Death in the Pines (6 page)

She looked at the light through her wine, speculatively. “Do you think the world is dying?”

The question startled me into momentary honesty: “It seems like it. That's why I came here from Atlanta.”

“Are people evil?” she asked. “Essentially, I mean. Are most humans evil?”

“There are times I think so.” God, I hadn't had a conversation like this since my disastrous freshman year in college.

“Could you be persuaded otherwise? That most humans are essentially decent and kind, but their actions may become evil because they lack understanding?”

“I've never thought about it.”

“But you have.” She looked at me with her odd, large eyes. “What do you think of the earliest people who lived here? That they were savages, primitives? That they ran around scalping each other? Always fighting wars, half-starved most of the time? That is what your schools teach you, isn't it?”

“Something like that.”

“There were times when the people of old broke the Law. The Law of Nature, I mean. Such people have no idea of the right, the good, the polite thing to do.”

I couldn't help chuckling. “The polite thing to do is not to come into a stranger's house and help yourself to his wine.”

“No, in certain contexts it is very good manners to do so, particularly if the wine is out where anyone can see, an open invitation. And a friendly glass of wine is not much in repayment for my answering the question you asked at the turning of the year, when you scattered your friend's ashes over a pile of stones.”

“You were there? You saw that?”

“No. Squirrel told me.”

“Who's that?” I remembered then: a gray critter head-down, high in a tree, chattering. “Wait—you don't mean a real squirrel, do you? An animal?”

She didn't answer me. Just looked at me with those doe eyes.

“Look,” I said, “I realize your people might believe—why are you laughing?”

“You still think I am an Abenaki. I am not. I am not even a Native American. My people were here when the Abenaki arrived. Don't ask me the tribe, for it is not a tribe. And I could not pronounce our name with these lips.” She gave me a gaze of such placid confidence that I wanted to hug her.

But I channeled the feeling into irony. “So a squirrel told you I buried a friend and said some words. What else do you hear from your squirrel friend?”

She looked down at the rug. “That Jeremiah Smith died today, just twenty minutes ago, outside of Northfield. He was walking because he did not have a truck. A car struck him, and he died instantly.”

“What!”

“It was a car with license plates a different color from those of Vermont. Squirrel does not see colors the same as you, so I cannot describe it, and of course Squirrel does not read, does not know letters and numbers. But it was a dark car, and it came fast and swerved on purpose to hit the old man.”

“A squirrel told you this?”

“Not a squirrel. Squirrel. A squirrel is an individual animal. Squirrel is … like the spirit of all of the individual creatures, the great reality that shapes them and gives them purpose and sees through all their eyes and hears through all their ears.”

“I hope Squirrel is wrong,” I said. “Because you've been here for more than twenty minutes. And if Jeremiah is dead and the police come asking me, and it turns out that he was killed as you say—well, they won't believe that the spirit of a squirrel tipped you off.”

“I know,” she said. “They would think that I heard by telephone or radio. But I do not own any electronic devices.”

“Or they'd think you were involved with the killing,” I said. “That you were in on it.”

“Believe that if you must,” she said. “But Jeremiah believed in you and trusted you. He knew about me and my people. I am not worried about the police. They could not find me. But
let me warn you not to speak to anyone about what I have told you tonight. If you do, I will never return to you again.”

“And my life would get back to normal,” I said. “How could I face that?”

“You can answer that,” she said. “I cannot.” Carefully she set her empty wine glass down on the floor, bending over from the waist in a curiously lithe movement. Without glancing back at me, she turned and walked to the door, pushed it open, and stepped through into the black, starless night. Watching her leave, I was struck by how totally female she was, and how hard I'd been trying to ignore it while she'd sat with me in my cabin.

“Hey,” I said. “Wait. Come back.”

I opened the door onto darkness. No sound, not even the wind. No crunch of footsteps on crusted snow. She had faded into the night. I finished the last gulp of my wine and stood there, wondering just what the hell had happened, until I started to shiver. Then I went back inside and made sure my cell phone was charged before checking the recently called numbers.

I
pulled up the last number Smith had dialed when he'd had my phone, after his gas tank exploded.

After two rings, a man's rough voice said, “Yeah?”

“Jeremiah Smith there?” I said, keeping my voice casual, as if I were asking for an old friend.

After a pause, the same voice asked, “Who's this?”

“Oakley Tyler. He visited me yesterday. I'm trying to get in touch with him about something he asked me. Who's this?”

“This is Bill—wait a minute, you called me. You don't know?”

“Oh yeah, guy with the tow truck, right?”

He snorted. “Yeah, that's me.” He paused for a moment, then said in a flat tone, “Smith's dead.”

I shivered as a wave of cold moved through my body. “When?”

“Half hour ago, maybe a little more. I just got off the phone with the chief.”

“Chief of police?”

“Yeah. I was apparently the last guy saw him alive. He came in to hear about the damage to his truck. He stayed for
dinner here, and then was gonna hitchhike to Montpelier to see his grandson.”

“Hitchhike?”

“Lotsa people do. In these parts, anyway.” His voice had a defensive scorn, as if my question had betrayed a flatlander's ignorant elitism.

“How did Smith die?”

“Hit-and-run.”

“Any witnesses?”

“None they can find, but maybe tomorrow after it's in the paper somebody will turn up.” A phlegmy sigh seemed to signal Bill Grinder's decision to stop making me reach for every bit of information with a pair of tweezers. “OK, here's how it was. He was walking north on Route Twelve, about a mile outside of town, where he was hit. Not long after that, the cops say, another driver saw his body on the side of the road and dialed nine-one-one on their cell. He was dead when they called, though. The driver checked.”

