Dangerous Undertaking (11 page)

The white van beat Rich Blanchard’s deadline by an hour. The vet, Tommy Lee, and I met two government officials in the front yard of Charlie’s house.

The senior man introduced himself as Dr. Phillip Camas. “Is this the Hartley property?” His tone made it clear there would be no chitchat.

“Mr. Hartley is inside,” answered Rich. “He lost a prized animal because of the water. I sent the sample, and I can show you around.”

“Whatever,” said Camas. “Can we drive to it?”

“The stream is down in the pasture. Your van ought to make it.”

Once at the stream, Dr. Camas and his assistant drew a beaker of creek water. A quick test conducted in the rear of the van confirmed its toxicity.

“Mr. Hartley dump any chemicals on his property?” asked Camas.

“Charlie? He’s just an old-fashioned farmer. Little fertilizer maybe.”

“Well, this isn’t a little fertilizer. Not by a long shot.” Camas nodded to the second man, who began packing equipment in a leather satchel.

“What now?” asked the vet.

“Now, we walk upstream until we find where the hell this poison is coming from.”

Fifteen minutes later we stood at the mouth of Hope Quarry, its granite walls scarred with pock-marks from the dynamite charges of years gone by. Nature had transformed the abandoned basin into a spring-fed pond that spilled over and formed the creek meandering through Charlie Hartley’s pasture land.

“Nothing flows into this other than runoff,” said Rich.

“Divers?” the assistant asked Camas.

“Not if we can avoid it,” Camas replied. “First we’ve got to alert all areas downstream where we think the levels could be dangerous. Possibly as far as the stream flows before joining a major tributary. And I’ll need engineers to contain and neutralize the contamination here. Tell the regional office I want a remote-cam and operator on site before authorizing any divers to go into that shit.” He turned to Rich Blanchard. “This is more serious than one dead horse.”

Within four hours the driveway to Charlie Hartley’s farmhouse was clogged with late-model cars and vans, all cream-colored with permanent license plates and double-parked from the highway to the front porch steps. The EPA set up a mobile lab at the edge of the quarry. Government ‘techies’ crawled all over. Orange plastic stakes lined the creek bank for the entire distance from the pasture to the quarry. I couldn’t determine whether they performed some scientific function or merely marked ground samples.

The water in the stream dwindled to a trickle. Tadpoles, newts, and salamanders lay dead in the drying mud. The last hundred yards of the creek wound up a steep grade to the lower edge of the quarry basin. The rail spur I had walked last Saturday ran down from the left ridge along the rim of the quarry and ended near the lip of the spillway. Two four-wheel-drive vehicles were parked on the opposite side. A wall of quick-set synthetic had been erected across the gouge in the basin that formed the mouth of the stream, effectively damming the water flow.

Several clusters of workers were spread around the quarry. They climbed down the jagged rocks to fill glass vials with water. An orange stake was hammered in the ground marking each specimen location, and identifying labels were stuck on the stake and vial. I counted nine such markers spaced twenty yards apart. There were still a good number of samples to be taken if they planned on covering the full circumference of the one-hundred-yard diameter pond.

Tommy Lee and I volunteered to help a young woman unload electronic equipment from the back of one of the all-terrain trucks. A television monitor and several coils of cable had been set on a portable table.

“Is this for underwater use?” Tommy Lee asked, lifting a silver metal case off the tailgate.

“Yes. It’s a remote vid-cam. We submerge it from either a boat or the shoreline. Has a spotlight and sensitive chip to feed us pretty good pictures. Better than sending a diver down.”

“Impressive,” said Tommy Lee. “What do you think is down there?”

“Not sure. Has elements of highly corrosive sulfuric acid. Just hope we can remove it. You guys are welcome to watch.”

Tommy Lee and I patiently waited while the EPA team assembled the video rig. The mini-camera was mounted in a stainless steel ball with a thick, quartz face plate. All rubber gaskets and cables were sheathed in protective alloy coverings. The unit was mounted on an extendible rod that held not only the camera but also an underwater spotlight aligned with the camera lens.

“Are the others trying to find where the pollutant is most concentrated?” I asked.

“Yes,” answered Camas. “Helps narrow down the scope of the video probe. We’ll cover the whole pond if we need to, but the higher the toxic count, the nearer we should be to the source. That’s where we’ll start.”

