“You’re the right guy for the job, Sam.”
Gibson knew his situation. He knew he’d taken a job with local investigations to try and save his marriage. He also knew the divorce was final and the marriage over. If Gibbs knew, everyone knew. Including Salazar. And Maggie. “I’ll take it under advisement.” But it wouldn’t really affect his decision.
“Consider us even. And no more Saturday calls.”
“Not today,” Sam said. “I promise.”
Before pulling back onto the road he called the Sheriff.
“Sheriff Goddard.”
“Sheriff. Sam Rivers.”
“Did you hear how we spent our afternoon?”
“I heard. Thanks for covering for me.”
“The least I could do.”
Sam explained about Ashland’s finding and the hybrids. The Sheriff wondered if they could be wild and Sam told him it was unlikely.
“What’s it mean?”
“I don’t know. But while we’re thinking about it can you look up an address?”
Sam gave him the Snow Bank Kennels address.
“I don’t have to look it up. Took it down this afternoon. That’s Angus Moon’s address. He gave it to Svegman when he filled out those reimbursement forms. Everything but the Snow Bank Kennels.”
It was like a lost puzzle piece suddenly found. “Sheriff,” he said. “I think we need to pay Angus Moon a visit.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Sam told him where he was headed.
“Don’t say anything to Angus Moon. After it’s over, meet me at the office. We’ll give Angus Moon time to get home, and then pay him a visit together.”
The remainder of his trip to the cemetery gave him a little time to contemplate current events. Ever since he’d found out about the old man’s death he’d looked forward to the burial. He wanted to greet all of them, what was left of the old man’s Club, the remnants of Williston’s avarice and greed. He wanted to look them in the eye, unable to do so when he was a child. But since his arrival, events had taken on a life of their own. For starters, he was no closer to the identity of [email protected] than he had been back in Yellow Rock. It could have been anyone. And he was no clearer about the reason for the messages. If he was being summoned, who had done it, and for what purpose?
He looked forward to watching the four members stand beside the grave. He suspected they’d be surprised, though by now they all knew he’d returned. They’d object, of course, but they would keep their objections to themselves. Because there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it.
As he covered the distance Sam became preoccupied by more than the identity of canislupustruth and his emails. Or her emails, if it was a woman. He had questions. The old man knew he was being investigated. And if the Sheriff and Jeff Dunlap were correct, the investigation into Pine Grove Estates could put the man away for the rest of his life. Did that prompt Williston Winthrop, a man as tough as boot leather, or Italian leather, given his expensive tastes, to kill himself? The idea was unimaginable, Sam knew.
And hybrids had entered the barn. If Angus owned the hybrids did they stage the kill? Was the Club just trying to get rid of the calves because they didn’t want to care for them? Then get the state to pay for it? It would be like Bill Grebs and Angus Moon, he guessed. And probably Young and Gunderson, too. In one well-planned moment they could rid themselves of the need to care for the calves and ship and sell them. And news of the kill would be proof wolves were getting out of hand. The ranchers’ outrage over this kill would be heard much further than St. Paul. Every rancher in the nation would be pointing to it as evidence wolves needed to be contained and killed. And definitely taken off the Endangered Species List. Except the Club hadn’t anticipated Sam Rivers’s return or his particular expertise. It seemed unthinkable they’d risk staging the kill, but Sam didn’t believe the animals had busted loose, made their way six miles through woods to Winthrop’s farm, entered the barn and went on a rampage.
There were plenty of questions. He was looking forward to posing a few to Angus Moon, after the burial, out at Moon’s place.
The drive was helped. He had time think, to mull, and to let recent events percolate through the cold.
On the way through town he passed the gutted Winthrop building. It was a frozen black hulk. It was an eerie presence in the middle of town. Like a charred skeleton, Sam thought.
As he thought, other questions arose, but the answers seemed to swim at the periphery of his awareness.
