His father looked at him. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘Know what?’ he asked, suddenly feeling a sickening dread.
‘The parson died,’ his father said, for the first time saying the quaint title without ironic intonation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, though he wasn’t. ‘I didn’t know. Is Cassie all right?’
His father looked pained, and then he told Michael the news, confirmed later that night when Michael at last read Cassie’s letters. She had left town, and gone to Texas with Ronald Duverson. They were married now.
Five
1
HE WAS ONLINE at home, working at the dining room table, trying to download an ancient simulation package that would let him calculate the impact of increased water flow on the downstream side of the bridge. Increased water flow? Christ, he thought, if the dam gave way you would be talking about a flood, a wall of water whooshing down the Still.
He worked for some time, entering the measurements he’d taken at the bridge of the cracks in its three supporting piers and making various educated guesses about the rate of water flow. It was clear from his calculations that the upstream side of the bridge, through a combination of high water level and the strength of the current, needed replacing. And that was happening. But what he now saw clearly – thanks to a case study of an even smaller river in Idaho – was that any significant increase in flow (say twenty per cent) would make both the downstream side of the abutments and the central piers vulnerable, and thus put the whole structure in danger. Increased rainfall might not be enough, but the contents of a town lake less than ten miles away should do the trick nicely. The Fennville dam had better not give out.
He called Gary’s yet again, and still got no answer. It was four days since he had run out of the house, and Michael was worried – this was now more than a weekend trip away to see some friends. He got into his rental car and drove down to Cedar Street, but there was no car in front of Gary’s, nothing to indicate that he had come back, even momentarily.
He wondered whether to call Maguire and tell him that he still didn’t know where Gary was, but he could see nothing but downside in doing this – for his brother, and possibly (though he couldn’t have specified why) for himself. Yet since there seemed no point waiting for the police to come to him in search of his brother, he decided to go and talk to Jimmy Olds.
In the past the police station had consisted of a room in the Town Hall, a small, windowless room in the back of the building with a yellow linoleum floor, a desk, and a chair on which Jerry Dawson would hang his gun between patrols, sit with his feet up on the desk, and smoke cigarettes – Winstons, invariably purchased from the drugstore.
Now a new station had been built across Main Street with a firehouse-style garage in front, which held two gleaming squad cars. Michael walked past them into a suite of offices in the back. He found Jimmy Olds in one of them, sitting at a PC, filling out a form.
‘Jesus,’ he said with disgust as Michael came in. ‘George Coffin’s dog bit a man on Beach Road. Jerry Dawson would have shot the dog, or maybe just shot the man, but I have to fill out a form.’
Michael sat down. On the wall behind Jimmy hung a clipboard holding a stack of Wanted posters and a roster sheet showing the schedule for the week. Out the back window he could see an old classmate named Emma Taggett pinning sheets up to dry on her clothes line.
‘There,’ said Jimmy, as he banged
‘Is there any?’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘We were trying to narrow down the possible suspects. You know, close down some categories. The problem is we’re having trouble keeping any categories open. We’ve gone through students, and friends, and neighbours, and haven’t turned up anything.’
Michael said, ‘I still wonder if it couldn’t have been some vagrant, just passing through town. But Maguire insists it was planned, so it must have been someone my father knew.’
‘He keeps looking for a connection between your father and the Marines, but there isn’t a lot to go on. At least not that makes sense to me. I can’t believe your daddy had much time for the likes of Raleigh Somerset.’
‘Of course not. It’s all because of Gary. You must have heard his prints were on the bat.’
Jimmy scratched his cheek then unwrapped a stick of gum and put it in his mouth. ‘I wouldn’t worry very much about it. I explained to Maguire that your brother might not have your brains and yes, he’s had his moments, but there’s nothing really bad about him.’
‘Did Maguire accept this?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jimmy, ‘in as much as he accepts anything a dumb-ass small town cop like me has to say. Don’t be fooled by Maguire; I know him from before. He’s real nice and acts all friendly, but he’s an ambitious son of a bitch and ruthless on account of it. If you ask me, he’s got his own agenda, which has more to do with rolling up these local Marines than—’ And he stopped, in awkward recognition of what he had been about to say.
