Little Brushy Creek, September 20
The September morning broke as clear as the gravel
bottomed creek sliding beneath Clarence Greer as he drifted with the current and poured from his three-decade-old thermos.
Like his body, the old thermos showed the wear of age, yet retained, for the time being, the ability to keep the vital liquid
from leaking away or growing cold. The rich chicory aroma invoked memories of river coffee brewing in his father's blackened
and dented percolator. He set his cup on the single plank bottom of his johnboat and snatched the paddle. With
two deft strokes he cooperated with the current to negotiate a chute between submerged logs. Only the ache in the small
of his back betrayed the illusion that he was still a wonder-eyed boy---that and the stiffness of his hands.
"Good girl," he murmured to his craft.
The flat-bottomed boat drew little water, and
he was finding that he could maneuver it through the twists and turns of the creek almost as well as the canoe he had been
forced to retire. Little Brushy had no white water, so there was no real need of a canoe. Getting in and out of
a one, even his wide-beamed Grumman, had become increasingly shaky the last few years. So, being only a moderately stubborn
man, he'd finally yielded to the inevitable. He sipped again, admiring his handiwork. It had taken a full summer
of patient toil, the kind perhaps only an old man could enjoy. Its smooth hand-planed cypress planks were thin and light,
making the johnboat only a bit heavier than his old canoe. It slid through the water silently, more naturally than a
metal boat, somehow more at one with the creek.
Rounding
a new gravel bar sculpted by the spring floods, he spied a stand of about a dozen butternut and black walnut trees, healthy
and soaring over twenty feet. His. The burlap bag at his feet was half full of deeply furrowed round and oblong
nuts. Last winter he had placed them in a pile of sand at the end of his patio to let them freeze without drying out,
a process necessary for germination. Today he would plant nuts, as he had been doing for the past thirty odd falls.
Clarence dipped his paddle and steered toward a bluff that looked promising.
He grounded in the still water on the inside of a gentle bend, grasped the bag,
and stood, both feeling and hearing the protesting creak of his left knee. Despite this reminder of his advancing age,
he looked forward to the light work of his spring and fall ritual, heeling in nuts to replenish the creek habitat. Few
of them would even sprout. Squirrels would find most. Many would simply rot in the ground. The surviving
seedlings were always a pitiful percentage of the year's planting, but it nature's way to do it with numbers, and he was just
lending a hand.
He punched an iron
bar into the sandy soil and worried out a shallow hole. After dropping in a butternut, he jabbed back into the ground
about four inches away and pushed soil toward the hole then stamped it closed gently with the heel of his boot.
Yeah, I've heard the jokes, he
said to himself as he continued to heel in the nuts. Old Clarence wants to plant something besides people.
Well, I've planted almost as many of them as I have of you guys.
He laughed aloud, thinking about the silliness of talking not just to himself, but
also to a bag of nuts.
Greer didn't
mind the jokes. He knew that people need to joke about undertakers, and that was all right. He was well-liked
and respected, else the good people of Hawthorn County wouldn't have made him their perennial choice for coroner going on
four decades now.
Not that you've
got a lot of competition, Clarence---only mortician in the county.
Greer stopped his work long enough to make his way up a saw briar tangled bank to retrieve
a shopping bag caught in the brush.
"Plastic!
The bane of modern life," he said, stuffing it into his back pocket.
Looking upward as he wiped sweat from his brow with a large, faded blue
bandanna that once belonged to his dad, he noticed another bag lodged in the fork of a tree some fifteen feet above his head.
Last spring's high water mark. Inspecting the sparsely covered ground beneath his feet, he probed with the tip of his
bar feeling, but not hearing, the scrape of something beneath the leaf litter.
Gravel. That won't do.
Further down he crossed over to a dry channel the creek had decided
to abandon years before. A brushy hillock beyond drew his attention. The soil looked promising, so he extracted
a handful of butternuts and began heeling them in, working slowly upstream, parallel to the creek until he came to a rusty
section of galvanized wire protruding nearly a foot from the alluvium in which it was buried. Not unusual---bits and
pieces of old fences could be found all along the creek among the debris carried off by the frequent spring floods.
