Circles in the Snow

by Patrick F. McManus

  Tully followed the old printer into his back room. Huge pieces of equipment filled the place.

  “My goodness!” Tully said. “Don’t tell me I’m looking at a flatbed press!”

  “Yes, sir, you are. This here is a flatbed cylinder press, the last of its kind in use, far as I know. Years ago, when all the other weekly newspapers started switching to those sissy offset presses, I went around the country picking up letterpress equipment wherever I could find it. Got most of it for just hauling it away. Of course, they’re not making any more of it nowadays, so I figured if some of my machinery broke down I’d want some way to repair or replace it. Now I’ve got a barn out back of my house crammed full of old letterpress equipment.”

  Tully shook his head in amazement. “Vernon, I’m surprised you can find any paper around to fit your press.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised, Sheriff. There’s quite a few folks around who run letterpress as a hobby, print books and stuff like that. We’re one of a few, maybe the only one, that prints a regular newspaper. Folks all over miss their letterpress newspapers. I tell you, our readers are absolutely crazy about Augie’s writing, think he’s Mark Twain come again. You’d be surprised the number of subscribers we have scattered all over the country who get their subscriptions by mail and even some outside the country who get their subscriptions that way, but it doesn’t make any difference to them because what they’re after is August’s writing. You probably noticed we even get some national advertising.”

  “I have noticed that, Vernon, and wondered about it. Anyway, the reason I stopped by is, I’m looking for August. Can you tell me where I might find him?”

  The newspaperman scratched his stubbly chin. “You sure you ain’t intending to arrest him?”

  “No, much as I would like to, I’m not going to arrest him.”

  “In that case, he’s up at Pine Flats.”

  “No! Not Pine Flats!”

  “Yup, he heard there was a robbery up there and went up to cover it. That’s what a real newspaper reporter does.”

  Tully sighed. “I suppose you’re right, Vernon. I’m headed up that way tomorrow and maybe I can catch up with him. Thanks for showing me around the Silver Tip Miner.”

  He walked out to his car and started the long drive home.

  Chapter 7

  Tully’s Explorer bumped down the snowy ruts of the road across the wind-burnished snow of his hayfield, the dark shape of his two-story log house slowly appearing in the glow of his headlights. In the bottomland off to his left wound Grouse Creek, filled with trout in the spring and summer, spawning kokanee salmon in the fall and winter. On the hillside off to his right, a thick woods rose up tall and dark, a half-mile square of mature cedar, pine, larch, tamarack, birch, alder, and an excess of cottonwood. The forest gave him a strange sense of comfort, even though he did practically nothing with it, except for an occasional stroll among the trees.

  He and his wife, Ginger, had built the house themselves with logs they had harvested from the forest. They excavated a gigantic hole with hand shovels, poured a concrete floor, and then built stone-and-concrete walls for the basement and foundation, all of it backed with layers of black plastic sheeting to prevent the intrusion of water. To build the log walls, they created an elaborate hoisting system consisting of a tall pole rising straight up from the center of the basement, with a leveraged pole on top rigged with tackle extending out over the construction site. This rather perilous contraption allowed just the two of them to hoist and set log after log in place. After three years of work, the house was completed. And then Ginger died. He felt extremely guilty about her death, thinking maybe it was all the hard work that had killed her, but her doctor said no, it was a congenital weakness in her heart, something she had either been unaware of or had simply chosen to ignore.

  Tully never recovered from her death. His loneliness afterward eventually led to the short but passionate affair with Daisy. He had sworn to himself that he would never again allow himself to fall in love. It was simply too painful, and that very likely was what had led Daisy to give up on the affair.