He approached the outskirts of Defiance. There was a turnoff for the cemetery. He could see through the gate to the maintenance shed near the front opening. There was a man leaning over the blade end of a backhoe, chipping away frozen clods. Sam glanced at him. Beneath the dangling Nordic earflaps he recognized Ben Saunders, a kid he knew in school. He’d been a heavy drinker. As Sam passed, Ben kept his attention on the backhoe.
The main cemetery road was a long drive bisecting two graveyard knolls. At the base of the knoll a few vehicles were already parked: a police car, Hank Gunderson’s blue pickup, Angus Moon’s junker, a Honda CR-V and a nondescript Chrysler. Sam assumed the CR-V was Hal Young’s. Sam guessed the Chrysler was a clergy car, owned by whomever the Club had paid to say a few words over the grave. Sam pulled up and parked behind the CR-V. He checked his watch and saw it was a quarter to 4:00. The service must have been brief, shorter than expected. That made sense. And Sam preferred it this way, making his entrance with the rest of the Club standing over the grave.
Atop one knoll Williston Winthrop’s grave was still open. Behind it the wilderness bush was an impenetrable weave. The other knoll was opened to an arctic wind that had started to come on when the sun was still off the horizon. It was a fitting backdrop for the old man’s burial.
A plowed path wound through the tombstones that knifed above the snow. At the top of the hill the five figures gathered around his father’s grave. Approaching the site he couldn’t see a casket. Everyone stood around the open grave. Even the hearse had departed.
The old man’s already in the ground. But not covered. Not yet.
The western horizon was fiery red. The wind whipped out of the northwest and in spite of a promontory planted to cut off the breeze, the icy gusts blew small drifts of snow over the frozen crusted surface, like sand over desert dunes.
At the top of the hill the figures bent and tightened against the cold. They looked up to watch Clayton Winthrop make his way there.
When Sam reached the top he came to stand beside them. The old man’s simple wooden casket lay in the bottom of an eight-by-four-by-five-foot rectangular hole. The earth had been chiseled out of the ground. Even burying the son of a bitch was difficult, Sam thought. As it should be.
Grebs, Angus and Gunderson stared at him. Young looked at him and jerked away, as if the winter had blown something into his face, forcing him to squint and turn aside. Then Gunderson focused his attention toward the grave. The pastor nodded to Sam, a question in his eyes.
Grebs and Angus didn’t turn away. They stood with fixed gazes. Sam held them, then stepped within earshot of the pastor and said, “I’m his son.”
The pastor’s eyes squinted his acknowledgment. “Would you like to say anything?” the pastor wondered, thinking it was odd Sam hadn’t attended the service, which had been brief and at which no one spoke.
Sam shook his head no.
Then the pastor started speaking. Sam couldn’t hear everything, but it was bits and pieces of words spoken by a pastor who clearly didn’t know the old man.
“Good man... God-fearing... Kingdom of Heaven... Hell...,” The wind tore the words out of his mouth. Sam guessed it was the preacher’s standard homily, spoken over a man, who as far as Sam knew, had never seen the inside of a church.
Finally, the pastor hurried through the Lord’s Pray
er and it was over. He bent to the frozen pile of dirt, starting to pick up a mitten full of earth when Sam interrupted.
It was all moving too fast. Sam didn’t know what he’d expected, but he was finally at the edge of the old man’s grave, and within minutes the ceremony, the ritual, such as it was, would come to a close. It was the cold whipping across the cemetery rise. It was seeing them all here. He wanted to walk over to Angus and tell him he knew about his hybrids. Somehow he felt cheated.
The others watched Clayton Winthrop move to the head of the grave. The frozen clods dropped from the pastor’s hand.
Then Sam scraped up a pile of frozen earth and held it, thinking over the casket. He wished the old man was alive. Sam wished he had returned while the old man was among them, and given the son of a bitch a taste of the anger he’d known as a boy. But it would have been hollow. It would have made no goddamn difference to Williston Winthrop. He would have laughed at the gesture.