‘Finding my father’s killer,’ said Michael to finish Jimmy’s sentence, waving a hand dismissively to show he had not taken offence.
‘Anyway,’ said Jimmy, ‘Maguire will talk to your brother again, I have no doubt, but then that’ll be it.’
Michael took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Jimmy, I can’t find Gary.’ Jimmy looked at him with surprise. ‘And if I can’t locate him pretty damn quick, I bet Maguire will issue a warrant for his arrest.’
Jimmy’s expression was now impassive, but his jaw was working hard on his gum. ‘So what do you want from me?’
‘I want a little time to look for him before Maguire goes public with anything. My brother left a note for his friend Bubba. I thought I’d start with him. You know where he lives? And does he have a last name?’
‘Braithwaite. Bubba Braithwaite. He lives way out on M-nineteen, past old thirty-one. Hang on a minute.’ He got up and went over to a bookshelf behind Michael. It held stacks of reports, a volume of the township’s ordinances, some ringbinder manuals, and a phone book. ‘Here he is,’ he said, opening the phone book and locating the right page. ‘Three-four-three Meisenheimer. M-nineteen turns into it. He’s on the left side of the road, about two miles past de Goreyands.’
‘I got it. Thanks.’
Michael started to get up but stopped when Jimmy jabbed a finger in his direction. ‘I’ll give you until Monday. If he doesn’t show up by then we’ll start looking ourselves, and letting everybody know we’re looking too. That fair?’
‘More than fair. What are you going to tell Maguire?’
‘As little as possible.’ Jimmy snorted. ‘He won’t hesitate two seconds to hold you if he thinks you’re getting in the way of his investigation. And God help me if he thinks I’ve contributed to it.’
‘I’m not trying to obstruct anything. I just want to find my brother.’
‘Sure,’ said Jimmy, extracting his gum from his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then examining the soft cream-coloured plug. ‘I’m trusting you, Michael, on account of we go way back. And I liked your daddy.’
‘I won’t abuse your trust.’
‘Sure,’ said Jimmy again, reinserting his gum, and beginning to chomp slowly. ‘And if you tell Maguire about this conversation, I’ll deny it. And then he’ll lock your ass in jail. And still come after me.’ His expression said we’re all victims together.
He went home and ate a roast beef sandwich slathered with mustard, then drove out Park Street towards the Back Country. Instead of crossing over onto M-19, however, he turned left, and drove north along old 31, thinking he’d better cover the most obvious ground first. He passed smallholdings and cherry orchards, a maple syrup stand, and went down the deep dip past Ferguson Park, a small picnic area in a stand of paper birch on the east side of the road. His mother would sometimes stop here so they could pick watercress out of the creek that bubbled through this stretch of low land. Climbing agai
n, he looked sharply when the road levelled off, saw the sign, Lashings Depot, and pulled in.
The place was set back about fifty yards from the road. Harold’s house sat in the shade of a patch of maple trees to Michael’s right, but the office shack and the store barn, a vast aluminium affair, were out in the open, with a big turnaround for the trailer trucks that came in to collect the fruit. Behind the barn three deep square pits had been excavated, lined with black polyurethane, then filled almost to the top with brine solution. Here, by the ton, cherries were dumped. Within a week the fruit lost all its colour, ready for the insertion of artificial dye; Gary always said that once you’d seen this method of preparation, you would never eat another maraschino cherry in your life.
Michael found Harold standing in front of the office, staring gloomily at the pits and their bobbing seas of cherries. He was a tall, balding man in his sixties, mild-mannered, as Michael remembered, patient, soft-spoken if a little reserved. But now he seemed cranky.
‘Gary’s brother, right?’ he said, taking off his glasses. He didn’t offer to shake hands. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I was hoping you might have seen my brother.’
