Quiet Dell: A Novel (22 page)

Quiet Dell No Longer Quiet—Quiet Dell was the noisiest and busiest place in West Virginia yesterday. Thousands of automobiles were parked for miles along the Clarksburg–Buckhannon highway. No accurate estimate can be made of the numbers who have visited the “Murder farm.” State policemen say they were too busy handling traffic to attempt to count the automobiles but there must have been 50,000 at least, yesterday and Saturday night.

—
The Clarksburg Telegram,
August 30, 1931

The Gore Hotel was an imposing yellow-brick edifice on the corner of West Pike and Second Streets. Eric pulled up in front of the red-and-white-striped awning.

“Let me get the other bags in and then come back for Duty,” Emily said. “He fits in my valise, in case there’s a no pets policy.” She turned to the backseat and moved the dog’s pillow from the open basket to the floor. “Now, you’ve been walked and fed. Wait quietly, and don’t jump about.”

“He understands your every word,” Eric said dryly, but Duty settled on the pillow. “Isn’t it a problem, in and out with the dog?”

“I’ll speak with the manager. I must explain that he is not a pet. He’s an extremely important material witness.”

“Next you’ll have his paw on a Bible.”

“Animals don’t require oaths, Mr. Lindstrom; they are already God’s creatures and do not engage in deception. Now, let us proceed. I’m sure you want to be rid of us.”

“I’ll come in with you, and say we’re related. Make sure you’re settled.”

“Can’t we just be colleagues?”

“Best to be both.” Eric was out of the car, motioning a porter who appeared at the broad revolving door. The porter’s dark red jacket matched the awning, and his sleeves were cuffed with gold braid. A Negro gentleman, he seemed the epitome of genteel Chicago.

Emily, carrying briefcase, handbag, grip, went ahead into the
hotel. The lobby was posh, comfortable, sedately furnished with dark green leather-upholstered settees and armchairs. An ornate phone booth stood in one corner near a rack of newspapers on rods; their pages hung down like newsprint flags. Emily perused them: morning editions from Clarksburg, Huntington, Pittsburgh, even
The Washington Post
.

Eric, at the desk, made a point of reading the clerk’s name tag. “Good day, Mr. Parrish. I am Eric Lindstrom, and this is my cousin and colleague, Miss Emily Thornhill. We are journalists from the
Chicago Tribune
. I am staying down the street at the Waldo, but Miss Thornhill, I believe, has a reservation here.”

“Yes, Mr. Lindstrom. You’ll find the Waldo just down the street, corner of West Pike and Fourth. Miss Thornhill has Room 127 here at the Gore, private bath, and 126, as well; there’s a door through. Reserved by a Mr. Malone, for the
Chicago Tribune
.”

“Indeed.” Eric shot Emily a glance. “That is correct.”

Emily stepped over to the clerk, smiling, and noticed a stack of bound newspapers on the long mahogany desk. The word
Widow
jumped out at her.
Decomposed Body Uncovered near Quiet Dell Garage
read the headline. She took a copy as the room seemed to darken around her, and held it out to Eric.

Eric snapped it open. “Sir, this is the evening paper?”

“Just delivered.” The clerk scowled. “A bad business, a very bad business.”

“Mr. Parrish, I would be obliged if you would direct us to Quiet Dell. It’s nearby?”

“Very near, four miles or so. Take Second to Main, which becomes the Buckhannon Turnpike, and drive straight along. You’ll see the crowd.”

“The crowd?”

“Oh, yes, I’m afraid so.”

Eric nodded his thanks and was out the door. Emily looked for the porter and extended fifty cents. “Mr.—your name, sir?”

“Woods, ma’am.”

“Mr. Woods, please deliver these to my room? I will be back
presently.” She heard his “Yes, ma’am,” behind her as she pushed her way through the revolving door. The car was running. It was nearly six in the evening of a beautiful summer night. They had two hours of waning daylight.

