“Mariah was on the phone a lot. Can you get a record of her calls the last several days? To look for matches?”
“I’ll try. Still, I wouldn’t bet on the ‘who’ approach getting it done: I’m becoming more and more convinced we have to work
from the why.”
“Mariah usually made herself noticed. If we knew where she went to do her research, it would give us a better idea of what
she was looking into. I can show her picture around tomorrow.”
“I’d rather put Steve on that. City library, state, university. Departments of environment, state, commerce—where else?”
“Transportation, probably; there was a flap about those access roads. Agriculture? The Garden Center got into trouble a couple
of years back for sneaking in shrubs that were under state quarantine. I would have a better sense than Steve of what to look
for.”
“Maybe you two could do it together,” Calvin suggested.
Baxter shook his head. “I don’t think so. If Steve gets an ID somewhere, Val, you’re our consultant. Otherwise, the lower
your profile, the better. For starters, does anybody except the three of us know about this tape?”
“No.”
“Good. I intend to leave it that way for now. And I strongly advise you to.”
“What’re you going to do, pass off Mariah’s murder as some goddamn stupid accident? I won’t sit for that.”
“Take it easy. Between the marks on her shoulders and the cord without fingerprints I’ve got adequate on-the-scene reasons
to treat it as a suspicious death. Because you found both bodies, there’s bound to be speculation that the two murders were
connected. I’ll do my best to play that down.”
“I thought your game plan was to make the killers nervous.”
“It’s been revised. When this crew gets nervous, they kill people, and I’m looking at their most likely victim number three.
If they think you know what Mariah wanted to discuss with you, or can figure it out—”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to stay with your sister for a few days,” Calvin said soberly. “Or at a motel.”
“So the killers wait a few days till I come back? I’m staying here. And I want to help with this.”
“If we need you. You’ll be safer keeping away from it.”
“I’ll be safer when those killers are ID’d. If you don’t want my help, I’ll find something to chase on my own.”
For such a low-key person, he looked awfully close to explosion. “You want a job? Fine!” Baxter paused for a deep breath.
“Yesterday I got hold of the documentation on the Hudson Heights planning history, from application to approval. There’s a
lot of paper. I’m on page three and don’t know what the hell I’m looking for. You’ve got a much better background, and you
worked out there long and recently enough to relate what’s on paper to what actually happened. Look it over; see if there’s
something that doesn’t jibe. Or starts any other bells ringing. I brought all the binders home, so you can work there.”
It startled me that I could find humor in this. “I should be safe in the sheriff’s house? Okay, I’ll take a look. It may not
be a total waste of time.”
“Could you try for a slightly more positive approach? Val, I’m not ruling out the Garden Center. There may well be something
corrupt or warped or both to be unearthed at that establishment. But my gut feeling says our ‘why’ is centered on Hudson Heights.
You’re a night owl—how about getting started on your reading now?”
The suggestion drew a curious glance from Calvin and automatic resistance from me: I was not ready to go even that far into
hiding. Besides, there were phone calls that needed making. “Tomorrow morning, when my head’s clearer. Roxy and I will tough
it out here the rest of the night.”
“Do you own a firearm?”
“I’m not into hunting.”
“Most people who live this deep in the country keep at least one around, whether they hunt or not. You might want to look
into it.”
“I don’t think so. This way I like my chances of never shooting anybody.”
He frowned. “That patrol will be around every fifteen minutes. I’m in the village, third house in on Larch Drive. On your
right, a green ranch. How early can you make it over in the morning?”
“Is seven okay?”
“Make it six-thirty and I’ll feed you breakfast. And Val—” He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at it with a puzzled expression.
“Take care.”
• • •
Logically, whoever killed Mariah would not have expected me to discover her body, nor could they know about the message she’d
left on my answering machine. So why would I need to take care, any more than I usually did? It’s not like I leave my doors
open at night. Nonetheless, after the two men departed I went around checking that the windows were locked, pulling down shades
I’d normally leave up, drawing drapes. Those couple of nights after Ryan’s murder I’d had a sense of something undesirable
lurking out there, but it had been my privacy, not my safety, that felt threatened. In retrospect, I’d been considerably more
indignant than uneasy. Now … At least the boys weren’t around.
