Buried in Stone

by Eric Wright

  “Maybe he would want to.”

  “I’m not letting him. Best for him that we finish now. But I didn’t ask you to drive me in for that. I just wanted to ask you to be a pal to him. Would you? He thinks a lot of you, and he doesn’t have any buddies. That’s partly his job, I suppose, but he’s always been more or less on his own. He needs someone to talk to, I know that. So I thought I’d tell you how much he admires you and maybe you could spend a little time with him. For a while.”

  It was naked, embarrassing, and naive in its assumptions about relationships. How could he explain to her that he and Caxton had no history on which to base a friendship, that it wasn’t something you could just initiate if it hadn’t happened in the past three years? And then he thought that she wasn’t asking him to be bosom pals with Caxton. Just to keep an eye on him and listen to him occasionally. In other words, be a neighbor. He could do that.

  “I’ll look him up,” he said. He added, “If he stays around.”

  “Tell him to,” she said again, with a fierceness that surprised him. “Talk him out of leaving. Where would he go?”

  Pickett pulled into the parking lot of the OPP detachment in Sweetwater and offered a thought. “You’re leaving because of the shame of it all, or some such, aren’t you? Don’t you think he might have trouble with that, too? He might not want to carry on being chief, might think that he’s tainted. He could well want to make a clean break.”

  “Tell him not to,” she said. “Tell him to forget about me.”

  ★ ★ ★

  They met Wilkie in his office, and he drove ahead of them to the little hospital where Marlow’s body was being kept in cold storage.

  “Let me go first,” Wilkie said. “I’ll put the light on and you can go in when I come out. It’s pretty bad, you know that.”

  She stood close to the door, waiting for the moment to go in. “I don’t want anyone watching me,” she said.

  She came out almost immediately, nodded, and turned away, trembling slightly.

  Pickett took her arm and led her back to the car. When he had helped her inside, he came back to Wilkie, who was standing by his own car. “She’ll want to know the schedule,” he said. “When can she think of a funeral?”

  “There’s an autopsy, an inquest—I don’t know. Not until we’re sure what happened. Why are you driving her around?”

  Pickett explained briefly her desire to keep Caxton out of any unpleasantness.

  “Bit excessive, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe not for her. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Who shot him, Mel?”

  “Everyone in Larch River is hoping it was a stranger.”

  “You have to, don’t you?”

  By the time Pickett had returned to the car she was composed enough to ask him to stop at a grocery store on the main street of Sweetwater. “I don’t want to be stared at, shopping in Larch River,” she reminded him. She seemed to be surviving her ordeal well enough now.

  He waited at the door of the store to help carry her grocery bags to the car. They said nothing on the ride back. Pickett was feeling himself being sucked into Caxton’s world by the sheer pull of the man’s need of him, and he wanted to preserve some distance. He felt uneasy. There was no way of knowing where the investigation might lead, and while the idea of Lyman Caxton as a killer was absurd, his training told him that Wilkie couldn’t think that way. He did not want to be privy to any of Caxton’s secrets that Wilkie ought to know.

  Betty unlocked the door of the bakery and stepped in, turning in the doorway to take the groceries from him. He was very conscious of Lyman Caxton sitting in his car, watching the house from a block away. In spite of wanting to stay clear, he would have to find an excuse to drop by; Caxton, it seemed to him, was capable of getting emotional enough to do something silly, like trying to hunt down the killer all by himself.

  CHAPTER 10

  On Tuesday, the Larch River Gazette carried an account of the incident, together with a picture of Marlow. The Gazette was not much more than an advertising flyer, but it was widely distributed in the area, and a man in Jacob’s Creek, a hamlet eight miles from Larch River, recognized Marlow’s picture and called in to the OPP in Sweetwater.

  The duty constable led him through to Wilkie’s office.“I saw your guy,” the man said. “The dead guy. He was in one of those cottages up past the landing.”

  “When?”

  “Three weeks ago? Hold on.” The man, Jerry Laker, a salesman of camping supplies and sporting goods, thumbed through a small diary. “The hardware store in Larch River carries our stuff and I did an order there in the morning and then took a few hours off to go fishing. I do that a lot if I’ve met my quota. Here it is, Wednesday the eleventh. I rented a boat at the marina and went up to the fishing camp. I know the good spots along there and I was planning to fish my way back.

  “So I’m most of the way home, trolling the shoreline, and I ran out of gas. Son of a bitch at the marina hadn’t filled up the tank—there’s no way I could’ve used five gallons. We had a little argument about it when I got in.” He grinned. “It’s nice to tell an asshole what he is, after you’ve spent a week being polite, kissing butts to get an order. Anyway, there I was, up shit creek. I did have a paddle but it’s slow going, paddling a sixteen-foot aluminum boat, so I was hoping someone would come by and give me a tow. Then I saw smoke coming from the chimney of one of the cottages, and I thought I would see if I could borrow a gallon of gas. I tied up at the dock and unhooked my gas tank, but just as I was getting out of the boat, this guy came out of the cabin. He couldn’t see me, so I stayed where I was until he was back inside the cabin.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was taking a leak in the bushes around the side of the cabin. He’d come out to use the outhouse, I guess, but he couldn’t be bothered to walk that far. He was nearly naked, just had his shorts on, so it was a bit awkward for me. Once he was back inside, I stepped out onto the dock and hollered, real loud, Anybody home? Then I walked, real slow, up to the cottage, hollering every few steps. Your guy opened the door as I got to the porch. He was more or less dressed now. I’m sure it was him because of his stupid little beard. Behind him, in the living room, I could see a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, watching me, pretending to read a magazine. She made a hell of an impression on me, too, because although I couldn’t see her face because of the magazine, I could sure see the rest of her. She was wearing some kind of bathrobe that was mostly open and she had her feet up on the little table in front of her, posing like a picture in a skin magazine. Apart from that, all I could see of her was her long yellow hair.”

