An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  CHAPTER 5

  In the deep country, they don’t bother to mark the streets with signs. Gravel roads intersect with other gravel roads. Old horse trails covered with stone led to places no one needed to go anymore, where once important families or businesses used to be, but were now gone. The cornfields on either side of her were so tall with corn, they towered over her car. She took a narrow lane cut through the middle of a field, watching the green leaves slap her windows and mirrors as she drove. She wasn’t even sure it was a road.

  The GPS on Carrie’s phone beeped, announcing it was off-line. She turned down the next dirt road she came to, following the path that seemed the most welltrodden. This was black bear country. Water moccasin country. As untouched as it was in the days when the Shawnee packed their homes and left for Ohio, abandoning the region and leaving nothing of themselves behind.

  Like every lower-middle-class white girl she knew, Carrie grew up hearing she had Indian blood. Her father was Cuban and her mother was pearl white. Except for a baby book with a half-drawn family tree, nobody had bothered writing down the names and dates of birth of any relatives beyond two generations, but her mother would tell anyone who listened they were part Indian. Carrie’s mom left when she was still young, but her father kept up the myth, often reminding Carrie she was a true child of America, and to always eat all her corn because her ancestors had been the ones who taught everyone else how to grow it.

  It was bullshit. When she was twelve years old, she found an old trunk of her mother’s belongings tucked away in the attic. Inside was an old Indian blanket. Carrie stared in wonder as she pulled it from the trunk and carefully peeled it apart, shaking dirt from its folds. The fabric was moldy and frayed, but more precious to her than spun gold, because she knew, she just knew, it had been passed down to her mother from some distant native relative. It was the answer to the mysterious connection to her mother, a connection denied Carrie since the day the woman left.

  She laid it on the attic floor to examine it, running her fingers over the fading Navajo symbols, when she saw the tag at the bottom of the blanket, hidden in the fringe. Made in China. She folded the blanket and stuffed it back into the trunk.

  Her best friend, Molly, had always claimed to be Indian too. Penny, Molly’s mom, said an old family photo somewhere showed one of her great grandmothers dressed in buckskin, her long black hair done up in feathers. She wasn’t sure where the photo went, but she’d seen it, or her mother had seen it, one or the other, she couldn’t recall.

  For all of eleventh grade, Molly wore around her neck a medicine bag, stuffed with things she called relics. A lock of her grandfather’s hair. A bag of weed. A guitar pick from her favorite local band. None of it made sense. Whenever Carrie asked her, Molly said, “It’s part of my religion. I’m Indian.”

  They’d sit in the woods and smoke weed and drink, and then Molly would burn sage and wave it around, chanting. She’d tell Carrie, “I don’t need to know what I’m saying, it’s about the feeling. I’m connected to nature, to the stars, to the universe itself. That’s what being Indian is. Before the white man came, Indians were pure and peaceful, one with the land and guided by the Great Spirit. I’m going to live on a reservation someday, in a place where they still remember what that means. That’s why it’s okay if I smoke weed. I’m allowed to because it’s part of my religion.”

  “Then it’s part of my religion too,” Carrie had said, reaching for the joint. “I’m part Indian.”

  “No you aren’t.”

  “You aren’t either, bitch. Pass it over.”

  Molly closed her eyes and inhaled, touching the medicine bag around her neck, then exhaled slowly. “You have to promise me something,” Molly said. “If I ever die, you have to make sure I have this with me. I’ll need it for my journey into the afterlife.”

  Carrie said that she would make sure of it, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Molly handed the joint to Carrie and started drumming on her thighs with her hands. Carrie took a long drag, coughed, and threw back her head, singing fake Indian words until they both busted up laughing.

  Molly had been dead almost a year now.

  Carrie found the medicine bag in one of her jewelry boxes. She cut off a lock of her own hair and then cut off a piece of Molly’s daughter Nubs’s hair and stuffed them both inside it. At the funeral, she’d tucked the medicine bag into Molly’s stiff hand and wept so hard people came up from their seats to keep her from collapsing.

