The Bramble and the Rose Read online

  “This is what they have,” he said.

  “How are we going to get this down to the creek?”

  “We’re not, I guess. We take it as far as we can onto a trail, and hope for the best.”

  “Well, it ain’t going to work,” I said.

  All the same, we two hauled it into the shadows, down far enough to where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I told Shaun what Wy had told us about the body. The CO baited the trap with a couple pounds of ground beef in a bucket, and we called it good. High up on a flat stone overlooking the most likely path from the swamp to the trap, Shaun and I reclined with our rifles and scopes. I was not expecting to see the animal, but now the hunt for man or beast was in my blood. I scanned the woods until quitting time.

  As we neared the road once again, we both stopped short and cursed the sight of a white vehicle parked not too far from ours. A news truck. Not much news out here. With bad accidents or fires they sometimes came to make sense of it all. Occasionally they made it to a crime scene in time to throw a reporter with a microphone in front of a taped-off place that had once been a home. How else were they going to get out and find news? Just one crew this time, a young man in a plaid blazer and a cameraman from a Binghamton channel north of the border. As Shaun and I stepped out of the trees, the cameraman shouldered his camera and got a shot of us. I caught myself sinking a little down under the brim of my hat and trying to disappear behind my glasses. I remembered what Julie always told me, stood up straight, and took a breath.

  The anchor set us up with the woods at our backs, and I told him and the camera we had reason to believe there was a dangerous animal loose in the swamp down there. I cautioned the people not to go into the woods alone, and particularly not in the Red Pine Road area, but if you do, make noise and bring spray.

  “What makes you think it’s dangerous?” said the anchorman, knowing very well why.

  “A man has died,” I said.

  “What man? How? What can you tell us?”

  “I can’t say at this time,” I said.

  Shaun leaned in and mentioned the trap we had. “Don’t go near it, folks,” he said.

  “So your plan is to capture the animal?” the anchor asked. “I assume it’s a bear. Or a mountain lion?”

  “It’s not a mountain—we don’t have mountain lions,” said Shaun patiently. “It’s not a mountain lion. We’re not going to be specific at this time. We don’t want you sportsmen out here. We know you can handle yourselves. But while we’re out here, the best help you can give us is to stay away. I’m sure Officer Farrell agrees. We get people out here trying to be helpful, and somebody gets hurt.”

  I stopped in the office real quick on the way home to clean and stow the .40 I had out in the field with me. The light on my answering machine was blinking; it was a message from Dr. Weaver. I called her back, and it turned out she just wanted to ask after the bear, and when could she do the work on it. When I told her we hadn’t got it, there was silence on the other end of the line.

  “You’re getting beyond the point where a dead bear is any use, Officer. After a certain time, we’ll never know if we got the right animal. Then you’ll have to kill them all. I have a mind to get back up there and find him for you. Whoever you’ve got, get them out in the field.”

  I called Sheriff Dally about getting at least Deputy Jackson for the evening, but he said no can do, get Shaun to press the Game Commission for men. I had already asked Shaun this; he’d told me it’d be a day or two.

  “But we got a match on the guy’s prints,” Dally said. “An ex-cop from the Harrisburg area. His name is Carl Dentry, he was military, then Harrisburg police for about twenty years, then an investigator for PDE, then for the AG’s Criminal Law Division, then retired about six years. He’s a licensed PI in Pennsylvania, but far as I can tell, he’s not working. Nothing unusual came up online. Black Nissan Pathfinder and a Harley in his name.”

  “Oh,” I said. The AG’s office had resources to investigate a range of misdeeds, from Medicaid fraud to drug trafficking to financial and organized crime. I wasn’t aware that they were active up our way.

  The Pennsylvania Department of Education staffed investigators to look into claims of teacher misconduct. Basically, they rooted out pedophiles and drug users in the school system. Their investigations sometimes ran parallel to law enforcement, sometimes did more, sometimes less, and sometimes they were at odd angles to what we did. We’d only had one since I’d come back to Wild Thyme, and it had come to nothing, a sweet old guidance counselor with an iron-gray perm on the wrong side of a troubled mother. Carl Dentry wasn’t the investigator; I’d have remembered his name.

