Fateful Mornings Read online

  And yet the wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.

  —W. B. YEATS

  FATEFUL MORNINGS

  PART ONE

  AS THE sun gained the eastern sky, I drove my truck through a meadow and toward Maiden’s Grove Lake. On the hills, aspen trees leafed out like pale green clouds, and scattered in the grass below, violets stood up to the wet, cold spring. Everywhere you looked, summer was promised.

  Who named the lake Maiden’s Grove I do not know, probably the same person who named our township Wild Thyme, back two hundred years ago when northern Pennsylvania was still frontier. They arrived and there it was, a deep glacial rut fed by springs and spilling into January Creek, hooking into the Susquehanna at some point south, and then running hundreds of miles out to the Chesapeake Bay.

  I came to a right turn and took the road to where a dozen cottages sat on the shore. They’d been built in the thirties, when the family that owned most of the surrounding land had sold off a few parcels to raise cash. The family, name of Swales, had evidently grown rich again down in Luzerne County. Until recently, they’d left the other three-quarters of the lake wild. The south shore cottagers were a house-proud and wealthy few who prized quiet and solitude. They stocked the lake with trout and forbade motorboats. At Cottage Seven, I pulled in next to a navy Mercedes wagon and walked to the side yard. The midmorning sun scattered white light across the lake’s blue surface. You could smell the light. Rhonda Prosser, a slender middle-aged woman with the wiry limbs of a distance runner, crouched in front of a broken basement window. On my arrival she stood. She wore gray dreadlocks with silver rings and charms woven in. Her face was severe and beautiful, the face of a white woman, to be clear, dreadlocks notwithstanding. I’d seen her and her husband at monthly township meetings in the summer months. They’d made it a project to beleaguer the township supervisor—my boss, Steve Milgraham—over fracking. In particular, where was the EPA looking after us, and where was the Act 13 money going? For this they had become notable in Holebrook County despite being themselves residents of New York State, north of the border.

  Rhonda peered at me over half-glasses clamped onto the very tip of her nose.

  “Henry Farrell, Wild Thyme,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. I was expecting state police,” she said.

  “Well,” I said.

  “So you’re going to handle this? Because I called before. I left messages on your machine. People raising hell at Andy Swales’s place, and you won’t lift a finger.”

  It was true. Andy Swales was prince of the family and had, that past year, built a stone castle on a hill overlooking the northern shore, along with a small boathouse and a dock. From the Prossers’ cottage, you could see a turret.

  Swales leased some of his land and a trailer up there to a young couple named Kevin O’Keeffe and Penny Pellings, in exchange for their caretaking the house and grounds. Yet them two were not known for care. Child Protective Services had removed their newborn girl, Eolande, about a year ago, in a case that saw a bit of publicity. In addition to the occasional check-in relating to their efforts to get Eolande back, I’d been on a domestic call to the trailer that winter, nothing too bad, just hippies in a squabble that went too far.

  Point being, with Kevin and Penny living up there, a certain local element had new access to the lake, and the cottage owners didn’t like it. Starting that spring, any chance they got, they called about some scandal up to Maiden’s Grove, somebody playing music too loud too late or bait-fishing their trout. I told them once you stock a public lake, the fish are the commonwealth’s. But I’d called Andy Swales about the noise. He’d told me his tenants could do what they pleased, as long as they didn’t get carried away, his words. Me, I also figured it was a free country and people were allowed to get drunk at the wrong lake if they wanted.

  Worst of all to the cottagers on the southern shore, worse than their new neighbors to the north, Swales had signed a gas lease. At some point in the future, they all might look out across the lake to see a derrick punching poison into the earth with nothing but a thin concrete well protecting their water supply.

  “Well,” I said, “the state called the county, and the county called the township, and the township is me, so.”

  “Mmm.”

  “The nearest state barracks is an hour away,” I said. “I may work with the county on suspects and that. Show me around?”

