Hope to Die (11 page)

I guess two beers will do that to you when you’re pushing eighty and close to death.

ATTICUS JONES SLEPT UNTIL
we were a mile shy of Buckhannon, where he seemed to hear some internal alarm clock because he came awake with a loud snort, looked around, and said, “Take Route Twenty south.”

We rolled into the town, and as I turned onto the two-lane highway, I was surprised. I suppose I expected Buckhannon to be some idyllic backwater on a Saturday afternoon, and it
was
quaint, with older brick buildings and blooming trees everywhere, but the place was also bustling with dump trucks and pickups of every shape and size and crawling with ore rigs loaded with coal.

“There are mines here?” Ava asked.

“You are in Coal Central, young lady,” the old detective replied. “Buckhannon’s the county seat of Upshur County. You throw a stick in Upshur County, and there’s a mine. You shake a dog, and a mining consultant will jump off before the fleas. That Sago Mine where they had the explosion back in 2006? Killed those twelve men? That’s just up the road there. Lot of money coming out of Buckhannon. Lot of black lung too. Killed my father. Killing me.”

“You were a miner here?” I asked, surprised.

“Four years to get the money to go to West Virginia Wesleyan over there on the other side of town,” Jones said. “Hated every minute of the mines but had to do it. Now, south of French Creek Road, you’ll be looking for the signs to the Pig Lick Mine, up that Pig Lick Road. About nine miles out of town.”

We drove past a mine-safety school and then traveled along the Buckhannon River, which looked beautiful in the spring sunshine. We reached Pig Lick Road fifteen minutes later.

There were warning signs about mining trucks and steep grades, and the dirt road had potholes and long stretches of washboard that had us bouncing all over the place even going slow. The enormous, bright yellow Crossfield Mining Company ore trucks laden with tons of coal, however, didn’t seem affected in the least by the road conditions, and they scared the hell out of us as they barreled downhill going sixty-plus. But I managed to keep the sedan well out of their way through a series of switchbacks the Pig Lick Road made as it climbed the ridge.

Just below the top, however, an ore truck came up behind us, real close, and started honking for us to get out of the way.

“Don’t worry,” Jones told me. “You get to the crest there around the next bend and you’ll find a place to pull off where you can see and he can get by.”

The road was wider in the saddle and I did as he said, swinging the car into a pull-off with a guardrail that separated it from a cliff that fell away several hundred feet to a narrow valley floor. The mining truck slowed as it passed. I saw a man in the passenger seat. He wore a blue uniform, sunglasses, and a yellow hard hat. He glowered at me as he went by.

I SHRUGGED THE GUY’S
anger off and gazed across the valley to where it looked like some giant had come along and lopped off the entire top of a mountain. The wound was almost a mile long and God only knew how wide. Dust rose off the top of the strip mine, stirred by the breeze and the dozens of trucks moving to and fro.

“Below us, that’s Hog Hollow,” Jones said. “That’s where Thierry came from.”

“The mine?” I asked, confused.

“No, no, that wasn’t around back then,” the old detective said. “But it’s part of the story.”

Jones cracked another bock beer and sipped from it as he explained that Thierry Mulch had been born into a family of pig farmers and moonshiners. Four generations of Mulches had lived in the bottom of Hog Hollow, the narrow valley between us and the present-day Pig Lick Mine.

Kevin “Little Boar” Mulch, Thierry’s father, had gone to school with Atticus Jones but dropped out at fourteen when his father, “Big Boar,” died. The boy had to take over the family’s affairs.

Little Boar married his second cousin Lydia when he was in his twenties and she was no more than sixteen. Lydia was a looker, which made Little Boar obsessively jealous. She was also bookish, which made him angry and resentful.

“Little Boar was ignorant and knew it but buried his own shame by always belittling Lydia,” Jones told us. “Got worse after she had Thierry, who they called Baby Boar.”

