Summerkill (6 page)

So going for a time-based exemption was surely worth a shot. Meanwhile …

At Birchwood, Pete’s favorite mantra—at every inopportune opening we’d chorus it back to him—had been “Learn to work with
what you’ve got.” By the time I came around to examining that seriously, I could credit myself with a sharper mind than most
of my cottage mates, when I wasn’t too antsy or pissed off to use it. What else might I have going? Not size, for most applications,
and surely not charm or disposition. Most people consider being energetic a plus, but they take it back when you throw the
qualifier “hyper” in front. As far as I know, your normal human being does not go around surging inside all the time. How
the hell do you make a plus of that? More than two decades later this remains an ongoing project. What it comes down to is,
if I’m awake, I need to be doing something.

Habitually, I keep a clean house, as much for the purposeful activity involved as for aesthetic reasons. In my Birchwood days,
before discovering the joys of working outdoors, I’d made a name for myself as the demon housecleaner of Danton Park—got all
the jobs I could handle. Some of the ladies were a little afraid of me, but boy did they get value for their money.

So that afternoon, the outdoors being too cluttered, I made a beeline for the vacuum cleaner. Later I exchanged it for a can
of furniture polish and the electric buffer, after which I marched upstairs and dug noisily into straightening up the boys’
quarters, which they weren’t going to appreciate. By one-thirty, when I came back down, Ryan Jessup’s body was gone and most
of the investigators with it. A second TV crew, this one from Channel 11, had arrived and departed. I could see through the
kitchen window that the contents of the Bronco still lay around on the ground, though none of the several men who remained
seemed to be doing anything with them. I had no desire to go out and mingle.

In the course of sitting around watching the boys dawdle with their food, I’d developed an ambitious kitchen-cabinet-reorganizing
scheme. It didn’t absolutely have to be saved for a rainy day. If one of those men looked in and wondered what evidence I
was trying to get rid of, he was welcome to come hand me things.

It may have been my hope that by clattering enough dishes I could continue to avoid hearing myself think. This didn’t work.
Somebody, incredibly, had set me up as a murderer. I might not be happy to learn who, but didn’t I need to know?

Because of the way things had been scripted, Mariah was likely right in her implication that the killer would turn out to
have some connection with the Garden Center or Hudson Heights. The sheriff’s assumption that this defined a large group of
people was technically valid, but most of the Etlingers’ landscaping crews and Clete Donnelly’s construction workers had scant
familiarity with my schedule and little if any working-hours involvement with Ryan Jessup. Those who saw him most, the Garden
Center staff, I couldn’t readily evaluate; with the high turnover rate the last couple of years I wasn’t even solid on current
first names. Ryan would have been that, and more, and he could surely have bugged someone. Hell, most of them, probably, at
one time or another. Enough to plan and carry out a murder? I couldn’t seriously think so. Much as I’d rather not, it was
time to move on to the name players.

I would have exempted Willem—he won’t even step on ants—except that far and away the most likely place for someone to have
raided the Bronco and snatched my pruner was the workers’ parking lot at Hudson Heights. And it was Willem who’d sent me there
Tuesday. None of the four people I usually worked with—Clete Donnelly, his son Kyle, construction boss Matt Conroy, or land
management supervisor Thurman Haynes—had been on the scene. The vandalism was easy enough to spot—some perennials and a couple
of small shrubs yanked out of the ground—and to repair, but it had involved leaving the Bronco open and out of my sight for
a good half hour. There’s also the fact that Willem does lie fluently, when he chooses, plus he’d gotten as bummed out as
I’ve ever seen him about the stifling effects of Ryan’s economies on some of his projects.

