He pulled the cruiser into the county parking lot and they both got out. “You don’t talk much, do you,” Burke said.
Weatherstone nodded again. It was true.
“It’s probably just as well. I talk enough for both of us. And I probably talk more than I should.” He leaned against the cruiser. “I don’t know why I told you all this. Sheriff already thinks I took Maggie’s ten dollars, but he can’t prove it. If I hear you’ve passed it on, I’ll call you seven kinds of a liar. Of course, it won’t do me any good. He’s trying to get rid of me anyway. I just got two years to retirement, but I know I won’t make it that long. Do you want to know how I know?”
He did, but the deputy didn’t wait for him to say so.
“You remember how the sheriff went to Portsmouth to recruit you for this job? Of course, you do. He knew you were a local boy and he saw you got good grades and he knew you would work hard and do what you’re told. And being new, you come cheaper than us old dinosaurs. The county’s hurting for money and they can’t hold on to everybody. We got at least one more deputy than the budget will allow. So do the math and see what you get. Somebody’s got to go. Somebody’s in his sights. And who do you think it’s gonna be? The old expensive, lazy one? Or the cheap young guy trying to make a name for himself?
“I reckon I’ll find me a little trailer like that old man.”
* * *
THE SHERIFF paired Weatherstone with each of the deputies in turn, which meant that he covered all three shifts in the first week and in the second week as well. He looked every day at the older deputies on the force, who were, to a man, heavy in the gut, stiff in the bones, and slow. And he thought, will I be like them? He wanted to stay more like the lean, foxlike sheriff, whose campaign posters were still, a year after the election, stapled to trees and telephone poles every few miles along the main roads and even on some of the side roads. So once a day, every day, he ran the five miles from his mother’s house, past Maggie Boylan’s and back. He ran in daylight and in dark and he ran sometimes fresh and sometimes so worn and disoriented after doubled shifts that he ran himself right into a ditch.
But if ever he wavered, he had only to look to the posters, six or eight of them on the trees and poles along his path, to see the sheriff, faded, but still smiling, still looking lean, fit, and electable.
* * *
AT ONE week into the job, Deputy Timothy Weatherstone made his first arrest. The sheriff had sent him in the cruiser out into the county to serve another notice. On his way back to town he saw an SUV parked along the side of the road and the driver slumped over the wheel.
Passed out, as it turned out. Weatherstone roused the driver, breathalyzed him, put him through the DUI paces, then read him his rights. “Wait a minute,” the driver said. “My car wasn’t even moving.”
“Procedure, sir. Left wrist please.” He waited for the man to raise his hand and then cuffed him.
“Now, wait a minute,” the man said. “Do you know who I am?”
“I have all your information.”
“No, I mean, do you know who I am?”
He did not. But when he got to the office with his prisoner, Tom Burke took one look and said, “Son, you’ve stepped in it now.”
* * *
AS IT turned out, Weatherstone’s prisoner was a county judge.
“I understand,” the judge told the sheriff. “He was just doing his job.”
The judge nodded all around with a special nod to Deputy Weatherstone. “I appreciate your diligence, deputy.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” he said.
“Your mother was a fine woman.”
“Thank you, sir. I thought so too.”
“Keep up the good work.”
“Yes, sir.”
With one more general nod, the judge was out the door.
The sheriff tapped Weatherstone at the elbow, guided him into his office, and closed the door. “The judge is a diabetic,” he said. “And diabetics sometimes get woozy. He pulled himself over to measure his sugar, but then he passed out. You caught him when he was just coming to.”
“But sir, the breathalyzer . . .”
“The breathalyzer was defective.”
“Sir, with all due respect . . .”
“It was defective, son. I tested it.”
“Can you show me where it went wrong?”
“It’s gone, son. I pitched it and the janitor came in and took the trash.” The sheriff stared at Weatherstone in a way that almost dared him to look toward the trash can.
