Death in the Pines (9 page)

I shook my head. “No charge. Jeremiah paid me already.”

His gaze was wary, and I recognized the look of the righteous one. The monk's-cell apartment fit him: a young man unseasoned by life, still believing the world is populated by good guys and bad, white and black hats, no room for gray. I could read it in his eyes. In his estimation, if you weren't a crusader, you were for sale, you had a price, you had an ulterior motive. “You took money from my grandfather?” he asked in a harsh voice.

“A little. But he bought me with his trust.”

“Yeah. Well. He's dead.”

“And I owe him.”

“So …” Jerry scratched his head. “You'd help me for free?”

“As much as I can. I'm not independently wealthy.”

“But you're a PI. You charge for what you do.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “If I do this, I do it because Jeremiah trusted me. But if this gets big, if I face a lot of travel expenses, if I have to bring in other people, I won't have the cash to continue it.”

“So I'd have to pay you.”

I began to sympathize with the guy who'd hit him with the stun gun. “This isn't about payment. Mostly, it's about my wanting to know who killed your grandfather. Let's cut out the bullshit about money, OK?”

“Can I trust you?”

“I did get you out of the clearing.”

“But you could be one of them, it could be a setup to make me trust you.”

“Then you'd be screwed. But I'm not one of them.”

“Prove it.”

I grinned at him. “You want to see my Eagle Scout badge?” I got up, and he automatically reached for my empty beer bottle. He put it inside a kitchen cabinet, alongside three or four others. Abstemious little monk. “Think about it overnight,” I advised him. “Are you safe here?”

“They took me about half a block from here.”

“Then go stay with someone.”

“You're serious?”

“Dead serious,” I said. “Hop a plane. Or at least go somewhere that's not as easy to find as this place.”

“I could,” he said slowly. “I have some friends who wouldn't mind putting me up. But I don't want my friends hurt, and these guys know where I work, anyway, so what good's that?”

“Do you have a car?”

“Nope.”

I shook my head. “Guys are chasing you, zapping you with a stun gun, they probably killed your grandfather, and they'll involve your friends if you stay with them. You're telling me you can't run away from these guys, you can't avoid them, and you can't fight them. So how are you going to stop them?”

“I could do what they want.”

“What's that?”

“That's the problem,” he said. “I don't know.” He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes unreadable.

I
t had been a long, late evening. I crunched up the old logging road toward my cabin, fighting off a mixture of frustration and anger. Jerry's decision to stay alone in his apartment, expressed in polite words that translated to “I don't trust you, and you can't help me,” galled me. Damn him. I had managed to sell myself on the idea of finding the people who'd killed Jeremiah Smith. I was fairly certain that Jerry either knew who they were or knew the information I'd need.

I'd work on it tomorrow, I promised myself. As I topped the last rise, I wasn't too surprised to see yellow kerosene lamplight spilling from the windows and the faint gray billow of smoke from the chimney. I saw a form pass by the window and released the grip I'd instinctively taken on my gun. Sylvia again. Just what I needed.

She opened the door as I stepped onto the shallow porch. “Hello again,” I said, stepping across the threshold. She inclined her head and went to sit in the straight-backed rocker, the same one she'd taken earlier. Her liquid brown eyes flicked up to meet my gaze, and then she stared down at the floor again.

I took a deep breath of woodstove smoke, kerosene, and some faint musk, probably perfume, though I'd never smelled anything quite like it on any other woman. It was a sensuous aroma, a rutting-animal whiff, but redolent of leaves and loam and deep shaded forest glens.

“Did you find him?” she asked in her precise way.

I plugged my cell phone into its charger, took off my jacket and tossed it on the bed, got a wine bottle and a glass and poured myself a drink. I sat down facing her. She obstinately stared at the floor as I studied her more closely than I had earlier. Her skin was odd, both young and old, flawless from a distance, but from close up scored with minute creases and wrinkles. She might have been twenty-five, she might have been fifty, on the evidence of her skin. Her face had the Asian, high-cheeked quality I'd seen in many Native Americans, but in the lamplight she seemed more European. And now I decided that her hair wasn't black after all, but an incredibly rich and deep chestnut brown.

