True Intent

by Michael Stagg

  “You should always know what you're fighting for. And against.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Liselle pointed at the sunroof. “Do you mind? It's beautiful today.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Liselle opened the sunroof and I had to admit that the wind and the sun felt good after being cooped up all morning in the office. We had a little bit of time before we got to Groves State Park, so I said, “Biology, huh?”

  Yes, I am that smooth.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a specialty?”

  Her hair was whipping around her eyes so she pushed it back and said, “Woodland management is the technical term. Basically though, I like working with trees. Always have.”

  “Did you grow up near the woods or in the city?”

  “I’m from a little town down surrounded by the Mark Twain National Forest, just south of St. Louis.”

  I thought. “I don’t know that area. Is that in the Ozarks?”

  She nodded. “It is. The Forest isn’t as big as some of the other national parks but there’s mountains and woods and some of the most beautiful springs you'll ever see.”

  “Did you study down there too?”

  She nodded. “I did. Went to Washington University right there in St. Louis. What about your wife?”

  “Michigan State. She wanted to stay close to home.”

  “Me too. I was the first Vila to come down out of the mountains and go to university. I found I didn't want to go too far away either.”

  I smiled. “You can take the girl out of the woods…”

  Liselle smiled back. “But she won't enjoy it.” She looked out the window.

  “Is that where you live now?”

  “I live in Fredericktown. Far enough away that we’re right there in the Forest but close enough to St. Louis that I can get there when I have to.”

  “Is that where you grew up?”

  “In a smaller place if you can believe it, farther west and farther in.” Her eyes narrowed and she pushed her hair back again. “That's why this invasion matters so much to me.”

  We drove on until I saw the little brown and white sign identifying the turn-off for Groves State Park and I took it. About ten minutes later, after we’d driven north on a quiet road through some hills and trees, we came to the park entrance and wound our way to a parking lot, which was mostly empty since it was a weekday afternoon.

  “How long a walk is it?” Liselle asked as she got out.

  “About a quarter of a mile to the trail. See that lake there?”

  She nodded.

  “That's Glass Lake. There are trails that run all the way around the lake and connect to other lakes and woods for about a seventy square mile area.”

  She shaded her eyes and smiled. “Perfect.”

  So I led her to the trail that went through the Groves.

  On the north side of Glass Lake, there is a grove of trees. That's not unusual for Michigan as most of its lakes are surrounded by woods, at least until cottage-makers clear them. What is unusual is that this particular grove is made up of seven individual types of trees that have grown in clusters, forming seven smaller, distinct groves of trees. There’s White Pine, Sugar Maple, Red Oak, Black Cherry, Quaking Aspen, Eastern Hemlock.

  And Ash.

  Each section of the grove is comprised of trees of only the one type which, in these days of planting and husbandry, wouldn't surprise you—except that the Grove is not the result of the Michigan DNR or Michigan State University’s famous horticulture department. By all accounts, the Grove is natural and unexplainable. Legend has it that when French explorers found Glass Lake about three hundred years ago, the Grove was already there and that, when they learned the language enough to ask, members of the First Nations told them that it had been there as long as they remembered too. A theory popped up now and then about how the soil in each area of the Grove was conducive to that particular tree, but that really didn't explain it. Eventually, the state stopped trying and simply embraced it, made it part of a state park, and built a walking trail so that people could enjoy it.

  At the head of the trail, there was an eight-foot-tall sign letting us know that we were about to enter the Groves Trail, identifying the seven trees, and giving a brief history. Sarah and I had long since stopped reading it but Liselle had never been here, so we paused, and she read, and I turned my face up to enjoy the fall sun. There weren't any other hikers on the trail just then, which was nice because the quiet made it even more enjoyable. Liselle didn't say anything as she finished and walked on. Her eyes were intent as she looked around, as if she were devouring every bit of information the trees could give her.

  I had seen that look before.

  Though her eyes were intense, her pace was relaxed as she took it all in. “The White Pine is first then?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  As we walked into the first layer, pine trees towered almost one hundred and fifty feet above us. The canopy was solid but not overcrowded and we walked easily down the path among the trees.

  “How far north do the trees go?”

  “Almost a mile.”

  Her eyes widened. “Each section?”

  I nodded.

  “Amazing.”

  “It is.”

  She didn't seem inclined to go off the path just then. She simply walked and looked from side to side. Glass Lake was visible through the trees on our left, about a hundred feet away. On the right though, it was pines as far as the eye could see.

  We walked for a time, easily and quiet. Then it changed. There wasn't a hard, straight line, but in the space of no more than fifty steps, the towering white pines gave way to the dark green leaves of sugar maples. Now Liselle did leave the path and she went over and put her hand on one of the trees. These were shorter, closer to one hundred feet, and Liselle shook her head. “This must be beautiful later in the fall.”

  “All orange and yellow. They’re pretty brilliant.”

  “So old,” she said.

  “How many years do you think?”

  Liselle looked up and reached around the trunk with both arms. “They can live over four hundred years. Some of these are close.”

