Archer Mayor - The Dark Root

We shipped the charred skeleton off to the state’s medical examiner, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom, but I was pretty sure that unless we could find a dental chart to match it, it would remain a John Doe for some time.

Alice Sims had not yet done the deductive math Sol Stennis had worried about-connecting the crash site to our canvass of the Upper Dummerston Road. We’d diverted her with leaks about the stolen car and our search for the driver’s identity. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before she put it together and let everyone know we were dealing with homicide.

It was therefore with considerable relief that I received a call from Sol at ten o’clock that night at the office.

“I think I found those three kids. You know the pond at the top of Rice Farm Road?”

I did. Located on a long, winding dirt road connecting Brattleboro’s north end to the village of West Dummerston six miles farther up, the pond was an artificial water hole carved into the top of a hill overlooking the West River Valley. Because of its peculiar location, fishermen, canoeists, and hikers could enjoy the twin pleasures of being on a pond and a mountaintop simultaneously.

I told Stennis to pick me up. During his brief tenure on the force, he’d made an art of keeping tabs on the town’s restless youth, and in a hub employment center like Brattleboro, with a daytime population of forty thousand people, a police force of twenty-eight quickly learned not to puff up its detectives at the expense of the patrol officers. Becoming a detective was still a reward, as in all departments, but we, more than most, encouraged our patrol to become independent investigators.

It was early spring yet, and while the leaves had come out, the nights were still cool and the bugs hadn’t quite hatched. It was the peaceful hiatus between winter and summer and never lasted long enough for my liking. I sat back in Stennis’s passenger seat, enjoying the breeze through the window. The sepulchral blur of the woods raced close by us in the darkness, absorbing like a dark blotter the glimmer of our headlights.

The southern approach to the pond was as dramatic as the site itself, emerging as it did from the folds of the forest. At one moment, we were climbing in low gear, encased by trees on one side and a steep dirt embankment on the other, when abruptly the bank ceded to the pond’s smooth, flat expanse, not five feet from the driver’s window. It was like taking an escalator from the bottom of a lake and suddenly breaching its surface, without a ripple. A little farther on, the road leveled out so near the water’s edge that the latter’s black, glassy plane began mere inches from our tires. It perfectly mirrored the canopy of stars overhead, doubling its impact and making me feel I was floating in space.

“There they are,” Stennis muttered, oblivious to the scenery.

Ahead, parked on a tiny peninsula, was a single small car, its lights out, looking more like a washed-up boulder from a distance, except that in its midst glowed three tiny orange eyes-cigarettes belonging to ghostly inhabitants.

Stennis pulled up alongside and switched on his brilliant, side take-down lights, wiping away the stars, the illusion of private spaciousness, and quite on purpose, establishing our dominance. His voice, however, was just as conspicuously quiet and gentle. He spoke first to the girl in the back seat. “Hi, Sally. Been a while.”

Large, broad-shouldered, her pale face almost perfectly round, Sally took a purposeful drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. She made a visible effort to ignore the blinding effects of the light.

“Hey, Stennis.” Her voice was hard, flat, but not unfriendly, showing she was both used to this kind of approach by the police and always in control, in style if not in fact.

Sol picked up his flashlight and shined it into the shadows of the car that his rooftop lights couldn’t reach, directly into the faces of the two young men sitting in the front. Both of us watched how their pupils reacted, how their expressions changed. They mimicked their more assertive companion, with less success, but boldly enough that we could tell they were clean-the cigarettes were just that, and those were only sodas balanced on the dash.

“Mike. Pete. How you doin’?” Stennis asked.

The one at the wheel was Mike Beaupré, the older brother by a year. “We’re doin’. ”

“What’re you up to way out here?”

“Staying out of trouble,” Sally answered from the back.

Sol nodded and killed all his lights, acknowledging that he was taking them at their word. “Any trouble in particular?”

I saw her smile in the glow of her cigarette. “You should know.”

“We don’t do too bad.”

Mike chuckled. Cadaverously thin, with his baseball cap perched back on his head and a sharply protruding Adam’s apple, he looked like an animated scarecrow. “Only when you catch us.”

“I haven’t had to come after you in a long time.”

“You just haven’t caught him at nothin’,” Peter called out from beyond his brother. He was the low man on the totem pole. The three had been inseparable friends since childhood and, despite their youth and unremarkable appearance, were tough in ways I’d never been at their age. While they all had records, none of their crimes had been more than petty in nature. But their experience had given them stature among their peers, and they were worthy of our grudging respect. Which was why Stennis was allowing the conversation to follow the etiquette of the street.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he now said, following up on Peter’s quip. “You might’ve settled down a little in the past year.”

Mike mulled that over, gently bobbing his head. “Gettin’ older.”

It was a comment an uninformed adult would have smiled at, but we knew the backgrounds of these kids-the neighborhoods and families that had shaped them. None of it compared to the ghetto of a big city, of course, but their lives had still been marked by neglect and violence and poverty.

Stennis returned to the point, now that the social amenities had been observed. “You’re a long way from downtown tonight.”

“Think you’d be happy ’bout that,” Sally said guardedly.

“I’m not complaining. A little curious, maybe.”

“We needed a break, man,” Pete spoke up. Mike nodded silently.

“The burned car?” I asked quietly. Sally turned her head and stared at me. I didn’t have the rapport Sol had with them, but they knew me as a straight player.

After a long pause, she said, “Yeah.”

“Who was the driver?”

“Benny Travers.”

Sol let out a low whistle. “No shit.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Her face was hard to read in the gloom. Travers and she had been more rivals than friends, both street-level wielders of influence, but with significantly different management styles. While Sally was more of a consensus builder, albeit with a hard right hook, Travers had been a typical bully. Older by ten years and more traveled than Sally, he’d done hard time, had a rough reputation, and being originally from out of state, hadn’t had the local ties that we tried to work to our advantage.

“He got whacked,” she finally answered.

“By who?”

“Don’t you know shit?”

“We know you were at the scene before we were.”

The implication hung in the air for a long, still moment.

“I got a call,” Sally finally said.

“Who from?”

She looked around restlessly, as if suddenly constricted by the small car. “I don’t know.”

“We think Sonny did it,” Mike said.

Stennis was incredulous. “Sonny Williams? You’re shitting me.”

Sally was contemptuous. “Not Williams. Jesus. Williams couldn’t whack himself , for Christ’s sake.”