Death Climbs a Tree (17 page)

“When is it?”

“Thursday morning. I don't suppose you'll come.” She kept her voice light.

“Not unless they drag me down. But I'll think of her then.”

“You see Fred?”

“Tonight?”

“He mentioned checking out some lights you saw.”

“Really. I wasn't sure he believed me.”

“You think they had something to do with Sylvia?”

He was silent for a few moments, and she thought she could hear wind in the trees over his head. “I suppose it's possible.”

“Andrew, don't let them hurt you!” It burst out of her in spite of all her promises to herself not to voice her worries to him.

But he didn't fuss at her, and he didn't come back with some flip response. “Not much I can do if they're determined. But I'm keeping a low profile. And I'm not using so much as a flashlight myself. I don't want to remind anyone that I might be up here watching.”

“Good. The paper hasn't mentioned you. It's as if when Sylvia died, the tree sit ended. You think they don't know?”

“They didn't get it from me. Still, it's no secret. And you can see the platform a long way off. I'll be glad when the trees finally leaf out.”

“Andrew, how long do you expect to stay up there?” When did oaks and maples and such leaf out, anyhow? She couldn't remember.

“I don't know yet. So far, no one else is offering to take over.”

And you'll stay until someone does? That's not the way you made it sound at first. But she held her tongue this time.

“Mom? You mad?”

“Not at you.”

He was right, though. The thought of Andrew up there, unable to defend himself against a sneaky assailant, filled her with rage.

“I feel that way about the guy who got Sylvia. If he showed up, I'd drop out of this tree so fast.…”

“You really cared for her.”

“I don't know. Maybe I would have. I'll never find out now, will I?”

The sadness in his voice gave her new reason to rage against Sylvia's killer. In taking her life, he had stolen not only her future but also the futures of others who might have become involved with her. Never mind whether Sylvia would have made a good life partner for her son.

But none of that came close to the rage she felt at whoever would endanger Andrew himself.

And who would? she wondered. Tom Walcher, the angry construction boss? If Fred was right, and she believed he was, someone had intentionally caused Vint's accident—almost certainly the same someone who had caused Sylvia's fall. Bert, of the fierce temper? She needed to meet that man. The people Fred was checking out tonight, whose lights Andrew had seen? Whatever they were doing in the woods, it seemed they didn't want witnesses.

“Mom? You still there?”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

“Me, too. Did Fred mention whether he ever got Sylvia's things from Skirv? He carried off her sleeping bag and coat and stuff that was up here.”

“I can ask him. How well do you know Skirv?”

“Not too well. He's kind of strange. You always have the feeling he has some other agenda.”

“I know.”

“You know him?”

“Sometimes when we need an extra percussionist, Matt Skirvin plays. If I'm lucky. He's good, but totally unreliable. Never bothers to cancel. Never even makes excuses. Seems to me he shows up when he feels like it and lets us go hang when he doesn't. So I try not to depend on him. I was surprised to see him out there this afternoon. I'll have to tell Fred I have his phone number.”

“Good.” He yawned audibly.

Even over the phone, it was catching. Fighting back a yawn of her own, she said good night and looked for her orchestra list to write Fred a note with the number before sleep made her forget.

Matt Skirvin was still out there checking on Andrew, or that's what he said, anyway. Why had he volunteered for Sylvia in the first place? Andrew claimed not to be in love with her, and Joan was inclined to believe him. But Matt was older, probably older than Sylvia. Was
he
in love with her? Did she turn him down? What if he thought she and Andrew were a couple? Would he have reacted like Wozzeck, in the opera? “If I can't have you, then nobody will!” he tells Marie. And then he stabs her.

Had Matt killed Sylvia? And was he waiting for his chance now to take revenge on Andrew?

She shook her head, hard. Don't let your imagination run wild, she told herself. Just give Fred the phone number. But her hand shook while she wrote it down.

17

Joan had read most of the paper over breakfast by the time Fred, freshly showered but bleary-eyed, dragged himself into the kitchen.

