Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  He let go of the handle of his pitchfork, bent and hoisted a bushel of potatoes into the truck. After that, his voice never wobbled as he told her how they worked through the rest of that day’s chores – got the body rolled onto a tarp, put a man at each corner and hoisted the tarp onto the sled. Then waited some more for the helicopter to get into position and lower the hoist, which they locked very carefully onto the sled.

  ‘After that it was the flyboys’ problem and we went back to fighting fires. Luckily it was near the end of my shift. I didn’t have much fight left in me by then.’

  Alice thanked him for his clear and comprehensive report. She never shared with him that the only body she’d ever found was her husband’s, already growing cold by the time she got to the ER. She had not done any running or squawking, that day or later. Like with dying, there was just never any time for that.

  By the time Alice drove out over Clarence’s cattle guard she had begun to worry – how was she going to write this story? The two accounts were so at odds. A couple of miles down the gravel road, she found a driveway to turn around in. She went back and asked Clarence, ‘How much do you care about who gets credit for what? OK if I sort of meld the two stories?’

  ‘Oh, heck yes, Miz Adams, don’t worry about that. Just say the crew did this and that, and spell our names right, we’ll be happy. Hey, you want a couple of these nice bakers to take along?’

  ELEVEN

  It was not possible to give good directions in Clark’s Fort, the sheriff often protested to angry visitors when they finally found him. The town had grown up alongside two creeks, each with an early gold strike swarming with hopeful miners. By the time everybody recognized that the showings in Clark’s Fort pans were coming down from the Nelly Belle mine up in Hastings, a fort had been built at the confluence where the two streams joined to form Owl Creek. A blacksmith named Clark, two outfitters, a barber and a merchant selling feed, seed and groceries were doing a brisk trade with incoming gold-hunters, and had no intention of moving.

  Early Clark’s Fort streets were built on top of two-tracks that mostly followed animal trails. They were hardly ever straight, and the people using them put up a shed or a lean-to wherever they needed one. The first ones could be knocked down easily, but as the buildings grew larger and more solid, they became real estate, which made them harder to move.

  Sullivan Street, where the sheriff’s office occupied the ground floor of the McQuade Building, ran east to west near the top of a ridge, and his office faced south. But his front window afforded a view of Wilson’s Drugstore, Carlo’s Pizza, and the First Federal Bank, on the other side of Sullivan Street as it completed its horseshoe turn three blocks below and meandered west to east toward the river.

  Anyway, Tasker said, in the first weeks after the fire, his biggest problem wasn’t the few people who couldn’t find him but the many that could. Even before the fire started he had been busy, with an outbreak of opioid overdoses and a string of break-ins, two troublesome series that he thought were probably related. He was responsible for the evacuations that had to be ordered as the fire advanced, and now that a dead body had been found in the ashes, he was running that investigation as well. The phones in his office rang without a pause.

  Tasker was brown-bagging his lunch rather than face the torrent of questions that would pour over him if he went out to eat at a local restaurant. The bags were filled on weekdays by his compassionate office manager, Hannah Pease, who made two extra sandwiches, with chips and pickles, along with the three she was already making for her kids’ school lunches, and brought them to work with her. Tasker devoured one between phone calls at lunchtime, and took the second one home with him for a late supper. He thanked her several times for keeping his body and soul together, but after a couple of weeks he could feel his soul begging for reassignment to a body with a better social life.

  An overworked widower with no dating history, he saw no way to improve the menu until, during a long phone call about yet another break-in, he found himself staring at the sign on the end of Carlo’s Pizza and got an idea. The sheriff and Carlo Moretti had been friends since they’d helped each other get good marks for ‘plays well with others’ in kindergarten. So after a brief conversation with Carlo, the sheriff put on his long raincoat with the hood up and had a deputy deliver him to the back door of the pizza shop. From the alley, he darted inside and took a seat at the chef’s table in the kitchen, with his back to the ovens.

  Carlo was too busy to stop for lunch that day, but he stepped over to the table occasionally for brief remarks. The two friends, like an old married couple, could speak volumes with a shrug or a grunt. By the time he finished his garden salad, the sheriff’s ‘Traffic back here,’ and eye-roll were answered by Carlo. ‘Mostly construction,’ he said as he went by, carrying two large, thin-crust pizzas with everything.