“That was an off-brand. We’ll get a better one to replace it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you did the right thing. You followed procedure. There’s a procedure on the books, so just follow procedure. If I could get the rest of this department to follow procedure, I’d be a happy man.” He paused and looked to his watch, then continued. “So, do we understand each other, deputy?”
“I believe we do, sir.”
The sheriff nodded toward the door and Deputy Weatherstone knew it was time to leave the office.
“You’ll learn a little more about these things as you go along.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And by the way, Tom Burke is a little rough around the edges, but he’s been a good deputy in his time. You could learn a lot from him.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
“But don’t listen to everything.”
“No, sir.”
“You’re doing a good job, deputy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You can go now.”
“Yes, sir.” He stepped out into the outer office.
Burke was at the desk, pecking statistics into a computer. “So you got taken to the woodshed,” he said.
Weatherstone glared and did not speak.
* * *
FOUR DAYS later, the sky was a bright bolt of blue. But Burke was in a dark mood. He pulled shut the door to the sheriff’s office, snatched the keys out of the desk, and said to Weatherstone, “Come on, we got to set out that old man.” The tenth day had come and gone and the old man had not come to court.
“So where’s he gonna go?” Weatherstone asked.
“Not our problem,” the deputy said. “If he’s smart, he’s already gone.”
In the cruiser, Burke gripped the steering wheel as if he was trying to strangle it.
Weatherstone asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. I just want to know what in the hell made us want to become deputies in the first place? We could have been doctors or farmers or drug dealers or just about anything. So what were we thinking?” He looked to Weatherstone. “Out of all the things you could have been, why a small-town cop? Why a deputy in the Morris County Sheriff’s Department? Did you watch too much TV?”
“We didn’t have a TV.”
“Your mother didn’t believe in it, did she?”
Weatherstone glared. “Did you know my mother?”
“Son, everybody in this county, if they don’t know somebody, they know somebody that knows them.”
“But did you know my mother?”
“No,” the deputy said. “I can’t say as I did.”
“Then don’t talk about her.”
They drove in silence for another mile. Finally, Weatherstone said, “I didn’t get here from watching TV and it wasn’t all about learning from books, like you seem to think. I’d like to help somebody the way some people helped me. Which you don’t seem to understand.”
“No,” Burke said. “I don’t reckon I do.”
* * *
WHY, TIMOTHY Weatherstone wondered, had that old man spotted him as Jenny Weatherstone’s boy? He knew that was just the way people talked and that he would be, to those who knew her, Jenny Weatherstone’s boy until the last of them died, but still, he hated being called a boy in front of Burke and he hated that everyone seemed to know his mother and her history better than he did.
For he remembered nothing of t
he time before his mother found the church. He knew, from hearing his mother testify, that she had been wild and had run with a wild crowd, that his older brother and sister had been sent to live with relatives in the city, that his father was a biker who died in a gunfight and that his mother had found Jesus and turned her life around.
But nothing before.
He had a recurring memory, which intruded into dream: He and his mother sat together on the worn benches of a country church: a young preacher snarled and sang his way through a sermon. “You might not like me here!” the preacher called. “But you’ll like me in heaven.” And the young preacher sang and he snarled until something in the sermon raised his mother, by the rhythmic snarl and song of it, up out of her seat, singing and clapping her hands. He must have been five, six years old and he was afraid his mother would spin away from him altogether, called into a joy that had never called him. He reached to grab her by the elbow and pull her back down, but she was gone down front to testify and left him alone on the bench.
* * *
THE OLD man was not on his front step this time. The door of his trailer was open and Timothy Weatherstone expected to see him appear in the door as they pulled into the drive. But he didn’t appear and he didn’t answer Burke’s call nor Weatherstone’s knock.
Weatherstone stepped to the porch and peered in the doorway, but Burke stood back. “Do you see anything in there?”
“No sign.” He knocked and called and got no answer. “Should I go in?”
