Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp (4 page)

Of course, pie alone wasn’t
quite enough to overcome the disturbing events of the morning. I
dialed Chad’s cell number. Chad is my son, soon to begin his junior
year at Michigan Tech. However, he was spending the summer studying
wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I knew I couldn’t reach him
if he was actually on the island, but he was supposed to show up
here for a visit, some time this month. His phone rang four times,
then went to voicemail. I left a message but had no idea when he’d
actually receive it.

I looked around my kitchen.
It was the one room I’d hardly worked on at all. Secondhand
appliances and cracked vinyl went well with the old-fashioned
wallpaper featuring faded green twining ivy. I wasn’t exactly
jealous of Janice’s kitchen. I’d made my choices about which rooms
to fix first, but sometimes it was hard to be patient.

I wandered into the living
room and ran a finger along the spines of my CD cases. Jazz?
Ragtime? Easy listening? Classical? Nothing fell into the nagging
hole inside me. I’d cut all my ties with friends from the Chicago
area when Roger and I broke up. Chad was essentially grown. We’d
always been close, and I knew he was excited to see the house I’d
bought, but his visit was possibly a couple of weeks away and I
hadn’t heard his voice since mid-July, when he’d placed a hurried
call one night on a mainland trip to do some shopping.

Although I’d known for
months that Cora and Adele did not like each other, I’d never been
in the middle of an actual confrontation. Mostly they just avoided
one other. Today’s spat made me feel distant from both of them. I
hadn’t felt this alone since I’d moved to Forest County.

I went back to the kitchen,
cut another slice of pie, and poured a glass of iced tea. I
wouldn’t be rushed through this glass. If I couldn’t have nice
friends, at least I could have comfort food.

After I’d licked the plate,
and the second piece of pie and the tea had pleasantly expanded in
my stomach, I headed for bed.

My bladder woke me the next
morning; the sun was already up. Inevitably, the phone rang just as
I was finishing up in the bathroom. It was the home phone, not my
new cell. Thinking it might be Chad, I didn’t want to miss it and
rushed downstairs.

On the fourth ring, I
grabbed the handset. “Hello?” I gasped, trying to catch my
breath.

“Ana? Is that you? You
sound funny.” It was Adele.

“It’s me. It’s really
early. I had to rush to catch the phone. What’s up?” I wondered if
she wanted to talk about the events at the Pine Tree the day
before.

Adele was never one for
preliminaries. She launched right into the meat of her news. “I was
just opening up the office at the store and I heard something
coming over the police scanner. I called my neighbor to verify the
news, because I wasn’t sure I caught it all.”

“All what,
Adele?”

“I’m trying to tell you.
Jerry Caulfield’s body was found in the river, downstream at
Jalmari. They said he’d been cut up! What am I going to do? Oh,
Ana, what am I going to do?”

Chapter 5

At six-forty-five,
Wednesday evening, I sat uncomfortably at a roll-out table in the
multi-purpose room at Forest County Central School, several miles
north of Cherry Hill. It looked like nearly a hundred other
residents had already turned out for the meeting. If only we knew
what the meeting was for. I’d gotten a call around two in the
afternoon via the Crossroads Fellowship telephone tree. Geraldine
Longcore had told me that Sheriff Newt Sullivant and Cherry Hill
Police Chief Tracy Jarvi were requesting all county residents to
attend a brief informational meeting at seven at the school.
Geraldine said she had no idea what it was about. She made sure I
remembered the next person on the phone tree list, and hung
up.

Newton Sullivant was
practically a stranger to me, but Tracy was our young female Chief,
a friend, whom I liked a lot. The law enforcement agencies almost
always worked together in this rural area.

I did my duty and passed
the message on to Marie and John Aho, the service station owners.
“Maybe it’s about Jerry,” Marie said with a catch in her voice, and
then she hung up, just as abruptly as Geraldine had.