“Herschel Vint's obituary is in already,” she told him. “And an article about the crash, with a picture of the car. Nothing about its being a suspicious death.”

“Mmm.” He poured himself a cup of coffee.

She stuck some bread in the toaster, passed him the front sections of the paper, saving the funnies for herself, and waited.

Eventually, he told her about staking out the meth lab. “We waited till midnight, but not a soul showed. Finally, we went in. They'd been cooking meth, all right. There was plenty of evidence left behind, even some of the finished product, but they were out of there. Either someone warned them, or someone was in there when we found the place earlier in the day, and they cleared out in a big hurry.”

“Too bad.” Joan poured him another cup of coffee. He was going to need it. She hadn't heard him come in, but he couldn't have had much sleep.

“At least we shut it down. Sheriff Inman will have someone check on it from time to time, but I don't expect them to risk going back.”

“I guess that's something.”

“Yeah, but not enough. They could pop up anywhere. People have been known to cook meth out of car trunks, would you believe that? It's harder to get the ingredients than it used to be. Maybe that'll help.”

“They're expensive?”

“Not for these guys. Farmers use tanks of anhydrous ammonia in fertilizer, and meth cookers would steal it.” He laughed. “But with this new GloTell stuff, they can't get away with it as easily.”

“What's GloTell?”

“A new pink dye developed specially for this purpose. Even if you wash it off, it shows up in ultraviolet light for days. If you touch it, it stains your hands pink, and if you use it in methamphetamine, it turns the meth pink. People who snort it or shoot it end up pink, too. They're not going to want to buy meth made with stolen ingredients. But it's so addictive, we may even catch a few that way.”

He really was wound up. She wondered whether the coffee had been a mistake.

“The saddest thing we found out there was a child's raggedy teddy bear. Can you imagine cooking that stuff in front of little kids?”

She couldn't. She wondered how many children of the people who used the stuff were affected, too. Probably plenty.

“Inman says it's not unusual to find kids at these labs when they make arrests. They have to hose them down to decontaminate them and throw away all their things—teddy bears, blankets, clothes, such as they have—before they can put them in foster care.”

“The poor things!”

“You have any idea how many kids end up in foster care after their parents are arrested for meth? Or how sick they sometimes get?”

She shook her head.

Fred drained the cup and stood. “The good news is that Andrew's no threat to these guys now.”

She'd forgotten her own child. “That's right! So they're no threat to him. But we don't know…”

“No, we don't. It might not have had anything to do with them in the first place. If I were Andrew, I'd get the hell out of that tree now.”

She looked him in the eye. “Whenever anything you're doing is dangerous, you quit?”

His eyes crinkled down at her. “Yup.”

Joan sighed. “I guess if I can let you go to work, I ought to be able to let him do what he thinks he has to do.”

“Is it so hard for you, what I do?” He wasn't teasing now.

“Sometimes.”

He reached across the table to her, but when the phone rang, he stretched out a long arm to the wall near the stove instead and listened a moment. “I'll be right there.”

“See?” She smiled at him. It's really all right, she wanted that smile to tell him, because it really was. Just hard sometimes.

“Don't worry. That was Johnny Ketcham. I'm needed at the station house, but no one will be at my throat.”

“You're coming home tonight?”

“Best I know.” It was as close as he ever came to promising.

“And you saw the phone number I left on your dresser?”

He patted his breast pocket. “Got it, thanks. I don't expect to find much of anything in Sylvia's things, but it can't hurt. What do you know about that guy, anyway?”

“Matt Skirvin? Nothing much.” And I'm not going to tell you what I was thinking about him last night.

“You've met him?”

“Oh, sure. He fills in on percussion for the orchestra, when he feels like it. Trouble is, I never know when he's going to feel like it.”

“Andrew called him weird.”

She thought it over. “Maybe. Or just flaky. He rode his old bike out there yesterday afternoon to check on Andrew.”

“He ever sound a little wild?”

