Tuesday, February 12
Wednesday, February 13
Getting out of the city was tedious. As is often the case, all the folks who chose to ignore the forecast decided to head home at the same time. The ones who had stayed home from work decided to go shopping while the others were bailing from work. The result was gridlock. The streets were snarled and the salt trucks, which had been waiting for hours, were rendered useless.
The interstates were easier to negotiate. Trucks loaded with salt and pushing plows spread across all of the lanes of I-66 to dispatch the fallen snow. When the snow immediately began to cover the pavement, another fleet of trucks took over. The storm, it seemed, had met its match. But as I traveled west, the snow fell faster than it could be plowed. An SUV changed lanes too quickly, spun out, hit the median, then another car. Traffic stopped and the snow piled up. I assisted other drivers with the injured until police and paramedics arrived, but the opportunity to beat the storm home passed.
That I reached the poor farm at all was something of a miracle. A chance encounter with a pickup truck sporting a snow plow and a driver willing to take two hundred dollars to carve a path to my front door was all that saved me. Even so, it was after midnight. The power was off, the house was cold, and the kitties were pissed. I fed them and built a fire. The five of us slept in a heap on the floor while the storm raged outside.
The snow fell through the night. I awoke at sunrise and ventured out on the porch. The snow was lighter now, the small flakes swirling on their way to the ground. All totaled, another fifteen inches had been added to the snow pack. A gusty north wind whipped the new snow into impressive drifts, then sculpted them with a delicate touch. If there hadn’t been so much of it, I might have thought it beautiful.
The electricity was still off. I had no heat, no telephone service, and no internet connection. More importantly, I needed to drain the water from the pipes to keep them from freezing. I also needed to look in on my neighbor, Gloria, to be certain she was managing. I was eager to process what I had learned about Seymour Van Dyke, but that endeavor would have to wait a bit longer.
I used a camping stove to make coffee and eggs, then donned a winter coat, gloves, and boots, and headed outside. The wind was sharp and penetrating, swirling the snow into blinding white clouds. I shoveled the snow off the porch and made a path to the well house. I shut off the pump and opened the drain valve, then headed to the north pasture. Here, the wind had redistributed the snow, exposing brown grass where the land was flat while creating thick drifts where the land sloped upward. The patchy snow cover gave the field an uncertain look, much like a snake in mid-molt.
Gloria Strap lived on the other side of Lynn Run, a small stream that marked the eastern border of my farm. Her house was set behind a berm that provided some protection when Lynn Run left its banks in the spring.
Visiting Gloria was difficult under any circumstance. She was in her late seventies and passing through the early stages of dementia. Her head was filled with ghosts of family and friends who had hurt her, misunderstood her, and abandoned her for no reason she could articulate. When the ghosts visited her, she devolved into inconsolable sobbing. When lucid, she could tell fascinating stories about Lyle and its residents in decades past. Winter seemed to make her short-term memory worse. I’d asked Doc if cabin fever had something to do with it, but he told me her mind was slowly failing her and that, at some point, she would have to be institutionalized.
I spend enough time dealing with my own demons that I wasn’t anxious to deal with Gloria’s. But despite my reluctance, I trudged forward. I saw her through the bay window at the back of her house. She was sitting in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, her hands folded in her lap. Gloria, like Luci Turnbull, wore her age with elegance and grace. She had a thick mantel of snow-white hair, beautiful skin, and a gentle figure. Soft lines gave her face character, but she had been spared the wrinkles and loose skin of her contemporaries. What time had spared her body it had taken from her brain. Gloria would lose her identity long before she lost her life or her beauty.
I studied her for a moment, her eyes frozen in a vacant stare. I tapped on the glass, but she remained motionless. I hurried to the front door and stepped inside, unsure what I would find. Cold air greeted me, but the smell of death did not. When I knelt in front of Gloria’s chair, she gazed at me. “I don’t remember you,” she said.
“You will,” I said. “You’re freezing,” I added, squeezing her hands.
