The directions brought him to the bottom of a steeply climbing dirt road and, just as the boy had promised, a bull stood in the field, staring at the mountain that arose from the landscape across the road in the near distance and slowly moving his jaws. He was the picture of perfect contentment, reddish brown, with a huge set of horns, and his back rippled and shone in the bright August sunlight.
Warren pulled the Galaxie over to the side of the road and was rolling up the windows when a sedan with the words STATE POLICE and a seal with a pine tree in the center turned up the road behind him and pulled over.
Detective Lieutenant Tommy Johnson of the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation called to him, “Don’t bother with the windows. How are you, Frankie? How’s the moving going?” It had been Warren’s father’s nickname for him when he was a boy so of course Tommy would use it. But it felt strange, a relic of his childhood. Everyone but his parents just called him Warren now. Carefully locking the driver’s side door and then feeling silly about it since his windows were wide open, Warren got into the sedan and grinned at Tommy, who grinned back and winked before pulling out and speeding along the road. Tommy, an army buddy of Warren’s father who had been a regular if infrequent presence in Warren’s life, had always reminded Warren of an elf. Though he was nearly six feet tall, his thin face, small nose, and slightly protruding ears gave him the mischievous air of a character in a children’s book. A radio crackled on the car’s dashboard stand.
“Almost done,” Warren said. “I was unpacking the dishes when the boy came over.”
“How are you finding the place?” Tommy had put Warren in touch with the real estate agent who had arranged the rental, sight unseen. “Nice town, Bethany, isn’t it?” His voice held a little uncertainty. Warren had never been to Bethany, Vermont, before Tommy had convinced him to move here.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty little place all right.”
“Well, sorry to call you out before you’ve settled in, but it’s a good chance for you to get the lay of the land.”
They started up the hill. Both sides of the narrow, hard-packed dirt road were lined with low stone walls tumbling over in places, brownish-green fields stretching beyond. As they climbed, a herd of black-and-white cows came into view and they passed a white farmhouse and a big red barn.
“Fire was at a farm owned by a man name of Weber,” Tommy said. “His wife smelled smoke and sent one of her kids down to call it in. They’ve got a volunteer fire department here in Bethany and they rang the alarm and the boys went up and put it out. Took a little time, but they kept it contained. The farmer—Hugh Weber’s his name—they couldn’t find him last night so it wasn’t a surprise when they found a body. The regional medical examiner has been here to look at the remains but they’re not much more than bones at this point.”
The scent of smoke was getting stronger through the open window.
“Tell me about the farmer. Weber.”
A little smug grin flashed across Tommy’s mouth for a moment. “According to the chief of police here in Bethany, he’s a bit of an odd duck. He pronounced his name Vay-ber.”
“Was he German?”
“Not for a long time. Grandparents, maybe. Grew up in New York City.”
“Really? How’d he end up running a farm here?”
“Chief says he was one of these back-to-the-land types, came up for the simple life and so forth. We’ll find out more once we get up there, I’m sure.”
“Wife?”
“Yeah. Although … I guess she’s an odd duck too. Chief Longwell said she might be slow, not right in the head. Not much more than a girl herself but she’s got a bunch of kids around the place, all boys. Ah, here we are.” They’d reached the top of the hill. Warren could feel the land fall away on either side, the fields open, sloping down from around a small homestead, with a gray house, stone walls, outbuildings, and a big wooden barn, one side of it a black dent where it had burned. Across the road, twenty or thirty sheep grazed, white-and-black dots in a sea of green. A couple of cows stood by a tree in a small paddock next to a smaller barn.
Out of Tommy’s car, the air was thick with the smell of burnt wood. Agony Hill. He wondered how it had gotten that name.
A large pickup truck with a pile of hay in the bed, a Bethany Police Department cruiser, and a fire truck sat in the barnyard. There were a couple of firefighters still hosing down the side of the barn, but the fire was mostly out. “They think they saved about half of the hay,” one of the men said and Tommy nodded seriously. Warren wasn’t sure how valuable hay was. Obviously it meant something for the man to mention it, though.
The barn was standard New England fare, from what Warren could tell, tall, with a steeply pitched roof and a simple rectangular shape, except for a few small extensions, one of which had clearly been the source of the fire; it had burned down to its headers, beams, and a few sections of roof. The front of the barn was blackened by the fire and a large set of double sliding doors lay on the ground, splintered by what looked to Warren like a hatchet blade.
