A Dawn of Death (3 page)

"It's my job to keep an eye on town property," Cory said patiently. "Until the selectmen have made a final decision about what to do with this land, it's not wise for the garden club to start planting. If you can wait a week, that will give us enough time to make the decision about whether the garden will remain here."

"Mother Nature doesn't wait for anything," Dale said. "We have to plant when she says the time is right."

"I understand." Cory's smile didn't waver. "It's just that gardening is hard work, and it would be a shame to make it harder than it has to be by making everyone do their planting twice."

"The real shame," Dale said, crossing her arms over her chest, "is that there's anyone at all in this town who thinks this land should be sold for development. It's been a community garden forever, and that's what it should remain."

"It's not that easy," Cory said evenly. "You know how long it takes for some of the selectmen to commit to a position on a new issue. There's a benefit to having the community garden here, but the money from selling the land could also benefit the town. It's not a simple decision."

"Yes, it is," Dale insisted. "The garden needs to stay right here where it belongs. I'm going to make sure we have the necessary votes, no matter what it takes."

They continued to argue, but Helen tuned them out. She'd heard enough political posturing over the years to know that Dale and Cory weren't likely to change the other's mind or offer any new insights, and yet they would both insist on repeating their positions until they felt that they'd done their duty and impressed their supporters with their dedication to the cause.

Helen wasn't sufficiently invested in either side of the argument to care, and she'd heard enough to know what the issue was. If the garden was relocated, it didn't really affect her. She only had the six little pea plants in the ground, after all, and presumably they could be moved with little more effort than it had taken to plant them.

Helen was still waiting for an opening in the argument so she could excuse herself and go home, when a man jogged up to interrupt the conversation. He was in his late twenties and skinny, with short, dark hair and a full beard. He wore faded jeans and a hooded, mud-brown jacket with
Toth Construction
embroidered in an elegant font across the upper left side of the front. He carried a hard hat with the same logo on it.

"Where's Sheryl?" His eyes were in constant movement, his gaze darting seemingly at random from spot to spot. "I've been waiting over at the Elm Street job for an hour now. I swear she didn't tell me my dozer was over here. I'd have come to get it earlier if I'd known, and now she's going to blame me for the delays at the other site."

"I have no idea where Sheryl is," Dale said, "but after she schemed to buy this land out from under us, I'm going to make sure she never sets one foot in the community garden."

The construction worker snorted. "She already did. That dozer certainly didn't get here on its own, and she's the only one who could have brought it here."

"Don't take that tone with me, Marty Drumm. Your mother raised you better than that," Dale said. "No matter how the dozer got here, we're not letting it leave again until we're compensated for the damage it did compacting the soil where it's parked."

"You can't do that," Marty and Cory said in unison, although it was hard to hear Cory's quieter voice beneath the other man's angry shout.

"Sheryl's going to blame me," Marty said. "I've got to get that dozer back to the jobsite
right now
."

Helen decided no one would notice if she slipped away now, so she took several quiet steps back before turning and heading down the sidewalk in the direction of the corner property where her car was parked. She continued to hear the two raised voices behind her and the occasional quieter comment from Cory.

Helen passed the central path of the garden and her plot with its six little seedlings that, from ten feet away, were hard to identify as things that had been intentionally planted rather than some random weeds. As she approached the end of the garden's frontage, she couldn't help wondering how the bulldozer had ended up being left there instead of returned to the primary jobsite.

Toth Construction
was painted on the side of the cab in the same elegant font as the embroidery on the construction worker's mud-brown jacket. It was obvious that Dale hadn't arranged for any earthmoving help, and Helen couldn't imagine why anyone would think it would be a good spot to leave heavy equipment. Moving it during business hours would be particularly tricky, considering the street's heavy traffic and the double-parking that narrowed the travel lane to less than the width of the dozer.

At the corner of the lot, she paused to contemplate the dozer as if it might be able to tell her what it was doing there. When it didn't offer up any answers, she looked back at Dale and Marty who were still arguing while Cory waited patiently for them to wind down. Helen had a fleeting moment of regret, wishing for once that she had her cane with her so she could use it to jolt Dale and Marty out of their pointless shouting match. If they worked together, they might have figured out what the dozer was doing here. As it was, Helen might never know how it had ended up here, and she hated having unanswered questions.

She looked away from the argument toward her car where she knew there would be warm, dry air and a comfortable seat. She might be feeling like her old self, but the cold, damp air wasn't good for her, and the last thing she wanted to do right now was risk triggering a flare.

Still, something bothered her about the way the bulldozer was parked, something she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she knew it would continue to gnaw at her if she didn't at least try to figure out what it was.

Helen turned away from where Jack and her car were waiting for her to stare at the out-of-place earthmover. She'd always known, in some vague way, that bulldozers were large, but when viewed from a distance, against the backdrop of a large parcel of land or a skyscraper, they seemed fairly ordinary. Standing just ten feet away, this one was intimidating. The roof of the cab was a good twelve or thirteen feet high, and the blade was taller than she was, taller even than her friend Tate's six feet. To get into the cab, the operator had to climb over the track it ran on, which, at its highest point, was above Helen's eye level, and it wasn't as if there was an elevator or even a sturdy little ladder.

She glanced back at the construction worker who'd come to claim the bulldozer, only to feel even more baffled than before. How could someone so slight operate something this gargantuan? She knew it wasn't as if he had to physically push it around, but surely, something this big would require a good deal of physical effort to operate. She'd ask him, but he and Dale were still shouting at each other while Cory waited patiently like a good politician looking for an opening to propose a compromise.