Briefly, he thought about digging out the nuts he had planted lest they eventually grow through the wire and girdle themselves.
The spring torrent had scoured away nearly three
feet of the detritus, uncovering a corner of the fence section atop which a large flat stone lay half buried and firmly embedded
in a mixture of rotted leaves and twigs, sand, and gravel. The wire had been there a long time. He turned to leave,
but then something red caught his eye. He bent to examine it. It was a piece of cloth. He tugged gently,
but it wouldn't come free. Although it had lost little of its color, it felt crumbly.
Nylon. Plaid?
The tickle of a memory surfaced. An impossibility, but he remembered the description
like it was yesterday.
It's been
all of what---twenty or twenty-five years?
It
was but a blink for an old man.
He
went back to the boat for the army surplus trenching tool he always carried. Using it like a short handled hoe, he carefully
raked out the loosely packed sandy soil at the edge of the wire, working like an archeologist. The tool scraped audibly
on something hard and smooth. He probed carefully with a stick until some ten inches of the tubular object's shape was
free of soil. Greer wiped the moisture from his glasses and bent low to examine it. Oddly discolored by the chemicals
in the soil, lay a human thighbone---a small human thighbone.
Enough to make a good guess.
It would take a comparison of dental records to make sure, but he already knew.
She had been wearing a red plaid skirt on the day it happened.
At least now we can bring you home, Marie.
Clarence sighed, stood, and waited for his lightheadedness to subside.
People might think it odd that a man so familiar with death could be affected as he was, but he would never be able to reconcile
himself to the death of the young. It was an abomination. When his faintness had abated enough for him to feel
relatively normal, Greer made his way back to the johnboat feeling the weight of all his seventy-nine years.
It took him nearly two hours to get back to his car and into town. By then
it was nearly eleven. The bright fall sun cast a short, sharp shadow as he ascended the courthouse steps. Inside
the musty coolness of the old building, known by the older residents of the county as "The Green Top," his footsteps
echoed down cracked tile halls and up the polished granite stairs. Like a Greek temple, the sound intimidated the individual
who came to plead his case or answer to the powers that be. He had outgrown that feeling long ago, but its memory still
hung in the air like stale cigarette smoke. The Sheriff's Office was on the third floor, and he was winded by the time
he got there.
"Shug in, Betty?"
asked Greer abruptly as he stepped into the office. The frosted glass panel of the door rattled as he closed it behind
him, as it had been doing for the past fifteen years.
"He's been in there grumbling all afternoon, Clarence," said the prim woman sitting at a wooden
desk. Both she and it were of indeterminate age, somewhere on the experienced side of forty.
"Careful though. He's in a foul mood---paperwork."
"Not true, Clarence. I live for this
stuff," came a deep voice from the inner office. "Come on back."
Greer closed the inner door when he came in, eliciting a raised eyebrow from the
sheriff.
He frowned. "I
think I found the Preslar girl's body."
Shively
took it in without a change of expression, but a knot twisted in his gut. His emotions seldom played across his features.
He nodded but didn't say anything for a long moment. Despite the absence of a body, Marie Anne Preslar's killer had
been put out of everyone's misery via the Missouri gas chamber almost twenty years previously.
"Where?" he asked.
"Little Brushy Creek---west side---near Lone Hill Tower. Shallow grave
. . . partially uncovered when the creek went out this spring."
He ran his fingers through what remained of his thin hair before continuing in a more clinical tone.
"The remains have been in the ground the
right length of time if my judgment's any good. I'm pretty sure it's her. At any rate, we've got a body to recover."
"Well, let's get out there," said Shively,
pushing his considerable bulk up from his wooden swivel chair.
He opened the door and stuck his head through. "Betty, get ahold of Carter and---who else
we got handy?"
"Guidry
just drove in, but he's scheduled to go off duty."
He suppressed a scowl. Despite his new deputy's unquestioned competence, the man rubbed him the wrong
way.
"Tell him not to run off.
He's got overtime today."
Mirabelle craned her neck to look toward the sudden
ringing.
"No you don't, Nature
Girl," said Jill Carter as she reached for the phone. "Baby gets a new diaper no matter how many phones ring."
