Summerkill Read online

  Indoors, staring at the yellow card of emergency numbers the rescue squad passes out every year, I took a long, fuzzy minute to comprehend what the choices were. I picked the sheriff’s department number rather than the one for the state police, largely because the former is headquartered up here in the northern part of the county, the latter twenty-some miles to the south. It also couldn’t hurt that one of the deputies moonlighted as a backhoe man. We’d worked several Garden Center jobs together and got along well. The state police were an unknown quantity.

  After giving the dispatcher bare-bones information and being assured someone would be right over, I sat there for at least another minute before it kicked in that there were other calls to be made. Donna Jaworski has handled Vicky’s and my legal business the last several years with crispness and competence. I caught her on the way out of her office and told her what little I could. Then I had to ask “Are they likely to arrest me?”

  “Not right off the bat, I wouldn’t think.” If it had been a videophone I could have watched her frowning. “It’s well known you didn’t like this guy?”

  “Very.”

  “Look, I’ll hustle on down as soon as I’m finished in city court. Shouldn’t be much after noon. Meantime, try to think a minimum of twice about whatever you choose to say. Which I’d suggest be as little as possible.”

  Next I dialed Mariah Hansen’s number. Mariah conducted a large portion of her life over the phone, but she wouldn’t dream of picking it up before ten A.M. I told her answering machine it didn’t look promising for me to get over there today, since I’d just found a dead body in my front yard.

  Willem? He’d called the night before to tell me he was staying over in Marysville, to review some materials in the school’s design library with one of the people he’d met at yesterday’s seminar. One of the female people, would be my guess. Unless you’re into camping, there’s only one place to stay out there, and I supposed they’d still be in his hotel room.

  Bingo. “News flash,” I informed his lazy, sensual hello; “Ryan was murdered sometime last night—in my front yard.”

  His “Ryan?” came through sharp and clear. The female murmuring in the background sounded less than fully awake.

  “Our very own. He was stabbed with my long-handled pruner.”

  “Val, you didn’t—”

  “Of course not!”

  What I got instead of the hearty reassurance I craved was a brief pause. Then: “So … I guess I’d better head on back?”

  “I wouldn’t rush—it’s not going to be fun. You might want to shore up your alibi, though.”

  “Why in the world—?”

  “Assuming they get past me as most likely suspect, who are they going to look at next? Maybe the heir apparent who also had his run-ins with the guy, and whose inheritance is looking a little questionable?”

  “That’s crazy. I’ve been here in Marysville since before noon yesterday.”

  “When I was in a hurry I used to make that run in less than an hour. All I can tell you about the time of death is it happened after quarter to nine last night and before quarter to eight this morning. You’re looking at a bunch of non-public hours. It wouldn’t hurt to get her last name and phone number.”

  Vital alerts delivered, I headed outside to wait for the cops. Should I rethink my apparel? My working garb of khaki shorts, oversized T-shirt, and hiking boots did not suggest a person of refinement and substance. Monetary substance, that is. I stand 5′ 11″ and my body type is much closer to the women Rubens painted than to anyone who might be asked to strut down a fashion show runway. I do not use makeup; my straight blond hair was in a ponytail that morning instead of the French twist I sometimes make. When I wear it loose I could put on wooden clogs and a smile and look appropriate in an ad for Dutch bulbs.

  Pronouncing it ridiculous to dress up for the occasion, I closed the kitchen door behind Roxy and me. I felt no need, nor certainly any desire, to approach the body again. My stomach was still queasy from the first viewing. To compensate for not having a photographic memory like Willem’s, I’ve trained my eyes to fix a scene, detail by detail. Nightmare fuel though it would certainly become, I’d forced myself to learn all I could, visually.

