Edward Lee: The Backwoods

“No, ma’am,” a woman replied quickly.

“What about Ernie Gooder?”

The receptionist seemed hurried. “He hasn’t been found yet either, and neither has Chief Sutter.”

“Is Sergeant Trey available now?”

An exasperated sigh. “No, ma’am. He’s out helping the state police look.”

“Well, if anybody turns up, could you please call—”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I have a radio call. I have to go. Call back at five or six. Sergeant Trey should be back by then. Have a good day.”

Click.

The little bit of radio squawk Patricia had heard in the background sounded urgent. Maybe those really were sirens I heard. . . .

She showered and dressed, feeling awkward, even uneasy. I’m the only one here, she reminded herself. Last night she’d slept fitfully, the only one in the house then, as well. But she’d been sure to wear her nightgown this time, and close and lock the window and her bedroom door. She’d refused to admit to herself that she was afraid.

The beautiful morning outside should’ve heartened her, but it didn’t. What’s happening here? she thought, driving through some of the town’s side roads. Modest homes from sparse yards looked back at her. Yes, the town appeared normal, quaint, and very sane. But this past week assured her of the falsehood of appearances. Who knows what’s going on behind some of those doors? she thought.

She took the Cadillac off the Point, vaguely heading in the direction from which she thought she’d heard sirens. An ambiguous nausea flirted with her stomach, and it took her a few moments to realize why: this was roughly the same direction as Bowen’s Field. . . .

Forget about it. You’re long over all that.

And she did feel long over the incident, just as Dr. Sallee had explained. And miles before the road would lead to Bowen’s Field, she saw a state police car turning down a trail into the woods.

Something is going on out here, she realized.

The road wound down to a rutted dirt lane. Around the bend, she stopped short, startled. My God! What happened here? An ambulance and three police cars sat parked with their lights flashing. Sergeant Shannon, the rugged state trooper she’d talked to yesterday, stood with the other officers, arms crossed and looking down toward a fingerlike estuary cutting into the woods from the bay. Shannon turned at the sound of her tires, then broke from the others and approached.

“Ms. White,” he said, holding up a cautious hand, “you don’t want to come down here.”

“What happened!” she blurted, heart racing. She spotted two EMTs dragging a gurney from the ambulance. One of them also unfolded a black body bag. “It’s not my sister, is it?”

The trooper blocked her way. He looked a little pale. “No, it’s not. It’s one of the other missing persons—Ernie Gooder. I’m afraid he’s d—”

Patricia pushed past him, wild-eyed. No! It can’t be! But even as the plea left her lips, she knew the worst.

Her eyes shot down at the water. She blinked. Then she jerked her gaze away.

“I told you you didn’t want to come down here, Ms. White,” Shannon said. “There is some rough stuff going on in this town.”

Rough stuff. What Patricia had seen in the several seconds she’d actually been able to look was this: Ernie’s dead body being dragged out of the shallow water . . . or, it could be said, something significantly less than his dead body.

From the chest down the body looked corroded, or even eaten. All the skin and quite a bit of muscle mass was absent, leaving raw white bones showing. The waist down was the worst—there was essentially nothing left but tendons and scraps of muscle fiber along the leg bones and hips: a wet skeleton. Skeletal feet pointed up at the ends of the lower leg bones. Ernie’s sodden shirt had been torn open and hung off the shoulders, while his pants looked congealed at what was left of his ankles. Some arcane process had whittled away the flesh, leaving this human scrap, and in the final second of her glimpse, Patricia realized what that process was.

At least a dozen very large blue crabs let go of those skeletal legs when the body had been pulled out, whereupon they skittered back into the water. Ernie had been used for crab bait.

Patricia wanted to throw up. She felt dizzy at once, and braced herself against a tree. “My God,” she wheezed.

“Sorry you had to see that,” Shannon said. “These drug wars can get down and dirty.”

“Iknew him very well,” Patricia mumbled over the nausea. “He simply wasn’t the type to sell or use drugs.”

Shannon seemed convinced otherwise. “We found crystal meth in his room, so how do you explain—”

“Sergeant Shannon?” one of the EMTs called out. He knelt at Ernie’s horrific corpse, as gloved cops prepared to slide it into the body bag. “Found some CDS in his pants pocket. Looks like crystal meth. You’ll want to bag it as evidence.”

“You were saying?” Shannon said back to Patricia.

When she heard the bag being zipped up, some morbid force caused her to steal one last glance. Ernie was now mostly in the bag, but his head hung out, neck craned back. That was when she saw . . .

His teeth . . . My God, his teeth . . .

“You all right, Ms. White?”

“His two front teeth are missing,” she croaked. “It’s impossible for me to not have noticed that in the past.”

“Ever hear of false teeth? They probably fell out when his attackers were putting him in the water.”

Patricia didn’t hear whatever else he said before he departed and went to secure the drug evidence.

His two front teeth are missing. The words droned in her head. It was the one thing she’d never forget: the man who’d raped her over twenty-five years ago had been missing his two front teeth. . . .

Patricia could barely maintain her composure. She stood up at the end of the road with Shannon. They both watched in silence as the ambulance and other police cars drove away, leaving a veil of road dust hanging in the air. When the last vehicle had left, Patricia stood in numb shock, the cicada sounds beating in her ears.

“I can tell you,” Shannon began, “nothing will ruin a town and its people faster than dope. It’s happening everywhere. And half the time it’s the people you least expect.”

“It’s just . . . Ernie,” she said. “He wasn’t the type at all.”

“All it takes is one hit off a meth pipe and you’re done. Every addict I ever busted says the same thing. It changes you overnight. And once the stuff tips you over, you’re making it or selling it just to maintain your own supply. It turns decent people into thieves, killers, criminals—human animals. And good luck making it through rehab. This stuff and crack? The success rate is so low it’s not even worth bothering with. You can put a meth-head in prison for ten years, and he’s back with the pipe the first day he gets out. That’s how addictive this stuff is.”

Patricia shook her head, looking out into the woods.

“So you knew this guy pretty well, I take it,” the trooper observed.

“I thought I did. I grew up with him as a kid. I live in D.C. now, but I came back to Agan’s Point for a visit—the first time in years.”

“Well, now you can see what happened to him over those years.”

“I guess I knew something was wrong—I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten involved with drug people. He wasn’t the type.”

“There isn’t a type . It can happen to anyone. You experiment with something like this, think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it once to see what it’s like.’ Then you’re never the same. We’re pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks two nights ago.”