  All this, Wilkie, as good as his word, reported to Pickett on his way through Larch River that afternoon. He continued, “Caxton identified her right away. Linda McCourt. She works behind the desk of that gas station up at the junction, the big new one. Her old man owns it. So I went up to see her.

  “She was scared of her old man finding out at first, so I had to explain that I didn’t have any interest in her sex life, though between ourselves it could have been interesting. She’s a feisty little babe—I had the feeling she was measuring me while we were talking. Anyway, I told her that officially, in case her old man wondered, I was inquiring if she had seen any suspicious characters on foot near the gas station, or walking the highway to and from Larch River, and then she agreed that she and Marlow had spent the occasional afternoon at the Dakin cottage, just a couple of times, but apart from the man who came looking for gas, whom she remembered, no one had seen them, she was sure. Marlow used to pick her up at a government dock around the point, the place canoeists use as a starting point for their trips. They got to the cottage by boat, and afterward he took her back to the government dock, where she had left her car. Not on weekends, no. On her afternoon off. The last time they’d spoken to each other was in early August, she said, when they had a fight.

  “I asked her what the fight was about, and she said they had an
arrangement to spend a couple of days in Toronto together. They were going to drive in separately and meet at a hotel in Toronto. He never turned up, never called, nothing. When she came back, she went over to the bakery to find him, and he told her he’d left a message at the hotel to say he couldn’t make it. Anyway, he said it wasn’t his problem. She should have been more careful.”

  “About what?”

  “She went in to have an abortion, which she had, without anyone around to hold her hand. If her father had found out, he’d have wanted to kill someone—her or Marlow. So that was their last date. She said when she heard he’d been shot she assumed it was because he had been caught screwing around with someone else. Anyway, she was glad. She said it wasn’t her problem. He should have been more careful.”

  “Does her father own a handgun?” Pickett joked.

  “Does Linda McCourt have a jealous boyfriend her own age?” Wilkie pondered in return.

  “I’d say not. If she was screwing a character like Marlow—how old was he, thirty?—then that’s where she got her kicks. She’d regard boys her own age as kids.”

  “That’s what I figured. She’s frightened of her old man, of course, but she couldn’t help bragging a little that she was Marlow’s mistress, even though he’d dumped her like that.”

  “Does she think she was the only one?”

  “Wasn’t she?” Wilkie asked.

  “From what Lyman Caxton tells me, Marlow spread himself around. The history includes two others around here that Caxton knows about. He covered a lot of territory delivering bread, until his sister took some of the flak and put a stop to it. He got caught by the guy who runs the campers’ supply store at the junction just outside of town. This guy had gone to Toronto for a fresh supply of that junk he sells, the moccasins made in Taiwan, and decided for a change not to stay over as he usually did. He came home and found his missus in bed with Marlow. He phoned Betty Marlow and told her to take him off the bread route. Told her why.”

  “So far, then, it could have been a drinking pal, a husband, or maybe a jilted lady.”

  “The most likely is someone with a grudge who’d lost a fight with Marlow. Marlow liked to fight, too.”

  Wilkie held out his mug for more coffee. “Can I leave out anybody around here?”

  “Me. I never spoke to the guy. You say he and this kid used the Dakin cottage? You talked to Dakin yet? He and his wife run the bed-and-breakfast place on Main Street. He wrote a play they’re putting on here. By the way, do many of the folks here have cottages as well as houses?”

  “A few. The cottage is a place to take the kids on the holidays, I guess. And they rent them out. But, sure, I talked to Dakin. He hasn’t used his cottage for a month. Apparently he let his wife use it so that she could be alone on the weekends. She was writing a book, he says.”

  “Where was Mrs. Dakin on Friday? If she was at the cottage she might have heard something.” Pickett told Wilkie about the marriage breakup.

  “Dakin never said anything about that. Where will I find her, do you know?”

  “According to young Eliza, the girl who found the body, she left town on Saturday. What have you found out about Marlow? When was he last seen?”

  “He left town on Friday afternoon. We’ll know where he went when we find his car. It shouldn’t be hard to spot. Rusted-out light blue Chevy. I’ve got the boys looking for it.” Wilkie sat back. “So you know this Eliza? How?”

  Pickett told him how.

  “And this Dakin wrote the play you’re all acting in?”

  “I’m building the scenery. Dakin wrote the play, yeah.”

