To Darkness and to Death (9 page)

“Sort of like this building,” Clare said.

“Sort of. Anyway, twenty years later, it was rebuilt in the grand Adirondack style by a van der Hoeven trying to please his pretty young wife. There are pictures in the historical society—I guess the best way to describe it was Swiss chalet meets twig Gothic.”

“Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“Did he please his young wife?”

“She couldn’t have been that impressed, because she took off for Europe with their son and stayed there for the next few decades.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Well, the son returned from Europe right before the First World War broke out.”

“Good timing.”

“This would have been Eugene’s… let me see… greatgrandfather. Can’t remember his name.”

“You’re really good with all this local history.”

He smiled like a shyly pleased schoolboy. “I did a report on it in high school. Even then, I was into old houses.” Russ had extensively rebuilt his Greek Revival farmhouse.
The house where he and his wife live
, she reminded herself.

“That van der Hoeven thought what the place needed was Old World elegance, so he added on turrets and towers and battlements and the like, trying to turn a Swiss-Gothic chalet into a castle. Even in his day, when rich people were building privies shaped like Versailles and carriage houses that looked like the Tower of London, it was considered a great big ugly heap.”

Clare looked around her at the clean lines of the current Haudenosaunee. “Is that when the family built this house?”

“No, that came when Eugene’s grandfather tried to modernize the old building. Evidently the older van der Hoeven wasn’t content to merely build castles. He wanted to live in the Middle Ages.” Russ tapped his temple meaningfully.

“You mean… ?”

“No running water, no electricity, no central heating. He actually disconnected the bathrooms that had been state-of-the-art in 1880 and installed drop toilets.”

Clare made a face.

“Yeah. So when his son inherited the place, he decided making the fourteenth century fit for human habitation wasn’t worth the trouble, and he had this house built.”

“What happened to the old camp?”

Russ’s blue eyes clouded over. “It burned down.”

Comprehension dawned. “Is that what happened to Eugene?”

He nodded. “Whoever says money solves all your problems never met the van der Hoevens.”

She was climbing onto the stool kitty-corner from Russ when the letter and pamphlet crinkled inside her pocket.
Speaking of problems
. She pulled them out. “Take a look at this.” She held them out to him. “Have you ever heard of this organization?”

He scanned the letter and unfolded the brochure. “One of the radical environmentalist groups, right? Like Earth First? Volunteers living in trees, that sort of thing?”

She shook her head. “More like spiking the trees and then blowing up the loggers’ equipment. The Planetary Liberation Army believes in direct action.”

“That’d be pretty direct, yeah.” He read the back of the pamphlet. “I don’t see anything here about the Adirondacks. And I’ve never heard of them operating in our area.” He looked up at her. “Where’d you get these?”

She had thought out her answer when she persuaded Lisa to let her keep the documents. “They were here in the kitchen.” She opened the drawer and tossed the remainder of the pamphlets on the stack of wine crates, just as Lisa had done. “I was opening up drawers, looking for utensils and stuff.” There. Absolute truth. “These are more in the same vein.”

He ruffled through the brochures. “These could be anybody’s.”

“The only people who live here are Eugene and Millie. One of whom is now missing.”

“You think this may have something to do with her disappearance?”

“She gave them money. It’s not like mailing in your annual donation to the Sierra Club. These folks aren’t sending her a preprinted thank-you letter and a calendar.”

He glanced at the paper again. “If she’s the outdoorsy, save-the-earth type, she probably gets solicitations from every group under the sun. Lord knows, my mom does.” Russ’s mother was an environmental activist whose various causes and concerns came close to giving her son an ulcer. “Adirondack Conservancy, Stop the Dredging, Mothers Against Nuclear Waste Disposal—Mom supports ’em all. It doesn’t mean that she’s plotting to blow up Nine Mile Point.”

Clare flipped her hand open. “But what if she were? Millie van der Hoeven, I mean, not your mom.”

He looked at her skeptically. “And this is based on?” He flapped the brochure at her. “One letter inviting her to talk and a diatribe about the evils of development? That doesn’t make her a terrorist.”