“How'd the police get a reading on time of death?”

“From me, I guess. Like I told them, Jeremiah left here during the first commercial after the seven-thirty news started on Fox, so it was probably seven thirty-five or close to it. The car found him at ten minutes to eight. He'd walked about a mile, which takes around fifteen minutes. Don't take rocket science.” He was getting tired of talking, I could tell. Or just resentful.

“Was the driver that found him local or out-of-state?”

“How the hell should I know? Wait, no, it was local, had to be, because it was that girl works at the drugstore in town, it'd closed at seven and she was on her way home.” He paused for a moment. “Smith said you was some kind of cop?”

“Private. He came to see me about a problem.”

“So whyn't you call the cops and ask them?”

“Sorry, Bill. Just an old habit. I apologize for taking up your time.”

I heard the volume of a TV set in the background being turned up, had a vision of him sitting with a remote in his hand. And then there was a click and the line was dead: he'd hung up.

So let the police handle it. Too bad I didn't get back to Smith, but it's out of my hands. Now he'd never be able to answer my questions about why Caleb Benson had reacted to me the way he had in the restaurant, about how he had known of Smith's visit to my cabin, about why Smith was so concerned about his grandson. Smith was beyond telling me now. But I still had just over ninety dollars of his money in my wallet. I wondered if maybe Mr. Benson might need something more to worry about than his payroll or EPA regulations. Decided to give him something to worry about.

Before tilting at his windmills, Don Quixote armed himself with a rusty lance. I picked up the gun and put it back into my jacket pocket, slipped the cell phone into the other pocket, and went out the door and into the night.

Walking carefully in the dark, I followed the rutted trail of my own footsteps down to the Jeep. Cold air cut my nose and made my eyes water. Twice I called for Sylvia, but heard no sound of her, saw no sign. At the Jeep I paused and called her name again. Still no reply. I got into the Jeep, started it, flipped on the high beams, and drove down the last of the logging trail and out onto the town-maintained road. It was snowing again, not hard but steady, and the night flaked into what looked like volcanic ash in the twin headlight beams.

I drove two miles north, farther than she could have walked in that time, and then turned around and went back four miles south. No sign of her. If she'd had a vehicle parked nearby, it must have been far enough down the road that I didn't hear her start it, but close enough that she could get to it and get out of the area before I had finished my phone conversation with Grinder and come looking.

But it didn't make sense that anybody could make it down a rocky, hilly, twisting trail at a dead run in total darkness. Maybe she was still hiding back there in the forest, or maybe somebody picked her up. Maybe a coconspirator with a shotgun microphone and a cell phone or radio, and boots bigger than size ten.

Heading toward town, I thought of Jeremiah Smith, and a slow anger washed over me. The plastic steering wheel creaked, protesting my painful grip on it, and I exhaled and let go, feeling the blood return to my fingers. The old man who'd been so alive yesterday afternoon, who'd come to get my help to save another life, was dead.

He was about John Lincoln's age.

Snow swirled and danced ahead of me. Curtains of it brushed the road. I drove without really noticing much of anything until up ahead I saw a rusty sign with a bad case of the quaints and the cutesies: Y
E
Q
UALITY
M
ECHANIC
. Grinder's red tow truck was tucked beside it, in front of a house that looked like it hadn't been painted in a decade or more. The blue light of television leaked out of one window, like a strange species of radioactive gas, and I guessed that was where Grinder lived. A mile north of that I came to the scene of the hit-and-run.

The investigation had not yet wound down. An empty Vermont State Police car with its engine running and headlights
on hummed on the gravel shoulder of the road behind a Northfield Police car, its engine also chugging. Both cars sent ragged gusts of exhaust into the night. In my headlights the gray vapor ascended through the snow like ghosts seeking heaven.

Two men sat in the Northfield car. I pulled up behind them and was about halfway out the door when both of the cruiser's front doors flew open and the cop on the driver's side emerged and said, “Step out of the vehicle.” The passenger cop wore a state trooper hat and a cold expression, and in his hand a pistol pointed in my general direction.

I finished my climb out of the car and put both my hands at my sides, where they could see them.

The Northfield patrolman walked up to me. He looked to me the more competent of the two, a muscular man in his early thirties with close-cropped blond sideburns showing under the edge of his cap. He walked ramrod straight; his face was wide with large pale-green eyes and a long nose that looked like it had been broken once. Unlike his buddy, he had an air of authority that did not need a gun to front for it. He stopped just in front of me and said, “Help you with something?”

“Bill Grinder tells me Jeremiah Smith was hit and killed along in here.”

The patrolman's face did not change expression. “And who are you, sir?”

Nice to know I rated a “sir.” I told him my name and added, “I live on the other side of town, near the Roxbury line.”

“You the PI? Moved here from Atlanta?” I caught the faintest whiff of derision in the last word, a phony Southern drawl. They never get that right. And they think we use “y'all” as a singular pronoun.

“That's right,” I said.

Contrary to what you see on TV, most cops hate PIs. They figure we make more money, have longer and more frequent vacations, and don't have to live by all the rules. They're wrong, but with reasons. One is there are a lot of incompetent PIs in the world, so most cops know by heart a dozen or more stories of investigations around the country that some private heat screwed up. Some of them spin yarns about brother cops getting seriously killed because a PI stuck his nose in where it did not belong.