“You talked to him?” she asked, startled.
“Kind of. I didn’t really say who I was, and he didn’t do much more than grunt. You know…”
She did. When you went to interview someone who might have something interesting to say, you didn’t want to show more cards than you had to.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“Just that we’d found the grave exposed and needed to know about next of kin for legal reasons. I told him I had a form to fill out-made it sound boring as hell.”
“He’s related how?”
Willy gave a shrug as they edged over the top of the rise and finally saw a farmhouse ahead, nestled against the forest behind it like a newborn tucked up against its mother.
“Beats me,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”
The road was slightly better on the other side, so they closed in on the house in a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, they paused in the dooryard with the engine running, respecting the rural protocol of giving homeowners time to take notice-and to call in any near-feral dogs that might be prowling about.
But it didn’t apply here. The peeling front door to the battered house yawned open, and a large bearded man stepped out and waved to them.
“Gee,” Sammie muttered as she slid out of the SUV. “Not a blood-dripping sickle in sight. Bummer.”
“Next time,” Willy assured her.
They approached, still watching the terrain before them, if this time for chunks of wood, randomly scattered tools and farm equipment, and assorted other lumps and clumps that had acquired a thin skin of earth and weeds over the years.
“You Jeff?” Willy asked, drawing near.
The man nodded. “Yup.”
He stepped free of the threshold, leaving the door open, took two steps forward, and waited for them, the sun to his back. There was no shaking of hands or other formalities. Jeff simply waited, his hands hanging loosely, for his guests to speak their piece.
“Jeffrey MacQuarrie?” Willy repeated. “Just for the record.”
MacQuarrie acknowledged with a single, silent tuck of his chin, his eyes steadily on Willy’s.
“We’re from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” Sam announced, showing her credentials, which MacQuarrie ignored, his gaze unshifting. “We’re here about the grave of Herbert Rozanski,” she finished.
“So I heard,” was MacQuarrie’s response.
“From me?” Willy asked, who’d neither introduced himself nor shown his badge. “Or someone else?”
“Both.”
“What did they tell you?”
“The water opened up the grave.” MacQuarrie’s voice was deep and friendly in tone, although his body language remained neutral.
“That all?”
“Pretty much.”
“They tell you what they found inside?” Sammie asked bluntly.
“Yup.”
“What do you make of that?”
The hint of a smile lurked within the heavy beard, and MacQuarrie’s eyes narrowed with humor. “The grave was missing something?”
Sam laughed while Willy grunted, “Very funny.”
MacQuarrie tilted his head to one side. “You gotta admit.”
“Okay, okay,” Willy conceded. He looked around at the disheveled front yard. A rusty pickup was parked nearby, and he walked over to it to sit on the lowered tailgate, using the trailing edge of the truck bed as a backrest. The move also allowed him to shift from where the sun had been hitting him in the face-a position he wasn’t convinced that MacQuarrie, presumably a seasoned hunter, hadn’t calculated.
“Now that we got the country hick bullshit out of the way,” he told their host, “you want to tell us how you connect to Herb Rozanski?”
“You found me,” MacQuarrie told him. “Don’t you know?”
Willy just stared at him.
“Cousins,” MacQuarrie yielded as Sam crossed over to join Willy, at the opposite end of the tailgate. MacQuarrie followed suit by settling onto a large, leveled-off tree stump whose scars attested to its use as a wood-splitting station.
“My mother was Herb’s father’s sister,” he explained.
“Herb’s father being Bud Rozanski,” Willy suggested.
“And his mom being Dreama. They died, so I got the place.”
“Just like that?” Willy asked. “They didn’t have other kids?”
“A couple more,” Jeff said.
Willy chuckled and shook his head. “You must really like us.”
In the silence following, Jeff shifted his attention from one to the other of them. “Pardon?”
“The ‘yup-nope’ treatment,” Willy expanded. “We actually get overtime for sitting around listening to this crap. I can do it all day.”
Jeff MacQuarrie appeared to consider that. “Another son named Nate, and a daughter-Eileen Ranslow,” he stated, thereby announcing his choice to be more communicative. “Nate pretty much took off. Eileen got married and never liked living here anyhow. We all talked it over when Bud was about to pass. I was starting a family, and Bud didn’t see just letting the place go; Eileen was cool about it, and Dreama was long dead. So, I got it.”
“For future reference,” Willy said, “we’ll need a list of relatives, complete with contact information and how they fit into the family tree. You good with that?”
MacQuarrie nodded.
“Okay,” Willy kept talking. “Tell us about Herb. And don’t hold back.”
The bearded man smiled again. “Not much to tell. Bud was the eldest. My mom was the youngest; about twelve years apart, and Mom had her kids later in life-just the opposite of Bud. So, Nate, Herb, Eileen, and me didn’t mess much. I was a kid when Herb died. All I know was that he got caught up in some equipment and was killed. Used to happen all the time, back when.”
Willy waved his hand around vaguely. “Here?”
Jeff pointed into the distance. “They had a lumber mill set up in an old barn, out that way. A big shed, really. ’Bout ten years ago, I had the fire department come out and burn it down as a training exercise. Wasn’t much left to it. Bud had sold all the equipment long before, and Mother Nature had done the rest.” He contemplated his comments briefly before adding, “Anyhow, that’s about it. Like I said, Herb got tangled up somehow. It ran off a truck PTO, with open pulleys and leather belts running every which way, and no guards or safeties on the saw blades. I seen pictures-crazy dangerous. One wrong move…” His voice trailed off, as if surprised by its own sound.
“He was working the mill alone?” Sammie asked, speaking almost for the first time.
Jeff shrugged. “You wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know. It got to Bud pretty bad, I can tell you that. But he was a stoical man. Dreama? Family stories have it that it killed her. I guess Herb was like her favorite, or something. She died soon afterwards, people said of a broken heart.”
“So why did they bury a box of rocks?” Willy asked.
MacQuarrie spread his hands. “I didn’t know they had-not till old Irene brought it up to light. That’s what the Bible says, right? About the cleansing power of water?”
Willy pushed out his lower lip thoughtfully, not having the slightest clue about MacQuarrie’s allusion. “You a big churchgoer?”
The other man laughed gently. “Not hardly. My wife would like me to be. I just stick to weddings and funerals.”
Sam read Willy’s body language and hopped off the truck bed. “Okay, Jeff, could we get that family tree off you?”
MacQuarrie rose more awkwardly and led the way back toward the house. “More like a shrub. I got most of it stuck to the fridge, near the phone,” he said.
“What about people who might have a better memory about when Herb died?” Sam asked. Willy was already wandering around the yard, as if exploring the more obscure piles of junk.
“Oh, sure,” MacQuarrie said without looking back. “I mean, it may’ve been almost thirty years ago, but people remember. Shit, it’s all they got to do. I figure every screwup I’ve ever pulled, from childhood on, is like carved in stone with some of the people around here. It’s crazy.”