  As Tasker took delivery of his standard with meatballs and mushrooms, he asked, ‘Building what?’

  Carlo, swigging ice water during a brief sit-down, said, ‘New folks in the drugstore tearing out the soda fountain. Putting in a shipping store.’

  ‘New folks? Jack and Mamie sold out?’

  ‘A month ago,’ Carlo said. ‘Where you been?’

  ‘On the phone,’ Tasker said, pointing uphill to his office.

  ‘Oh, yeah, the fire,’ Carlo said, and ran to sign for a shipment of pepperoni.

  ‘Yeah, the fire,’ the sheriff muttered to himself, ‘plus a dead body nobody wants and a string of home invasions, is all.’ He stood up and shrugged into his coat, then made a check-signing motion to Carlo, who sent back a circled OK with his left thumb and forefinger, while his right hand rang the pickup bell for two thick crusts with extra cheese. For a fat man, Carlo could really move, Tasker thought fondly as he tightened his hood and ran out to the patrol car idling in the alley.

  This latest overdose shouldn’t even be my case, Tasker thought resentfully as he rode back uphill. The victim’s license plate was from Billings, and his backpack held charge slips from Butte. But he had parked his vehicle next to a post-and-rail fence around a highway rest-stop in McGill County, so his oxycodone-fueled coma became Tasker’s problem to solve. The sheriff had no idea where he got the probably legal prescription dose of oxy, or why he had chosen to zone out in the sordid clamor of a highway rest stop when countless acres of glorious wilderness stretched all around him. Maybe if the kid woke up he would ask him.

  He had another, less-fragmented conversation with Carlo at mid-afternoon, to iron out a few details. And for the rest of that long month, while the body from the fire was still unidentified and the number of overdoses around the state kept rising, their arrangement held: at a phone call from the sheriff’s office, a pie went into the oven, a salad was dressed and kept cool and, as soon he could, the sheriff jumped out of a patrol car in the alley, came in the back door and ate at the chef’s table. His server, often the proprietor, left his bill and a white Styrofoam box beside his plate, so as soon as he finished eating, the sheriff signed his tab, put his leftovers in the box and went back to work.

  Sometimes they’d trade a word or two while Tasker waited for his ride. Carlo’s Pizza had been broken into a couple of years earlier, and although the burglars got no cash they did considerable damage getting in. Carlo was outraged, and vowed never to let it happen again. He’d consulted Tasker often that year as he installed heavy security doors with double locks, steel mesh on windows, security cameras over both entrances and hidden in pictures of pizzas on the end walls. He was particularly pleased with how well a camera could be hidden inside a painted olive. ‘The next bandit that hits my place,’ he told Tasker, ‘I will deliver to you tied in a bow.’

  The sheriff had been mildly amused by these fantasies about a crime wave hitting the pizza shop, but it began to seem less unlikely as the tangle of delivery trucks increased between the drugstore and the restaurant.

  ‘FedEx or UPS?’ Tasker asked, watching deliveries pile up outside t
he back door of the drugstore.

  Carlo shook his head. ‘New outfit called Tri-State Shipping, they told me. Faster, cheaper, better … you know.’

  ‘Sure. Fred and Mamie gone to see the world?’

  ‘Mmm. Starting with Iowa.’ The cook and the sheriff looked at each other and shrugged.

  The next day, as Tasker sheltered in his long coat with his back to the open door, Carlo looked over his shoulder and said, ‘There’s the new people now. My trainee’s OK on the counter for a minute. You want to step over and say hello?’

  ‘Sure, I can if you can,’ Tasker said, and they dodged traffic across the alley. At the back door of Wilson’s Drugstore, which was on the corner and had entrances on both Sullivan and Veronica Streets, Carlo said, ‘Harley, my man,’ and shook hands with a burly, handsome man stacking boxes. He had a thick head of auburn hair and a beard to match, all of it flecked with silver. When it’s all white, the sheriff thought, he’ll be the perfect Santa at everybody’s Christmas party.