  As he bumped down the driveway closer to the house, he hoped maybe one of the lights would be on, because that would mean Daisy had come out for the evening. No such luck. He shut off the car, waded over to the planked front porch, stomped the snow off his boots, and went inside. The living room was dark and gloomy and cold. After turning on the lights, he opened the door of his wood-burning heater, shoveled out the cold burnt remains of the last evening’s fire into a bucket, and then thrust in a wadded-up newspaper, two handfuls of shavings, half a dozen sticks of cedar kindling, and three large pieces of split birch. He touched it all off with his lighter. The birch would burn for the rest of the night, and he would at least be able to get up to a warm house. He went to the bedroom, took off his clothes, and, shivering, put on a sweat suit and climbed into bed. Most nights after work he strolled around his studio checking out the paintings he had in various stages of completion. The studio occupied the entire second story. Someday soon, he hoped, he would somehow become a full-time painter. Tonight, however, he simply climbed into bed. The icy coldness of the sheets shot through his sweat suit as if driven by electricity. Oh, what the hell, he thought, and went to sleep.

  Chapter 8

  The next morning, sitting alone sipping coffee and eating a piece of dry burnt toast, he thought his life had better take a change for the better soon. At forty-eight, he was getting too old to keep fighting criminals day after day. There had been a time when he took a certain satisfaction from throwing bad guys in jail and even sending a few of them off to prison. But anymore he felt mostly sorry for the poor stupid wretches, a bad frame of mind for a sheriff. If he had learned anything over the years, it was that you can’t be stupid. The world gobbles up stupid people like so many potato chips. Stupid people usually are poor. It comes with the territory. He shoved a bowl of cold cereal to the other side of the table, got up, and drove to town, stopping at McDonald’s for his standard breakfast of Egg McMuffin and coffee. Then he headed for the office, to see if there was any word from Brian or Buck on the Pine Flats situation.

  Apparently having heard the klocking of his cowboy boots on the marble-chip concrete floor of the courthouse hallway, Daisy looked up from her intense conversation with a pudgy little fellow seated in a chair next to her. The man had curly black hair and rimless glasses and was scribbling furiously on a yellow notepad on his knee. He was the editor and only reporter of the Silver Tip Miner.

  “Augie!” Tully growled. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just my routine job of collecting news for my paper. Anything you would like to add, Sheriff, or must I go with the tidbits I’ve received from my other sources?”

  “Are you by any chance at this very minute sitting next to one of your blabbermouth sources?”

  “What! Daisy? By no means, Bo. Daisy wouldn’t give me the time of day, would you, Daisy?”

  “Certainly not!” Daisy said, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, right,” Tully growled. “Well, come on in, Augie, and I’ll give you the lowdown.”

  Finn winked at Daisy, got up, and followed Tully into his office, closing the door behind them. He pulled up a chair to Tully’s desk, sat down, cleared a little space on the desk, and placed his yellow pad on it. “Not often I get a murder to write about, Bo. Mostly it’s babies that just got born and grandmothers visiting from out of town.”

  Tully almost smiled. He couldn’t help but like the guy. He was one of the funniest people Tully knew. He was also a towering intellect, at least compared with most of the residents of Blight County. Tully sometimes wondered why the little man wasn’t reporting for The Washington Post or The New York Times. He was perfectly capable of doing so. Instead he had settled into the little town of Silver Tip, Idaho, and become not only its leading intellect but also its most prominent citizen, and a first-rate journalist to boot. The latter included a constant probing of law enforc
ement for any signs of corruption or incompetence. So far, he had found none. As Tully had once told him, it was too bad he hadn’t been around when Pap Tully was sheriff. He would have thought he was in heaven. And Pap probably would have been in prison!

  Tully leaned back in his swivel chair, folded his hands on his belly, and said, “Well, Augie, did your source in the other room fill you in on all the details of our recent crime?”

  “What source is that, Bo? You mean Daisy? Why, she never gives me the tiniest tidbit about what goes on here.”

  “Yeah, right. So what do you want to know about our murder?”

  Tully filled him in on all the details, the few he knew. The editor thanked him and got up to go.

