by Tim Poland
“Certainly a time to rally the troops, it seemed,” Keefe said. “Including him.”
Sandy reached for Keefe’s hand and squeezed it.
“You get some rest, honey,” Margie said, “and we’d best get home before those boys burn down the house or something.”
“Oh god, Margie,” Sandy said. “You had to leave the boys alone to come down here for me? I’m so sorry.”
“Nonsense,” Margie said. “They’re fine. Luke is perfectly able to keep an eye on Matthew. Since he took up this bird-watching thing, he’s become quite the little watcher.” Margie’s eyes shot over to J.D., who’d given Luke the field guide. J.D. shrugged, a sheepishly guilty grin on his face. “It’s getting a bit obsessive, actually. Keeps harping on needing to spot that damned woodpecker. What is it again, a pixilated woodpecker or some such?”
“Pileated woodpecker,” J.D. offered, his grin widening.
“I think we can help with that,” Keefe said. “Bring him up to the place sometime. I know a spot where we’ve a good chance to put him onto that elusive bird of his.”
“It’s a date,” Margie said. “But now I need to go pack those boys off to bed, and you need to do the same thing.”
Handshakes and embraces were passed around the group gathered in front of the sheriff’s office. Sandy took J.D. into an especially tight embrace and thanked him again. Even in the dim, damp light under the awning, she could see him blushing.
“I’ll call you,” Margie said as she and J.D. trotted off toward his SUV.
“Come, my dear.” Keefe slid his arm around Sandy’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”
Home. We live up there. I’m with her.
She leaned into Keefe’s side, suddenly more exhausted than she’d ever been, and knew, as they stepped out into the rain, that home, at least that night, would be the bungalow along the headwaters.
MARGIE extracted a cigarette and a plastic disposable lighter from the vinyl snap-pouch where she kept them. Her lips pursed firmly around the filter tip of the cigarette as she clicked the lighter and cupped her hand around it to block the breeze. It flared into a small blue flame on the fourth try. Margie inhaled a deep draft of smoke and held it in her lungs while she tucked the lighter back into the pouch. When she exhaled, the breeze caught the smoke and carried it upstream, away from where the two of them sat on the riverbank.
“Want one?” Margie held the pouch out to Sandy, who declined with a shake of her head. Margie put the pouch into a small day pack on the ground by the rock where they sat, discharged another long plume of smoke through her lips, and turned back to Sandy.
“I know of at least two nurses at the hospital who are pregnant and going on maternity leave soon. One of them, hell, she looks ready to pop any day now.” Margie seemed more concerned about Sandy’s lack of employment than did Sandy herself. Sandy wondered if she was perhaps being too lackadaisical about it. Since the night of her arrest, she’d hardly given it a moment’s thought. “It’d be easier if you had your RN. They don’t take on LPNs that much these days, but I could look into it if you want me to.”
“Thanks,” Sandy said, “but I’ve got enough saved. I’ll be fine for a while yet.” Not that Sandy had ever been obsessively frugal. Her job had provided more than adequately for her modest financial needs. In truth, most of what she needed in the world didn’t present itself with a price tag or bar code. She hadn’t done any actual accounting, but Sandy guessed she could last without a job well into the next year before things started to get tight. “Probably best not to even start looking till after the trial.”
Margie shrugged with resigned agreement.
The summons had been sitting in her mailbox on Willard Road when Sandy left the headwaters to collect her mail three days ago. Her court date wasn’t scheduled until the very end of October.
“Wouldn’t exactly put me in good standing with a new employer to ask for time off to go to jail.”
Margie exhaled and mashed her cigarette in the damp dirt between her feet. “You’re not going to jail. They just couldn’t really do that.”
“Sure they could. I’m guilty. I hit her.”
“Bitch deserved it.”
Sandy grinned and patted Margie on the knee. “Much as I’d like it, you won’t be the judge in my case.”
“If I was, she’d be the one heading to jail. Ought to be against the law to be that much of a bitch.”
Sandy chuckled silently as Margie fished out another cigarette and lit it.
