Summerkill (25 page)

“Why not the golf course? It wasn’t as dramatic as chopping off the top of a hill, but there’s been a lot of land reshaping.”

“True. But if we’re going on your premise that they got rid of Skip and wanted to get rid of me because of something we might
glom on to at Hudson Heights, I can’t see how the golf course would figure into it. We weren’t involved there. Both of us
put in a little time on the south entrance to the residential loop—and no, I can’t think of anything special about that. Mostly,
we worked on the plateau. When Ryan was out there, he was usually on the plateau, too. If he noticed something we didn’t,
I can’t believe it had anything to do with landscaping. Ryan didn’t know squat about that.”

“Ryan knew numbers. Ryan had a nose for actionable numbers, maybe.” He shook his head. “Beyond that, I still don’t have a
clue what animated this guy. What was his goal? Blackmail on the installment plan, which it looks like what he was into here,
though apparently he settled for a one-shot payment back in Watertown, is a high-risk activity. Your victim has to be looking
for ways to shut you down, and the longer it goes on, the less benign those ways stand to get. I have to think whoever he
hit on would’ve been unable to raise the kind of cash his information was worth all at once, but he figured they could manage
five thou a month. For how long, did he suppose? And then what?”

“We can’t even be sure that whatever he was extracting money for had to do with Hudson Heights.”

“Pretty sure. This morning I quizzed Skip about that analysis of the Garden Center books you put him on to. His projections
and what actually shows look very close. Skip thinks Ryan was genuinely trying to get the place on a sound financial footing.
No way was there an extra five thou a month to appropriate for himself. And he must have known enough about the family’s personal
finances to realize they’d be hard-put to come up with that kind of cash even three months in a row. If you wanted to blackmail
the Etlingers, you’d go for a lump sum, make them sell something. The cash-flow approach wasn’t going to fly.”

“All right, Hudson Heights. There’s been lots of money flowing around there. Mostly out, my new client in Platteville thinks,
but hell, why not out to Ryan?”

“Why to Ryan is more the issue.”

“Do you want to hear the only, only thing I found any cause to wonder about this morning? It’s going to strike you as stupid.”

“Not until I hear it.”

“All right: I never saw it, nor ever will—it’s under God knows how many tons of dirt now. That road up to where you guys dove
off into the quarry pond? Why was it there?”

He didn’t answer immediately, then asked, “Could it have been left over from the logging days? That’s all that occurs to me.
I shouldn’t have called it a road—track is more descriptive. Two tire ruts, seriously overgrown between. Where we stopped
was as far as we dared go, but it looked like the track had once continued on a ways. I never wondered why. When you’re a
teenager, you assume things are put there to accommodate you.”

“Really? I assumed they were mostly there to get in my way.”

He reached over to pat my hand. “You should talk to somebody who might remember more about that track. I know just the person.”

• • •

It didn’t feel a bit warmer at eleven than it had at six, and the sky was shedding a fine mist, just enough to make me keep
giving my windshield single swipes with the wipers. Not optimal weather for a country outing.

Patroon County, being mostly rural, has many tucked-away pockets, delineated with unlabeled roads that either dead-end or
eventually take you to someplace recognizable. Close to an hour after Baxter went off to argue with Phil Thomson, I had managed
to follow his directions into one of these pockets and arrived at a clearing centered by a small, squared-off box of a house,
white-painted and plain. You could call it a cottage if you deleted all connotations of charm. The ID Baxter had given me
was not so much the structure as what I would find in the yard—a neat alignment of retired vintage cars, none of them restored
quite to the point of running and all, he said, wired to an alarm that would go off in the sheriff’s department at any sign
of tampering. This was a wise precaution, given their isolated location and the likelihood that their combined worth exceeded
a quarter of a million dollars.

In addition to the silent, unmoving vehicles there were reddish chickens who ignored me and a cat who took off into the sparse
woods surrounding the clearing as soon as I stepped out of the Bronco. An aging dog of indeterminable breed barked heartily
but kept his distance, unwagging tail wavering between slightly above and decidedly below horizontal. The precipitation was
the other side of drizzle now, not a pleasure to hang around in. Still, since I was expected I figured my best move was to
let the dog announce me and await developments.

