The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “What did you do in Chicago?”

  “Real estate development.”

  “Ah…so it was a natural.”

  She gave another laugh and launched into the prepared part of the program.

  “Nothing about Stevens Falls is natural. It’s like I keep telling anybody who’ll listen. This is a town and a way of life on the brink. We either bootstrap ourselves into the new century or we go the way of all those hundreds and hundreds of other Northwest towns that just dried up and blew away when they ran out of whatever it was they were selling. Coal, tin, lead, lumber, it doesn’t matter. One ending is another beginning. One man’s loss is another man’s opportunity.”

  She was right; it could be done. Up in the Cascades, the mountain town of Leavenworth had transformed itself into an alpine village, Octoberfest, lederhosen, dirndls and all. Farther over the mountains, Winchester had turned itself into the wild wild West, with saloons and staged gunfights in the streets. Vast tracts of eastern Washington, once considered unusable, were now covered by trendy vineyards. She caught me looking at her. “I was doing my spiel, wasn’t I?”

  “You’ve got my vote,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I am something of a fanatic on the subject.”

  “It usually takes a fanatic to get anything worthwhile started.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I was hoping it was me.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve heard some variation of that before.”

  We rolled back past the Steelhead, out the west end of town, toward J.D.’s place and the damaged bridge. “You know that bridge that’s coming up in a few miles?” I began.

  “The Fox Creek Bridge.”

  “The one to J.D.’s place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  She kept her eyes on the road. “Actually…nothing. We’ve just had it closed all this time so we could drive J.D. crazy.”

  She put her right hand across her chest, Pledge of Allegiance position.

  “I swear, Leo. That’s what J.D. thought was going on. That man honest to God thought the whole thing was a conspiracy to drive him out of business.”

  “So then, it is damaged.”

  She looked at me as if for the first time. “Of course it’s damaged. Why else would it be closed? He’s not the only one who uses that bridge. It’s a heck of an inconvenience for a lot of people, not just Mr. J.D. Springer.”

  She went on. “Last winter we had nearly double our average rainfall. You remember how bad it got out here?”

  I said I did. I recalled pictures of people rowing boats through downtown.

  “We had rocks the size of houses rolling down the Hoh. It’s a seventy-year-old wood frame bridge. It took quite a beating.”

  “How long is it going to take to fix?”

  She barked out a dry laugh. “Ha,” she said. “With or without money?”

  “I thought the state—” I began.

  “The state comes up with half of it. The feds come up with half of that. The rest is our responsibility.”

  “And you don’t have it.”

  “Touchdown,” she said. “Things like the road we can do. But we don’t have the engineering expertise to do anything about the bridge.”

  “What about the road?”

  She took her eyes off the road for a moment. “You’re doing that detective thing again, aren’t you?” she chided. I resisted a strange desire to confess all. “It’s in the blood,”

  I said.

  “The road was easy. We had Tonkin Construction go out of business. He had all his construction equipment up for sale. He was getting offers of five cents on the dollar because the equipment was so old. The stuff just sat there in the rain, month after month. When the river washed out this part of the road…” She made a rueful face. “As usual, we couldn’t come up with our share.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I had an idea. What if we did it ourselves? Lord knows we’ve got enough people who know how to operate heavy equipment and have the time. I sat down and did the math. The way I calculated it, if we paid old man Tonkin twenty cents on the dollar and paid operators ten bucks an hour, adding in the cost of materials, it was still seventy percent cheaper than having an outside contractor do the job. So…I went to Mr. Tonkin and put it to him.”

  I was thinking the old guy never had a chance. “And he went for it,” I said.

  “Oh heck. He was thrilled. He helped us put the stuff back into shape and then taught everybody how to run the machines.”

  She anticipated my next question. “It was slow going. There was a pretty steep learning curve. Especially with some of the people we had doing the learning.” She grinned over at me. “You remember Whitey from back at the tavern?

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, just to give you some idea of what we were working with, Whitey drives the dump truck on the road crew.”

  She could tell I was suitably impressed. “We made a lot of mistakes, but we learned from them. We did it as soon as we could pay for it. That’s something else J.D. had a problem understanding.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That he was the only one living out this far, and that, you know…that we were going to get around to this end of the road when we got around to it. He seemed to think that we should aim all our resources at his problem, and when we didn’t, when we took care of the most first, he seemed to think it was personal or something.” She took a deep breath and went on. “In the end, we got it done for about half the cost, and now we collect the state and federal money, do the work ourselves and pocket the difference. This fall, we put a new roof on the school with the leftover money.”

  About a mile before the Fox Creek bridge, we skidded to a stop in front of a galvanized cattle gate. Ramona got out, unfastened the lock and chain and then tied the gate open. When she got back in, she said, “Wait till you see this thing. The Air Force guy they sent out when we took it over said it was designed to survive anything short of a direct nuclear hit.”

  We went bouncing up a well-worn dirt track, winding our way up the side of a steep clear cut mountain. Ten minutes of gunning it up the straights and then sliding around the switchbacks. The scenery never changed. All the way to the top, the unbroken ranks of huge gray stumps sat among the scrub brush like tombstones.

