The Bramble and the Rose Read online

  THE BRAMBLE

  AND THE ROSE

  A HENRY FARRELL NOVEL

  TOM BOUMAN

  For Dad

  The interrupted fern is less a lover of moisture than its kindred, and while it may occasionally be found with the cinnamon fern in some springy spot in the open grove, its preference is for the fence-row and bushy half-wild lands that border so many of our back-country roads. Here it often thrives in the face of the most untoward circumstances, frequently perched upon the top of a half-buried stone pile, through the interstices of which its strong roots ramify to the soil below. It is from some such situation as this that the wise fern cultivator selects his plants for the garden, for the labour of removing the stones from about the prize is much less than is required to dig it up when growing in the soil. It is as firmly anchored as any of its relatives and does not come up whole without a struggle.

  WILLARD N. CLUTE,

  OUR FERNS IN THEIR HAUNTS, 1901

  THE BRAMBLE

  AND THE ROSE

  WHEN I got to the station, Terry Ceallaigh was waiting for me behind the wheel of his pickup. The engine was running, and the windows were fogged. The sun had yet to rise on a cold early morning between summer and fall. I tapped on his window. Terry startled and, seeing me, turned off the truck and stepped out. I got him into the station and started some coffee brewing. My office was shoehorned into the Wild Thyme Township garage, along with the plows and the grader and the fire station. It was tight quarters, but I was only a one-man police department in a northeast Pennsylvania hamlet, and they tell me I have all I need.

  With a mug in his hand, Terry drew himself upright and told me about the dead man. “I don’t know how you deal with something like that,” he said when he was done. “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Tell me where,” I said. I’d already put in calls to Pennsylvania State Police, the Holebrook County Sheriff’s Department, and the conservation officer assigned to our area, Shaun Loughlin. Shaun had called the biologist who works with the Game Commission. All the while Terry Ceallaigh and I were talking, I searched him for signs. Terry was a tall, fit man in his thirties with long hair in two braids like Willie Nelson. He smelled like shampoo. Bronze bracelets clinked on his wrists as he raised his coffee mug, and he had tattoos on his hands, which were battered and seamed with engine grease.

  I followed Terry back out to Red Pine Road. He pulled onto the shoulder, creek on one side, slope on the other with a logging switchback cut into it. The creek bent under the road and continued into a wooded ravine. This was not Terry’s land, but his neighbor Mark Moore’s. In years past, kids went down there to leap from a rock cliff into a deep pool in the creek. I got out and went to Terry’s driver-side window.

  “I can’t go back again,” he said, pointing into the woods. “Watch your feet when you get there, I threw up.”

  I told Terry to stick around, and stepped into the woods. Dry leaves underfoot, a touch of red and gold in the green above me, the wind pushing the trees around to reveal the pure blue sky. Red Pine Road was called that because of the species of tree that covered the ridge, a tree as short as it was tangled. The men who first tamed the area would have been disappointed in the timber; they were seeking the much larger hemlocks for the bark, which they used for tanning hide. Those men were also the ones who almost drove the Pennsylvania deer to extinction in the process of cutting away first growth. Eventually they—the Game Commission or somebody—had transplanted Michigan whitetails to replace the local population, thinking nobody would notice. But some families, mine included, remembered through the years that the Pennsylvania deer had been a smaller, less obvious animal.

  I had to push through a thicket of pine, and an acre or so of beech tag, blackberry brambles, and maples turning the color of cherry bubble gum. Then a tromp through the shallow parts of the creek. You won’t believe me but I smelled the body before I saw it, almost by a mile. That’s because it had been warm and something had eaten out the man’s guts, from thighs to rib cage. Where he lay was close to the Freefall, where kids used to jump, but not the exact spot. You could tell the body was a man’s—an old hairy chest spattered with black blood. He wore a plain blue short-sleeved shirt. His head was gone, and where it should have been was a ring of dried blood, suggesting impact. But for the missing head, this would’ve been a job for the commonwealth and their game people, not my problem. His arms were spread wide, as if drawing power from the rippled rock below or the sky above, or both. His legs were white and hairless where his jeans had been torn away, and he still had one black leather boot on. Flies circled above him. I took out a pair of earplugs and put one in each nostril. The hillside rose above me, covered with ferns, trees, and moss. I stood there, shifting from leg to leg, looking away and waiting. A fly bit me. I came out of my brown study, taped the scene off, and waited for the others.