The
Cherry Hill Herald
comes out every
Wednesday; however, my copy comes in the mail on Thursday. I really
wanted to see if someone had managed to get anything about Jerry’s
death in before it went to press. But driving to town, potentially
having to talk to grieving locals, was beyond my courage level. I'd
hunkered down in my bedroom for the rest of the afternoon to read a
few chapters from
East of
Eden
, with Beethoven’s
Eroica
symphony mournfully echoing my
mood. Cherry Hill wasn’t looking so innocent and friendly to me any
more.

Judging from the folks who
had turned out for the meeting, more than one telephone tree had
been summoned to action. In addition to those from the Crossroads
church, there were plenty of Catholics and Lutherans in attendance,
and dozens of people I didn’t know at all. John and Marie Aho
approached the table section where I sat alone.

“Ana, it’s so good of you
to show up for this... this, whatever it is.” Marie struggled to
speak.

“She means, because you’re
pretty new to Cherry Hill,” John added.

“Does anyone know why we’re
here?” I asked.

A tall, thin woman wearing
a tropical print dress, one of the strangers to me, slipped into
the bench on the other side of the table. She held out a narrow
hand covered with rings. “Virginia Holiday,” she said in a husky
smoker’s voice as we shook. “Holiday Real Estate. I bought that
little building on the Caulfield block. Great location.” She
twisted on the seat and also shook hands with John and then
Marie.

“I’m Ana Raven,” I said.
“It rhymes with ca-bana.” Apparently, the palm trees and flowers on
her dress made me think of beaches and small pointed
tents.

“Nice to meet you,”
Virginia said. “What’s this all about?”

“We assume it’s something
about Jerry Caulfield’s death,” John said. “You haven’t
heard?”

“Caulfield’s...” she began
tentatively, but was cut off by Adele who swept toward
us.

“This is one sad day for
our community,” Adele announced loudly, shaking her
head.

From a couple of tables
away, a man yelled, “Where’s the Sheriff? It’s
six-fifty-eight.”

“Damn mysterious, if you
ask me,” said a woman I identified as a Lutheran, because she had
served me a hot dog at the St Johh's lunch tent on the Fourth of
July.

People had continued to
drift in, and now the room was packed. I saw Cora and her son Tom,
but they took seats on the far side of the room, and didn’t respond
when I waved.

“But, I just spoke to Jerry
Caulfield about the...” I heard the woman across from me begin. My
attention was distracted as two men entered the room from the
school hallway, rather than through the outside doors. Harvard
Brown, a Sheriff’s Deputy, and Kyle Appledorn for the city, were in
full uniform, including hats and holstered guns. Harvey walked
through the room and took a formal stance beside the double doors
that led to the parking lot, while Kyle remained near the hallway
opening. Neither man said a word, but everyone quieted down. Adele
motioned for me to slide in along the bench, and she sat down at
the end.

Harvey and Kyle had their
eyes focused on a shorter table that was marked “reserved,” on
which rested a portable podium and microphone. It was positioned
near a windowless door that probably led to the kitchen, since
there was a closed, long metal rolldown window in the same
wall.

The kitchen door opened and
Tracy Jarvi, also in full uniform, came out. Behind her was Sheriff
Sullivant. A third person was behind the Sheriff, and by virtue of
his height we could all see at a glance who it was: Jerry
Caulfield. I swear I felt a breeze from the collective
gasp.

Beside me, Adele moaned and
laid her head on her arms on the cold Formica. Her body was shaking
so hard it tickled my arm. After the sudden quiet, the room erupted
in a wave of babble as people reacted to the presence of the
not-so-dead newspaper owner. Sheriff Sullivant produced a gavel
from somewhere and rapped on the short table. A chair screeched as
Tracy pulled it out and sat down. Her eyes roved over the people in
the room, searching for information in their reactions. Jerry
remained standing in full view of everyone. I thought he was
working very hard not to smile.

“Ladies and gentlemen,”
said the Sheriff. The microphone squealed and everyone flinched.
Sullivant began again from a better distance, “Ladies and
gentlemen, as you can clearly see, Jerry Caulfield’s alive and
well. First off, I’ll give him a chance to speak to you and verify
that assumption.”