As long as they were too busy to notice her, it wouldn't hurt to get a closer look at the dozer to see if she could figure out what it was that was bothering her about it. She wasn't in any rush to get back to the cottage. She usually had lunch with Tate in her garage, which served as his woodworking studio, but he wouldn't be there today because of a family commitment. She didn't have anything else on her schedule until tomorrow when her nieces would be visiting for Sunday brunch, which was really just an excuse for them to make sure Helen wasn't doing anything remotely interesting.

Helen stepped off the sidewalk and made her way across the corner of the farmhouse's lawn, staying uphill from the garden itself. As she approached the far side of the dozer, she shivered, not from the chill in the air but from the prickly sort of reaction that was often described as feeling someone walk over one's grave. More likely, she was just sensing that someone was watching her. She was hidden from Dale's, Marty's, and Cory's view, but there were hundreds of windows facing her from the retirement community across the street. None of them had any reason to wish her ill, so why was she feeling so uncomfortable?

Perhaps the threat came from somewhere closer. Almost all of the gardeners had gone home when the shouting began, leaving only Paul Young working in the last plot in the far corner. He was kneeling with his back to her, planting his peas and definitely not watching her. That just left the farmhouse, so she checked its windows but didn't see anyone there.

Helen shrugged. She'd probably just mistaken a chill from the spring air for the shivers of danger. Or it could have been Jack keeping an eye on her. Not that he meant her any harm, but if she thought about it, it was a little creepy the way he always knew when she was ready to leave and had the car waiting the moment she reached the pick-up spot.

Satisfied that she was in no immediate danger, Helen continued around the corner of the bulldozer. From there, she could see past the blade to the ground between it and the track. In the shadow of the blade was a mud-brown jacket like the one Marty wore.

And then she realized it wasn't just a jacket. A pair of jeans stretched away from the bottom of the jacket, and there was rust-colored water in the nooks and crannies of the recently plowed earth around the jacket.

It took a moment to realize those puddles weren't just muddy water like the ones Helen had seen elsewhere in the garden. These were stained with blood. A great deal of blood.

CHAPTER THREE

Helen had once seen a television show featuring a tough-guy police detective who was fairly interesting up to the point where he was in a tricky situation and started shrieking, "Help me! Help me!" in a panicked falsetto. She expected more of a TV character, so she'd immediately lost interest in the character and the story. The least he could have done was to shout something more creative.

Faced with the body beneath the dozer, Helen felt a little more sympathy for the TV detective. Still, she'd never been much of a screamer, and it really wouldn't accomplish anything right now. Between the road traffic and the shouting by Dale and Marty, she doubted anyone would hear her yell for help. Besides, it was quite obvious there wasn't anything that could be done for the unfortunate person underneath the dozer's blade, considering how much blood there was.

She might as well just go ahead and dial 9-1-1. The approaching sirens would get everyone's attention soon enough. Her hands shook, but she managed to contact the police dispatcher and provide the address for the garden.

Jack was the first to realize something was wrong and came running over to Helen. She hadn't even heard the sirens yet, and he'd reached the edge of the farmhouse's lawn. She turned her back on the gruesome scene, which was just out of Jack's line of sight.

"Stop," she said. "You don't want to get any closer."

At his inquiring look, she raised a thumb to point over her shoulder. He took a couple of steps to his right until he could see past the bulk of the blade to the body. He cursed and stumbled back to where he could no longer see the corpse.

"You should probably wait in the car," Helen told him. The first responders would be regular patrol cops, but they'd be calling in Wharton's senior homicide detective, Hank Peterson, who believed that the only good Clary was a jailed Clary. Jack couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the body underneath the dozer, but Peterson didn't let little things like physical impossibility affect his theories of a case. Peterson didn't like Helen much more than he liked Jack, but she'd been the one to find the body, so she had to stay at the scene. Peterson might condescend to her and lecture her, but he wasn't likely to handcuff her. "No need for you to endure Hank Peterson's company."

"I can't leave you alone with a dead body," Jack said.

"A corpse can't hurt me." Helen registered the fact that Dale and Marty had stopped arguing. They must have heard what she did now—sirens heading in this direction. "And it sounds like I'm about to have plenty of company. You should go on back to the car before the cops get here. No point in wasting their time trying to pin this on you."

"All right," Jack said with obvious reluctance. "But I'll be in the car keeping an eye on what happens. Just wave if you need me for anything."

Jack left as the sirens drew closer. Dale, Marty, and Cory arrived in a group, their disagreement apparently set aside. In fact, at least for the moment, they shared a single expression, one that held nothing but curiosity.

Helen held out a hand. "You might want to stay there on the sidewalk. I'd already contaminated the scene before I realized what had happened, so I'm staying right here until the police arrive. It would be better if there weren't any more footprints to confuse things, though."

"I don't think the police will bring out a forensics team to deal with a bit of trespass," Dale said.

"It's more than that now," Helen said. "There's a body under the dozer."

Dale gasped, Cory's eyebrows rose, and Marty started forward, but fortunately Dale and Cory were quick enough to catch him by one arm each and hold him in place. The victim was probably one of Marty's coworkers. He didn't need to see the body.

The first two patrol cars arrived, lights and sirens activated, and screeched to a halt in the middle of the street, one in front of the other. Their drivers jumped out in almost perfect unison. They looked to Cory first, and he pointed them to Helen who simply pointed her thumb over her shoulder without saying a word. A moment later, she was being hustled over to the back seat of the cruiser closest to the bulldozer to wait, as she'd predicted, for the arrival of Detective Peterson.

Detective Peterson was five and a half feet tall, about the same height as both Helen's ex-husband and Cory O'Keefe, but he was stockier than the other two men, and he acted as if he were nine feet tall. He routinely looked down on civilians, which was somewhat understandable, at least from a physical point of view when he was interacting with a five-foot-two-inch woman like Helen, but he even managed to do it with the six-foot-four-inch Paul Young, who'd joined the gathering rubberneckers.