Below the Tree Line

by Susan Oleksiw

  As she stepped back to admire her handiwork, a small black hatchback pulled up in front and parked.

  “Hey, Josie.” Felicity leaned in the open side window and greeted the driver. Josie Halloway had delicate features and curly light brown hair, but her hands were often smeared with oil. She helped out her husband with his garage once in a while, mostly with the bookkeeping, but she wasn’t above changing tires or oil or batteries or anything else that needed doing. Flat Road Automotive was a family affair if Bruce needed help. Not yet fifty, Josie was already a grandmother.

  “You’re early.” Josie looked past her at the repaired vegetable stand. “Are you going to have an April crop?”

  “I overwintered a lot of greens, so unless we go into a deep freeze I’m thinking I’ll open up the garden and see what’s there.” Felicity leaned against the car door. “It’s been such a mild winter and there’s no reason to wait.”

  “I’m glad your dad is all right. I heard he ran off for a while.”

  “Well, we found him.” Felicity glanced at the stand. “I hope it looks more inviting when it’s packed with veggies. Looks a little pathetic right now.”

  Josie laughed. “They always do. There’s nothing sadder than all those empty stands along Route 2 just waiting for warm weather and new crops. Are you going to Sasha Glover’s service?”

  “Is it set?”

  “Tomorrow. Both Sasha and Clarissa.” Josie’s good cheer faded and she opened her mouth to say something, but she waited until an approaching car passed. She and the other driver acknowledged each other with a slight wave of the hand before she leaned closer to Felicity. “Two funerals in one family in one day.” Josie turned to look at the farm stand again. “I hope you have something more upbeat on your agenda. Do you?”

  “Not quite. I’m on my way to see your husband. My truck stalled the other day and I don’t know why. Before I do anything I want to check with him.”

  “Well, he’s there. But he’s kinda grumpy today.”

  Felicity promised to keep that in mind. Josie went on her way, and Felicity put away her tools. Less than an hour later, she was pulling into Flat Road Automotive. She parked in front of the last bay and shut off the engine.

  Bruce Halloway’s automotive repair shop and garage sat next to a gas station, and it was hard to tell that the two were separate businesses. The gas station did no automotive business, by agreement, and Bruce never pumped gas. He leased some of his space to Hogie Dubois, who rented out and maintained a small fleet of cheap cars. Bruce also had the town’s towing contract, and after an accident he could be found sitting in his tow truck parked behind the police cars. He had arrived on the scene of Clarissa’s crash and towed away the wreckage after Jeremy and Felicity left. Today she found Bruce where she expected to, under a car.

  “No one’s supposed to come into the garage,” Bruce said when Felicity reached the back of the bay where he was working. “Is that a dog?”

  “It’s me, Felicity. This is Shadow.” The dog continued to sniff Bruce’s shoes and pants legs and then moved to the doorway leading into a small office. Felicity tugged on the leash and led Shadow out to the yard and around the side of the building to shrubbery and trees. This seemed to please him and he snuffled and poked and scratched for several minutes, leaving Felicity to let her thoughts wander along too.

  “How’s your truck running?”

  She turned to see Bruce behind her. Despite the chill he wore only a T-shirt over oil-stained navy work pants and heavy boots. He looked tired, and she wondered if he ever took a regular weekend off. He loved his work, and it meant that he often said yes to a customer when he should have said no and gone home to get some rest.

  “That’s why I’m here. I stalled going about twenty. Fortunately, no one else was on the road, but I want to check it out.”

  “How old is your car?”

  “It’s a 2002 Toyota Tacoma.”

  “Yeah, they do that.” He pulled a rag out of his pocket and walked back into the garage.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good time. You look kinda beat.”

  “There is no good time.” He tossed the oiled rag onto a cluttered workbench.

  “Is that Clarissa Jenkins’s car?” Felicity walked deep into the end bay, where a badly damaged sedan sat high up on a lift. She didn’t have to crouch more than an inch to look at the undercarriage.

  “You shouldn’t go over there.” Bruce sounded like he was telling her the time of day, not like he was giving her the warning required by his insurance company.

  “Are you working on it?” Felicity stepped back and took another turn around the raised body.

  “Not yet. The cops released it, and I just put it up there. I haven’t done anything yet. I thought I’d buy it for salvage and repair it. My dumbest idea yet.” He pushed his hands into his pockets.

  “You don’t think someone would buy it even after you repair it?”

  “People buy wrecks all the time,” Bruce said. “The buyer would have to insure it as a wreck, but it could still be a good car. It just means the buyer wouldn’t get the same replacement payout if something happened to it, and the insurance premium would be a little higher. But that’s not the reason it was dumb. You know cars pretty good. Take a look.” He began to collect tools, leaving Felicity to inspect the vehicle on her own. She crouched under, then backed up and moved to the side.

  “That’s the brake caliper.” She reached out to the front right wheel and pointed to a part.

  “Yeah. Don’t touch anything. You can look, but that’s all.”

  She glanced at him, then moved down to a line, and then to a valve. “Bruce, what’s going on? The bleeder valve is open. Are you working on it?”