A young officer, gangly, red-headed, dressed in the green uniform of the Vermont State Police, was guarding the entrance to the barn. He stepped forward and Tommy introduced him as Trooper Goodrich. “Trooper Goodrich here is interested in criminal investigation,” Tommy said with a wink. “He can be your assistant, help you get up to speed. It’s going to be great to have you helping out down here.”
Warren smiled at the young trooper. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty and he looked extremely nervous. “Franklin Warren. Nice to meet you.” The kid blushed deeply and shook Warren’s hand.
“Who called it in?” Warren asked Goodrich.
“One of her boys,” Goodrich said. “They don’t have a telephone here so he drove down to one of the neighbors’ places.”
Warren pointed to the splintered wood on the ground. “Tell me about these doors here.”
“Well, the fire chief said it was bolted on the inside when they got here so they broke it down,” Goodrich said, his voice squeaking a little. Warren knelt and inspected the pieces of door that had been splintered and destroyed by the firemen.
“This was the only way in?” Tommy asked.
Trooper Goodrich nodded and Tommy said quickly, “Get a cordon up. This is evidence.” Goodrich nodded and went off to do it.
Warren studied the pieces of wood and the hardware for a few more seconds and then said, “Let’s go in.”
The barn was cavernous inside, the ceiling soaring high above them. Sunlight shone in through holes and gaps in the boards high on the walls, sending strange beams of light here and there that reminded Warren of a spiderweb. To one side, bales of golden hay were stacked high like a staircase. That hay seemed not to have caught fire, but across a narrow channel to the right, more stacks were blackened and soaked with water.
“By God, they’re lucky they didn’t lose it all,” Tommy said. “Those boys did well to put it out before it all went up.” Warren took that in. Tommy was right. The barn was essentially a tinderbox. That the firefighters had managed to save so much of it was a small miracle.
The body had been found in what was left of the scorched extension to the side of the barn by the ruined hay, about twenty feet by twenty feet. There had been a door separating it from the central space of the barn, but it was gone now, burned and on the ground. A small group of men, some in uniforms, were standing around, looking at something, and Warren, knowing it was probably the body, slowed his pace, trying to steel himself. Tommy looked back and waited for him.
“You okay, Frank?” he asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
They entered what was left of the extension.
The object of their interest lay on a metal cot. Warren took a handkerchief from his back pocket and covered his mouth and nose with it as he approached. He felt dizzy all of a sudden; the room smelled horribly of cooked meat. The remains were heavily damaged by fire, the familiar stick-figure shape of the skeleton barely recognizable.
It was hard to tell what else the small room had contained; everything had been burned almost beyond recognition. But as Warren looked at the collapsed forms in the early light filtering through the gaps in the roof, he thought he could make out a desk and chair and a bookcase, some blackened and waterlogged piles that must have been books.
“Tommy,” said a tall, burly man in a uniform. Not green, so not state police, Warren thought. He must be local, an assumption that was confirmed when Tommy introduced him as the chief of the Bethany Police Department, Roy Longwell.
“Good to meet you,” Longwell said to Warren. “Tommy told me he was bringing a hotshot new guy up from the city.” There was a bit of an edge to the words and Warren found himself glancing over at Tommy, who looked slightly uncomfortable and said, “We know anything about this yet?”
“Just what you’ve got in front of you,” Longwell said slowly. “You heard they had to break down the door?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I heard. What do you think, Detective Warren?”
Warren looked up quickly, letting the handkerchief drop and feeling suddenly on display. “He was lying on the cot,” he said to Tommy. “I don’t think he tried to get up. So sleeping, maybe. This room is definitely where the fire started, so the question is, why didn’t he wake up?”
“That might have something to do with it,” Longwell said, pointing to a gin bottle against the wall, the label scorched.
Warren patted his trouser pocket, looking for his notebook. But of course it wasn’t there. He hadn’t planned on working this morning.
“Is there a crime scene photographer?” he asked. “I’d like to get some snaps of the floor.” He strode across the room to the doorway to the little office. “And the doors out there.” He pointed back to the main barn entrance.
Tommy, looking sheepish, said, “No, but there might be a camera in the car. I’ll check when we’re finished here.”
Warren caught Chief Longwell studying him. He was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered and packed into his uniform, his thick head of salt-and-pepper hair like a helmet. He offered a small smile when he met Warren’s eyes, and his were pale blue, intent, a little predatory. Warren could feel Tommy’s nervousness at being under his watch.
Warren tried to fix in his head the location of the body, the bottle, and a few other features of the space. It would have to do. He thought for a moment about what he wanted to know. “Why was he sleeping out here?” he asked Goodrich.
