The Case Against Owen Williams (5 page)

“What about the daughter?” Drost asked.

“I don't know,” Carvell said. “But I wouldn't be surprised if she were a little like the mother at that age.”

“I wonder what I should do,” Drost said. “I don't think I'd better put out an alert this soon, but it's beginning to look funny. I wonder if I should go out to the dance hall and look around. Just so that everything's done right before I start the rumours flying.”

Carvell looked at his watch.

“I'll come along,” he said. “Nice day for a walk in the country.”

The Silver Dollar was a long, wooden, one-storey building standing in a ragged clearing of dirt and weeds that had once been part of a farm, now failed, vanished, and mostly overgrown by bushes and small trees. From the front peak of the roof a round sign, painted silver, hung out over the front door with the name, The Silver Dollar, printed around the edge. The centre of the sign had been decorated with a couple of dozen bullet holes of assorted calibres and one charge of bird shot fired at close range. The door was closed, and there were shutters on the windows, not to keep out burglars, which they wouldn't have done, but to dissuade the local bucks from shooting out the windows.

Drost parked at the back out of sight of the road, and he and Carvell got out. There was no one around. Drost had been out to The Silver Dollar often enough at night but never during the day, and the quiet seemed unnatural. Instead of the usual uproar of music and rage, there was only the backdrop of bird calls and somewhere, everywhere and nowhere at once, the intermittent shrillness of a cicada.

They walked from the dance hall back towards the woods and entered along one of the trails that led out of the parking lot, following the route that Williams had described to Drost the day before. At what had been the edge of the original, much larger clearing, the overgrowth of bushes gave way to taller evergreens, and then the track came out into a long, narrow clearing that was growing up in bushes and small evergreens.

“This is the end of the Birch Road,” Carvell said. “The land here wasn't any good, and the road was just left to grow up. It comes out over that way onto the Hannigan Road.”

“This is where they went, according to Williams,” Drost said.

They wound their way through the small trees. A little further on, they came out onto the Birch Road proper although it still wasn't much of a road, more dirt than gravel, with a strip of weeds down the middle. A quarter of a mile or so from the back of the dance hall, they emerged onto the Hannigan Road.

“This is where Williams says he left her,” Drost said. “She went off up the road towards home, and he went down the other way.”

They stood and took stock. To their right, toward the Bangor Road there were houses, and Drost could see a woman in an apron standing on a front porch watching them, her eye caught no doubt by his uniform. To their left, the Hannigan Road swung away uphill toward the Coile place. Fifty yards from where they stood it was joined by another road that ran away from them eastwards back towards town. This was Broad Street although it wasn't broad here or anywhere else. But then neither were there any birch trees on Birch Road nor had anyone named Hannigan, so far as anyone knew, ever lived on Hannigan Road. On the upper corner of the intersection of Broad Street and Hannigan Road, there was an abandoned church and its graveyard. Drost and Carvell crossed the road and wandered, more or less aimlessly now, up past the end of Broad Street and turned into the graveyard over a crude cedar-log culvert.

The doors and windows of the church had boards nailed across them, and the graves around it were untended, overgrown, as if their occupants had long passed out of memory. At the back of the churchyard beyond a weathered cedar-rail fence, the ground dropped away sharply through a tangle of alders and chokecherry bushes. A couple of hundred yards away, where the ground rose again, Drost and Carvell could see through the trees the roofs of some houses and a squat church steeple roofed with sheet metal that shone silver in the sun.

“You can't see it from here,” Carvell said, “but there's an old gravel pit down there where people sometimes go to drink. Do you want to have a look?”

“Okay,” Drost said. “Then we'll go back. I'll let it sit for a day or two, and if she still hasn't turned up, I'll put it on the wire.”

They walked back out of the churchyard and around onto Broad Street. Down the Hannigan Road, the woman who had been watching them from her verandah had been joined by another woman and an old man. A hundred and fifty yards along Broad Street, they came to the road that led down into the gravel pit. It was more a track than a road. The grass had begun to creep into it from the edges, and there was a deep channel down the middle where the rain was eroding it away. There were recent car tracks all the same, straddling the erosion channel.

The pit didn't look big enough ever to have been a government or commercial operation. More likely it had been used by farmers as a source of gravel for their own driveways, but it didn't look as if anyone had hauled out of it for a long time. The ground in the middle was still bare, but grass and weeds and small bushes were growing around the edges under the broken banks, which like the road were eroding away, exposing the roots of the small hardwoods at the top. In some places, the banks had collapsed completely, so that instead of a cliff face, there was now just a slope on which stood in some places the dead, whitened trunks of trees that had been brought down when the bank collapsed.

It was perhaps that broken earth, those whitened skeletons of trees, stirring remote associations, which made Carvell recognize almost at once what the smell was that hung in the air.

It was nearly seven-thirty when Hooper, standing beside the patrol car, saw the two cars and a small van approaching up the Hannigan Road. Hooper's face was still pallid, the faded freckles of his child- hood showing through his tan. He had been violently sick earlier, and he felt vaguely sick still and also humiliated.

