Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  A floorboard creaked. I jumped, startled.

  “Don’t you need some lights on in here?” Melvin came into my office from the hall.

  I’d been so engrossed, I hadn’t realized it had already grown dark outside. The laptop screen gave the only light in the room.

  “Don’t hit the switch. You’ll blind me.” I fumbled for the chain on the walnut floor lamp beside my desk, a lamp hand-turned by my granddad.

  Melvin walked over and joined me in the pool of light, taking a seat in the armchair beside my desk.

  “Where’s your cell phone? I’ve been calling you most of the afternoon.”

  “Hmm. Plugged into the charger? In the cabin?”

  “And your office answering machine?”

  I turned to the mahogany buffet that served as a credenza behind me. Only after I shifted some of the stacked books and files could I see the message light blinking.

  “From you, I presume?”

  “Several,” he said.

  “Do I need to listen to the messages, or are you going to break the suspense?”

  “I had a client who needed some legal advice this afternoon.” He sounded irritated. “Just trying to steer some business your way.”

  “So, who needed help on Sunday afternoon?” A gentle reminder that I’m not required to be on the clock on Sunday, even if he insisted on working all the time. “Or did you get it taken care of?”

  “I tracked down Lincoln Graham on the golf course. Your buddy, the sheriff, had Lionel Shoal in for questioning. Things got pretty tense. Shoal called me for advice.”

  The lamp apparently didn’t highlight my surprise at Shoal’s name. “Long story, but it’s probably best you couldn’t find me.”

  Given our brief encounter on the mountain, Shoal likely wouldn’t have been excited about having me come to his rescue.

  “Just trying to help get you on your feet.”

  I didn’t respond to the pique in his voice. “Why did he call you? I mean—” I didn’t want to sound rude, but who calls his financial adviser from the sheriff’s office?

  “I was on the board of directors for his company and the only board member in Dacus. He didn’t know who else to call.”

  The light from the floor lamp encircled my desk with a warm glow. Melvin studied my desktop. Only a few papers, a notebook, and my almost empty calendar in view. With the rest of the room in shadow, I couldn’t see the jumble of boxes and disarray in the rest of the room, just the little sanctuary of my desk.

  “You hungry?” His tone said he was offering me an olive branch.

  “Ravenous,” I realized as soon as he asked. “Let’s go exchange our long stories.” He’d been trying to do me a good turn. I’d wait to ask how he got hooked up with Shoal.

  Sunday nights offer sparse pickings in Dacus, unless you want moderately edible pizza. Which lots of people who’d been to Sunday night prayer meetings obviously did. While we waited for a table at the Pizza Wheel, we watched a bunch of ten-year-olds playing video games and spilling energy and gum balls all over the place.

  Once we were seated, I gave Melvin the thumbnail version of the plant rescue efforts and the afternoon’s drama. The description of the mottled, swollen leg wasn’t appetizing, but sharing it with Melvin helped me process just how horrible it was, that I hadn’t exaggerated it in my mind.

  He took a sip of his sweet tea. “No wonder Shoal was rampaging. He didn’t give me the details. Now I’m especially glad he fired me from his board.”

  “Fired you? Melvin. How scandalous.”

  “I’m not the scandal.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “Okay, you can’t leave it there.”

  He toyed with his red plastic tea glass for a moment deciding what he could say without violating any confidences. “Lionel Shoal came here from Phoenix with the idea of setting up a development company to sell limited partnerships in his projects. The initial landowners would finance the development of the property, as an investment interest.”

  What little I knew about limited partnerships came from a textbook and a single law school course on business organizations. The use of limited partnerships had fallen out of favor thanks to some tax shelter abuses in the seventies, but it could still be a useful investment vehicle for the right project.

  “Sounded like an interesting plan,” he said. “I agreed to join his board—an advisory board, really, as he did the setup and got things rolling. He proposed a housing development bordering the national forest land. Rather than a golf course—ridiculous on land that steep—the drawing card was a tax-sheltered investment in lands reserved in conservancy. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. Tax benefits would accrue to the limited partners, the initial investors. They and the later homeowners would enjoy access to the conserved lands and to the national forest for picnicking and hiking.”