  “By the way, Augie, how did your pictures turn out?”

  “Great, as always. I’m running three in next week’s paper. I can give you a set of all the prints, if you want them.”

  “I would love a set of prints. You never know whether there might be something in one of them that solves our murder. Oh, by the way, Augie, did you talk to Brian and Buck when you were up in Pine Flats investigating the robbery?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. We had coffee together at the café. The suspects in the crime had fled the scene, but I did get a lead on where they might be hiding out.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Sorry, Bo, I can’t reveal facts in my story until they are published. But I did speak to an eyewitness of the so-called crime.”

  Daisy stuck her head in the door. “Oh, Bo, you just missed an important phone call.”

  He stared at her. “I can’t even imagine a phone call important enough I would want to get it.”

  “Well, you’ll want to get this one. It was from your agent in Spokane. She was all excited.”

  Tully leaped up from his chair. “Jean Runyan called?”

  “Yes!”

  “And she was excited?”

  “Yes!”

  “I’ve never known Jean to get excited about anything but money. Maybe I should call her back.”

  Daisy shook her head in exasperation. “If you don’t do it this minute and tell me what she wanted, I will have to kill you!”

  Augie said, “I’d better leave and let you make your phone call, Bo. You can check with me later about the eyewitness up at Pine Flats. I don’t think anybody else knows about her. Oh, and I’ll also want to know the details about this phone call from your agent.”

  He got up and left.

  Tully sat back down and dialed Jean Runyan’s gallery number in Spokane.

  One of the clerks answered. “Runyan’s.”

  “Alice, this is Bo Tully, returning Jean’s call.”

  “Oh, Bo! Hold on a sec and I’ll get her for you. This is so exciting you won’t believe it!”

  “Try me, Alice.”

  “Jean would kill me if I told you. Hold on, here she comes.”

  The agent picked up. “Bo, you’re not going to believe this.”

  “If you don’t tell me quick, I’ll come up there and . . .”

  “No need to get violent, Sweetie. The news is that an art buyer from a gallery in Seattle came by and bought that big watercolor of yours, the one of the Blight River with the fall cottonwoods in the background.”

  “Wonderful! A Seattle gallery. That’s practically the big time.”

  “Yes! And he paid twelve thousand dollars for it! And you laughed when I said I was holding out for ten.”

  “Wow! Now I have to sit down!”

  “I told him I couldn’t let it go for ten and he offered twelve. I took that. And he wants more paintings from you!”

  “Let me call you back, Jean, after my heart starts beating again.” He hung up, leaned back in his swivel chair, and put his boots up on his desk.

  Daisy jerked opened his door. “Bo, that’s so wonderful! Twelve thousand dollars! Now you can become a full-time painter!”

  He tugged on the droopy corner of his mustache. “Not quite yet. I still have a murder to solve. If you’re done listening to my phone conversations, hunt down the Spokane phone book and check the Spokane Yellow Pages for any archery stores. I know we don’t have any in Blight County. Bows and arrows are a bit too prissy for folks around here.”

  “You got it, Boss.”

  Tully walked over to his CSI unit. It was typing madly away on a computer. “Lurch, you and Pap come up with anything more on the person who shot the arrow into our vic?”

  The Unit stopped typing and looked up. “Yeah, I did, Boss. If the boot tracks in the woods belong to the shooter, and Pap was pretty sure they do, they had to be made at almost the same time Fester was shot. That’s what the snow indicates, anyway. The shooter was a small guy no more than five-eight or so.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “That’s what Pap figured. The tracks were made by a small boot, a size eight at most or even smaller. That would indicate a pretty small man, don’t you think?”

  “Or maybe an average-size woman,” Tully said. He thought about the hiking boots he had expected to see in Hillory Fester’s closet but hadn’t. He stood up and looked out the window at Lake Blight. It had frozen over and was now covered with several inches of snow. Perfect for ice fishing. Just his luck to be stuck with the stupid murder of someone most sensible people hated anyway. “Yeah, Lurch, it definitely seems as if we’re not looking for a giant of any kind in the way of a killer, particularly an intellectual one. How did you find his tracks, anyway?”