  “You hear anything from PDE lately?” said Dally.

  “No, sir, the teachers are behaving themselves, far as I know.”

  “And Dentry’s retired. Well. I’ve got to call PSP and get someone down there to talk to his wife. In fact, I do believe this is one for PSP. What a shame. In the meantime, we’ll find connections he may have had to the area. I’ll give the wife a day to absorb the news, then maybe we’ll call, see about talking to her ourselves.”

  Dally faxed me a headshot of Carl Dentry—yes, we still used faxes—and I had a look. He was a tough old barnacle. Unsmiling, narrow, and craggy, with a biker’s long mustache. In my mind, I tried to match up the photograph with the head we’d found, which hadn’t any beard, and just about could do it.

  Mark and Frieda Moore were no help. I stopped by there in the evening, bringing with me the photo of Carl.

  Mark took the paper from me and peered into the image. “Is this him?”

  “Do you know him?”

  Mark shook his head. “Never seen him before. Frieda?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “How about your house sitter?” I said, thinking of the car Terry said he saw or heard that weekend.

  Mark shook his head, perplexed. “We don’t have one.”

  “Oh. Never mind. Anybody else have keys to your place?”

  “No. Well,” said Frieda, “the boys do.”

  “The boys,” I said. “One’s in New York, the other in …”

  “Portland, Oregon. He owns a bicycle store there. We called; they don’t remember anything about the trespassing, who got caught, the boys don’t know.”

  I said goodbye, drove not half a mile, parked on the side of the road, and walked up the Ceallaighs’ driveway. I first found Carrianne around the side of the house, where tomato plants spilled out of cages, drooping with the last of the season. Many of them were half eaten already.

  “Chipmunks,” Carrianne said, disgusted.

  “I hear you.” I decided to risk it. “How’s Shelly Bray these days?”

  Carrianne looked at me a long moment. “How’s your wife? Terry’s in the garage.”

  I nodded. “My wife is well. Listen, I heard she’s been in town. If you see her …”

  “I haven’t.”

  “If you do see her, tell her, I don’t know. Tell her don’t go to strangers.” Carianne simply looked at me without saying a word. From my pocket, I pulled the folded piece of paper with Carl Dentry’s photo on it. “Seen this guy, ever?”

  She looked at the face. “No. Is he the guy?”

  “I can’t say,” I told her.

  “Terry’s in the garage,” she repeated.

  I passed a firepit circled with fieldstone, a few cords of wood stacked on pallets, and came to the green garage. Inside was a spotless concrete floor, steel tables, a wonderland of power tools, presses and the like, wrench sets, a woodshop with racks of lumber, and the machines. Three Yamaha bikes, fluorescent green, red, and pink. They also had a camouflage ATV, a Gator, a couple snowmobiles, and a small black trailer. Terry’s hands were black and greasy, and there were several mechanical parts arrayed on a nearby table, but he was just drinking a beer and staring into space when I walked in. There was a whiff of weed smoke on the air. He handed me a beer.

  “Quite a setup in here,�
�� I said.

  “It never ends,” said Terry. “More, more, more.”

  “Remind me what you do for a day job?”

  “You mean, how do I afford this?” he said. “I’m in IT.” He named a health services provider that operated several hospitals north of the border. “The day job of all day jobs, though my hours are all over the place. When I started racing, it was just me sleeping on couches, not a care in the world. My first bike was secondhand and I built it up. Got a few sponsorships in the early 2000s, got a better bike, better gear.”

  “I didn’t know you raced.”

  “Placed a few times. In Pennsylvania and up to Unadilla, mostly. Did an enduro once. We’d go all through the region, west through Pennsylvania to West Virginia.”

  “ ‘We.’ That where you met Carrianne?”

  “Eventually. She was in the WMX Championship.” Terry looked around him. “Seems like a lot, maybe. Most of this shit is years old now. We’re selling some. I just try to maintain it, give it to the kids one day. What else you going to do? You don’t have forever. Get yours, pass it on. This is me,” he said, pointing to a framed shot of a biker skidding through a turn, throwing a fan of dirt at the camera. An ad for gear, with his name signed small in the corner as “Ty Kelly.”