“The neighbor referred to this as the ‘pig house,’” the trooper said. “I guess he had a typewriter out here, books and so forth. He loved to write letters to the editor of our local paper here. Long letters. Practically every week. He was always mad about something.”
Warren tried to imagine what kind of a person would come out to a pig house in the back of a cow barn to write angry letters to the editor of the local newspaper.
“You’re the chief here,” he said to Longwell, wanting to cut through as much bullshit as he possibly could. “What was the first thing you thought when you heard there’d been a fire up here?”
Longwell glanced at Tommy and then said, “I thought of Forrest Germond.”
Nobody explained, so Warren said, “Who?”
Longwell sighed. “Farmer from a town twenty miles to the south whose land was taken for the interstate. You know they’re building the interstate through Bethany? He locked himself in his barn, let the animals out, set the barn on fire, and then shot himself, the day before they came to bulldoze the farm. He loved it, didn’t want to give it up.”
Tommy said, “We investigated it, but it was pretty clear it was suicide.”
Warren turned to stare at him. “When was this?”
“Last summer.”
“You think there’s any connection?”
When Tommy didn’t say anything, Longwell offered, “Well, interstate’s not coming up here on Agony Hill. Nobody wants this farm. But…”
Warren had to resist asking Tommy why he hadn’t mentioned it until now. “But it could have put the idea in his head,” he said.
Tommy rubbed a thumb and index finger over the bridge of his nose. “Seems odd he didn’t get out of the barn otherwise. Even if he’d been drinking, I’d say. And there’s the bolted door.” Warren now understood Tommy’s demeanor. He’d assumed this was suicide from the moment he heard about it. He was using the scene to show Warren around, get a sense of him as an investigator. He didn’t think this was a real case. Longwell nodded in agreement. Apparently he’d decided too.
Warren got out his handkerchief again and wiped the sweat off his face. “I’d like to talk to the family.”
“They’re not there,” Longwell said. “Dr. Falconer came up. Mrs. Weber, she wasn’t feeling well.” He averted his gaze for a second, then continued, “He took her and the boys down to Uptons’. Said he’d give her something to make her sleep.”
Warren glanced at Tommy to see if he objected. It was standard practice to try to speak with witnesses as soon as possible after any unnatural death.
“I’d say it can wait until tomorrow,” Tommy said, with a finality that Warren didn’t like. “You and Trooper Goodrich can come back then. Now, Frankie, you want to come with me and we’ll see if I’ve got that camera.” Longwell and his men went to confer with the firemen, and Warren followed Tommy back to the cruiser. “There you go,” he said, rummaging around in the trunk and coming up with a simple Canon. “There should be film in there. Trooper Goodrich can help you get up to speed on what they’ve got at the barracks. You’ll find that our equipment’s not the most up-to-date right now, but we’re, uh, creative. I’ve been able to utilize some real up-to-the-minute techniques in some of my investigations and I know you’ll introduce us to some even better methods now you’re here. You’ll get the barracks set up just the way you want it, I’m sure.” Tommy seemed distracted, eager to hand this off to Warren and be on his way.
Warren watched the scene unfolding in front of the barn. “How does jurisdiction work in a situation like this?” he asked Tommy, trying to keep his voice gentle, merely curious. “With the local men, the chief there, and then with us here too?”
“Oh, well, I guess it depends on what it turns out to be. But this one’s ours for now. Chief may be poking around too, but I want you to investigate it the way you’re used to. If it’s suicide, then we want to know that. Everyone will be a little jumpy because of the connection with that other farmer. The interstate’s caused a lot of hoopla around here.”
Warren nodded, feeling not at all reassured.
They found Trooper Goodrich back at the barn and Warren told him he wanted to take some photos of the remains. They were walking back inside when he thought of something. “Any animals dead?”
Goodrich pointed to what must have been a row of stalls. “Nah, they’re out in the barnyard or on pasture in the summer. That’s what she said anyway. Mrs. Weber.” There was something about the way he said Mrs. Weber. He and Tommy and Trooper Goodrich went back to the remains of the pig house and Warren showed the younger man how to take crime scene photographs. “I like more rather than less,” he said. “Take them like this if you can, so you can put the prints together and get a sense of the whole scene.” He showed Goodrich how he used his finger to mark the edge of each section so they could put them all together once they were printed and they wouldn’t miss anything. Goodrich seemed interested and told Warren he liked photography and was looking forward to learning more about it.
“Hey, Pink, give us a hand, will you?” one of the firefighters called out once they were done.