  The new druggist made so much welcoming racket that for a couple of minutes the sheriff couldn’t make out whether Harley was his first or last name. When that was cleared up and his name confirmed as Harley Dahlgren – he produced a card so the sheriff could spell it right on the arrest warrant, he said, and they all had a good big laugh about that – Dahlgren put his head in the back door of his new establishment and said, ‘Honey?’

  A small, brown-eyed female straightened up from the box she was unpacking, came out and was introduced as Lorraine. It was hard to guess her age; she was small and pale, had nice brown eyes and a dimple when she smiled. She wore a pink fleece vest over a denim dress with embroidered flowers on the collar.

  ‘How nice to meet you,’ she told the sheriff, giving him a smile that made her dimple flash again. ‘We can always use another friend in law enforcement, can’t we, Harley?’

  She spoke so softly that he had to lean toward her to hear her above the truck noise in the alley.

  ‘You bet,’ Harley said. Then explained. ‘Lorraine got kind of spooked by her first week here. There was a forest fire burning all over the mountain the day we moved in – everybody said it was headed our way. Then a couple of nights later, when the fire was out, we had a big fight out here in the alley. There was a lotta cursing and somebody got knocked out. And soon as she got calmed down after that, somebody found a dead body up on the mountain in the ashes from the fire. About then Lorraine started saying, “My goodness, Harley, what kind of a place did we move into?”’

  ‘We did have a bad fire on the mountain,’ Tasker said. ‘But a fight? I guess I missed that. When—?’

  ‘Oh, it was when we were first moving in,’ Harley said. ‘So I guess … Golly, it’s almost a whole month already, isn’t it? Time sure flies when you’re busy. Some of the local heroes were bumping chests in Carlo’s place one night and Carlo told them to take it outside. Don’t get me wrong, I fully endorse your right to do that,’ he told Carlo. ‘I’d have done the exact same thing.’

  The chef rolled his shoulders in a multipurpose shrug and pleated his jowls in an ambiguous smile, but Harley rattled right along. ‘But when the man doing the yelling hit the other one so hard he flew into the side of his truck and got knocked out, I decided to call the police.’

  ‘Which turned out to be unnecessary,’ his wife said.

  ‘Well, he was lying there in the snowbank, bleeding. He’d hit the truck so hard he put a big dent in the fender. I didn’t want to leave him there and I didn’t feel like it was my job to pick him up, but I went inside to make the call, and by the time I got back outside the man had revived, I guess. The truck was still there but he was nowhere to be seen. And by morning the truck was gone too. So we never did hear what the argument was about.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s settled by now,’ the sheriff said. ‘And feel free to call me any time, Mrs Dahlgren, but I won’t be any use to you for fights inside the city limits – you want the police for that. You should have the numbers for police and fire posted by your phone. Do you need me to—’

  ‘I’ve got ’em, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘But while we’re talking, maybe you can tell me which grocery store I ought to use? Carlo says you and him have lived here forever, that you know everybody.’

  ‘Well, now, he’ll get in trouble if he plays any favorites among merchants, Lorraine,’ Harley said, grinning. ‘We have to get that kind of gossip from customers.’

  ‘Which, fortunately, we always have plenty of,’ Tasker said. ‘We are not going to run out of gossip any time soon.’

  Lorraine flashed her dimple again in a big smile, and after that she just watched the sheriff with polite interest, like a well-trained child who’s been told not to speak until spoken to.

  But Harley talked a lot, said how pleased he was by the cordial reception they were getting from the merchants around them on Sullivan Street and praised the nice welcome basket from the Chamber of Commerce. What pleased him most of all was how quickly he’d been able to slot himself into two local singing groups.

  ‘I love music. I’ll sing any kind of harmony, hymns or pop or barbershop,’ he said. ‘I said to Lorraine when we first got here, “Till I find a choir that’s looking for a baritone, I just feel like a motherless child. But now here I am.”’ He swung his arm to encompass the whole hilly neighborhood. ‘I’ve only been in Clark’s Fort a month, and I’m already in the Methodist choir and the Eagles’ men’s chorus. Wonderful.’

  Lorraine nodded beside him, huddled inside her pink vest. A sharp little breeze was snapping the flags at the gas station a block west on Sullivan Street. Lorraine Dahlgren looked kind of delicate, the sheriff thought. She probably should put on a coat with sleeves.

