Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

A ringing phone waked Selby. His bedroom was in shadows, but the first sunlight was filtering dully through the frosted windows.

His dreams had been of hounds on leads, black and brown shapes with lolling tongues, and cemetery markers and objects in patterns he couldn’t identify or make sense of...

The hounds had struck at the entrance to a small estate called Vinegar Hill. A lane from Dade Road led back through a hedge of locusts to a house and garage. After flashing his light through the windows, and seeing what he had both expected and dreaded, Selby had told Gideen to pack in the hounds and head back for Little Tenn.

No gas stations were open; Selby had driven home and called the sheriff’s station on Route One. That had been two a.m.

He snapped on his bedside lamp and answered the phone.

“Sergeant Ritter here, Mr. Selby. Figured you’d better know this. Battalion Chief Quill and his unit at Coatesville got a brush-fire alarm a couple hours ago. Had to bring in the pumper from Odena to get it under control.”

In some strange way, Selby knew with certainty what Sergeant Ritter was about to tell him. Last night, as Gideen had been loading the hounds into the truck, Selby had seen a red light like the dome of a police car flare briefly on a hill beyond White Clay Creek.

Sergeant Ritter was saying, “I logged your call around two-thirty and patched it straight through to Sergeant Wilger in East Chester. He said he’d get someone on it, check the county recorder, find out who’s living there.”

Selby let out his breath slowly. “Where did you say that fire was?”

“They tell me you could see the flames clear over to Quarryville. Kids probably, Chief Quill says, let a campfire get away from ’em, got scared and ran for it. No sign of ’em though. Fire took the old Vinegar Hill place except for the garage and some of the back trees around it.”

A white Toyota Celica was parked on the shoulder of Dade Road at the entrance to Vinegar Hill. Behind it was a maroon sedan with East Chester police insignia on the door panels.

“This is obviously a waste of time.” Shana stepped from the station wagon and stared at the blackened trees. The lane into the house had been churned into a glistening gridwork of mud by the fire apparatus. Water thick with soot and charred splinters foamed in the ruts.

“You can stay in the car if you want,” Selby said.

“What difference does it make anyway?” Shana asked. “Sergeant Ritter told you the whole place was gone.”

Her hair was in a loose ponytail and she wore Normie Bride’s freshman letter jacket, compensating for the long sleeves by doubling the cuffs back over her wrists.

Burt Wilger came up the lane from the house, his boots and poncho wet and muddy, and his glasses smudged with soot.

Nodding to them, he said, “It’s a tough break,” and glanced behind at the layers of smoke drifting from the blackened house. “If you were right, Mr. Selby, we might have had something to go on.”

“I was right,” Selby told him. “Four hours ago, there was evidence here. Now we’ve got a fire sale.”

“You’re positive about that? Evidence, I mean?” Wilger looked at Shana and cleared his throat. “The DA’s here, she’ll want to talk to you. I’ve got to check the fence line, see if I can find out where those kids broke through it.”

A patch of lawn had been trampled down by the firemen, and churned into haphazard patterns by their hoses. Beyond the muddied grass stood what was left of the house, the beams and supports standing like a crooked black skeleton against the sky. The roof had burned completely away, and the bedroom and living room floors had collapsed into the basement. Only the fieldstone fireplace and chimney were undamaged; that and the garage, which had been protected from the flames by the thick crown of a maple tree which had toppled down around it.

Shana stopped on the sodden lawn and looked at the garage door, a tense frown shadowing her eyes. The whole place had a chilling look to Selby, a charnel house with black, twisted trees forming an arch above it.

Shana walked closer to the garage, but stopped, her arms, spindly looking in Normie’s big, loose jacket, crossed across her slight breasts.

A woman came around the side of the house. As she lifted a dripping branch to duck under it, Dorcas Brett seemed taller than he remembered her, slim in a dark leather coat and copper-colored boots. The boots, flecked with water and mud now, were probably what made her seem taller, he thought; either that or the precise way she chose her footing, which gave a taut, controlled line to her body. In the morning light, drops of water glinted in her hair. Without gloves, her hands looked white as popcorn against the backdrop of charred trees.

She introduced herself and Selby said, “Yes, we’ve met, this is my daughter, Shana.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember, Mr. Selby.” Dorcas Brett glanced at Shana, who was staring again at the garage doors. “Perhaps you’d rather talk somewhere else, Mr. Selby.”

“What is there to talk about?”

“This place can’t be very pleasant for your daughter.”

“Then let’s get it over with. This is where it happened. What else do you need to know?”

She hesitated and said, “Well, for one thing, Mr. Selby, the county recorder’s office hasn’t got back to us yet. We don’t know who owns Vinegar Hill. We can’t search the house or what’s left of it until we have their permission or the evidentiary basis for a search warrant.”

“I don’t see any problem. Last night I saw what my daughter described to the police, specific things she saw inside this house the night she was raped. Doesn’t my word count as evidence?”

“It’s a sticky legal business, but I’ll try to put it as clearly as I can. To satisfy the probable cause requirements, to prove to a magistrate that we have good and sufficient reasons for a search warrant, our evidence has to satisfy the same standards of admissibility that would be applied by a trial judge. The evidence has to be obtained legally, without violating anyone’s civil rights. It can’t be tainted. So it’s not just a question of what you saw last night, but how and where you saw it.”

“Because I was trespassing you mean?”

“Yes, and if you forced a door open and went inside you could be arrested for committing a felony. I can understand your frustration, but I didn’t write the amendments to the Constitution that—”

He interrupted her. “Then let’s try it this way. Supposing you claim you overheard me telling a bartender what I saw last night. You could act on that, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t that provide, what’s the phrase — an ‘evidentiary basis’?”

“Yes, but if we agreed to do something like that we’d both have to perjure ourselves.”

“Let’s go to a real bar then,” Selby suggested. “I’ll tell a real bartender all about it. You can listen if you want to. Wouldn’t that soothe your legal conscience and protect your flanks from your bosses in East Chester?”

“No, listen. I don’t have a particularly sensitive legal conscience, and I don’t have any need to protect my flanks, as you put it. My only consideration was—”

She pushed her dark hair from her forehead. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said unexpectedly. She was pale except for points of color on her high cheekbones. “I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter. I should have told you that first. It was rotten and vile and sickening and if any words of mine can help, if my sympathy and outrage means anything to you, you have them in full measure.”

Selby said, “Yes, that means something, Miss Brett. Thank you.”

From the lane, Wilger called, “Kelly, County Records just patched a message through to me. A caretaker checks this place out every week or so, but it’s owned by an army officer stationed down south somewhere, a General Taggart. He owns the property to the fence lines, sold off the rest to a developer.”