by Eric Wright
After that, Caxton called whenever Pickett was in residence; Caxton had never been a policeman before he was appointed chief in Larch River, and he liked talking police talk to Pickett, whom he admired enormously. Pickett, in his turn, at first thought Caxton to be something of a fool, but soon began to appreciate another side of the chief, what he thought of as Caxton’s “country” side. Caxton was apparently wholly and comfortably in charge of the physical world. He understood car engines, boilers, septic tank systems, pumps, and everything else mechanical with an instinct that he took no pride in whatsoever. And he was just as much at home in the natural world. Pickett very early became used to Caxton pointing out the signs of raccoons or foxes or some other creature that had passed across Pickett’s land, signs that Pickett often couldn’t see a second time after he had momentarily taken his eyes off them. Later, when he knew Caxton better, it seemed to Pickett that Caxton’s view of the natural world included its human inhabitants. He automatically registered the external behavior of all the creatures he met and was immediately aware when a person or animal behaved oddly, as if he were always on the alert for rabies. What drew the two men together, then, was a mutual admiration: Pickett knew all about being a cop, and Caxton (or so it seemed to Pickett) knew everything else. And Caxton was a police buff. In landing the job at Larch River he had satisfied a major childhood desire, and in Pickett he found his idol, a man who had worked as an investigator in the homicide branch of the Toronto police. Every time they met, Caxton had a new question for Pickett, and if they spent an hour together, Pickett was sure to spend five minutes explaining police technique. Thus when Caxton appeared while Pickett was building the cabin, Pickett usually had a construction problem for Caxton to solve in exchange for his newly thought up question about fingerprints or bloodstains.
It was useful to have the chief on his side. Very early in their relationship Pickett had some tools, a new chain saw among them, stolen from his little trailer while he was in the city. He told Caxton the next time he called. Caxton looked around the trailer, nodded, and said, “It was one of the locals. I’ll see what I can find out.”
“How do you know it was a local?”
“They took the useful stuff, the saw and the good tools. But they didn’t take your heater, though that’s worth money, or your little fridge there. You might need them, see, to survive. But you can manage without a saw until you can buy another one. The locals think you’re worth a few bucks.”
Caxton never found the saw or who took it, but no one ever stole anything from Pickett again, and it took him no effort to realize why.
The police chief was waiting for them on the steps of his house. Caxton was a big man with a more or less permanent smile on a round, meaty face. Mainly because of his haircut—short on the back and sides and combed long across the top—he looked out of date, like a police chief from a thirties movie.
He waited for them to approach the steps. “Hi, Mel,” he called. “I was hoping to get my storms up, but that’ll have to wait, I guess.”
“This is Dennis Corning,” Pickett said.
“Dennis,” Caxton said, putting his hand out. “Come on in, Dennis. You too, Mel,” he added, winking, making a little joke out of the possibility that Pickett might not have felt himself included in the invitation. He led the way inside. “Hey, Dennis. Aren’t you Dinah Stuckey’s nephew?”
“She left me her house when she died.”
“That’s what I heard. Going to be living here now, are you?”
Pickett, seeing the irritation on Coming’s face at Caxton’s inappropriate attempts to be sociable, said, “It was Mr. Corning and the lady he was with who found the body, not me, Lyman.”
Caxton waited a long time to respond, showing he had got the message, looking squarely at Corning. “Who’s the lady?” he asked. “Let’s sit down.” He put on his glasses.
“Her name is Eliza Pollock.”
Caxton wrote this down and turned to look at Pickett. “Where is she now?”
“We left her at my place. She was feeling rocky.”
“I’ll have to interview her separately. Where is the body?” He looked over his glasses out the window as if he expected to see it propped up in the back of Pickett’s car.
“On the trail up behind the row of cottages.”
“Anyone we know?” Caxton asked Pickett.
“I haven’t seen it.”
“A man?” Caxton asked Corning.
“I think so. Pants. Yes. Work boots. But he was unrecognizable. Animals, I would think. I didn’t look for long.”