“You can, but I don’t think he’s in there.”
Weatherstone stepped through the door and into the trailer. He called the old man’s name again and the name fell like lead. There was not a breath of sound. The fire had gone out of the wood stove. On top of the stove, a skillet with a gray pool of bacon grease. On the kitchen table, a plate with the cold remains of a breakfast. In the bedroom, bathroom—still nothing.
Outside, Burke studied the woodpile. “Hasn’t been touched,” he said. “Not since we were out here ten days ago.” He looked over to the porch. “And the water jugs, check them out. There’s not a one of them out of place.”
“So where is he?”
“Not far, I don’t reckon.”
Burke’s hunch took them out to the edge of the pasture. They found him—the picked-over, pillaged rags and bones of him—in a scattered half circle at the cliff edge. “Buzzards by day, coyotes by night,” Burke said. “It ain’t pretty.” The old man’s hat, coat, boots, and the shotgun that had probably done the deed, were scattered out with him. A few scraps of him lay in the sand and gravel at the bottom of the cliff. Either they had fallen as the dozers undermined the bank or the buzzards had cast them down as refuse.
The deputy shook his head. “You can see what kind of help we were to this old bird.”
* * *
THEY REMAINED on the scene for several hours more. They had to call off the trucks and dozers from working under the cliff and scraping up any more remnants of the man. They cordoned off the area with crime scene tape, called in the county coroner and the forensics from Portsmouth, photographed each site, and canvassed each clump of dusty Johnson grass or ironweed for any bit of nightmare bone. By the end of it, they had most of him—the stripped bones, a few hanks of hair and scalp, his boots, some torn, bloody rags of his clothing, and a few fragments of teeth and his broken, blown-out skull—all stacked in a grisly pile near the shotgun which they had dusted for prints. “He probably used a deer slug,” Burke said. “You wouldn’t want bird shot for a job like this.”
At the end of it, long after dark, the forensics bagged the old man up and took him away.
* * *
WHEN BURKE and Weatherstone got back to the office, there was still the report to write. “You’re the one with the college education,” Burke said. He threw the keys in the desk drawer and walked out. So Weatherstone got the job of typing up the report, which proceeded to detail their discovery of the remains of the alleged victim, assumed to be the individual named in the Notice to Vacate and stated that they were unable, due to the scattered condition of said remains, to make a positive identification, but noted the similarity to the above individual’s clothing, including hat, shoes, coat, shirt, and trousers when seen on the previous date, and then to detail the steps taken to secure the area and to contact forensics and to assist the forensics and the coroner after they arrived, and noted that, coroner’s report pending, there was no immediate evidence to suggest foul play and that the likely cause of death was suicide.
He reviewed the report, decided it said what he wanted it to say, printed it out, put it on the sheriff’s desk, and drove himself home.
He ran that night harder than he had ever run. And still, his sleep was haunted with rag and bone.
* * *
IT WAS by now mid-December. The hour had fallen back and darkness fell each night with a suddenness and finality that caught Timothy Weatherstone by surprise. So now, when he ran, it was almost always after dark. But he always took the same near-memorized path, down the road and along the creek and back.
The moon was at the half and it half-lit the creek and the hills around him. He ran down the road past Maggie Boylan’s little house. There was a couch on the porch with an afghan laid across it and all looked normal and neighborly. But none of Maggie’s house lights were on, just a security light for the yard, and he guessed that Maggie was across the creek getting her fix. A car came up the road and he trotted into Maggie’s drive to let it pass. The car had a low-pitched rumble running through its pipes and a high-pitched guitar riffing through its speakers. Here comes another one, he thought. He watched the taillights cross over the rattling bridge and climb the gravel lane to the top of Pillhead Hill.
“We’re just waiting till the time is right,” the sheriff had said. “We’ve got undercover working.” He trusted the sheriff, but each night, the cars rolled down the road, steadily, one after another; and this car with its rumble and riff would be followed soon by yet another.
