Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Library,” he said. “That’s where we’ll find Miss Ethel. This’ll make her year.”

  I closed the door of the cruiser. “Is this lady reliable?” I asked. There was something about his tone of voice.

  “Miss Ethel? Solid as a rock. Oh, there was the peeping Tom last year, and the ghost she saw at the old Parker place the year before, but …”

  I groaned. “Jeff, if this lady’s—”

  “Just kidding,” he said with a wink and backed into the street. “You form your own opinion.”

  TWO

  The library was a one-story, tan brick building across the street from the courthouse. Water dripped from the oaks in front and we stepped over puddles on the walkway. The four or five people huddled at the reading tables looked up as we entered.

  A fat little woman with short, gray hair headed for us while we were still wiping our feet on the mat.

  Jeff jerked his head in my direction: “Miss Ethel, this is Dr. Alan Graham. He came up from Baton Rouge. The Corps of Engineers called him. He’s an archaeologist.”

  The little woman’s blue eyes lit.

  “You’ve come to find out what fell in the river,” she said, sticking out a hand.

  “I don’t know if I can help you,” I said. “But I’ll do what I can.”

  “He’s an expert,” Scully pronounced, and I restrained an urge to kick him hard.

  Abruptly, the librarian turned to the shelves, from whence a younger woman with brown hair and glasses had emerged.

  “I’m going out,” she told her assistant. “I’m going to show Dr. Graham here where the thing fell into the river. I’ll be back later on.” She looked up at the sheriff. “Well, let’s go.”

  We went back out to the car and I took the backseat, letting Miss Ethel sit up front.

  “Now we have to pick up Jeremiah,” she said.

  “Miss Ethel—” Scully began but she cut him off:

  “He saw it, too. You know where he lives. I know he’ll be there. He has nowhere else to go on a day like this.”

  “Who’s Jeremiah?” I asked.

  “They call him Hawkeye,” Scully said, “because he’s got one eye. Local humor. He’s a black guy, fishes in the river, and picks up cans and bottles for recycling.”

  “He was in his boat when it hit,” the librarian explained. “He heard it, too. He’s a witness.”

  “Yeah,” Scully drawled.

  Jeremiah Persons, AKA Hawkeye, lived in a tumbled-down shack just across the river from the town. A wisp of smoke curling up from his chimney was the only sign that anyone might be alive behind the cardboard-covered windows. A shopping cart sat untended in the yard, and a stack of old tires graced one corner of the lot. Beside the house lay the stubble of a garden, its furrows sloppy from the rain, and the yard itself was a quagmire of mud and water.

  Scully stopped just off the main road, on the last firm ground, and tapped his horn a couple of times. A few seconds later the front door opened and a face peered out.

  Miss Ethel swung open her door and got out, oblivious of the wet.

  “Jeremiah, put on your coat and come out here. We need to talk, you hear?”

  The door shut and we waited. Three minutes later the door opened again and a form emerged. It wore an army field jacket and a leather cap with ear flaps. The figure slogged through the mud to the car and Miss Ethel rolled down her window.

  “Get in,” she ordered. “We’re going to show Dr. Graham where the thing went into the river.”

  Jeremiah Persons climbed in beside me, saying nothing, and the sheriff backed gingerly onto the roadway, then started forward again, toward the bridge.

  “It was about ten-thirty at night,” Miss Ethel said, “the day after Thanksgiving. I was driving back from Ferriday, visiting my niece. It was a clear night, almost no clouds.”

  The iron trusses loomed in front of us.

  “I was right where we are now,” she said. “I had my window down, because the air conditioning doesn’t work in the Chrysler anymore, and it was about seventy degrees. I was thinking what a shame it’s always so hot around Thanksgiving.”

  We started up the bridge.

  “You can stop here, Jefferson,” she declared.

  “But …”

  “Just put on that flashing light thing and direct traffic around us while I explain to Dr. Graham.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jeff Scully stopped in the center of the span, put on the emergency brake, started the blue flasher lights on the dash and rear window, and forced himself out of the vehicle.