  “Pap scraped away the top layer of snow and dipped out the prints in the crust of the first snow with a plastic spoon. He showed me how to do it. He’s pretty fantastic when it comes to tracking.”

  Tully shook his head and smiled. The old man hadn’t lost his touch. “You find anything that might tie the shooter to the tracks?”

  Lurch leaned back in his swivel chair and sighed. “Only that the person who made the tracks in the woods and the vic were at the scene at the same time, right after that first snowfall, in fact right at the start of it.”

  Tully frowned. “Let’s see now, Lurch. Pap’s and your theory is that the shooter somehow knew Fester would be showing up on a particular morning at a particular time, apparently to shoot at eagles across the river. From what I’ve learned about Fester, it’s quite likely he was the nut killing eagles. Maybe he bragged about it to someone and that person either became the shooter or told the shooter when Fester would show up. The shooter got to the woods early. While he waited for Fester, he built a fire back in there where it couldn’t be seen and was using it to keep warm.” He turned from the window and looked back at the Unit. “That the way you see it?”

  Lurch nodded. “Yeah. Pap, too. That’s what we think the evidence indicates.”

  “So why didn’t the shooter just step out of the woods and drill Fester in the back of the head with a rifle? If he thought a rifle would make too much sound, there’s not a house within two miles of the clearing. Hunting season was over, but it’s not unusual to hear shots in the woods after the season closes, usually some poacher working late on his winter’s venison.”

  Lurch nodded. “Yeah, I thought about that, too. You want to know how the shooter got to the woods, Boss?”

  “Yes, you got any idea?”

  “I do. He drove into a little skid trail on the far side of the woods, then hiked into where he built the fire and waited for Fester. That first snow was fresh at the time, still falling, but I was able to get a cast of the tire print and of the boot print leaving it. It’s a pretty good cast, good enough for us to find a match. I also got some good photos of the tire’s imprint in the ice. There’s a place where the tread was nicked pretty hard by something sharp. If we find the tire and match the nick to the imprint of the tread, we can place the owner or at least the driver at the scene and time of the murder. Then I think we’ve got our killer. Pap figures a four-wheel-drive pickup and, given the tire size, a three-quarter-ton.”

  Tully shook his head in amazement. “E
xcellent, Lurch! You’ve practically solved the murder, except we have a few thousand three-quarter-ton pickups in Blight County. Even little old ladies drive them. But great work.”

  “Thanks, Boss, but I don’t have the slightest idea who the killer might be, if that’s important. As you say, we have a few thousand three-quarter-ton pickups in the county.”

  “I’d look at the pickups on the Fester ranch for starters. What’s wrong now?”

  “You think Fester’s hands will be pleased to see me snooping around their trucks?”

  “Good point. They probably haven’t lynched anybody out that way in a while, so I better call the foreman and tell him you’ll be checking their pickups as a matter of routine. If they give you any trouble, I’ll come out and handle it.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Boss. Oh, and here’s another thing. The same pickup made two tracks on the skid trail, one from driving in and the other from backing out. Then another truck drove all the way in and backed out, all this about the time Fester was shot. There was another short track from a different vehicle, right at the entrance, like someone had pulled in a short ways and backed out, probably to turn around. The track had been driven over so many times it was impossible to get a cast of it.”

  “Well, if we do get any leads maybe we can match the other treads. You sure the tracks were made about the same time Fester was shot?”

  “Yeah. Pap says the tracks were made during the first snow and the second snow filled them in at the same time it covered the body. That’s Pap’s idea, anyway. I tell you this, Bo, Pap really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to tracks.”

  “I know he does. And you got some casts of the boot prints.”