Shadow of Death (11 page)

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Authors: William G. Tapply

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: Shadow of Death
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“You lookin' for him, or for his camp?” said Harris.
“Both,” I said. “Either.”
“Well,” said Harris, “couldn't tell you where Albert might be, but I s'pose we know where Albert's camp is, don't we, Dubber?”
“Yep,” said Dub. “S'pose we do.”
“Not sure Albert would like us tellin' some friend of his wife's where it is, though. Whaddya think?”
“I think you got a point, brother.” Dub poked my arm. “What do you think, Boston?”
“I think,” I said, “that you guys are having some fun for yourselves. Me, I just want to find this place. You going to tell me where it is or not?”
They looked at each other, pretending to ponder the question. Then Harris nodded, and Dub said, “Well, I guess any friend of Albert Stoddard's wife oughta be considered a friend of ours. You want to get to this place, you gotta head up to Limerick. Next town to the north. Fifteen, twenty minutes from here.” He hesitated. “Shit, Harris, fetch that DeLorme from the office, willya? We don't want Boston, here, driving that pretty Beemer down some dead-end road where he can't turn around.”
Harris went into the office, and a minute later he returned with a tattered book of topographic maps. He and Dub spread it on the hood of my car, and Dub used a ballpoint pen to trace the route from the village of Southwick to a little round pond buried deep in the woods in the northwest corner of Limerick. They showed me where the long driveway led off the dirt road to the camp. I'd spot it about fifty yards after I crossed a wooden bridge where a brook passed under the road.
“Long ways in,” said Dub, tracing with his finger the distance from the road to the pond.
“Close to a mile, I'd guess,” added Harris. “Long ways in a Beemer.”
I studied the map, then looked up and nodded. “Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”
“You ain't gonna get lost, are you?” said Harris.
“No,” I said. “I've got it here.” I tapped my head.
Harris looked at Dub. “He must've went to college.”
“I did,” I said.
“You got one of them cell phones with you?”
I shook my head.
“What're you gonna do if you get stuck?”
“I guess I'll have to walk,” I said. “You think I'll get stuck?”
“Not unless you get lost.”
“I won't get lost,” I said. “Thanks for your help. I better get going before it gets dark.”
Harris nodded. “Gets dark early this time of year. That's when the bears come out.”
“Lotta bears around here,” said Dub.
I smiled. “I'll keep an eye out for bears.” I climbed into my car and pulled away from the garage. Harris and Dub stood there side by side, watching me go. I lifted my hand, and they both lifted theirs.
I decided to get Henry some water and something to drink for myself before I headed to Limerick and went looking for Albert's camp, so I stopped at the general store.
When I went in, Helen, Carol's partner at the real estate office, was standing by the counter talking with the elderly man at the cash register. She was leaning over the counter
patting his cheek, and they were laughing about something. When they saw me, they stopped laughing.
I said hello to Helen, and she nodded to me. I found the cooler at the back of the store. I got a bottle of orange juice for me and a bottle of water for Henry and took them to the front.
Helen had left, and the old man—I guessed he was somewhere in his late seventies or early eighties—was perched on a stool looking at a newspaper through a pair of thick black-rimmed eyeglasses that were perched way out there toward the tip of his long, meandering nose.
I put the two bottles on the counter.
The old guy used his forefinger to push his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and peered up at me. “That'll be two bucks even,” he said.
I took out my wallet and put a five-dollar bill on the counter. I noticed that his eyeglasses were the kind with built-in hearing aids.
“Understand you been lookin' for Stoddard's old hunting camp,” he said.
“That's right.”
He clanged open his cash register, made change, and slapped the three bills down on the counter.
“Did you know the Stoddards?” I said.
“Can't say I really knew 'em,” he said. “It was a long time ago.” He frowned. “Arnold? Harold? Something like that. Owned a business of some kind over in Keene. Quiet folks. Pretty much kept to themselves. One day they up and moved away. Let's see, that was … my goodness, that must've been thirty, thirty-five years ago.”
“You don't know Albert, then?”
“The boy?” He shook his head. “Guess he was a teenager when they left. Helen was mentioning him just now. Friend of yours, is he?”
I nodded.
“And you're looking for his camp.”
“I am.”
“Guess you talked to the Goff boys, eh?”
I smiled. “Do you know everything?”
“I guess I know just about everything that happens in this here town,” he said. “Which amounts to nothin' much worth knowing.” He grinned. His teeth were yellowish and a little large for his mouth. “I'm sure the Goff boys got you squared away.”