“I’m not saying she is. But we have this supposedly woods-wise young woman who goes out for a walk after a late dinner. She’s spent every summer of her life right here in these mountains. And she gets lost? On the same day that she’s supposed to sell her family’s land to a multinational wood products corporation?”

“Which is then signing it over to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. They’re not going to be clear-cutting the place. They’re going to put a stop to all development. And logging. The PLA people should be doing the happy dance over this. If they know about it.”

She thought about what Lisa had said. About how being lost in the woods could make a convincing alibi. “It may not have anything to do with Haudenosaunee. Or maybe it does. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of selling off to—what’s the name of the company?”

“GWP, Inc.”

“To GWP. Maybe she didn’t trust them to give all the easements or whatever to the conservancy.”

Russ rolled his eyes. “Maybe she’s being held prisoner by the president of GWP, who’s planning on selling her into white slavery after the signing ceremony tonight. Have you seen that picture of her in the hall? She’s quite a babe.”

Clare made a face. “You’re impossible.”

“That’s what Linda says.”

There was a pause. When Clare spoke again, her voice was quiet. “It could be nothing. But someone ought to be aware of it.”

He kept his eyes on the letter as he carefully folded it into thirds. “And now I am.” He held it up. “Mind if I keep it?”

She shook her head. He unsnapped a pocket on the outside of his camo pants and stuffed the papers inside. She tossed open the door to the pantry and snapped the light on. Surprise, surprise, there was an unopened jar of marmalade sitting next to a tin of tea and a box of farina. She turned back to Russ and set the jar next to his blackberry jam, thinking,
Why am I bothering with this
? A loaded question.

“I’m sure the team will appreciate your search efforts,” he said.

She snorted. “This is the problem with letting people know you can cook. I’ll probably be relegated to chef and bottle washer for every rescue they call me in on, for ever and ever, amen.”

He grinned. “C’mon, Julia Child. I promise I won’t stick you in a kitchen. Let’s ask Eugene if there’s anything else he can tell us about his sister’s disappearance.”

9:30 A.M.

Randy didn’t set out from his house intending to drive to the Reid-Gruyn mill. He had woken at nine fresh and clear and full of energy, despite his heavy drinking the night before. His dad had been the same way. He used to tell Randy the secret was to eat lots of protein all the time. He had lived on eggs, chicken, and venison, and if he hadn’t fallen to lung cancer after forty years of a two-pack-a-day habit, he’d probably be partying still.

Randy rolled out of bed, scrubbed the stale smoke and alcohol smell off in the shower, and ate six eggs scrambled for breakfast, accompanied by the frenetic blare of a morning game show. He was going to take his bike into town and retrieve his truck from Mike Yablonski’s. That thought, combined with the noise from the television and the simple necessity of washing, dressing, and making breakfast, all kept the great dark heavy truth of being laid off at bay. It broke through in flashes—when he reached for his motorcycle boots and saw the steel-toed boots he wore lumbering, or when the bills piled on the corner of the kitchen counter caught his eye—but for the most part he moved in a state of deliberate unawareness.

Oddly enough, it was on his bike, headed into town, that he started to come to grips with it. The wind was whipping around him, the sun shining through the bare branches, swirling trails of fallen leaves marking where he passed. He felt good, and when he felt good, he thought of Lisa, and when he thought of Lisa, he heard her sweet voice, so full of confidence in him. “He’ll find another job. He always does.”

Shit. He couldn’t let her down.

It was bad enough she was wasting herself, scrubbing other people’s toilets. He knew she was thinking about a baby. She was nuts about her niece, Maddy—always offering to have the kid over, spending money on cute little dresses for her. Lisa deserved a kid of her own, and she shouldn’t have to leave it at home to go out to work. He wanted to support her, to give her the freedom that his brother-in-law, with his polished shoes and his creases in his pants, couldn’t give his wife.

God
damn
, but he had counted on that logging money. He supposed he could try for a team working farther up north, but that would mean moving out for the winter, getting home a few weekends every month if the roads were passable and he wasn’t too exhausted to drive. He couldn’t do that to her. She needed him. And as the new man on the team, he’d get the shit jobs and the shit hours. With no guarantee that he could come back the next year.

