Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  “Fungus.”

  He laughed. “None growing in here. Come on into the living room and let’s talk like civilized people.”

  He sat in the chair, I took the sofa. “I know you were up to something with Eva,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “And you shot her,” I said. “I thought it was Darryl, but I was wrong. Why didn’t you finish me off? Did you think I was dying already and there was no need for further effort? Or that if I thought it was Darryl that would get you off the hook?”

  He shook his head and sighed. “You’ve lost me. I’m going to put on a pot of tea.” I started to get up, but he motioned me back. “Your shoulder must bother you. I’ll bring it in here.”

  While he tinkered in the kitchen I counted books. He had seventeen on his shelf dealing with mycology, the branch of biology that deals with fungi.

  “Here’s our tea,” he said as he returned with a tray bearing two steaming mugs and three small brown bottles, each with a hand-lettered label. He picked up one and shook it, showing me that it contained a powder. “Fungus,” he said. “OK, this fungus is famous in Chinese medicine. It’s Cordyceps, and it lives on the cocooned larvae of moths and cicadas. It used to be horrendously expensive, but a few years ago scientists found a way to grow the fungus in a culture.” He opened the bottle and tilted about half a teaspoonful of the powder into the cups.

  He picked up a second bottle. “This one isn’t a fungus but the root of a plant. Siberian Ginseng, or Eleutherococcus. Cordyceps is the ultimate Chinese tonic, Eleutherococcus the ultimate Russian one. You’ll find the effects gentle but stimulating.”

  “You were in Eva’s car when you killed Jeremiah,” I said.

  “He wasn’t really my grandfather,” Jerry said, stirring his tea. “I was adopted.”

  “You put the flare in his truck and shot at him?”

  “That was Bill Grinder.” Jerry smiled. “His phone in the shop call-forwards to his cell phone. Jeremiah never even considered that it could have been him.”

  “And Grinder shot at me in the cabin when Eva came to get those files.”

  “That was Eva’s idea. She wanted to scope your place out and find out what you knew.”

  “What happened? How did Lauser get involved?”

  “Bad luck. Benson saw me returning Eva’s car. Lauser did work for them. He was supposed to scare me away from Eva, that’s all.” He grunted in soft laughter. “Benson and Lauser thought I was sleeping with her. They were wrong. I was doing business with her.” His voice got louder. “Lauser was an idiot. He planned to go to the USDA about the mycorrhizae. Benson was an idiot, too. He was running scared and wanted to get his company away from GMOs. I told him I could fix it.”

  “You developed the pine fungus,” I said.

  “I did,” he said softly. “It was part of my PhD dissertation, actually.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Once I get it right, I can patent it and sell it for millions.”

  “Except it kills trees.”

  He glared at me. “The next iteration won’t! It’s a matter of fine-tuning. Benson financed my research, but he cut himself off from me. Whatever. I don’t need his company. I’ll sell the next patent for fifty million and Benson’s company will go down the tubes.”

  “And I can’t prove any of it.”

  “But it’s good to know your guesses were right.” He got up. “I’ll be right back.”

  He went through the bedroom, into the bathroom, and I heard him urinating. I looked at the two mugs.

  Don’t interfere.

  But I did a little fiddling.

  The toilet flushed and I heard Jerry wash his hands. When he came back he said, “Much better.” He sighed. “I spent all morning with the police. Two shootings at your cabin, one tore a chunk out of my grandfather’s ear, got them all full of themselves.” He saw I was holding my mug, and he winked and picked up his own. “Go ahead. You’ll like the taste.”

  I could smell his tea, musty and sweet, with a faint hint of apple. He drank from his mug, first a taste, then throwing back nearly half of it. “Delicious.”

  I drank half the contents of mine, watching his smile as I looked over the rim of my cup.

  We sat like old friends, drinking until both of us had nearly finished.

  Then Jerry laughed. “You switched the mugs.”

  “Did I?”

  He tenderly picked up the third brown bottle. “This is Amanita phalloides. The death cap. One of the deadliest fungi in existence. There is no antidote. It’s also a strong hallucinogen. Before a victim dies, he gets a really wild trip. And this tincture has virtually no taste.”

  He set it down. “Of course, if I was going to poison one of the mugs, I would have poisoned mine. I could have been certain that you’d switch them when I was out of the room. I know you’re clever. I know your instinct.”

  “Like you knew the cleverness and the instincts of your UVM advisor?”

  “He poisoned himself.”

  “You know, Jerry, I don’t believe that,” I said. “I think he saw how crazy you are. I think he knew that letting you play around with genes was like letting a weak-minded twelve-year-old run around with dynamite and matches. I think he had you pretty well pegged.”

