“I believe we left one on the campus, in case the fire came back. I can run it myself if it’s still there.”
“Do you think the fire will come back?”
“Not unless the wind plays us false. We set a successful backfire above Buckhorn Meadow this morning. We should have it under control in another twenty-four hours – maybe sooner if we get the rain that’s predicted.” He glanced at the moving sky. “I’m hoping for just enough rain to discourage Rattlesnake but not enough to bring the mountain down on us.”
Kelsey asked me to ride with him in the station wagon. In order to keep my freedom of movement I said that I would follow along in my car.
We drove out through the scorched mouth of the canyon and up into the foothills. The campus playing field, which had been swarming with men and machines the day before was almost deserted. A couple of maintenance men were picking up bottles and scraps of paper and replacing turf.
A tractor equipped with an earth-moving blade was standing in the lot behind the bleachers. While Kelsey was getting it started, I climbed to the top of the stands and looked around.
Whitecaps stippled the surface of the ocean. Above the coastline to the southeast, smoke hung like early twilight in the sky. At the other extreme of vision, storm clouds were moving down from the northwest, trailing black rain along the coastal mountains. It looked like a day of change.
Kelsey rode the tractor down the hillside trail. I followed along in his dust, carrying a spade I had borrowed from the maintenance men.
For twenty or thirty minutes I leaned on a sycamore trunk and watched the tractor push dirt in a slow back-and-forth rhythm. When it got about as deep into the earth as a man is tall, its leading edge jarred against metal and Kelsey nearly pitched head first from his seat.
He backed out of the gradual hole he had made and let me climb down into it. In a few minutes I had spaded clear enough of the metallic obstruction to see that it was a dark red car top blotched with the lighter red of rust and shaped like a Porsche roof.
I cleared the left front window and smashed it with the spade. The odor of corruption came out, dry and thin and shocking. In the hollow of the car’s body something wrapped in a rotting blanket lay on the front seat.
I stretched head down in the dirt and peered in at the dead man. The flesh was always the first to go, and then the hair, and then the bones, and finally the teeth. Leo Broadhurst was all bones and teeth.
chapter 32
I left Kelsey widening and deepening the hole around the buried car and phoned the sheriff-coroner’s office from the college. Then I drove down the hill and paid another visit to Fritz Snow’s house.
Somewhat to my surprise, Fritz answered the door himself. He was dressed in an old brown cardigan and slacks, with worn sneakers on his feet. His shoulders were bowed and his eyes bleared as if the weekend had lasted a generation and aged him by that much.
He blocked my entrance with his soft reluctant body. “I’m not supposed to let anybody in.”
“You wanted to talk to me yesterday.”
“Did I?” He seemed to be trying to remember. “Mother will slay me if I do.”
“I doubt that, Fritz. The secret’s out anyway. We just dug up Leo Broadhurst.”
His heavy gaze came up to my face. He seemed to be trying to read his future in my eyes. I could read it in his: a future of fear and confusion and trouble, resembling his past.
“May I come in for a minute?”
“I guess so.”
He let me in and closed the door behind me. He was breathing audibly, as if the action had used up most of his strength.
“You told me yesterday that you buried Mr. Broadhurst. I thought you meant Stanley. But you meant his father Leo, didn’t you?”
“Yessir.” He looked around the sparse room as if his mother might have bugged it. “I did a terrible thing. Now I’ve got to suffer for it.”
“Did you kill Leo Broadhurst?”
“No sir. All I did, I buried him with my ’dozer when he was already dead.”
“Who put you up to it?”
“Albert Sweetner did.”
He nodded in confirmation of his own statement, then looked at me to see if I believed it. I neither believed nor disbelieved it.
“Albert Sweetner made me do it,” he said.
“How could Albert make you do it?”
“I was ascared of him.”
“You must have had more of a reason than that.”
Fritz shook his head. “I didn’t want to bury him. I got so nervous I couldn’t run the machine. Albert tried to take it back to the compound. He ran it in the ditch off Rattlesnake Road, and they caught him with it and sent him back to prison.”
“But you got off scot-free?”
“I did that time except that I got fired and put in the nursing home. They never found out about Mr. Broadhurst.”
“Does your mother know what you and Albert did?”
“I guess she does. I told her.”
“When did you tell her?”
He considered the question. “Yesterday, I guess it was.”
“Before I was here, or after?”
“I don’t remember.” Fritz was showing signs of moral strain. “You keep coming back and back. And my memory keeps jumping around on me. I keep remembering when Digger got my daddy.”
“When Digger got him?”
“That’s right, when they buried him out at the cemetery. I could hear the dirt plunking down on the coffin.” Tears formed on his face as if it was deliquescent, drawing moisture from the air.
“Did you tell your mother before I was here, or after?”
“After, I think it was. After you were here. She said if I told another soul they’d send me straight off to prison.” He lowered his tangled head and gave me an up-from-under look. “Will they send me to prison now?”
“I don’t know, Fritz. Are you sure that you and Albert didn’t kill him?”
The idea seemed to shock him. “Why would we do a thing like that?”
I could think of several reasons. Leo Broadhurst had been lucky, and they had not. He had married the richest woman around. He had tumbled the prettiest girl, and got her with child, and Albert and Fritz had taken the rap for it.
Fritz was alarmed by my silence. “I swear I didn’t kill him. I swear it on the Bible.” There was an actual Bible on the table, and he rested his palm on the black cloth cover. “See, I swear it on the Bible. I never killed anybody in my life. I don’t even like to trap a gopher. I hate to step on a snail. They’ve all got feelings!”
He was weeping actively again, possibly over the deaths of snails and the agonies of gophers. Above the watery noises he was making I heard a car in the street and looked out through the front window. An old white Rambler pulled up at the curb behind my car. Mrs. Snow got out with a heavy paper bag in her arms. She was wearing a raincoat over slacks.
I went outside, closing the door on Fritz. His mother stopped abruptly when she saw me.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I had a talk with your son.”
“Can’t I leave the house without you persecuting him?”
“That’s hardly the case. Fritz told me he buried Leo Broadhurst’s body. I understand he told you, too, so we needn’t argue about it.”
“That’s nonsense, he’s talking nonsense.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We dug Leo up this afternoon. It hasn’t been established yet, but I think that he’s been dead for fifteen years.”
“Frederick knew all this and didn’t tell me?”
“He told you yesterday, didn’t he?”
She bit her lip. “He told me some kind of a story. I thought he was making it up out of whole cloth.” Her face brightened alarmingly. “Maybe he is making it up. His head’s always full of stories.”