  “Just stand over there and make sure we don’t get hit by a car,” she ordered, then turned to me.

  “I was going about twenty. I never go faster than that when I go over this old bridge. And that’s when I heard it.”

  “Heard what?” I asked.

  “Well, it was a loud whoosh, with a little bit of a whistle. Like to scared me to death, I tell you. And then it hit the water.” She pointed to a spot just downstream. “Right about there.”

  “I see,” I said, staring out at the gray surface.

  A car crept past and Jeff Scully waved it on.

  “It made a loud splash and there were big waves.”

  “Was there a moon?” I asked.

  “Not much of one. But I could hear the waves hitting the banks. I was so scared I slowed down and stopped right in the middle, where we are now.”

  “Did you see a trail of fire or anything?” I asked. “Or hear an explosion, like a sonic boom?”

  “No. I heard just what I told you. But whatever it was has to have been big, to have kept the water splashing against the banks for so long afterward.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She rolled down the window and called out to Scully. “All right, Jefferson, get back in and drive us under the bridge so Jeremiah can explain where he was when it happened.”

  The sheriff nodded wearily. “Yes, ma’am.”

  We drove back into town and made a U-turn at the base of the bridge and then went back across to the other side. At the base of the bridge ramp was a shell road that turned back toward the water’s edge, and we followed it until we were almost under the bridge itself. The librarian sprang out of the car, and I heard Scully groan as he opened his door.

  “Come on, Jeremiah,” she called, “show Dr. Graham where you were when it happened. And don’t slip on these rocks.”

  Jeremiah Persons hobbled forward, squinting from his good eye, as water dripped onto us from the metal girders above.

  “There,” Jeremiah said, pointing.

  “Where?” I asked. All I saw was the gray surface.

  “ ’Bout halfway out,” he said. “It come down there.”

  “You saw it?” I asked.

  “Saw the waves,” he said. “Heard the splash. ’Bout knocked me outa the boat.”

  “You were fishing?”

  “Checking my trot lines …” He hesitated, sneaking a glance at Scully.

  The sheriff shook his head. “Go ahead, Jeremiah. I’m the sheriff, not the game warden. Besides, if I arrested everybody around here who fished without a license, they’d have to build a new jail.”

  “Tell Dr. Graham what else you heard,” Ethel Crawford ordered. “Tell him what it sounded like.”

  “Loud,” the old man mumbled. “Like a train. Or maybe a sire-een.”

  I saw Scully’s brows rise.

  “How far were you from where it hit?” I asked.

  “Maybe fifty feets. Maybe a hundred. Waves come over the side of the boat.”

  Scully folded his arms: “Jeremiah, when you’re out alone in the boat, maybe you take a little something to keep you warm, eh? A bottle of that Nighttrain, maybe?”

  “Nah, suh, not that night,” Jeremiah Persons said.

  “No?”

  “Doctor said don’t drink it when I’m taking medicine. Well, I was taking medicine that night ’cause I had a headache.” He brought out a small bottle and showed
it to me.

  “Interesting,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “What are you going to do now?” Miss Ethel asked.

  I shrugged. “Don’t know there’s anything I can do. There’s no way to find out what’s down there without spending a lot of money. Now, if the sheriff wanted to drag the bottom …”

  “If it was space junk,” Scully said, “or even an asteroid, it most likely buried itself in the mud. Dragging probably wouldn’t find it anyway.”

  “Space junk?” Miss Ethel asked.

  “Something from a rocket launch or a piece of a satellite falling back into the earth’s atmosphere,” I said. “People would be surprised if they knew how much of that stuff falls around us all the time. Mostly it burns up in the atmosphere, but sometimes a chunk of metal makes it through. Or it could be something off an airplane. I’ve heard of pieces falling off in flight.”

  “I called NASA,” Miss Ethel declared. “They said it wasn’t theirs.”