“Thanks for feeding the stove,” I said.

She nodded but did not look up.

I drank a third of my wine in one swallow. “You were right. Someone used a car to murder the old man.”

She began to rock placidly, silently, casting moving shadows on the rough pine boards.

“Do you know anything else that you should tell me?” I asked.

“You will not believe me.”

I handed her my glass of wine. “Try me.”

She took one small sip, then returned the glass. “Some people stopped you so you would hear the old man's grandson. You went to him. You probably saved his life.” She took a long
breath and then let it out. Dropping her voice as if confiding a secret, she murmured, “You are a good man.”

“And some bird told you that? Or a squirrel?”

She shook her head. “You cannot understand. It doesn't matter.”

“Deer were standing in the road. Not people.”

She folded her hands in her lap and weaved her head from side to side, but kept her eyes on the rug.

“I can't believe the deer told you, so who did? How? Cell phone? Radio?”

“It doesn't matter,” she said again, and sighed.

“Maybe it's the only thing that does,” I said, and that made her look at me, her brown eyes wide. “Are you talking about, about forest spirits?”

She smiled, a surprisingly childlike smile—or maybe the smile of a mother whose little one had finally said two sensible words. “You think there are spirits in the forest?”

I took another sip of wine. “Sometimes it feels that way. Especially at night.”

She shook her head, now watching me closely. “No little people live out there, if that is what you are thinking. No tiny fairies or sprites or dolls or toys or cartoon characters. No what do you call them, no little elves that disguise themselves as squirrels, trees, rocks. You have to know that the animals, the plants, the rivers, mountains, the soil, are not like that, not like cartoon characters.”

“OK,” I said. “I won't expect a rabbit to ask me what's up.”

She smiled again, as if we had shared a private joke, and then she frowned. “But everything around us does hold Spirit. Is Spirit. Even the walls, the metal in your stove, the floor. This cabin is Spirit, and all its pieces are Spirit, and it is a seamless whole. Like Squirrel. All squirrels are individual animals,
and yet all are Squirrel. It is not that this bear or that bear is Grandfather. It is Bear that is Grandfather. Do you understand what I mean? Your words are difficult, like trying to shape a cup to hold water out of water itself.”

“I don't know.” I couldn't suppress a yawn. Black night brooded outside the windows. “I've been through times of serious thinking about spirit and souls. When my parents died, when my fiancée died, when my best friend died. My conclusion? It beats me. I may find the answer when I die myself. Or not.”

“Your religion teaches you strange ideas. You believe you must die before you know Spirit?”

I gave a weary chuckle. “Religion isn't about making sense. Most believers are satisfied with ‘God said it, so I believe it, and don't bother me with questions.'”

“And you meet God when you die.”

I ran my finger across the window. The Thermopane—one of my upgrades when I bought it—had a small flaw, letting in moisture. It dripped from my fingertip. “Yeah, that's the idea. You meet God and he judges you.”

“I think he will judge you with compassion,” Sylvia said. “You offered your help. Life needs your help, here, in this place, now.” In the lamplight she was startlingly attractive. I thought longingly of bed and of how many months mine had been lonely. She smiled. “I am not here to have sex with you.” It was a soft, firm declaration, spoken without embarrassment or harshness.

“I didn't mean to ask you,” I told her.

“No. But you did ask what you should do next with your life. I have the answer: Life needs your help, and since your life is part of all Life, it would be a good thing to offer that help. We believed you were sincere. That is why it was suggested that I talk with you, guide you if I could.”

“Who suggested?”

Her expression clouded. “I'll introduce you to them when the time is right. They live nearby. All around.”

“Your people?”