Jerry stepped to the
podium. He was wearing a light blue dress shirt, open at the neck,
and crisply pressed navy slacks. A summer tan contrasted with his
wavy white hair, which glowed, even under the unflattering
fluorescent school lights. He cleared his throat, adjusted the
microphone to his height and spoke in a perfect tone, slightly
cynical, but jocular. “Hello, friends. It would be overly trite to
quote Mark Twain and say something like ‘the reports of my death
have been greatly exaggerated.’ So I won’t say that. Actually, it
hasn’t even been reported, and I was quite surprised to hear the
news myself when I awoke late this morning after a busy night at
the print shop. I’ll let the Sheriff explain. Please note,” he
added, “that the
Cherry Hill Herald
did not carry any false headlines.”

Jerry pulled out the
remaining chair—no grating sound when he did it—and sat down on the
other side of the podium. He relaxed and a grin broadened across
his face.

Sullivant stepped forward
again, but he was not smiling. “Now that we’re relieved to learn
our newspaper’s still in business, let’s discuss how this rumor got
started. I believe that any number of private citizens own police
scanners.” He paused and glared at several people in the room,
including Adele, who had recovered enough to sit up.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Adele
whispered to me as she lowered her eyes.

“That’s perfectly legal,”
Sullivant continued. “However, I have to say that it’d be a good
thing for people to be certain of what they think they hear before
calling all their friends and neighbors with the latest
news.”

“I know what I heard just
fine,” piped a woman in a bright lavender sweat suit.

“You know what you think
you heard, Helen,” the Sheriff said, his voice threatening to make
the microphone squeal again. “Just hold your horses for a
minute.”

Everyone squirmed; there
were a few coughs, and Sullivant went on. “The partially decomposed
body of a man was discovered on Tuesday, down the river at Jalmari.
Without doin’ a lot of fancy testing, it’s pretty clear that he’s
been whacked on with a hatchet, although we don’t have an official
cause of death just yet.”

I searched for Cora’s eyes
across the room and found that she was also looking for mine. She
raised her eyebrows.

“We found a wallet in his
pants pocket, making tentative identification gol-darned easy. The
man’s name is Jared Canfield.” Sullivant let this information sink
in for a few seconds and then asked, “Anyone here think they know
this fella?”

Chapter 6

I awoke Thursday morning
with a pounding headache and scenes from the meeting playing
through my head. No one had a clue who Jared Canfield was, but
there had been plenty of speculation, none of it meaningful. The
Sheriff gave us some facts, but they were meager. Canfield’s
laminated driver’s license showed him to be from Royal Oak, a
suburb of Detroit, five-foot-eight, with brown hair and eyes, and
fifty-two years old. In the wallet had also been two credit cards,
some damaged pictures, and a few pieces of paper which were soggy
and unreadable. These had been taken to the State Police lab. If
the Sheriff knew more, he wasn’t sharing.

We citizens had been sent
home with admonitions to keep our ears open, and our tongues more
tightly under control.

Strong coffee and some pain
killers were first on my agenda for the day. Before long, I was
sitting in my living room, reading and thinking about what I might
try to accomplish. My brain was seriously foggy, and I must have
dozed off because I jumped at the sound of a knock at the front
door. I hadn’t heard anyone drive in.

The knocking was repeated,
more insistently, and I hurried to the door. Whoever was out there
was standing to the side, out of sight. I couldn’t see anyone
through the old wavy glass panels, and no vehicle was within
view.

“Who’s there?” I
called.

There was no answer, but a
squarish shoulder eased into sight and the person knocked again. I
pulled open the door and blinked in the morning sun at the sight of
a thin but muscular young man, about six feet tall, with light
brown wavy hair, a little wild. He wore jeans and a brown t-shirt
with a white silhouette of a moose on the front. His blue eyes were
twinkling.