Addicted to his own rotgut hooch, Thierry’s father became increasingly violent as his son grew up and revealed himself to be as bookish and smart as his mother. Little Boar put Lydia in the ER at St. John’s Hospital on a number of occasions, once with a fractured arm, another time with a fractured jaw. Twice, Lydia brought Thierry into the same ER. His father had seen fault with how Baby Boar had done his chores and beat him with a barber’s shaving strop.

“No one arrested the guy?” Ava said.

“Those were sadly different times, young lady,” the detective said. “And from what I know, kids teased Thierry unmercifully as a child. They called him Pig Boy and would taunt him with ‘Sooooweeee’ and ‘Here, piggy, piggy!’”

When Thierry was thirteen, his mother met a mining engineer, someone from Montana or Oklahoma, and they had an affair. Without a word to her husband or son, Lydia left the family, took off with the engineer, and was never seen around Buckhannon again.

Everyone knew. People laughed behind Thierry’s father’s back, which made him get drunker, angrier, and even more reclusive. School became the boy’s refuge, the only place he could go to escape his father’s wrath.

“Smart boy, that Thierry,” Jones said. “Real smart. And that was the shame of it all, what I think led to the killing.”

Thierry wanted to go to college. Little Boar laughed at his son, told Baby Boar he would spend his life just like his father, tending to the hogs, but maybe Thierry could use his chemistry-class skills to make better moonshine. The farm had more than a hundred pigs on it, but Thierry’s father said there was no money for something as useless as school.

The summer before what would have been Thierry’s senior year, his father ordered him to quit high school, said it was a waste of time and he wouldn’t stand for it. Right around then, a lawyer showed up in Hog Hollow with an offer to buy the Mulch property.

Little Boar owned twenty-six hundred acres, seventeen hundred of them barely tillable in the rocky bottom of the hollow and the rest considered worthless for generations, a steep, rocky ridge covered in hornpout hickory and other trash trees. Given that assessment of the property, the lawyer’s offer was more than generous, in the high six figures. Little Boar refused to sell, said Hog Hollow and Pig Lick Mountain were sacred ground to the Mulch family and would always stay that way.

A month later, the offer was doubled, and Thierry’s father refused again. The offer was tripled the month after that, and a drunken Little Boar pointed a double-barreled twelve-gauge at the attorney and told him to get off his property and never come back.

Jones took a sip, gestured toward the hollow, and said, “So it’s October first now, and school’s on in Buckhannon, and Thierry’s not there. About eight in the morning, I get a call from the sheriff. Thierry had just called in hysterical, said his father had fallen in with the hogs sometime during the night and they’d eaten most of him.”

FOR A SECOND I
almost didn’t believe my own ears, and then I said, “It’s him, then. No doubt now.”

I explained about Preston Elliot’s skull and femur found at the commercial pig operation in Virginia.

“It
is
him,” Jones crowed and slapped his thigh. “I knew it! When I got down to that farm about two hours later, I knew Thierry had killed his old man. I could just feel it; something about the way he moved when he showed me to the feedlot that the deputies had cleared. It was like he’d been relieved of some heavy burden.”

When he got to the pigsty, Jones saw that most of Little Boar’s flesh had been consumed already. Thierry showed little emotion, just gave this blank stare at what was left of his father. He told Jones that Little Boar had been drinking the evening before. The boy said that he did what he always did when his father was into his second jar of moonshine: he went to his room, locked the door, and read a book.

“Aristotle,” Jones said. “He was reading Aristotle.”

Thierry claimed he’d been deep into
Nicomachean Ethics
, reading about how man can best lead a good life, and had turned off his light around eleven. An hour later, he was roused by the pigs squealing, but that wasn’t unusual. There were all sorts of turf battles in the sties. You just got used to it. Thierry said his drunken father must have gone out to see about the ruckus and fallen in.

“I told Thierry that he didn’t seem too shook up about his daddy’s death,” the old detective recalled. “He said, ‘I hated the sonofabitch, but even I wouldn’t have wanted him to die that way.’”

