The Third Hill North of Town Page 18

  Hence the reason no one began to hunt for a missing 1957 Beetle until almost eleven o’clock that night, when Chuck at last recovered enough to inspect the barn with Horvath. Unfortunately, the theft of his beloved, erotically charged automobile hit the grieving widower almost as hard as the loss of Bebe. It was a devastating double blow, and nearly the death of him, too.

  Many people had believed Chuck and Bebe to be a laughable mismatch. Chuck was tall and whip-thin, with a sparse, white mustache and stooped shoulders; his disposition was gruff and dour, and he seldom socialized with anybody. This aversion to company extended even to his own daughters. Chuck was fond of his girls, as he had been of his son, too, before the boy’s death in the war, but to be honest he had never given his kids much thought. He had a limited supply of love, it seemed, and was unwilling to share his small stockpile with anyone but Bebe. Bebe’s flightiness and forgetfulness were a constant source of aggravation to him, yet he’d find himself smiling at her sometimes, for no reason, and his heart always lifted a little bit when he’d come home in the evenings and see the light shining from the kitchen window.

  He had fallen in love with her the moment he’d met her at an auction, decades before. She had been hovering around a table of glass figurines, and Chuck, surrendering to an odd, carnal impulse, had purposely bumped into her as he was strolling by. She had blushed and giggled, then scurried off with her friends, and he had watched her go in stunned silence, still able to feel the softness of her body where it had connected with his. He’d shown up on her porch the next day, carrying the small glass swan he’d seen her ogling at the auction. She’d flushed with joy and then burst into tears seconds later, overwhelmed to be courted by this earnest and attractive stranger, with such an obvious flair for gift giving. He didn’t care that she was silly and sentimental, nor that she was his polar opposite in almost every way imaginable.

  All he cared was how she made him feel when she touched him.

  It was the kind of touch, he believed, that could make the blind see or the lame walk, and for the first time in his life he felt whole, and healed. Before that moment he had not even known he was sick. Yet this supernatural, restorative touch of hers was all too fleeting; he found he needed it every day to reclaim his sense of well-being, and if he were away from Bebe for too long he began to wilt, like a thirsty rhododendron.

  The only other time he experienced a similar sensation of peace and completion was when he sat in the driver’s seat of the Beetle.

  That he derived nearly as much sensual satisfaction from a Volkswagen as from his wife sometimes disturbed him, but not often. The truth was the Beetle reminded him of Bebe; their comely curves and undemanding, durable demeanors made them seem somehow related, like sisters, in his mind. Cheerful, solid, and unpretentious, neither required anything from him but patience and affection. He had never been attracted to glamorous women and sleek cars; elegance and grace were wasted on him. The only thing that fired Chuck’s soul was reliability, and a certain coy vulnerability that Bebe and the Beetle each possessed in spades.

  Chuck Stockton harbored no thoughts of vengeance for the barbaric, thieving criminals who had destroyed, in a matter of minutes, his entire reason for existence. If he’d returned home as they were committing their atrocities it would have been a different story, of course; but after the fact, vengeance was only a poor excuse to go on living, and as such he wanted nothing to do with it. In the suicide note he penned in the wee hours of Sunday morning, he asked to be buried with as many as possible of Bebe’s ash-covered swans that had survived the fire. He wrote he had never liked the “silly damn things” in life, but in death he wanted something of Bebe’s with him, and he supposed her beloved swans might be better company than most.

  In the final conversation he had with Fire Marshal Horvath that evening, Chuck was told of the crime spree that had started in Prescott, Maine, and had proceeded to rip through his own home like a tornado eight hours later. He learned of the separate plights of Julianna Dapper and Trooper Lloyd Eagleton; he was informed that a young black man named Elijah Hunter was likely to blame for everything that had happened, and he was promised that everything possible was being done to bring the savage, depraved animal to justice.

  He was also one of the very first people to hear the name of Elijah Hunter’s equally bestial accomplice.

  The underwear Jon Tate had so carelessly tossed aside by the tractor in the barn when changing his shorts and socks earlier that evening was an old set of boxers from his high school days. In his haste to return to the sunlight, Jon had forgotten that his mother, Marline—who believed high school locker rooms were full of towel-snapping, garment-stealing perverts—had sewn labels into most of his clothing, including his underpants, in an attempt to discourage theft.

  Thus it was that Orville Horvath successfully identified the second most-wanted man in the northeastern United States. The names of Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate would soon be broadcast on every police radio and teletype machine from Maine to Pennsylvania, and pictures of the two boys—as well as their victims, living and dead—would begin appearing in newspapers and on national television newscasts by the end of the weekend.

  Chuck Stockton was past caring about such things, however, and well before he’d finished speaking to Horvath that night, he’d decided to end his life as soon as he could arrange to be alone. At 4:00 a.m. on Sunday he left a note for his daughters in the guest room of his neighbor’s house, and made his way on foot back to the dairy farm. Everybody had gone home by then, and he lingered undisturbed for a moment by the ruins of the house before moving over to the barn. He slipped through the open door, lifted a rope from the wall, and climbed the ladder to his hayloft. Straddling a beam for balance, he scooted out until he was directly above where the Volkswagen should have been, shortened the rope to an appropriate length, and began tying his knots. Securing the rope around the rafter was easy and quick, but his hands shook a bit, surprising him, as he tightened the noose around his throat.

