Dead Level (12 page)

“I should go soon,” Ellie said when we’d finished piling the boards for the railings, the ones for the steps, and at last the narrower planks that the floor would be made of, already cut to the lengths I’d specified. “But …”

I took a wild guess. “But let’s drain the culvert first?”

She nodded. “Otherwise, if we get more rain …”

“Ellie, the storm’s gone by.” Even as I said it, though, I could feel the air cooling, wisps of clouds over the sun hinting at more rain to come. And the water in the pond
was
very high.…

“But what if something happened,” Ellie persisted, “and you tried calling someone on your cellphone for help, only no one could get here to rescue you? Or—”

By “something,” I knew she must mean an accident with the chain saw. Out here with no electricity—the solar panels didn’t provide enough juice to run power tools—it was a necessity, and she was nervous
about my arm maybe getting cut off, and then no one being able to get out here over the flooded-out road to help me apply a tourniquet.

“Look,” Ellie wheedled, “let’s just drive out to the culvert with a couple of crowbars. Maybe a little encouragement is all it needs.”

In my experience, a beaver-dammed culvert generally needs more than sweet talk, even if it’s teamed with crowbars. An atom bomb might do the trick. Or maybe a missile strike. But Ellie was going to be disappointed if we didn’t at least try, and she had put that lovely bath bag together for me.

So after a little more grumbling, I gave in. Minutes later, following another brief, bumpy ride, the two of us were hopping out of the truck onto the dirt road bisecting the pond, still way too full—nearly overflowing, in fact—on one side, and muck-empty on the other.

“Oh,” Ellie breathed, looking around happily, and I had to agree. It was a really glorious autumn afternoon, the kind Mother Nature doles out every once in a while between her more usual offerings of blizzards and typhoons.

Flame-red leaves fluttered like danger flags on the azure sky. Russet-hued cattails thrust up from grassy thickets, platelike green lily pads overlapped on the water’s surface, and hawks sailed with wings outspread, spying out the whisker-twitchings of rabbits they could swoop down on and devour.

The birds reminded me that despite its beauty, this remote wilderness really was a kill-or-be-killed kind of place, however cozy I might manage to make it inside the cottage. An unprepared or merely unlucky person could perish; just a week earlier, one hunter apparently had, walking into the woods before dawn with a gun on his shoulder and not walking out again. His body had still not been found. And I would be all alone here, so the road could indeed be a safety issue just as Ellie had suggested.

But I still didn’t think the culvert-clearing project was urgent. I wanted to start working on the deck, not on a job that hadn’t even been on my to-do list a few hours ago.

“Just let me take a poke at it, though,” said Ellie, seeing my expression.
Balancing easily, she stepped out along the metal culvert pipe’s length, nearer to its plugged-up opening. Small ripples slopped right up over the corrugated pipe’s top. “If it doesn’t start breaking up right away, I promise I’ll …”

“Ellie,” I said cautioningly, because I’d heard enough tales of kids who’d ventured too near a flooded culvert, got sucked in, and drowned.

She hopped onto a smooth, flat rock and perched there while poking repeatedly at the culvert’s blocked end with one of the crowbars we’d brought. Every so often she pulled away a solid mass of grass and mud with the tool’s curved end, and in response a blurp of water burst from the other end where I was stationed.

Then suddenly the blurps connected into a thin trickle that turned to a steady gushing. And even with that deck on my mind, I couldn’t very well stop her when she was making good progress.

The gush became a torrent. “All right!” Ellie shouted, and started to give a fist pump. But then she froze, her eyes on the water flowing from the far side of the pond,
toward
the culvert.

A
lot
of water. Something had given way upstream, the pond was suddenly rising very fast, and what had been a rivulet atop the road became a flood. Ellie scrambled back to stand beside me.

“Jake? Do you see what … Oh, my God. Is that …?”

“Yes,” I said. The road was already awash, a thick torrent of pond water carrying away great swaths of gravel and even some sizable stones.

But the flood itself wasn’t what had captured my attention so completely. Or hers, either. She stared, her look changing from startled disbelief to frank horror as she aimed a shaking finger. “Jake, I think that’s a …”

Words failed her. But I didn’t need anyone to tell me what was floating swiftly toward us, shifting and turning as the fast current rushing toward the newly unblocked culvert sped it along.

It was a body.

CHAPTER
5

B
y the time Eastport police chief Bob Arnold arrived at the culvert, it was nearly four o’clock and the pale autumn sunshine was deepening to the color of old sherry. He’d called the Calais cops, too, because the land around the flooded pond lay in that town’s jurisdiction, not Eastport’s.

So while Ellie and I stood watching, two unhappy-looking Calais officers made their way along the beaver pond’s muddy bank to where the corpse lay. Between us and them, a gully a foot deep and a couple of feet across now cut diagonally across the road, with water still running through it.

Bob stood on the far side of the flood-dug trench, where his squad car was parked. “Looks pretty soft,” he said, meaning the soaked roadbed. “You could probably still drive across, but …”

But if not, then my truck was stuck on
this
side of the gully, over here with me. “Yeah,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe.”

Pink and plump in his blue uniform, black shoes, and a black leather duty belt loaded with Mace, handcuffs, a whistle, his nightstick, and his service weapon, Bob had thinning blond hair and a pink rosebud mouth that did not look as if it belonged on a police officer. Any crooks who were fooled by his appearance, however, soon found out that looks weren’t everything.

