Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  Someone once estimated that if the honeybee, which pollinates the majority of the foods we eat, ever goes extinct, humankind will follow in four years.

  I turned the page just as Lucille brought my breakfast. While I ate and appeared to read, I was eavesdropping, with difficulty. Benson and his guest did not speak loudly or boisterously. Benson was saying in a calm voice, “But I have to be a hundred percent sure, Frank, that all that stuff is dead. Not ninety-nine. You need to think this through again.”

  “I’ve got everything covered,” Frank said in a near whisper. “We clean it up, we take it as a loss. We don’t want to try this again, even if they’re certain it’ll make a fortune. There’s way too much goddamn risk.”

  “Do what you can on your end,” Benson said. “And I’ll wrap it up on mine.”

  Frank got up and walked out without another word, just as Benson got his breakfast. Benson ate quietly while he read his copy of the Financial Times. I finished my food and got a refill on the coffee. The cat in Mutts was playing with his little pink sock. The first word in the Jumble puzzle turned out to be toque, which gave me a hard time. And then Benson cleared his throat loudly, and when I looked up he crooked a finger at me.

  There is a time and a place for machismo. Julio’s at a little past seven in the morning is not it. I pushed back my chair and walked over to Benson. “Sit down, please,” he said.

  I sat on the empty bench opposite him.

  “I assume you wanted to see me, Mr. Tyler,” Benson said. “Here I am.”

  I frowned. “I was having my breakfast and reading the paper. I don’t know you. I’ve never met you, never seen you before this morning. Why should I give a damn about you, mister?”

  “What did old Jeremiah Smith tell you last night?” Benson asked.

  He was good. He had a high forehead, dark hair crinkling up from it in a widow’s peak. I couldn’t read his eyes, nor quite name their color: dark, nearly black, but whether blue or an unusual dark gray, I couldn’t say. His face was not a handsome one, but it held weight and authority. You saw faces like that on old Roman sculptures. And he exuded something, a sense of contained power. Sitting opposite him was a bit like having a picnic on the shoulder of Mount St. Helens.

  “Jeremiah’s a friend of mine,” I said. “He helps me drink my wine.”

  “I am sure you have some mighty fine wine,” Benson said without cracking a smile. “Jeremiah Smith has some odd ideas about me, Mr. Tyler. I trust you have the sense to question anything a prospective client might say to you. Please rest assured that I have no ill-will against the old man. If he has hired you—”

  I laughed. “You look as if you know a few things, or ought to. Feel free to check and see what sort of fees Lincoln and Tyler charged, and what sort of clients we took on.”

  “It was a small fortune,” he said. “A corporate clientele. And very discreet service. Mostly you guys did international industrial espionage or recovery of stolen goods.”

  I nodded. “And so you will know that I sold out and retired.”

  “I heard you got a cabin outside of town. Why live so poorly when you musta cashed out well?”

  “I always loved Thoreau,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to die without having tried a simple life.”

  “For how long?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. So far it’s surprisingly fulfilling.”

  He nodded. We nodded at each other. It began to feel like a Japanese tea ceremony. To break the stretching silence, I finally said, “Now if I may ask an equally personal question, who the hell are you?”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Tyler.”

  I grinned. “All right, Mr. Benson, I will not. Jeremiah implied you were a dangerous man whose activities ought to be looked into. He more than hinted that you could have inconvenient people removed.”

  Benson spread his hands. “Did he tell you how many people I employ? How much of the area’s economy depends directly upon me or upon one of my companies? I doubt that very much. I am a businessman, not a murderer, Mr. Tyler. Any money-making activity takes a small toll on the environment. My businesses do. But we operate within the letter of the law. We harvest trees, true, but we replant when we do. We produce materials that are toxic, but we detoxify them or dispose of them so they are no threat. The simple truth, Mr. Tyler, is that people like Smith despise me because they think I am despoiling their world, changing it for the worse. But whether I am here or not, the world will change. It is change they fear, not me.”

  “I’ll tell him so,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.”

  Benson nodded, and looked back down at his Financial Times, dismissing me. I got up, dropped a couple of dollars on my table as I walked by it, then went up front to where Lucille was working the register. “He’s paid for yours,” she said, nodding back toward the booth.

  “No he hasn’t,” I said, handing her one of the bills I had received from Smith. “He’s just given you an extra tip, that’s all.”

  She didn’t argue. I took my change and walked out into the clear-aired morning.

  I could have gone straight from Julio’s to Smith’s place. He’d given me the address the night before, a trailer park outside Northfield, when I was driving him in to the bar. I should probably have done that, but I felt the need to think about things for a while. And I told myself that it could wait.

  So I drove back out of town, out to the logging road, and as far up it as I could, just past the blackened spot where the truck had burned. The newspaper said it would be another unseasonably warm day, but then an arctic blast was due out of Canada in a day or two.