  Ordinarily the medical examiner, Wyatt Brophy, would take charge of the scene, and he picked his way down the ravine to join me. But because an animal was likely involved, Wy deferred to Shaun Loughlin, who was trained in attack-scene protocol, as most newer COs had to be. Shaun arrived shortly after Wy and got to work. Anything that looked like a bite mark, Shaun shot with his digital camera, laying his ruler into each photo, one shot with, and one without. He also collected saliva from torn flaps of white skin, which trembled at the delicate touch of his swab. He shooed at flies.

  “This it?” said Shaun. “No campsite? Tent?”

  “This is it,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to get the bear, then.”

  “Bear?”

  He showed me a paper envelope with strands of heavy black hair he’d collected.

  “Huh,” I said. Well then, where was the head, I wanted to know.

  “The biologist is on her way from Harrisburg,” Shaun said. “She should be here in an hour.”

  I looked above us and down the ravine to where the body lay. “Shaun, is it a problem if I climb up?”

  “Go around, not straight up. You’ll get dirt on the scene.”

  So I did, walking past another creek bend and then up a gentler incline, until I caught a glimmer of creek below me. On my stomach I eased down to a shale ledge and peered over it. There was the dead man below me, thud. I took a couple photos. I had braced myself against the trunk of a narrow beech whose roots had forced themselves through the layers of rock to the surrounding earth. Just above where my hand was, in a crook, the faintest scuff in the tree’s gray bark. A small disturbance, a freshness. The mark was about an inch wide. I took a photo of that.

  Down below, I stood next to Wy Brophy for a moment. “Look for signs he’d been tied,” I said. “Rope burns.”

  Wy raised his eyebrows but showed no real surprise. “Look at this,” he said, crouching. Where the head would have met the body, there was the halo of dried blood. The stone’s surface was blue-gray and smooth, with wavelets shaped by water and baked from mud to stone some millions of years ago. With a toothbrush, Wy cleared away some rust color from the surface to reveal divots in the stone, new and white. He looked up. “The fall couldn’t have been thirty feet. Not enough to knock someone’s head clean off.”

  Shaun stopped what he was doing to listen to Wy, then came to look. “Teeth marks? Claw marks? No.”

  I looked down at the body, imagined a heavy flat stone in my hands, raised it over my head, and brought it down where the neck should have been.

  “Right,” said Wy. “Repeated blows with something hard enough to chip the stone beneath. The cervical vertebrae are smashed to hell, you can see in there. What’s left of them.” He took a flurry of photographs, his camera clicking.

  The creek bubbled as we circled and circled the bod
y, waving at flies. At one point I found a dried smear of blood on a face of stone. Then Shaun found another set of drops on the flat rock of the creek bed. We took samples. Shaun got a chirp on his radio, hiked back to the road, and returned with three companions: Holebrook County Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Jackson, who held the leash of a beagle named Paycheck, and a short woman with white hair like a dandelion. Shaun introduced the woman as Dr. Mary Weaver, the bear biologist. She was dressed for the outdoors, with broken-in hiking boots and a boonie hat on a string around her neck. She had what looked like a .30-06 rifle on her shoulder, a revolver on her hip, and a hunting knife buckled to her thigh.

  “Mary runs a lab down to Harrisburg,” Shaun said. “We use her for attacks, poaching investigations, and that. She can ID ground meat from a butcher shop. A little piece of sausage, she can tell us deer, horse, woodchuck.”

  “Delighted,” she said, shaking my hand and Wy’s in turn. She glanced at the corpse and said, “What the frick?”

  “You work any like this?” I said.

  “I work all over the East, through to Ohio. I just got back from one down in Georgia. That’s the way it’s going for these bears. You don’t usually see the head come off, though. That’s a new one.”