I smiled. “They were very helpful.”
“It's up to Limerick,” he said. “The camp.”
“Dub and Harris eventually showed me how to find it,” I said. “It probably would've been easier if I'd asked you.”
“Think they're Abbott and Costello, those two fellas. Some folks don't think they're so funny.”
“I thought they were pretty funny,” I said. I held up the water bottle I'd just bought. “You don't have some kind of container I can borrow so I can give this water to my dog, do you?”
“Guess I might,” he said. He groaned, climbed off his stool, bent creakily under the counter, and came up with a plastic bowl.
“Thanks,” I said. “I'll bring it right back.”
The old man waved away that idea with the back of his hand. “Keep it,” he said. “You might need it later.”
“Well, thanks a lot.”
“Hell, it's just a plastic bowl.”
“Even so,” I said. “It's very friendly of you.”
“Guess I want you to think of Southwick as a friendly town,” he said. “I'm betting the Goff boys had a little fun with you. Their idea of fun, anyway. Pair of clowns, them two.” He held out his hand to me. “Names Farley, by the way. That's my first name. Farley Nelson. Lived in this town all my life. So'd my daddy. Me, I never saw no reason to go anywheres else. Never understood why anybody would. Nice town, Southwick. No place better on God's green earth, if you ask me.” He grinned. “Course, I ain't ever been anywhere else.”
I gripped Farley Nelson's hand. It felt like a hunk of tree bark. “I'm Brady Coyne,” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “Heard that already.”
“Well,” I said, “thanks for the bowl.”
“Oh, I like dogs,” said Farley. “Got two setters and a beagle and an old black Lab, myself. Usta hunt 'em, but last few years, my damn arthritis, mainly in my knees …”
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other and smiled and nodded while he told me about his ailments, and how good the partridge hunting used to be before the woods grew too tall, and how the cottontails had about disappeared—damn coyotes, he figured—and how nowadays the out-of-staters all came for the turkeys, and how he didn't do much hunting anymore. Still liked fishing, though. Had a bass pond dug out behind his barn, got a kick out of raising the fish and then trying to catch them, and I guess old Farley Nelson would've talked on and on if a gang of kids hadn't come in to pepper him with questions about the latest videos.
I used that as an opportunity to escape.
When I stepped outside, I saw that Helen was sitting on the bench in front. I nodded to her.
“Mr. Coyne,” she said.
I stopped. “Yes?”
“Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
She patted the bench beside her, and I sat down.
“That your dog?” She pointed at my car. Henry was sitting in the front seat looking at us.
“Yes. How'd you know?”
“Massachusetts plates. Hunting dog?”
“I guess he would be if I hunted,” I said. “He's a Brittany. It's in his genes.”
“Everybody hereabouts hunts. Bet Farley got your ear.”
I smiled. “He seems like a nice guy.”
She nodded. “He is. He'll talk your ear off, though.” She looked away for a moment. “I was a bit short with you back at the office,” she said. “I wanted to apologize.”
I waved that sentiment away with the back of my hand. “You were doing business,” I said. “I understand.”
“It wasn't exactly that.”
“No?”
“I knew the Stoddards,” she said. “Didn't like them very much.”
I shrugged. I figured if she wanted to tell me why, she would.
Evidently she didn't. “That's why I reacted the way I did when their name was mentioned,” she said. “I don't like to be impolite, but I guess I was, and I'm sorry for it. I can tell you where their camp is.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I talked with the guys at the garage. They showed me on a map.”
“Harris and Dub,” she said. “Regular encyclopedias of information, those two.”
“Did you know Albert Stoddard?”
“Just by reputation,” she said. “He was about twenty years younger than me. He was a teenager when the Stoddards moved away.”
“What was his reputation?”
Helen blinked at me. “I didn't mean it that way. I just meant, I didn't know him personally.”
“Have you seen him recently?”
“Albert Stoddard?” Helen shrugged. “I don't suppose I'd know him if I did see him. What I remember is a skinny towheaded boy riding around the dirt roads on a three-speed bicycle. He must be, what, a forty, forty-five-year-old man now?”
“About that. He's a college professor.”
“Imagine that,” she said. “Are you looking for him?”
I smiled. “I'm just looking for his camp.”
“It's in Limerick.”
“Yes,” I said. “That's what the Goff brothers told me.” I stood up. “And I want to see if I can find it before it gets dark.”
“Well, you better get started, then,” said Helen.
I held out my hand to her. “It was nice talking with you.”
“I just didn't want you to get the wrong impression,” she said. “We're really a friendly town.”
“That is my impression,” I said.
I went to my car, and when I opened the door, Henry slinked guiltily into the back.