"Hello." She held the phone in
the crook of her neck to leave both hands free as she sat back down on the bed beside her daughter who kicked enthusiastically,
enjoying her freedom from the bulky diaper.
She
listened a moment and shook her head.
"Betty,
Richard is at the canoe rental." Her experience as a deputy's wife had taught her not to relay messages from the
office. "You have the number, right? Okay."
She hung up and patted her daughter's bare bottom. "Maybe Daddy's float trip business
can make us a lot of money. Then he can stop playing policeman."
Jill didn't think Richard would really leave the department, although he seemed
to think he would. The canoe rental he had borrowed to buy could free him from police work, but she doubted his commitment
to that despite his promises. With everything that had happened, it was obvious that he would never be able to realize
his ambitions, but she knew he would never really be able to leave it behind without regret. Their new debt worried
her. With his meager pay as a rural deputy, and her own less than spectacular salary as a community college associate
professor, they could barely meet expenses. What would happen if some unexpected major expense came up?
"Mommy worries too much, Baby Girl,"
she said as she finished pinning the diaper. "But if she doesn't think about these things, who will?"
She held the baby to her shoulder and went to
the kitchen to warm a bottle.
"You're
Daddy is a wonderful man, Mirabelle . . . just not too realistic sometimes."
As
Shively turned off the blacktop onto a gravel road, he looked across at the tall, gaunt, solemn figure sitting stiffly in
the passenger seat. He couldn't remember his old friend ever looking so much like the prototypical undertaker as he
did today. Greer's usual joviality was submerged beneath craggy features frozen in solemn preoccupation.
"What are you thinking so hard on, Clarence?"
"Marie's Mom."
Shively glanced into the rear view mirror. Dust billowed behind
his cruiser, although he was barely doing twenty, totally obscuring the car of the deputies following him.
"Partner, she's accepted this a long time ago."
"This'll bring it all back. You know,
Shug, she's been dead more years than she lived." He sighed. "Parents aren't supposed to bury their
children. Her mom has to do it all over."
"At least she'll have her decently buried now."
"I suppose." Greer leaned forward. "Right here.
Pull over."
Shively parked with
his passenger side wheels in the shallow ditch. The second car pulled in behind him as he and Greer got out.
"Want us to pack all the stuff down there?"
called Richard Carter as Shug came around the rear of his cruiser.
Shively considered it. If Greer was right about the body being Marie Preslar's, the case was
already closed. The chances of finding anything important were minimal. Still, he didn't want to start making
exceptions to procedure. Twenty odd years had taught him that good police work consisted of a scrupulous attention to
details.
"Treat it like it happened
yesterday," he said. "You need the practice."
Although not the most experienced crime scene investigator, Carter had more formal training than
anyone else in the department, besides which, Shug liked his thoroughness.
"I originally put in back up the road a piece," said Greer as he led them
down to the gravel bar on which he had grounded the johnboat.
"Figured we'd have to ferry across if we didn't want to get our feet wet, so I left the boat
here and walked back to the car."
After
three crossings, during each of which Greer had insisted on doing the paddling, the four men and the discount store plastic
storage box containing the county's evidence gathering equipment were safe, and dry, on the far bank only fifty feet from
what Marie Preslar's killer had intended to be her final resting place.
After Richard took the orientation photos, they approached the shallow grave and got
their first look at the partially uncovered remains.
"That skirt's the clincher, Shug," said Greer. "As soon as I saw it, I recollected the
description and knew it was her."
"Cute,"
said Guidry. "He threw that woven wire over her because he was too damned lazy to dig a deep hole and didn't want
the dogs to pull her out. Guess he didn't have energy left after he got through with her."
Greer clenched his jaw at the irreverent comment.
Shively decided to ignore the former New Orleans policeman's remark.
Cop work wasn't conducive to sensitivity.
"Got
all the pictures, Carter?" he asked.
"Yeah,
including the close-ups."
He
picked up the ruler he had used for scale and the small arrow he had placed near the grave to orient the scene by pointing
it at a large sycamore tree whose white bark would be easy to pick out on the orientation photos. As the remains were
being uncovered he would take a series of in situ shots, although all of that would be academic. There was no mystery
here.