I saw no reason at all to exempt the other three Etlingers. Willem’s wife Kate and his parents, Eleanor and Rodney, were less
than crazy about me, and I couldn’t seriously believe they’d been crazy about Ryan either, whatever surface noises they made.
They’d created a toney image for the Garden Center, the “we may cost a little more, but we’re worth it” sort of thing. The
effects of Ryan’s penny-pinching were starting to strain the credibility of that claim. At staff meetings they always managed
to say something positive about how he was putting their financial house in order. Beneath the surface, though, had it reached
the point where one or more of them decided Ryan’s cheapness could be expurgated only by expurgating the man himself? Or had
it come to seem all too likely he was on track to end up literally owning the store? Since they didn’t really want me around,
either, why not two birds with one stone?

Clete Donnelly was a man with a genuine appreciation of business bottom lines. His by-marriage connection with the Etlingers
had not inspired him to cultivate a toney image or to adopt his in-laws’ style of papering over delicate subjects with pleasant
words. Officially, he’d recommended his distant relative from Watertown to the Etlingers; the common wisdom was they’d had
no choice in the matter. Willem’s marriage to his daughter, together with his subsequent guaranteeing of two sizable loans
the Garden Center could not have obtained on its own, had given him a legitimate interest and plenty of clout.

Clete’s own financial picture was probably a work in progress since he’d launched Hudson Heights, by far his largest and most
ambitious project to date. The financing was from a consortium of county investors, abetted by a low-interest state loan and
some nice perks extracted from the county development agency. In most people’s minds, though, Clete Donnelly was Hudson Heights.
He gave every appearance of thinking so, too. Modest, Clete is not. Or indecisive. And if he were a less tenacious man, Hudson
Heights would never have gotten off the drawing board.

For most of its length Patroon County, which is on the southern fringe of the Capital District, is bordered on the west by
the Hudson River. A little farther south the river frontage, much of it nicely elevated, was bought up during the nineteenth
century by families for whom the American dream had come true beyond their wildest imaginings. They transformed their land
into country estates with extensive grounds and lavishly appointed mansions. A number of these estates are still intact, the
majority in one form or another of public ownership.

That sort of development didn’t happen here, though our river frontage is just as dramatic in places. We were a little too
far from Manhattan, and back in that era Riverton, our only city, was a lively, raucous, anything-but-elegant port. Its famous
red-light district drew customers from within a hundred-mile radius. The rest of the county has always been primarily agricultural,
though mills did have a few decades’ worth of heyday; a dozen or so of their massive redbrick shells are still around.

The land along the river north of Riverton was too hilly to be considered good for farming, nor did it afford promising sites
for mills. A scattering of residences, some affluent, some ordinary, gradually accumulated along the narrow, flat valley plain
just beyond the riverbank and the railroad tracks that parallel it. The heights remained largely untampered with until Clete
started buying up parcels of land in the area. People watched—some with amazement, others with outrage—as he literally sliced
off the summit of Crane Hill, the highest elevation on his property—in fact in the whole county—to create a much larger top
surface. The general assumption was that he planned to build himself a house up there. Clete’s castle, people started calling
it in advance. His idea, when announced, was quite different and much grander: a tour-quality golf course, winding among two-acre-plus
upscale residential properties, tied together by an elegant clubhouse and inn on the hill he had reshaped, overlooking the
river: Hudson Heights.

At first glance the project had a lot going for it. The people of this county, though acknowledging that some sort of development
might be desirable, are picky about which types are suitable. Only the lightest of industries need apply, and these days you
can forget your large middle-income housing tract. Since I’ve been here a utility company identified a potential site for
a power plant and a farmer wanted to turn his cornfields into a speedway. The level of general distress was amazing, and both
projects died quick deaths.

So you’d think a concept like Hudson Heights—designed to look nice, not make much noise, and bring some serious money into
the area—would breeze right through the planning boards. Who was there to object? A decade or so earlier, the answer would
probably have been “no one.” Unfortunately for Clete and his backers, by the time they’d gotten their act together, so had
all sorts of environmental groups.