Emily looked at the words:
Body Uncovered
. So he had buried them, all of them, surely. Eric drove along nearly deserted, brick-paved streets. The sidewalks presented occasional passersby and the Victorian architecture seemed almost a stage set; there was money here, a vaguely Southern sensibility more akin to Baltimore or Cincinnati than Atlanta. Yet it was like nowhere else; she had never been to such a place, with such verdant, encroaching hills and small, brilliant skies.

“It seems a rather nice little town,” Emily said.

“Oh yes, very nice. Do you have the paper there?”

On the highway, he drove faster. Hills rose steeply on the right; small, fenced fields to the left, a creek, a few cows raising their woolly heads at the sound of the car. Beyond the rolling land and meandering creek, as far as the horizon, forested mountains rose in line after heightened line.

“Emily,” Eric said, “read it to me.”

“They found Mrs. Eicher—they’re calling her Ada—at three-forty-five yesterday, and then all three children, within a half hour, ten feet from her. Shallow grave. A ditch near a garage, in Quiet Dell.” Emily looked up, her eyes swimming.

“Go on,” Eric said.

“Cornelius O. Pierson, alias Harry F. Powers . . . held in the city jail. He’s been charged. Probable murder warrants, so he hasn’t confessed. It gives his address, somewhere called Broad Oaks. Must be a section of Clarksburg. It says he’s forty-five.”

“Clever how Main Street becomes a turnpike,” Eric mused. “Look in the glove box, will you, and get the press card for the windscreen. A garage. I must drive straight up. If it’s a mob scene, I can’t leave the car to be vandalized, with all the cameras in back. Not to mention the car itself.”

“Eric, these are farmers, not hoodlums.”

“These are bootleggers, Emily.”

“A few are, as in Chicago and everywhere.”

“I like it. You’re in town ten minutes and ready to join the booster club.”

“Well, you can’t assume.” She flipped her own credential to the outside of her bag and put the press card on the dash. She took the dog’s leash from her bag and attached it to Duty’s collar.

“You’re bringing the dog?”

“You don’t seem to understand what a help this dog will be, Mr. Lindstrom.”

“There,” Eric said. It was a left turn, a narrow, dusty track. The tops of cars shone black above overgrown banks of flowering weeds and brush. Automobiles were parked to both sides for several hundred yards.

Emily turned to see Duty struggling for perilous balance on the edge of the backseat and took him into her lap. She breathed in the crushed green smells of earth, wild mustard, honeysuckle, and then a darker scent. Eric pulled carefully onto an open dirt swath before the garage, which was rude and small, square, flat roofed, with wooden doors in front. The crowd—perhaps two hundred or more, men, mostly adults, a few women—stood quietly. All looked toward the back of the building.

Emily got out quickly, looping the dog’s leash around her wrist. She heard then the pounding of pickaxes and the slough of dirt, shoveled and thrown. The smell was the sewer ditch, uncovered. They are gone now, she told herself, they are not here, not even their bodies, but the men were still digging and the crowd was waiting. Eric photographed the throng pressed up to the sides of the building, constantly clicking the shutter as he framed the gathering.

The crowd seemed country people, in overalls, their sleeves rolled up; a few women in housedresses. A quiet restlessness moved among them; few spoke, and only in lowered voices. She followed Eric around to the back. The ditch, a deep gash perhaps four feet deep and three feet across, ran straight some forty or fifty feet from the garage to the back of the lot. A narrow sewer pipe
showed along the bottom, and a sort of winch had been rigged near the exposed foundation of the building, for pulling up the bodies with ropes.

Duty struggled forward on the leash, dragging her to the very edge of the ditch. It seemed he might jump in, and the thought horrified her.

