Gone, Baby, Gone (24 page)

Sometimes, those bodies are found. And sometimes, they’re not. The quarries, given to underwater storms of black silt and sudden illogical shifts in their landscape, rife with undocumented shelves and crevices, yield their secrets with all the frequency of the Vatican.

As we trudged up the old railway incline, snapping branches out of our faces, trampling weeds and stumbling over rocks in the dark, slipping on sudden smooth stones and cursing under our breath, I found myself thinking that if we were pioneers trying to pass through these hills to reach the reservoir on the other side in the Blue Hills, we’d be dead by now. Some bear or pissed-off moose or Indian war party would have killed us just for disturbing the peace.

“Try and be a little louder,” I said, as Broussard slipped in the dark, banged his shin on a boulder, and straightened up long enough to kick it.

“Hey,” he said, “I look like Jeremiah Johnson to you? Last time I was in the woods, I was drunk, I was having sex, and I could see the highway from where I was.”

“You were having sex?” Angie said. “My God.”

“You have something against sex?”

“I have something against bugs,” Angie said. “Ick.”

“Is it true that if you have sex in the woods, the smell attracts bears?” Poole said. He supported himself on a tree trunk for a moment, sucked in the night air.

“There aren’t any bears left around here.”

“You never know,” Poole said, and looked off into the dark trees. He placed the gym bag of money by his feet for a moment, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at the sweat on his neck, wiped his reddening face. He blew air out of his cheeks and swallowed a few times.

“You okay, Poole?”

He nodded. “Fine. Just out of shape. And, oh, yeah, old.”

“Want one of us to carry the bag?” Angie asked.

Poole grimaced at her and picked up the bag. He pointed up the slope. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”

“That’s not a breach,” Broussard said. “That’s a hill.”

“I was quoting Shakespeare, you vulgarian.” Poole came off the tree and began trudging up the hill.

“Then you should have said, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” Broussard said. “Would have been more appropriate.”

Angie took a few deep breaths, caught Broussard’s eyes as he did the same. “We’re old.”

“We’re old,” he agreed.

“Think it’s time we hung ’em up?”

“Love to.” He smiled, leaned over, and took another breath. “My wife? Got in a car accident just before we were married, fractured some bones. No health insurance. You know what a fracture cost to fix? Man, I’ll be able to retire about the same time I’m chasing perps with a walker.”

“Somebody say a walker?” Poole said. He looked up at the steep slope. “That’d be sweet.”

As a kid I’d taken this path several times to reach the watering holes of Granite Rail or Swingle’s Quarry. It was supposedly off-limits, of course, surrounded by fences and patrolled by rangers for the MDC, but there were always jagged doors cut through the chain link if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t, you brought the equipment to make your own. The rangers were in short supply, and even with a small army they’d have been hard-pressed to patrol the dozens of quarries and the hundreds of kids who made their way up to them on a blistering summer day.

So I’d climbed this ridge before. Fifteen years ago. In the daylight.

It was a little different now. For one, I wasn’t in the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager. Too many bruises and too many bars and far too many on-the-job collisions with people and pool tables—and, once, both a windshield and the road waiting on the other side—had given my body the creaks and aches and constant dull throbs of either a man twice my age or a professional football player.

Second, like Broussard, I wasn’t exactly Grizzly Adams. My exposure to a world without asphalt and a good deli was limited. Once a year, I took a hiking trip with my sister and her family up Washington’s Mount Rainier; four years ago I’d been coerced into a camping trip in Maine by a woman who’d fancied herself a naturalist because she shopped at army-navy stores. The trip had been scheduled for three days, but we’d lasted one night and a can of insect repellent before we drove to Camden for white sheets and room service.

I considered my companions as we climbed the slope toward Granite Rail Quarry. My guess was none of them would have made it through the first night of that camping trip. Maybe with sunlight, proper hiking boots, a sturdy staff, and a first-rate ski lift, we’d have made respectable progress, but it was only after twenty minutes of thumping and banging up the hill, our flashlights trained on the imprints and the occasional embedded railroad tie of a railway that had stopped running almost a century ago, that we finally got a whiff of the water.

