Summerkill (30 page)

“That is also not part of my normal sheriffing procedure,” he said eventually. “In case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” But I had to say it, because she kept wet-nosing at my exposed side: “Roxy may have been.”

Unhurried, he shifted position so we both could see the thick blond head and inquiring eyes. And start giggling. Which led,
a bit later, to him asking, “That’s the only condom I brought. Do you—?”

“No,” I said regretfully. “With two kids in the house …”

Things quieted down, sort of, but it soon became apparent that neither of us was committed to ongoing chastity. “All right,
lady,” he said, pulling back, “I’d best turn down the covers, tuck you in, and banish myself to the RV.”

“Forget the tucking. I hate tight covers.”

He sighed. “Then I’ll turn them down and kiss you goodnight.”

Rather lingeringly, that turned out to be, until I finally said, “Would you get out of here?” Which wasn’t meant as a question,
or surely as a complaint.

I
s it ever without awkwardness, that next encounter after you’ve made love for the first time? What did it mean? What does
he/she think it meant? Maybe if you’re committed to a lifestyle of one-night stands you can banish such uncertainties, but
I have my doubts. Even Willem, who knows a brief encounter when he’s had one and who considers long-term, exclusive attachments
uncivilized, concedes the likelihood of discomfort in the early going.

Fortunately, that Saturday morning Baxter and I had no time for a meaningful discussion and plenty of other things to think
about. I was already up when he knocked on the kitchen door a little past six-thirty, looking as if that night’s sleep hadn’t
been much of an improvement over the previous one. By way of greeting, we went for a medium-strength hug.

I’d scrounged in the bottom corner cabinet for the rarely used coffee machine. “How many invaders did you run off last night?”
I asked, handing him a cup and nodding toward the sugar and creamer.

“I lost count. How did you sleep?”

“Mmm,” I evaded. To tell the truth, I’d slept amazingly well. I did lie awake for a while—when you’ve got a good afterglow,
float with it, and besides it was nowhere near my usual bedtime. Then suddenly the clock read shortly after five
A.M.
I’d genuinely conked out: no corpses shimmering behind my eyelids, and if there’d been bad dreams I didn’t remember them.
“What do you like for breakfast?”

“Whatever’s handy. Cereal and milk? Toast, fruit, anything I can wolf down. Frank’s picking me up in ten minutes. I want to
put today’s agenda into play as early as possible.”

“The boys’ cereal collection is in that cabinet to the right of the sink. Take your pick. Get me out the box of cornflakes
while you’re there. The fruit’s already on the table, I’ll bring the milk and bowls. Do the men all line up at attention while
you read off the assignments?”

“That sounds picturesque.” He took a sip of his coffee, carefully set it down, and started constructing his cereal. Too strong,
too weak, too stale? People fudge when you ask them. Since I refuse to taste-test, maybe I should bow to reality and toss
the coffeemaker? “The day shift is nine guys up here, plus four down at the Clarksburg substation and the three assigned to
the courthouse. Usually a few are on some detail and there’s no reason for them to check in first. Whoever’s around, we get
together.”

“Kind of like a football huddle?”

“We’ll have to try that someday. Break with a rousing communal grunt.”

“How many of your nine up here are on the murders?”

“That’s a variable, depending how many people we can spare from the routine stuff and what there is to do.” He paused for
a couple spoonfuls of cereal. “Frank’s the lead officer days, and I switched Calvin to the three-to-eleven shift so he could
take over then. Winston Moeller is in charge nights. You probably haven’t met him. Winnie’s caretaking, basically. There’s
not much active investigating to do on his watch.”

“I don’t suppose he called with any hot developments last night?”

“No. But guess who did call—at a quarter to six, which is astonishing given the hours he normally keeps. Phil Thomson is not
happy with me. He insisted I come down to Riverton for a conference this morning. I said I’d try to squeeze out the time.”

“But you won’t.”

“No point. Phil isn’t going to tell me anything useful I don’t already know. Any more than I’d tell him. What are you planning
to do this morning?”