Sam let go the earth and clods fell across the top of the casket like rattling clumps of ice. “May you sleep more contented in death than you ever were in life,” Sam whispered. He tried to summon some small vestige of hope for the old man’s soul. He tried to summon something like forgiveness, but he couldn’t forget everything the old man had done to him. He felt sorry for the bitterness of the old man’s life. That much he’d worked out. People wanted forgiveness. People believed you needed to forgive in order to move on. Forgive and forget. But could a person really forget that kind of pain?
Sam knew he’d moved on. He’d made a life for himself. His life. And though it hadn’t turned out exactly the way he’d wanted, it was his, just the way it was.
About all he could summon for the old man was the faintest particle of pity. And not a whole lot of that.
The others watched Sam’s lips move but could not hear him.
Then a powerful blast of icy air broke them up like bowling pins. Young was the first to peel off and go. He struck down the path, hunched against the wind. Gunderson followed him, bent and angled toward his truck. Both of them left without a glance in Sam’s direction. The pastor turned to leave and then Angus Moon shot an angry glance at Sam, turned and started down the path. Grebs was the only one who decided to have a word. In spite of the cold he stepped a few paces to where Sam was standing at the head of the grave.
“Clayton,” he said, nodding. “Heard you was in town.”
“It’s Sam. Sam Rivers.”
“Yeah,” Grebs said, looking away. “I heard something like that.” Another icy blast brought his breath up short. Then, “I know there was no love lost between you and Williston.”
Sam remained quiet, holding the law man’s squint.
“Tell you the truth, I’m a little surprised to see you.”
“Say what you will about the old man, he was still my father.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“It’s been twenty years.”
“You be stayin‘ on long?”
“Haven’t decided.” Sam wondered if Grebs knew why he had left. If he had, Sam knew, Grebs would probably use it to pressure him to move on. But Grebs only stared at Sam as if he knew, which Sam remembered was one of his interrogation tactics; feigned knowledge of some kind of transgression until the person grew uneasy and confessed.
“We had a little trouble over at your Mom’s place,” he said, staring at Sam.
“Trouble?”
“Someone broke in the other night. Probably the night of that big storm.”
The night Grebs was up to some bedlam of his own, Sam thought, remembering the conversation he’d overheard hunkered down in the roadside ditch. It was an age ago. “From what I remember Mom didn’t have much worth stealing.”
“That’s the peculiar part,” Grebs said. “Just took some of her preserves, far as I can tell.” He was peering at Sam, trying to figure him.
“She put up some mean preserves. Whoever did it had taste, I’ll say that for them.”
“Do you remember where you were that night?”
“On my way here,” Sam said. “I came in the day after the storm. Come to think of it I stopped for gas in Brainerd early that morning, if you need someone to vouch for me. What were you up to that night?”
A shadow passed over the policeman’s face. He looked away. Then he recovered, turned and grinned. “Any business in town?”
“Yup,” Sam said. “But it’s private.” The town cop was starting to annoy him.
“No reason to get your hair up, son. I still have some responsibilities here. People still pay me to know other people’s business.”
“But I’m not one of them.”
“It’s the jurisdiction. Doesn’t matter if you live here or not. If you come into Defiance, I worry about you.”
“What are you worried about?”
Grebs paused. “That some people don’t forget the past. Don’t let it go.”
Sam didn’t smile. He kept his pulse even. “Some things are hard to let go.”
Grebs sighed and looked away. “I suppose,” he said. “No harm in remembering, as long as it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
“Not sure where it’ll lead. Still trying to figure it out.” Grebs didn’t like that answer, which was just fine with Sam Rivers.
The town cop looked at him and managed another steely grin. “Godspeed, then,” he said, and turned and started down the hill. After taking a few steps he looked back and said, “any problems me looking into the back boot of that jeep?”
Sam returned the look, unsmiling but calm. “Got a warrant?”