  * * *

  Carrie stopped her car at the next intersecting road, if that’s what it was, instead of just a flattened path run over so many times it had killed everything but the dirt. If it rained, she was never getting out of there. The dirt would turn to quicksand and sink her car up to the bumpers of the unmarked Ford Crown Victoria. People out in these parts drive trucks and Jeeps for a reason, she thought. The closest thing the county had were a few SUVs, and she was too low on the totem pole for one of those. The newest member of any police organization is always given the shittiest equipment, with all the good stuff going to the senior people. The kicker is, the FNGs get stuck with all the work.

  Carrie had been the Fucking New Guy her entire career. Five years in patrol at Coyote Township, but she was the last one hired, so she was the Fucking New Guy. Promoted to county detective, an accomplishment nobody had done at such an early age, and to them, she was still just the Fucking New Guy.

  Even if they didn’t see her as the FNG, they saw her as something much worse. The Girl Cop. Hired in Coyote just because Chief Bill Waylon was afraid of getting sued. Protected and coddled because he thought of her like a daughter. Hired by the county because—and the very idea turned her stomach—she was supposed to be sleeping with that walking bag of chauvinistic shit Harv Bender.

  It was always something, she thought. Maybe it always would be. Maybe it was like that all over the world, and always had been. No matter what you did, there was some group of assholes standing off to the side flinging shit at you.

  She made a right turn onto another dirt road. Sooner or later, she was going to find civilization or she was going to drive off the edge of a cliff. At that moment, either one would do.

  * * *

  A large sign posted at the edge of the road read, LISTON-PATTERSON TOWNSHIP, ESTABLISHED 1982. Carrie stepped on the gas, glad to be driving on a real road. It was cracked and patched so many times it looked like a quilt made from different-colored pitch and tar, but it was wide and flat and she didn’t care.

  Abandoned shops and gas stations lined the road on both sides, their windows and doors boarded up, and the prices for the goods they once sold were so old they were comical. Cigarettes, a dollar a pack. Gasoline, seventy-five cents a gallon. The stores still in business had dull neon signs in their windows where the light gave out around the bends in their letters. Guns, beer, tobacco, and lottery tickets, in varying configurations, and several newer-looking shops proclaiming, We Buy Gold!

  The We Buy Gold! shops were franchise operations. They’d popped up throughout the county over the past few years to capitalize on the heroin epidemic. Junkies stole whatever they could get their hands on, wedding rings, earrings, watches, it didn’t matter. They stole it from anyone dumb enough to leave their car or house unlocked. Or gullible enough to believe the junkie had gotten clean and could be trusted. A bag of heroin cost ten dollars in the big cities and got more expensive the farther out you went. But nobody bought heroin by the bag. They bought it by the bundle. Tightly rubber-banded blocks of ten or twelve bags each, which normally cost a hundred bucks.

  Enterprising fiends ripped off enough people to make a quick hundred dollars at the We Buy Gold! shop, raced to the nearest heroin dealer to buy a bundle, shot up what they needed, and came home. They sold half the remaining bags to their fellow fiends for a few dollars extra, and the next day, it all started over again.

  One We Buy Gold! in such a small town meant they were testing out the market. Two meant th
ey’d liked what they found. Any more than that was a clear sign of a robust and thriving heroin problem, and junkies were coming in from all over to sell their stolen shit. Carrie could see people standing inside the gold shops, biting black fingernails as the owner counted out their money. Others waited outside, staring through the front window, waiting for their cut of whatever was sold inside. The gold shop employees always smiled as they handed over money when they were buying six thousand–dollar wedding rings for $140. They always said, “Come again.”