The man who emerged from the building was wiry and gimpy, his left leg several inches shorter than his right. Red-tanned skin
stretched taut across his skull, which was decorated on top by a fringe of white hair that stood up in little tufts. He did
look old enough to have been around for whatever was to be remembered about Crane Hill. With poetic license, you could project
him as having been around when the retreating glacier carved the Hudson Valley and sculpted it. I smiled tentatively. “Mr.
Kanser?”

He nodded. “You will be the young lady Baxter sent out. Why do you stand there in the rain? Hansel won’t hurt you.” In affirmation,
the tail came up and wagged a few times before the dog turned away and meandered off. I followed Mr. Kanser into the house.

The small living room carried that slightly stale smell peculiar to places inhabited by the elderly. It also had what was
probably a stronger connection to Baxter than the old cars: a lot of wooden furniture. Not Baxter’s style—these pieces were
of dark wood, heavy, very intricately carved. My Grandmother Wyckoff had a chair and bureau in similar style, though of inferior
quality; they’d come over on the boat from Germany with her parents. According to Baxter, Mr. Kanser had come over on a boat
with his parents in the early 1930s. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the furniture had made the trip too.

It must have been my day to feel confined. Mr. Kanser’s living room was no more than twelve feet square, and wherever there
wasn’t furniture, irregular stacks of books and magazines, none of them recent-looking, obliterated the floor space. We settled
into two of the heavy chairs. Baxter had cautioned that my host was not one for idle chat, so I started right in. “I hear
you’ve done a lot of hiking.”

Mr. Kanser nodded. “I have climbed all the high peaks in the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. I have done the Appalachian
Trail and in New Zealand the Milford Track. And many times the Heilbronner Weg in the Alps.”

I nodded in appreciative ignorance. “You’ve hiked some right around here, too?”

“One cannot properly hike in this area,” he corrected. “The elevations are insufficient. One can walk. This I do often.”

Emil Kanser’s English was only faintly accented, but his speech patterns marked him as an immigrant, or else someone who got
his idea of how people talk from books. I saw neither television nor radio in the room. “You used to, um, walk in the Crane
Hill area, Baxter tells me.”

“That was many years ago. You would not have been born yet, or Baxter either, the last time I went to Crane Hill. I myself
was still a young man.”

“What made you stop going there? It’s not very tall by your standards, I guess, but it’s the tallest place around.”

“It was the gravel mining, finally. How can one walk agreeably amid such noise and foul odors? But already I did not go there
so frequently.” He smiled. “Already I had discovered taller places. Also, Mr. Toby Babcock was not a hospitable man. To pay
for the privilege of hunting on his land I understand. To pay merely to walk …”

“The gravel mining started in the late forties?”

“Yes, and continued well into the fifties.”

“But before that, in the early to mid forties, weren’t there a lot of trucks coming there to dump waste materials? Didn’t
they bother you?”

“I was, in 1941, eighteen years of age and in excellent health. Because of my German ancestry, the army sent me to the Pacific,
where my second language could not benefit either side. It was 1947 before I returned here. And then, it may have been two
or three times more, I paid my money and climbed Crane Hill.”

“What route did you take?”

“Because of the many gullies in the area and the cliffs on the river side there were only two approaches to be considered.
The easier was from the southeast, where Crane Hill sloped gradually all the way up, until Mr. Donnelly started wreaking his
havoc. This I did not find an interesting route. One rarely emerged from the trees. Thus I walked in more from the north and
west, a steeper incline but the views were more open. There was an old logging road one could follow much of the way up.”

Baxter’s track. “Were loggers still using it?”

“No—no, I believe not since the early thirties. After the war one could still follow the left branch of it almost all the
way up to the small caves.”

“Caves?”

“Three of them. The one was tall enough, I could stand inside. The others, no.”

“I’ve never heard of these caves. How far up the hill are they?”