  “Nope.” He crouched beside her under the car. “The bleeder valve on every caliper is open and the fluid reservoir is almost empty.” He shut his eyes for a moment. “And the only fluid in it is water, plain old tap water.” He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  Felicity stared at him, and then ran her hand in the air alongside the caliper and the lines. She hurried to the other wheels. He didn’t try to stop her or tell her she was wasting her time. “Would the water do anything?”

  Bruce shook his head. “Water isn’t going to stand up to that kind of heat.”

  “I wondered about the car when we came on the crash site. There were no skid marks on the road. It didn’t look like she tried to brake.” She stepped out from under the car. “What about the steering?”

  Bruce picked up a screwdriver and tossed it onto the workbench. “Yeah, that too. Not the fluid—something else.” He took a deep breath. “Now, there’s no telling when this damage was done. Jeez, Felicity.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Clarissa picked her car up from us on Monday morning. It’d been sitting here all weekend. Just out in the lot. The way I leave them. Just waiting for her to come and get it.”

  “We all leave our cars out there, Bruce.”

  Bruce opened his mouth to say something but turned at the sound of a car driving up to the gas pump. “I’ve never had anything like this happen. I called Chief Algren as soon as I realized what it all meant. He should be here any minute.”

  “No one else has looked at the car?”

  Bruce shook his head.

  “When would Clarissa have known something was wrong?” Felicity asked. “Could she have pulled over on Flat Road right away?”

  Bruce shrugged and rested his hands on his hips. “Her car’s an automatic, and those things drive themselves. You don’t have to step on the gas to get them going.”

  “So she’d need her brakes right away?”

  Again he shook his head. “Not for sure. She goes out here, down Flat Road, and turns onto High Street. The hill isn’t steep, and at that hour, before seven o’clock or so, the lights are still blinking red or yellow, yellow on High Street. So if no one’s
coming she can go right through, and then she’s climbing. She doesn’t need a brake till she gets up to the ridge. There’s a little turn, so maybe by now she feels something in the steering. But when she reaches the intersection and has to turn left, she has to know something is wrong. By then she knows she has no brakes and the steering is off.”

  Felicity listened, and when he finished they looked at each other.

  “So she would have known just when she was coming toward my place.”

  “Yeah. She might have guessed earlier if she tried to brake at the curve, but for sure by the intersection. The road is banked there so that alone would have carried her through the intersection onto your road. The banking would have put the car into a turn and then it probably would have swerved back and forth with the layout of the road.”

  A car pulled off the paved road and onto the graveled apron for the garage. Both turned to watch the chief park and climb out of his car.

  Bruce turned back to her. “I kept telling myself the damage to the steering system could have been done in the crash. The way things pop off if they’re loosened isn’t going to show after you’ve crashed into a tree. And they had an eyewitness telling them she swerved to avoid hitting an animal. But after seeing all that—” He waved at the underside of the car. A moment later he turned to nod to the police chief as he walked into the bay.

  “Hello, Felicity.” Kevin stared at her.

  “You’re not going to let me stay, are you?”

  A few hours later, just before eight o’clock that evening, Felicity knocked on the door to the Algren home. Natalie Algren made and sold preserves and small handworked items, mostly small felt toys and animals. For the last several years she had sold her goods on Felicity’s farm stand in exchange for time managing it.

  “We just finished supper.” Natalie led Felicity into the kitchen, smiling warmly and her green eyes sparkling. Natalie’s short black hair shimmered like pure silk in the overhead light. She moved softly, easily, and though she wasn’t a petite woman, she seemed to have the grace of someone light.

  To Felicity’s mind, Natalie Algren was the most remarkably and genuinely cheerful person anyone could ever meet. She seemed to move in a separate world, smiling at the oddities of human beings around her. Even when she’d had so much trouble with her ankles the previous summer, she’d remained cheerful and upbeat. Her mood never seemed false, and Felicity thought Kevin a fortunate man.

  The two women settled at the kitchen table and went over the schedule for the farm stand. Natalie spread out on the table some of the things she was planning on stocking. The women compared estimates from previous years with final sales figures. They concluded their pricing and scheduling for the upcoming year in less than an hour.

  “Kevin’s fixing up the little stand I used last year,” Natalie said, and headed out to get her husband. A moment later Kevin followed her into the kitchen, wiping his hands on a rag and then flicking it onto his sawdust coated jeans. “You’re making a mess, Kev.” He looked down at his legs, as though not sure what to do about them or the sawdust. Natalie appeared behind him with a hand vacuum cleaner and proceeded to tidy him up.

  Kevin lowered himself into a chair and rested his arms on the table. “Any more of that?” He nodded to the coffee pot sitting on a warmer, and his tone was at once intimate and respectful. His wife placed a mug in front of him. “Felicity was at Flat Road Automotive this afternoon,” he told his wife. He lifted the mug and took a sip. “It’s police business, Felicity. I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  “Okay, I won’t ask. I rebuilt my farm stand this afternoon,” Felicity said.

  “You got it set up too,” Kevin said. “I saw it on my way home.”

  Natalie and Felicity glanced at each other. Her farm was certainly not on his way home.