  We went inside. The interior of the cottage was white and spare. The spaces beneath tables and chairs were empty, the countertops clean, the shelves filled with art books. Life preservers and baseball mitts hung on hooks in a shale-floored mudroom with a bench and a view to the lake. Unlike most of the homes I visited on the job, there was not a thing in this one you could call junk. In fact, the cottage was so little disarranged that I had a hard time believing it had been burgled until I came to the wall fixture that had once held a flat-screen TV, and saw the outlines where a stereo had once sat on a chest painted in blue milk wash. According to Rhonda, two vintage stringed instruments had been taken, but not the priceless barn harp, which was crumbling into something more like folk art. She showed it to me and strummed it; it did not play well. In an upstairs bedroom, the burglars had forced open a locked drawer in a nightstand and taken an HK 9mm automatic handgun. Rhonda said it was her ex-husband’s, for coyotes, described it as black, hadn’t touched it since the divorce. There was a touch of weariness in her voice when her ex-husband came into the story. It was the first I’d heard of the split, so I guessed it was recent. She didn’t know if the gun was loaded; it may well have been. There was a nearly empty box of 124-grain full metal jacket ammunition still in the drawer. All the liquor was gone. Downstairs in the basement, any tools not bolted down had been taken. We headed back up to the ground floor.

  “This is the most valuable thing in the whole place.” Rhonda pointed to an oil painting in a golden frame with a picture light mounted over it. “Why turn on the light and not take the painting? Odd. I guess I shouldn’t wonder.” Cows in a field by a creek at sunset. She straightened it with a brush of her fingers and a flash of turquoise jewelry.

  “So last night. You got a call when?”

  Rhonda looked pained. “We set calls to come here, not ­Syra­cuse. He did, my ex, Evan. That’s where I was last night, Syracuse. The call came to him, but the cottage is mine now, so he called me. The summers we stayed here, we rarely even locked the doors. But friends on Silver Lake had a problem. He got the system, thinking once we have it, we’ll never need it. You just don’t expect this.”

  “You’re a long way out,” I said.

  “So we thought,” said Rhonda, and then reconsidered. “No, it’s more than that. You keep going along, you’ve got a good thing. How could you expect this? You’re going along.” With an index finger, she whipped tears from under her eyes. “We just have to absorb this now, I guess. There’s no place to be.”

  “Just from my perspective, I’ve seen it before. It’s not personal. These people, they didn’t mean you harm. They don’t know you. They only know what they need, and that’s probably heroin. So the call came here,” I continued, “the dispatcher didn’t like it, she called the state police, state police called . . .”

  “Evan,” said Rhonda, “my ex.”

  “And he called you.” She nodded. “I’ll try to get a few prints and whatnot, but the likeliest way forward is people. People talking.”

  I didn’t have high hopes. In the commonwealth, every house burglary was a felony, and no
body wanted to send their ­brother-in-law or whoever to prison over a stereo. Especially not in the government-resistant culture that had taken root in the hills of Wild Thyme. Maybe I could follow the items over the border to the small cities on New York’s Southern Tier. Probably not. I took prints from the doorknobs, a few surfaces, and had a long look around. The burglars had left nothing behind. Before breaking in they’d probably taken off their boots, even. I gave my regrets and got on the road.

  It took about twenty minutes to get back to the station. Rounding a bend, I rolled into the familiar valley and parked on the gravel surrounding the municipal garage. Wild Thyme Township had not always had a policeman on the payroll. I ­suppose it had depended on how safe people felt, and how much taxes they wanted to pay. Before my return from ­Wyoming—State, not County—a few years back, the post had stood vacant, and the people relied on Pennsylvania State Police and the Holebrook County Sheriff’s Department. It was largely Sheriff Dally’s doing that I got the job; he’d wanted to trim back his own department’s ambit and felt that as long as I was up there in Wild Thyme, I could be of use.