“He doesn't say much at all to me. Maybe to the other percussionists. You think he's done something?” Maybe she should tell him, after all.

“Probably not.” He kissed her and went out whistling Scott Joplin's “The Entertainer.”

Joan put the breakfast dishes in the sink and decided not to carry a brown bag to work. This was one day she wanted to hear the gossip around the lunch table.

She didn't have to wait for lunchtime. When she arrived, the bridge players were shaking their heads over the meth lab, which they'd heard about on the radio.

“It's not the first one in Alcorn County,” Berta Hobbs said. “But it's the first one inside Oliver.”

“Wouldn't be if they hadn't annexed so far out,” said her partner, Ora Galloway, who'd been playing at the senior center since his wife of almost sixty years had died. “Makes no sense at all to say Yocum's Woods is in town.”

“It does when you build apartments out there,” Berta said. “Think of the property tax.”

“They're supposed to be for low-income people,” Ora countered. “Tax on new construction like that will drive up the rent.”

“Not with government subsidies,” Berta said firmly. “One heart,” she bid.

“You think those apartments will attract more drug dealers?” said the opponent to her left. “Pass.”

“Bound to,” Ora said. “You cram that many poor people together like that, you'll see. Two clubs.”

Joan hung up her jacket and slid her purse into her desk. At a table outside her office, Mabel Dunn and Annie Jordan were putting together the newsletter she had produced on her computer.

“I'm glad Cindy Thickstun can't hear them talk like that,” Mabel said, folding newsletters before passing them to Annie to staple. “She'd really lay into them. She's so proud of her daughter, even if having them all at her house is hard on her.”

Annie sniffed. “Cindy always did think her children could walk on water. But I wonder if she'd be in such an all-fired hurry to get those grandbabies out if she thought they'd run into drugs where they were going.”

Joan climbed the steps to the room where the morning exercise group was gathering. Still waiting for their peppy young leader to arrive, they were talking about Herschel Vint.

“Nice young fellow,” one man said. “Helped me when I had to sell off that stand of timber. The state wanted to buy it, and Herschel told me how much I could hold out for. The state got the woods it wanted, and I got a fair price. He didn't have to do that.”

“He left a wife and three boys,” a woman said. “I don't know why they had to print that picture on the front page. Why couldn't they think of those poor children? Bad enough they had to lose their daddy—they shouldn't have to see that car with the window all smashed in. Enough to give 'em nightmares.”

“I don't know,” Margaret Duffy said. “Kids sometimes find the truth easier to bear than what they conjure up in their imagination.” Margaret would know, with all her years of teaching.

“Like murder?” someone said.

Joan's antennae rose. Why was anyone talking murder? Nothing in the story had suggested anything but a traffic accident.

“Maybe,” Margaret said. “After that speech he gave, I expect EFF thought about it a time or two.”

“He laid it on the line about them, didn't he?” The man who'd sold the woods chuckled.

“But I'd think the people who want to build that apartment would have been even more upset,” said Alvin Hannauer. “He as much as said they were raping the land. Didn't claim to be speaking for the DNR, either. Just stuck his neck out. If someone murdered him, now, I'd look in that direction.”

“Nobody murdered him, Alvin,” Margaret said. “He hit a tree.”

“On a sunny Sunday with a dry road, right.” He gave her a professorial glare, which he'd probably used on Oliver College students who challenged him in class.

As Joan remembered, Margaret's sixth-grade classroom glare was even fiercer, but she didn't use it now. Instead, she raised her eyebrows. “You really mean that?”

“I hope the police are considering the possibility.” He glanced over at Joan, who concentrated on not letting her face give anything away. Fred told her the little he did only because she had proved her ability to keep her mouth shut. “And I'd think first of the construction people. That's who's losing money every day they can't start this project.”

“But why take it out on Herschel? All he did was make a speech.” The man who was grateful to him had a point. “Nothing like those EFF people, who wrecked the machinery. Or the tree sitters. Isn't a young man up there now?”