56

The devil goes on exacting compound interest …

Walden, “Economy”

Jack Markey had had enough. He had been clever, he had been responsible, he had done whatever was necessary, he had delegated the job whenever it was possible to do so and performed it himself when it was not. But this was the last goddamn time.

The body of Pete Harris was so heavy, Jack had to drag it by the feet along the path beside Gowing’s Swamp. By the time he got it down beside the watery margin of the bog, he was worn out. He shoved the carcass under a bush, and ventured into the muddy water. Sinking down, hanging on to the brittle branches of dead trees, he heaved himself toward the middle of the swamp. Jack had not bothered to find a pair of rubber boots. His shoes were mired in mud. His pants dragged at him, soaked to the hip.

He had no eyes for the strange beauty of his surroundings, no interest in the bird singing somewhere above him—only a desperate desire to lunge forward until he found the hole in the middle of the quaking bog, the place where people shot horses and watched them sink.

Then he saw it, a small pool of open water in the middle of the encircling sphagnum. At once he turned and struggled back to the shore for the body of Pete Harris.

God, it was impossible. First Jack tried hoisting Pete up on his shoulders, dragging him by the arms, bending himself double. But their combined mass was so great that his feet plunged too deep in the slimy mud and he nearly lost his balance. Then he let the enormous weight slip down his back until it was half-submerged. Grasping the feet again, he tried floating it behind him. The effort was almost more than he could handle. The body kept snagging on fallen trees and the roots of straggling bushes.

The worst was yet to come. The big-bellied carcass was a spongy pneumatic mass of air cavities, and it floated high above the surface. It wouldn’t sink. Jack had to slosh back to the shallows and return with a water-soaked log. And then he barely had time to drop it on Pete Harris and retreat, because there were voices in the woods.

They were near, very near, a man talking loudly, a woman laughing. Christ! Jack hauled himself back to the shore, catching at twigs, tripping and splashing up to his chest in muddy water. Full of dread, he crawled high on the bank and hid himself in a grove of pine trees, slumping down exhausted in the low undergrowth of blueberry and fern.

He was only just in time. Soaked through and shivering, he watched through a gap among the whippy stems of buckthorn. What the bloody hell were they doing?

Oliver had told Homer how to find his way in. With Mary and Hope slogging behind him, Homer led the way through the watery moat to the carpet of sphagnum moss supporting the bog garden in the middle of Gowing’s Swamp. Silently they stood gazing.

“Better not all stand in one place,” whispered Mary, and they moved apart. The mossy surface billowed beneath their feet.

It was not a place for talking. Slowly they walked around the green-gold garden among the dwarfed larches, the panicled andromeda, the swamp azalea and summersweet. Cotton grass lifted puffs of white on wiry stems.

“Listen,” said Mary. They all looked up as a watery warbling began in the woods, a bell-like melody. A moment later it was repeated in a higher register, the last notes rising out of hearing.

They didn’t need to be told what it was. Homer looked at Mary. The singing stopped, then began again, a little nearer.

Hope listened, too. She was inundated with waves of regret. With the song of the wood thrush in her ears, she kept seeing the anguish on Ananda’s face as he crumpled the letter to which she had signed her name.

Then there was a new sound, a blare of music from the direction of the housing development off Lexington Road. The thrush stopped singing. The boom box shouted, “Do it, do it, do it …”

“Oh well, hell,” said Homer, and they turned to go.

Again he led the way. With his arms held high before his face, he pushed through the surrounding barrier of thorny bushes, holding them aside for Mary and Hope. “Watch out for this one. Wait a sec, this way’s easier.”

And then, turning for a last look at the Garden of Eden, he saw a hand rise up and sink among the dwarfed trees.

“Shit,” whispered Jack Markey, watching from the shore.

“Wait for me.” Homer turned around and started back and looked again. The hand was gone. Had he been mistaken? Now there was nothing in Gowing’s Swamp but miniature larches and green moss and cotton grass and the tyrannical vibrations of the world’s loudest radio.

“Homer?”

“Wait a minute.” Homer turned and stared at the green pool where the body of Pete Harris was now rolling slowly, floating just under the surface. Homer saw only the half-submerged log that held it down. The log bobbed slightly and lay still.

“Come on, Homer.”

“Coming.” Homer shrugged his shoulders and made his way out of Gowing’s Swamp, following Mary and Hope along the woodland path to the car. For the rest of the morning he tried to put the mirage of the disappearing hand out of his mind. But later in the day he had a call from Julian Snow.

“Pete Harris is missing,” said Julian, his voice sounding faint and far away.

“He is?” Homer thought about it. “Do you think he walked out on his wife?”

“She doesn’t think so. She says this isn’t like him at all.”

“Well, thank you, Julian. I guess I’d better speak to the police again.”

“Okay, good.” Julian’s voice faded as though he were calling from the moon. “So long. I just thought I’d let you know.”

So Homer told Police Chief Flower about the hand he had seen in Gowing’s Swamp. Maybe, he said, it belonged to a man named Peter Harris who was missing from Pond View.

At first Jimmy Flower pooh-poohed it, but at Homer’s urging he agreed to walk around the corner of the building and speak to the fire chief, because some of the fire fighters were scuba divers. It turned out that the divers were pleased to have an honest-to-God reason for putting on their rubber suits and testing their equipment. But when Homer told them what the problem was, they lost their enthusiasm. And then it took the rest of the afternoon because they had to borrow underwater lighting equipment from Cambridge.

It wasn’t until late in the day that two divers from the Concord Fire Department eased themselves into the hole in the middle of the quaking bog with a lot of breathing apparatus and submersible lamps and grappling hooks.

The whole thing was embarrassing. The divers found nothing in Gowing’s Swamp at all, not even a dead horse. Homer was mortified.