There were the water people, concerned with what the golf course runoff—all those turf-management chemicals— would do to the
river. There was the topography focus group, maintaining that changing the contours of the land to the projected extent would
have a detrimental effect on interior farmlands. The habitat environmentalists got busy compiling lists of birds and plants
whose territory would be made unlivable; the infrastructure folk documented projected strains on local resources. Claims were
put forth that there were several Indian burial grounds in the marked area. Another group researched previous usage and found
that in the mid to late ’40s part of the land had been rented out to Albany Univers, an industrial conglomerate, for dumpsites.
Given the firm’s diversity even back then and the minimal record-keeping requirements of the era, heaven only knew what might
be in them.

Mariah, to whom I owe most of my historical background on this region, had a major role in the protest scenario as it unfolded.
She insisted her opposition stemmed from the conviction that natural beauty should be preserved: what Clete had done to Crane
Hill before the project even got under way was an ominous portent for things to come. I’m sure she believed that, but I suspect
her fondness for a good argument and her dislike of Clete Donnelly factored in, too.

Clete scored the first points. The Indian group’s claim of having discovered some artifacts in the quarry pond area of the
site he shot down by producing a video of the very same people burying the alleged finds.

After that things got serious. In its required Environmental Impact Statement the Hudson Heights group addressed the possible
environmental threats one by one, either showing that no significant problem would be created or modifying the original scheme’s
grading, drainage, housing density, maintenance program, and road routing to lessen negative impact.

Some of the EIS claims were disputed, especially regarding the golf course’s impact on its surroundings. What evolved was
a “green thinking” approach to course maintenance that the environmentalists grudgingly accepted. Clete grumbled that he hoped
the grass would listen to his entreaties to grow, the weeds and bugs to his pleas to go away, because those were just about
the only weapons he’d been left with.

The hardest area for the Hudson Heights group to address in the EIS, and the one on which opponents to the project came to
pin their hopes, was the dumpsites. Of Albany Univers’s five plants in the region back in the ’40s, one was known to have
produced paint thinners, another assorted plastics; both had used chemicals whose waste products were classified today as
hazardous. If the dump contents had come from either of those two plants, there was a real possibility parts of the area were
contaminated and should not be built on.

Working from what Albany Univers had on record plus a ledger and crude maps provided by a man named Toby Babcock, who had
owned the bulk of the land Clete bought, Thurman Haynes and his land-management crew identified the general locations of the
three dumpsites Babcock had collected money on and compiled a partial list of the materials that should be in them. A few
were mildly undesirable, none was a major toxin. To this research they added extensive soil testing in the site areas, which
pretty much confirmed what they expected to find and gave no indication of a serious problem. They estimated that everything
in the dumpsites had come from two of the conglomerate’s more benign plants and posed no environmental hazard. As an extra
precaution, however, they proposed to leave the sites forever green.

Without Clete’s involvement, that might have satisfied the project’s opponents, but he did have a reputation for bending facts
to suit his purposes. A challenge was posed: open the sites to impartial testing—let the public find out was really underneath
that ground.

To some people’s surprise, Clete agreed this would be the responsible way to go. Not only did he accept the challenge, he
made a weekend party of it—free hot dogs and soda, clowns for the kiddies. Thurman marked the general outlines of the three
sites and had visitors choose random sections of them to uncover. Anybody could watch, check out the contents, take his own
soil samples. The makeup of all three sites turned out to be pretty much as estimated.

So it finally came down to there being no good reason why the Hudson Heights project should not go forward. That’s all you
need; the neighbors don’t have to welcome you. This spring the clubhouse and the first nine holes of the golf course had their
gala grand opening. At least thirty of the proposed eighty-two houses were scheduled for completion by the end of the summer;
a few were already occupied. Hardcore opponents like Mariah remained unplacated, but most of the environmental activist leadership
was not local and has moved on.

The golf course, designed by a landscape architect with an international reputation in that specialty, was being installed
by a large Westchester County architect-engineering firm. It was much too extensive a project for the Garden Center. The contract
the Etlingers won was for the landscaping on the enlarged top of Crane Hill, which came to be know as the plateau, where the
clubhouse and a still-uncompleted inn were located, as well as the two main entrances to the development. In addition, the
firm was made the first referral for residential landscaping. It was far and away their biggest contract ever.