“Color of hair?”
“Easy!” Pickett warned, as Corning’s face went white.
Caxton moved quickly across the room and caught the man as he tottered. He laid him down on the couch and went into the bedroom for a pillow and comforter. When he had covered Corning, he beckoned Pickett out of the room. “Delayed reaction,” he said, authoritatively. “I’ll get Dr. Kuntz to come over. I saw him pull up to the house a few minutes ago. You go back to the girl. I’ll be along soon. I know that place on the trail. Maybe you and I could take a look? I know all those cottagers, though I guess it’s probably a stranger or there would have been a report. I ain’t heard of anybody missing.” Now Caxton was getting excited. “I wonder how long it’s been there. Last body we found had been there forty years, they said. Some poor bastard had just walked into the bush and fell down a hole. Didn’t have any people to worry about him so he wasn’t missed. No foul play that they could find. They found the skeleton last year when they were surveying up there.” He began to load his pockets with items from the desk. “I’ll pick you up in a little while, okay?”
Pickett sighed. “I’m retired.” He put his hand up to deny what he had just said. “No, no. Sure. But it might take more than two of us to fetch it out.”
“Depends. Probably have to bring in the OPP, anyway.”
Pickett looked up, surprised. This sounded like a big leap. For some reason, he had been assuming that whoever it was had died in the bush, at worst had had an accident, fallen down drunk, perhaps. It had not yet occurred to him that the victim might have been murdered. “I think Dennis meant a bear had got to him.”
Caxton shook his head and glanced through the doorway at Dennis Corning. “We don’t have those kind of bears around here.” He smiled. “They say some wolves were sighted along near that ravine last winter. I don’t know. Probably a couple of dogs run wild. Anyway, one of us might have to stay with it.” He tightened his belt. “We’ll take a look, but there’s bound to be an investigation. I’m not set up for that.” He added, “I’ll just check that Betty’s all right. She’s got flu or some damn thing. We usually get together Sunday afternoons. I told her I’d look in when I’d finished the storms. Now let’s go see if we can make an ID.”
Betty Cullen was Caxton’s girlfriend in a relationship that went back to long before Pickett had arrived in town, but they maintained separate houses. “I’ll wait for you at the cabin,” Pickett said. He drove off to look after Eliza.
Half an hour later, Caxton appeared outside Pickett’s door. He had changed from his Sunday afternoon clothes into his police chief’s costume: khaki pants and shirt, badge, and what Pickett thought was a slightly silly pointed hat. His demeanor had changed, too. He looked harassed.
He’s had a fight with his girl, Pickett thought, as he came out to the porch to meet Caxton. He put a finger to his lips. “She’s got her eyes closed,” he said.
“I’ve left Dennis to rest up, too,” Caxton said. “The doctor said he’ll be all right.”
The door opened behind them. “Can I go over there now?” Eliza asked. She seemed to have recovered completely.
“Wait a bit,” Caxton said. “He’ll be okay in a bit. Let’s go, Mel. Oh, I’d better get your statement first.” He took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen and looked at his wristwatch. “Now. When did you come across the body?”
When he had finished, he said, “These are j
ust notes, really. I’ll type this up later. Ready, Mel?”
Pickett could see that Caxton was sweating slightly, trying not to make a mistake. For a moment, he was afraid that the police chief would warn Eliza she mustn’t leave town, but Caxton was impatient now to view the site, and trotted off to his car.
Pickett’s cabin was served by a gravel road that ran southwest from the town, past his cabin, and then crossed the river by a one-lane steel bridge before continuing on to a summer cottage community on the shore of Otter Lake. Duck Lake and Otter Lake were actually two large swellings in the river. Duck Lake was close to the town and provided the beach; it was connected to Otter Lake to the south by a narrow strip of the river about a mile long. The swamp that lay between the town and Duck Lake also made the east bank of the river unsuitable for development, but half a dozen cottages had been built on the other bank.