No, what he needed was a real job again. Regular hours, benefits, something he and Lisa could rely on. And with this thought, his Indian Chief Springfield seemed to turn, of its own accord, onto Route 57, leading him along the river, toward the Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper mill.

He dismounted in the employee lot and hung his helmet over the back of his seat. Just looking at the place depressed him. Red brick, with high narrow windows, it squatted in its own chemical stink like an animal too sick to move. Past the “new” building—which had been completed the year his grandfather was born—the “old” wooden mill moldered into the river, surrounded by weeds and discarded machinery. He and Mike used to sneak over there on break and smoke joints until the big Mohawk foreman had caught them and knocked them both to the floor, screaming that the place was a freaking firetrap, for chrissakes, and didn’t they have the sense God gave geese?

That hadn’t been the last straw, but it was near enough, and the next time Randy got into trouble, fighting in the break room with an asshole who tried to stiff him on a bet on a Giants game, he had quit before he could get fired. That had been three years ago. Now he was back, tail between his legs, asking for a chance to close himself inside with the foul air and the fluorescent lights and the foreman chewing his ass if he missed two minutes on the clock.

He closed his eyes against the cold fresh air and the sunshine and went in.

The Saturday morning shift was light, and nobody was in the break room yet. Randy walked past the scrubbed pine tables and the scarred door to the men’s room, past the battered green lockers, lifted the heavy latch, and walked out onto the mill floor.

The sickly sweet smell of fermenting pulp hit him like a blow to the face. His eyes watered and he sneezed. The air was hot and heavy and moist, pulsing with the sound of the pulper and the rollers and the constant boil and slosh of water. He skirted the edge of the floor. If there hadn’t been a change in the past three years—and “change” wasn’t usually in the Reid-Gruyn vocabulary—Lewis Johnson would be hanging out at his stand in the northeastern corner of the floor, where he updated stacks of forms and quality reports and kept an eye on the men.

Randy found the foreman where he had expected. Same hours, same spot, same dark green uniform with LEWIS in a red oval over the chest pocket. In three years, while Randy had gotten married, buried his father, moved into the old man’s house, and added four tattoos to his collection, Lewis Johnson had done nothing. He looked exactly the same: solid, square-faced, his skin like badly cured deer hide that had started to crack. He still had all his hair; one of the older guys had once confided to Randy that Indians didn’t have any hair below the neck, so they got to keep what they had on top.

“Randy Schoof.” Johnson didn’t sound thrilled to see him again.

“Hey, Lewis.”

“What are you doing here? Last I saw you, you were wiping the pulp off your boots, promising we’d never have the pleasure of your company again.”

“Well. You know. Times change.” God, this was going to be hard. He postponed his complete humiliation for another minute. “I got married.”

“I heard. One of the Bain girls, right?”

“Yeah. We got us a house up past Barkley Mountain and everything.”

“Wasn’t that where your dad lived?”

“Ayeah.” Ayeah. Christ, he sounded like a hillbilly. An old hillbilly. “Yes,” he tried. “I got it when he passed.”

Johnson nodded. “I’m sure you miss him.” Randy was glad Johnson didn’t try to hand him a line about how sorry he was. Steve Schoof had been everything the Reid-Gruyn foreman wasn’t: fun-loving, easygoing, hard-living. Randy’s dad had worked so that he could afford to party. If Johnson had ever even had a beer after eight hours on the floor, Randy had never heard about it.

“So,” Randy went on, “there’ve been a lot of changes in my life in the past three years. I been working every winter as a logger for Castle Logging.”

Johnson nodded. Randy wondered if he’d show more of what he was thinking if he weren’t a Mohawk.

“But, um, Ed’s decided to close up shop. He’s retiring to Florida. And so I’m looking for work.” He blurted the last sentence toward the stained concrete floor.

Johnson sighed. “Believe it or not, Randy, I’d probably hire you back if I could.”

Randy scrunched up his face.
What
?

“I know Ed Castle some. He supplies us with pulp. And if he’s kept you on for the last three years, you must be settling down some. Of course, getting married does that to a man.”