  The area beyond the stores was a wasteland of gravel lots overgrown with weeds that grew up through discarded car wheels and glinted with the shattered glass of broken beer bottles. Narrow roads led past those lots, toward clusters of shanty houses, each one no bigger than the length of Carrie’s car. Behind them a series of trailers sat on concrete slabs. Yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags rippled in the wind. Jack Daniels blankets were draped across some front windows in place of curtains. Rusted charcoal grills and old cars propped up on cinder blocks covered the small patches of land in front of them.

  She saw a sign for the Liston-Patterson police station and pulled into the lot. The station’s front windows were yellowed. The protective covering applied to the windows to keep people from seeing in had cracked and peeled away in large strips, but no one had bothered to scrape them.

  The lot was empty. Carrie draped her gold badge around her neck and walked to the station’s entrance. She knocked lightly, then louder, and waited. She couldn’t see anything past the film covering the windows. No doorbells or phones were mounted to the wall to allow a visitor to contact the dispatcher. She knocked again, then tried the doorknob, and to her surprise, found it unlocked.

  She pulled the door open and called out, standing at the entrance, looking in. Open offices lay to the left, and beyond them a corridor led down to two jail cells. A framed portrait hung on the wall in front of her, the painted image of a smiling police officer in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Beneath the frame was a brass placard reading, “Liston Borough Chief of Police Walter C. Auburn. Killed in the line of duty, February 16th, 1981. Forever our Chief. Forever our Greatest Defender.”

  The sound of shuffling papers drew her toward the corner office. Stacks of papers were everywhere, scattered across old desks and bulky metal filing cabinets. The man inside the office had his back turned to her, showing a few long strands of white hair covering his liver-spotted scalp. He muttered in annoyance as he pulled a metal filing cabinet drawer out and grunted as he shoved the papers stacked inside it back, then stuffed a handful of new ones down in front of them. He had to use both hands to close the thing and was out of breath by the time he turned to see Carrie in the doorway. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Detective Santero. From the DA’s office.”

  “Nobody’s here,” he said, moving to grab another handful of papers. He wore thick, plastic-framed glasses with lenses that magnified his eyes, making him appear like some sort of frog.

  “Can anyone come back?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody tells me anything.”

  He looked through the papers in his hand, then turned away again, searching the faces of the filing cabinets. Old incident reports, Carrie realized. The kind they used to write up before we all had computers. The kind you needed a typewriter to fill out. How quaint.

  The clerk scowled at one of the reports and slapped it with his fingers. “These idiots. I told them they have to put the day and the date, each time.” He crossed the room in front of her, heading out the door toward an adjoining office.

  “You guys always leave the station unlocked like that?” Carrie asked. “I was able to just walk right in here.”

  He tossed the papers onto a desk inside the next office and sat down, pulling the vinyl covering off a large manual typewriter. He leaned forward, squinting as he rolled the incident report into the slot and lined it up with the keys. “What’s today?” he asked, without looking at her.

  “October fifteenth.”

  He counted backward on his fingers, then typed. “How hard is it to remember to put the day and date in? We trust these people to carry guns, but they can’t remember to do a simple thing like that.”

  Carrie waited for him to stop typing and unscroll the paper. “I really need to speak to someone. Can you call one of your cops back for me?”

  “Chief’s out in the woods. So’s the other two. Radios don’t work out there. You’re welcome to go looking for them if you want, but I advise against it.”

  “So there’s no one?”

  “There’s me. But I’m just a clerk. Name’s Lou.”

  Carrie watched him use both hands to force one of the metal filing cabinet drawers open, grunting as he pulled. “Who’s handling your calls for service?”

  Lou furrowed his eyebrows. “If we get any, I’ll let you know.”

  She slid a business card out of the back of her badge holder and laid it on the desk. “Tell your chief he needs to call me when he gets in. I’m here to help with the human remains they found out in the woods.”

  “All right,” he said over his shoulder.

  “You know anything about that, Lou?”

  “Not much,” he said. He grunted as he gripped a stack of reports stuffed inside the cabinet drawer and tried to pull them out. “Hot damn, they wedge these things in here so tight. From what I hear, they found a foot. Now they’re looking for the rest.”