  Paycheck got the corpse’s scent and into the woods we walked, straight to a hole in the ground where the carpet of leaves had been tossed aside and dirt chucked out in all directions. From there, the dog led us to a nearby oak with three trunks joined together at the roots. One trunk was living, the other two dead, cracked open and hollowed out. Deputy Jackson gave a tug at the leash, but the dog insisted, so we circled the tree looking for signs. At the base of one dead trunk, hairy droppings spilled out of a crack barely big enough to fit a foot inside. The old lady lowered herself to the ground and shone a flashlight in, and said nothing. Again, Jackson tugged at the dog’s leash, and again, the dog stayed put. I cast my eye up the tree, found an open bole near a joint about ten feet off the ground. I wedged myself between two trunks and hitched up the tree to where I could grab on to a limb and look into the hollow. My Maglite beam caught white flesh and teeth crusted with black blood, and some human hair. The dead man’s head was not exactly looking up at me, nor was it not. One eye was aimed at the sky, the other side of his face had been pulled or pushed down into the hollow.

  I got down quick as I could to the forest floor, where I took a break and sat until the afterimage of the face cleared from my sight. Then, with a knife, I climbed up there again, and, gentle as could be, slipped the blade between the head and the rotting wood surrounding it, popped it loose. Flies spiraled out from beneath. At that moment, I felt a scrabbling inside the hollow, and Mary Weaver hopped to one side as two shadows shot out of the ground entrance, then stopped in the midst of some blackberry brambles to stare at us: raccoons. With a gloved hand, I took the head by the ear, lifted it out, and dropped it into a paper grocery sack that Shaun Loughlin held open for me. Parts of it had been gnawed to the bone. Shaun took samples of hair and scat from the raccoons’ den, and swabbed the head for saliva. Too late, I pulled the .40 and looked for the animals. They had disappeared.

  Would you understand if I said it was actually easier, the worse it got? This man, whoever he had been, was nothing but a thing now. A foul-smelling thing, with very little life left to call out to me. We left the head by the body.

  The dog led us to the edge of a swamp, dark and surrounded by hemlock, where the creek splayed out into a dozen smaller channels, then into a great brown bowl of water that beavers had dammed. Paycheck lost whatever scent he had.

  Out on the road, just a little past the Moores’ driveway, I thought I found something. A wobbling tire track in the road; the track became two crisscrossing each other, then they widened out and stopped. I took pictures. An ambulance had arrived, along with another state vehicle and Sheriff Dally’s car. The sheriff and I stepped off to the side and I told him, “It’s a homicide. Loughlin and the scientist think a bear’s been at him. We know raccoons have.”

  “It couldn’t have been a bear, plain and simple?”

  “The head’s taken off with, I don’t know, a sharp rock. Then buried. Angry work, or desperate.” Before the sheriff could ask, I said, “We found the head. Raccoons had it in a hollow tree.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The bear could have dragged him down,” I said, “but why? We can’t rule it out, I guess.”

  “He could’ve been camping, hiking, fallen, died a natural death, been taken. In whatever order,” said the sheriff hopefully.

  “The guy had nothing, no gear, no wallet, even.”

  Dally looked down the creek, where techs had started their work. “If it’s a homicide, we’ll keep it quiet for now. Why don’t you wait here, talk to any press that shows. Keep it simple. Say it’s an animal attack, give some broad strokes about the victim—height, weight, race, age. I’ll refer anyone to you, and that’ll give us some cover. Make it look ordinary. Happens every day.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You know the landowners?”

  “Yes. Terry there”—I pointed to his truck—“found him. Lives next door to Mark Moore and his wife. Them two don’t get along great, and neither do their dogs, I guess. But they never gave me any problems other than that. Citizens.”

  “Well, sound them out, if you can. But we’ll mostly work it out of my shop. It’s watch and wait with PSP; if we need them, they’ll take over. I’ll have Jackson or Hanluain look through the missing persons, call around. Keep notes, be in touch.”