  Things didn’t go quite the way he had planned, however.

  In the moonlight streaming through the doorway, a stray black cat with long, matted hair and an erect, bushy tail cautiously padded into the barn. It looked up and froze when it saw Chuck sitting on the rafter above it, and Chuck froze, as well, not having anticipated a witness to his last moment on earth.

  “Get out of here,” Chuck rasped after a moment, breaking the silence. “Go on, scat!”

  The cat flicked its tail once or twice, then casually sprawled on the dirt floor and began to clean itself, wetting a front paw with its tongue and using it like a washcloth to scrub its forehead and ears.

  Chuck tugged at the rope around his throat, unable to get enough air to yell loudly.

  “Get the hell out of my barn!” he rasped again with mounting frustration. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  The cat ignored this second croaked entreaty entirely, raising a back leg and arching forward gracefully to lick its anus.

  “Goddammit!” Chuck choked out.

  Chuck couldn’t have said why he didn’t want to commit suicide in front of a stray cat; all he knew was that he wanted the flea-infested, mangy thing out of his barn, right that very damn minute. He kicked his legs wildly, trying to frighten the stray, but it was too engrossed in what it was doing to pay the thrashing dairy man above it any attention.

  Chuck finally managed to loosen the noose around his neck. Ripping the rope from his head in rage and filling his lungs for a properly intimidating scream proved to be his undoing, however; he lost his balance and fell from the rafter, plunging toward the barn floor like a meteor. He landed badly, breaking both an ankle and a wrist, and the subsequent pain he felt was enough to make him howl so loudly that the black cat had no choice but to take him seriously at last, bolting through the open door and disappearing into the night. The patrolman assigned to keep a close eye on the dairy farm was passing by at that very moment, and since the patrol car’s windows were
open, the accursed cat wasn’t the only one who heard Chuck’s yell of agony. The officer came to investigate and caught Chuck in the act of trying to re-climb the ladder in the barn, in spite of his injuries, with a rope coiled around his shoulders. An ambulance was summoned, and Chuck was taken to the hospital, sedated, and put under close observation.

  It had been a busy twelve hours at the Stockton Dairy Farm.

  A few minutes past 2:00 a.m. (and a couple of hours before Chuck Stockton’s attempted suicide), Samuel and Mary Hunter pulled into the driveway of the Stockton Dairy Farm and asked to speak to Fire Marshal Orville Horvath of the New Hampshire State Police. Chuck Stockton had vacated the premises long before the Hunters’ arrival, on his way to spend the remainder of the night—or so Horvath believed—at a neighbor’s house. Most of the emergency personnel had left, as well, but a few of Orville’s underlings, grumbling and irritated at being kept so long at a site where they could do little real work until the sun rose, were still milling about with flashlights, halfheartedly inspecting the Edsel, the barn, and the still-smoldering wreckage of the house. The sky was crowded with stars, making flashlights almost unnecessary.

  Orville Horvath was not an imposing man. He was five foot three and weighed slightly less than his pet rottweiler, Lucy (Lucy was 114 pounds, Orville only 112). His fireman’s jacket and bright yellow helmet were too big for him; his knee-high boots made him look like a small child playing beside the ruins as larger, more adult-looking men in similar apparel performed grown-up tasks around him. His voice, too, was less than commanding; it was thin and high-pitched, and he tended to mumble.

  He was also a man who loved his job a bit more than he probably should have, which was why he’d insisted on staying so late, even though there was really no point in keeping his men there so long.

  Fire, and its aftermath, excited Orville. From the red, glowing cinder of a cigarette tip to the deafening hell of a forest conflagration, he could never get enough of it; fire was the one true love of his life. He had been married and divorced three times and scarcely remembered the names of his ex-wives, yet he could recall the details of every fire he had investigated for the past twenty-eight years. He was in the habit of putting himself to sleep at night by reciting the chemical compounds in soot, and the smoky aroma of an outdoor barbecue was enough to make him reach for his binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of his next-door neighbor’s open grill through the hedge separating their lawns.

  But fires resulting from arson were his favorites. Especially when there was an apparent homicide involved. It was torture to postpone his investigation until first light, when it would be safe to comb through the ashes and debris, and he knew that no matter how many aromatic hydrocarbons he recited that night in bed he’d get no sleep. It had been all he could do to conceal his impatience while consoling Chuck Stockton about the loss of his wife—even though he felt genuine compassion for the bereaved man—simply because he wanted nothing more than to sit by the ashes and think about the fire he had witnessed that evening. The dying tongues of flame, running low on combustible material, had licked lazily at the cement foundations of the house before at last surrendering to the water hoses of the fire trucks, and Orville had watched their flickering, sensual death throes with his mouth slightly open and his eyes narrowed into lustful slits.

  Mary Hunter’s first impression of Orville Horvath was not favorable.