Below him in the pit, Carvell was sitting in the shade on a little ledge of earth that had slid down from the top of the bank, grass and all, and formed a kind of natural bench. Drost paced slowly, obsessively, around in the middle of the pit, looking at, without really seeing anymore, the scattered testimony of the pit's social life. Bits of paper and boxes, most of them soaked and dried and bleached, though one Sweet Caporal cigarette box looked new. Bottles, some whole, most broken. Black Diamond Demerara Rum, Moosehead Ale, Sharpe's Pure Vanilla Extract. A couple of French safes. Some dried shit.

At the western end of the pit towards the abandoned churchyard, partly screened by high grass, in a little hollow among some of the older piles of earth from the collapsing bank, a green canvas tarpaulin was spread, its corners held down with stones. Above, among the trees between the churchyard and the edge of the pit, Drost could see figures moving again, three men this time, creeping forward as if stalking something.

“Get out!” Drost shouted. “Get out. Get back on the road.”

The men stopped and stayed where they were, standing completely upright now, straining to look.

“Get out!” Drost shouted again, his voice trembling with rage. “Get out or I'll have you arrested.”

The men hesitated and then slowly disappeared backward into the trees. On the opposite side of the pit, there were more of them, kids this time.

“Hooper!” he shouted. “Get them out of there.”

This had been going on—going on and getting worse—for nearly four hours. While Carvell had walked back to the car and driven to town to get Hooper to report to Fredericton, he had stood guard over the obscenity that had lain uncovered in its little hollow until Carvell had come back with Hooper and the tarpaulin.

It had started almost at once, a man and one of the women who had been watching them from the verandah earlier edging inquisitively down the road into the pit. What they had seen, he couldn't tell, but his driving them off had only excited their curiosity more, and the word began to spread. They began creeping cautiously down the road. They began slipping up to the edges of the pit through the trees. And the more he drove them off, the more they gathered, and there began to seem something sinister, something ghoulish, in the persistence with which they bore down on him. Once, rattled, alone, at the end of his resources of self-control, he had started to unholster his revolver with the idea of firing a warning shot into the air before his reason resumed control.

Then Carvell and Hooper had come back, and Hooper had taken one look and been sick. Drost had sent him up to the top of the road to keep watch on the crowd, fifty at least by then, probably a hundred and fifty by now, that had gathered along Broad Street.

And through all this he had tried to think. Carvell had said that he was certain that the figure under the tarpaulin was Sarah Coile. And so far as it was possible to tell, it looked like the girl he had seen in the photograph. And the clothes were right. Nevertheless, it was an assumption, and someone would have to make a positive identification. But so far he had done nothing about getting in touch with the Coiles, and he wondered how long it might be before word spread up the road to them.

“They're coming,” Hooper shouted from halfway down the pit road.

Relieved, Drost followed him back up, and he was waiting with him when the two cars and the van pulled up behind their own patrol car.

In the passenger seat of the first car, beside his driver, sat Detective Staff Sergeant Grant. The second car was driven by a corporal named Kroll, whom Drost had met once or twice but whom he knew mainly by reputation as part of Grant's criminal investigation team. This represented something of an elite, a good place to be if you wanted promotion badly enough. The constable driving the van he recognized as the provincial dog man from Moncton, a hundred and fifty miles away. If he had been brought from there today, that was quick work even for Grant. Maybe he really was God.

Like the others, Grant was in uniform, and as he got out of the car, all six-foot-two of him, and put on his cap, he was an impressive figure of authority. He looked at the crowd on the other side of the street, and their chatter died as abruptly as if they had been figures in a movie whose sound had been turned off.

“Quite an audience,” he said to Drost.

“Yes,” said Drost. “They've been a problem.”

Grant looked at them. Behind the trees at the edge of the pit above the tarpaulin, two young men in gumboots and mackinaws were poised, looking down.

“Reynolds,” Grant said to his driver, “get those god-damned hillbillies the hell out of there.”

Then he went out onto the road and faced the crowd.

“This is a police investigation,” he said, “and you are to stay away from it. The next one who crosses this road will be arrested for obstruction of justice. There isn't going to be anything for you to see, and the best thing you can do if you want to stay out of trouble is to go home.”

He waved his arm at them, a wide sweeping gesture as if he were shooing away a herd of cows. Like a herd of cows, the crowd stirred within itself, fell back, reformed a little further away, and stood watching, dumbly.

Grant turned back to Drost.

“All right,” he said. “Now let's see what we've got.”

At the bottom of the road, Carvell was waiting. Carvell had heard of Grant but had never met him. If Grant had ever heard of Carvell, he gave no sign of it.

“George knows the ground better than I do,” Drost said. “And when we thought we might have a problem, he came out with me to have a look around. He was the one who knew about this gravel pit.”

“That was helpful,” Grant said.

Together the three of them walked across the pit. Drost took the stones off one side of the tarpaulin and lifted it, and they stood looking down at the figure beneath.

“You say her name was Sarah Coile?” Grant said.