But on to my second round of post-body-finding phone calls. It was a shorter list this time, different priorities. Except
for Vicky. It was after ten; on a Wednesday she should be home from work.
Jason answered. He’d come up with a whole new slew of spinoffs on Ryan’s murder that I had to hear, but finally did pass me
on through to his mother. I started to tell her about Mariah, whom she’d met a couple of times, briefly. They hadn’t taken
to one another. Mariah failed to scope out much of interest, and for her part, Vicky isn’t keen on brittle, clever people,
nor was she a whole lot more enthusiastic than Eleanor about the Mariah-Willem-me trio.
Which didn’t keep her from feeling bad for me or wanting to drive right down. I told her of my early-morning assignment, and
she had the breakfast shift tomorrow: we’d both be better off trying to get some sleep.
She connected the dots, of course. Two murders within a week in an area where two murders in a decade might go as a crime
wave; both victims people I knew. What had I gotten into? Just then we heard the little click that meant Jason had picked
up the extension in his room.
“Come stay with us until things settle down” was her bailout.
I thought of Jason having a second killing to follow me around about and shuddered. “I’ll be fine here. I’m always off somewhere
most of the day, and nights everything gets locked nice and tight.”
“Still …”
“Vicky, the main reason I called is the boys. Do you think they’ll hear, up in Speculator?”
“Probably not, but I’ll alert Gina, just in case.”
“There’s more. If things don’t settle down by the time they’re due back here, we’ll need to make other arrangements, for a
while. My own safety I can handle, but how can I watch those two closely enough, the ground they cover in the course of a
normal day? Of course we’ve got the rest of this week and all of next. Probably it’ll be wrapped up by then and a non-problem.
If not—”
“No way are they moving back here!” Jason had to inject.
“Jason, keep your ears out of other people’s conversations,” I instructed, knowing his mother wouldn’t.
“I mean it, Aunt Val. Three days next week, like we talked about, so I can come along to the Cape. If you try to dump them
on me longer than that, you’re going to be sorry.” He slammed his phone down.
“We’ll work out something else, if we need to,” Vicky said, not quite managing to keep the weariness out of her voice. “Val,
why don’t I come down after my shift tomorrow and keep you company for a couple of days? And then we could go somewhere for
the weekend.”
“Stay put. I really am okay, and I have a bunch of stuff to do. We’ll see how the weekend looks come Friday, okay?”
“That depends if your bunch of stuff includes trying to find who killed Mariah.”
“I thought that’s what we had a sheriff’s department for.”
“Sure you did. I’ve known you all your life. Val, take care, please?”
For several minutes after we hung up, I sat staring at the phone, thinking about who else I should tell about Mariah, who
it wasn’t too late in the evening to call. It took little time to get down to the one name I already knew. Reluctantly, I
dialed Willem’s number.
Vicky claims she’d never get entangled with a man she couldn’t pick up the phone and call. Far as I know, she’s held to that,
though you could argue she’s sometimes put up with worse inconveniences. In principle, I held our tacit “don’t call me, I’ll
call you” arrangement in contempt. In practice, I hadn’t experienced much trouble getting used to it. You have to discover
your own tolerance level—sometimes it surprises.
The phone rang twice. As the third ring began my finger inched toward the disconnect button. Kate’s voice intervened.
“Kate, could I speak to Willem, please? It’s important.”
There was no immediate response. Finally, she said “I had to put up with things for the sake of the Garden Center that I don’t
have to put up with anymore. No, you cannot speak to Willem, and I will not give him a message. I want you to leave us alone.”
With that, she disconnected.
I could call back, but she’d have the wit to terminate before the answering machine kicked in and I voiced a message Willem
might hear. I could drive over—wouldn’t that make for a delightful scene? Well, it was his system we were stuck in. If he
really wanted to be his own man, it wasn’t that hard to acquire, or conceal, a cell phone.