  “They may not know. It could be from a Russian satellite. I’m not sure what can be done.”

  I started toward the car but her voice caught me.

  “Jefferson said you had some kind of metal-detecting machine.”

  I gave Scully a dark look. “Oh?”

  “I told her about the magnetometer,” Scully said, avoiding my eyes. “That your crew had done a mag scan of the river where the new bridge is supposed to cross, half a mile south of here, and since you had the machine up here already, and had a boat and all, that maybe …”

  The thought of a boat trip in the rain, on a half-frozen river, with the wind cutting through my jacket, was not appealing.

  “Well …”

  “Probably wouldn’t take but an hour or two,” he said. “I mean, since you already have it here.”

  David was going to hit the ceiling.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  When we’d dropped off our two guides Scully gave me a sheepish grin.

  “Sorry, Alan, but it’s an election year. I can’t afford not to get involved. Even if it’s a batty old librarian and a one-eyed drunk.”

  “And get me involved,” I said dourly. “If I’d have known you were going to turn out to be a politician …”

  “Didn’t,” Scully said, pulling into his parking place. “All I ever wanted to be was an archaeologist. That’s why I worked for you that summer ten years ago.”

  “Twelve.”

  “But not many people make a living at it. So I went to vet school and became a veterinarian. I would’ve been happy but then people started reminding me about my father and how he was sheriff for twenty years, and they expect me to help ’em.”

  “So you agreed to run because of your father.”

  “That was the beginning. It was really thanks to Jacko Reilly, though. Folks wanted to be rid of him. But now he’s gone and what am I going to do for an encore?”

  “Beats me. Why didn’t you drag the river before you got me up here?”

  “Because there’s nothing down there. But do me a favor: Run the mag and make the old lady happy.”

  THREE

  “You’re going to what?” David Goldman demanded. We were seated at the kitchen bar in what had once been a farmer’s house, about a half a mile west of Lordsport, off Highway 20. There was a drink in front of each of us, thanks to the bottle of Dickel’s I’d brought with me. A fire blazed in the gas space heater on the far wall, and on the closed-in back porch the other four members of the crew were washing artifacts.

  “Bertha didn’t leave me much choice,” I told him.

  David scowled.

  “But that means you have to pull somebody off my crew, and I’m trying to finish on time, since you raised hell last time about my being a day over the budget.”

  “Marilyn raised hell,” I corrected. “That’s her job. Saving money and keeping clients happy.”

  “Forget about the archaeology,” he mumbled.

  “No clients, no archaeology,” I said. It was a discussion we’d had before.

  “Besides,” I told him. “I’ll run the mag and have Jeff run the boat. You aren’t using the rig now.”

  “It still pisses me off,” he protested. “Where does Bombast get the nerve? Flying frigging saucers!”

  “I had to make it up to her,” I told him. “She’s been short-tempered with me ever since you caught her call last month and told her to say hello to Larry and Curly.”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  “No.”

  I finished my glass and went onto the back porch, where three people sat around a pair of zinc wash tubs, scrubbing bits of pottery. On the right, with tattooed biceps bulging under the sleeves of his dirty T-shirt, sat Gator, a sometime student who could sniff out an archaeological site like an Indian. Seated across from him was a small, dark-haired man who looked dapper even in faded jeans. L. Franklin Hill was our computer guru, but he was also a born field leader. Separating them was a tiny, pixie-ish woman, Meg Lawrence. In her third year of college, she was taking a semester off to do archaeology, over the protests of her parents. I’d promised her father I’d make her go back to school at the end of the summer.

  “I hear we’re going hunting for a flying saucer,” Gator said, grinning, his uneven teeth giving him a jack-o’-lantern look.

  “Who said?” I asked.

  David shrugged. “Jeff Scully was talking the other day.”

  I looked at David. “So this wasn’t exactly a surprise.”

  “I figured you’d say no.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You knew I wouldn’t be able to say no. You guys are enjoying this.”