  “My son did not set fire to this house and kill that poor woman,” she said, after the introductions were out of the way. “And if you think he did, you better put your dog here in charge of this show, because it has more brains than you do.”

  Lucy the Rottweiler went everywhere with Orville. Orville found her presence to be very comforting, and he enjoyed watching the fear she inspired in even the biggest of men. No one had ever dared to become aggressive with him when Lucy was at his side. In addition to her muscular frame and belligerent brown eyes, she also had a mouthful of jagged, yellowish teeth that could mangle an arm or a leg with a single snap of her jaws, like a bear trap.

  Lucy began to growl, deep in her throat.

  “Try it,” Mary murmured, glancing down at Lucy with indifference. “You just come right on and try it.”

  Lucy abruptly ceased growling and sat on her haunches.

  Orville blinked several times and resisted a peculiar urge to crouch beside his dog. “We have an eyewitness account of your son attacking a woman in that car,” he said, pointing down the hill at the hulking shape of the stranded Edsel.

  Sadly, this sentence did not come out as clearly as it might have. Orville’s mumbling always worsened when he was nervous, so it sounded to the Hunters as if he’d said: “Weaven I wiz cunt you son-snacking woman thacker.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Mary responded coldly. She wasn’t sure what Horvath’s cryptic insult meant, but she didn’t care for it one little bit.

  Elijah is in even worse trouble than I imagined, she thought. She shot a grim look at Samuel, who was equally perturbed. He frowned back at her and raised his eyebrows, but he stayed silent, knowing it was best to let Mary handle the fire marshal as she saw fit.

  Lucy the Rottweiler watched this exchange with confusion, swinging her massive head back and forth from Orville to the Hunters. She whined a little in support of her master, but appeared reluctant to offer any further challenge to the tiny woman confronting him.

  Orville made another attempt to assert control. “There’s also a report he assaulted a police officer this afternoon.”

  It was best to say these hard truths forthrightly, he found, rather than beat around the bush with the parents of criminals, who were always unwilling to believe their offspring could be capable of such things.

  Mary’s eyes narrowed. She could have sworn Horvath just said, “Salsa rubbery asshole tit up Lucifer the zephyroon.”

  “What?” she demanded. It wasn’t just Orville’s filthy mouth that enraged her; she also believed he was toying with her.

  Orville cringed at the hostility in her tone, and Lucy all but prostrated herself on the ground.

  At that moment a passing car on the highway screeched to a halt next to the Edsel, then lurched into the driveway where the four of them were clustered. Its glaring high beams made them wince as it approached; gravel crackled underneath its tires as it parked next to the Hunters’ blue pickup. It was a Cadillac, Orville noted, shielding his eyes, and there appeared to be two large men sitting in the front seat.

  Now what? he wondered, praying these new arrivals weren’t related to the Hunter woman.

  The Cadillac’s engine stopped and its lights snapped off, leaving them all momentarily blinded. The doors opened and Lucy leapt to her feet with a relieved-sounding snarl, as if anxious to once again challenge somebody who behaved the way one was supposed to behave when facing a displeased rottweiler.

  The two newcomers stepped from the car and closed their doors as sight returned to the tense little group watching them.

  “I need to speak to the guy in charge,” the driver of the Cadillac called out.

  That would be my wife, Samuel Hunter thought, biting his lower lip to keep from saying the words aloud.

  Orville raised a hesitant hand. “I’m Fire Marshal Horvath.” Proclaiming his title in this manner made Orville feel more confident, and his speech became somewhat less garbled. “May I help you?”

  “Shouldn’t that dog be on a leash?” The Cadillac’s passenger, an older man, was lagging behind his companion and eyeing the growling beast with obvious apprehension as they drew closer.

  Mary Hunter sized up the two strangers, trying to determine if they might pose yet another threat to her son. The older man seemed harmless enough; his voice had been deferential, and his steps were fearful and wobbling as he approached the bristling rottweiler. He had a round, jowly face and a substantial paunch, and his bald head glistened in the starlight.

  He looks like a walrus, Mary noted to herself.

  The other man was ev
en larger than his companion, but much of his bulk appeared to be muscle. He had wide, round shoulders and thick, sturdy legs, and he moved easily over the rough earth. He planted himself squarely in front of them, and there was something about him that disturbed Mary. He was close enough by then that she could make out his face. He was an attractive man, with sharp, regular features and probing, alert eyes, but he looked both angry and worried, and under a great deal of strain. She intuitively grasped he was there for a reason similar to her own, and this scared her more than she wanted to admit.

  This man could be dangerous, she thought. Someone he loves has been hurt.

  “Sit, Lucy,” Orville ordered, responding to Edgar’s query. The dog obeyed with gratifying haste. Orville glanced at Mary to see if she’d witnessed this demonstration of his authority, and was disappointed to find her glowering at the younger of the two strangers instead.

  “I’m Mary Hunter, and this is my husband, Samuel,” she said. Her tone was polite, but for some reason Orville got goose bumps on his arms listening to her. “Who are you?”

  The driver answered, but he addressed Orville, clearly not understanding who the small woman was or why the fire marshal was deferring to her.