The ditch was muddy and wet, for it opened into a little creek whose dark green water lay nearly still, barely visible through the towering, weedy growth along its banks. Scrub trees, purple weeds, stalky blooms taller than the men who stood near them. Was that Queen Anne’s lace, grown to such a height? The white flowers were the size of parasols. A smaller ditch, the uncovered gas line, bisected the large one. The two indentions formed a shape very like a cross that emptied into the water. Now she saw men in suits and fedoras, and uniformed police, near the building, watching the work. A ladder lay propped against the back of the garage, and a solid row of spectators, some just boys, had seated themselves along the back of the roof and hung their legs over casually. One or two wore shirt and tie, as though they’d come from jobs in banks or drugstores back in Clarksburg.

There was Eric, standing on the roof behind the seated men, shooting the entire view of the ditch to the creek, and the still, empty field beyond the narrow band of water. She turned, pulling the dog with her, peering past the disturbed ground as far as the horizon. The creek looked no more than fifteen feet across, and she could see the water move, a glowing lip against the opposite shore and gently ascending meadow. The sun was low in the sky and the angle of light burnished the ground. Heavy-limbed trees stood silhouetted in the field, gravid, sentinel, their canopies subtly stirring. The sky was still pale blue against the darker earth, and the creek seemed to mark a line between one world and another. She imagined walking across the water, leading Duty on the leash to that other, empty meadow that lay bathed in the softest pearlized light, but could not bring herself to approach. None of them, on this side, were worthy of that place.

•   •   •

Annabel can dream when she’s awake, and waken in her sleep, or she is never asleep, but always dreaming. She moves above or through the urgency of people moving and doing; she turns away at will and bridges great distances in the breadth of a thought. She is here, in the place Grandmother called
below
. Narrow dirt roads thread through the mountains. Drawn closer, she sees throngs of people crowded near the hunched garage. Lines of metal glint in angled curves: the tops of many black cars. The glass of the windscreens sparkles and catches the sun.

She sees the long bright car that pulls up last. A tall blond man exits, heading straight for the crowd, flashing his silent camera, and a woman gets out, with Duty on the leash. Annabel hears the click of the leash moving, and smells the trampled grass, dung, and earth, and so many shoes and boots and mingled bodies. She knows she smells what Duty smells. She cannot feel the weight of him, or the warmth, but senses him intensely, for nothing separates her now from those for whom she longs so deeply. Duty turns his head, confused. His long mournful search is over; he has found them.

Emily stands beside the dark slash in the ground. Duty drags at the leash. He smells some remnant mixed in the earth and pulls Emily to the dirt edge of the gash; he would leap into the dark, roll in it and taste it, as with dead things at home: a squashed bird, a rabbit torn by cats.

Annabel waits in the meadow across the creek. There is no death here, no danger. Birds take wing like glimmers, rising up; rabbits wear their closed wounds like flowers. She knows the gash across the creek is dense and black, deepening, tugging at the crouched garage. The people standing near are quiet, as though gathered for a meeting of great import. She sees Charles O’Boyle walking up out of the ditch, carrying Grandmother’s last meal up the stairs on the silver tray. His steps are measured, just as at home on Thanksgiving. He had turned on the landing, the tray perfectly
balanced, and caught her eye, for she stood above him waiting, just as now. Then she sees her mother in his arms, for Mother grew faint on Christmas and he carried her into the kitchen. Annabel hears water leap out of the spigot, splattering in the tin sink, but Charles is standing at Grandmother’s window, looking at the playhouse through the snow. It is the humid end of summer here, but Charles is putting the warm blouson hats on their heads at Christmas, the Canadian hats for the Canadian toboggan, and hers is banded and jeweled. How odd to think of it, and the light his camera made when he snapped their picture, with the snow falling so heavily.

Across the way, a light flashes from the roof of the garage, like an eye that opens while the ground is sifted and pulled. Deep in the gash, a glow begins. They have found something; they murmur that something is found. Annabel hears Duty barking as he used to bark at home; the crowd is shifting and moving, and she sees Duty pull Emily toward her, straining at the leash.

•   •   •

The dog seemed beset, and no wonder. Emily must work; she must get close to those in authority. She tore her gaze from the meadow opposite and addressed a policeman at the foot of the excavation. “Excuse me, Officer. Can you tell me who is in charge here?”