  “Any idea who the foot belonged to?” she asked. She bent down beside him and helped pull the reports free.

  “Probably some little kid went out in the woods and got lost.”

  Carrie let go of the files. “They found a child’s foot?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Did any kids go missing around here recently?”

  “Not for years,” Lou said. He carried the stack over to another filing cabinet and pulled the drawer open. “Long time ago, back in 1981, a little girl named Hope Pugh vanished, never to be seen again. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s who the foot belonged to.”

  “Jesus,” Carrie whispered. “Is there a case file around I can look at, from when she went missing?”

  “No case files that old around here,” Lou said. His thumb flipped through the row of reports in the cabinet, searching their numbers. “Not since the two departments merged back in ‘82.” He cocked his head at the portrait of Walter C. Auburn and said, “Just one of many things that got screwed up in the aftermath of his murder. Damn shame that was. Walt was a great man.”

  Carrie glanced back at the portrait on the wall, the smiling chief, Forever Our Greatest Defender. “I’m sure he was. Hey, do Hope Pugh’s parents still live around here?”

  “Sure, they go way back around these parts,” he said, slamming the filing cabinet shut and going off in search of another. “Why?”

  “I’d like to speak with them. Maybe they remember something that can help.”

  He pushed his thick glasses upward on the bridge of his nose. The wide frog eyes behind them focused on her. “I hope you don’t intend on bothering them. They’re good people.”

  “I told you,” she said, “I’m just here to help.”

  * * *

  She followed the clerk’s directions, turning left to go the opposite way of the police station, into what used to be Patterson Borough. Along the main street stood a long row of well-kept stores, all of them old, but clean. The kind of place where the storekeepers swept the sidewalks in front of their businesses each day. She didn’t see any chain stores or fast-food places. She drove past a few local bars, an ice cream shop, a diner called Ruby’s, a magazine and newspaper store, a compound pharmacy, a hardware store, a coin laundromat, even a vacuum repair store. A humongous John Deere tractor was parked on the street in front of the shops, its fat tires sticking halfway out into the street. The drivers that had to go around it did so without complaining. Carrie chuckled to herself as she steered around it too.

  The houses in that area
were small single homes with porches, and rickety wooden steps going up to them. People sat on swings or rocking chairs, watching her unfamiliar car turn down their street. She counted the addresses until she found the right one, and parked.

  A metal handrail, made of what looked like crudely welded pipes, rose alongside the steps to the Pugh house. It wobbled when she touched it, rust flakes coming off in her palm. She brushed her hand on her pants, smearing them with a dull brown streak. She knocked on the front door, still brushing at her pants. When she looked up, an old woman with sunken eyes stared back at her through the door’s screen.

  The woman wore a high-necked shirt with a blue apron tied in front of it, all of it simple material, except the apron had been decorated with white lace around the edges, their slight unevenness revealing their handmade origins. She opened her mouth to speak, but could not seem to bring any words up.

  “Mrs. Pugh?” Carrie asked.

  The woman’s eyes welled with tears, and she covered her neck with her hand, stroking it, calming herself, as she saw the gold shield draped around Carrie’s neck.

  “I’m Detective Santero with the Vieira County detectives,” Carrie said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Mrs. Pugh said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can I come in? I’d like to talk with you and your husband if he’s around.”

  “What about?” she asked. She leaned forward, looking at the street behind Carrie, and up and down it as far as she could see without opening the door. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, ma’am,” Carrie said, forcing a smile. “I’m here about your daughter.”

  “Who’s there, mother?” a man’s voice boomed from the rear of the house.

  “A girl, says she wants to talk about Hope,” Mrs. Pugh said over her shoulder.

  “I’m a detective, sir,” Carrie called out. “With the DA’s office.” She smiled again at Mrs. Pugh, doing her best to mean it. “Can you let me in, please? I’d hate to keep hollering about your personal business from out here on the porch.”