  “What were you doing out my way?” Felicity asked.

  “Police business,” Kevin said.

  “Oh, tell her, Kevin. She has a right to know,” Natalie said.

  “What my wife means is that I have some public information, yes, because it was in the town notes. Some of it, anyway.” Kevin tipped his head toward his wife, softening his words. He closed his eyes a moment, and when he opened them he looked straight at Felicity. “I was checking out a report of a 911 call from Clarissa Jenkins a couple of weeks back. It seems she made the call from her home, but when the Lanark officer drove up, a man was driving away and she didn’t want to press charges.”

  “Was Clarissa hurt?”

  Kevin tightened his shoulders and shook his head. “The report said one side of her face was red, as though someone had slapped her hard, but she insisted it was all fine.”

  “Did she give the man’s name?” Natalie asked.

  “She refused to press charges or say anything more.” Kevin shifted in his seat as if about to stand up.

  “That poor woman,” Felicity said. “Maybe that’s what she was going to tell Sasha. That her boyfriend is violent and she broke it off because of that.”

  “Maybe.” Kevin’s face was blank, giving away nothing of his feelings. “We’ll never know unless she told someone.”

  Felicity glanced at Natalie and wondered if they were thinking the same thing. “And then she had that car crash.”

  “We can’t jump to conclusions, Felicity.”

  “I know, I know, Kevin, but something very strange is happening around my farm. I thought it began with Sasha Glover. But after what I saw at Bruce’s garage today and after what you just told me, I have to wonder if it begins even before the car accident. Perhaps even before the prowler at my place.”

  “Did you put up motion detectors?”

  Felicity nodded. “Sasha’s dad, Mr. Glover, told me something that seems worrisome. At first I dismissed it, but it’s something to think about. Kyle, Sasha’s boyfriend, got the idea there’s some kind of buried treasure in this area. I never heard anything like that before, but that’s what Mr. Glover said. Maybe Kyle was pressuring Clarissa about it.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  Felicity stared at Kevin, startled by his change of subject, but relented. “Better. Less agitated. He’s still talking about something secret and I shouldn’t tell anyone. Of course, since I don’t know what it is, I can’t, so that’s just fine.” She’d decided not to share more of her suspicions until she was sure she would sound less foolish, or at least less like Old Zeke.

  “It’s the way things are now,” Kevin said.

  “I didn’t mean to be flippant. Whenever I think about him I get agitated too. Since he disappeared from Pasquanata, the home has had to hire additional help to watch him. At least that’s what they’re telling me. And I have to pay for this extra service—a mental health care giver, a special service for people in his condition, now that Dad has shown he can’t be left alone.”

  “You have to pay?” Natalie asked. She’d come to stand behind Kevin, her hands resting on his shoulders.

  Felicity nodded. “That’s what they’ve told me. I have to come up with several thousand dollars a year.”

  “That can’t be right, can it, Kevin?” Natalie leaned over her husband.

  “I’m at my wit’s end, Kevin. I’ll get some cash from the farm stand and timbering. But short of selling land, I don’t know where I’m going to get a few thousand extra every year for the rest of his life.” Felicity looked at the tissues sitting on a bookcase against the wall and wished for once she could break into tears and have the relief of feeling all that worry and fear and anxiety flowing away. Instead she took a deep breath and swore softly under her breath. “Every time I see Dad he makes me promise not to sell anything and then the manager wants to know when they can expect a payment.”

  “You’ve given them something already?”

  “Not yet, but I said I would soon. I had to. I was afraid they’d put him out and then what would I do
?”

  “Can they do that?” Natalie asked.

  “Don’t know,” Kevin said. “But I can give you some numbers to call so you can find out.”

  Kevin walked Felicity to her car soon after she told them about the Pasquanata Community Home.

  “Are you going to Clarissa Jenkins’s and Sasha Glover’s funeral tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.” He raised his hand to stop her from saying anything more. “Felicity, don’t ask me any more questions. I know you want to find out what I think, but this is police business, state police business.”

  “But you do know something.”

  Kevin glanced back at the house. “I felt so good just a moment ago.”

  Felicity smiled and opened the truck door. “And you will again, as soon as I leave.”

  Kevin lowered his head and looked at the ground before stepping closer to her. “I don’t know if anyone is chasing hidden treasure—as absurd as it sounds. But I want you to be careful. Clarissa’s car sat outside Bruce’s garage long enough for someone to tamper with it. You take your pickup there. Natalie takes our car there.”

  “You sound so serious.”

  “Felicity, you live on a huge piece of land, alone, with a few animals. You’re very vulnerable.”

  “My family has been on that land for almost three hundred years,” Felicity said, a smile of incomprehension growing.

  “Things aren’t the same, Felicity. Just listen to your name and your mother’s and grandmother’s. All those words of virtue—Charity, Faith.”

  “And before them Hope and Devotion.” Felicity’s smile softened. “I know life is changing, Kevin. How could I not know? But I can take care of myself.”

  Again he raised his hand. “I know you have a rifle and a shotgun. But those arms won’t do you any good against someone who sneaks around. Clarissa probably had no idea what was happening to her as she drove to your place.”