"Let's remove everything
down to the wire, boys" said Greer.
Although
it was early fall, the temperature hovered in the mid eighties and what breeze there was didn't penetrate to the hollow where
the grave lay. The air was dead calm and humid, what the old folks called "close." Richard and Guidry
were soon covered with a glistening sweat that attracted a milling mob of gnats to worry at their eyes as they cleared away
the tangle of tree roots and decayed leaves.
Normally
the debris would be carefully sifted and examined for evidence, but Shug decided to omit that. When everything was removed
down to the rusted wire, they paused to let Richard take more photos though nothing of interest was apparent. After
tugging the woven wire free, they began clearing away more soil, now mixed with sand and creek gravel. Using a knife
to cut away the tree roots, they uncovered more of the nylon skirt. It had resisted the assault of the years surprisingly.
Its festive colors lent an air of pathos that Richard could have done without. He would have preferred unearthing the
bones alone, like an archeological dig. The short skirt made it all too real, and Marie Preslar too much a person.
"Take it easy there, boys," said Clarence.
"Try not to disturb the bones. You'll have to work real careful now."
"As if it makes a difference," said Guidry, wiping at the sweat from his
brow with the back of his wrist. "Didn't you say this case was already solved?"
"It is. The killer died in the gas chamber," said Shively
tersely. "But we're going to follow procedure anyway."
Guidry grunted.
Richard Carter understood that there was more to it than that. Ron Guidry was a good cop, but he had
a hell of a lot to learn about small town police work. His crude irreverence was out of place in Blue Creek, as it would
be in any small town where no one was anonymous and where policemen met the survivors every day---that's the way
Richard thought. Whether the tragedies that ruined their lives came as accident or violence, the survivors were constant
reminders to him that he was dealing with people, not things. That made objectivity difficult, if not impossible.
Both Shively and Greer had known this girl. Although dead over twenty years, she still deserved respectful treatment,
and somewhere in the community, she still had a family.
Clearing away a clot of blackened leaves, Richard froze. Discolored lower leg bones lay uncovered, crossed
at the ankles. Several loops of braided nylon cord, once wound tightly, now lay slack with an elaborate double tied
slip knot at the left side, its long end trailing away and disappearing beneath the moisture darkened earth.
"Want me to photograph that?" asked
Richard, realizing what the ligature meant.
"You
took pictures of everything else," said Guidry. "You gotta take pictures of the fun and games."
Shively scowled. "Uh---yeah.
Do it by the book."
He bit back
the bile that had risen in his throat. "You know, when I was a kid I used to see detective magazines with pictures
of women tied up like that. Then I had this sociology professor who assured us that stuff like that doesn't contribute
to sex crimes. Well, that's bullshit!"
The solitary expletive was a virtual explosion of profanity coming from Shively, a tough cop, but also a deacon
in the Baptist church.
"Don't
say anything about the way we found her," said Shug as Richard snapped the pictures. "You boys got that?"
Richard nodded. Guidry rolled his eyes,
but kept his mouth shut for once.
"Her
Momma doesn't need to know about this," agreed Greer.
After taking
the remains to the funeral home where they would stay until a positive identification was made, Richard's workday finally
ended. He drove east toward home with the sinking sun flashing blindingly in his side view mirrors as he negotiated
the twists of U highway. The gathering darkness mirrored his mood. Guilt ate away at the lingering excitement
he'd experienced at the discovery. It was a part of his job that he thought in his more melancholy moods was hazardous
to the soul.
You
shouldn't enjoy this, scolded a stern voice in his head.
And he didn't, really. Despite the objectivity he donned more and more easily
at crime scenes, sometimes he couldn't put aside the humanity of the victim completely enough to look at things unemotionally.
He certainly hadn't at this one. Cops needed their objectivity to ward off the depression of the banal awfulness they
had to deal with daily. Sometimes things still got through, like this time.
At bottom, sex-killings---and that was what this most surely was---had a depressing
sameness about them. Despite the elaborate rituals, the odd fetishes, and the bizarre paraphilia, it was always the
same tired story. The guy does what he does because normal consensual sex is beyond his ability to even understand.
He plays solitaire.