  To be on the safe side I stopped at one of three woodpiles and got an armload of firewood. Toted it to the back of the cabin and dumped it in the sheltered lee near the plywood trapdoor. Went back down for another armload, and another. Kept at it for three or four loads past what felt necessary, until my lungs were heaving and my shoulders aching. Then, feeling righteous, I went back into my cabin and checked my phone. There are solar panels on the roof that charge a 12-volt marine battery. The marine battery provides enough power to keep my cell phone charged through a little Radio Shack 12-volt-to-110-volt inverter, and to run the radio when I decide to turn it on, which is pretty much never.

  I built a fire and took out my book. Somehow something would be settled, or my subconscious would settle it. It is a kind of faith I have.

  A solitary lunch, a solitary dinner. Night came on, and I stepped outside to see what the air tasted like. It was a thick darkness. Around the cabin, the forest was that kind of deep, deep black that comes with a heavy overcast on a winter night. No stars, no moon, and out here in the mountains, not even the lights of a nearby city. I walked down to the Jeep, more by instinct than vision, wanting to be out just to keep my ears open. Absurdly, I had the feeling that there were eyes in that darkness.

  I reached the Jeep, a barely discernible block in the gloom. The wind was getting cold. I stood there breathing it in for ten minutes or so. Nothing, no sound. Somehow I did not relish the climb back up to the cabin through the darkness, so I opened the Jeep and found the small kerosene railroad lamp that I kept there for emergencies or the darkest of nights. I lit it and in its ruddy glow headed back toward the cabin, the swinging light causing shadows to move and flicker as if the trees were dancing.

  Unexpectedly, I smelled wood smoke billowing down the hillside. When I had left, the fire had burned down to a bed of red embers. I broke into a faster step, following the trail through the snow that Jeremiah had stamped out the previous day, and my heart beat fast, apprehensive that I had done something spectacularly stupid and that the cabin was on fire.

  But it wasn’t. It stood there square and solid as ever, and yellow light, lantern light, streamed out the windows. I knew damned well that I had extinguished the lantern inside before I left, to allow my eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom. I flipped up the globe on the railroad lamp I was carrying and blew o
ut the wick: the forest expanded around me in the sudden blackness as if the land had exhaled.

  Fifty feet to my right I heard a mournful hoot as an owl surveyed the slim pickings of a winter forest where snow protected the burrows of the field mice. I took careful steps, watching the windows closely for signs of movement within the cabin, but also scanning the area around me for any evidence of an ambush. If the light in the cabin was bait, I didn’t intend to walk into the trap. I wrapped one hand around the Police Special in my pocket. It had been there all day, ever since I had decided to have breakfast at Julio’s.

  I saw through the front window a flicker of motion: somebody was sitting in one of the rocking chairs, moving gently back and forth. My space was being violated. With a self-righteous sense of indignation, I marched up to the door and threw it open.

  The woman I’d seen the day before—Sylvia—was sitting in the straight-backed rocker. She smiled at me, a juice glass full of my wine in her hand. “Welcome back from the world of the forest spirits,” she said, raising the glass in a salute. Her smile was warm and friendly, her speech still careful and precise. She was wearing the same tight-fitting buckskin pants, shirt, and moccasins.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, relaxing my hold on the pistol in my pocket.

  “You had a request,” she said simply. “You wanted to know what to do with the rest of your life.”

  That threw me. To hide my confusion, I poured myself a glass of wine, noting that she had stoked the stove and trimmed the lantern, adjusting the wick so it gave a clear, smokeless light. I sat in the other rocker. “I think you have the wrong guy.”

  “This is excellent wine. A good drug to keep a populace docile.” She smiled as if we had just shared a private joke and took another delicate sip.

  “Beats nicotine,” I said. “So, for the sake of argument, what would you recommend I do with my life?”

  “You could save the creatures of the world,” she said, face and voice utterly serious.

  I stared at her. “Are you a missionary? From some religious group?”

  “It is not necessarily a religious effort, is it? You don’t consider yourself very religious, yet you try to save people.”

  “I’ve tried now and again,” I said, and drank half my wine. “I’ve also hurt people, some very badly.”

  “Killed some?”

  “Yes.”

  “But always to save others. The weak who cannot help themselves.”

  “The rich weak,” I corrected, wondering what the pitch was and when it was going to come. Join us, my brother. Come to our compound in beautiful Belize. Have a cup of Kool-Aid.

  She looked at the light through her wine, speculatively. “Do you think the world is dying?”

  The question startled me into momentary honesty: “It seems like it. That’s why I came here from Atlanta.”

  “Are people evil?” she asked. “Essentially, I mean. Are most humans evil?”

  “There are times I think so.” God, I hadn’t had a conversation like this since my disastrous freshman year in college.

  “Could you be persuaded otherwise? That most humans are essentially decent and kind, but their actions may become evil because they lack understanding?”

  “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “But you have.” She looked at me with her odd, large eyes. “What do you think of the earliest people who lived here? That they were savages, primitives? That they ran around scalping each other? Always fighting wars, half-starved most of the time? That is what your schools teach you, isn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “There were times when the people of old broke the Law. The Law of Nature, I mean. Such people have no idea of the right, the good, the polite thing to do.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling. “The polite thing to do is not to come into a stranger’s house and help yourself to his wine.”

