McKean S03 The Ghost Trees

One day recently, while I was at my writing office putting the finishing touches on a news story about the latest tragedy involving high-fructose corn syrup, Peyton McKean phoned. “Remember the old shaman, Henry George?” he asked, giving pause to my indignant keyboard jamming.

“Of course I remember him,” I replied with disdain. “He was my prime suspect in the death of that geoduck digger.”

“Franky Squalco just called and told me George has been arrested in connection with the death of one Bradley Peter Olafsen in West Seattle.”

“You see?” I crowed. “I knew he was a bad one.”

McKean suggested an excursion to the crime scene, so after hanging up and shutting down my computer I put on my hunting jacket and boonie hat and went out to the lot and got my Mustang and picked him up from his labs at Immune Corporation on the Seattle waterfront. Following his directions, I drove us to a brush-choked hillside in Puget Creek Canyon, where a mud-splattered side track off the pavement of Puget Way led into a secluded glen among tall trees. Our Duwamish Indian friend Franky was waiting there, dressed in a dark green hooded raincoat, rain pants, and black rubber boots to fend off the drizzle and chill. He waved us into a graveled parking place beside a muddy, brushy, sword-fern-encircled turnaround. I pulled in gingerly, trying to avoid getting muck or mars on the Mustang’s newly refinished midnight blue paint job.

Across from us a blue-and-white Seattle Police cruiser sat on a similar graveled siding. Beyond it, two men were hitching a tow truck to an oversized, camouflage-colored pickup truck backed into a grotto deeper in the forest. An officer was removing yellow barrier tape from around a crime scene within the grotto’s gloomy spaces.

Franky’s dusky cheeks dimpled with an ironic smile as we got out of my Mustang. “Seems like you guys always show up just after everything’s done.”

“Is the mystery solved?” McKean asked.

“Cops think so, but I don’t.”

“Then maybe we’re just in time. Tell me what went on here, Franky.”

Franky led us into the grotto and gestured at a wide, long patch of sawdust-strewn ground beside a large, newly-cut tree stump. “That’s where Olafsen’s body was,” he said as a second police officer pulled up the taped outline of a human form within the sawdust area. “Got killed right beside where the tree was cut down. Big tree.” He gestured beyond the pickup, where the sawdust stretched off for perhaps a hundred feet through crushed undergrowth. Lopped off evergreen boughs and splinters of wood outlined the shape of a huge tree felled from the edge of a grove of tall evergreens. The trunk had been sectioned and hauled away. The piney scent of cut wood hung cloyingly thick in the damp air.

Peyton McKean inspected the stump. “Western red cedar,
Thuja plicata
,” he announced with his usual pedantic air. As the officer left the site, stuffing the tape in a black garbage bag and putting it in the patrol car trunk, McKean inspected the ground where the body had been outlined. Bending his lanky frame almost double, he meticulously searched among the wood chips for any fine detail the police had missed.

Franky nudged me with an elbow. “That’s why I called Peyton McKean here, Fin. If anybody can clear Henry George, he can.”

“Clear him!” I scoffed. “I thought we came to convict him.”

McKean stared down his long nose like a gangly Shepherd dog whiffing a scent, inspecting the patch of ground closely. Then he straightened to his full six-foot-plus height and turned to Franky. The faintest hint of doubt creased his high brow under his tipped-back green Stetson safari hat. “I see nothing useful. A genetic analysis of the bloodstains would give the expected result, I’m sure. The victim’s blood.”

“Cops said he got clubbed to death,” said Franky. “Skull got dented, neck got broke.”

“Understood.” McKean glanced at the red stains soaking into the sawdust. “I’ll assume the autopsy will confirm the cause of death, but I’m looking for something here that sends a clear message about the murderer. Hundreds of work-boot waffle prints in the soft forest soil and tire tracks of two large vehicles, one of which is still here. White plaster remnants tell me the shoe-and tire-print team was diligent, but this is a very challenging crime scene. It’s been raining for two days. Under such circumstances evidence just melts into the forest floor.”