That was Thierry’s line and attitude during the entire investigation. Jones said he searched Thierry’s room and found Aristotle on the table but also Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, the story of a man who murders someone he thinks no one will miss.

Jones asked him about it, and Thierry shrugged, said he hadn’t cracked it yet but that it was a requirement for honors English. Though his father had forced him to leave school, he’d been keeping up with the requirements.

The old detective said he tried every way he could to rattle the boy’s story, but Baby Boar never wavered. Young Mulch had admitted readily that he’d thought about killing his father. Who wouldn’t? The man was sadistic and in many ways deserved to die. And Thierry said that maybe someday, if it had come to it, he would have killed his father. But this was an accident, an act of God, and as fitting an ending as there could be for the man—eaten by his own hogs.

Jones said, “Autopsy showed a hairline fracture of Little Boar’s skull, but the hogs gnawed and hooved on it so hard the ME couldn’t say what had caused it.”

Soon after, the old detective learned of the offers to buy the Mulch land. He pressed Thierry on that angle too. But young Mulch said the offers were news to him. Little Boar had never confided in him about anything.

Four months later, however, Thierry turned eighteen, and as the sole heir to the Mulch land, he signed a contract selling the property to the Crossfield Mining Company for $5.5 million. Turned out the worthless mountain was made almost entirely of coal.

When Jones pressed Thierry about the sale, Little Boar’s son replied that he had no intention of being a pig farmer and that the sale was the practical thing to do, a way out, another act of God.

“He knew I didn’t believe him,” Jones said, shifting in his seat and adjusting the nose clip of his oxygen line. “He knew I was going to stay after him until I figured out a way to trip him up.”

“So you think he staged his own death?” I asked.

THE OLD DETECTIVE TIPPED
his beer my way, said, “Thirteen months after he killed Little Boar. Took almost that long to get the estate through probate and establish that Thierry had a legal right to sell the land. But it went through and he turned the land over, got his money, bought a brand-new Ford pickup, and started partying hard.”

The Crossfield Mining Company gave Thierry a month to sell the hogs and clear off the property. Two nights before they were set to bulldoze the pig farm, Baby Boar was seen drunk in town. Later that same night, around three a.m., someone traveling on Route 20 North spotted a fire burning up high on the ridge above Hog Hollow.

Jones gestured through the windshield toward the cliff. “Back then there was no guardrail here. Carrying a full tank of gas and going better than sixty by the trajectory, Thierry’s new truck dropped two hundred and twenty-two feet and exploded in a fireball when it collided with a big boulder down there on the flat. It was a dry year and it lit the whole damn woods down there on fire, took them two days to put out the flames.”

“Was there a body?” I asked.

“Squished pieces of one burned black as charcoal,” Jones replied. “We recovered enough to say he was male, and that was about it. The fire that took the truck was incredibly hot, melted the steel, so hot the fire marshal thought there might have been a second accelerant on board, like naphtha or something. But we never found evidence of it. Then again, our chemical forensics weren’t exactly first class back then.”

I nodded. Naphtha was what was burned in camping stoves. It was extraordinarily combustible stuff. A truck soaked in naphtha that was also carrying a full tank of gasoline would have created an incredible explosion.

“How’d you identify Thierry?”

“Couldn’t,” the old detective said. “Little Boar believed in dentists less than in schools. Thierry had never been to a dentist in his life, and there was no such thing as DNA testing back then. Everyone just assumed it was him. Happened on the Mulch road in a Mulch truck with a male driver. Must have been a Mulch at the wheel.”

“But you didn’t think that added up?”

Jones shook his head. “No, I think he killed someone else, a transient or a hitchhiker, put him in the truck, and sent it flying off the cliff.”

The old detective started to cough then, one of those long hacking sessions that shook his entire body. When he finally calmed, he said weakly, “I think we better start back, Dr. Cross. My daughter will be all shook up I’m not there when she comes for dinner.”