The Homecoming (38 page)

Farrier stopped and looked at her.

“
Talking
?”

The officer nodded, her expression quite serious. She glanced at her partner, a slender kid with restless eyes and a tense way of holding himself. “Am I right, Kenny?”

“They whisper,” he said, backing her up without hesitation or any sign of embarrassment. “Not like in words, but after a while, you’re here all night, it starts to make sense. I know it’s just the wind in the branches and the sound of the river, but it’s …”

“Freaky,” said the woman. “Just plain freaky. We’re off duty now. Ma’am,” she said, addressing the Coast Guard officer, “you be careful if you have to go into that river here. There’s a big whirlpool about fifty feet offshore, because of the way the river bends through here. And the current is really strong. You lose your grip on the bank and you’re gone, ma’am, you’re gone.”

“I will,” said Farrier, smiling at her, and then she stepped through the curtain and found herself in what looked like a large green vault made out of willow branches and supported, like a circus tent, with three huge willow trunks, intertwined sixty or seventy feet overhead into a tangled green web. Farrier looked up at it, craning to take it in.

“Man,” she said, “reminds me of a church. How old are these trees, anybody know?”

“They were old when Niceville got started,” said Tig, “and Niceville got started in 1764. There are engravings of the town, over at City Hall, made around 1820, and you can see them there along the Tulip. An arborist from Cap City told the mayor that these may be the oldest willows in America.”

“That’s difficult to believe. We had willows when I was growing up in Maryland and most of them didn’t last longer than a hundred years. These sure look old, don’t they?”

“They smell old, anyway,” said Nick, who shared Kate’s dislike of Patton’s Hard. “You can see the tracks run right through here.”

Although the sun was rising fast it was still shadowy under the willows and he used his Streamlight to pick out the twin ruts that had carved a path through the mud and dead leaves. The tracks ran through the curtain fall on the river side. The inference was pretty obvious, and Farrier was all business from there on in.

As she and Tig went on to look at the site, Lemon and Nick stopped to look at the battered old lawn chairs that were all that remained of Rainey and Axel’s hideout collection.

Everything had been photographed and tagged and bagged and taken back to the forensics lab at the CID HQ on Powder River Road. For what purposes, neither man was ready to speculate.

Especially not Lemon Featherlight, who, after what he and Doris had seen on top of Tallulah’s Wall, was beginning to think that dark things were swirling around Rainey, and the fact that he was the only person who had been able to see Merle Zane meant that he was tangled up in it somehow, whether he liked it or not. Brandy Gule, the half-feral young woman with whom he had been living, had fought with him over what she called his obsession with “that creepy crypt kid” and now she was gone.

They heard a rustle of leaves. Tig and Farrier came back under the canopy, Farrier’s expression verging on grim.

“That’s a hell of a river you guys have there. Diving it’s going to be like catching a ride on a moving freight. We’ll need that hook set up before I put one of my divers into that current.”

And that’s what they did.

The operation took over six hours, from the time the mobile crane managed to power its way into the willow line—cutting a huge swath through the trees, but there was no help for that.

The operator had no faith in the load-bearing quality of the riverbank, so he set the apparatus up on solid ground at least thirty feet back from the bank and extended the crane at a forty-five-degree angle until the hook was over the place where the car had gone in. Once the rig was set and fixed, the divers came down to the site, four of them in dry suits and carrying full-face masks with closed-circuit cameras attached.

Only two of them were wearing single-tank backpacks. The other two were dressed to go in if they had to, but their job here was to pay out the running lines attached to the divers and monitor their safety while they were in the water.

The divers, both petty officers, one a rangy kid named Evan Call and the other a short bulky fireplug of a guy named Mike Tuamotu, hooked their safety lines onto the strongest tree trunks they could locate, did a final check-down, and eased into the murky water about twenty feet upriver from the point where the car had gone in, paying out their safety lines and riding the current down along the riverbank.

Farrier had turned up the loudspeaker on the CCTV system, so Tig
and Nick, standing back from the console, could see what the divers were seeing, and hear their cross talk.

Lemon was standing at a distance, less caught up in the process than he was by what was at stake.