At
least this player has left the building, he thought as he turned off the highway.
Leaves littered the gravel lane leading over the forested hill to the
board and batten house he rented. Jill's car was in the drive and the house lights were on inside. He went up
the steps quickly, glad to be home. She was cooking, and his daughter lay in an antique wooden cradle near her mother,
but safely away from the stove. He tossed his hat onto the peg and took off his holster, hanging it next to the hat
by the front door until he could take off his jacket. Then he took his pistol to the bedroom closet, concealing it on
the top shelf.
"Thanks for the
call telling me you'd be late," said Jill, the reproach in her voice only a gentle reminder of his negligence.
"Sorry, Babe. Things took longer than
I expected. We were out on the creek at a crime scene, and I was out of pocket so to speak. Couldn't call you
except by patching it through the office. They don't like that."
"I've told you that you should take the cell phone."
"You need it more than I do. Nothing is going to happen to
me, but if you break down or run out of gas or something---"
"I won't run out of gas. I take care of things better than that."
"Are we going to fight?" he asked, trying to tease her out
of her mood.
That she didn't answer
was a bad sign. He tried again. "I really am sorry, Jill. I'll try to do better."
"Does that mean you'll take the cell phone?"
"No."
"You stubborn man."
"Gotta take care of my ladies."
Jill turned around for the first time since he came into the kitchen. She
had been speaking with her back to him. He was holding Mirabelle gently in his arms, his thin craggy face crinkling
in an attempt to elicit a smile from the third member of the family. She felt her heart stir, and her pique evaporated.
Richard was just Richard.
"I'm
making steak and a salad tonight. I hope you haven't spoiled your appetite."
"I have all sorts of appetites, milady, none of which I have indulged
in enough lately to deserve the epithet of spoiled."
"Hmmph," she responded with the hint of a slight smile.
"How was school?" he asked, pulling back a chair from the
table.
"Good. I ran across
a research topic that may work for my thesis. Have you heard of an area northwest of Doniphan called the Irish Wilderness?"
"No. Odd name. I would've remembered
that."
"It was settled
by Irish immigrant families brought here by a Catholic priest sometime early in the nineteenth century and then abandoned
during the Civil War."
"What's
the story?" asked Richard distractedly as he played face games with Mirabelle.
"That's what I intend to find out. There's not much written about it,
and I'm not sure there is enough significance about it to build a doctoral thesis around, but I intend to research it anyway,"
she said, bending to check on the steaks sizzling beneath the broiler flames.
"They're done," she announced as she slid them out of the oven and set
them atop the stove. "Go wash up while I pour the wine and set the table."
"Here," he said, standing up and holding out the baby.
"You entertain our daughter, and I'll help put everything on the table after I wash my hands."
"She'll be fine here," said Jill, taking Mirabelle from him
and depositing her in the crib after a quick kiss. "She must learn that she does not need to be the center of attention
all the time."
"You're
a cold-hearted woman," he joked.
"Careful,
Richard, or that may be a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Richard
listened to the soft sounds coming from the adjoining room where Jill was putting Mirabelle down for the night. She
tiptoed to the doorway, and then paused as if she'd forgotten something. The trim lines of her figure were clearly backlit
by the warm luminescence of the night-light in Mirabelle's room. Silently, she slid the gown from her shoulders and
let it fall to the floor. As she neared the bed she turned just enough to reveal herself in silhouette. She came
around to his side of the bed and stopped, her body glowing in the dim light, as if offering herself to him. Richard
pulled her gently down, took her head in his hands, and brought her mouth to his. They kissed, tenderly at first, and
then with a growing urgency.
Later,
as they nestled with Jill's head on his shoulder and her still bare body molded to his, the events of the day began to seep
back into his mind. He could still feel the feeble insubstantiality of the remains he'd helped transfer to the van.
How obscene that a vibrant young
woman could be reduced to something that weighed less than an empty suitcase, he thought.
The bones had seemed to possess an almost negative
buoyancy, as if they'd have floated away into the sky had he released his hold on the body bag. Involuntarily he cringed,
tensing slightly.
"What's wrong?"
Jill asked, an edge of concern in her voice.
"Nothing.
Just thinking about that poor girl.