He glanced high into the tree canopy overhead. Drizzle from the gray sky put a shiny glint on the foliage of a hundred trees filling the interior of Puget Creek Canyon from its soggy, fern-choked bottom to the salmonberry bramble-blanketed ridge tops on either side. “Large drops of water,” he murmured, “falling from the tips of cedar boughs and bigleaf maple leaves a hundred feet above, splashing down with sufficient force to meld the mud and blood and plaster into murky goo. Rainforest swallows clues whole, even in the middle of Seattle.” He picked up one of the many small branches trimmed from the trunk and left lying on the mossy, sawdust-covered ground. Eyeing its cut end carefully down his long nose, he remarked, “Sliced off neatly with one clean blow of a finely sharpened ax. An ax wielded, I would say, by a skilled woodsman.” He tossed the branch back among its fellows and turned to Squalco.

“So, tell me Franky, how did you get involved in what seems a run-of-the-mill bludgeoning?”

Franky flinched at McKean’s clinical minimization of the crime. Like me, however, he had learned to accept McKean’s cool, professorial detachment from matters people with normal emotions take with a dose of adrenaline. Franky shrugged his shoulders under the wet raincoat. “Yesterday morning I came down to see what all the chainsaw noise was the night before.”

“Your house is where?”

“Up there.” Franky pointed a thick finger to a place on the edge of the canyon where the roofs and windows of several houses were just visible through the intervening bigleaf maple trunks. “The blue house. Down here, this is all city greenbelt and Puget Park. The cops was already makin” them plaster casts when I came down the raccoon path. When they seen me pokin” around they had some questions. Asked me, did I know Henry George and I told “em I did. Told me he was down at the precinct, arrested for killing this Olafsen guy. Said they found Henry right here at the scene.” He tucked his gray braids inside his raincoat hood and drew the drawstrings tighter as if the cold drizzle bothered him more than it had a moment before. “But no way Henry George killed anybody. I thought if somebody could find out who the real murderer was, you could, Peyton.”

The police cruiser doors slammed shut and the car pulled out, followed by the tow truck drawing the pickup behind it. McKean pushed his damp Stetson farther back on his head. “Maybe it will help if you explain everything you know about why George was here.”

Franky sat down on the stump, protected from the wet by the rain clothes he’d worn on the day I had first seen him in his dinghy pulling Chinook salmon out of the Duwamish River. “You see,” he began, “I come here with Henry to pray for a good catch, sometimes.”

“Why pray here?” McKean questioned. “We must be two hundred yards from the river.”

“This cedar grove is very special to Duwamish people. My great-grandfathers used to cut trees here for dugout canoes. You could just slide ‘em downhill along Puget Creek and then carve your canoe by the river bank.’

McKean scrutinized the grove carefully. “Forgive my skepticism, Franky, but none of these trees are more than one-hundred-fifty years old, judging by their girth.”

“Their what?”

“The width of their trunks,” McKean explained, “can be used as a crude measure of their ages. Now, we may be standing on the perimeter of a grove of perhaps twenty cedar trees, but it is obvious to me that every tree in this forest, the cedars, the maples, and even those few scraggly Douglas firs scattered around, has been growing only since the area was logged by the first pioneers in the late eighteen hundreds.”

“White pioneers,” Franky muttered.

“And black pioneers, and Asians and more,” McKean retorted, always a stickler for detail.

“White,” Franky resisted. “That’s the word I use for all you newcomers. Doesn’t matter what color your skin is. Your culture’s as white as a blank piece of paper.”

“Don’t turn sour on me, Franky. If I’m going to help your friend, then I need your enthusiastic cooperation. Now, let’s make a count of this stump’s growth rings.”

“Impressive,” he murmured after counting. “One-hundred-thirty-seven years old. Some of the other cedars in the grove are a bit bigger, but none look much older. There’s nothing here like the thousand-year-old giants of the Olympic National Park.”

“Sure,” Franky conceded. “These are just baby trees. I know that. Duwamish people know their own forest, Peyton. But there’s been cedars here forever.”