The road turned south after it crossed the bridge, but at the foot of the bridge on the far side, the town had cleared and graveled a parking space and set out two picnic tables. There was no road to the cottages along the river shore. The owners kept boats at the marina on Duck Lake and came in by water.
The two men parked in the picnic space and started up the trail. Soon it climbed sharply away from the river as a gully developed that split the land and forced the trail higher. Very quickly they were high enough so that they were catching only an occasional glimpse of a cottage between the trees, and past the cottages the river formed a backdrop to the scene. Caxton led them straight to the spot on the trail that Eliza had described, and Pickett leaned against a birch tree as the police chief walked to the edge of the gully and dropped to his knees to peer down. Almost immediately he stood up again and walked back to sit down in the spot where Eliza and Corning had stopped. He put his head in his hands. Pickett wondered if Caxton had ever seen a dead body. Twenty years in the Department of Lands and Forests, then seven years in Larch River would not have produced many.
“I’ll wait here,” Pickett said. “You go do what you have to.”
Caxton sniffed hard and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’ll radio them from the car, then come back up, let you go home. Be fifteen minutes.”
“Know who he is?”
“No face left. It’s a mess.” The sight of the body seemed to have astonished him, as if he had not expected death to look like that. He slapped his knee to brush off the pine needles and set off down the path, leaving Pickett to keep guard. Pickett made himself as comfortable as he could against the birch tree. He had no desire to inspect the body himself. He had lost interest in corpses when he left the homicide unit.
★ ★ ★
When the police chief returned, he told Pickett he could manage until the Ontario Provincial Police came. Pickett offered to stay, but Caxton shook him off. “You go home. Oh, wait a minute, you don’t have a car.”
“I’ll walk,” Pickett said. Caxton obviously wanted to be left alone to get used to what had happened. “I’m getting chilly,” Pickett explained. “I’ll see you later.” Then, for Caxton’s sake, he risked insulting him. “Don’t try to move it, Lyman. Wait’ll they bring in a hook.”
Caxton walked up to the tree Pickett had been leaning against and squatted at the base. “Don’t you worry about me, old son,” he said. “I don’t even want to see it anymore, let alone handle it.”
CHAPTER 3
Back in the cabin, over more tea, Eliza told him the story.
“When I woke up this morning you could tell that today was going to be the last best day of the year. I turned on the radio and they were playing Mahler, and that did it. I wanted to get out, into the woods.” Pickett wondered if Mahler made you happy or sad. He had heard the name often enough, of course, but it meant nothing. Eliza always talked to him as if he was familiar with her world. Pickett never inquired after her references unless it seemed necessary, preferring not to interrupt the flow just to be clear on every detail. He justified to himself not asking her to stop to unpick every unfamiliar reference by an analogy with his reading practice: when he was reading a book, he didn’t stop to look up every new word. Besides, Eliza’s inclusion of him in her world was flattering, and well worth a little mystification here and there. It could get embarrassing only if a third person were present, a person as ignorant as he who might ask, after Eliza had gone, who Mahler was. It was a chance he could take. Otherwise, it was exhilarating.
Eliza continued. “I went downstairs and made some coffee and took some up to Dennis. He was awake but he didn’t want to get up so I told him if he was feeling amorous, which he was, we could celebrate outside, in the woods with Mahler.”
Pickett thought Coming’s costume was accounted for now, assembled in a hurry from whatever he’d found on the floor of the bedroom in order to get to the woods before she changed her mind. This was another thing about chatting to Eliza. You could generally count on her in a one-on-one conversation to refer, casually, to some matter that in his experience was usually, if referred to at all, raised only between very close relatives or people who had been friends since high school. He knew that times had changed, and he had wondered at first if she was representative of all lady freelance book editors in their mid-twenties, but he was fairly sure now that either she was an original or she had given him a privileged status. Either way, it made for lively listening. So Mahler, it seemed, made you feel horny.