  I gave a half nod, half shrug to keep him talking. No lawyer can know everything about the law, and Melvin, the financial whiz, often filled in gaps in my business law knowledge.

  He must have read my puzzled look because he continued. “South Carolina has favorable conservancy laws that shelter against property taxes if land is maintained in its natural state. I’d never seen that employed on a real estate development project, and I was intrigued.”

  “Interesting.” I’d made small gifts to the Chattooga Land Trust, which buys land in the river’s watershed, but I’d never heard of a for-profit conservancy. I didn’t share my ignorance.

  “He also had another draw, though I was skeptical of that one. The land includes an abandoned gold mine. He thought people would enjoy telling their friends they owned part of a gold mine. I thought it sounded dopey and too much of a hazard. Somebody goes poking around in that thing and it collapses, guess who gets sued.”

  “You’ve been hanging around me too long, seeing lawsuits lurking in every hole. So what got you kicked off the board?”

  “I didn’t really get kicked off. I quit.” He paused, weighing his words. “Let’s just say I didn’t agree with some of Shoal’s tactics, and I’m picky about my business associates.”

  “That’s where they found the body today, in the gold mine. Reckon that’s what happened? It collapsed on him?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.” Melvin looked surprised. Lionel obviously hadn’t explained what prompted his visit with L.J.

  Except for the swollen leg, the body had been out of sight in the dark slash in the hillside, so I hadn’t been able to see much except the jumble of rocks surrounding the opening. Maybe a rock had fallen and hit him on the head.

  “If it was an accident,” I said, “why did L.J. haul Shoal into town to grill him?”

  “Don’t ask me. She’s your buddy.”

  L.J. and I have that loaded relationship that can only exist under the weight of childhood rivalries and playground battles—the kind of memory-bound relationship you don’t develop unless you know people over the changing of decades. In other words, L.J. and I had baggage. We certainly weren’t buddies and never had been.

  “Speaking of our erstwhile men in khaki. . .” Melvin nodded toward the door. I turned to see Rudy Mellin saunter into the Pizza Wheel.

  “They let you come in out of the cold tonight, huh?” I said as he caught sight of us.

  Rudy gave Melvin an abrupt nod, then ignored him. Once a suspect, always a suspect in Rudy’s book. “That’s what rookies are for, spending the night out in the cold.”

  I thought about some kid propped up on a rock out-cropping all night, keeping watch in the dark, alone.

  “Hope you had two rookies. That’d be a spooky place to spend the night.”

  “Just one.” Rudy looked down at me with a grin. “Little chicken’ll likely huddle in his patrol car, where he can’t see the scene he’s supposed to protect and run out of gas trying to keep warm. I can tell you, if I have to haul a can of gasoline up there tomorrow morning, we’re going to be short one rookie.”

  He cocked his head. His tone loade
d with implication, he said, “I’ll let you two get back to your dinner. I’m gonna go over here and bite into half a hog. I missed—”

  The cell phone on his belt buzzed. With the ease of much practice, he pulled it out and turned away, muttering into the phone hidden in his beefy hand. I like somebody who doesn’t include me in his phone calls.

  After a quick conversation, he snapped his phone shut and turned back to us, his mouth slightly agape. “You won’t believe this. Both the real estate office and the model home up near that gahdam mine just blew sky-high.”

  “What?” Melvin and I reacted in unison.

  “Neil said it sounded like an atom bomb. Just lit up the sky. Gotta get up there. Shit. I’m starvin’.”

  “Get them to fix you a sandwich, Rudy. You know you’ll be out there all night.” I sounded like my mother.

  Nobody has to urge Rudy to eat twice. He flagged down a waitress and headed to the register to pay. I really did feel sorry for him. I get horrible headaches when I don’t eat.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, as much to myself as to Melvin.

