The road out of Southwick angled northeasterly into Limerick, and I followed the Goff brothers’ map in my head to the right fork and then the sharp right turn onto the dirt road at the stop sign, and fifteen minutes after I’d driven away from the general store in Southwick I crossed the little wooden bridge over the rocky streambed and turned onto the pair of ruts leading into the woods. If the Goff boys hadn’t been funning me, that would take me to Albert Stoddard’s hunting camp by the pond.
The roadway was old and rocky and the ruts were deep, and I had to steer my left-side tires onto the crown between them to prevent the undercarriage of my BMW from scraping against the rocks.
Goldenrod and grass grew in the roadway. I couldn’t tell how recently any vehicle had been here, but it was obvious that it was not heavily traveled.
Well, Gordon Cahill’s little Corolla had been here. Gordie had taken the photos to prove it.
And the photos showed Albert’s Volkswagen. That made two vehicles before mine.
I drove in first gear, and the weeds and brush scraped against the sides of my car. Henry stood on the backseat with his nose pressed against the window, alert for partridges.
I crept along at about five miles per hour. The old roadway seemed to go on and on. It passed over the trickle of a brook, bumped up and down small hills, curved through woods and past grown-up meadows, and I guessed I’d gone over half a mile when it crested a rise and began to descend. Here the woods thinned into meadow studded with clumps of alder and poplar and juniper, and below me lay a little bowl-shaped pond nestled among the low wooded hills.
I stopped to take a look. Albert’s camp crouched close to the pond in a grove of big pine trees. Gordon Cahill had taken his pictures from right here on the old roadway.
I keep a pair of bird-watching binoculars in my glove box. I took them out and scanned the scene. The green Volkswagen was nowhere to be seen. The place looked deserted.
I continued down the hill, pulled up in front of the camp, got out, and walked around it. The clapboards, once painted white, were now gray and flaking. Pine needles clogged the gutters, and a few bricks had fallen away from the top of the chimney.
Out back stood an unpainted outhouse. The door hung open. I peeked in. It was a two-holer. Most of the outhouses I’d seen—and used—had two or even three side-by-side seats, and I always wondered if, back in the days of outhouses, visiting them had been a social activity.
A half-empty roll of toilet paper sat on the wooden bench. The rims of the seats were gouged and splintered where porcupines,
I guessed, had gnawed on them. They looked pretty uncomfortable.
Beside the house was a small barn with a caved-in roof. I slid open the door and went inside. Aside from an ancient tractor, a couple of oil drums, a rack of rusty gardening tools, and a stack of firewood, it was empty.
I prowled around the rest of the area. There was no green Volkswagen Beetle—or any other functional vehicle—anywhere, which, I cleverly deduced, meant Albert wasn’t there.
I went back to my car, let Henry out, and he and I followed a path down to the edge of the pond. Beside the path at a little sandy beach, a red Old Town canoe lay overturned on a pair of sawhorses. I went over to it and brushed my hand over it. Some dried sand was caked on its skin.
I looked at the sand on the rim of the pond and saw a few grooves such as the keel of a canoe would leave if it had been launched or landed there. It was impossible to tell how recently they’d been made.
The canoe had been used sometime recently. The sand would’ve been washed off the canoe in the first rainstorm. I tried to remember. It hadn’t rained for over a week, at least in Boston.
Henry waded in and started paddling around. I sat on the pine needles, leaned my back against the trunk of a tree, and watched him.
Albert, where the hell are you?
The sun was falling behind the mountains beyond the pond. Off to my right, half a dozen wood ducks wheeled in and splashed down. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after six. I had about half an hour of daylight left.
I called Henry in, and we headed back to the camp.
I stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the screen porch for a minute, pondering the pros and cons of breaking and entering. The outside screen door hung slightly ajar. I wouldn’t have to do any breaking to enter the porch. I pulled it open and went in. Henry, of course, followed me.
A square table and four creaky-looking rocking chairs sat on the narrow porch. The wood on all the pieces of furniture was raw and rough, as if time and weather and heavy use had worn away their finish. It would be a nice place to sit and rock and look at the pond, especially at dawn and dusk when deer and turkeys would be active and bass or trout might be dimpling the water’s surface.
I was tempted to sit in one of those rockers and try it, except here, on this porch and away from the open water of the pond, the shadows were creeping in fast. The woods already looked dark. I wanted to get on with it.
I tried the door that opened to the inside of the camp. It was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped directly into the kitchen.
Entering, surely, though technically, at least, not breaking.
“Albert?” I said without expectation. “You here?”
If he was, he wasn’t admitting it.