I noticed that the sample-collecting teams had reached halfway around the quarry and were beginning to work along the bank of the rail spur. I looked up the tracks I had walked a few days ago. “Dr. Camas, you can take all the water samples you want, but the pollutant had to be dumped from somewhere. If the railroad tracks were used, I’d submerge your vid-cam at the point where the rails run closest to the water.”

“You would, huh.” He thought for a moment. “Miss Dodson, is the unit operable?”

“Yes, Dr. Camas.”

“We’ll continue gathering the concentration samples as planned. In the meantime, let’s test the equipment. I suggest you follow this man’s recommendation as to the best site.” He gave a nod to me and went off to check on the rest of his staff.

We helped the video technician carry her equipment to the edge of the water directly below the railroad tracks. Through a series of extenders and flotation devices, she deployed the camera unit nearly thirty feet offshore and twenty feet down.

The image on the monitor was stark in its high contrast. The harsh spotlight bloomed out the near rocks and debris while darkness immediately swallowed up their shadows. The pictures could have been beamed from the dark side of the moon. Miss Dodson spent ten minutes adjusting her focus and mobility controls. Satisfied the unit was working properly, she began to make systematic passes over ten-foot square areas.

The chill of late afternoon settled over the quarry. Charlie Hartley came from the farmhouse with thermos bottles of hot coffee. I gave a cup to Dodson, who took it with a “thank you” while keeping her eyes on the screen. As she touched the cup to her lips, she let out a short shrill scream, flinging the coffee across the table and splattering my pants with the scalding liquid.

I ignored the pain and ran to her side. Her face was white, and her fingers trembled on the controls. In a few seconds, the others gathered around us and silently stared at the monitor. Slowly, Dodson backed up the camera, meticulously adjusting the focus so that no rock escaped her scrutiny.

A blurred shape passed directly in front of the lens.

“There,” Dodson whispered to herself. She racked the focus sharply to the foreground.

A human hand filled the screen.

Chapter 11

Dr. Phillip Camas and his EPA team weren’t prepared for a corpse. Their textbook approach to identifying and containing toxic waste disintegrated with the discovery of the body. Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins encountered little protest as he took control of both the priorities and resources at hand. He radioed for a rescue crew and boat, declared the rail spur off-limits until it could be searched for evidence, and commandeered the vid-cam for closer study of what lay beneath the pond’s murky surface. Dr. Camas was left free to continue with his tests and make plans to siphon out the rising water into secure containers.

I stood silently beside Tommy Lee as we watched Dodson track the underwater camera.

The hand and arm stuck out from under a barrel that appeared to be at least fifty gallons or more in size. As the camera drifted over its curvature, a gaping hole crossed the screen out of which drifted swirls of a dark gray liquid.

“What’s that?” asked Tommy Lee.

“I’d say it’s what all the fuss is about,” said Dodson. She moved the camera through the liquid, racking the focus as the spotlight was blocked by the dense fluid. “Can’t tell the color, but it looks concentrated and diffuses into the water fairly quickly.”

She maneuvered the camera down the other side and into a clearer field of water. The spotlight illumined the silhouettes of more of the containers. Dodson panned the lens 360 degrees. Some of the containers had streams of gray liquid leaking from them. The camera continued its arc and for a few seconds only rocks and stones were visible. Then a length of jean-clad leg appeared. No one said a word; no one breathed. Dodson inched the camera forward along the tattered pieces of cloth. A bare streak of flesh was visible beneath the torn clothing; part of an exposed calf had been eaten away by the harsh chemicals, the bone and cartilage distinctive against the darker flesh.

A severely scuffed boot drifted off screen as Dodson moved on to show more of the sunken drums.

I heard Tommy Lee whisper beside me, “The only person I know missing in the county is Dallas Willard.”

I tried to recall if the boot and jeans matched what Dallas had worn in the cemetery. All I could remember was the shotgun.

The light faded quickly as the sun sank behind the mountain ridge. We had spent several hours at the site, using the camera and rescue boat to retrieve the body. The toxic acid had made identification difficult, but the hair coloring left no doubt in my mind that we had found Dallas Willard.

Tommy Lee bypassed the limited skills of coroner Ezra Clark and requested transport of the corpse to the Asheville morgue and a forensic medical examiner. He left Reece in charge at the scene, where Dr. Camas began procedures to extract the drums from the quarry.

“You know what this means,” Tommy Lee said as we got in his patrol car.

“Since Dallas’ pickup was by the railroad tracks, he walked to the quarry and either fell in or jumped in. You’re probably looking at an accident or a suicide.”

