The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (43 page)

In the last year Duquet’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate, dimness alternating with flashes of light and tiny particles gliding through his field of vision, like birds in the sky. He said nothing to Forgeron of this, only, “What is wrong with your face that it shows so rough and crimson?” Forgeron shrugged.

The plan was ill-fated. Two days later a packet entered Boston Harbor with great sacks of mail. Among Dred-Peacock’s mountain of letters was one from the family attorney informing him that his older brother and his nephew had both perished on the flanks of an Icelandic volcano and that he, Dred-Peacock, had succeeded to the title and to the family estate in Wiltshire. In seconds Dred-Peacock’s talk of colonial liberty and rights evaporated, his self-definition as a man dedicated to New England self-rule shriveled.

“I must go,” he said to Duquet. “It is my responsibility to my family and to the estate. I cannot evade the title. I leave at once.”

“Yes,” Duquet said. “I quite see.” Scratch a New England colonist, he thought, and you find Old England—the way a tree’s bark may hide the inner rot.

And as if that were not enough, word came that Forgeron was ill with a fiery skin inflammation and the quinsy, a putrid sore throat that forced him into his bed. Duquet decided that he would not delay. He would seek out McBogle alone.

Duquet had the kitchen woman make him a canteen of strong black coffee. He would ration it out, drink it cold, eschewing fires, as the forest was sown with skulking Indians and Frenchmen looking for scalp money or payments for captives. He hired a schooner to take him to the mouth of the Penobscot, and there on the riverbank began his solitary journey.

It was early spring, rafts of rotten ice riding the current in company with the first of thousands of logs. Where there were mills, crowds of woodsmen stood on the banks, snagging the logs with their outfit’s mark of ownership. The work continued all night by the light of enormous bonfires, cat-footed men running out onto the heaving carpet of logs to hook and prod their property to shore. Impossible to put a canoe into that maelstrom. Duquet had ordered his timber crews to hold back his logs until the river cleared of the floating forest. Now he set out on foot. And noticed two riverbank men turn away from the heaving river and cut obliquely into the forest. He smiled. Did they imagine they were not noticed?

Sometimes he was on dim Indian trails, following landmarks almost always obscured by the jagged skylines of conifers, but more often he made his way through logging slash and blow-downs. Although timber cutters had worked the area along the river, a mile or so inland was still
terre sauvage
, and like the ocean it breathed wild grandeur; from it emanated a sense of great depth. The tree limbs arched over the silent earth like the dark roof of a vaulted tomb. Once from a distance he saw two men working a pit sawmill, the top man bending and rising like an automaton, the man below in a smother of woolly sawdust. Intent on their labor, they did not see him. If they were industrious, he thought, they could cut a thousand boardfeet in a day, but it was more likely that their work would be interrupted by a scouting party out for captives or blood. Or the two riverbank louts.

He skirted innumerable ponds, sinking to his knees in soggy moss, and took an entire day to cross an autumn burn, the charred trunks of the smaller trees with their own black limbs tangled around their roots like dropped drawers, still-smoldering logs that could not be quenched. The biggest trees stood lightly scorched but unharmed. Winter snow had converted the ash to black muck. On steep slopes it was the ancient wind-felled monsters that caused the greatest hindrance; the branches on the lower side plunged into the earth and supported the main trunk, which resembled a multilegged monster, the remaining branches clawing out like arms with a hundred crooked spears thrusting upward. There must have been a strong windstorm to put down so many large trees. Some had pulled their neighbors to the ground too. Often Duquet had to crawl beneath these barriers, through leaf mold, fern, toadshade, and viburnum, through slimed fungi, only to encounter another half-decayed giant within a few paces. He could not count all the streams and bogs, the hellish thickets of close-packed larch, the whipping red stems of osier willow. The treetops dazzled. The flashing wings of hundreds of thousands of northward-migrating birds beat above him. He saw snowy owls drifting silently through the trees, for they had come into the Maine woods by the thousand that winter, and with the turn of the season were retreating to the cold lands. His eyes wearied of broken, wind-bent cedar fringing glinted swamp water. All one afternoon he had the feeling he was being watched, and as twilight thickened he saw a gray owl flutter to a branch stub and grip him with its gimlet eyes. Of all birds, it was this wretch he hated most.

