As
the sun gained the eastern sky, I drove my truck through a meadow and toward
Maid-en’s Grove Lake. On the hills, aspen trees leafed out like pale green
clouds, and scattered in the grass below, violets stood up to the wet, cold
spring. Everywhere you looked, summer was promised.
Who
named the lake Maiden’s Grove I do not know, probably the same person who
named our township Wild Thyme, back two hundred years ago when northern
Pennsylvania was still frontier. They arrived and there it was, a deep glacial
rut fed by springs and spilling into January Creek, hooking into the
Susquehanna at some point south, and then running hundreds of miles out to the
Chesapeake Bay.
I
came to a right turn and took the road to where a dozen cottages sat on the
shore. They’d been built in the thirties, when the family that owned most of
the surrounding land had sold off a few parcels to raise cash. The family, name
of Swales, had evidently grown rich again down in Luzerne County. Until
recently, they’d left the other three-quarters of the lake wild. The south
shore cottagers were a house-proud and wealthy few who prized quiet and
solitude. They stocked the lake with trout and forbade motorboats. At Cottage
Seven, I pulled in next to a navy Mercedes wagon and walked to the side yard.
The midmorning sun scattered white light across the lake’s blue surface. You
could smell the light. Rhonda Prosser a slender middle-aged woman with the
wiry limbs of a distance runner, crouched in front of a broken basement window.
On my arrival she stood. She wore gray dreadlocks with silver rings and charms
woven in. Her face was severe and beautiful, the face of a white woman, to be
clear, dreadlocks notwithstanding. I’d seen her and her husband at monthly
township meetings in the summer months. They’d made it a project to beleaguer
the township supervisor—my boss, Steve Milgraham—over fracking. In particular,
where was the EPA looking after us, and where was the Act 13 money going? For
this they had become notable in Holebrook County despite being themselves residents
of New York State, north of the border.
Rhonda peered at me over half-glasses clamped onto the very tip of
her nose.
“Henry Farrell, Wild Thyme,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. I was expecting state police,” she said.
“Well,” I said.
“So you’re going to handle this? Because I called before. I left
messages on your machine. People raising hell at Andy Swales’s place, and you
won’t lift a finger.”
It was true. Andy Swales was prince of the family and had, that
past year, built a stone castle on a hill overlooking the northern shore, along
with a small boathouse and a dock. From the Prossers’ cottage, you could see a
turret.
Swales leased some of his land and a trailer
up there to a young couple named Kevin O’Keeffe and Penny Pellings, in exchange
for their caretaking the house and grounds. Yet them two were not known for
care. Child Protective Services had removed their newborn girl, Eolande, about
a year ago, in a case that saw a bit of publicity. In addition to the
occasional check-in relating to
their efforts to get Eolande back, I’d been on a domestic call to the trailer
that winter, nothing too bad, just hippies in a squabble that went too far.
Point being, with Kevin and Penny living up
there, a certain local element had new access to the lake, and the cottage
owners didn’t like it. Starting that spring, any chance they got, they called
about some scandal up to Maiden’s Grove, somebody playing music too loud too
late or bait-fishing their trout. I told them once you stock a public lake, the
fish are the commonwealth’s. But I’d called Andy Swales about the noise. He’d
told me his tenants could do what they pleased, as long as they didn’t get
carried away, his words. Me, I also figured it was a free country and people
were allowed to get drunk at the wrong lake if they wanted.
Worst of all to the cottagers on the
southern shore, worse than their new neighbors to the north, Swales had signed
a gas lease. At some point in the future, they all might look out across the
lake to see a derrick punching poison into the earth with nothing but a thin
concrete well protecting their water supply.
“Well,” I said, “the state called the county, and the county
called the township, and the township is me, so.”
“Mmm.”
“The nearest state barracks is an hour
away,” I said. “I may work with the county on suspects and that. Show me
around?”
We went inside. The interior of the cottage
was white and spare. The spaces beneath tables and chairs were empty, the
countertops clean, the shelves filled with art books. Life preservers and
baseball mitts hung on hooks in a shale-floored mudroom with a bench and a view
to the lake. Unlike most of the homes I visited on the job, there was not a
thing in this one you could call junk. In fact, the cottage was so
little disarranged that I had a hard time believing it had been burgled until
I came to the wall fixture that had once held a flat-screen TV, and saw the
outlines where a stereo had once sat on a chest painted in blue milk wash.
According to Rhonda, two vintage stringed instruments had been taken, but not
the priceless barn harp, which was crumbling into something more like folk art.
She showed it to me and strummed it; it did not play well. In an upstairs
bedroom, the burglars had forced open a locked drawer in a nightstand and taken
an HK 9mm automatic handgun. Rhonda said it was her ex-husband’s, for coyotes,
described it as black, hadn’t touched it since the divorce. There was a touch
of weariness in her voice when her ex-husband came into the story. It was the
first I’d heard of the split, so I guessed it was recent. She didn’t know if
the gun was loaded; it may well have been. There was a nearly empty box of
124-grain full metal jacket ammunition still in the drawer. All the liquor was
gone. Downstairs in the basement, any tools not bolted down had been taken. We
headed back up to the ground floor.
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Fateful Mornings by Tom Bouman is
published in July by Faber & Faber.
Buy it from SHOTS A Store.
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