She sighed and rose from the chair to go. At the door she paused, hand on the knob, again avoiding eye contact. “I cannot put some things in any words you would accept or understand. But I think you can feel this: when things are out of order, or in the wrong order, the world is in disharmony.”

“A few decades ago kids talked that way,” I said.

“Many thousands of years ago everyone knew it without talking.”

She opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind her.

I stood, holding a half glass of wine. Sylvia exuded a primal sensuousness that aroused me, made me want to touch her, to hold her. She had a softness and a self-assurance that combined oddly in a feminine mystique so powerful that it made me feel like a kid in her presence. At times she spoke with such confidence that her words were heavy with what felt like ancient wisdom, and at other times she had the affect of a beautiful girl-child. And despite her soft refusal, a sensuous grace lived within her that made me want to be with her, to join with her in pure and primordial sex.

And yet she talked to squirrels. She didn't know how to use a phone.

I felt tipsy, but I drank another glass of wine. Then I wanted her back in the cabin with me. I threw open the door and looked out into the faint moonlight. The clouds had cracked open, and through a wide rift in them I saw overhead the glittering strip of the Milky Way, stars like diamond dust on black velvet.

“Sylvia!” The forest was silent, save only for the gentle sound of a wind through naked tree limbs, the soft rustle of pine needles. The wind was coming out of the north, pushing a cold front in. It brushed my face with a bitter touch.

I knew she had gone. Yet I stepped outside and circled the cabin, boots crunching in the snow. She wasn't hiding in the shadows. I didn't spot her tracks.

I'd spent more than half my life coming up with the right answers for people who'd paid me well. John Lincoln was fond of saying there are no real mysteries. “Somebody always knows,” he had told me more than once. “Find the person who knows, and the mystery goes away.”

I was quite certain that John had never met anyone like Sylvia. Completing my circuit of the cabin, I stepped up on the porch again. It was late enough, and I had drunk enough, to make me feel as if the timber under my feet were drifting on an unsteady current. “Sylvia!” I called again. “Come back. I need you.”

No response. My nose ached from the cold wind.

“Screw it,” I muttered. I went inside and got a pan, and took it out to a deep, clean drift, then scooped it full of snow, carried it back into the cabin, and put it on top of the stove. By tomorrow morning it would reduce to maybe a pint and a half of water.

Still cold despite the stove's warmth, I stripped to my underwear and fell into bed. I fell asleep with the sour aftertaste of wine and failure on my tongue.

I
woke the next morning with a pounding headache from too much wine and not enough water—that and the heat in the cabin that had further dehydrated me for the first half of the night. Twice I'd risen to step outside to pee, not wanting to walk the thirty feet or so to the outhouse. Both times, as I stood shivering in the cold moonlight, having thrown on only a T-shirt, jeans, and unlaced boots, I'd felt that someone was watching me.

Easy to dismiss as wine-induced paranoia. Each time I'd stepped lively back into the warmth of the cabin and the depths of the flannel sheets and army wool blankets and had drifted back to sleep wondering if I should call Jerry. My dreams were vivid worries about his safety.

The sun woke me, lying in a bright stripe across the bed. It was still low in the sky. I guessed the time at somewhere between seven-thirty and eight, late for me. By design I'd bought no clock for the cabin, but now and again I turned on a little transistor radio to catch the news on Vermont Public Radio in low fidelity.

During my months in the cabin I'd adjusted to judging time by the fall of the light, knowing the rough times of
sunrise and sunset, knowing how they changed a few minutes each day. The Earth had swung past the winter solstice just before Christmas, and now the hours of daylight were getting longer, heading toward the summer solstice in June, when the sun would come up before five in the morning and linger until nine in the evening.

Perhaps because of my elliptical conversation with Sylvia the night before, I meditated on my life and its pattern as I got the stove going, poured some of the melted snow into my Brita water filter, then heated the rest of the water and used it to wash my face and torso. Thoreau had been right: living in the forest you discover a thousand unsuspected connections to time and seasons. Winter is when you withdraw, retreat, slow down, and think and brood.