Gloria said nothing while I started a fire in her woodstove. The draft was good and the wood dry. In a few minutes, the black metal clicked and clanked to life. I put a pot of water on the stove and, while it heated, rubbed her hands. When it whistled, I made her a cup of tea and sat next to her.
“Has Roslyn been here?” asked Gloria.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do, unless you’re getting as forgetful as me. She’s my sister. She played with you when you visited the old poor farm.”
I remembered a woman of little patience with children who was quick to criticize and scold.
“Of course, Roslyn,” I replied.
Gloria finished her tea. I took her cup, and she smiled at me. “I’m sorry, Shep. You’d think I’d remember you of all people.” She sighed. “I know what’s happening to me. I’ve seen what it does. That’s not how I plan on dying.”
“You haven’t lost yet,” I said.
I checked Gloria’s generator and saw that it had been left in manual mode. “That damn thing costs too much money to run,” she said, “and it’s too damn loud.” I convinced her to let me turn it on and to leave it in auto mode. Moments later, the furnace kicked in and the lights came on. I warmed Gloria’s breakfast in the microwave and watched her eat it. As I left, I wondered how I’d cope with her reality.
By the time I headed back, the wind had shifted to the south. The light falling snow was now rain mixed with sleet. As I arrived at my front porch, I heard the throaty growl of a diesel engine approaching. I turned and saw a plume of snow moving toward me. A few minutes later, the noise stopped and the plume dissipated, revealing the pickup truck that had rescued me the night before. The door opened and a burly thirty-year-old with a pony tail and an earring stepped out. He nodded and said, “Markus is the name. I was just down the road a piece so I thought I’d come by and see how you were doing.”
I offered him a cup of coffee and invited him inside. Markus was a far cry from a chatty guy, seeming to prefer to communicate with head nods. He followed me into the kitchen, where his attention was drawn to two cats hovering around the refrigerator. “Probably a mouse,” I said.
A long groan suggested that Markus thought otherwise. He grasped the fridge and twisted it away from the wall. Another sigh, and then he actually spoke, “That’s a problem,” he said pointing. I followed his hand to a dimple in the floor, then followed his gaze to a bulge in the ceiling. “Outside,” he said, taking a mug and walking away.
With coffee in hand, we stepped onto the porch into a heavy fog that clung to the snowpack, obscuring everything beyond twenty feet away. The air temperature, which just a few hours ago had been in the twenties, was now almost fifty.
“Don’t be fooled,” said Markus. “The cold and snow are coming back tonight. If it’s heavy, I’ll be back in the morning to keep your driveway open.”
We worked through the crusted snow to where we could see the line where the roof joined the back wall of the house. The line was reasonably straight before a noticeable dip could be seen a few feet on either side of the kitchen. “Most of the year, I’m a contractor,” said Markus. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s happening, but I’d like to check the basement.”
The basement seemed less foreboding this time, with Markus leading the way. I stood by the steps and watched the beam of his flashlight move and pause, then move again. Each time the light stopped, I heard a soft “yup” confirming some undisclosed conclusion.
A few minutes later, Markus joined me at the foot of the stairs. The power had come on and the oil furnace rumbled into operation. “Lucky for you your cats were playing with a ball. The crack in the foundation is new and it’s only going to get bigger. Looks like you’re moving,”
“Can’t you jack it up or something?” I asked.
“I could. I wouldn’t. We would need to pour footers along that back wall. I’d need jack hammers to get through this clay, and the vibration alone might bring it down. This old house isn’t worth killing someone. It’s trying to die. You should let it.”
“How soon?” The question sounded eerily like a question asked of a doctor issuing bad news.
“Tonight. Next year. Maybe never.” Markus looked at me. “You won’t get any warning. My opinion is that if you stay in this house, eventually you’ll be buried under it. I’ll install a temporary support along the middle beam. Once that’s in, you can move your stuff out. Keep in mind that the support will cause the weight to shift to other beams. The support will eventually fail, and the house will implode. With the rain adding to the weight of the snow on the roof, it may happen sooner rather than later.”
