Cutter's Run (7 page)

I shook my head.

“People’re the same everywhere,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. Stupidity, greed, hatred, bigotry.” He shrugged. “It’s prettier up here, anyhow. And most of the time, the air smells better.” He shook his head. “Swastikas. I don’t like that smell.” He lifted his hand in a quick wave, turned, and climbed into his truck. “If you hear anything,” he said through the window, “you let me know. About swastikas, about poisoned dogs, about Ms. Gillespie.”

“And you’ll do the same?” I said.

He nodded. “Sure.”

I watched him drive away, then went inside. I bent over Alex’s partition and said, “The sheriff was here.”

“Mm,” she murmured. Her glasses were perched down at the tip of her nose, and she held her head tilted slightly back so she could peer at her computer monitor through them. “That’s interesting.” She bent forward suddenly and hit a couple of keys. “Nice,” she mumbled.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.

“That’s great.”

I left her with her non sequiturs. Her powers of concentration were awesome when she was writing, and I doubted if anything I’d said had penetrated all the way to her brain.

I found one of her yellow pads and wrote: “Went to see Charlotte. Hope the work’s going well. Be back for lunch.” I signed it “Your virtual spouse,” added a few X’s and O’s, and left it on the kitchen table. Then I went outside, climbed into my Wrangler, and headed for Charlotte’s place.

As I bumped over the dirt roads, I couldn’t avoid noticing the big red swastika on the hood in front of me. The Wrangler was ten years old, with assorted rust spots, dings, and scratches. I’d bought it from a kid in Limerick who was off to the Marines. The new Beemer was my Massachusetts lawyer car, and the Wrangler was my Maine wood-splitter car. It was in good mechanical condition, but the kid had driven it hard, and it showed. It wasn’t worth repainting. On the other hand, I did not like driving a Nazi advertisement. Maybe Leon had the right idea. Slap on a coat of house paint and call it done.

I pulled onto Charlotte’s old rutted woods road and decided to keep going at least far enough to hide my Jeep from anyone passing by. It already had enough decorations. I slipped it into four-wheel drive and inched my way a hundred yards or so down the curving slope until I came to the dried-up boulder-strewn streambed. I parked there and walked the rest of the way in.

I hoped I’d see smoke curling up from the stovepipe and Charlotte in the yard weeding her flower garden or holding a cat in her arms or sipping coffee on her front steps.

But it looked the same as it had the previous day. It felt the same, too. Desolate. Abandoned. Her mountain bike leaned against the side of the little house in precisely the same place. No smoke curled from the chimney, and Charlotte was not in the yard.

I went to the front door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, no sound from within.

No sign of life whatsoever.

“Charlotte,” I called, loud enough to be heard from inside or from the woods out back. “It’s Brady Coyne. Are you there?”

I turned away from the front door, lit a cigarette, and scanned the meadow. I saw nothing. I went to a window and looked inside. The tall pines behind the house left it in morning shade. By holding my hands around my eyes, I could make out the shapes and shadows of furniture. I was looking into her living room, which held a sofa, several bookcases, a woodstove, and a couple of big rocking chairs. A braided rug sat in the middle, and no cat or dog was curled up on it.

I didn’t know Charlotte’s habits, of course. Perhaps she was one of those compulsive walkers who was never home and who I always seemed to come upon striding along back roads when I was out exploring in my Wrangler. And maybe her cats lived in the woods, and Jack had been her only house pet.

But I didn’t like it.

I peeked around the side of the house to her vegetable garden, but she wasn’t there. Then I went back to the door and knocked again, with no expectation that it would be answered. While I waited, I glanced down and saw the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from the crack under the door. I bent and pulled it out.

It was my business card with the note I had written to her the previous day, exactly where I had left it.

Okay, maybe she just hadn’t noticed it. Or maybe she was away for the weekend. Maybe the swastika and Jack’s sudden death had spooked her, and she’d decided to go stay with a sister somewhere.

There were plenty of explanations for Charlotte Gillespie’s absence.

But she’d sent a note asking to see me. If she had wanted to talk to me, as her note had said, then why wasn’t she here? Why hadn’t she called or written another note, either telling me where I could find her or else letting me know that she no longer wanted to talk to me?