I poured half of the bottle of water into the bowl Farley Nelson had given me and put the bowl on the backseat. Henry licked the bowl dry, then lay down.
As I pulled away from the general store, I waved at Helen, who was still sitting on the bench.
She lifted her hand to me.
The truth was, I still hadn't made up my mind whether Southwick was a friendly town.
T
he road out of Southwick angled northeasterly into Limerick, and I followed the Goff brothers' map in my head to the right fork and then the sharp right turn onto the dirt road at the stop sign, and fifteen minutes after I'd driven away from the general store in Southwick I crossed the little wooden bridge over the rocky streambed and turned onto the pair of ruts leading into the woods. If the Goff boys hadn't been funning me, that would take me to Albert Stoddard's hunting camp by the pond.
The roadway was old and rocky and the ruts were deep, and I had to steer my left-side tires onto the crown between them to prevent the undercarriage of my BMW from scraping against the rocks.
Goldenrod and grass grew in the roadway. I couldn't tell how recently any vehicle had been here, but it was obvious that it was not heavily traveled.
Well, Gordon Cahill's little Corolla had been here. Gordie had taken the photos to prove it.
And the photos showed Albert's Volkswagen. That made two vehicles before mine.
I drove in first gear, and the weeds and brush scraped against the sides of my car. Henry stood on the backseat with his nose pressed against the window, alert for partridges.
I crept along at about five miles per hour. The old roadway seemed to go on and on. It passed over the trickle of a brook, bumped up and down small hills, curved through woods and past grown-up meadows, and I guessed I'd gone over half a mile when it crested a rise and began to descend. Here the woods thinned into meadow studded with clumps of alder and poplar and juniper, and below me lay a little bowl-shaped pond nestled among the low wooded hills.
I stopped to take a look. Albert's camp crouched close to the pond in a grove of big pine trees. Gordon Cahill had taken his pictures from right here on the old roadway.
I keep a pair of bird-watching binoculars in my glove box. I took them out and scanned the scene. The green Volkswagen was nowhere to be seen. The place looked deserted.
I continued down the hill, pulled up in front of the camp, got out, and walked around it. The clapboards, once painted white, were now gray and flaking. Pine needles clogged the gutters, and a few bricks had fallen away from the top of the chimney.
Out back stood an unpainted outhouse. The door hung open. I peeked in. It was a two-holer. Most of the outhouses I'd seen—and used—had two or even three side-by-side seats, and I always wondered if, back in the days of outhouses, visiting them had been a social activity.
A half-empty roll of toilet paper sat on the wooden bench. The rims of the seats were gouged and splintered where porcupines,
I guessed, had gnawed on them. They looked pretty uncomfortable.
Beside the house was a small barn with a caved-in roof. I slid open the door and went inside. Aside from an ancient tractor, a couple of oil drums, a rack of rusty gardening tools, and a stack of firewood, it was empty.
I prowled around the rest of the area. There was no green Volkswagen Beetle—or any other functional vehicle—anywhere, which, I cleverly deduced, meant Albert wasn't there.
I went back to my car, let Henry out, and he and I followed a path down to the edge of the pond. Beside the path at a little sandy beach, a red Old Town canoe lay overturned on a pair of sawhorses. I went over to it and brushed my hand over it. Some dried sand was caked on its skin.
I looked at the sand on the rim of the pond and saw a few grooves such as the keel of a canoe would leave if it had been launched or landed there. It was impossible to tell how recently they'd been made.
The canoe had been used sometime recently. The sand would've been washed off the canoe in the first rainstorm. I tried to remember. It hadn't rained for over a week, at least in Boston.
Henry waded in and started paddling around. I sat on the pine needles, leaned my back against the trunk of a tree, and watched him.
Albert, where the hell are you?
The sun was falling behind the mountains beyond the pond. Off to my right, half a dozen wood ducks wheeled in and splashed down. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after six. I had about half an hour of daylight left.
I called Henry in, and we headed back to the camp.
I stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the screen porch for a minute, pondering the pros and cons of breaking and entering. The outside screen door hung slightly ajar. I wouldn't have to do any breaking to enter the porch. I pulled it open and went in. Henry, of course, followed me.