In its time as an operating poor farm, the main house had been the residence of a caretaker and his wife. The residents slept in a bunkhouse just behind and to the left of the main dwelling. The current bunkhouse was in very good condition. Individual bedrooms were connected to a large living space fitted with a glass-enclosed fireplace. A common kitchen and dining room adjoined the main room. The bunkhouse had been renovated to accommodate Kikora, a young chimpanzee I was compelled to care for last fall, meaning that some of the doors had been nailed closed and bars fitted in the windows. To keep Kikora out, the furniture had been pushed into the kitchen and a divider fashioned. The bunkhouse was not in shape for me to move in, and I wasn’t skilled enough to remodel it by myself.
I called Heartwood House and explained the situation to Cecil. Cecil didn’t say much other than, “okay,” leaving me wondering if he understood the problem I was describing. An hour later, Sheriff Belamy’s black SUV crept up the rutted road to the house. Harry and Cecil nodded, took their tools, and went to work in the bunkhouse. Robbie and Frieda carried baskets of food inside.
Sheriff Belamy stared at me and laughed. “Shit happens to you more than anyone I know.”
The sheriff and I busied ourselves clearing snow from the bunkhouse. Markus’ red pickup arrived a half hour later. He retreated to the back of his truck and walked into the house with a long metal post and a few tools. Twenty minutes later, he came out.
“That there’s a death trap,” he said, “but you should be good for a little bit. I need to show you what I’ve done and what you need to do while you’re moving out.”
I followed Markus into the basement. He must have had the eyes of a cat because I almost lost him in the shadows near the old boiler. When I found him, he was standing next to a metal post that extended from the floor to the ceiling.
“This here jack is holding up your house, at least for now. But because it’s sitting on dirt, you’re going to need to adjust it every now and again.” He pointed to a large box wrench fitted over a nut. “You turn this clockwise until it gets real tight. Too tight and you may overload the beam at the other end.” He moved his finger to a metal bar. “This is what you push if you was going to release the jack. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to touch that ‘cause the beam here will move and, once it starts, it won’t stop. You see what I’m saying?”
“Turn that one, but not that one,” I said.
“That’s about it,” agreed Markus. “If you hear a cracking noise, get your butt up the stairs real quick like. Of course, she may not give you a warning and just drop on your head.” A moment passed, and Markus slapped me on the back. “I’m just fooling with you.”
“You had me going there,” I said, amazed at how social Markus had become. “One more thing. You have mice, maybe rats, getting in here. Don’t take much of a crack for them beggars to sneak inside. You don’t want them to get into your stuff before you move it.” He clicked on a flashlight and scanned the joists just behind the boiler. “I put a couple of traps up there where I saw droppings on top of your duct work. If they get snapped, you’ll smell ’em.”
I followed Markus to his truck. He offered to take down the house once it was empty and I accepted.
The hardest task was to clear the snow and ice from the well house to turn on the water to the bunkhouse. Belamy helped me free the lid and watched as I climbed down a short ladder. At least in the winter, I didn’t have to worry about copperheads. The water ran muddy for a while. I waited until it cleared, then turned on the water heater.
As the temperature dropped again, Belamy and I dug a path from the main house to the bunkhouse. I moved small appliances, clothes, boxes of books, personal papers, electronic equipment, and anything I could grab to the porch. I couldn’t believe that I could have accumulated so much stuff in a year. Harry, Belamy, and I hauled it all to my new home. At my direction, the poor farm’s historical documents were stacked along the wall in the main room. I put the papers relating to Jennifer Rice’s murder on the small café table near the fireplace. Frieda had found pictures of my mother and Reilly Heartwood and placed them on the mantel.
As the first flakes of new snow started to fall, Belamy insisted that the work was done for the day. I had water, heat, electricity, a functional kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath. The rest could wait.
