Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  “At least now we don’t have to carry it so far to get it into the buckets,” she said, and began digging again.

  Right, and if it had buried us both completely, I thought, at least no one would have to dig our graves. But it hadn’t, and half an hour later we’d loaded enough.

  As we drove back to the cottage, the wilderness was full of sounds: crickets chirping, woodpeckers rat-a-tatting, the rush of a rising breeze chattering in the dry leaves and clicking brittle branches together. Glancing back at the culvert, I noticed that in the little time since we’d seen it last, the pond had already risen back nearly to the level that it was before the flood.

  “You’re sure?” Wade Sorenson put both big hands flat on Bob Arnold’s old gray metal office desk and leaned over it intently.

  Not for the first time, Bob felt glad that Wade was one of the good guys. “Well, let’s see, now,” he replied. “Guy goes into the woods with no more idea what he’s doing than I would have if I stepped out onto the moon.”

  Wade looked skeptical, but he kept listening. “Wrong gear, wrong clothes, wrong time of year,” Bob went on. “No cellphone on him, either, no way to call help if he gets in trouble. Next thing you know, he turns up deceased. That surprise you a whole lot, does it?” he asked.

  Reluctantly, Wade shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “City people don’t realize how it is, way back in there. Dead when he hit the water, the M.E. says?”

  For the past twenty hours, Wade had been out on a tugboat helping bring in a freighter. So he’d just learned about the body Jake and Ellie had found, and of course he didn’t like it.

  To put it mildly. “Yup,” Bob said, glad he could answer with certainty. Because they didn’t know where the death site was, an autopsy had been done right away, just to make sure an accident really was all they were dealing with.

  “Victim had a heart attack, it turns out. Must’ve been by the water when it hit him, he fell forward onto a rock, smashed his face up, and splash—so sayeth the autopsy report, anyway, and I think I’ll just go ahead and believe it, if that’s okay.”

  That, at least, seemed to pacify Wade, whose problem Bob understood. If Wade rushed on up to the cottage to check on his wife, Jake, she might feel that he was patronizing her, as if he thought she couldn’t take care of herself.

  But if he didn’t go, he’d keep on feeling that he should’ve. “Give her a call, you want to know for sure everything’s okay,” Bob advised just as his own phone rang.

  “Yeah,” he answered it, recognizing the caller ID number. As he listened, he looked out through the big glass front door of the old Frontier Bank, on Water Street in downtown Eastport.

  “So you got stiffed, huh? Yeah, I can come in and take a report.” In a few days the police station would be moving to its new quarters, two blocks away in the refurbished A&P building. There he would have clean white walls, tiled floors, upgraded lights and heating, and an honest-to-God holding cell.

  He supposed he ought to be happy about it. “But why don’t I take a walk around town, first,” he said into the phone, “and make sure your pair of deadbeats aren’t still around? Maybe they haven’t quite gotten out of town yet.”

  He listened briefly. “Good, then, I’ll be by in about half an hour.” But his caller wasn’t done.

  “Huh,” Bob said again when the last bit of information the Rusty Rudder’s owner had to say to him had been communicated.

  The last, least-welcome bit. “Uh, listen,” he said when he had heard it. “Wade’s here, you want me to put you on speaker?”

  He hated the speakerphone. Talking, it was like shouting into a cave, and listening was worse. But it had its uses, and now was one of them; at least he wasn’t having to give the bad news.

  “Wade?” said the restaurant owner, his voice thinly echoey, then went on apologetically. “Listen, you know I’m not one to say much about my customers.”

  “Right,” Wade and Bob replied together. The Rusty Rudder owner never said word one about what his customers did, said, or consumed while they were in his establishment.

  Or about them any other time, either, for that matter, and everyone knew it. “But Sam asked me to,” he continued. “Couple years ago now, Sam came in and asked me. He made me promise him this, you understand?”

  “Promise what, pal?” Wade asked patiently. Even on the tinny speakerphone, he and Bob could both hear the tension in the pub owner’s voice.