“Well, first, I’ll be painting a big blue rectangle. Then I want to check out several things in the Hudson Heights material.
I need to run an errand—there’s a good paving supplier this side of Pittsfield, and I want to see if he’s got anything I can
use for the new garden in Platteville. On the way home I may pop in on Skip where he’s working—he’s not great about calling
back.”

“Good idea.”

“Yesterday I asked Denny to help me find somebody to keep an eye on the property when I’m not around. He’s checking if the
Yardley brothers are available. So I might be meeting with them later to set up a schedule.”

He smiled, tipping his cereal bowl to access the last of its contents. Someday I’d have to make the boys watch him eat. “One
or more of them on the premises should discourage all but the hardiest intruders. At least make ’em wait till you’re home
alone. Which you are not going to be, for as long as it takes me to get these people.”

“That doesn’t sound like you plan to solve the case today.”

“You never know. Not to worry—except for one drugstore item, I’m provisioned for an extended camping trip.”

I helped him lug in the Hudson Heights binders and site plans, getting a milk-tasting goodbye kiss for reward. The paint-over
quickly taken care of, I spread out the site plans and arranged them in chronological order, then extracted from the binders
the two earlier maps of the area they’d submitted with the application. One was a simple atlas-type map made in the early
thirties as part of a federal public works project. The other, much more detailed, came from a topographical survey of the
entire county done in the late eighties. Neither indicated the existence of any caves on Crane Hill, but the latter showed
a very minor road winding part of the way up it, perhaps to where Baxter and his friends had parked for their lunatic high
dives. From the contour lines the height looked feasible, though they’d have needed to walk some to get the right angle on
the quarry pond. How much farther on had Mr. Kanser gone? If his estimate of more than three-fourths up was correct, it must’ve
been at least a hundred feet. Then if you allowed for a thirty-some-foot reduction of the top—by very rough estimate, the
top of the bat cave mightn’t be all that far underneath the present surface.

You tend to think of hills as being symmetrical, though most of them aren’t. The 1980s topo map showed that Crane Hill certainly
wasn’t. The contour lines indicated sheer cliffs fronting the river and an almost as steep rise up from the quarry pond, a
portion of which had been dug out from the hill’s base. Between these two strong verticals the lines confirmed a series of
broad, gentle downward rolls in the southeast—the pool/tennis-courts area has been leveled off on the uppermost one—and, around
to the north of the quarry pond where the old logging road came up, terracing that grew sharper and steeper the closer you
got to the river. This remained the most heavily forested face of the hill, even after the carving out of the Hudson Heights
approach road and some reshaping to create a gradually sloping access to the golf course.

Even before Clete got to work on it, Crane Hill had been pretty fat. The map showed a summit walking-around area maybe 200
by 400 feet overall. Uneven and pockmarked it must have been—you’d have to keep watching where you planted your feet—but negotiable.
Between taking off the top and building up the sides, the surface area had been nearly tripled, and the leveling process had
made it much more usable.

Carefully, I studied the sequence of site plans. The first several, as expected, showed a pool/tennis-courts complex up top.
But from then on, that area was parking lot. Rationale for the change? “Owner preference” was the only enlightenment the binders
had to offer. In the specs, the paving material got considerably thicker as things went along. Engineers’ demands, or had
somebody gotten nervous? Unsurprisingly, the binders refused to clarify that point.

Driving toward Pittsfield and walking around the supplier’s yard I stubbornly focused on the Platteville garden. But even
before my order was written up, Hudson Heights reassumed control. There had to be some way to take things to the next level.
It felt so close. Maybe Skip could provide the necessary boost up.

He was currently working on the dirt-lot parking area for a mini shopping mall in Devon, a hamlet a few miles east of the
Pinehaven town line. My arrival was not well-timed, as it turned out. The larger of his two backhoes had broken down earlier
in the morning and on-site repairs were not holding. Skip doesn’t panic about things like that, but he takes them very seriously.
Skip takes life, period, very seriously. I’ve often wondered how he came by his nickname.

How it ended up was, I asked my questions to his disappearing and reappearing, usually prone body. Not that he was noticeably
impatient or inattentive, but I do believe I’d have engaged a higher level of his mind if less of it had been devoted to machine
repair.