  “You anglicized too,” I said. “My name used to be ‘Fearghaill.’ Where’s ‘Ty’ from?”

  “Thought it’d be easier on the sponsors,” he said. “Not that they were beating down my door. People know me here as Terry Ceallaigh, spelled the old way, so, anyway.”

  “The kids must like living here,” I said. ATVs and dirt bikes, snowmobiles, hunting, target practice, chickens, light recreational explosives. All the things his neighbors complained to me about. A dream. Yet most kids grew up and left Wild Thyme soon as they could. “You think they’ll take it on?”

  “I don’t know. I do know it’s the next best thing to Mark’s place,” Terry said. “That’s home to me, that place. I grew up there as if it was my own. Then Grandma and Grandpa died, one right after the other, and Mark came in out of nowhere and bought it. My people wanted the money. At least he never tore it down, built some McMansion. I always wanted to get it back, looked for it to go on sale. Carrianne’s people are from Hazleton, so that’s where we settled first, not having any place else to go.” He shook his head. “Hazleton is,” Terry said, with some discomfort, “overrun. With illegals. This plot came on the market, and we moved up the country.”

  I pulled out the photo. “Down to business. Ever seen this guy?”

  “Can’t say I have. But you know the shape he was in when I found him.”

  Terry gave me a list of names of people who had been out that weekend. Nate Hancock’s was the only name I knew. I placed some calls as a matter of habit, but we already knew it wasn’t a friend of the Ceallaighs we’d found in the Freefall.

  I showed Carl Dentry’s photo at the High-Thyme Tavern and at the Loyal Sons of Hibernia. No, brother.

  I left the .40 in the locker at the station, but the rifle was mine, and I took it back to the Meagher cottage on Walker Lake. Miss Julie eyed it as I set it in a hall closet, but said nothing, only raised her eyebrows and shrugged. I was later than usual. She had some water just about to boil for pasta, and we had that and the last of the marinara from her plum tomatoes, and red wine for me. It was a one-sided dinner; she had morning sickness all times of day or night. She ate when she felt like it, which was at odd hours. Also, her breasts were swollen and sore, and she couldn’t get comfortable with them, and often mentioned it. I knew it and there was nothing I could do for her. But she sat and we talked, and eventually she pulled over her space-age computer and showed me where the local news channel had posted a story about the hunt. “Killer Bear Sought in Holebrook County” was the headline, and to drive the point home, they threw in a stock photo of a grizzly.

  THE MAID SERVICE that had cleaned the cottage after the wedding left almost no trace of the party, except for a stink that lingered where we couldn’t find what was making it, until one day we did: several shrimp tails wrapped in a napkin, stuffed in a plastic lowball glass, and placed high on top of a medicine cabinet in one of the bathrooms. There were still burned-black pig bones in the yard. I flung the biggest of them into the lake, and the smaller pieces I swept into a garbage bag and put out with the trash.

  Almost a full bar’s worth of liquor remained, some unopened bottles, some down to a finger. Miss Julie and I spent a moment with our hands on our hips, looking at the little skyline of vodka and bourbon and the cases of wine. Not as if she could drink in her condition, but she had a history anyway—booze and pills. As for me, I knew if I wasn’t careful I’d enjoy more of the hard stuff than I could stand. We’d boxed some up and I brought bottles in to work here and there. One to the township mechanic John Kozlowski, a peace offering to the Sovereign Individual, something for Shaun Loughlin.

  With the dead man and everything running wild at work, I’d had very little time to check in with my sister Mag. All I really knew was that her husband Dennis had split back south, taking their daughter Brit, leaving Mag and the other two kids. Father nor Ma would talk to me about what had happened between them. Miss Julie’s idea was that weddings can expose things going wrong in other lives—can make you see that you will never get to the altar, or show you a chill in your marriage of ten years, things like that. Maybe so. Mag was like me, just quiet, not wanting to bother people. One evening we brought over some wine, a case of beer, and a bottle of gin. Ma looked sideways but I saw Father’s eyes light up at the beer, a bright local ale that he’d drank too much of at the reception.