  “About drinking,” came the reply. At this, Wade’s blue eyes opened wider in surprise and his square jaw tucked down abruptly, as if he were reflexively rejecting what he’d just heard.

  “He asked me, if I ever saw him drinking in here, to go to one of his family members. Right away, he said. So now I am.”

  “Well, now,” Wade temporized, a clash of emotions clearly visible on his rough-hewn face. “That’s fine, I mean, I’m glad he said that, and that you kept your promise, too. But are you sure he wasn’t just sitting with people who were …?”

  “No. And that’s the other thing,” came the answer. “I just told Bob I had a couple of visitors in here with a stolen credit card last night. I didn’t tell him, but I’m telling you, that’s the pair that Sam was with.”

  The restaurant owner took a breath. “Drinks, dinner, the whole shebang, and now I got a guy in here, he says that card is his. Says he thinks he left it at the boatyard yesterday, credit card company called him late last night to say it was used, and was he the one who used it? Which he wasn’t.”

  Worse and worse; Bob looked at Wade and shook his head wonderingly as the food-and-drinks man kept talking.

  “See, when the card got used, the owner hadn’t realized that it was lost yet, so he hadn’t—”

  “Reported it yet,” Bob finished. “Yeah, I get it. But calm down, okay? Everything’s all right, we’ll straighten it out.”

  He hung up. It wasn’t all right; in fact, it was pretty goddamned far from anything that was even anywhere near all right.

  “Look, Wade, just leaving Sam aside for a moment …”

  Wade glanced up. “What?” he snapped, but then his expression softened; he knew none of it was Bob’s fault.

  “Look, as far as Jake and Ellie being at the cottage goes, I know what you’re really worried about, okay?” Might as well at least get that off the agenda, Bob thought.

  “But Dewey Hooper’s just a lowlife wife abuser who went too far, not some criminal mastermind. Also, turns out he was kind of nuts on the topic of the woman he killed, according to the prison guys the state police investigators are talking to. Obsessed with her, they say, and she’s buried in New Hampshire where her sister lives now.”

  Bob took a breath. “They think he might be headed for her grave, down around Nashua. And besides, if he were around here, by now someone would’ve seen him and recognized him.”

  He got up, picked the telephone handset back up out of its base, and with the ease of long practice punched in the keystrokes that set it to forward calls to his cellphone. Then out of habit he checked to make sure the wires leading to his computer modem and fax machine were all plugged in securely.

  Once he moved to his new office, he could say goodbye to the tangle of wires. In its place he would have high-speed broadband, and a new, much more powerful computer that could send or receive big files—crime-scene photographs, surveillance videos, and so on—without the machine crashing and having to be restarted just as the data transfer had nearly completed.

  All of which was fine, he supposed, and he was grateful for the grant that had gotten it all for the city, and thus for him, because that was where the city council had decided to spend it. He’d taken it as a compliment, appreciating what he regarded as a vote of confidence.

  But personally, he wasn’t looking forward to the move a bit. He’d gotten used to this place, with the heavy brocade floral curtains at the high, arched windows, the marble counters, and the old carpet on the floor. Plus the vault came in handy for storing valuables
, weapons, and contraband.

  “Yeah, I guess Hooper wouldn’t come back here,” Wade said. “What I don’t get, though, is how he avoided the cameras in the prison in the first place. I mean, being as we agree he’s not the genius type.”

  Bob looked up from untangling one of the phone wires. “So you knew him?”

  Wade shrugged. “Not really. Ran into him once or twice, and that was enough. Unusual type of guy, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “Right,” Bob agreed. “Hell, half our upstanding citizens are unusual.” He put a wry twist on the word. Way the hell out here in what the rest of the world thought was the boondocks, unusual was pretty much a requirement.

  “He didn’t strike me as a real smart fellow, though,” Wade went on, still frowning over what he’d heard on the phone. “Smart enough to fool people whose jobs’re not to get fooled, I mean.”