  She patted the tree and we continued to walk along the path. It was darker in this section, as the broad green leaves blocked out more of the light than the pine needles had.

  “I can’t believe no one ever logged this,” she said.

  “Sarah said that the logging was always farther north and the farmers never got this far. Then, by the fifties, no one wanted to see it destroyed.”

  “No, you wouldn't think so.”

  “MSU lead an effort to preserve it and a state park was born.”

  “That was well done.”

  We walked for a time and again the trees changed over the course of about fifty steps. The trees grew shorter again, to maybe seventy-five feet or so, and the smell of cherries and the chirping of birds became pronounced. Now Liselle couldn’t contain herself. She went right over to a tree and ran her hands along the trunk. “Black cherry,” she said. “This really goes on for a mile?”

  “All the way to the Cache River Rapids.”

  “What a sight this must be in the spring.”

  “White flowers everywhere.”

  She smiled, joyful. She moved to a tree with a branch hanging low enough to reach up and grab a handful of the small, dark cherries. “Not quite in season,” she said but she took a bite anyway. She ate four in quick succession, then puckered at the sourness and laughed. “Should have known better,” she said, wiping a little juice from the side of her mouth. “Had to try them, though.”

  I smiled and she wandered a little ways off between the trees, putting one hand out and then the other.

  “Do you have anything like this in Missouri?”

  “Not with so many separate groves. Usually it’s just one.” She shook her head. “I just don’t see how it’s possible.”

  “Sarah told me that
the people of the First Nations said that this was how the trees chose to grow. The French explorers told tales of dryads guarding the Grove and trappers went missing just enough to encourage them.” For some reason, recounting this made me hear Sarah’s voice fairly clearly for a moment. That was getting harder to do. I paused, then said, “She thought it was as good an explanation as modern science had found.”

  “A spirit protecting the trees would solve a lot of problems,” Liselle said, and came back to the path.

  We walked on. The trees were shorter and the leaves farther apart in this section so it was noticeably lighter than in the other two. The sun shone through in one of those picturesque views where you can actually see the rays of light between the trees. We walked through it and I enjoyed the smell of the cherries and the songs of the birds and the rays of light that blinked through to warm my skin after weeks of sitting in a cold antiseptic office surrounded by plastic and metal. And, if I was telling the truth, I enjoyed walking next to someone who was so clearly enthralled by the beauty of the woods. We walked for a time and then, as before, over the course of about fifty steps, it all changed.

  Everything was dead. Every single tree for as far as the eye could see.

  The ash trees.

  The trunks were tall and the branches were bare and the ash trees stretched far into the sky like dirty bones. No leaves blocked the sun so that its rays cast shadows on the bark, making the grooves seem like gashes in the bone. In the space of one hundred more steps, we left the cherry trees behind and were left standing in a silent graveyard.

  Liselle stopped. Her face was horrified, her stance rigid. She just stared and I had to admit that, even though I’d seen it many times, the impact of going from the other trees to this was stark and brutal.

  “It's one thing to read about it,” I said. “It's another to see it.”

  She still stood there, staring. Finally, she said, “A mile?”

  I nodded. “Just like the others.”

  And then, if possible, her face got worse. She looked at me with what I took to be pain and it seemed that her light green eyes became a pale silver. “Except it's not just a mile. It’s the whole state.”

  I nodded. “They killed almost every one.”

  She looked back at the dead trees. “When?”

  “For these? A few years ago.”

  She took a step forward and put her hand on a trunk. She pulled her hand back as if it'd been burned. “These are dangerous.”

  “I know. But with the budget crisis, people don't want to pay to have them removed or to replant with something else. There are too many in neighborhoods and more public areas that take priority.”

  Liselle put her hand back on the tree, focused. “Have any of them been studied?”

  “Quite a few. Follow me.” I’d been this way with Sarah many times so I guided Liselle further up the path to where it bent around a particularly large, but still very dead, ash tree. We went around the tree to the side away from the path where a section of the bark had been stripped away. A swirl of trails and crisscrossing paths, lighter than the flesh of the tree, swirled around the trunk. Liselle bent down and put her hand on it.

  “They monitored the trees to mark the borers’ progress,” I said. “In the space of a year, they went from one tree in twenty being infected to all of them.”

  “There was nothing they could do?”

  “Not here. The borers had already taken hold by the time they were found.”

  “So your wife just had to watch them die?”

  I nodded. “She fought them in other places. But there was nothing to be done here.”

  “That must've been terrible for her.”

  There are worse things. “It was.”

  “But she kept fighting them?”

  “She did.”

  “She sounds like a good woman.”

  “She was.”

  “I would have liked to have met her.”

  “I wish you could. You’d have a lot to talk about.”

  We started to walk again and it turns out that a grove of dead ash trees and the mention of my wife Sarah gave us both something to think about so we didn't talk. Instead, we walked, each weighed down by a stark reminder of loss.