The shadows were even deeper inside. What light there was came from four small windows on two of the walls. I blinked a few times, and after a minute my eyes adjusted, and I saw that the entire downstairs of the camp consisted of a single room. The floor was cracked and faded yellow linoleum that was curling up along the edges. The walls were cheap old imitation pine paneling.
The kitchen had a soapstone sink with a hand pump. It was flanked by cabinets without doors that held glasses, mugs, plates, canned goods, pots, and pans. There was a
blackened wood stove with a flat surface for cooking. The wood box beside the stove was empty. There was an oval dining table pushed against the wall. Four mismatched wooden chairs were pushed in around it.
The opposite end of the room was dominated by a large fieldstone fireplace. Facing it were two soft chairs, a big sofa, and a coffee table. On both sides of the fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bookcases had been built in, and they were stuffed with books.
A narrow, open stairway against the back wall led up to what appeared to be a sleeping loft over the kitchen end of the camp.
A Coleman lantern sat on the kitchen table. I lit it with my Zippo lighter.
My stereotype of a hunting camp included a mounted deer head over the fireplace and a stuffed mallard sitting on the mantel and a fox pelt tacked to the wall, but Albert’s camp had none of these artifacts. In fact, what struck me was what the place was missing—personality, character, history, family. No old maps tacked on the walls, no ancient family photos or outdated calendars or old license plates, no fishing rods hanging on pegs, no stacks of board games on the shelves.
It struck me as the sort of place where a bunch of guys might come for a weekend to play cards and grill steaks and drink beer and escape women—which, come to think of it, probably fit Albert’s needs perfectly. I wondered if he had a bunch of guys he liked to hang out with.
Or boys. Maybe he brought boys here.
I realized I didn’t know Albert very well.
I took the lantern over to the stairs leading up to the loft. I hesitated at the bottom and said, “Albert, I hope to hell you’re not up there.”
No response. I went up the narrow stairway.
A grown man would have to stoop to walk around in the loft. I chose not to walk around. I could see everything from the top of the stairs.
Two bare mattresses lay directly on the floor. Otherwise, it was empty.
Albert, asleep or dead, was not there.
Finding Albert’s body, I realized, was what I’d been expecting, and dreading.
I let out a long breath and went back down the stairs. Henry was waiting at the bottom with a where-the-hell-did-you-go look on his face.
I scratched his forehead and went over to the fireplace. I lifted the lantern and scanned the books in the shelves. It was an eclectic collection of novels and biographies, mysteries and westerns. None, as near as I could tell from a cursory look at the titles, had been published since about 1970.
Henry had crawled up on the sofa, and he was curled in a corner giving me his isn’t-it-time-to-eat? look. I sat beside him, and when I set the lantern on the coffee table, I noticed that a book lay there along with a chipped white coffee mug and a big glass ashtray. Both the mug and the ashtray were empty.
I picked up the book. It was a biography of Henry Clay. I guessed Albert was reading it. His place was marked about two-thirds of the way through with a letter-sized envelope.
I slipped the envelope out of the book. It had been addressed to Albert at Tufts University. It was dated June 22 of this year and postmarked from Milford, New Hampshire.
It had been slit open. Inside were a couple of folded-up newspaper clippings. I took them out, laid them side by side on the coffee table, and moved the lantern closer.
They were obituaries—one for a man named Oliver S. Burlingame and the other for Mark Gorham Lyman.
I assumed—although I could’ve been wrong—that these clippings had been mailed to Albert in this envelope. Maybe not. Maybe he just used the envelope to keep them in. But either way, these obituaries apparently had some significance to Albert.
The typeface and bland formulaic style suggested they’d been cut from small-town newspapers.
I read the first one:
OLIVER S. BURLINGAME
Banker, Little League Coach
KINKAID–Oliver S. Burlingame, 45, died accidentally March 19.
Mr. Burlingame was born April 12, 1957, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, son of Anne (Stowell) and Raymond Burlingame. He attended the St.
Paul’s School in Concord, NH, where he was captain of the cross-country team and a member of the rifle team.
Mr. Burlingame earned a B.A. degree in finance and marketing from Northeastern University in 1980. He moved to Kinkaid in 1982 and began work as a loan officer for the Kinkaid branch of the St. Louis Savings Bank. He was the assistant manager of the bank at the time of his death.
Mr. Burlingame was an avid skeet shooter and a champion bass fisherman.
Family members include two daughters, Mary Ellen Burlingame and Anne (Burlingame) Marvell, both of Kinkaid.
Services are private. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations in Mr. Burlingame’s memory be made to the St. Paul’s School, Concord, NH 03301.
Several things struck me. First was the word “accidentally,” coupled with the fact that no medical facility was mentioned as the place he had died.