  State prisons ran surveillance cameras 24/7, and there was no way to disable one or otherwise thwart it without the attempt getting noticed by the officers watching the monitors’ display. They glanced away once in a while, sure, human nature being what it was. But you still couldn’t count on them doing it just when you were doing whatever it was you didn’t want observed.

  Like, for instance, escaping. “Right,” said Bob. “No genius, and not very stable, either, according to the guys at the prison who ought to know. They were surprised he had the wherewithal to make a plan like he must’ve had, and keep it together.”

  “Yeah? Unpredictable, was he?” Wade asked distractedly. As he spoke he gazed out the bank building’s front window to where a tugboat was pulling in at the fish pier, down the block and over on the other side of Water Street, in the harbor.

  Sam wasn’t there. “Nope,” said Bob. “The opposite. And that, see, is what turned out to be his special talent.”

  Bob gazed around the old bank interior. “My understanding is that Hooper spent seven long years being a good little inmate who never gave anyone any grief.”

  Huge old double-hung sashes, each four feet high, sent thin, slanting October sunshine into the high-ceilinged room. Bob liked those windows, and particularly liked the bank’s high, marble-topped counter that he could stand behind or emerge from behind, depending on whether the person who’d come in to talk to him was a serious visitor or just a run-of-the-mill pain in the butt.

  “And the night he skedaddled,” Bob went on, “he did all the things he ordinarily did, and no other things.”

  Except for slipping through the open bay door and into a waiting ambulance, of course. “He walked out into the fenced yard, and then he didn’t show up again, but the guys viewing the monitors were so used to seeing his routine—emptying the trash in the Dumpster, for instance—that he’d become invisible, kind of.”

  Bob sighed heavily. “So they didn’t notice when he really wasn’t there, either, and it just happened to be that time, the only time when it really mattered, that the trash he was dumping was a dead body.”

  Bob took a breath. “Which he replaced in the ambulance with his own body, for long enough to get outside the fence.”

  Whereupon he had either jumped from the moving vehicle or somehow gotten out of the hospital morgue, and by the time anyone figured it out, Dewey Hooper was gone like a wisp of fog.

  “Not that he was normal,” Bob added. “Guards who knew him say all you had to do was look at his face an’ you’d know he was going to blow up sooner or later. Guys get an expression, they say, doesn’t look like any other facial expression, when they’re getting ready to lose it. Medical staff, social workers …”

  Sure, now they all said so, now when it was too late. But Bob didn’t guess anyone would’ve listened to any of them before, anyway, institutional hierarchies being what they were.

  “I guess that look was one more thing they got used to about Hooper,” he said. “Which maybe was the idea in the first place.”

  Wade nodded, charitably not remarking on what a balls-up mess the whole situation had been. But then, he wouldn’t; Wade wasn’t the type to state the obvious.

  Bob didn’t quite know what Wade might do, though, with the information he’d just gotten from the Rusty Rudder’s proprietor. Hell, he wasn’t sure what to do with it himself.

  He turned to Wade. “I remember Dewey. Arrested him many a time, drunk and disorderly and so on. He had the same look then. Our Mr. Hooper is the kind of guy gives the other 99.9 percent of unusual people a bad name. Hell, I knew it long before he did away with his wife.”

  Maybe not anything a psychiatrist could diagnose, but just the same … Bob felt uneasy simply remembering Hooper. “Come on, take a walk with me,” he told Wade, getting up.

  His old office chair let out a horrendous creak; in the new place, he would have all new office furniture, tables and file cabinets and bookcases that were on their way right now from the Office Depot in Bangor. Place was going to have restrooms, brand-new ones, and a locker room with a shower, even.

  But he was going to miss that old chair. He’d take it with him, but he knew it wouldn’t look right in the new place. That it wouldn’t fit in; he wondered yet again if he would.

  Outside, the sky was still blue but a new crop of huge, dark storm clouds lowered to the east; the weather of two days earlier was backing around for another whack at the coast. He crossed the street with Wade, between a pickup whose fenders were patched with silver duct tape and a Toyota whose inspection sticker was three months out of date; Bob made a mental note of the Toyota.