"The
one whose body they recovered today?" Jill always said they when she spoke of the sheriff's department.
"Yes," he said, ignoring her implicit
disapproval of his chosen occupation.
"Tell
me about her."
This surprised
him. He took a moment to begin, wondering how much to say.
"Tragic. And pathetic. She was a high school kid driving through town minding her
own business. Couple of punks who had just robbed a gas station ran a stoplight and hit her. Maybe she recognized
them---maybe they just---nobody knows why . . . but they stole her car and took her with them. Until Clarence found
the body this morning, no one knew for sure what happened to her. The perps were cousins, the oldest with a long but
not particularly interesting rap sheet. The younger one was a minor. Despite the lack of a body, the older one,
a guy called Knauts, got the death penalty and died in the Missouri gas chamber. The kid got twenty-five years after
being tried as an adult."
"They
killed her because she could identify them?"
He hesitated, thinking about the bondage. Marie Preslar wasn't killed just because she could identify
her abductors. "Probably," he said.
"Does she still have family? Parents?"
"Her mother lives over in Singletree."
"It must have been terrible for her . . . all these years without
knowing. Now that's over."
"Yeah.
Closure. Nice word. Like you would ever get over something like that."
"Losing a child that way, Richard. So unbearably sad."
Jill had fallen asleep a short time later, but that goal eluded him. His mind
stubbornly refused to let go of the image of crossed ankles, devoid of flesh and obscenely bound with braided cord.
You don't have the objectivity
for the job, Son, he said to himself. Guidry does. Does that make him a better cop? Maybe, but
it sure doesn't make him a happier one. Do I need that kind of insensitivity? Is that what it takes?
And, if so, is it really worth it? If you still want to be law officer you do. And I suppose running the county
roads at night and serving subpoenas is real police work?
Despite the depression and ugliness, Richard had no desire to be anything
but a law officer. As odd as it might have sounded to others, he thought it was his calling. He would never change
the world, never make a dramatic difference, but he would do the job well. That was all the difference anyone ever can
make. Unfortunately, he had what a colleague had once called this feminine tendency to be overly emotional.
They were just bones.
The girl is long gone, past suffering. But the rope, the ligatures, the hopeless terror---
You're letting it get to you. What happens if
you start thinking like that when it counts? What if the time comes when you have to think clearly and you can't get
useless stuff like that out of the way? A twenty-year-old closed case! Guidry says when it starts getting to you,
it's time to call it quits. Maybe. But maybe if it doesn't bother you, you're really screwed. As long as
you can still do your job . . .
Somewhere in the night Richard's interminable debate with himself slid imperceptibly away, and he fell into
a troubled sleep.
A bombed out
street in Mogadishu. The stale aroma of khat mingling with the musty staleness of the ruined city. The brief whiff
of something dead. He approached the corner warily. He had point, the rest of the squad were back and split, taking
both sides of the street. Only sporadic sniper fire in the distance. Then the wraith spun into sight from between
buildings, and Richard killed him again. A bundle of rags, bare feet, callused and unbelievably small. Around
the ankles were three dressed loops of a braided cotton cord. He nudged the body with his boot, turning it to its back.
The head lolled and a child's face looked at him with dead eyes.
Richard's
gasp awakened her with a start, and Jill knew immediately that he'd had the dream again. His breathing slowed, and she
saw that he was asleep still.
Why
do you have to do this to yourself, Richard? she thought.
How many times had she asked him? Not as many times as she had asked herself.
Jill scolded herself for her thoughts. Richard was Richard. His past made him what he was, the most admirable
man she had ever known. She loved him so. The Somalia nightmare came from a guilt that no amount of logic was
able to excise. He had killed a child---a soldier to be sure, but a child nonetheless.
How I wish I could exorcise your demon, love.
But demons like this one never leave those who cannot write off as fate
the things they have been forced to do.
It's not fair! she thought angrily. You sound like a petulant teenager, Jill. "It's
not fair?"
"So
we will live with it, Richard, you and I," she said aloud.
Jill snuggled close as if she could protect him from the dream boy. He murmured indistinctly
and rolled away, leaving her alone in the dark.
We will live with it, she reassured herself.