Nothing smells so clean and cold and promising as quarry water. I’m not sure why this is, because it’s merely decades of rain piled up between walls of granite and fed and freshened by underground springs, but the moment the scent found my nostrils, I was sixteen again and I could feel the plunge in my chest as I jumped over the edge of Heaven’s Peak, a seventy-foot cliff in Swingle’s Quarry, saw the light-green water yawn open below me like a waiting hand, felt weightless and bodiless and pure spirit hanging in the empty, awesome air around me. Then I dropped, and the air turned into a tornado shooting straight up from the advancing pool of green, and the graffiti exploded from the shelves and walls and cliffs all around me, burst forth in reds and blacks and golds and blues, and I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water, toes pointed down, wrists tucked tight against my hips, dropped deep below the surface where the cars and the refrigerators and the bodies lay.

Over the years, as the quarries have claimed one young life every four years or so, not to mention all the corpses dumped over the cliffs in the dead of night and discovered, if at all, years later, I’ve read the newspapers as editorialists, community activists, and grieving parents ask, “Why? Why?”

Why do kids—quarry rats, we called ourselves in my generation—feel the need to jump from cliffs as high as one hundred feet into water two hundred feet deep and mined with sudden outcroppings, car antennas, logs, and who knows what else?

I have no idea. I jumped because I was a kid. Because my father was an asshole and my home was a constant police action, and most of the time finding a place to hide was how my sister and I spent our lives, and that didn’t seem much like living. Because often, as I stood on those cliffs and looked over the edge at an overturned bowl of green that turned and revealed itself the more I craned my neck, I felt a cold sizzle in my stomach and an awareness of every limb, every bone, and every blood vessel in my body. Because I felt pure in the air and clean in the water. I jumped to prove things to my friends and, once those things had been proven, because I was addicted to it, needed to find higher cliffs, longer drops. I jumped for the same reason I became a private detective—because I hate knowing exactly what’s next.

“I need to catch a breath,” Poole said. He grabbed a thick vine growing out of the ground in front of us and twisted with it toward the ground. The gym bag fell from his hand, and his foot slipped in the dirt, and he fell on top of the bag, clenching the vine tightly in his hand.

We were about fifteen yards from the top. I could see the faintest green shimmer of water, like a wisp of cloud, reflecting off the dark cliffs and hovering in the cobalt pitch of sky just beyond the last ridge.

“Sure, buddy, sure.” Broussard stopped and stood by his partner as the older man placed his flashlight on his lap and gasped for breath.

In the dark, Poole was as white as I’d ever seen him. He shone. His raspy breath clawed its way into the night, and his eyes swam in their sockets, seemed to float in search of something they couldn’t locate.

Angie knelt by him and put a hand under his jaw, felt his pulse. “Take a deep breath.”

Poole nodded, his eyes bulging, and sucked air.

Broussard lowered himself to his haunches. “You okay, buddy?”

“Fine,” Poole managed. “Aces.”

The shine on his face found his throat and dampened his collar.

“Too fucking old to be humping my ass up some”—he coughed—“hill.”

Angie looked at Broussard. Broussard looked back at me.

Poole coughed some more. I tilted my flashlight, saw tiny dots of blood speckle his chin.

“Just a minute,” he said.

I shook my head and Broussard nodded, pulled his walkie-talkie from his jacket.

Poole reached up and grasped his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Calling it in,” Broussard said. “We got to get you off this hill, my man.”

Poole tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist, coughed so hard I thought he’d lurch into a convulsion for a minute.

“You don’t call anything in,” he said. “We’re supposed to be alone.”

“Poole,” Angie said, “you’re in some trouble here.”

He looked up at her and smiled. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Broussard said, and looked away from the blood on Poole’s chin.

“Really.” Poole shifted on the ground, wrapped the inside of his forearm around the vine. “Go over the hill, children. Go over the hill.” He smiled, but the corners of his mouth twitched against his shiny cheeks.

We looked down at him. He looked like he was one arch of the back or roll of the eyes from a headstone. His flesh was the color of raw scallop and his eyes wouldn’t stay focused. His breathing sounded like rain through a window screen.

His grip on Broussard’s wrist was still as tight as a jailer’s, though. He glanced at the three of us and seemed to guess what we were thinking.