“Seriously,” Margie said. A thread of smoke spun in front of her face before the breeze swept it away. “Not like you’re a real criminal or anything.”
Sandy could no longer be so sure about that as her friend. She’d hit that well-groomed woman. Hit her hard. She felt no regrets and knew that, given the occasion to replay the situation, she’d hit her again, just as deliberately, just as hard. Legally, it was simple—she had struck another person, and you didn’t get to do that without consequences. She was a criminal—a fact of law. She was coming to recognize the undiluted core of what was designated as crime. One desire (to slap the lipstick off that well-groomed woman’s face) trumped an opposing desire (the well-groomed woman’s desire and presumed right not to be slapped). One need fulfilled at the expense of another. Self-interest pursued and gratified without regard to the broader interests of others. Want greater than provision. When Sandy forced it all through this tiny opening, it kept coming up the same. She was a criminal. The nursing-home manager had reduced her beloved Edith Moser to a cipher on a balance sheet, and for that she had hit her. And she’d do so again. But had her angry, violent response been instigated as much by the possibility that someone else dared to have a say over the old woman’s life? The love and wonder she found in Edith, had she wanted it all to herself? And Keefe. She’d done nothing short of invade his sanctuary. We live up there. Yes, he’d said it, but did his remark carry the weight she’d accorded it? What part of the terse sentence did she feed most fervently on, we or there? And what of Vernon? He had killed a man. A fact. By all reasonable accounts of their final episode, he had been coming to kill her, to kill her and Margie both. But just as certainly as he sought to kill her, she had led him into the precise position where the encroaching wall of water would be most deadly. Self-defense, legally speaking. Still, had she just as much desired to erase from this new landscape in which she’d been reborn the burdensome past Vernon dragged behind him? Guilty as charged? Despite what Margie said, she had to wonder.
“What’s the lawyer think?” Margie asked.
“Doesn’t seem all that concerned,” Sandy answered. “Said he plays poker with most of the judges around here, so not to worry much.”
“Nothing like the good-old-boy network,” Margie said. “At least when it’s on your side.”
WHEN Sandy had finally been able to meet with the attorney last week, he hadn’t been much concerned at all with the battery charge. He’d spent the majority of the time talking about Edith Moser.
The attorney’s office was above a furniture-rental store in downtown Sherwood. A deep voice bellowed “Entrez” when Sandy rapped on the translucent pebble glass of the office door. A small outer office was unoccupied, containing a tidy desk, a few chairs, but no person. She passed through it to the inner office, a cluttered, one-room affair, dominated by a large, heavy man with steel-gray hair seated behind a desk stacked with files and papers, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows over beefy forearms, his necktie loosened at his thick throat.
“I’m Sandy Holston. We spoke on the phone,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. Sandy clasped the meaty hand he reached across the desk. “Jackson Stamper. You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up. As you can see, I’m a bit hobbled just now.”
He sat sideways behind his desk, one foot propped on the seat of a straight-backed chair. The foot rested on a cushion, wrapped in tattered bandages and a walking boot. When Sandy had finally contacted him, he’d apolo
gized for the delay in returning her calls, explaining he’d been in the hospital recovering from surgery.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning to a small sofa along the wall, equally covered with files and papers. “Just push that mess out of the way. I’ll get to it sooner or later. My secretary is off this week.”
“What happened?” Sandy nodded at the bandaged foot.
“Oh, nothing. They lopped off three toes.” Jackson Stamper huffed, a wry grin spreading over his jowled face. “Seems I find life’s pleasures far more interesting than my diabetes. Guess I’ll just let them hack away at me bit by bit till there’s nothing left. It won’t be pretty, but I’ll leave with a full belly and a smile on my face.”
“Looks as though you could use a new dressing,” Sandy said.
The attorney waved his hand at his foot as if swatting at a fly. “Enough about me. Let’s get to your business. So, you’re Edith Moser’s heir.”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” Sandy said. “But I was thinking more about the charge of battery just now.”