  I don’t know that Dally and I ever set this in stone as policy, but our practice was to handle our business, if it was our business. If it was a whodunit from out of town, with branches leading other places, we’d leave it to the state police and their superior resources.

  I found Weaver pulling equipment out of a maroon pickup with a white camper in the bed. At my arrival, she looked up at me, smiled slightly, and continued to rummage. She lined up a backpack, a tent, a pair of waders, a motion-activated wildlife camera, and a short-handled shovel on the roadside.

  “Where’s your gear?” she said. “Let’s get out there.”

  “My gear,” I said.

  “He’ll be back. Probably today, tonight, next few days. I’m going to set up. You should come,” she said.

  “Ma’am, Doctor, we don’t have permission to do that. I’m not sure the landowners even know what’s going on down here.”

  “So, get permission. He’ll be back.”

  “You say ‘he.’ ”

  “It’s a male.”

  “You know that already?”

  Mary hefted the large backpack onto her shoulders, and it reached a foot over her head. “It’s always a male. What’s your name again?”

  “Henry.”

  “I’d say he’s down in the swamp where nobody can get to him unless they’re out to shoot a bear. Which we are, once you get your ass in gear. Shaun’s coming. Aren’t you, Shaun?”

  The CO was leaning at the window of his vehicle. “What? All night? Henry, I got plans with my girl. You can handle this, right?”

  The biologist looked from me to Shaun and back again. She shook her head. “I’ll go out there alone if I have to. I’m not sure you understand. You ever handle a bear attack?”

  “I lived out West.”

  “Oh. Where?”

  “Big Piney, Wyoming. That area.”

  “U. a. horribilis,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Ursus arctos horribilis. Grizzly bears. You’ve worked with them.”

  “Yes,” I said. Out West we had some grizzlies that disported along the Green River and in the higher meadows, where occasionally a kayaker or a hiker seeking virgin ground would startle them into violence. One time when I was out there, a grizzly took a little nip of an ultra-marathoner as he floated barefoot over the hills, hungry for distance, no distance enough. The grizzly had been faster. Just a piece of calf muscle, and the animal was put off
by a faceful of bear spray, but it ended the runner’s career. In Wyoming such attacks required a conflict coordinator, a kind of field judge who weighed in on whether the bear lived or died. In this case, the coordinator argued that the grizzly had merely been surprised by the runner, and had reacted normally. The ultra man, the outdoors people, and local ranchers all agreed that the coordinator was wrong, and the bear was tracked down and shot. Not by me, but I was on the hunt.

  “Here, we’re dealing with an americanus,” the old lady said. “A different animal entirely. Usually amiable. Not a natural predator like a grizzly. But this one is different. And he’ll come back. We know that. He’ll come back here.”

  “Doctor …” I began, wondering how much I should say. As to this victim’s death, we would not be looking for a black bear, but a Homo sapiens or two. “I don’t know how you can be so certain yet. This could have been just a bear, wandering along, and, oh, hello. They eat carrion, don’t they?”

  “They do. And a bear that’s had man will seek it out again. Henry, I don’t see how any of us knows anything about this attack, not for certain, not yet. You could have a man-killer out there. The sooner we get to it, the sooner we’ll know.”

  I took off my baseball cap and scratched my head. “This is a small town without much local entertainment. If you say anything about man-killing bears to the press, well. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “What press?” she said. “I’ll be out in the field. You don’t have to talk to them, either. Come along.” The old lady was starting to make good sense. She moved closer. “If you get pushback, you might explain that a man-killer isn’t stupid. It stalks its prey in absolute silence. You’d be surprised. Most survivors never hear or see it before it’s too late, until it’s less than fifty feet away. And if it has a taste for man, harsh words won’t stop him.”

  THE STORY of this dead man—and some other animals into the bargain—began years ago. My part in it began only weeks before we found him. Two neighbors, Mark Moore and Terry Ceallaigh, sat side by side at my desk in the station on a late summer afternoon. They also lived side by side on Red Pine Road, each with a piece of land up there. Mark Moore was in his sixties, a transplant to Holebrook County, while Ceallaigh—pronounced Kelly—was a younger man from an old Wild Thyme family.