On the screen the image was coming from the camera of the lead diver, in this case Mike Tuamotu. The Tulip was a muddy river, and running fast. On the diver’s left as he eased down the riverbank they could see an immense wall of matted and tangled tree roots, an unbroken thicket of twisting vines and branches that disappeared into the dark water below the divers’ flippers.

“Stay out of that stuff,” they heard Tuamotu say as he brushed past a section of willow roots that seemed to reach out for him.

“Heard that,” said Call. “Looks like a mangrove swamp, doesn’t it?”

“He’s right,” said Farrier. “Those roots must go down to the bottom of the river. Like that all along here, you think, LT?”

“These willows here are the largest in Patton’s Hard,” said Tig. “But, yeah, I’d say so.”

“How long’s this park, anyway?”

“A mile. Little less.”

Farrier shook her head.

“Man, look at that root system. It’s like a dragnet. Or a sieve. Look at all the stuff that’s caught up in there.”

They could see every kind of debris that a river could carry embedded in the wall of roots, shreds of old clothing, a rubber boot, beer cans and plastic bottles, bits of matted fur that looked like roadkill. A lot of what looked like baskets made of bone, hundreds and hundreds of those, large, small, varying in color from gray to brown, trapped deep inside the root mass all the way along the bank. The current swirled and tugged around the divers and their lines were wire-tight.

“Mind that whirlpool, guys,” said Farrier, as the divers got closer to the eddying pool of spinning water that lay just a few yards offshore.

“Roger that,” said Tuamotu. “I can feel it right here. Real strong clockwise spin on it. What you figure those basket things are?”

“Lots of animals go into the river,” said Nick, thinking about the dog that Kate had tried to save right about here almost twenty years ago. “I guess the roots catch them up and there they stay.”

Apparently the divers could hear him.

“Bones don’t last in water,” they heard Tuamotu say over his microphone. “At least not in warm water like this.”

“I guess he’d know,” said Farrier with a smile. “Mike’s plucked a lot of bones out of deep water.”

“Yeah,” said Tuamotu. “Not all of them stripped clean like these things either. If they’re bone, something’s picked all the meat off them.”

“Got pike in this river,” said Tig.

“That’d work,” said Tuamotu. “Okay, there’s the car, boss.”

On the screen they saw a small pale blue blot begin to materialize out of the murky water. As Tuamotu moved closer it took on shape and form and clarity. It was Alice Bayer’s blue Toyota, almost vertical, nose down. Nick, watching the image sharpen, realized that he wasn’t breathing.

Lemon moved farther away and stood looking across the river towards Crater Sink, where the crows were soaring high in a blue sky.

Let it be empty
, he was thinking, and although he knew he was praying, he wasn’t sure to whom.

Or what.

Nick and Tig watched as Tuamotu reached the side of the car. It was tangled up in a massive snare of tree roots, coated in river silt, with only a tint of blue showing.

Tuamotu reached out and wiped a gloved hand across the driver’s-side window. The interior was dark. Call came up and put a light on the window.

Through the speaker they heard heavy breathing and the rushing scatter of bubbles rising up.

“It’s empty,” said Tuamotu.

“What about the trunk?” asked Call.

“It’s a freaking Toyota, Evan,” said Tuamotu. “It doesn’t have a trunk. It has a back pocket. You can’t even get a set of golf clubs back there.”

A ripple of relief ran through everyone on the surface.

Lemon felt his shoulders loosen.

Farrier waved to the crane driver. He hit a lever and the hook began to drop down on the end of a corded steel cable. Evan Call came to the surface, caught the hook, and guided it back down.

“Weeds,” they heard him say. “Like trying to run through a thicket of thorns. Catches at you.”

Through Tuamotu’s camera they watched as Call came back down the root wall, struggling with the weight of the hook, which tended to force him back into the matted growth that lined the bank. He was breathing rapidly. They could hear it through the speakers.

“Evan,” said Farrier. “Slow down. You’re starting to hyperventilate.”

“Hate these roots,” he said, mostly to himself.

A few seconds later he was at the tail of the car. Tuamotu moved up to brace him as he reached under the chassis to find a solid place to set the hook. They heard him muttering to himself, and his raspy breathing as he struggled with the cable. Tuamotu was holding Call’s belt and keeping the roots clear of Call’s tank frame. It took a while before they heard a solid muffled clank.