  “No, in certain contexts it is very good manners to do so, particularly if the wine is out where anyone can see, an open invitation. And a friendly glass of wine is not much in repayment for my answering the question you asked at the turning of the year, when you scattered your friend’s ashes over a pile of stones.”

  “You were there? You saw that?”

  “No. Squirrel told me.”

  “Who’s that?” I remembered then: a gray critter head-down, high in a tree, chattering. “Wait—you don’t mean a real squirrel, do you? An animal?”

  She didn’t answer me. Just looked at me with those doe eyes.

  “Look,” I said, “I realize your people might believe—why are you laughing?”

  “You still think I am an Abenaki. I am not. I am not even a Native American. My people were here when the Abenaki arrived. Don’t ask me the tribe, for it is not a tribe. And I could not pronounce our name with these lips.” She gave me a gaze of such placid confidence that I wanted to hug her.

  But I channeled the feeling into irony. “So a squirrel told you I buried a friend and said some words. What else do you hear from your squirrel friend?”

  She looked down at the rug. “That Jeremiah Smith died today, just twenty minutes ago, outside of Northfield. He was walking because he did not have a truck. A car struck him, and he died instantly.”

  “What!”

  “It was a car with license plates a different color from those of Vermont. Squirrel does not see colors the same as you, so I cannot describe it, and of course Squirrel does not read, does not know letters and numbers. But it was a dark car, and it came fast and swerved on purpose to hit the old man.”

  “A squirrel told you this?”

  “Not a squirrel. Squirrel. A squirrel is an individual animal. Squirrel is … like the spirit of all of the individual creatures, the great reality that shapes them and gives them purpose and sees through all their eyes and hears through all their ears.”

  “I hope Squirrel is wrong,” I said. “Because you’ve been here for more than twenty minutes. And if Jeremiah is dead and the police come asking me, and it turns out that he was killed as you say—well, they won’t believe that the spirit of a squirrel tipped you off.”

  “I know,” she said. “They would think that I heard by telephone or radio. But I do not own any electronic devices.”

  “Or they’d think you were involved with the killing,” I said. “That you were in on it.”

  “Believe that if you must,” she said. “But Jeremiah believed in you and trusted you. He knew about me and my people. I am not worried about the police. They could not find me. But let me warn you not to speak to anyone about what I have told you tonight. If you do, I will never return to you again.”

  “And my life would get back to normal,” I said. “How could I face that?”

  “You can answer that,” she said. “I cannot.” Carefully she set her empty wine glass down on the floor, bending over from the waist in a curiously lithe movement. Without glancing back at me, she turned and walked to the door, pushed it open, and stepped through into the black, starless night. Watching her leave, I was struck by how totally female she was, and how hard I’d been trying to ignore it while she’d sat with me in my cabin.

  “Hey,” I said. “Wait. Come back.”

  I opened the door onto darkness. No sound, not even the wind. No crunch of footsteps on crusted snow. She had faded into the night. I finished the last gulp of my wine and stood there, wondering just what the hell had happened, until I started to shiver. Then I went back inside and made sure my cell phone was charged before checking the recently called numbers.

  6

  I pulled up the last number Smith had dialed when he’d had my phone, after his gas tank exploded.

  After two rings, a man’s rough voice said, “Yeah?”

  “Jeremiah Smith there?” I said, keeping my voice casual, as if I were asking for an old friend.

  After a pause, the same voice asked, “Who’s this?”

  “Oakley Tyler. He visited me yesterday. I’m trying to get
in touch with him about something he asked me. Who’s this?”

  “This is Bill—wait a minute, you called me. You don’t know?”

  “Oh yeah, guy with the tow truck, right?”

  He snorted. “Yeah, that’s me.” He paused for a moment, then said in a flat tone, “Smith’s dead.”

  I shivered as a wave of cold moved through my body. “When?”

  “Half hour ago, maybe a little more. I just got off the phone with the chief.”

  “Chief of police?”

  “Yeah. I was apparently the last guy saw him alive. He came in to hear about the damage to his truck. He stayed for dinner here, and then was gonna hitchhike to Montpelier to see his grandson.”

  “Hitchhike?”

  “Lotsa people do. In these parts, anyway.” His voice had a defensive scorn, as if my question had betrayed a flatlander’s ignorant elitism.

  “How did Smith die?”

  “Hit-and-run.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “None they can find, but maybe tomorrow after it’s in the paper somebody will turn up.” A phlegmy sigh seemed to signal Bill Grinder’s decision to stop making me reach for every bit of information with a pair of tweezers. “OK, here’s how it was. He was walking north on Route Twelve, about a mile outside of town, where he was hit. Not long after that, the cops say, another driver saw his body on the side of the road and dialed nine-one-one on their cell. He was dead when they called, though. The driver checked.”

  “How’d the police get a reading on time of death?”