After six days he cut back toward the Penobscot, following Moosegut Brook; McBogle’s sawmill, sited on this tributary stream, could not be far distant. He listened for the sound of falls. He felt the mill through his feet before he saw it, the metal clank and rasp of the drive-shift gears and the pitman arm sending a mindless thumping rhythm into the ground. His eyes troubled him, the flashes growing more frequent, tree branches and needles sparking. He walked along the stream and, abruptly, there was the millpond and the mill, a heavy log structure built to take the weight of the saw machinery. He walked around to the side of the mill. And there was Dud McBogle standing above him in a razzle of flinching lights.

Recognition was instant. Dud McBogle was the ginger-whiskered timber thief who long ago had turned back and called something to the wounded boy. Duquet felt a red cloud of anger envelop him, a certainty that this man knew all that had happened those years ago on the riverbank. His blood instantly flowed back on itself. The teeth of the moving saw gnawed through a 20-foot-long squared log, sent up a spray of sawdust.

“I have been waiting for you these some years,” McBogle said in an easy tone. “I went back, you see. I went back and dug up the pit where you burned my boy.” Four men, two of them the riverbank men, stepped out of the mill gloom and stood beside him.

Duquet could smell the hot sawdust as the blade began a new cut, chewing through the log. He bucked and twisted as he was seized by McBogle’s men and carried into the mill. Narrow rods of light pierced the interstices of the shingled roof. He could hear the relentless up-and-down grind of the saw, could see McBogle’s hand near the lever that stopped the saw, could see the hand move away. What could not happen began to happen.

FROM
Floyd County Moonshine

T
HE SNOW HAD JUST BEGUN
to really fall when Johnny’s mother reminded him for the third time that she had to have milk and eggs. He’d been through fourteen winters in his lifetime, all of them in that same Virginia farmhouse back in the woods near McPeak Mountain, so he felt he had a pretty good feel for how bad this storm might be. The way the sky hung heavy, the way everything turned gray, the way smoke chugged from the chimney, not in a straight column but instead barely making it out before spilling and hovering over the roof like a witch’s brew. And by Johnny’s calculations, this was going to be a whopper. He’d seen deer feeding in the neighboring field in the middle of the day while he’d been splitting stove wood. Another sign.

“Johnny, I’m telling you, we have to have milk,” said his mother. “Henry’s probably going to close early. If the babies don’t have their food, there’ll be hell to pay. The truck isn’t going to be able to deliver in this snow. Not for a few days, most likely.”

“I know,” said Johnny, buttoning his mackintosh and securing a wool toboggan on his head. “I’m going.”

His mother reached into her coin purse and handed him four quarters. “Get as much as you can carry, and at least a dozen eggs. The hens aren’t laying good in this cold.”

“All right, Ma,” said Johnny as he threw a canvas rucksack over his shoulder and headed out the door.

Those babies. Those damn babies. They were enough to drive him insane. What his mother meant, what his mother called her babies, were the eight or nine or maybe ten cats, Johnny wasn’t even sure anymore, that ruled his mother’s life. They ate better than he did most of the time, and he resented them for it. There’d been many a day, while his mother was at work and he’d already gotten home from school, when he’d considered taking the twenty-gauge and culling the kitty population by a few. But he’d never mustered the courage. Not yet, anyway.

He cursed those cats as he headed down the road to Henry’s General Store—the dirt and gravel already covered in a thin layer of snow—working his way through the Pleasant Grove section of McPeak Mountain. It was the only store on the mountain, and he knew his mother was right: Henry often closed shop early, for any reason he felt like, though usually it was because he’d run out of liquor and needed to get home before his throat got too dry. So a snowstorm was a perfect excuse for him to close, head home, sit around a fire, and get down to some proper drinking.

The temperature wasn’t cold, barely freezing, and there was no wind to speak of. The flakes fell straight down, fat and heavy, as Johnny trudged along, his boots giving that comforting crunching sound as they marched through the absolute quiet. Johnny loved the silence that a snowstorm brought. No birds chirping, no cars straining to make it up the hill, no clopping of horse hooves or the creaking of wagon wheels from old-timey farmers who’d still stubbornly resisted the purchase of an automobile.