  We arrived at the top on two wheels, a combination of too much speed and a steep final grade that gave way a little too quickly to the man-made plateau at the summit. To my left, in a large fenced-in yard, a dump truck, a road grader, an asphalt spreader and a steamroller. In front of me, something that looked like it should be defending the Siegfried Line. A squat concrete bunker with a massive antenna on top. At least two hundred feet of welded steel and dull red paint.

  I chuckled. “You could broadcast to Rangoon on that thing.”

  “We could send pictures into space, if the FCC would let us,” she said. “All we had to buy was the rig you saw in the office and a commercial VCR. Everything else was already here.”

  She turned off the truck and checked her watch. “Gotta hurry,” she said, grabbing the red tape box, popping the door and hustling toward the bunker. I pried my fingers from the overhead handle and followed along at a leisurely pace. She looked back over her shoulder. “You always walk this slow, Mr. Leo Waterman, or do you just like being behind me?”

  “A little of both,” I admitted.

  She laughed and walked faster. Over to the thick steel door. She unlocked it and pulled it open, blocking my view of the interior. “Come on,” she said. “The tape loop recycles at two-thirty. If it’s going to be nice and neat and I’m not going to stop something midstream, that’s when I need to change the tape.”

  The interior was tiny, one table, one chair, still smelled of fresh concrete. Two overhead lights cast a dim glow over the low room. The feeling was one of being squeezed. Of dampness. Of an oppressive weight coming at you in all directions. I felt trapped and had to o
vercome the urge to back out the door. On the wall to the right of the door, someone had drilled into the concrete and hung a piece of plywood with a series of hooks. On the hooks hung keys labeled TRUCK, SPREADER, ROLLER, GRADER. A bead of sweat rolled down my spine and I shuddered at the dampness.

  “It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it?” she said. “I used to feel the same way, like the whole thing was going to come down around me.” She checked her watch. “Here we go,” she said. She pulled this week’s tape from the red box. We waited in the damp silence until the three-quarter-inch video player on the table beeped twice and then made a loud clicking noise. She pushed the eject button. The tape slid out. In went the new. Buttons were adjusted and knobs turned. “It’s completely automatic,” she said. She pointed to a red toggle switch on the VCR. “I come up first thing on Friday, flip that switch up, and we’re on the air all over the peninsula.”

  “I’ll be outside,” I said. I stood in the clearing taking deep breaths, feeling disassociated from myself. I heard the whoosh of the door being closed and the crunching sound of her feet on the gravel. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Like you said,” I replied. “It’s a weird feeling in there.”

  She took off for the car. I ambled along behind, taking in the scenery.

  “Just when I was wondering if there was anything that made you uneasy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pulled open the truck door and stood there. One arm over the open door, one arm on the roof, her hair moving slightly in the breeze. “Well, you slew the town bully. You faced down a whole pack of his friends.”

  “I had you on my side.”

  She waved me off. “You weren’t one bit afraid of that motley crew. Don’t tell me you were.” I tried to protest, but she gave me the raspberry. “And then you very nearly get into it with Nathan Hand about whether or not you’re going to get in the police car.” She shook her beautiful head. “Just when I was beginning to think you were Superman.” She snapped her fingers. “Another illusion shattered.” She got in the truck and started the engine.

  “Better now than later,” I said. I hopped in beside her and fastened myself down as she did a doughnut in the gravel and then went ripping back down the narrow road.

  11

  REBECCA WAS SEATED AT THE SAME TABLE WHERE WE’D had coffee a couple of hours before. “How’d you do?” I asked as I sat down.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “The eviction,” I said, “seems like the most pressing.”

  She agreed. “I talked with the city attorney—a man named Mark Tressman. A dedicated letch of the first order.”

  “Really?”

  “Mark, as he insisted I call him, assured me that he and his wife had”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“an ‘arrangement’ about such things. I asked if he’d mind if I called her and chatted and all of a sudden he got all professional on me.”

  “Do tell?”

  “Anyway…according to Mark”—she bobbed her eyebrows up and down—“the tax rules for homesteads differ radically from those which cover regular property.” She waved a hand.

  “Did you know that a homestead reverts to the county if it’s not continuously occupied by the owner or his agent?”

  “Really?”

  “According to Casanova. He went into all this legal mumbo jumbo, but the deal is this: There’s an old law, still on the books, that allows cities or counties to foreclose on homesteads after the taxes are more than ninety days in arrears.”

  “How long do regular property owners have?”

  “According to Tressman, virtually indefinitely. All they have to do is occasionally make some sort of token payment on the back taxes and the city or the county is required to start the eviction process all over again.”

  “How long has she got?”

  “Eleven days.”

  “What if the taxes are paid?”

  “Tressman claims it’s too late for that. He said J.D. challenged the order and the edict was upheld by a county judge.”

  “If the law were that cut-and-dried there wouldn’t be more lawyers than white rats,” I said. “We better get Jed on this right away.”