“Cedars’ll be here long after you pahstuds are gone!” a voice called from among the living trees. For a moment it seemed as if the forest itself had spoken, but then a shrunken old man stepped from among the lowest-hanging cedar boughs. He came at us slowly with the aid of a walking staff carved with Northwest native totem art. The old man’s dark, piercing eyes, deeply lined, brown-skinned face, wild head of coarse gray-black hair and sparse, scraggly beard were immediately familiar. “Henry George!” McKean exclaimed.

George’s derisive grin was gapped where a front tooth had gone missing. His attire was peculiar: a shawl blanket of woven cedar bark fibers covered his shoulders. Shabby blue jeans and an orange plaid flannel shirt covered his body. Nothing at all covered his feet, which were thick and brown like the hand that clasped the cedar cape closed at his chest.

“Henry!” Franky exclaimed. “How’d you get out?”

“Cops had nothing to go on,” the old man muttered. “Couldn’t keep me just ‘cause they don’t like my face.’ He nodded at the fresh stump. ‘There’s the real victim, like a thousand others killed by your kind.’ He glowered at McKean and me. ‘Franky, why’d you bring these pahstuds to our sacred place?’

“To help you.”

“Don’t need no help.”

We had met this obstinate old cuss before, when a geoduck digger was murdered near his camp at the mouth of the canyon, where a drain conduit emptied Puget Creek into the Duwamish River. Although George’s intonation of the term pahstud implied disrespect for McKean’s and my European American heritage, McKean ignored the slight and calmly interrogated the man.

“Franky told me the police found you at the crime scene, singing an Indian song over the body of the dead man.”

“Body of the dead tree,” George corrected. “I sang to the spirit of the tree. To wish it well in the afterlife. Trees have spirits, you know. Not just people. Cops figured I killed the tree poacher. But I didn’t. Just wish I did.”

“Tree poacher?” I remarked. “I’ve never heard that term.”

“Poachers cut down cedar trees without any kind of permit,” Franky explained.

“Cut ‘em up into shingle bolts to make a little money,’ the old man muttered bitterly. ‘Sell the bolts to cedar mills that don’t ask where the wood comes from. Bad business. Not even legal by pahstud standards.’

“Real bad by Duwamish Indian standards,” Franky said. “No one apologizes to the trees or thanks them for their lives taken.”

“What brings you here now?” McKean asked. “I would think this is the last place - ” George cut him off with a dismissive wave of his staff.

“I come and go as I please. This here’s old Duwamish tribal land.”

“Yes, of course,” McKean replied. “We’re just above the old village site.”

“Village is long gone.” George scowled with smoldering rage. “Burnt to the ground by pahstuds in the eighteen-nineties. Same pahstuds whose fathers killed old Grandmother Tree.”

“Grandmother Tree?”

George gestured at the cedars whose green boughs hung overhead. “These trees here are just her babies, and her babies’ babies.”

We looked at each other, mystified, until George grumbled, “Come on. Now you’re here, you’ll find her sooner or later.”

He led us into the grove up a narrow path that twisted through the green foliage of living cedars interspersed with huge rotting stumps.

“White man’s doings,” the old man said, pausing to look up at one ten-foot tall stump. A foot or two below its severed top were some horizontal rectangular notches about eight inches wide, four inches high and eight inches deep.

“Know how those marks got there?” George asked.

I guessed. “Chopped out with a chain saw, by loggers?”

George scowled more darkly. “Weren’t no chain saws back then. Used axes.”

McKean, never lacking for historic or technical information, spoke up. “Those are springboard cuts, to be exact. Old-time loggers stood on planks called springboards to fell big trees using only axes and handsaws. To save labor, they would make their cut well above the flair of the roots, which would have added much more sweat and time to bring the tree down. They would use axes to cut notches and then put a plank in and step up on that plank as a springboard for cutting the hole for the next. Finally, standing on their springboards, two loggers could use a long whipsaw to make the felling crosscut.”

“When I see those holes on a stump,” the old man fumed, “I see a ghost tree, murdered by your kind.”