I didn’t like it at all.

I walked slowly all the way around the little house. By peering into the windows, I saw that the ell on the right side held a pair of bunk beds and the one on the left was a kitchen. There was a hand pump beside the sink, a gas stove, and a small refrigerator. Steep narrow stairs at the back of the middle room climbed up into what I assumed was a loft or maybe just an attic, which had a tiny square window on each end. There was a back door off the kitchen. A well-worn path led from it into the woods, where I could make out the shape of an unpainted plywood-sided outhouse.

A big propane tank on the outside of the kitchen end provided fuel. But no electrical or telephone wires came into the house.

No electricity and no plumbing and no telephone. Spartan living. I wondered where Charlotte Gillespie had lived before she moved to this place, and why she had come here. I wondered if she had chosen to live here because it was where she wanted to be, or if she’d been trying to escape from the place she had been.

It struck me as lived-in but abandoned.

The more I thought about it, and the longer I spent peering into her dark, empty little house, the more ominous it felt.

I circled the house twice. When I again stood by her front door, I shaded my eyes and scanned the meadow. It was knee-high in grass and weeds, punctuated here and there by big boulders and juniper bushes. It sloped away down to the stream, which glinted through the trees and brush that lined it and marked its course through the valley. Beyond the riverbed the ground rose again to Noah Hollingsworth’s orchard.

Where was Charlotte?

I wandered out back and followed the path into the woods where I had seen the outhouse. It was shielded from the main house by a clump of scrubby pines, and when I turned the corner and saw it clearly, I stopped.

A large red swastika had been painted on the outhouse door.

I
CLENCHED MY FISTS
against a sudden surge of emotion—a strong dose of anger, mingled with sadness and profound apprehension.

I wanted to hit somebody.

I wanted to cry.

I took a deep breath. It was one thing to paint a hate symbol on the sign at the end of the roadway. It was quite another thing to come into Charlotte’s yard with a can of spray paint and leave what was clearly a message on the outhouse, less than fifty feet from the house itself.

This was purely evil.

I went up to the outhouse and touched the bright red paint on the door. It was dry. Perhaps it had been there the previous day when I was there. For all I knew, the painter had just finished his work when I arrived, and he’d doubled back while I was looking around calling for Charlotte, and when he—or she—spotted my Jeep, he’d decided to practice his artwork.

I’ve spent plenty of time in outhouses. You don’t visit remote fishing camps in Maine and Canada without accepting—and even welcoming—outdoor plumbing. I’d done enough camping to appreciate the comfort of an outhouse when compared to hanging onto a tree and squatting in the woods.

Some outhouses are decidedly utilitarian. The holes cut into the bench are rough and misshapen, and you sit on them gingerly lest you fall in or get splinters. An old Sears Roebuck catalog serves double duty as reading matter and toilet paper. Other outhouses are comparatively elegant, with actual toilet seats nailed onto the benches, a roll of real toilet paper hanging in front of you, a bucket of lime on the floor, and a few old magazines in a rack within reach of the seat. After you finish, you toss a scoop of lime down the hole. The lime is supposed to keep the odor under control.

I was never able to determine that the lime did much good. Regardless of how comfortable—or painful—an outhouse might be to one’s bottom, they all smelled the same. No one I have ever met actually enjoys the distinctive odor of the inside of an outhouse.

It wasn’t the anticipated aroma, however, that made me hesitate to open the door to Charlotte Gillespie’s outhouse. It was the omen that had been spray-painted on it, and what that swastika made me fear I might find inside.

It opened with a creak. It smelled as I’d expected. And I saw instantly that it was empty.

It was a two-holer with store-bought seats nailed to a slab of thick plywood that hinged against the back wall so that the whole bench could be raised. A nearly full roll of real toilet paper sat between the two holes, and a month-old copy of
Yankee
magazine lay on the floor. At the top of the back wall was a rectangular screened opening for light and ventilation. The light was dim, and the ventilation was ineffective.

I clamped my mouth shut, lifted the hinged wooden bench, and looked down into the pit. In the dim light, I could see that it held nothing except what one would expect to see in an outhouse pit, and I let the bench slam down.