  As we walked, the trunks changed from gray to white and the leaves gradually returned. The trunks on the new trees were pale with knobs of black on them, as if they had survived the carnage next to them, but just barely.

  “Quaking Aspen,” she said and put a hand on a tree and I swear it seemed to me that she took comfort from the fact that it was alive.

  She pushed off then and we walked down the trail until eventually we were surrounded by green leaves and pale trunks. Where she had wandered around before, she now walked with a more purposeful stride, barely looking at the surrounding trees.

  “How far along are you in Missouri?” I said.

  She didn't look at me. “It's just starting.”

  We didn't say anything else as the trees grew taller and the pale bark changed to dark and the leaves grew more lobes and the trail became shadowed as red oak trees blotted out the sun. The strength of those trees after the devastation of the ash was palpable. Liselle’s interest seemed to be piqued again but much of the wonder she’d displayed on the first half of the trail seemed to be gone.

  We walked through the section of red oak and entered the last section of the Grove, which was eastern hemlock. The great old trees grew well over one hundred feet tall, were eight to ten feet around, and had what non-woodland biologists would think of as soft needles rather than of leaves.

  “So bounded on each side by hemlock and pine?” said Liselle.

  I nodded. “With the cherry and ash in the middle.”

  “That's all of it?”

  “It is.”

  She looked around. “Our car is at the other end of the trail.”

  I nodded. “The trail loops around.”

  “So we have to go back through again?”

  “Yes.”

  Panic is too strong a word for what flashed across her face; it was like right before you rip off a Band-Aid or swallow some particularly bitter medicine. Whatever it was, purpose quickly replaced it. “Let's go then.”

  We followed the path as it looped around away from the lake and back through the Grove. Liselle was still attentive, but we were walking far more quickly now and she seemed focused in a different way. She continued to stop here and there, but now it was if she was looking for specific things. As we came back to the section of ash, she didn't hesitate and strode through, taking it all in. As she looked at the trees beyond me, I caught a glimpse of her face.

  It was ferocious.

  We went back through the cherry and the sugar maple and the pine and then left the trial and got into my Jeep. We didn’t talk as I drove her back to her hotel and, honestly, I didn't mind. As we pulled in, she said, “I appreciate you taking me out there today. Very much. I realize it couldn’t have been easy.”

  “It was actually. It was nice to be back out there. It’s been awhile.”

  We said good-bye and she got out of the car and closed the door. She turned back then and made a gesture for me to roll down the window. I did. She leaned in far enough that her pale blonde hair hung inside the car. “Do you mind if I get in touch if I have to follow up on your wife's research?”

  “Not at all. I don’t know much about it, but I can put you in touch with people if you need me to.”

  “Thanks.” She stood up and tapped the car roof and I rolled up the window and pulled away.

  When I checked the rearview mirror, she was gone.

  8

  I had just arrived at my office the next morning when my phone buzzed. Mitch Pearson, Chief Detective in Charge of Serious Crimes for Carrefour, Ohio.

  “Nate Shepherd,” I said. Why let him know I had him as a contact in my phone?

  “Nate, it's Mitch Pearson.”

  “What's up, Mitch?”

  “The Philli
ps autopsy has been completed. I think that the family is going to take him home today.”

  “Great. Do you need Matt's contact information to let them know?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks for letting me know then.”

  “This isn’t a courtesy call, Nate. I'd like to talk to Ms. Vila.”

  Shit. “Sure. Why?”

  “I have a few more questions for her.”

  “About?”

  “I'll explain when you come down here.”

  This, as you might imagine, was not good. “When?”

  “Before she leaves. Anytime is fine. Just let me know you’re coming so that I'm here.”

  “No problem. What did the autopsy show?”

  “It's all doctor stuff. I’ll give you a copy when you come down.”

  “All right. I'll get a hold of her and let you know.”

  “Thanks, Nate. I'll see you then.”

  I hung up and dialed Liselle. “Hi, Nate,” she said.

  “Two things. The autopsy is done so they'll be releasing Richard's body today. I assume the family will be going back now.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn't ask what the autopsy found. I took that as a good sign.

  “Second, Detective Pearson wants to talk to you again.”

  Silence. Then, “Why?”

  “He didn't say.”

  “Should I do it?”

  “I think we should go down and see what he wants. I'll go with you and cut things off if things don't seem to be going well.”

  “All right. When?”

  “I'll pick you up in an hour. Sound good?”

  “Perfect. I'll see you then.”

  We hung up. I immediately called Ray Gerchuk. I'll be damned if I was going to walk into Mitch Pearson's office not knowing what the autopsy had found.

  “Nate,” Ray said when he picked up the phone. “Is this my fishing invitation?”

  “Afraid it's work again, Ray.”

  “All of this work is getting in the way of a reduction in the bass population.”

  “My dad awaits your call. I heard you finished the Phillips autopsy?”

  “I did.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Pearson called me and said he'd give me a copy but that he didn't want to explain all the doctor stuff on the phone. So I thought I'd call the doctor about the stuff.”