“It was lovely on that trail, like a blessing, a farewell from the world.” She made a Camille-like gesture, enjoying herself for a moment. “The leaves are gorgeous, and enough have come down to make a carpet, especially with the pine needles in the hollows, and the air was patchy—cool and warm alternating like the river water in spring. It was so physical. I wanted to go for a swim.” Camille, and Pickett, were left behind as Eliza recaptured the excitement she had felt.
“Then you saw the body.” Pickett was curious at more than one level.
“Not yet. We lay down to feel the sun in our faces for maybe the last time, you know? And … we made love, then Dennis walked down to the gully and shouted, actually called me over, and I went and took a look. Then we came back.”
Pickett knew now what she had meant when she had said, “You should have stopped me.” Corning should have stopped her from seeing the body. He really did have bad instincts.
“Why did you come to me? Why not go straight into town?”
“Yours is the closest place along this road. Besides, I needed a friend. Dennis … Dennis didn’t want to report it at all. Let someone else find it, he said. God! I said, we can’t just leave it there. Then I remembered you lived here.” She turned and examined the cabin. “Are you nearly finished?”
Willis barked at her to be picked up and she lifted the dog awkwardly onto her lap. “Is this what she wants? I don’t really like dogs, but she seems very friendly. Will she pee on me or anything?” She stroked Willis inexpertly, catlike, passing her hand down the length of the dog’s back. “She’s nice. Maybe I’ll have a breakthrough.”
“The vet called her a tart.”
She laughed. “It takes one to know one.” She scratched behind Willis’s ear with a more spontaneous enthusiasm. “Oh, here they are now.” She ran outside, with Pickett following.
Caxton’s car turned in at the gate and rolled up to the porch. On the road beyond the fence, an Ontario Provincial Police patrol car and an ambulance waited, both vehicles with engines running.
“You can go see Dennis now,” Caxton said through the car window. He nodded to Pickett, turned the car around, and drove off.
She seemed in no hurry to leave. Pickett guessed the reason. “You feel up to driving?” He lifted Willis from her.
“Would you mind? What about the dog?”
“I’ll use my car. We’ll take Willis with us. She doesn’t mind the back of my station wagon, but she doesn’t like strange cars.”
“Sensible tart, eh?”
On the way through town, they passed two more OPP cars heading for the
scene of the crime. Already small knots of citizens were gathering, asking one another what was going on. Fortunately the tourist season was almost over, or there would have been many more sight-seers. Pickett said, “Can you take it easy the rest of the day?”
She shook her head. “I have to go down to the hall. We’ve missed too many rehearsals.”
“What time does play practice start?”
“Rehearsal, Mel. Rehearsal. You make it sound more of a village pageant than it already is. Three o’clock.”
Dennis Corning was sitting on the steps of Caxton’s house as they drove up. He got in the back of the car and cut short Eliza’s inquiries. “The flow of blood to my brain was temporarily halted,” he said. “Now I’m fine.” He addressed Pickett as if he were a cabdriver. “You know where we’re going?”
“Back to my place to get your car. Eliza didn’t want to drive.”
They continued in silence. At the cabin, Corning said, “I’m very grateful,” as if he wasn’t. Eliza, flinching at his rudeness, said, “I am, too. ‘Bye, Willis.”
“Come and see her again,” Pickett said.
“I will.” She held out her hand, then pulled him forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for looking after me.”
Corning, who had quickly climbed into his own car, said, “For Christ’s sake, Eliza, the whole day is shot,” and revved his engine.
Eliza responded to this by carefully wiping the nonexistent lipstick from Pickett’s cheek, then taking her time walking slowly to the car.
Watching them drive away, Pickett had the feeling that if this were a cartoon, he would be seeing the sides of their car bulge, and steam coming out of the windows to represent what was going on inside.
He had met Eliza earlier in the summer when she had called at the cabin looking to see what she could borrow from him for the first production by the newly formed Larch River Players. One glance had told her that a man building a log cabin does not have an attic full of knick-knacks that would dress up a stage, but she had done well from her visit by getting him to agree to come to the community hall to see if there was anything he could do to help out by way of constructing the set. He was happy to take any opportunity to become a part of the community.