  In fashioning the police station itself, the township had cornered off a piece of the building that doubled as a garage and volunteer fire station. I unlocked the door and propped it open, then switched on a rotating fan. It never made a difference. Sometimes it felt like the air in my office had not changed since 1967 when the garage was built. Nothing in, nothing out. The desk beside mine remained vacant. My latest deputy—Krista Collins, formerly of the county sheriff’s department—worked for me for about five minutes before getting herself deployed again, this time to Afghanistan. There she met a sergeant and let me know she wasn’t returning to Pennsylvania probably ever. Even if I could hire somebody, there were precious few academy graduates angling for a low-paying rural post. The applications I did get were from older cops with brutality complaints and discipline problems, guys who fell out with their departments and were looking for rescue. If eleven dollars an hour was worth it, most of them had to be pretty sorry, but I kept a few applications on my desk anyway.

  I considered manning one of my speed traps throughout the township, but decided against it. It was a lazy May morning after a dawn turkey hunt, and besides, as policeman of a small township, it is a fine line between making yourself useful and paining the community’s ass. For that reason I tended to focus my efforts on the king cabs and tanker trucks come in from elsewhere to work the Marcellus shale play.

  I called the sheriff’s department and asked about any burglaries their way, any suspects. Nothing out of the ordinary in Fitzmorris or around. I filled out most of a criminal complaint, leaving space for the offenders’ names, and put it in a desk drawer.

  Not too long after I had done this, the township supervisor stepped in. He wore a striped polo shirt, Bermuda shorts the color of peas, and dusty work boots. As I mentioned, Stephen Milgraham was his name, the middle-aged owner/operator of a contracting business. I privately called him the Sovereign Individual, or just the Sovereign, owing to his libertarian leanings. Being a department of one, I was answerable to the Wild Thyme taxpayers by way of the Sovereign. He criticized me publicly, declined to pay for con ed, and took away my mini-fridge.

  “Steve,” said I, “glad to see you, please sit.”

  “Ah, thanks.” The Sovereign scraped a chair over to my desk and sat on the edge of it. “How are things, keeping busy?”

  “Always. Always something.”

  “I ran into Rhonda this morning.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You told her we’ve got a heroin problem.”

  “News travels fast,” I said.

  “Henry.” He spat some wintergreen dip juice into a soda bottle. Steve knew roads and their upkeep, he knew the voting people of Wild Thyme, and he was well liked. It would have been convenient for me to like him too. Increasingly I had the impression that he’d be happy for me never to arrest anyone again and to move to some other county.

  I said, “Come on, Stephen—”

  “I have enough trouble? From Rhonda? You ask me—”

  “Stephen—”

  “Maybe she got hit because nobody likes her.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “If you need more work, let me know,” Stephen said, standing as if to close the matter. “But we don’t want you making up—”

  “I didn’t make up anything—”

  “—stories and then putting them in your blotter, scaring the little old ladies in the ladies’ club.”

  “—and it isn’t you who decides how much work I have,” I said.

  “Oh, no?”

  “Okay. But please. Just read the blotter. The last few months.” Heroin’s arrival into the countryside had been a shameful secret at first, but you saw stories in the paper now. The truth was, within the past six months I could probably have made as many drug arrests as I had the time and inclination to make. I used to drive around what we call the Heights, a low-income community of outlaws and misfortunates perched on our highest hills, and wave to the people I saw around their homes. Sometimes I’d think, I know that guy to be a deadbeat—what’s in his pockets? Now, with everything coming in, I had that thought about almost everybody, ordinary citizens too.

  “I’ve seen the reports,” said the Sovereign. “What, a few burglaries.”

  “A few burglaries a month where there used to be just a few all year. Possession. Overdoses, MVAs. If you think I’m catching everything . . .”

  “I don’t. I’m on my way to work. I’m not trying to be a prick. You’ve got to do your job, but you could stand some discretion. You and your reports.”