Second was the New Hampshire connection. Peterborough, where Burlingame was born, lay less than a half hour’s drive from both Southwick, where Albert Stoddard grew up, and Limerick, where I now sat. And come to think of it, Milford, where the envelope had been postmarked, was perhaps a half hour’s drive east of Southwick.
I had no idea where Kinkaid was, though a good guess would put it in Missouri, assuming the St. Louis Savings Bank was a clue.
Third was the fact that in more than twenty years, Oliver Burlingame seemed not to have made much progress in his life. The leap from loan officer to assistant manager of the same branch bank suggested perhaps one promotion. A man of little ambition, or limited ability, or both.
Fourth was Burlingame’s age. Albert Stoddard was about forty-five, too.
Hm. I turned to the other obit.
MARK GORHAM LYMAN
Sales manager, church deacon
BANGOR–Mark Gorham Lyman, 46, died suddenly on April 2.
Mr. Lyman was born in Keene, New Hampshire, and graduated from Bangor High School where he played on the football and baseball teams. He served in the United States Army where he attained the rank of corporal. Upon his discharge he returned to Bangor, where he became a salesman for Sprague Electric. He was the regional sales manager at the time of his death.
Mr. Lyman served as a deacon for the St. Anne’s Episcopal Church for sixteen years and was active in the Bangor Community Theater.
He leaves his wife, Gail (Evans) Lyman, and one son, Mark Gorham Lyman, Jr.
Funeral services will be held at 11:00 A.M. on April 5 at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church.
So. Burlingame died “accidentally,” while this Mark Gorham Lyman died “suddenly.” Keene, New Hampshire, Lyman’s
birthplace, was maybe a half hour’s drive from Southwick. Lyman, like Burlingame, was about Albert Stoddard’s age.
And the two men had died within a couple weeks of each other.
I started to reread the Burlingame obit—and that’s when Henry jerked his head up, barked, uncoiled himself, and went skittering on his toenails across the linoleum floor.
He pressed his nose against the door and growled deep in his throat.
“Cut it out,” I said to him.
He continued to growl.
I hastily refolded the two clippings, put them back in the envelope, and slid the envelope into my jacket pocket.
I picked up the lantern, went over to the kitchen door, and knelt beside Henry. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I said.
I thought of porcupines and skunks and raccoons. I didn’t want Henry to tangle with any of those critters. Bird-dog genes might’ve flowed through Henry’s veins, but he was still a city dog.
The Goff brothers had mentioned bears. Black bears, our New England species, were notoriously shy. Still, all bears were territorial. A Brittany spaniel would be no match for a bear.
I told Henry to sit, which he did, and to stay, which I knew he would do. Walt Duffy, his previous owner, had trained him well, and so far my haphazard commitment to discipline had not untrained him.
I opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the screened-in porch. I held up the lantern and looked around. I saw nothing except the darkness under the pine trees, heard
nothing except the soft early-evening breeze rustling the branches.
The light from my lantern didn’t penetrate the dirty old screening very well, so I pushed open the screen door and started down the back steps … and then something hard smashed against the bony knob of my right ankle.
I yelped, felt myself falling, dropped the lantern, flailed my arms, and crashed onto the ground. I landed flat on my chest, and the wind blew out of my lungs.
The lantern flared and then died when it hit the ground. All was darkness.
I curled fetally on my side, grabbed my throbbing ankle with both hands, and tried to suck breath into my lungs. Sharp fiery pains were shooting up my leg and my chest burned. My mind whirled with confusing thoughts and images.
Then I became aware of movement close behind me, the merest whisper of sound—the smooth sole of a shoe scraping over a soft blanket of pine needles, and then the slow, calm exhale of a breath.
I sensed that someone was standing close to me.
I turned my head and looked up. The figure of a man, silhouetted against the silvery night sky, loomed over me.
“What’s your problem?” I said. “Albert? Is that—?”
He kicked me in the ribs. He grunted with the effort.
It felt like I’d been shot. Red lights flared like sudden flames inside my head.
He put his foot on my chest and rolled me onto my back. Then something pressed hard against the middle of my forehead. It felt like the side-by-side ends of two sharp, slender metal pipes cutting a figure-eight into my skin.
It took me just an instant to realize what it was.
It was the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I figured my head was about to be blown off.
Then the pressure on my forehead went away. The gun barrel traced a slow, sensuous line down the side of my face and over my chest and belly. It stopped at my groin and prodded me there.
My scrotum shriveled. I took a deep breath, started to speak—and that’s when he smashed the gun barrel down on the very center of the top of my head, and white lights blazed for an instant before everything went black.