I
might as well have told Baxter I’d be over at six
A.M.
Hell, four. The amount of time I spent lying prone in bed that night couldn’t have totaled an hour. My super-charged body
was beyond settling into a static position, and now there were two corpses competing for behind-the-eyelids images. One of
them kept restarting a crying jag.
I’m a big fan of cognitive therapy. When fair-to-middling agitated—a not uncommon condition—I can usually course-correct by
pulling the situation apart into bite-sized components, listing their possible ramifications, and then building the picture
back up again, sensibly reorganized. But when big-time agitation sets in, I can’t diagram Jell-O.
Thus I launched into my repertoire of exercises: deep knee bends and sit-ups and jumping jacks and squat thrusts, everything
I could remember from my old jock days. I processed all available laundry and mopped the kitchen floor. Declaiming poetry
was a bummer, the passages that stick in my mind being more turbulent than uplifting, so I danced along with the Francescatti/Casadesus
version of the Kreutzer Sonata—and kept bumping into things. Pacing the porch I focused on identifying wildlife sounds, until
some began to seem suspiciously un-animal-like. Then it was back to the exercises. It wore poor Roxy out, trying to be companionable.
I greeted the dawn of a chilly, heavily clouded morning both wired and enervated. Looking something like that too, apparently,
judging by Baxter’s “Up all night, huh?” greeting. He didn’t strike me as being all that crisp and crunchy himself, I told
him.
Which was true. In barely a week I’d logged enough time in the presence of his water-off-a-duck persona to develop some sense
of its subtleties. And limitations. His night might not have been as physically active as mine, but I doubted it was significantly
more restful.
Driving over, I’d played at predicting what he would choose to surround himself with. Nothing in the way of elaborate furnishings
or strong colors, I thought. Like his clothes, his house would be utilitarian, bland, presentable but not spiffy. There was
probably a basketball hoop in the driveway for his daughter. The front yard would be overgrown foundation plantings and weedy
grass.
I’d nailed those last two points, and the smallish RV parked on the back-around fit right in; a trailered boat wouldn’t have
surprised me. I was also pretty much on the money about housekeeping standards, unless he’d spent a significant portion of
the night tidying up. As to style of decor … Well, inside it was the most wooden house I’ve ever seen. By that I mean wood-filled,
not stuffy. While all the furniture had a discernible purpose, the designation “utilitarian” would have been way off. There
wasn’t much in the way of elaborate shaping or carving, but somehow even the plainest country-style pieces had a feeling of
elegance. Outside, it was your standard ranch. Inside, it was a very strong house.
“You made all this?” I guessed, remembering Mariah’s Shaker bench. He had ushered me to a seat at the well-knotted pine kitchen
table. Bacon was nearly cooked in a skillet; four eggs lay ready on the counter. One by one he neatly broke them into the
skillet.
He managed to look simultaneously proud and sheepish. “There’s a lot of it, isn’t there? I keep meaning to pare down.”
“You’re very good. Do you ever work on commission?”
“I’ve got several pieces in the works and a list of others promised. Who knows when I’ll ever get to them? Sheriffing is hell
on leisure time. It’ll be my second career when I retire.”
“Sounds like a natural. When do sheriffs get to retire?”
“This particular one in three years, two months, and five days. There’s a twenty-year pension you can opt for in county law
enforcement.”
“By then you’ll probably be having so much fun you’ll reup,” I said, the idea of retiring at or around the age of forty being
not immediately admissible.
He laughed. “By and large, the citizens who draw the attention of a county sheriff’s department are not fun people. There
are occasional exceptions.”
“I hope. Anyhow, Calvin says you get your fun solving puzzles.”
“True, but that’s not one of the more time-consuming parts of being a sheriff. Or a deputy; you don’t get as bogged down in
the bureaucratic bullshit at that level, but there’s an awful lot of small stuff to wade through. Maybe I’ll pick up a P.I.
license, too, when I retire, and take only interesting cases. A dual second career: I’ll bill myself as the woodworking detective.
The investigative woodworker?”