Warren’s face must have shown curiosity about the nickname because Goodrich said, “Everyone around here calls me Pinky.” Warren had just thought to wonder where the kid had gotten the nickname when Goodrich blushed again, more furiously this time, the color spreading alarmingly along his face, from his chin up to his forehead, and the question was answered for him.
Tommy followed him back out of the barn and Warren understood that he was on display. Tommy was the reason he had this job and Warren needed to show him that he had made a good choice in pulling whatever strings he’d pulled to go around the usual custom of promoting from within to bring Warren up here from Boston.
Tommy, who’d been the top detective for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation for five years now, had pitched the job to Warren over drinks at a bar in Cambridge last winter. Tommy had been at the hospital at Harvard for a training and he’d called up Warren’s father and asked if he could meet Warren to talk about something. He’d taken their drinks to a back booth and after a little chitchat, he’d told Warren that he’d been handling investigations all over the state, but that it was becoming untenable as more and more crime seemed to be making its way to Vermont. He wanted Warren in Bethany to take on investigations in the southern part of the state.
Before 1947, Tommy had explained, Vermont hadn’t needed a statewide police force. Any petty crimes that came up were investigated by local sheriffs or police departments. “Wasn’t much to investigate,” Tommy had said. But then, after World War II, there had been a Bennington College student who disappeared, and they’d created the State Police. By 1957, they’d put together a team with some expertise in crime detection and investigation.
Warren remembered stirring the ice in his whiskey sour as the door to the bar had opened and a cruel gust of frigid air came barreling through. The offer of the job had seemed like another kind of door, an escape route. He had agreed before he’d really thought it through. “We’re doing our best, but we could use a crack detective like you,” Tommy had said. “Up on all the latest stuff.”
Warren was not too modest to admit that he was a talented investigator, but he was pretty sure the job offer had also been inspired by that faraway Italian battlefield where Warren’s father had saved Tommy Johnson’s life by hauling him out of the mud and tying his belt around Tommy’s leg to prevent him from bleeding out from a shrapnel wound. Tommy and his leg had gone on to marry a woman named Judith, have five daughters, and become Detective Lieutenant Tommy Johnson of the Vermont State Police. He had never forgotten Allen Warren’s act of heroism. How could he? He must look at those scars every morning when getting dressed.
Outside the barn, the cows had gathered at the fence line—if only they could speak—and Warren went over to watch them for a minute and get his bearings. The house faced the road, the barn to the south side. Behind that were fields sloping down to a tree line. He had the sense that somewhere, far in the distance, there was water running. A river probably. He didn’t think there were any lakes around here.
The farmhouse was low-slung, with what looked like an old addition out in the back. Up close he could see the paint was peeling and dirty, that it wasn’t so much gray as dirty white. The windows were dusty but when he looked through one on the porch, he could see what looked like a kitchen table, piled with dishes and papers. He walked around the back of the house, nearly tripping over a child’s wagon on its side in the grass. There was a picnic table, scabbed together from scrap wood and painted green. The yard had been neatly trimmed, but beyond was a field of tall grass, a rusting tractor abandoned picturesquely at the edge.
The other windows yielded partial views of more rooms of the house, a cluttered corner of a living room, lined with bookshelves, what looked like a bathroom, an old-fashioned metal tub in the center of the room but no toilet or sink. The absence of the first was explained by the small wooden structure in the corner of the yard: the outhouse. He came back around to the front of the house just as three men came out of the barn with a wooden stretcher, the body zipped into a bag. They placed the zipped bag in the hearse to go to the state pathologist in Burlington. It looked very light; Hugh Weber’s remains barely filled it.
Warren imagined the family sleeping inside the house. They must have heard the cows bellowing in the barnyard, awakened to the smell of smoke and the sight of flames engulfing the barn. But if it wasn’t suicide, why hadn’t their bellowing awakened Hugh Weber and why hadn’t he gotten out of the barn? Why had he been sleeping in the barn anyway? Had he bolted the door so no one could get in to save him? And what had started the fire?
He’d get answers to all these questions soon enough. For now, he would have to learn what he could from the place. Once the hearse had driven away, he walked back around the house again.
That was when he saw the paper taped to a windowpane in the kitchen. Someone had pressed flowers and leaves between two pieces of wax paper and then written below, in black ink, words that he had to read backward through the window.
Summer end full leafing
Flowers filling ground space open
Petals blue and yellow on
Autumns open leaf pull
Warren stood there for a moment, trying to understand the message, then gave up and headed for Tommy and the car.