Harold looked mildly incredulous. ‘Shoot,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got four tons of cherries sitting out there, with a Mexican kid who don’t speak English and a retard I got from the Labour Exchange. And apples start in two weeks. I wish I had seen your brother so I could give him a piece of my mind.’
‘He said he’d stopped working here. Did something happen?’
‘I spent a lot of time on your brother. I worked him hard, but no harder than I worked myself. I wasn’t ever exactly sentimental about him and neither was my wife, but he had a future here. Why else would I have made him partner?’
‘What happened? Was it after my father’s murder?’
Harold shook his head. ‘It began before then. Otherwise, I might understand it. Everybody was shook up by that murder, so who knows how a son feels?’ He added more gently, ‘Well, I guess you know.’
‘What exactly did Gary do?’
‘It’s more like what he didn’t do. Last fall I ended up doing half the apples myself. He said he was sick – sick for two weeks. Next thing I hear he’s been over at Scotch Haven at some hootenanny with his Michigan Marine friends. Marines. Shit, I got drafted and never went anywhere except Oklahoma, but even I know a real army from this bunch of a-holes.’
‘He doesn’t do any work for you in winter, does he?’
‘There’s nothing much to do. Me and Mary spend three months in Florida, and I don’t even open the shed door until the end of March. Spring’s no big deal – we get ready but the hours aren’t very long. But your brother kept not showing up, or showing up late, or showing up drunk. You can’t have that. And I don’t care what he does on his lunch break but I can do without those friends of his coming by.’
‘Who were they?’
‘He never introduced them, which was fine by me. One tall, thin guy with a kind of crooked mouth.’
Mouth like an asshole. ‘Did he have a tattoo?’
‘Probably. Then another big fat fellow. Dirty.’
‘Bubba something?’
‘Yeah, that’s him. I actually thought I was going to have to break up a fight. Some other guy shows up – I bet you know him, he used to live in Stillriver – and he gets into an argument with this Bubba creature, and soon as you know it the two are squaring up. And your brother’s just standing there, and me as old as I am, I get to go out and say, “Go on, get, before I call the state police”. They didn’t come around after that. I told Gary I just wasn’t having it any more. And then he complained, saying he had rights. That was the last straw. “What do rights have to do with running a business?” I said. “Especially a business you’re supposed to be part of.” And he got huffy and went home early and that, Michael – I remember you now – was the last time I saw your brother.’
‘This other guy, what’s his name?’
Harold took off his cap and scratched the thinning hair on top of his head. ‘That’s what I’m trying to recall. He was a big guy too, but kind of goofy-looking, with eyes that looked wide open. But boy was he mad. I thought he was going to hit me for a minute.’
‘Raleigh. Raleigh Somerset.’
Harold eyed him with surprise. ‘How’d you know that?’
Michael shrugged. ‘Intuition.’
‘Well, you intuitioned right, that’s all I can say.’
There was a small crash and they both looked towards the shed where a Mexican kid driving a forklift looked mortified at the crate of cherries that had slipped sideways off the two thin metal tines. The big wooden box lay on its side as fruit spilled out, rolling like cerise marbles all over the concrete apron in front of the shed. Harold shook his head. ‘I’ll let him clean it up. Teach him to slow down with that thing.’
He paused and looked around him, as if to reassure himself that what he had built here was real. He shook his head wearily. ‘You know, your brother used to talk about you a lot. How you’d got away and done what you wanted to do. So I told him: “If this isn’t enough for you, then go try somewhere else.” But you can’t have it both ways. Or am I missing something?’ he asked Michael with genuine wonder.
Michael drove east and a little south and was soon in flatter, dustier country – there were no orchards here. He was in the poorest part of the county, a pocket where a vast tongue of sand from the lake extended inland for many miles. To the north lay the hardwood forest, which stretched up through Canada; to the south, the rolling orchard land of Sheringham’s; west, the place where sand belonged, the dunes and beaches that attracted tourists; and east – well, that was another county.