  “The thing is,” Wade said, “I bet Jake a hundred bucks that she couldn’t finish the deck we’ve been building up there at the cottage. Now, if I go up there myself, if she’s having trouble with it she might feel like I’m rubbing it in, and if she’s not, she’ll wish I’d waited so she could surprise me with how well she did it.”

  “And if you tell her what you just heard about Sam, she’ll be upset, but if you don’t tell her …”

  “Yeah. That, too,” Wade agreed. “Man, and this started out to be a good day, you know?” he added as they walked on.

  Past the granite riprap that formed a wall along one side of the walkway running along the edge of the harbor, the tugboat Ahoskie bobbed gently at the fish pier, her crisp, new blue-and-white paint job making her resemble a child’s bathtub toy.

  “Yeah, well,” Bob said. “That’s women for you. Damned if you do or if you don’t.”

  Which wasn’t really what either of them thought, just shorthand for how dumb a guy could get to feeling sometimes, not knowing what to do. Bob tried to remember when he hadn’t felt that way about something or another, and couldn’t.

  On their right, Passamaquoddy Bay spread blue and calm. Too calm, Bob thought, its surface glassy-flat. He made another mental note, this time to put a deputy in a squad car on the end of the causeway later if the weather really did blow up again.

  Between nabbing speeders and reassuring everyone else of a police presence, a cop visible in a storm was smart, safety-wise and politically. After all, having the city council on his side now didn’t mean he wouldn’t do or say something unpopular later.

  In fact he almost certainly would. At the end of the walkway stood the small, white wood-frame Quoddy Tides building, where the easternmost newspaper in the U.S. was published, and next to it a terraced perennial garden rising up to sidewalk level. The garden was a community project, miraculously unmolested by local youngsters; so far, Bob thought with a realism born of long-term experience. All it took was one dumb thug, but so far, so good.

  Past the garden they turned left, onto Water Street between the granite-block post office building and a long row of red-brick, two-story commercial buildings with fancy galleries and art shops on the first floors, apartments above.

  The shops were all closed, now that the tourist season was mostly over, and the apartments soon would be. With a view of the water out the back windows and lots of exposed brick inside, they were charming in summer. But in the wint
er with the wind blowing, you might as well try heating a lobster trap.

  Bob glanced at each one of the doors to make sure none of the locks had new pry marks on them, then stopped, scanning the length of the street. Eastport in the off-season was another kind of place entirely: less noise, less activity.

  Less of everything, including money, and when budgets got tight the copper pipes had a way of disappearing out of vacant buildings. So all winter he’d be checking those doors regularly.

  “Listen, Wade,” he began, taking an inventory of the street. But no unfamiliar faces or strange cars were in sight; so much for nabbing the credit card crooks before they left town.

  Wade looked out across the water, the muscles in his jaw twitching as a series of emotions chased one another across his face. Sam Tiptree’s triumph over his own demons had nearly killed him. But he’d beaten them, or at any rate wrestled them to a draw.

  Until now. “It’s a symptom,” Bob said. “Of the disease. Not a disaster.” A relapse, he meant, of the kind Sam had apparently had.

  “He’ll be okay,” Bob went on. “You all will be.” Being a small-town cop was the only job he’d ever wanted, but sometimes it was the pits.

  Wade squared his shoulders. “Yeah. All right. Guess I’ll be on my way, then. Better track the kid down now, before his mom comes home and hears about this.”

  Clearly the phone call to Jake, much less a visit, had been put on hold. Wade would want to find Sam, find out what was going on and what he could do to fix it, before he broke the bad news.

  They turned back down Water Street. “I’ll keep an eye peeled for him, call you if I see him,” Bob said as they parted.

  Wade nodded, still looking distracted. Funny, Bob thought, how a couple of hours—less, in this case—could make all the difference. A little while ago Wade had been debating taking a ride up to the cottage, wanting to ease his mind about a wife-killing prison escapee who by all reports was actually about three hundred miles away.