  Ryan’s costume was both more casual and more colorful than it ever got at the office—pale blue khaki pants and the remains of what must have been a spiffy royal-blue-and-white-striped wide-sleeve pullover. Clean white crew socks inside those Nikes. He was lying on his back, head slightly angled and slanted off the left side of a fair-sized rock. In life he’d looked younger than his thirty-two years, his regular-featured Boy Scout face projecting earnestness and reliability. When you understood the parameters, I suppose he had valid claim to both. I’d be surprised if girls ever described him as cute—he’d been seriously underanimated for that. His mouth, which had found so little to smile about, hung slightly open in death. Those pale, cool eyes were open too, normal size; the overall configuration of his features was curiously expressionless. Somebody’s coming at you with a long-handled pruner—shouldn’t you be showing emotion?

  His chest, the grisly focal point of the tableau, was pretty well torn up; my pruner must’ve been worked around several times before the killer left it there. Beyond that one area, no marks were showing on the upturned side of the body, but there was a reddish stain on the nape of the neck, I couldn’t tell how large. Something wasn’t quite natural about the way the body was positioned: like it had been laid out, maybe, instead of having fallen. Or might that be the effect of rigor mortis? The fingers, in particular, looked oddly stiff.

  There was one thing worth checking that was close to the house. The pruner was among the tools I chuck into the back of the Bronco each spring and leave there as far into November as it’s possible to plant. This part of the season, with most plants’ growth spurts behind them, you don’t have much need for a pruner. The last time I could recall using mine was on a runaway Japanese quince at Hudson Heights a couple of weeks ago.

  I don’t bother locking the Bronco on-site, or just to run into a local store. It does get locked at night, though, parked in front of my house. Had it been broken in to? Careful inspection turned up no signs of that, or of anything else being missing. Somebody had planned ahead. To repeatedly plunge a pruner into somebody’s chest and calmly walk away, leaving him dead or dying? I couldn’t fully take in, just then, that somebody I knew had actually done that.

  I was bursting to bring the two men from the sheriff’s department up to speed the moment their car arrived, but they had their own agenda. Leaving the car at the road end of the driveway, they walked in to within maybe twenty feet of the body, not so much as glancing in my direction. Satisfied it was indeed a body, one of them came over to Roxy and me and introduced himself as Sheriff Baxter Dye. The mean-looking, beefy one who remained behind he identified only as Joe.

  Pocket tape recorder in hand, he asked my name, if I knew who the victim was, what time I’d found the body, and whether I’d touched anything. I assured him no on that last one but conceded Roxy had done some close-up sniffing.

  He reached over and massaged that loose area of fur right behind her ears, winning instant devotion. “I’d like you to tie her up for a while, Ms. Wyckoff. Or is that a run back there, behind the fence? And then if you could wait …” He scanned in vain for a seating area or at least some front steps. “You can, uh, go on in the house, if you like.”

  I decided against the run for Roxy—she’s too vocal when something is moving around beyond her range. “Want a Milk-Bone?” I coaxed. Well, not as passionately as usual, she didn’t, not with two new people on the scene, but she reluctantly decided she’d take it. Since we’ve established that Milk-Bones live only in the kitchen, she obligingly herded me toward the door.

  I damn well intended to keep tabs on what was happening and, bribe dispensed, went back out, establishing position near the woodpile. Initially it didn’t look like much of anything was going on. This sheriff
was not a bustling sort of person. If having a murder to deal with got the old adrenaline flowing, it didn’t show in his movements. He was a good ten minutes making his way over to the body. He’d take a couple of steps, look around, say something into that little recorder, take a couple more steps.

  Joe, meanwhile, had fetched a thick coil of rope from the trunk of their car. He tied one end around a scrawny white pine, more or less at crotch level, then strung it along to the next tree the sheriff pointed to and made another attachment. And on around three more trees, until he had barely enough rope left to get back to his starting point, thus completing an irregular pentagon. Defining the scene of the crime, that must be. A keep-off statement of sorts: it couldn’t seriously be meant as a barrier.