“Get to that soon enough.” Stamper swatted the air again. “Edith Moser was a true character. Wonderful old gal. I didn’t think she had any family left. Were you related?”
“She was my friend.”
“Like I said, a wonderful old gal. My daddy worked with her at Old Dominion. Shoot, the way he talked about her sometimes, I swear. For years I thought he only married my mama as a last resort because he couldn’t talk Edith Moser into having him. But he never had nothing but praise for her. Tell the truth, I think he carried a torch for her right up till the end. She was my first case, you know, right out of law school. Little problem with the land title to her place out there on the river.”
While Jackson Stamper reminisced about Edith, Sandy recalled the surprising weight of Edith’s body in her arms as she carried her into the stream that last time. She thought about the black plastic urn sitting on her kitchen counter and wondered how long it would yet be until the waters went down enough for her to wade into the lower Ripshin with Edith one more time and feather her ashes over the current in the shadow of the big hemlock that wasn’t there anymore.
SANDY and Margie barely heard it over the booming rush of high water churning through the streambed of the upper Ripshin. A single rifle shot, somewhere in the distance, well over the ridge. The percussive report of the discharge, followed by a faint, rippling echo. To hear the pop of a gun being fired most anywhere in the Ripshin River Valley was hardly an occurrence to remark upon, especially in the autumn, when hunters were getting a jump on the beginning of deer season. Neither woman acknowledged the gunfire with anything more than a momentary and involuntary shift of her eyes in the general direction of the sound. And, still wrapped in the roar of the headwaters, neither woman heard the footsteps of Margie’s eldest son scuffing down the path to their spot on the bank until the boy was only a few steps away from them. He held a thick, green-backed book close to his chest, an index finger laid between the leaves.
“Hey, honey,” Margie said. “Did you find your bird?”
Luke nodded, opened the field guide to the marked page, and handed it to his mother to see. When he pointed to the photograph of the pileated woodpecker, Sandy thought the boy’s fingertip indicated the checkmark, carefully inked into the upper left-hand corner of the photograph, as much as the bird itself.
“Now I’ve seen them all,” he said.
“All of them?” Margie asked, genuine amazement on her face. “You’ve seen all the birds listed in your book?”
Luke smirked and scoffed. “No, mom. Geez. All the tree-clinging birds. Woodpeckers and stuff. Ones that hang on the sides of trees. Well, all the ones that live around here, anyway. Black-backed, three-toed woodpeckers only live in Canada, and I’ve never been to Canada.”
“So do we need to go to Canada now?” Margie said.
“Not yet,” the boy said.
Sandy leaned toward Margie and looked at the blazing color photographs. On each of the six images printed on the open pages, she saw the same checkmark, carefully inscribed into the same corner of each photograph.
“I’m glad you got to see the woodpecker,” Sandy said.
“So I guess Mr. Keefe knew the right spot to take you.” Margie handed the field guide back to her son, who laid it gently on his lap and gazed down at the pictures and checkmarks.
“Uh-hunh. A big old dead tree, way back there.” The boy waved his arm toward the slope rising behind them. “Had to wait there for a long time, but after a while it stuck its head right out of a big hole in the trunk. Lots of waiting in bird-watching.”
Margie grinned and ran her hand over her son’s hair. “So you two explorers had a good time?”
“Okay, I guess. We saw the pileated. Mr. Keefe’s kind of quiet and weird.” Sandy and Margie traded surreptitious glances. “But so am I, so I guess it was okay.”
Margie beamed, leaned over, and kissed her son on the top of the head.
“Mom.” The boy grimaced and pulled away.
“Where is Mr. Keefe?” Sandy asked.
“Said he was going back home.”
“Maybe we should head back, too,” Margie said. She gathered up her pack and she and Sandy rose from their seats.
“It’s going to rain some more,” Luke said. The boy closed his book and drew it close to his chest again.
Sandy took a few steps toward the trail back up to the fire road and turned back. She had always felt a certain indistinct pleasure in watching Margie’s relaxed, easy way with her children.
“Let’s go, honey. It’s been a big day for you and the woodpeckers,” Margie said.