I felt vaguely foolish, half expecting to find a body in the outhouse. But I’d had to look. I stepped outside, took a deep breath of clean air, turned, and followed the path around to the front of the house.

I tried the knob on the front door. It turned and the door opened inward. I stood there for a moment with the door half open. Yesterday I’d felt that I shouldn’t go inside. But that was before I knew about the swastika on the outhouse door.

I stepped inside.

Except for the hum of a motor—the propane-powered refrigerator—it was dead quiet inside.

I cleared my throat. “Charlotte?”

I expected no answer, and when none came, I called louder. “Charlotte? Are you in there?”

I closed the door behind me. I admitted to myself that I was still looking for a dead body.

There were no bodies downstairs, so I climbed the steep wooden stairs into the loft, which turned out to be an open attic that Charlotte had converted into her sleeping quarters. A box spring and mattress lay directly on the plywood floor. The bed was neatly made, with crisp sheets, a plaid blanket, and two pillows at the head. A low dresser crouched beside it. There was a rack where a few dresses and shirts hung on metal hangers. A wind-up alarm clock, a flashlight, a kerosene lamp, a stack of books, and a battery-powered radio sat on the floor beside the bed. The clock, I noticed, had stopped at nine-fifty. Whether it was
A.M
. or
P.M
., and what day, of course, I couldn’t determine.

I picked up the flashlight and shone it on the books. They included novels by Alice Walker and Tolstoy, worn old Modern Library editions of Plato’s
Republic, The Federalist Papers,
and Machiavelli’s
The Prince,
a thick Thoreau anthology, and several volumes, mostly by unfamiliar authors, on animal rights and nature and environmental politics.

You can learn a lot about a person from the books she keeps beside her bed.

I swept the flashlight around the dim recesses of the attic. There were several cardboard boxes and a few piles of folded clothes, but no bodies. I poked through the drawers in the dresser, feeling vaguely voyeuristic and perverted, and found only socks, underwear, and sweaters.

I went back downstairs and looked around again. The small bedroom on one end was pretty much taken up by the two sets of bunk beds, all of which had bare mattresses. A tiny dust-coated desk was jammed in between them under the window. A narrow straight-backed wooden chair was wedged into the kneehole of the desk. I sat in the chair and pulled open the drawers. They were all completely empty.

On the table in the kitchen was a glass, a bare plate, a dog-eared paperback novel, and a pewter candle holder. The candle had burned all the way down, leaving a hard puddle of orange wax that had spilled onto the tabletop. The glass was about one-third full of milk. I sniffed it. It had gone sour.

I picked up the novel.
My Antonia.
Willa Cather. I’d read it in high school, and remembered only that I’d found it tedious.

I opened it to Charlotte’s place about halfway through, which was marked by a bookmark. She had stopped reading in the middle of a scene. Her bookmark was an old business card. Harrington, Keith & Co., Certified Public Accountants, with a phone number and address in Portland, Maine. The card was old and smudged and wrinkled, as if Charlotte had been using it for a bookmark for years.

I slipped it into my pocket.

A couple of bowls sat on the floor next to the refrigerator. One contained a few nuggets of dry dog food. Poor Jack would never eat from it again. The other dish, which I assumed was for water, was empty. The refrigerator held half a loaf of bread, an unopened package of hot dogs, two cans of Diet Coke, a jar of mustard, four eggs, a stick of margarine, a container of cottage cheese, and a half-empty carton of milk.

I opened the cabinets, which held a few cans of soup and baked beans and dog food. The kitchen drawers yielded stainless-steel flatware, woven potholders, and a few cooking implements.

I went into the living room. Worn sofa, a couple of rocking chairs, braided rug on the floor, and a wood-burning stove built into the fireplace, with a few chunks of cordwood stacked beside it. A mounted rack of antlers hung over the mantel. A bookcase held some old novels, several
Reader’s Digest
condensed books, a few old copies of
Field & Stream
and
Sports Afield,
and an ancient set of the
World Book Encyclopedia.
Not the sort of literature that a Willa Cather fan would likely read. I figured this stuff had come with the place.