  Carlo asked Harley if he played any sport, and Harley confessed that he had two left feet. ‘Can’t run, can’t throw worth a darn. Any team I ever join, they end up yelling, “Aitch ee double hockey sticks, Dahlgren – watch the ball!”’

  ‘Harley, now,’ his wife said, her fingers over her lips, ‘language.’

  The sheriff’s ride arrived then, and a burst of emotional Italian called Moretti back to his kitchen, so the conclave in the alley ended with waves and nods.

  The sheriff was packing half his lasagna into the Styrofoam box the next day when Carlo stopped by his table to ask, ‘Whaddya think of the new folks, Jimmy?’

  ‘He’s loud and friendly,’ Tasker said. ‘She’s quiet and shy. Probably the perfect couple.’ He buttoned his coat.

  ‘You hit it off with her better than I did,’ Carlo said. ‘She’s still got it in for me a little bit about that fight, I think.’

  ‘Why? You didn’t start it, did you?’

  ‘No. Didn’t finish it, either. I did suggest they take it outside. It was one of those Navarros – they’ve all got a short fuse.’

  ‘Is that the Basque family that gets all steamed up about car bombs in Spain?’

  ‘Yeah. They weren’t fighting with each other that night, though. Frank came charging in here raising hell with some Fancy Dan that was sitting in a booth with his son, Steve. Dooley somebody. I don’t know what Frank was so mad about; they weren’t causing any trouble till Frank got there.’

  ‘Is the guy still around?’

  ‘I heard he changed his name again and left town.’

  ‘Boy, Carlo, you have so much more intrigue down here on this end of Sullivan Street. I’m stuck up there on my phone and I don’t see any of these people.’

  ‘It’s like I tell you, Jimmy. You gotta get out more.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tasker said, ‘I should go dancing every night like you do.’

  Carlo had made some menu changes that week, adding a Greek salad and a burrito. ‘Not exactly Italian but they’re Mediterranean, they blend in,’ Carlo said, and the sheriff liked both and ordered them often. As he put his second burrito into the box, Carlo said, ‘I see Hannah in the drugstore a lot lately. She picking up your prescriptions now?’

  ‘
Hannah’s a quilter,’ Tasker said. ‘You notice her cute little handbag? She made that herself. She’s talking to Lorraine about putting in a table with a good light in one corner, so Hannah’s quilting club could meet there and talk while they sew.’

  ‘What a sweet idea. Did Lorraine like it?’

  ‘Crazy about it. Told Hannah she just can’t get over how friendly everybody is here.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t we be with such a sociable couple?’ Carlo said. ‘So are you about ready to help Lorraine get out of her car?’

  The sheriff clipped the box closed, dropped the napkins on top and slid his supper into the sack. ‘Don’t start, Carlo,’ he said, and hurried out to his ride.

  The question had been code for a tease between them since the time, in fourth grade, when a trusting nine-year-old Jimmy Tasker had rested his shiny new bike against a wall to help a dimpled, smiling little girl climb out of her bumper car at the county fair. He turned back to find that her friends had ridden away with the Kestrel 4000 he’d delivered papers for a full year to earn.

  The sheriff would never say whether his interest in law enforcement started at that time.

  TWELVE

  ‘How about it?’ Undie said Monday morning, under the stairs between math and social studies. ‘Find any dealers?’

  ‘Big nada,’ Naughtie said – whispered, almost. He was jumpy, looking around. ‘Not one. And the guy I asked at the smoke shop almost broke my face for asking. Some kind of a funny rumble going on – nobody wants to talk about anything.’

  ‘I noticed my dad’s been working overtime,’ Undie said. ‘Maybe they made some arrests.’

  ‘Can’t you ask him?’

  ‘Nah. He’ll just recite some uppity rule about confidentiality blah-blah-blah. He loves to put me in my place.’

  ‘Which is where?’ Naughtie said, looking amused.

  ‘Right under his foot. My dad’s a world-class prick.’

  ‘Hey, at least you got one. My mom never tires of telling me how long it’s been since my sperm donor took off for the boonies.’ He was proud of the expression he had invented for his male parent – felt it showed the right mix of learning and contempt.