Not wanting to clutter it with too many preliminaries, I started off by telling him about the now-buried caves and my educated
guess as to their location. I wanted to know what would have happened to them, besides being buried, in the course of Clete’s
remake of the hill. Would the tops have been staved in?

“Most likely,” Skip thought. “The rock structure is weaker there than on the river face of the hill. There’ll probably still
be air pockets, though. If one of any size collapses, we’ll see the effects up top in spite of all that concrete.”

“Like a big hole opening up and swallowing a few cars?”

“A sizable depression, maybe, measured horizontally. I doubt you’d get anything close to car-swallowing depth. It could mess
up the surface of the lot, is about all.”

Scratch easy disaster theory number one. “Might the big cave, the one where the bats used to live, have been suitable for
use as a dumpsite?”

“Suitable? I suppose, if you’re thinking purely in terms of storage area. Assuming the entrance was big enough to drive into.
And you said there used to be a passable road up that high. There’d be the advantage of an easy close-off when it was full.
But I can’t see it would make much sense to truck stuff all the way up the hill when there were plenty of places to dump down
below.”

“Right. But let’s just say that fifty-some years ago somebody did turn the big cave into a dumpsite and what they were dumping
was toxic waste. How might this manifest today?”

The next time his body reappeared from under the backhoe it stayed a while. “We’ll assume there was a way for this stuff
to leach out, which could mean seepage if the right area was exposed. Are you thinking plateau surface or the side of the
hill?”

“Either. If you could see it, how would it look?”

“That’s a variable. With a mature leach-out you get ooze, and it can be bubbly. Maybe there’s vapor rising. Have you ever
seen the surface above a leaky old landfill? Or smelled it?”

“Sounds like you’re describing a mini thermal area.”

“Something like, but there wouldn’t be nearly the force involved, and that’s important here. This stuff would be a fair distance
from both the side and the top of Crane Hill now. Also underneath a thick concrete cap up top. Even if it got to leaching
pretty good, I’d be surprised if much of anything showed. I worked most of that area last summer and didn’t see indications
of anything going on. How about you?”

“Nothing,” I conceded.

“Of course if there is some sort of toxic leakage it might manifest a lot less dramatically in soil corruption. Are there
any areas where you’ve had unusual die-off?”

“Our die-off’s been within normal parameters. And the soil tests out healthy enough.”

“Did Cooperative Extension just do the pH, or did you send out to Cornell for the full analysis?”

I stared at him. “Oh, wow! Skip, I’ve got to run. I do thank you.”

He looked up at me sharply. “You’re welcome to stick around and tell me for what.”

“I’d best wait a little on that. Trust me. It would also be a good idea to keep any guessing to yourself for the time being.”

• • •

My next level! Why did they drive Skip away? Because he had damn good eyes and they couldn’t risk him spotting something he’d
insist be investigated. I’d figure to be a lesser danger in that respect, since I didn’t personally move any of the ground.
But what if I began wondering why plants were dying? How would these people know what might look to me like a normal problem
and what a suspicious one? Thus Thurman and all his reassuring soil tests.

Mariah. All right, so she couldn’t have known about the cave. She’d taken a different route, one Willem and I had unwittingly
pointed her toward in our Monday night reminiscences. My client with the yen to pave things over and the deception we’d pulled
could have put her in mind of Clete’s big concrete parking lot, which so many people thought was in the wrong place. Then
we’d fed her the idea that you’re only guessing what’s more than a few feet under a surface until you dig down, and told her
about Thurman’s phony genius in locating the dumpsites. I’d mentioned his insistence on doing his own soil testing. Willem
and I had half-kiddingly revived our argument about those Cornell Pink azaleas, which I’d bitched to her about often enough
before, too hung up on my conviction of their temperament to consider other possibilities.

Mariah must have been moved to do just that. She came up with an intriguing “what if,” figured out a way to research it, and
wanted to shore up her argument before springing it on anybody. And then she sprang it on the wrong person? Surely not Thurman.
By that time she’d have realized, as I did now, that he must be involved.