  The two of us sat for a moment lost in our own imaginings. I’d planned to go up to the cabin to spend the night. The real estate office could be on my way home—if I added a twenty-minute detour to my twenty-minute drive home.

  “You’re going up there, aren’t you?” Melvin said.

  His gray-blue eyes studied me, and he allowed me a bemused grin. Melvin and I hadn’t known each other but a few months, but I’ve learned he has an uncanny mind-reading ability.

  “Want to come with me?” I asked.

  9

  Sunday Night

  At my invitation to drive up the mountain to the explosion site, Melvin hesitated only a moment wrestling between dignity, maturity, and the nine-year-old’s sense of adventure that lurks in every adult male.

  “Long way for you to bring me back,” he said.

  “That’s okay. You’re there to provide a grown-up explanation for our presence.”

  “We were in the neighborhood and just decided to stop by?”

  “That’ll work.”

  We paid—separate checks after a short battle—but Melvin won the battle over who would drive. He thinks I drive too fast. He proceeded to poke around the curves in his Jeep Cherokee like Aunt Letha’s Rottweiler on a stroll around the neighborhood.

  When we got to the turnoff marked by the Golden Cove model home sign, we had no choice but to keep driving. Trucks and cars were parked thick along the side of the narrow two-lane highway, some with official markings, most of them the nondescript vehicles of looky-loos like us. Melvin passed twenty or so cars before he could park on the narrow grassy strip along the roadside. We walked back to the Golden Cove road.

  A few feet down the gravel road, the police had established a perimeter with yellow crime scene tape more than a football field’s distance from what had been the office. The cute little cottage with its shutters and flower boxes was splintered rubble, as though some little girl’s brother had stepped on her dollhouse.

  Spotlights from the two fire trucks and the police cars lit up the area like a shadowy black-and-white photo blurred by distance. On the hill, the model home was still standing, but it had sharper, more awkward edges than when I’d seen it yesterday morning. The roof canted over the porch. The side windows were ragged black holes.

  The air carried faint whiffs, but not the smell from a fire. This was a dusty smell. The firefighters stood inside the perimeter tape. With their coats hanging open and their helmets off, they were nothing more than casual spectators, like the rest of us.

  On our side of the yellow tape, mostly guys crowded along the gravel road, all staring, talking, shuffling aimlessly.

  The scene was surreal, hard to grasp. As my eyes adjusted to the sharp light and deep shadows, I noticed a second line of crime scene tape had corralled the idle firefighters and some paramedics and sheriff’s deputies away from the active scene investigation. No need to have the idly curious messing up evidence, even if they were wearing official uniforms.

  The tape lines disappeared into the trees past the huge glass and shingle house on the hill. In the woods far up the hill, I saw movement. An officer was stationed on the back side of what remained of the model home. Guess they wanted to make sure nobody snuck up the far side of the mountain to contaminate the scene. Like somebody was going to climb miles straight up through dense forest.

  Though this looked like the aftermath of a tornado, this was no act of nature. I’d seen an old furniture plant immediately after a gas explosion, one caused by arson. A huge fire had raged afterward. This was different, unusual enough to merit standing around contemplating it on a chill March night.

  “Avery.” Noah Lakefield appeared at my elbow, a bit out of breath. “What happened? Any idea?”

  He wore a toboggan hat pulled almost to his eye-brows and a much-worn down jacket. Melvin, standing on the other side of him, turned to study the newcomer in that unnerving way he has. I introduced them. Noah’s nod was polite, but he turned quickly back to me, the fount of no knowledge.

  “You been here long? What do you know? The cops said anything?”

  I shook my head. “We just got here. What you see is all we know.” I didn’t tell him about the call Rudy Mellin had received at the Pizza Wheel, labeling this an explosion. It wasn’t much news and it wasn’t mine to tell.

  Melvin stood with his hands deep in his cashmere overcoat pockets and watched the scene, leaving Noah and his questions to me.