  “And Mrs. Dakin? She the one who serves frozen croissants?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “You’re really in touch, aren’t you? Stay close, all right?”

  The car turned up the next day, tucked away on a quiet back street of Dumpy Lake, a resort village about fifteen miles away. Neither Betty nor Caxton had any idea what Marlow might have been doing in Dumpy Lake. Just as interesting was how he got back to Larch River. Wilkie had the car towed back to Sweetwater until he could make sense of it.

  Caxton said, “I’ve been thinking, Mel.”

  Pickett felt a heavy depression in his chest. He had been putting in a shelf above the stove, a nice morning’s work, when Caxton appeared. It looked as though he could expect a daily visit from Caxton while he worked out his misery. He could guess how it would go: every day Caxton would come to a conclusion about his relationship with Betty, a conclusion that Pickett would agree with, until the next day, when Caxton would see it all differently. This was more neighborliness than Pickett thought he might be able to cope with. “What about?” he asked.

  “Did you ever see Marlow to remember?”

  This sounded better. “Sure. I don’t think I ever spoke to the guy, but I saw him around, and in the bakery, of course.”

  Caxton took a copy of the Gazette out of his jacket. “That what he looked like?”

  “Yeah. That’s him. Says so right there.”

  “Look at it hard, Mel. That the way you remember him?”

  Pickett took the newspaper over to the light from the window. “Yes,” he said. “He had that little beard. That’s him.”

  “That’s how the guy identified him, too, Wilkie told me, the guy who saw him in the cottage. ‘Stupid little beard,’ he said.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “You couldn’t really tell much from the look I took, but he didn’t have a beard when we found him on the trail.”

  “Tell me what you’re saying.”

  “Why would he shave off his beard?”

  “He was bored with it. Wanted a change.” Pickett abandoned the shelf for the day and turned on the stove ring to make coffee.

  “Could be. Strange, though, don’t you think? And Wilkie’s not stupid. At some point he’s going to wonder where the beard is. And if that fella who first saw him in the gully sees the picture in the paper, he might wonder, too.”

  “So what’s on your mind, Lyman?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you, and you see if you can think of anything you haven’t told me that either fits or don’t fit. I think Timmy went up into the bush to meet someone. I mean, what if he went up there to have it out with someone?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “He had a shave, is all,” Pickett said. “The rest you made up.”

  “Could be. I hated that goddamn beard. It was like the kind Abraham Lincoln had, you know? He was always stroking it, curling it up. I saw a woman in a beer parlor stroking it once with her finger; you could tell he was having her, just the way she did it.”

  “He’s dead now, Lyman.”

  “Yeah, and he’s screwed me up totally.” He paused and looked out at Pickett’s yard. “I think I’ll find out about that beard, though.”

  He came back in triumph, early in the afternoon. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing strange going on,” he began, excited, full of news. “You know what I found out? He shaved that beard off before he went up the trail on Friday.”

  “Who saw him?”

  “No one saw him. I just … established it.”

  Pickett waited patiently for Caxton to shape the story for its full effect. He would get nothing done this afternoon.

  “I drove over to Dumpy Lake after I left you,’ Caxton began. “You know why?”

  “That’s where they found Marlow’s car.”

  “Right. There’s three motels in Dumpy Lake. Marlow stayed in one of them, I found out.”

  “What for?”

  “I reckon he went somewhere to get a shave.”

  Before Pickett could laugh, Caxton continued. “I was right. He took a room in the second one I checked. They recognized his picture. And I didn’t even have to ask. They said he checked in early in the afternoon and left before supper, while it was still light. They figured he must have wanted someplace to take a woman
, yet when they cleaned the room the next morning—he had to pay for the whole night, of course—the bed hadn’t been used. But the thing they did notice was that the washbasin was full of hair. He’d shaved his beard off. What do you make of that?”

  “I told you. He was bored with it.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. They didn’t actually see any woman with Marlow. They just assumed that’s what he was doing. I don’t think there was one. I think he went to Dumpy Lake to shave off his beard and come back here without it.”

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “To change his appearance. Because he didn’t want to be recognized by anyone as he came through town. He came back here and waited up on the trail. But the other guy was too smart for him. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to say. It’s ingenious, I’ll agree with that. You going to tell Wilkie?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “And maybe I shouldn’t. Mr. OPP Wilkie has as good as told me to keep out of it. He lets me watch, is all, just in case I see something he might miss.”

  Pickett knew why. Wilkie wanted Caxton where he could see him, but not part of the investigation. “What about the car?” he asked. “They found Marlow’s car at Dumpy Lake. So how did he get back here?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet.”

  “Most of what you’ve told me is just speculating. But if you come across anything concrete, you have to let Wilkie know.”

  A car turned into the yard, Eliza’s Volkswagen. Caxton stood up with the slightly inflated air of a man who would divulge what he knew in his own sweet time.

  Pickett said, “You don’t have to go, Lyman. You know Eliza. I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Something I want to look at,” Caxton said. He made a hat-touching gesture at Eliza and climbed into his car. “I’ll see you later.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Did I interrupt?” Eliza asked, watching Caxton’s car disappear through the gate.