“That’s got it,” said Call. “Mike, get me out of here.”

Tuamotu pulled at Call’s equipment belt until the diver was able to untangle himself from the roots that were wrapped around the rear of the car.

“Take us back ten feet,” said Tuamotu.

The topside attendants went back to the safety lines and began to reel the lines in.

“Good enough,” said Tuamotu. “We’re clear. You can take it up.”

Farrier waved to the crane driver, who shoved the lift lever forward. The diesel began to grind and the steel cable pulled taut with an audible twang, droplets of water flying off as it took the weight. The engine seemed to be struggling.

“Liable to pull the car apart,” said the crane man. Farrier made a circling motion with her hand.

Wind it up
.

The operator shrugged, increased the power.

The crane boom dipped and a groaning creak came from the stabilizer pads. Everybody moved back from that shivering cable. Another groan, and the diesel engine grinding low.

Then a burst of muddy water as the roots let go, and the crane settled back as the cable began to come back in.

“It’s going up,” said Tuamotu.

In a moment the tail of the Toyota broke the surface and then it was hanging clear, a muddy blue ball with water pouring out from every crevice.

The crane man lifted it up about fifty feet and slowly swung the crane around until he could lower the car down onto a patch of cleared ground. He worked it so that when the front wheels came down, he pulled the crane arm back to allow the car to settle down on all four wheels.

As soon as the slack came back on the cable line, Nick leaned down and jerked the hook clear. Then he came around to the driver’s side, gave Tig a look. Tig nodded, saying nothing.

Nick popped the driver’s-side door, stepping back as dirty water cascaded out from the interior, carrying with it the detritus of a life, a purse, sodden, open, spilling its contents on the ground, what had been a box of tissues, a wad of paper that might have been a three-ring binder, a Starbucks coffee cup, a pulpy mass that had once been a pack of Kools. Nick waited until the torrent became a trickle and then he leaned into the car, looked around, extracted himself, being careful not to touch anything.

“She’s not in here,” he said, thinking that although this was a relief, it didn’t solve anything. Alice Bayer was still missing. He looked at the shift lever. It was in
DRIVE
. His heart got stony as he considered what that meant. Farrier came up to Tig and Nick.

“Tuamotu’s on the horn,” she said quietly, with an edge. Everyone caught her tone and they looked at her, waiting for it.

“She wasn’t in the car. She was under it.”

They listened while Tuamotu and Call worked it out. The body was female, that much was clear, and partially clothed. Probably an elderly woman, for reasons neither diver wanted to make plain.

She was bound up, literally, in a cocoon of twisted willow roots. From the body’s position—they were all looking at it on the screen now—the subject had been trying to climb back up out of the river—they guessed she had fallen in—and gotten herself tangled up in the roots.

She drowned there, and stayed there even when the car came down on top of her. Or maybe she was going to get out okay and then the car came down on her. If that was the way it happened, nobody had to say the word
murder
but it was hanging in the air anyway. If she wasn’t at the wheel of that car, then somebody else was.

The divers—and the people watching, Nick and Tig and Farrier and Lemon—all agreed that the weight of the car coming down was what had pressed her body deeper into the root mass.

“Can you get her out of there?” Farrier wanted to know. There was a silence.

It went on.

Farrier was about to ask again when Tuamotu came back on the radio.

“Boss, these roots … they’re moving.”

Farrier frowned.

“Sure they are. Current’s running at seven knots and there’s a whirlpool at your back.”

Call came on.

“Not the current, boss. Mike’s right. They move. It’s like they’re curling around that woman’s body. You can see them tightening.”

Farrier gave Tig and Nick a look, went back to the radio.

“Evan, get a grip. Put your light on it.”

Call did. The cone of white light burned through the murk and into the root mass. Nick found himself looking into Alice Bayer’s distended face, her swollen eyes open, two opaque green marbles. Her mouth was stretched in what looked like agony and her dentures had come loose, a comical obscenity. Roots were wound around her and her arms were stretched out and up, her hands ending in fingers that were raw and torn at the tips, the palms shredded as if she had been fighting out of a trap. It was easy to imagine what her final moments had been like.