He went along Meisenheimer Road, past de Goreyand’s place, a small, neat farmhouse with green shutters shaded by an immense oak, then past acre upon acre of asparagus, by now let to seed, vast hairy plants blowing in the day’s light breeze. He couldn’t find the place. There was no numbered mailbox, no fence, no turn, nothing to show where Bubba lived. He wondered if Jimmy Olds’s estimate of two miles past de Goreyands was wrong, and carefully tracked a good four miles of road past the Belgian’s vast holding.
Finally, in frustration, he stopped at a farmhouse where three large mongrels circled his car and barked until a man came out of the kitchen and walked over to him. When he explained who he was looking for the man gave him a dubious look, but then supplied precise directions. ‘Mind his track,’ he said as Michael turned to go. ‘It’s usually passable this time of year, but with the rain we’ve had you could get stuck. You might want to walk in.’
He found the turn at last, an unmarked single-track road with high grass in the middle crown. It meandered across dry meadow until it climbed a slight rise and moved out of sight of Meisenheimer Road. After a quarter-mile the track began running gradually downhill, into a light copse of pale pin oaks and jack pine. The dry sand of the meadow gave way to softer, moister terrain, then suddenly mud. Before his wheels spun Michael pulled over, crushing dozens of ferns underneath the wheels. He was fairly confident he would be able to turn round.
Even in the shade of the wood stand it was hot, and blue flies circled him as he walked quickly along the track, picking his way around the churned-up mud. His view on either side was blocked by choke cherries lining the track; at a bend, a redheaded woodpecker suddenly flew off high and right, and turning the corner Michael saw a long, brown-and-white trailer ahead of him, sitting high up on concrete foundation blocks. As he approached he heard the deep bass of a stereo. He climbed up a homemade set of wooden steps to the trailer’s front door and knocked on the window pane, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the closed lace curtain. There was no doorbell so he knocked again, but no one came to the door.
He climbed down and walked around one side to see if there was a back door. Behind the trailer, an area roughly the size of a basketball court had been cleared out of the pine woods, which gave a faint eucalyptus
scent to the thick, moist air. At its far end, under the protection of a boarded lean-to, sat a Dodge pickup truck and two motorcycles, a big Harley and a smaller Japanese model. Next to a corner of the trailer there was a barbecue – recently used, Michael concluded from the blackened serving fork sitting on its rack, spattered with congealed grease the colour of skimmed milk.
There was no back door. Michael stood and looked at the vehicles and wondered what to do. Someone was inside; the thump of the bass was even more pronounced here. He stood on tiptoes by one of the back windows and tried to see in, but the height of the trailer was even greater here, as the land sloped gently downhill.
Spying a spare breezeblock, he lugged it over and deposited it carefully on the ground, then climbed up on it to look inside. The room he looked into was dark, and it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust. Two figures were sitting on the sofa against the far side of the room. He saw a handsome face, almost pretty, clean-shaven, darkly tan. It was a young man, Hispanic, with thick black hair parted in the middle and long enough to reach his shoulders. Next to him on the sofa sat Bubba, wearing a vast, old-fashioned man’s undershirt. Despite the thump thump thump of the music, the two were watching television, or possibly a video – Michael could only see the back of the set. As the music stopped between tracks, Bubba slowly lifted an arm, reached over and lightly caressed the hair of the youth next to him.
It was a gesture of such obvious and simple affection that in a different context it would have seemed entirely unsexual – like patting the head of a favourite Labrador, or ruffling the hair of an eight-year-old boy. But the Hispanic boy was not eight years old.
He was spying, Michael realized, there were no two ways about it, and suddenly he felt both prurient and exposed, perched on a breezeblock outside Bubba’s trailer. He got down gingerly but quickly and walked as quietly as possible round to the front of the trailer, wondering what on earth to do next. Did that mean what it looked like? He wondered. Is that what Gary gets up to? It would not come entirely as a surprise. Michael had worked in so many all-male environments that he knew a macho front – guns and fights and boys’ bravado – could often signal a womanless life. Having had the short end of the stick with their mother, Gary had never had the benefit of any female surrogates; his father had not remarried and there was no Marilyn to take an interest in Michael’s younger brother.
Stillriver Page 25