“And he just happened to disturb some chemical drums,” said Tommy Lee. “I don’t like coincidences, Barry. But, we won’t know anything definitive until there’s an autopsy on what’s left of him. I hope we can get the report sometime tomorrow.”

“Well, at least the county can breathe a little easier,” I said. “I know I will. And Bob Cain can stop screaming so loud about a crime wave.”

“That I don’t believe,” said Tommy Lee.

When we came to the main blacktop, he asked, “You in a rush to get back?”

“No.”

He headed away from town.

“I don’t like it when I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

“And I don’t like it when you don’t know what’s going on,” I agreed. “Particularly if I’m involved. Where are we headed?”

“To notify the next of kin that Dallas is dead. You’re going to meet Talmadge Watson, the heir to the Willard land.”

Tommy Lee cut on the headlights and fell silent. I left him alone with his thoughts.

“Look for a dirt road down here to the right,” he said. “Three eyes are better than one.”

After another quarter mile, I noticed a break in the roadside mountain laurel. We swung off on a single lane that was more gully than road. Low spots were still muddy, and Tommy Lee tried to keep up a steady momentum to avoid getting stuck. The tall hardwoods soon swallowed us up, and the blackness of the moonless night weighed down like a collapsing tunnel that pressed ever closer.

The road twisted and turned. I soon lost all sense of direction, certain only that we were climbing.

“Are we going to be able to turn around?” I asked.

“Yeah. We should be near the bridge.”

The car hit a sudden dip that dropped the road out from under us. Tommy Lee braked and we slid down a muddy slope until the hill bottomed out and the tires grabbed hold of packed dirt.

With shock absorbers creaking and the headlight beams bouncing up and down in the trees, the patrol car came to an abrupt stop.

“Maybe the county ought to buy you some tires with tread,” I said.

I peered over the car’s hood at a split-log bridge spanning a black void. The sound from a whitewater creek rose up from its depths. There were no safety railings and the width couldn’t have been more than a foot or two wider than that of the car.

“You call that a bridge, huh?”

“Gets us from one side to the other,” said Tommy Lee. “It’s not more than twenty feet above the water. Wanna take the wheel? Anybody who can drive around the expressways of Charlotte shouldn’t give it a second thought.”

I declined the offer. The timbers groaned and the washboard surface racked every joint of me, but the bridge held. When we stopped on the other side, I remembered to breathe.

“Tell me we don’t come back this way,” I said.

“Not unless you want to walk back to town. Relax, we’re just going to the top of this hill.”

I counted four hairpin turns where the road snaked back on itself to make it to the top. When we reached the crest, Tommy Lee stopped the car and killed the engine. He left the headlights burning and pointed to a soft, yellow glow shining through the woods off the side of the road. “There’s our man. Get out with me slowly, and then stay visible in front of the headlights.”

I followed his lead. We walked about twenty-five feet in front of the patrol car where the low beams converged in a broad pool of light. Tommy Lee held his hands out to his side and turned once around, then he faced the yellow glow in the woods. I mimicked the action, raising one arm and turning so that the lights caught the empty sleeve of my wounded one. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw the outline of a window with a thick brown shade that diffused the light behind it.

A sliver brightened as someone pulled the shade back a few inches. I stood still with my face angled to the headlights so that whoever was inspecting us would have a clear view. The shade was released, and a few minutes later, a ball of light started moving toward us.

I made out the shape of a kerosene lantern. Its reflector plate threw its beams forward and shielded the bearer in the night shadows.

“Who you done brought with you, Sheriff?” The voice croaked out like aged timber bending in the wind.

“This here’s Barry Clayton. He runs the funeral home in Gainesboro.” Tommy Lee shot me a glance to keep quiet.

“Jack Clayton’s boy?” he asked me.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, hoping it counted for something.

“What happened to your arm?”

“Dallas Willard shot me at his grandma’s funeral.”

“He did, huh. All them Willards is a strange lot.” He made the statement as if it explained everything. “Ain’t seen your Pa since Lottie passed over. That’s been nigh onto six years. Jack’s a good man, for an undertaker.” With that judgment pronounced, the speaker crossed into the light and walked up to me. He said nothing, merely nodded and waited. Tommy Lee knew to provide the formal introduction.

“This is Talmadge Watson. I been knowin’ Talmadge long as I can remember.”

I caught how Tommy Lee eased into the mountain dialect, but I knew if I tried to follow now, I would make it mockery. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Watson.”

“Talmadge,” the old man corrected.