He ran on, keeping to a path between the road and the creek. Beyond Maggie Boylan’s, there was a bend in the road and Maggie’s was the last lighted house. So, past the bend, he ran strictly by moonlight and memory. The rumble and the radio and the voices from the house on the hill faded. Soon there was only the pound of his shoes on the pavement and, in another half-mile, as the pavement ran out, the scratch of his shoes on the gravel.
He ran at times by the feel of it. He knew that the gravel was loose in one place and pounded into rock dust in another. He knew the road ran smooth in one place and rutted in another and he felt how the road banked at the curve and where it dipped and where it rose and where it ran straight and where it swerved. So he was not prepared when solid ground turned suddenly to water. The first splashy step startled him, but it was five, six, a dozen steps more before he could come to a slow, cold, shin-deep stop.
He looked around and saw nothing that he recognized. It was dark water all around him, the ripples glinting here and there in the half-moon light. A rippling image of the half-moon floated in the middle of the pool whose surface was broken by trees, floating branches, and spikes of fescue and Johnson grass. He had gotten deep enough and had turned himself sufficiently around, that he could no longer tell which way he had come in nor how to get out. A telephone pole rose from the middle of the pool. Stapled to it was the smiling poster image of the sheriff. Weatherstone stood and faced the sheriff a moment, and tried to recall where that pole stood along his path. But the sheriff was no help to him.
It made no sense. There had been no recent rain, no word of a flood downstream. He started to shiver from the cold.
In a moment, he heard a shimmer to his left. A black line crossed the moon-bright tablet of the water: a beaver, still at work on her dam. She paused, curious, gazed at him a moment, then dove with a gunshot flap of her tail and was gone.
* * *
IN HIS second week, Timothy Weatherstone was scheduled for the long dull hour
s of a rainy overnight at the jail. The rain was a silent, steady, daylong, nightlong rain that tapped at the windows and showed no sign of letting up. He talked for a while to an old bootlegger, checked on the dozen or so others, and when it was lights out, quiet set in. There were rounds to do every hour or so, the radio, a paperback novel, a look into the Bible someone had left, some filing, another check of the cells, a pot of coffee brewed, a frozen pizza microwaved, then coffee, radio, a cheap magazine, every word of the local paper.
Bored with it all, desperate to stay awake, with hours to go before the end of this endless shift, he paced the office floor, did pushups, squats, and jumping jacks, then settled back into the paperback book.
Along about two in the morning, he heard a voice from out in the street and went to the window. A woman stood on the sidewalk across the street. Her head was bare, her rain-blackened hair streamed to her shoulders. Her shoulders had huddled in for warmth and her rain-soaked jacket sagged. She raised her pale face to look up at the jailhouse windows and called out a name. Weatherstone could not make out the name she called. It could have been any of the names in his cells. No one answered and she shivered and called out again. Two more times and she turned to walk away and Weatherstone heard a voice from down the corridor—her man, one of the men in his jail—had wakened to her voice and had answered her.
There was a stir and a mumble from the others, but no one complained. Man and woman shouted back and forth for nearly five minutes. Weatherstone knew he was supposed to break it up, but he hesitated. Maybe they would stop on their own. And sure enough, the woman waved and the shouting stopped. She wiped her eyes, then waved one more time and was gone.
* * *
THE RAIN continued to fall through the night and into the morning, steady and relentless, all day and into the next. Weatherstone finished his rainy overnight shift, drove home through the fog and rain, and slept for a few droning hours before he came back to work at three in the afternoon for a second shift that he spent catching speeders with a radar gun. He had to double that shift, because one of the other deputies was down with the flu and another was stuck on the wrong side of a washed-out road. So he spent a second night watching over the jailhouse and listening to the rain. Toward midnight, the rain slowed, then stopped, only to start again with the same diluvian persistence.
Maggie Boylan Page 5