  He took one and found a chair on the porch and sat, wheezing like an accordion. Father had never drank much when we were growing up, so it was unusual. And I have to tell you how strange it was for me to see Father even sitting in the first place, when it wasn’t at the dinner table, and then only long enough to square his dinner away with stony efficiency. Father had been a stander, a doer, a walker, a worker. He was over sixty now. Up until the day he and Ma moved south, he could still claim title as the wiliest hunter Holebrook County had known in fifty years. He had been king of whitetail deer, wild turkey, grouse, and various critters you could trap for fur. Coyotes, when they reappeared in our hills in the late eighties, Father had shot like a chore, like taking out the trash. We hadn’t had bears again until the dawn of the twenty-first century, or at least they were rare, as I understood it.

  I took a bagful of things to the kitchen and saw that Ma had gathered clumps of the last bee balm, some different tree barks, and plant roots, and hung them from the beams in the kitchen ceiling to dry. She had been giving us herbal remedies and things since before they were popular. Strawberry leaf tea for fever, a cold heavy nickel on a bee-sting. My grandfather on Ma’s side had epilepsy, and took pills for a range of afflictions, but I also remember spying on him as he drank the blood of a freshly beheaded dove, straight from the neck, and later Ma explaining to me why. He died when I must’ve been six.

  Ma gave me a hug. In it, I felt her happiness for me and the baby on the way. I was happy and then quickly sad, as tends to happen to me. I said something I had been thinking since the wedding, but had not said to anyone else: “It isn’t fair.”

  I didn’t need to explain it. Ma usually would have said something like, “God has other plans.” Not this time. She turned to stow the things I’d brought in cupboards, then, just as I was about to leave the kitchen without an answer, she spoke.

  “No, it isn’t fair. She was taken so quick. She took you away from us so quick. We never really knew her. So … you’re right, it isn’t fair.” Polly. There was an old hurt nesting in her words.

  “I wish you had known her.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it. Polly was mine. I tried to understand how Ma must have felt, with me gone so far away in Wyoming and her and Father with no money to visit. I might have been dead myself, almost. Almost, though. Ma stood there wringing her empty hands. Then she reac
hed out and put one on my arm.

  “What is fair,” said Ma, “is to accept what comes your way, good and bad. So be thankful. And don’t let any woman, dead or alive, interfere in your marriage.”

  That evening while Miss Julie packed some of our things to take over to the cottage and entertained Carter, I cornered sister Mag and dragged her out the kitchen door by her ear. I had a bottle of red wine with me, and we took it out to the firepit, not bothering with cups. We passed it back and forth in silence for a bit.

  “I hope you know what you’re getting into,” she told me, and handed me the bottle.

  I shrugged. “People been having kids since the dawn of time.”

  “And getting their hearts broken,” Mag said. “I know you. You’ll be wrapped around this kid’s finger.”

  “Come on, now,” I said.

  “I don’t know anymore. You try to turn them into good people. And they are so damn happy and proud to give you a necklace of beads they made at school, or tell you the same knock-knock joke wrong for the hundredth time, and it’s not long before you get to thinking about the world making them unhappy. When they know what you know. It’s going to happen. And you can’t stand it.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “I won’t let it happen.”

  She laughed. “You won’t let them see things as they are?”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Just like Father and Ma, raising us wild.”

  “If you think Father ever had his heart broken over us, think again.”

  She looked at me like I was stupid. “Henry, you think because he doesn’t say a thing, he doesn’t feel it.”

  As we talked, I considered her view on Father, so different from my own. But mostly I was thinking about another man in the family. I would tell you it’s not that I didn’t like my brother-in-law Dennis Conkins. But it wouldn’t fool anyone to say that. The fact was I disliked him. It wasn’t outright hatred, but kind of what the hell, what is this guy doing here, he’s not one of us. Loud opinions, chest sticking out, leather bracelets, and a five-string electric bass for playing three-chord hot country in a bar band. In fairness to him, nobody ever could be us but us, growing up so spare and close to the hills out here. So when I started hearing from Mag about their problems, it was with a selfish spark of hope that Dennis might disappear for good. But then of course I thought about Mag, and that there must be something that she loved about him, or maybe once there was. Even more I thought about Ryan and Brit, hopeful about the world like a lot of young kids are, not knowing any better, wanting a dad like everyone else has. Carter was too young to hope about anything other than food.