The boy fell in line, in front of his mother and behind Sandy, as the three of them climbed back to the fire road.
“J.D. and your brother come back down yet?” Margie asked.
“Naw, they’re still up there somewhere.”
EARLIER, during the general small talk amongst the entire group as they set off on their way up the fire road in search of the pileated woodpecker, Keefe had been polite enough but remained largely quiet and withdrawn. J.D. had grumbled briefly about another purported sighting of a mountain lion, the investigation of which had revealed that someone’s large yellow Labrador had been snooping around a neighbor’s garbage cans.
“Don’t you know it’s Tommy Akers,” J.D. said, “blabbing about this nonsense to any fool who’ll listen. Last thing I need.”
Sandy shivered at the memory of the long tail she had glimpsed up here the day after Edith’s death. She shot a quick glance at Keefe, but he didn’t return her gaze. J.D.’s complaint about phantom mountain lions appeared to have stirred in him a recollection other than the big cat Sandy may or may not have seen.
“Not to overburden you, son,” Keefe had said, “but I think someone may have been baiting bears up here, too. Couple miles up the road, found a pit. Not my area of expertise, but my guess would be bear baiting.”
“Great,” J.D. had muttered.
Simply the phrase “bear baiting” provided more than ample provocation to enflame the youthful bloodlust of Margie’s younger son. Matthew grew instantly animated and giddy at the prospect of gobs of blood, torn hide, perhaps even a vast pit filled with the rotting carcasses of dead bears. He leapt about frantically, pleading to be taken to the bear-baiting pit. “Oh, please. Please. It’ll be so cool.”
J.D. sighed and reluctantly agreed to take Matthew with him in search of the bear-baiting pit. Sandy smiled, watching the glow spread across Margie’s face as she watched her husband and youngest child trek back to the bungalow, where they would pile into the government SUV for the drive up the fire road.
SANDY, Margie, and Luke arrived back at the bungalow to find Stink still curled in his spot on the sofa. Keefe wasn’t there. His truck sat in the usual spot. None of his fishing gear was gone—with the headwaters as high and forceful as they were, that came as no surprise. Sandy thought, perhaps, the cave, but the high water would ma
ke fording the stream to get there nearly impossible as well.
Luke settled into the armchair and reopened his book to the checked picture of the pileated woodpecker. Margie went into the bathroom, and Sandy rousted her dog. He’d been awakened by their entrance but remained on the sofa, his neck and snout stretched out slightly to take a whiff of the boy sitting near him.
“Come on, you lazy old thing,” Sandy said, roughing up his fur with her hand. “Get up. Go on out there and do your business. You’ve been in here for hours.”
Stink slid slowly from his spot on the sofa, yawned, stretched, gave another perfunctory sniff to the boy, and waddled out the door that Sandy held open for him. She followed the dog into the clearing. She looked across the stream and peered into the shadow of the cave, confirming what she already knew. Keefe was elsewhere.
Margie stepped out the front door as Sandy and Stink came back out of the clearing and up to the porch. Stink paused to let Margie pet him, then walked back inside to continue his interrupted napping. “Sure he couldn’t have gone fishing?” Margie asked.
“Not in this water.”
“Where do you think he went?”
“Don’t know.”
And just then, as their words dissolved in the air, the sound of tires slipping on gravel rose behind them, shortly followed by the green SUV rolling down the driveway and into the clearing. A serenely beaming Matthew sat strapped in the passenger seat beside J.D. Keefe was in the back.
“Oh, there’s our answer,” Margie said.
The two grown men stepped from the vehicle and walked to the porch. The boy brought up the rear, walking more slowly, his hands clutched at the center of his chest, as if he carried something both precious and fragile.
“Thanks for the lift,” Keefe said to J.D. as they mounted the porch. Keefe nodded to Sandy and Margie and passed on into the bungalow. Sandy’s eyes followed Keefe’s passage, then turned back to J.D. “Where was he?” she asked.
“We saw him on the way back,” J.D. said. “He was sitting in that clearing up there with the old cabin chimneys.”