  Once he got to where he could study the body close-up Sheriff Dye stood for what seemed like another ten minutes, talking steadily into the recorder. He repositioned himself twice to check things out from other angles. Finally, sticking the recorder in his shirt pocket, he made his slow, careful way to one of the rope perimeters, and leg-lifted himself beyond it.

  Then he conferred with Joe briefly and they both climbed back inside the enclosure. They commenced to walk it excruciatingly slowly in parallel lanes until the one or the other of them had managed to stare at every square inch of the ground. Several spots they flagged with what, from my distance, looked like Popsicle sticks.

  Only after this reconnaissance was completed did the sheriff go back to the car, get on the radio, summon others to the scene, and start taking an interest in me.

  When he came over to where I was standing the first thing he said was “Don’t you have a kid in Little League?”

  I knew I’d seen the man around somewhere. My dentist’s stepdaughter, Stacey Dye, the bane of Alex’s batting average: this must be her father. “My nephew, Alex Gutierrez,” I acknowledged. “He and his brother live with me.”

  “Shortstop for the Eagles, right? The kid moves well.”

  “Yep. He struggles with his hitting, still, especially when your daughter’s pitching. She’s a good little athlete.”

  “If you ever want to tell her, leave out the ‘little,’” he admonished, smiling. “How many ten-year-olds do you know who weight-train?”

  If she took after her father, as seemed to be the case, Stacey should have a good shot at her size goals, weights or no. He was around my height, maybe twenty pounds heavier. Somewhere in my age bracket too, I guessed. Generic brownish hair thinning on top, nice brown eyes set among otherwise unmemorable features, a little rumpled in appearance but well shy of the Columbo look. Same profession, though, so why the hell were we talking Little League? I asked and he shrugged. “Supposedly people open up more if you can establish some connection. But, okay, let’s get down to business. See how much of the groundwork we can get through before the rest of the crew shows up. Mind if I record instead of taking notes?”

  I was a little more forthcoming than my lawyer had advocated, but on the whole I thought Donna would have approved of my calm manner and precise, not overly detailed answers. Sheriff Dye’s questioning was methodical. First he reconfirmed the name of the victim, established that we were both associated with the Garden Center. He asked when I’d seen Ryan last, and looked surprised at my claim of almost a week ago. “I spend virtually all my time on-site; Ryan was mostly in the office” seemed to satisfy him as explanation. We were taking things chronologically from the time I found the body, and I decided to volunteer about recognizing the pruner. Wouldn’t it look suspicious if I pretended otherwise? My initials were etched on the handle.

  We managed to cover most of my ideas about that pruner before the first siren erupted. Over the next half hour or so at least a dozen vehicles accumulated out front, discharging maybe twice that many people, ready to start bustling. Most were carrying something: different sizes of black cases, a 35 mm camera, a Palmcorder, assorted tools and measuring devices. Not a one of them turned out to be Calvin, the deputy I knew. My luck, he was on vacation that week.

  More people on the scene did not signal a quickening of pace. The sheriff made everybody else wait beyond the ropes while two guys, one with the camera, the other manning the Palmcorder, filmed Ryan and his surroundings from all angles. Then it was the doctor’s turn. Once he was finished, several other men, who I concluded must be evidence collectors from the way they kept putting things in plastic bags, were allowed in. When they were finally through collecting, the whole thing loosened up and it became open season on Ryan’s remains; at least that was the visual effect.

  The action was by no means confined to that area—people started tromping all over the place. The deputy named Joe wanted access to the Bronco and thrust a consent form at me. His attitude would have won him a flat refusal, except it would be damn inconvenient to have the Bronco off-limits for any length of time. So I signed my okay and unlocked it for him, then immediately started regretting. I am careful with my things; I did not appreciate watching its contents yanked out and strewn around.

  Roxy, indoors, was understandably outraged at her exclusion from the action. Normally she’ll give up barking at what she hears if she doesn’t get to see it. That morning she sounded as if she could go on nonstop forever and fully intended to.

  Just shy of eruption I butted into a conversation the sheriff was having with one of the oversized-black-briefcase toters to announce that I was going inside.