A square table and four creaky-looking rocking chairs sat on the narrow porch. The wood on all the pieces of furniture was raw and rough, as if time and weather and heavy use had worn away their finish. It would be a nice place to sit and rock and look at the pond, especially at dawn and dusk when deer and turkeys would be active and bass or trout might be dimpling the water's surface.
I was tempted to sit in one of those rockers and try it, except here, on this porch and away from the open water of the pond, the shadows were creeping in fast. The woods already looked dark. I wanted to get on with it.
I tried the door that opened to the inside of the camp. It was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped directly into the kitchen.
Entering, surely, though technically, at least, not breaking.
“Albert?” I said without expectation. “You here?”
If he was, he wasn't admitting it.
The shadows were even deeper inside. What light there was came from four small windows on two of the walls. I blinked a few times, and after a minute my eyes adjusted, and I saw that the entire downstairs of the camp consisted of a single room. The floor was cracked and faded yellow linoleum that was curling up along the edges. The walls were cheap old imitation pine paneling.
The kitchen had a soapstone sink with a hand pump. It was flanked by cabinets without doors that held glasses, mugs, plates, canned goods, pots, and pans. There was a
blackened wood stove with a flat surface for cooking. The wood box beside the stove was empty. There was an oval dining table pushed against the wall. Four mismatched wooden chairs were pushed in around it.
The opposite end of the room was dominated by a large fieldstone fireplace. Facing it were two soft chairs, a big sofa, and a coffee table. On both sides of the fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bookcases had been built in, and they were stuffed with books.
A narrow, open stairway against the back wall led up to what appeared to be a sleeping loft over the kitchen end of the camp.
A Coleman lantern sat on the kitchen table. I lit it with my Zippo lighter.
My stereotype of a hunting camp included a mounted deer head over the fireplace and a stuffed mallard sitting on the mantel and a fox pelt tacked to the wall, but Albert's camp had none of these artifacts. In fact, what struck me was what the place was missing—personality, character, history, family. No old maps tacked on the walls, no ancient family photos or outdated calendars or old license plates, no fishing rods hanging on pegs, no stacks of board games on the shelves.
It struck me as the sort of place where a bunch of guys might come for a weekend to play cards and grill steaks and drink beer and escape women—which, come to think of it, probably fit Albert's needs perfectly. I wondered if he had a bunch of guys he liked to hang out with.
Or boys. Maybe he brought boys here.
I realized I didn't know Albert very well.
I took the lantern over to the stairs leading up to the loft. I hesitated at the bottom and said, “Albert, I hope to hell you're not up there.”
No response. I went up the narrow stairway.
A grown man would have to stoop to walk around in the loft. I chose not to walk around. I could see everything from the top of the stairs.
Two bare mattresses lay directly on the floor. Otherwise, it was empty.
Albert, asleep or dead, was not there.
Finding Albert's body, I realized, was what I'd been expecting, and dreading.
I let out a long breath and went back down the stairs. Henry was waiting at the bottom with a where-the-hell-did-you-go look on his face.
I scratched his forehead and went over to the fireplace. I lifted the lantern and scanned the books in the shelves. It was an eclectic collection of novels and biographies, mysteries and westerns. None, as near as I could tell from a cursory look at the titles, had been published since about 1970.
Henry had crawled up on the sofa, and he was curled in a corner giving me his isn't-it-time-to-eat? look. I sat beside him, and when I set the lantern on the coffee table, I noticed that a book lay there along with a chipped white coffee mug and a big glass ashtray. Both the mug and the ashtray were empty.
I picked up the book. It was a biography of Henry Clay. I guessed Albert was reading it. His place was marked about two-thirds of the way through with a letter-sized envelope.
I slipped the envelope out of the book. It had been addressed to Albert at Tufts University. It was dated June 22 of this year and postmarked from Milford, New Hampshire.
It had been slit open. Inside were a couple of folded-up newspaper clippings. I took them out, laid them side by side on the coffee table, and moved the lantern closer.
They were obituaries—one for a man named Oliver S. Burlingame and the other for Mark Gorham Lyman.
I assumed—although I could've been wrong—that these clippings had been mailed to Albert in this envelope. Maybe not. Maybe he just used the envelope to keep them in. But either way, these obituaries apparently had some significance to Albert.
The typeface and bland formulaic style suggested they'd been cut from small-town newspapers.
I read the first one:
OLIVER S. BURLINGAME
 