“I would say three-quarters of the way. No, no, more than that. High enough, they are no longer exposed, after Mr. Donnelly’s
… excuse me—I believe he calls it reshaping. I cannot find the words in English for what I might call it.”

“I understand what you mean. Can you tell me where the other branch of the logging road went?”

“To the cave of the bats, as I remember, and a little past it. When I returned from the Army there were downed trees and displaced
rocks as far as one could see, along that branch. I thought to bushwhack it some day, but then the gravel mining—”

“Tell me about this cave.”

“It was remarkably wide for this area and also deep; I would estimate something on the order of ninety by thirty feet. There
remained good headroom well toward the back. At one time it was the home of many, many thousands of bats. What I remember
best about it was the incredibly foul odor. I only entered once, as a boy. Never did I feel an urge to return.”

“You said ‘at one time’ there was a colony of bats. What happened to them?”

“I cannot tell you. I believe they were no longer there after the war, because many hunters were using the area by that time.
Mr. Toby Babcock had complained earlier that too few would come to hunt, because the noise of the gunshots would set the bats
to flying out during the daylight and the hunters did not like this.”

The bats mustn’t have been too pleased either, I thought. “Maybe that’s why the right branch of the road was blocked? Maybe
Mr. Babcock had found a way to seal off the cave and get rid of them, and he didn’t want anybody trying to open it up.”

“Again, I cannot enlighten you.”

“After the war, did the logging road look as if it had been used recently? Say by trucks?”

“Vehicles did make use of it, frequently enough to keep the tracks smoothed down. Most likely, this would have been hunters.”

“From what Baxter says, the area was still popular with hunters when he was a teenager.”

“Young lady, it continued to be well used until Mr. Donnelly bought the property and began his depredations. Or perhaps you
think, like my nephew, that what he has done constitutes an improvement?”

“I think I would very much like to have seen that cave, when the bats lived there.”

• • •

Cool it, I admonished myself, back in the Bronco. The idea of toxic wastes being stashed way the hell up a hill inside a bat
cave which was now sealed off under many, many cubic tons of dirt could be a wee bit of a reach. In so many ways, though,
it might fit. How did we know we had all Toby Babcock’s records concerning dumping on his land? Mariah had been involved in
the controversy over the dump contents. In the process she’d learned a fair amount about Albany Univers and what, in their
manufacturing processes, might have constituted toxic wastes. In creating his plateau, Clete ensured the bat cave would be
well hidden. Serendipity or intent?

Okay, so there wouldn’t have been anything for Ryan to see on top of the plateau—overhearing was more his style, anyhow. But
Skip and I were both supposed to know land. Could somebody have been worried that we might see something, interpret? Still,
why would anyone have hauled such stuff most of the way up a hill to cram into a smelly cave when there was so much unused
land down below they could have dumped it on? And what, short of a noxious-smelling substance oozing out of the ground, might
Skip or I have spotted?

I told myself to calm down and run the idea past Baxter before I tried to take off with it. We were supposed to get together
back at his house at two-thirty, which was not much more than an hour away. There were a few things I could check out in the
binders first.

Rather than detouring by my house, I used my cell phone to see what my answering machine had to offer. Lots of hang-ups, it
turned out. Jack Garrett wanted to talk, as did several other media people. So did Denny, at least that sounded like what
he mumbled. Chauncy Bellis, the plant pathologist, said he found the newspaper details about Mariah’s death absurd. Could
I verify? I put that one off. He wasn’t a person you told stories to, and I wasn’t sure what to say. The last message on the
tape was from Willem, a simple one: “Val, call me. Please?”

W
ell, I wanted to see him too, I reasoned. And it wasn’t like there was anything urgent to look at in those binders. I punched
in Willem’s office number.

The day remained dreary, the moisture receding to a gentle mist. Excellent planting weather. There were still those few mums
to set in at Mariah’s, plus all the mulching to do, the paths to lay. She’d never see it now, but I wanted to finish up for
her. I’d ask Baxter when I could get in there.