  As the supervisor walked out my door, I said, “Steve, it’s not me that’s scaring the little old ladies. You see that, right?”

  It was early afternoon and I was sleeping peacefully at my desk when my phone chirped: a text message from Shelly Bray. With her two kids at school, her husband safe at work, her horses fed, and no clients at the stables, this was my signal to stop by. I had a half-hour window after every text to show up or not. Our system was simple. She never texted me for any other reason, and only ever wrote hey there or how you? or simply, hi. If I could go, I would.

  I turned onto Fieldsparrow Road and parked my car out of sight on the late Aubrey Dunigan’s farmstead, where we’d had so much trouble the year before. I trotted through his scrubby field to the wooded ridge above. A trail led past a well pad that had been cleared but not drilled; at the moment it was just a silent expanse covered in a wisp of bluegrass. The unit in the rock far below included some of the Bray property. The lease was yet another bone of contention between Shelly and her husband. She was knee-jerk opposed to hydrofracking—a view I shared for my own reasons—but her husband saw that he couldn’t keep it away. In the end, he had won.

  I paused at the forest’s edge to look out over the wide golden dell surrounding the Brays’ horse farm. It thrummed with life, a braiding flow of light, insect buzz, and wildflower scent mixed with manure and hay. As I crept toward the house, keeping to the tree line, Shelly’s two horses flicked their tails in the scant shade of a wildling apple tree, ignoring me. Wurlitzer and Pinky were their names.

  At the kitchen door I removed my boots, wary of leaving imprints, and felt a rush of desire and dumb luck as Shelly padded down the stairs. She was a pretty brunette of forty or so with a huge devilish smile. That morning she wore only a clean white tank top and striped underwear. Stepping past me to the refrigerator, she removed a pitcher of ice water with lemon slices floating in it. She poured a glass and handed it to me.

  “You look beat,” she said. “Come on up.”

  Naked under a stream of cool water in the guest bathroom shower, I stood behind her and ran my hands over her abdomen, the muscle and flesh of it now as familiar as her face. My hand moved down between her legs, and my breath got short. Feeling me get hard, she bent forward with one hand on the tile, and with the other guided me inside her, unprot
ected. It was too good to bear. “Jesus,” I said, “we can’t.”

  Shelly gripped me to her with a hand behind my thigh. “I want you to. I want you to come.”

  I broke away before it was too late and stood, wild-eyed, with my back against the tile as Shelly shrugged, stepped out of the shower, and left the bathroom. I followed. In the guest bedroom, she pulled me to her and we took our time to finish what we’d started, but with protection. Afterward we lay side by side atop the bedspread, brushed by the warm breeze moving through the open windows.

  “Hot,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What, Henry?”

  “What, what?”

  Shelly plucked her shirt from the floor and pulled it on over her head. Tugging her underwear up, she said, “The thrill is gone?”

  “That’s not the problem. That is the problem.”

  “I could leave him.”

  This was the second time she’d said something like this. The first time, a week ago, I’d ignored it. “Not on my account,” I said. “The kids.”

  “Henry, I’ve known him years. He’s not evil. But please understand: he’s too broken to be fixed. Don’t beat yourself up over the kids. We’d be doing them a favor.”

  “Just . . . not on my account.”

  She sighed. “Tomorrow, then?”

  As I got dressed, I heard car tires. Downstairs, Shelly cursed. “Henry?”

  “I’m out the window.” I had memorized the house’s layout for just such a moment, but never expected I’d be dumb enough to let it happen. Barefoot, and as gymnastically as is possible for a six-foot man, I folded myself through an open window and let go of the sill, dropping ten feet to the ground. From there, I slunk behind a woodpile. Around the corner of the house, Shelly and her husband Josh faced each other on the porch.

  “Surprise, surprise,” I heard her say.

  “The AC died,” he said, “you believe that? They sent us home, day off.”