work at making each syllable and word come out perfectly, as if maybe she'd grown up with a speech impediment or stutter and had overcome it by sheer force of will. Her tone held no
apology. Instead, she made me feel obscurely as though I were the intruder, as though an apology might be in order.

But I was thinking like an investigator, too, at some level. We were downhill from where the truck had burned. She might have fired the shot—except she had no rifle, and her moccasins had not left the boot tracks that I had followed.

“You see somebody around here with a rifle?” I asked.

She shrugged, then pointed toward the river with her chin. “There was somebody farther down the hill. I heard two shots. He was hiding in the ditch across the road when you turned toward the town, and then he got up and ran down the hill to the water.”

I was wondering how the hell she had planted herself on that rock without leaving tracks herself. The snow uphill from her was thin here in the cover of the woods, but it lay absolutely unmarked. “Did you get any sort of look at him? What he was wearing?”

She held her right hand up and waved it from side to side, as if she were saying “no” with it instead of shaking her head. “It was a man, but I did not see him. I only sensed him.”

“And what are you doing here?” I could not keep an edge of frustration out of my voice.

“Just sitting.” She smiled, the kind of smile that comes from the stomach and ends up on the face, that moves from one person to another. It touched my irritation like warm wind on snow. “You don't need your weapon,” she added. “A bit of food to leave for Squirrel would be better.”

“How'd you get here? Why are you here?”

She moved her head, as though indicating the jumbled pile of slate slabs. “My people live near here, and this site was once a holy place of friends of ours. I come here sometimes.”

That told me something, anyway. “Are you Abenaki?” I said. Just a week earlier there'd been an article in the paper
about an Abenaki burial site being dug up by a developer. The Abenaki Indians had once ranged from Maine to Michigan, but by 1700 few remained alive after repeated encounters with Europeans. By 1800 the census had counted only about a thousand; since then their numbers have increased, and now Abenaki are scattered all over Vermont and in the Adiron-dacks of New York.

The woman tilted her head, as if considering what she was. “No,” she said. “Not Abenaki. My people were here before the Abenaki.”

The sun had set, turning the forest into a black-and-white sketch of winter. I heard men's voices and the rattle of a chain, and looked away through the trees, trying to see what Smith was doing. When I turned back, the woman was gone.

I walked all the way around the little hill formed by the stone slabs, but found no trace of her, and no tracks indicating her arrival or departure. Stumped, I hurried back to the logging road.

Jeremiah Smith was standing now and he half-turned to look at me as I came out of the woods. The shiny tow truck had backed up just downhill from the rear of the pickup, headlights throwing yellow cones down toward the road. Somebody was going through the business of getting a chain around the rear axle, probably a difficult job with two flat tires.

From down the slope I heard a kind of hurried clatter and turned just in time to see a doe break from the forest edge and rush in great rocking-horse leaps down the slope toward the road and the river. I couldn't image raising my shotgun.

In the twilight, she was simply too lovely to shoot.

A
cursing man came worming out from beneath the pickup. He had a brush cut, small ears, eyes that were set too far apart, and a little pig nose much too small for his large, square head. “Think that's got the sumbitch,” the man said. “Jeremiah, turn the spot around.”

Smith reached to comply. The tow truck's lights, including an impressive spotlight mounted next to the yellow flashers on top, illuminated the immediate area. “Here's Oakley back,” Smith said. “Find anything?”

“Tracks,” I said. “Across the road, leading from the river and back there again. He walked from just below here into the woods, took his shots, then headed down to the river and took off from there.”

Smith nodded. “Ain't no amateur. Sure ain't no kids, like you thought.” He nodded at the man who had just hooked up his truck. “This is Bill Grinder.”

Bill Grinder wiped his big red hands on a bandanna that might have been scarlet when it was new, took the cigar out of his mouth, flipped a lever and winched the rear wheels of the pickup a few feet off the ground, then put an iron brace in
place. “Jeremiah says somebody shot him,” he said to me, half a question half a challenge, as he walked over and stood with us.

“Looks that way,” I said. In the harsh light, I could see that Smith's earlobe was pretty badly ripped up, a ragged hole edged with congealed blood that looked black. He had streaks of dark blood on his neck, a spatter of it on his shirt collar, and some clotted blood matted on his gray beard.

“Jeremiah, I told you already,” Grinder said. “Dammit, let me call the cops.”

“And I already told you no,” Smith said. “It'd just make the papers and I'd have every snoopy bastard in town at my door, and they couldn't do a damn thing anyway. He got away.”

“Shootin' folks's a crime,” Grinder said, speaking around the cigar he had chomped down on again.

“Might have been an accident. A hunting accident,” Smith said in a dry voice.

“Deer season's been over for a month.” Grinder replied.

Smith gave me a sidelong glance that said as well as words could have that Bill Grinder wasn't the brightest bulb on the tree. “Yeah, but he might have been hunting fox or rabbit. Maybe wild turkey. Some damn thing's gotta be in season now.”

Grinder looked at me in frustration. I shrugged and he shook his head and sighed, breath like the breeze off a dung-heap, not sweetened any by the stogie he sucked on. “Oh, hell, it's your problem. Guess it was just an accident like you say, Jeremiah. You gonna ride into town with me?”