Robbie helped Frieda, Cecil, and Harry load Belamy’s SUV for the trip back to town. I turned toward the old farmhouse, which was a dark, lonely shape in the fog of falling snow. Sadness gripped me, but I drew in a breath and willed the feeling away. The Residents and this farm are all that connect me to my past. Growing up, I didn’t know Reilly was my father, but I guess at some level I did. This is one of the places where he played with me. He taught me to see the poor people here as family. I remember the smell of bacon and apple pie coming from the kitchen. I remember being told ghost stories by some of the older men and jumping into the hay from the top of the barn. The people I knew then, except for the Residents, are all dead. The old house became my sanctuary, the first place I’d felt safe after leaving prison, and it was dying, too.
When I turned away from the old house, the SUV departed. Robbie, standing a few feet from me, was watching me. “Are you okay?”
“I was just thinking how pretty the old house looks,” I said.
Robbie gave me a doubtful look. “I’m cold and need something to drink. We’re going to go inside and you’re going to explain to me why you failed to let me know about your trip to visit Gus. After you are appropriately contrite, you will tell me what you learned yesterday.”
I followed Robbie into the bunkhouse. She sat on a carpet in front of the fireplace. While I lit a fire, I described my visits with Gus, Zak, and Luci. She made faces but said nothing. I joined her and we watched silently until the logs were engulfed in flames.
“So,” she said, “if I get this right, we have three sets of photographs, all taken by women: Abigail Nichols, also known as Seymour Van Dyke; an unnamed woman who came to the farm with a baby; and Jennifer Rice, the one who was murdered. They aren’t connected by any physical evidence other than the pictures, but you are focused on them because you believe you might be able tease a motive for murder by discovering how they are related. Does that about sum it all up?”
“Pretty much.”
Robbie sat quietly, the glow from the embers painting her face in flickering hues of orange and red. She twirled her index finger around her thumb, signaling she was considering the new information, a process I had learned not to interrupt. The process ended when she said, “Doc and the sheriff asked me to stay behind to make sure you don’t get involved in Jennifer Rice’s murder. They don’t mind if you want to know who took the pictures at the farm. And it’s okay if you want to identify the lady with the baby, how she came to have it, why she was so eager to get away when Doc called the cops, and what happened to the child afterwards. Actually, I suspect they want you to do those things. What they don’t want is for you to be wondering who killed Jennifer Rice. They want you to accept that Albert Loftus did it.”
“So you’re like a double agent,” I said.
“Almost fifty years ago, a woman brought a light brown baby here. She may have sat close to where we are sitting now, thinking about her future. I can’t imagine how tormented she was. I can’t tell you why it bothers me so much that she seems to have disappeared without a trace.”
Another sigh and she stared into the fire. “I think about Jennifer Rice being beaten to death. No one should get away with beating up an elderly woman. No one. I want be certain that Albert killed her. Reggie said he and the detective in charge of the case weren’t certain, that there were holes in the case. The cops don’t know what we know, and we can’t tell them because Reggie’s our client. So if Albert didn’t kill her, it’s up to us to find out who did. I can’t explain why, but that’s where I’m parked.”
When I didn’t respond, she glowered at me. “Don’t even think about reciting that male gibberish about not wanting me to get hurt, blah, blah, blah,” she said in a dismissive tone. “I can probably shoot better than you and run faster.”
“You were always one to stand your ground,” I said.
“I’m serious, Shep. I want to do this.”
With a poker, I pushed a log, sending a shower of embers flying up the chimney. “The way this works,” I said, “is that we identify people who might know something about the victim. If they’re cooperative, they name others and so on. The danger comes from asking the wrong person the right question. But the hardest part is what to do with the answers. We have to decide what we do with what we know. We have to make choices, and sometimes its feels like playing God. Doing the right thing isn’t as easy as it sounds.”
“I can handle it,” she said confidently.
I poked at the log again to give the impression I was doing something useful. Robbie sounded confident about an undertaking she had never taken on. I had survived two quests for the truth involving murders. I wasn’t so sure I was up to doing it again.
I closed the glass doors to the fireplace and took her hand. “Well, then, there you have it.”