  “Amen,” she sighed. “I stopped at the clerk’s office.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “She. Nancy Weston. And…pretty much what you’d expect. Fifty or so. Struggling to stay in single-digit dress sizes. A bit full of herself. A little officious, maybe.” She took a sip of coffee. “Their records show that this year’s taxes were due on March fifteenth and had technically been in arrears for several months before the county took action.”

  “Why aren’t the taxes part of the payment on the note? That’s what everybody else does.”

  “Because there is no note. J.D. paid cash. She also confirms that the county did indeed make Mr. Bendixon a number of offers for his property and…”—she bent over the table and made a scrunched-up face—“and although she was not at liberty to divulge the exact figures, she thought she could safely say that the figures I had mentioned were by no means far from the mark.”

  “Not that she’s one to gossip,” I said.

  “Perish the thought.”

  “What else?”

  “The body.”

  She pulled a handful of photographs from the bench beside her.

  “Do I want to see those?”

  She held the photos against her chest and leafed through them. “You know…when the flesh is rendered this far asunder…” She looked up at me. “Just think of it as E.T.”

  She pushed the stack across the table. I picked up the top picture, turned it right side up. Not E.T. What it looked like was a mummy. One of those Egyptian mummies I’d seen on the Discovery Channel a while back. All black like tarred leather and clenched up, its mouth agape and eyeless sockets somehow seeming to bulge. The face was gone from the nose down.

  “What happened to the head?”

  “It exploded,” she said. “Look at the last picture.”

  It was a view from the back, with the mummy lying on its side. The back of the head had a hole in it. “In a very hot fire, the brain and the fluid surrounding it begin to boil. If the fire lasts long enough and the temperature inside the skull gets hot enough, the skull literally explodes.” I must have looked dubious. “Think of those self-contained popcorn things you buy. The ones where the tinfoil top swells up until it breaks open.”

  I made a mental note to buy chips for a while. I worked my way back through the photos until I got to the one I’d started on.

  “Anything catch your eye?” I asked her.

  “What catches the eye here is that, from a forensic standpoint, we don’t know anything. J.D. could have died from bubonic plague for all we know. The undertaker never even took an X-ray.” She pulled the photos from my hands and rifled through them. “If you are asking me what I’d get on the stand and swear to…From the pelvis, it’s a male…by the table ruler, the cadaver measures sixty-four inches, so even allowing for double the normal amount of tissue shrinkage, he was probably under six feet in life. That and the cadaver was badly burned in a fire that, in all probability, included an accelarant.” She turned the photos facedown. “Any more is speculation. What about you?”

  “I discovered that just about everybody in town had an active dislike for our former friend Mr. J.D. Springer.”

  “Like Sheriff Hand told us.”

  “Worse. I’m telling you, Rebecca, six to sixty, blind, crippled or crazy, they uniformly despise the guy.”

  “Isn’t it odd,” she said, “that you and I should have a vision of a man that is so completely at odds with what everyone else seems to think?”

  “It’s eerie, is what it is,” I said. “Kind of makes me wonder what else we might be missing.”

  “What else?” she pressed.

  I told her about my brief conversation with Linc.

  “Am I missing some profundity here, too?” she asked.

>   “Just an odd little exchange, is all. I mean, why hem and haw about it? Either he did or he didn’t sell J.D. the gas. Either way, he’s not responsible.”

  She wasn’t impressed. “Anything else?”

  “Then I ran into the Chamber of Commerce person.”

  “Bubbles with the blue truck?”

  I knew there was no way it had gone unnoticed, Ramona Haynes had gotten out of the truck with me. Before we got a chance to shake hands and offer farewells, she gave herself a good stretch, lacing her fingers together behind her, arching her back and rotating her shoulders. I’d made it a point to check the clouds for rain.

  “Yeah,” seemed like the right answer.

  “Did she do those sort of contortions the whole time you were with her?”

  I did it well. Face like a rock. “What contortions were those?”

  “That skywriting-with-my-nipples act she was doing out there in the parking lot. The one that caused that old geezer at the front table to drop his fork in his lemonade.”

  Mount Rushmore. “I musta missed it,” I said.

  “Hmmmm,” was her reply.

  “Now, Miss Haynes—” I began.

  “Bubbles?”

  “Yeah…Miss Haynes, as far as I could tell, sort of liked J.D. She just thought he was an insensitive, paranoid loser who had no idea what he was doing.”

  “Good thing she liked him.”

  “Around here, that’s as good as it gets.”

  “What now?”

  “So…let’s go back to J.D. and Claudia’s place.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something I need to check.”

  She started to speak. I jumped in. “I don’t want to say anything until I check back at the homestead, okay?”

  “I hate it when you do this.”

  I changed the subject. “Is that why you told me about this Tressman character being such a letch and coming on to you?”

  “What?”

  “Because you were jealous of Miss Haynes?”

  Flabbergasted, then disgusted: “Is that what you think? Don’t flatter yourself.”