“I’m old and in debt,” he said. “And I’ll be fine. You don’t find that girl, she won’t be.”

Broussard said, “I don’t
know
her, Poole. Get it?”

Poole nodded and tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist until the flesh in his hand turned red. “’Preciate that, son. Really do. What’s the first thing I taught you?”

Broussard looked away, and his eyes glistened in the light bouncing from Angie’s flashlight, off his partner’s chest and into his pupils.

“What’s the first thing I taught you?” Poole said.

Broussard cleared his throat, spit into the woods.

“Huh?”

“Close the case,” Broussard said, and his voice sounded as if Poole’s hand had left his wrist and found his throat.

“Always,” Poole said. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the ridge behind him. “So, go close it.”

“I—”

“Don’t you dare pity me, kid. Don’t you dare. Take the bag.”

Broussard lowered his chin to his chest. He reached under Poole and pulled the bag out, slapped the dirt off the bottom.

“Go,” Poole said. “Now.”

Broussard pulled his wrist from Poole’s fingers and stood up. He looked off into the dark woods like a kid who’s just been told what alone means.

Poole glanced at me and Angie and smiled. “I’ll survive. Save the girl, call for evac.”

I looked away. Poole, to the best of my knowledge, had just suffered either a small heart attack or a stroke. And the blood that had shot from his lungs didn’t exactly give cause for optimism. I was looking down at a man who, unless he got immediate help, would die.

Angie said, “I’ll stay.”

We looked at her. She’d remained on her knees by Poole since he’d sat down, and she ran a palm over his white forehead, ran it back through the bristles of his hair.

“The hell you will,” Poole said, and swatted at her hand. He tilted his head, looked up into her face. “That child is going to die tonight, Miss Gennaro.”

“Angie.”

“That child is going to die tonight, Angie.” He gritted his teeth for a moment and grimaced at something shooting up his sternum, swallowed hard to force it back down. “Unless we do something. We need every person we have to get her out of here in one piece. Now”—he struggled with the vine, pulled himself up a bit—“you’re going up to those quarries. And so are you, Patrick.” He turned his head to Broussard. “And you most definitely fucking are. So go. Go now.”

None of us wanted to. That was obvious. But then Poole held out his arm and tilted the wrist up toward us until we could all read the illuminated hands of his watch: 8:03.

We were late.

“Go!” he hissed.

I looked at the top of the hill, then off into the dark woods behind Poole, then down at the man himself. Splayed there, legs spread and one foot lolling off to the side, he looked like a scarecrow tossed from his perch.

“Go!”

We left him there.

We scrambled up the hill, Broussard taking the lead as the path was narrowed by thickets of weeds and brambles. Except for the sounds of our progress, the night was so still it would have been easy to believe we were the only creatures out in it.

Ten feet from the top, we met a chain-link fence twelve feet high, but it didn’t prove much of an obstacle. A section of it as wide and tall as a garage door had been cut out, and we walked through the hole without pausing.

At the top of the hill, Broussard stopped long enough to engage his walkie-talkie and whisper into it. “Have reached the quarry. Sergeant Raftopoulos is ill. On my signal—repeat, on my signal—send evac to the railroad slope fifteen yards from the top. Wait for my signal. Copy.”

“Affirmative.”

“Out.” Broussard placed the walkie-talkie back in his raincoat.

“What now?” Angie said.

We stood on a cliff about forty feet above the water. In the dark, I could see the silhouettes of other cliffs and crags, bent trees, and jutting rock shelves. A line of cut, strewn, and disrupted granite rose off to our immediate left, a few jagged peaks another ten to fifteen feet higher than the one on which we stood. To our right, the land rolled flat for about sixty yards, then curved and became jagged and erratic again, erupting into the dark. Below, the water waited, a wide circle of light gray against the black cliff walls.

“The woman who called Lionel said wait for instructions,” Broussard said. “You see any instructions?”

Angie shone her flashlight at our feet, bounced it off the granite walls, arced it off the trees and bushes. The dancing light was like a lazy eye that gave us fractured glimpses into a dense, alien world that could alter itself dramatically within inches—go from stone to moss to battered white bark to mint-green vegetation. And flowing through the tree line like reams of dental floss were silver stripes of chain link.