  David looked away. “Well, you don’t do fieldwork nearly as much as you used to,” he said. “We didn’t think it would hurt.”

  “We had a bet,” Gator said. “David said Pepper wouldn’t let you go.”

  My face must’ve reddened because Meg shook her head.

  “Don’t pay any attention to these guys, Alan. They’re just a bunch of juveniles.”

  “Apparently,” I said, turning around and almost colliding with the Mahatma, our New Age crew member, who could be as maddening as he was good-hearted.

  “You find it?” the Mahatma, whose birth name was Dean Callahan, asked.

  “What?”

  “The UFO.”

  “Go say a mantra, Dean.”

  “You know, this could be a vortex. I feel a vibration whenever I get close to the water’s edge. And when we ran the mag it kept giving false readings …”

  “You see what I’m cooped up with?” David asked. “It makes even your company seem good.”

  “The rain’s supposed to stop tonight,” I said. “I’ll run the mag tomorrow and leave you people alone.”

  It was ten-thirty in the morning before we got the boat into the water. True to predictions, the rain had cleared out, leaving a dry, cold wind that, after an hour, had sawed my face raw and left my hands numb. While Jeff Scully manned the outboard in the stern, guiding the boat, I sat in the bow, watching the readout from the magnetometer, which was little more than an arrangement of electrical coils in a three-foot-long torpedo-shaped tube called a tow fish that trailed behind the boat on a cable. Powered by a battery, the magnetometer would pick up any underwater concentration of metal. The “anomaly,” as such disturbances were called, would be reflected on the paper printout moving across the face of the control unit at my feet, which was a metal case with knobs and a track for the moving paper.

  I looked back at Jeff, and he shook his head. We’d just made a pass parallel to the west bank and another approximately down the middle of the river, and as yet there were no unusual readings. I knew what Jeff was thinking because I was thinking it, too, and every time I opened my mouth to tell him we’d done enough, I glanced over at the bank where my Blazer was parked with the boat trailer. There, at the foot of the water, bundled up like a mummy, Miss Ethel watched expectantly, as she had for the past hour.
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  Neither of us wanted to tell her the bad news.

  “I guess we could go along the east bank,” Jeff called over the sound of the outboard. “Then nobody can say we didn’t do everything we could.”

  I nodded, and the boat swung around to head downstream. The bridge passed over us, an iron shadow on slate gray water.

  She still wasn’t going to be satisfied: She’d probably want divers.

  We were at least two hundred yards downstream from where the object was supposed to have hit. What bothered me most was the possibility that the mag might actually pick up something: There might be old boat motors, tire rims, all kinds of junk, buried in the mud forty feet down. They would all show something on the printout How could I explain to the librarian that I wasn’t about to pay a diver to check out every squiggle on the paper?

  Jeff started the transect, heading toward the bridge. I watched the paper feed out of the printer.

  A line of four-digit numbers, roughly the same. Nothing.

  The bridge was a quarter mile ahead and the wind was straight in my face, so that tears ran down my cheeks.

  What the hell was I doing in the middle of a river, on one of the coldest days of the year, when I could be warm and snug at home, next to Pepper?

  Wishful thinking, because she’d be in class now, spewing out theory to a bunch of groggy students.

  At least I told myself they’d be groggy. For all I knew she’d have them on the edges of their chairs.

  Damn, what was wrong with me? Two years ago, B.P—. before Pepper, as David liked to say—I wouldn’t have thought about staying inside. Maybe he was right. Maybe I’d let my feelings for her spoil me. Maybe …

  I suddenly realized the numbers on the printout were larger than the numbers printed just before.

  I looked up in surprise: The bridge was almost overhead, and our cars on the east shore were just opposite us.

  The numbers went back to normal as we passed under the bridge.

  I let Jeff make a circle and head back downstream, closer to the bank.

  As we came even with the cars, and the place where Miss Ethel watched, I looked down at the printout.

  The numbers were not as exaggerated as before, but the effect was there.