I risked a glance up and down the mountaineer. His face was covered with stubble and his leathery lips were drawn tight, masking whatever teeth he had. He wore no shirt; only the upper half of his long-johns covered his chest. He had skipped a button hole and the yellow fabric was bunched up where the mismatch created an extra fold. Cigarette ashes stained and splotched the front. Brown suspenders hoisted dark baggy trousers over his scrawny waist, and the scuffed work boots made his feet look too big for his body. But the most prominent feature about Talmadge Watson was the rifle resting in the crook of his right arm.

“Talmadge,” I repeated. I sensed a handshake was not expected.

The mountaineer turned back to the sheriff. “Reckon this ain’t a raid,” he said.

“Now you know I believe in live and let live,” Tommy Lee said. “But, Talmadge, it is official business. I got some bad news. Earlier this afternoon we found Dallas Willard’s body at the bottom of Hope Quarry. It lay with some dumped chemical drums. We don’t know what happened.”

Talmadge took a sharp breath and looked away. For a long moment, there was no other sound except for the night crickets and the distant hoot of an owl. “Live and let live,” he said. “Seems like there’s been more dying than living lately. You know Martha Willard was my sister.”

“Yes,” said Tommy Lee. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, things have a way of gettin’ said by people too stubborn to take them back. Me included.” He shook his head. “You boys want a swallow?”

“That would be fine,” said Tommy Lee.

“Wait here.”

Talmadge stepped out of the light and walked back to the cabin. He returned a few minutes later, and I noticed he had exchanged his rifle for a long, gray coat.

“Give this to your pa,” said the old man. He held out his hand and stuffed a wad of bills in my palm. “Tell him my cash money’s as good as anybody’s, and I won’t hear it no other way. Now, Sheriff, we’ll have to get it from the creek. You boys turn your car around up in the yard, and I’ll meet you at the crossing.”

Before he started the engine, I asked Tommy Lee, “What’s this money for?”

“I’d say it’s for Lottie’s funeral. She was his wife. Talmadge probably didn’t have money for the burial, and your father didn’t charge him much, if at all. Talmadge knows that and is going to pay what he thinks is fair if it takes the rest of his life. Now, you don’t argue with Talmadge, and you don’t keep him waiting. We’d better get to the creek.”

Tommy Lee eased the cruiser down to where Talmadge stood with his lantern in his hand and signaled us to park just short of the log bridge. He waved us out of the vehicle.

“I’m gonna show you boys the spot in case you come by and I’m huntin’ or cookin’. Not that there’s a still around here.” He stepped down the bank to a narrow footpath that ran along the water.

I walked right behind him as we traveled single-file upstream from the crossing. After no more than forty yards, the creek took a sharp bend, and the car, headlights left burning, was lost from sight. Talmadge swung the lantern’s beam into the woods.

“There’s a couple of sittin’ rocks for you. They’re what attracted me to this place.”

The way he said it sounded like he was describing a favorite restaurant. Tommy Lee and I did as he instructed and sat down on two dry boulders. Talmadge set the lantern on the creek bank and grabbed a tangle of vines that grew out from a base of exposed pine roots and formed a thick mesh at the edge of the stream. He lifted them like a loosely woven carpet and revealed a backwater eddy notched into the bank.

A rusted chain looped around one of the tree roots and disappeared into the water. Talmadge reeled it in, careful to raise the links straight up so that whatever was tied to the submerged end would not be dragged across the rocky bottom of the stream. There was the clink of glass as Talmadge lifted a wire net out of the water.

“Nice and cold. Don’t need no refrigerator. Good thing too cause I still ain’t got no electric.” He untied a line that cinched the top of the netting so that it formed a closed sack. He removed what he wanted, secured the line again, and lowered his cache back into place. He spread the vines over the hidden pool and joined us.

I saw he carried a mason quart jar, the metal lid a bit rusty from its underwater storage. A liquid just tinged with amber refracted the light of the kerosene lantern and cast a mosaic of dancing shadows across the face of the mountaineer.

“This ain’t corn. Cooked it from apple. She’s smooth, but the fruit will stay in your head if you drink too much.” He twisted off the top and handed the jar to Tommy Lee.

The sheriff held the moonshine aloft in a ritual of admiration. “You’ve never lost the touch.” He closed his eyes and took two deep swallows, the gulps clearly audible above the sound of the rushing brook. His shoulders shook in reflex, and he let out a long sigh as he passed the jar back to Talmadge, who drew a steady swig before giving the communal cup to me.