The road was narrow and hilly, twisting and turning through stands of oak and pine. Henry’s was only a mile away, but in the snow everything took longer, and besides, Johnny wasn’t in any hurry. During the walk home it would be a different story, wanting to get the weight of the glass bottles off his back, but at the moment he was in no rush. At the moment he was going to enjoy it.

He stopped at the little stone bridge crossing Oldfield Creek and stared downstream, seeing rounded mounds of white on the exposed stones in the middle of the water. He often came down here and set leg-holds for mink, raccoon, and muskrat, selling the hides to Henry for a little spending money. But he preferred using snares, which he set in the fields by his house, occasionally catching the ultimate prize: a red fox.

As the creek gurgled along, as the snow continued to fall, now catching on the overhanging sycamore limbs that curled over the water, he wondered if his daddy had ever trapped. He wondered if his love for the hunt was inherited. He thought about that often when he was in the woods, imagining what his dad had been like, fantasizing about how different his life would be if his father hadn’t been killed during a training exercise in the army. His mother had told him she was still pregnant when his father died, at a barracks in South Carolina, never even getting the chance to go overseas and kill some Nazis. She only had one photo, a handsome man in uniform, his face turned to the side in profile. But he felt that he resembled his father, and hoped that when he was grown he’d have the same strong jawline, those same rugged features.

Johnny snapped out of his reverie when he heard the high whine of a pickup approaching. The engine raced and the truck moved fast, coming down the hill and heading toward the bridge, the back end fishtailing. It was an older model, probably a ’50 or ’51, and definitely a Ford, judging by the rounded roof and distinct eyeball headlights.

Johnny had to make a decision and make it fast. The truck now slid from side to side, out of control, the man frantically working his hands over the steering wheel, trying to right the ship. But it wasn’t going to happen. That ship was going to sink.

Johnny hopped onto the stone wall and then leapt, dropping 8 feet before hitting the creek. He landed on his feet, but his momentum carried him forward. He put out his hands, catching himself in the icy water, and avoided falling flat on his face. At the same instant his hands hit, a terrific crash sounded above him. Johnny looked back, arching his midsection over the water to stay dry, and saw metal colliding with stone, then a horrible scraping as sparks showered over the bridge. Finally there was a deadening thud as the truck careened across the road and slammed into the trunk of a fat oak.

Johnny’s boots sucked up the shallow creek water before he stepped out and climbed the gentle embankment toward the road. Steam hissed from the front of the truck, and the snow, which was hammering down now, disappeared as it hit the hot steel of the crumpled hood. The two tires on the driver’s side were flat and shredded.

The driver’s window was clouded over with fog, preventing Johnny from seeing inside. He looked around, hoping someone would magically appear who could help him. Could tell him what to do. But all he saw in either direction was a column of peaceful hemlocks, holding soft pillows of snow as they lined the road. Johnny grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door, dented and now showing streaks of silver in the red paint, was stuck. He tugged harder, throwing his weight into it, and the door opened awkwardly, sending off a horrendous squeak and pop through the otherwise silent afternoon.

Inside, the man sat slumped over the bent steering wheel, the top of it nearly touching the dashboard, almost as if it had melted. The windshield was fractured like pond ice, the epicenter containing pieces of hair and skin and blood. Johnny had never seen a dead person before, and though he was scared, he was also surprisingly calm. He grabbed at the wool collar of the man’s red-checked hunting jacket, pulling him back so he could sit properly. His head lolled, as if he had no neck muscles, finally resting against the cold rear window, his bloody chin pointing toward the roof.

Johnny hadn’t recognized the truck as one he’d seen around town before, nor did he recognize the man. But he didn’t figure anyone, not even a best friend or a wife, would have recognized him right then. His smashed nose had shifted to the left. A large piece of skin was absent from his forehead, presumably clinging to the windshield, and mashed wire from his glasses had wedged into his cheeks, though somehow the lenses had stayed intact. His entire face, from forehead to chin, was sopping with blood, and a pool of it stained the thighs of his dungarees.