“But it’s probably a better idea for you both to just jump across and ride back to Eastport in my car,” he finished.

I looked up past the pond’s far edge to where the stream that fed it vanished among the reeds. “Why’d it stop?” I wondered aloud.

Because it shouldn’t have; if the high-water condition of the lake was any indication—and it was—there were tens of thousands of gallons of water still up there, in a stream that was also near to overflowing its banks. So why wasn’t the flood still raging?

One of the Calais cops heard me as he slogged up out of the marsh; he’d been back there to see if he could find where the body had been, before it washed out.

“Big log dammed it off,” he reported. “Must’ve floated down from upstream somewhere; now it’s stuck hard across the stream.”

Bob looked sternly at me. “Hear that? You two should come out with me. ’Cause if you decide later that you want to …”

I got it. A big log lying haphazardly across a stream is not a reliable flood prevention device, he meant. If it floated free, that water could be roaring across the road again in a heartbeat. And if it happened to do so while we were driving
on
the road …

“Six inches,” Bob reminded me very seriously. “That’s all it takes to float your tires sideways. Less, if the road dissolves, and this road is no great shakes in the solidness department.”

He pointed at the lower section of pond, on the far side of the road where the culvert drained. An empty muck hole hours ago, now it was brimful, the water in it at least eight feet deep.

“You do
not
want to end up in there,” Bob said. “I mean it, Jake; are you hearing me?”

“I hear you.” The water down there roiled wildly on its way to some larger stream, deep in the woods. Foaming and churning, it made thick, loud sucking noises as if smacking its lips at the thought of swallowing someone, pulling them down into its cold, strangling clutches and drowning them mercilessly.

“Don’t worry,” I added to Bob, because he was right: we did
not
want to end up in it.

The Calais cops turned the body over, at which point any idea that there might be life left in it vanished. Floating face-down, it had been merely a bundle of waterlogged clothing.

Face-up, though, was another matter entirely. “Should they be moving him that way?” Ellie wanted to know.

Ignoring her, the two Calais officers went through the dead man’s pockets, coming up with a wet wallet. “I mean, shouldn’t we wait for the …”

One of the cops looked up. “Coyotes’re out here. Bobcats, too.” He gestured at the dead man, whose deeply gashed forehead made his face a meaty horror.

“You want to tell his loved ones there’s no body for them to bury ’cause we let the wild things gobble it up?”

He had a point. You never saw dead animals out here, or the parts of shot deer left by hunters who dressed out the carcasses in the field, either.

Just scattered bones. Besides, this wasn’t a crime scene as far as I could see, only an unattended death. So they’d haul the body in, do the autopsy later in Augusta.

The cop held up a driver’s license. “Harold Brautigan,” he read. “New York, New York.”

After examining the money in it—a ten and a few singles—he slapped the wallet shut wetly and looked at Bob.

“Tourist. Out here on a hike, looks like. But man, look at those shoes.”

The dead man wore leather sandals over black socks, which in my opinion would’ve been a poor choice for any location. But they were especially inappropriate for the woods.

“Slipped and fell, hit his head on a rock, tumbled into the water,” Bob theorized aloud.

The guy’s face looked worse than that. But I guessed it was the likeliest explanation, especially if you added in the effects of bird or animal activity, after the guy drowned.

The Calais cops dragged the body up the slippery bank and rolled it into a tarp. They’d driven here in a pickup truck with City of Calais logos on the doors; I winced as they hoisted the wrapped corpse into the truck bed and let it drop with a thump.

Soon after that, both Calais officers drove off with Harold Brautigan’s body in the back of their vehicle; on that road full of potholes, it was going to be an awfully bumpy ride. But then, he wouldn’t care. Bob got ready to go, too.

“You sure you both don’t want to come back to town with me?” he offered again. “Or I could ride you back to where Ellie’s car is parked?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m staying.” But then to my surprise, Ellie refused to be rescued, also.

“I’ll stay the night, too, I guess,” she said. “George and Lee”—her husband and daughter, she meant—“are visiting my aunt in Damariscotta. They won’t be home until tomorrow, anyway.”

The Calais cops had said they would send a town truck full of gravel, probably tomorrow morning. By afternoon the dirt road would be repaired, so we could get out on our own.

“Suit yourselves,” Bob agreed, not looking as if he liked it. But he could see we meant to stay, so a little while later he also took off in the squad car.

Clearly, he didn’t think anything was strange about the corpse
we’d found; other, I mean, than that we’d found one at all. But driving back to the cabin, Ellie said what we both were thinking.

“Not much money in that wallet.” For a tourist, she meant.

I pulled up by the cottage and parked. A bright pink sunset was spreading across the pine-notched horizon on the far side of the lake. “Maybe he used credit cards.”

We got out. The air smelled like evergreens and cold water.

“And that head wound,” Ellie added, ignoring my remark.

Face, too, actually. It was a very extensive injury. We went inside, where deep bluish shadows were already filling the room. The fire in the stove had nearly gone out, and the chill in the air was palpable.

“Do you think a rock could really open a gash that big?” she asked. “And beat up the rest of his face so badly, besides?”