  His face had turned scarlet. “Summers was an old fool. He was afraid of nothing, afraid of shadows. He had me pegged? I had him nailed. And he poisoned himself.”

  “As I just poisoned myself by drinking this tea?”

  The tension was ebbing out of him. He grinned, a sick, sly grin, the expression of a rabid fox. “You’re too smart. You’d choose the cup that wasn’t poisoned.” He rubbed his eyes, still grinning. “But you outsmarted yourself, and you’ll be dead in twenty minutes. I put a little bit of wormwood in the cup I gave you—it gives a distinct bitter flavor to the tea, but it’s not at all toxic in such a tiny dose. Your tea was totally safe. And when I drank mine, I tasted the wormwood. You switched the cups, just like I knew you would.”

  His sick smile broadened, the smart little boy so proud that he’d figured out how to kill, so much smarter than anybody else in the world. He was a god, could control life and death, and even if his GMO experiments didn’t work this time, and might even have destroyed every pine tree in the world, they’d work just fine the next time. Stupid humans; we’ll never understand his true brilliance.

  I leaned forward and poured the remainder of my mug into his. Clear water flowed out.

  He blinked as if he were having trouble focusing.

  “I could have switched mugs,” I said slowly and clearly. “Or I could have carried both to the kitchen, poured half of each down the drain, and put the rest together in one mug. And I could have rinsed the other one and filled it with plain tap water.”

  Jerry’s red face was now very pale as he tried to get up, but he was shaking so violently he slipped sideways in the chair. I took my mug to the kitchen, rinsed and dried it, wiped it clean of fingerprints and put it up.

  I think Jerry was trying to tell me something when I passed back through the living room, but whatever it was came out as mindless, gobbling, bubbling noises.

  I let myself out.

  25

  Gina’s friend Elaine had long, wavy chestnut hair and big round wire-rimmed glasses. I guessed her at thirty, plus or minus three years. I liked her voice, a full, rich, modulated contralto, as though she worked in radio or theater, but she was a physician, with a one-woman medical practice in Barre, a nearby town. “God, it’s turned cold again and it’s snowing,” Elaine said. “How long does this last?”

  “It’s February, and it’s Vermont,” Gina told her fondly. “Ask again in three months.”

  We’d kept our dinner date, sitting in a corner table in the Single Pebble, which very well may be the best Chinese restaurant in North America. With a pair of chopsticks I picked off my plate a thinly sliced shitake mushroom and shakily maneuvered it to my mouth.

  “Give me a break,” Elaine was
complaining. “I haven’t been here for a full year yet.” She gave me a professional glance. “You’re having some pain.”

  I was, but didn’t think it showed. “It’s not all that bad.”

  Then Gina’s cell phone went off, a Beethoven melody. She made a face, answered it, covered her free ear with her hand and murmured a few words. Her eyes grew wide and then she said, “Excuse me.” She headed to the restrooms, away from the murmur of table conversation, with one palm still pressed against an ear.

  “I hate those goddam things,” Elaine said.

  “All the inconveniences of home,” I agreed.

  Elaine took a delicate bite of food and gave me a speculative look. “So. Gina says you’re a detective.”

  “Retired,” I said. “Temporarily.”

  “Temporarily?”

  “I’m thinking of starting my own agency. A small one.” The mock eel was really delicious. I trapped another mushroom with my chopsticks.

  “Isn’t that—forgive me—an occupation that’s kind of dangerous?”

  “I don’t think of it that way,” I told her. “In school I was always the kid who tried to break up the fights. I never liked seeing bullies gang up on a little guy. I guess I haven’t changed much.”

  “We’re on a pretty big playground now,” she said. “A lot of bullies out there. Sometimes you get hurt if you interfere.”

  I felt a small sharp pang, not from my wounded shoulder. “Sometimes,” I said quietly, “somebody has to interfere.” I drank some tea. “Somebody who is awake enough to know what’s going on.”

  She looked at me with a faint, puzzled expression. Gina came hurrying back, her face heavy with news. I knew what she would say before she said it: some anonymous computer guy had flooded several different federal agencies with e-mails between Caleb Benson and Jerry Smith. She did say that, and more: Benson had just been taken into custody by federal marshals. The EPA was hurrying to a site in the woods to learn how much decontamination had to be done.

  “I’ve got to go to work,” she said. She punched in a number and said into her phone, “Hi, it’s Gina. Listen, all hell’s breaking loose. Can you meet me in the newsroom? And get Jerry. What? Jesus! Are you sure?”

  She switched off the phone and looked at us with dazed eyes. She whispered, “Jerry Smith is dead. He poisoned himself.”

  Elaine put her hand on Gina’s forearm. “Are you all right?”