  “Good idea—it’s a zoo out here. Look, I’ll need to go over a few more things with you when I get a chance to take a break. It shouldn’t be more than ten, fifteen minutes. Is that entrance your Bronco’s parked near the one I should use?”

  “I’ll leave the screen door unhooked.”

  It was more like half an hour before he came in. At least that’s what my watch said. My natural sense of time, usually pretty good, had gone dysfunctional. And every pertinent train of thought I tried to board immediately derailed. I’d been sitting at the dining-area computer, the one I let the boys use, botching up game after game of Tetris and feeling less and less on top of anything at all.

  “Nice back here,” he commented, going straight to the wraparound solar windows to check out the view down to the creek. “I heard you’d done wonders with the place once you get past the front.” And then with a quicker gear shift than I’d have anticipated from this man, “Do you have any idea why Ryan Jessup came to see you last night?”

  I shut down the computer before turning to answer him. “Do we know he came to see me? He never got as far as ringing the doorbell.”

  He pulled one of the dining-table chairs back out of the sun and sat too, which inspired Roxy to come over and plop her head in his lap. The neck massaging resumed. “One of my men found his car ten yards or so in along that tractor path to the Berkmeiers’ pasture.”

  “Beats me why he’d leave it there. It’s not like I’m short on parking space. Or maybe he didn’t know that. It would have constituted a first for him to set foot on this property at all. As you will find out when you ask around, Ryan and I did not get along, professionally. We had no relationship whatsoever beyond the office.”

  “Gotta wonder what was on his mind. Were you and your nephews home all evening?”

  “From somewhere between eight-thirty and a quarter to nine on. We went for pizza after the Junior All Stars game.”

  “I thought I remembered Alex there. At any point after that did you leave the house?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to put the dog in her run?”

  “Last year I made a doggy door on that side of the kitchen. When I’m home, I leave it unlatched till bedtime so she can come and go on her own.”

  He frowned. “I must’ve missed it. Good idea, though, the winters we get. Did she do any unusual barking?”

  “Nothing like this morning, if that’s what you mean. Whenever Roxy hears movement, which is umpteen times a night around here, she lets out a bark or two. I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary last night.�
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  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “Around one.”

  “Is that your usual hour?”

  “Mine. It was late for the boys.”

  “Those boys were up till one A.M.?” His tone was that of someone used to kids who conk out shortly after sundown.

  “There was that Schwarzenegger movie on CBS, which ran long. And when Galen—he’s the seven-year-old—was channel-surfing during one of the commercials he caught a promo for the Tonight Show. Leno was going to have Sandy Alomar, who happens to be Alex’s hero of heroes. Plus some or other band—the kids could tell you the name—it’s the current rage of the elementary school set. So—” I spread my hands.

  “Both boys are in the summer recreation program?”

  “It’s two-thirds of my day care. They’re down the road with Sue Donnelly the rest of the afternoon.”

  “We noticed what looked like a connecting path through the woods—a little ways up from the creek?”

  “Right. The kids use it all the time.”

  “Does it run in the other direction too?”

  “Toward the Berkmeiers’? It’s farther from the creek that way and overgrown, but you could bushwhack through. I can show you the entrance—it isn’t obvious.”

  “Maybe later. That’s something I always wanted—water frontage. Step right out your back door and go fishing. How long have you been here?”

  “Right here? Four and a half years. I grew up in Albany and Danton Park, so I was familiar with the general area. After Cornell I worked out in the western part of the state, and then down in Florida and North Carolina.”

  “What brought you back?”

  “Family considerations.” I decided that wanted a little amplification. “My brother-in-law died.”

  “I’m sorry. Anyhow, about that path—we’re trying to work out how Ryan Jessup got from where his car’s parked to where he ended up. With those layers of dry leaves and pine needles, it’ll be a miracle if we find useful footprints. Did you notice any lights moving around out there last night?”