  “Avery, which of those guys over the line there would most likely talk to me?” Noah nodded across the crime scene tape.

  Two young deputies stood inside the first tape, facing the crowd, keeping gruesomely curious civilians at bay with stern, unamused stares. They also served as gatekeepers into the limited sanctum between the two tapes, the area reserved for officials who had no official reason for being on the scene. A Dacus city cop came up and chatted with one of the deputies, who held the tape up and let him join the crowd of officers and other semiofficial attendees who needed to feel important inside the first yellow tape.

  “I don’t know, Noah.” In scanning the official-looking folks, I spotted Rudy. For some reason, I didn’t sic Noah on him. Rudy certainly knew how to handle reporters, but he’d already had quite a day. Even Rudy hadn’t made it inside the second tape, so he probably didn’t know much more than we did.

  “Ask those guys guarding the line if there’s a spokesman.” There probably wasn’t one, but they might have some tidbits to offer, if he asked nice. The cops were kids. They’d love the attention.

  Noah hesitated. He’d hoped I could offer a better inside track. When I didn’t, he stepped over to the nearest protector of the peace and was back almost immediately.

  “They’ve called in the ATF. No official—or unofficial—comments until after the feds arrive.”

  “ATF, huh.” I looked first at Noah, then at Melvin, who seemed intent on not joining in our conversation.

  Even Melvin’s concentration was broken by a sharp, loud voice.

  “Melvin Bertram! Finally, somebody who can tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  Lionel Shoal, unfazed by his afternoon with L.J. Peters.

  “My gahdam business is destroyed, and I can’t get one of these stupid hicks to talk to me. They act like mouth-breathing morons.”

  I felt spines all around us stiffen, and eyes cut toward Shoal. Not heads, just eyes. Shoal seemed un-aware that he was surrounded by hick morons. Did this guy really not have a clue?

  Melvin murmured quietly to him about the ATF, probably wanting to send a subtle message that he needed to quiet down.

  “This is a royal effin’ joke.” Shoa L.J abbed his fist at nothing, paced a half step and spun in frustration, anger on a short leash. “I got to find one of these morons that can tell me something, gahdammit.”

  He stomped off toward the nearest fresh-faced deputy, who’d heard most o
f the exchange.

  Good luck, Lionel.

  “That guy’s got some anger-control issues,” I said.

  Melvin agreed with a curt nod. “Ready to go?”

  “Yep. Least we can say we attended this event.”

  “No postcards to show for it, though.”

  Noah had picked the wrong time to disappear into the crowd. Shoal’s lack of control could be a reporter’s dream. My feet were numb and tired. I’d forgotten to bring my earmuffs, so I was glad to climb into the heated seat in Melvin’s Jeep.

  “So, this Noah works for your dad?”

  I snorted. I’d have to start calling him Clark Kent—there when things started, then gone in a blink. “I’m not sure he even knows what Noah was hired to do.”

  “Having a go-get-’em reporter in Dacus, that’ll be news.”

  “Yeah. I can’t quite figure him out. He seems a bit too. . . I don’t know.”

  “Out of place?”

  “Overqualified. This can’t be his dream job. But he apparently loves the outdoors. Drives around with a canoe on top of his car all the time, like he might need to use it at a moment’s notice.”

  “Waiting for God to break his promise and flood us out again?”

  “Who knows.” I couldn’t read Melvin’s face, but something in his tone hinted that he’d taken a dislike to the Dacus Clarion’s new ace reporter. I’d leave that topic alone for the time being.

  When we got back to the office, I climbed into my car. It was well after midnight and too late to wake up Mom and Dad, so I took the direct route to Luna Lake, not the least tempted to take the long way around by Golden Cove.

  10

  Monday Morning

  Despite my late night and black-and-white dreams filled with a sense of anxious waiting, I woke early Monday thinking about Maggy Avinger and her angel. My subconscious had hatched a plan, or at least a likely path.

  I sailed down from the mountain cabin, trusting all the junior deputies were sleeping in after their late night at Golden Cove.