  Gina almost jerked at the gentle inquiry. In a taut voice, she said, “Yes. No. I don’t know. I’ve got to get back to the newsroom.”

  “I’ll drive,” Elaine said. She gave me a pleading look.

  “Go ahead. I’ll settle the bill.” I watched the two women walk out of the restaurant.

  It was a lonely drive back to Northfield, along a snow-blurred highway. My shoulder throbbed abominably. Before I got there, a cop pulled me over and cited me for not having taillights. I’d have to get that fixed. Maybe Darryl would do it for me. He was a fair mechanic, and I still had a few of Jeremiah Smith’s dollars. Maybe Darryl could settle down and do something he was halfway good at, maybe he could make something of himself. Marie needed a father. Wanda needed love.

  And that made me think of Jerry, Eva, and Caleb. I brooded over the old triangle of corruption: money, sex, power. The primal stuff of the human condition. I did not look forward to spending the night alone in my cabin. It was haunted by too many memories, too much death. I knew with a certainty that I would lie there sleepless unless I drank myself into a stupor. I did not want to drink.

  But when I made the turn onto the old logging road, something astonishing happened. At first it was just puffs and drifts of snow chasing each other through the headlight beams, traveling diagonally across my path, right to left. Sitting in the Jeep, I paused, like Frost’s enchanted sled traveler, to watch the woods fill up with snow. And then in utter silence the first one emerged from the forest. And then another and another. And before my eyes a herd of a hundred, five hundred deer, crossed before me, many pausing and looking at me with gentle eyes. There couldn’t be that many deer in Vermont, I thought.

  And I somehow knew that if I climbed out of the Jeep they would all vanish and become a trick of the light, a secret of the night, no more than drifting wisps of snow. And in the morning light I would find no tracks, not a single one.

  Something huge and dark brought up the end of the long procession, too far beyond the headlights’ reach for me to see the Grandfather Bear shape.

  I switched off the lights and sat in the Jeep for a few minutes more, feeling that I had been given a vision, a blessing, and perhaps even unearned forgiveness. Then I got out and headed uphill to the cabin.

  I knew now that I’d be able to sleep.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to David Heron of the USDA, Kirk Waterstripe and Charles Redon of Soil Foodweb Inc., Brian Halweil of Worldwatch Institute, and in particular Dr. Norman C. Ell-strand of the University of Texas for help and information on everything from genetics to mycorrhizae.

  And to Dr. Elaine Ingham and Dr. Michael Holmes for discovering, back in the 1990s, the plan to release the genetically modified Klebsiella plant-root bacteria that almost killed the world—yes, it’s a true story—and for Dr. Ingham coming on my radio show to share it. We ignore their warnings at great peril to ourselves. For more information, visit http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/GEessays/Klebsiellaplanticola.html or just run a web search on their names.

  I was informed and inspired by listening to brilliant Abenaki storytelling by Joe Bruchac, and later by his son, Jesse Bruchac, on several public occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I lived in Northfield and Montpelier, Vermont, and by the wonderful people at the Abenaki Center in Swanton. Any errors in this book about the Abenaki are entirely my responsibility, and I hope I have represented them respectfully. And it’s worth noting that shortly after the point in time at which the book is set, in 2006, Vermont officially recognized the Abenaki.

  Thanks to Hal and Shelley Cohen for sharing that decade’s Vermont journey with us.

  Thanks to Carol Bedrosian and Little Bear, Ari Ma’ayan, Kurt Kaltreider, and Lewis Mehl-Madrona, for all they’ve each taught me about Native American culture. And to authors Rupert Ross and the late Peter Farb for their books Dancing with a Ghost and Man’s Rise to Civilization, respectively (among many others; these are exceptional).

  Special thanks to Rob Kall for being such a good friend and sounding board on this book, and to Bill Gladstone for his brilliant work as my agent.

  To Brad Strickland, one of the finest writers in print today, for decades of friendship and one of the finest editing jobs any author could ever ask for. Brad helped me shape this book into its current form.

  To Anita Miller, Devon Freeny, and Kristi Gibson for finding all the nooks and crannies, plot points, and details that I’d overlooked and made no sense. To Mary Kravenas and Caitlin Eck for their work marketing and publicizing this book. And to Cynthia Sherry, Anita and Jordan Miller, and Academy Chicago Publishers and Chicago Review Press for bringing it into print.

  THOM HARTMANN is a former psychotherapist, progressive radio talkshow host and liberal commentator, and bestselling nonfiction author. He is an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics, and is the originator of the hunter vs. farmer theory on ADHD. He lives with his wife, Louise, in Washington, DC.

  Cover Design: Joan Sommers Design

  Cover Photo: John Richburg

  Author Photo: Louise Hartmann

  Printed in the United States of America

 

 

 
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