Banker, Little League Coach
 
KINKAID–Oliver S. Burlingame, 45, died accidentally March 19.
 
Mr. Burlingame was born April 12, 1957, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, son of Anne (Stowell) and Raymond Burlingame. He attended the St.
 
Paul's School in Concord, NH, where he was captain of the cross-country team and a member of the rifle team.
 
Mr. Burlingame earned a B.A. degree in finance and marketing from Northeastern University in 1980. He moved to Kinkaid in 1982 and began work as a loan officer for the Kinkaid branch of the St. Louis Savings Bank. He was the assistant manager of the bank at the time of his death.
 
Mr. Burlingame was an avid skeet shooter and a champion bass fisherman.
 
Family members include two daughters, Mary Ellen Burlingame and Anne (Burlingame) Marvell, both of Kinkaid.
 
Services are private. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations in Mr. Burlingame's memory be made to the St. Paul's School, Concord, NH 03301.
Several things struck me. First was the word “accidentally,” coupled with the fact that no medical facility was mentioned as the place he had died.
Second was the New Hampshire connection. Peterborough, where Burlingame was born, lay less than a half hour's drive from both Southwick, where Albert Stoddard grew up, and Limerick, where I now sat. And come to think of it, Milford, where the envelope had been postmarked, was perhaps a half hour's drive east of Southwick.
I had no idea where Kinkaid was, though a good guess would put it in Missouri, assuming the St. Louis Savings Bank was a clue.
Third was the fact that in more than twenty years, Oliver Burlingame seemed not to have made much progress in his life. The leap from loan officer to assistant manager of the same branch bank suggested perhaps one promotion. A man of little ambition, or limited ability, or both.
Fourth was Burlingame's age. Albert Stoddard was about forty-five, too.
Hm. I turned to the other obit.
MARK GORHAM LYMAN
 
Sales manager, church deacon
 
BANGOR–Mark Gorham Lyman, 46, died suddenly on April 2.
 
Mr. Lyman was born in Keene, New Hampshire, and graduated from Bangor High School where he played on the football and baseball teams. He served in the United States Army where he attained the rank of corporal. Upon his discharge he returned to Bangor, where he became a salesman for Sprague Electric. He was the regional sales manager at the time of his death.
 
Mr. Lyman served as a deacon for the St. Anne's Episcopal Church for sixteen years and was active in the Bangor Community Theater.
 
He leaves his wife, Gail (Evans) Lyman, and one son, Mark Gorham Lyman, Jr.
 
Funeral services will be held at 11:00 A.M. on April 5 at St. Anne's Episcopal Church.

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