Grebs’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t stretch your welcome, Clayton,” he said, then turned and kept walking down the narrow path through the graves. On the way down he stopped and peered into Sam’s jeep.
No law against that, Sam thought. At the bottom of the hill Bill Grebs was the last to get into his car.
After everyone left, Sam turned and followed the icy trail to his jeep. When he was finally inside, he turned the key and the engine ground once, then gave out a small wheeze and stopped. He pumped the gas and tried a second time and the engine turned over, like an insolent child not wanting to wake up. He thought he’d better wait a minute, let it warm up.
He looked down at the gravedigger’s truck. Ben Saunders had gotten into his cab to warm himself. Now that he was warm, Sam guessed he would finish the job. Then he watched Ben step out of his truck. The man paused with his door still open. He looked up at the grave, as if in consideration, and then cast a glance toward Sam’s jeep.
Sam watched him through the frosted windshield.
There were so many things that were still unclear.
The mystery of canislupustruth.
The old man’s accident.
People age, Sam knew. They age and change. And Williston had been 62.
His jeep’s heater was blaring and the inside of the cab was starting to warm. He pulled off his mittens, reached over and picked up the post-it pad and the black felt-tipped pen. He searched through his center console for another pen. He didn’t like felt tips. He was left-handed. When his hand moved left to right over his fresh writing, the ink from felt tips rubbed off on the heel of his hand, leaving a black smear. But there were no other pens.
He hadn’t made a list since the night he’d buried Charlie. He could hardly remember it now. Though the pure memory of Charlie made him smile.
Canislupustruth, he wrote. Then underlined it.
The Iron County Gun Club, he wrote beneath it. Then he added (Bill Grebs, Hank Gunderson, Angus Moon, Hal Young).
Storm, he wrote. Hybrids, he added.
He glanced up. In the distance Sam watched Ben’s hand reach into the cab and pull something out. The jeep’s defroster was beginning to clear his windshield. Sam watched the man raise a pint bottle to his lips and drain its trace of
amber liquid. There was only a swallow. The gravedigger’s desultory toss of the bottle punctuated his thirst. He guessed Ben Saunders still had a problem.
Crown Royal, he thought, before he wrote it.
Then he pulled the post-it off the pad and placed it in the center of his steering wheel. There were more questions. He reconsidered the list.
He glanced up again and saw Ben look to the horizon, perhaps calculating the remaining daylight. The western edge of sky was starting to turn crimson. Then the gravedigger got into his truck, started it, turned around, and steered out of the cemetery.
Ben was returning to town to fetch a pint, something to help him through the labor of filling in the grave, Sam guessed. He watched the gravedigger’s truck lights disappear around the cemetery road curve.
Sam stared at the tire tracks in front of him. He noticed Hal Young’s CR-V tracks as they pulled away from the road’s shoulder and blended with the rest of the road. Then Sam reached out with his pen and wrote Cohibas after Crown Royal. The old man’s favorites. He examined the list.
He had seen those tire tracks before. He remembered the night of the storm, crossing Hal Young’s place on his way up Beacon Street to break into his mother’s house. Hal Young had been home that night, he remembered. He’d thought it was Hal Young’s wife, but he remembered hearing Young’s wife had died about a year ago. So it must have been Hal that night, returning to his office home. So who in the hell was out with Angus Moon, attending to the hybrids?
And then it occurred to him, like a jolt from a frayed wire. He reached into his coat pocket, dialed the Sheriff.
“Sheriff Goddard.”
“Dean. Sam Rivers.”
“You already finished?”
“Just about.”
“Come on over.”
“In a bit. Just one question. Did you get a copy of the Coroner’s report?”
“Came in yesterday, I think.” He could hear the Sheriff moving papers around his desk. “What about it?” he asked.
“Just out of curiosity, how was the old man identified?”
“I don’t need the Coroner’s report to tell you that. We all recognized him.”
Wolves Page 28
