Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

“You’re full of good news,” Joe told him. “What’re we supposed to check out?”

“That part’s a little jumbled. The emergency coordinator in the area-don’t ask me who or what-said he didn’t have time to go into detail. Apparently, most of South Newfane is being washed into the Rock River and beyond. But he said first that he needed cops, and then that they should be detectives-he was specific. ‘We got a missing person up here,’ or something to that effect. Sorry I don’t have more. I did ask.”

Willy was not in a mood to argue. “I’m in,” he said, sliding out of the SUV’s back.

Joe addressed Spinney. “They need a full crew?”

“Not our choice,” Les responded. “The Hummer only has room for two more. Pretty packed as it is. This is more the incident commander’s call than ours.”

Joe glanced at Willy. “You and me?”

Willy gave him a crooked smile. “Me and anyone ’cept you-know-who.”

* * *

The drive north was made in darkness, the Humvee’s roof, spot, and headlights all ablaze and, Joe thought, working as much against them as for them, the way the white light bounced off the prisms of a million falling raindrops. He imagined that from the air, they must have looked like a grounded cloud of fireflies, winding through the woods.

It was slow going. They avoided the pavement, since it was prone to caving in. They also had to double back a couple of times, their information being dated by a critical few hours. Conversation was minimal; a few actually dozed off. It was cramped, uncomfortable, damp, and clammy because of the partially open windows. Nevertheless, they made headway.

Where they ended up, hours after what would have been a twenty-minute drive-and after dropping off most of the other passengers along the way-was a cemetery tucked in amid a copse of ancient trees. It was high on a hill above a narrow, sylvan valley and normally solely populated by a small scattering of headstones.

But not tonight.

Joe and Willy eased themselves out of the vehicle and stretched in the fading rain, which was at long last reducing to a steady drizzle. A young man dressed in a yellow coat labeled EMS approached them, looking wet, unshaven, grim, and beyond haggard.

“You the police?” he asked hoarsely.

They merely nodded, perhaps sensing the inanity of displaying their shields in a place and time like this.

“I’m Joe,” Gunther thought to say. “He’s Willy.”

The man didn’t introduce himself, turning on his heel instead and leading them across the small cemetery’s uneven surface. Usually, trees are planted in such a setting to add grace and peacefulness. Here, the graves had come later, dug among the trees so that the huge trunks and gnarled roots appeared to have grudgingly made room.

“It’s over here,” their host said, speaking straight ahead in a loud voice, no doubt finding it less taxing than turning his head. Around them, small clusters of men and women, mostly dressed in fire department gear, watched them walk toward the very edge of the burial ground.

“There’s no river or creek to speak of up here,” the EMT was saying. “But once Irene let loose this morning, pretty much everything that could run water did.” His right arm flapped out to his side as he added, “And we have about two hundred feet of elevation above us here, so a lot of water ended up coming along this western boundary.”

He stopped near a roaring generator attached to three lights that his team had hung from an assortment of nearby branches.

Now he was shouting over the engine to be heard, and Joe and Willy leaned in close. “This is a small local cemetery. I don’t even know its name, and I’ve lived here all my life. But it’s still used, if not much. Anyhow, people take care of it and watch out for the stones, and mow it in the summer. It was the caretaker who got worried about what the runoff might be doing, and came up to see what was happening.”

He took a few steps toward where the light was focused, and his two guests finally saw the custodian’s source for concern-the water had indeed sliced alongside the lot, and created what looked like a six-foot-deep archeological trench, exposing the sides of several coffins in the process. There remained a trickle along the bottom, but the evidence spoke of a far more destructive cataract earlier.

“That’s dust to dust with a vengeance,” Joe heard Willy say softly to himself, adding, “Or mud to mud.”

The young man jumped down into the ditch and pointed at the row of more or less exposed boxes. He looked up at them, still shouting. “Pretty much speaks for itself, and no big deal when you get down to it. Not like anybody was actually carried away. That would really suck.”

Joe nodded to show his agreement, although he was beginning to question why they’d been called here.

Their host beckoned tiredly. “I’m real sorry, but you’re gonna have to come down here. I guess it’s not the first time you’ve gotten wet today, though.”

That having been said, they complied, slithering down the side of the ditch and joining him as he squatted down and played his flashlight along the side panel of the centermost coffin.

“Don’t know if it was a cheap box, or the passage of time, or maybe both, combined with the force of water, but you can see right here how the side caved in.”

Joe shifted around so that his sight line followed the light, dreading the macabre nature of what he was about to see.

“First time I saw it,” the EMT explained, “I thought it was just rubble that had piled up against the damn thing. But it’s not.”

He moved, handing the flashlight over. Joe lowered himself to his knees, feeling the water curl around his thighs. He pointed the shaft of light into the gash of splintered wood as Willy slid in next to him.

“Far out,” Willy said. “We got ourselves a mystery, boss.”

The stones and rocks weren’t piled against the coffin. They were spilling out. There was no body within.

It was a beautiful day the next morning-sunny, cloudless, pleasant. From the treetops, and above, the scene was what brought poets and artists to New England in droves. But below that lay the weather’s onslaught and the disjointed distribution of its destruction. Across the entire region, riverbeds were gouged and scoured as by passing glaciers, and left shimmering in the sun, bone white and raw, looking like the castaway skeletons of a geological rampage. They were strewn with rocks and boulders that had blended in harmony with the interstitial soil and vegetation for generations, to the delight of fishermen, boaters, and mere lovers of nature-soil that was now gone, wide and deep, and with it the substance that had made the rivers whole and vibrant.

What remained were hundreds of miles of hard, broken, shattered water channels, bereft of life and looking like smashed concrete. The vegetation had been stripped from the banks, the fish and frogs swept away, and the rest made to seem poor and exhausted and humiliated in the falsely cheerful sunlight.

The soil had not simply vanished, of course. It had been removed, as if by scientific process, down to its smallest granules and redistributed by the water across fields, lawns, streets, and into cellars-water that had then retreated almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Homes and garages were full of the resulting muck, cars were axle-deep in it, inventories from bookstores to machine shops to groceries were cemented in place by it. And artifacts like furniture, clothing, toys, and kitchen appliances had been scattered far and wide, later to be found as half-buried, crooked talismans-like pseudo Easter Island totems-stamped with logos reading GE and Frigidaire.