Fallen Mountains, page 13
Mick smiled. “You never really know people, not fully. People are strange. They hold onto things, they have secrets. And trust me: we do things we didn’t think we were capable of, good and bad. All of us. People can commit all sorts of atrocities, even normal people, good people. Think of wars. How else could such barbarities occur, if the deep capacity to do evil didn’t exist in every one of us? I’ve seen it all, Sheriff. I’ve seen a sweet-faced mother of three who found out her husband was cheating on her and stabbed him to death in his sleep. I’ve seen a beloved pastor of a church of three thousand shoot the man who molested his daughter. And yes, I’ve seen people killed over land. The thing is, each of us can only take so much. If we’re pushed too far, if we’re backed into a corner, we’ll snap. We’ll do things we wouldn’t, under normal circumstances. It’s a fact.”
Red thought of Possum on the floor of his trailer. At the trial, the defense attorney had provided proof that Possum had been being abused by Vance for over a year. Pushed too far, snap. He reflected on his own life: JT threatening to pull the health insurance, weeks before his little boy was to have the surgery he desperately needed. Backed into a corner, snap.
Mick continued. “The advantage to stepping into a case where you don’t know anyone involved is that you can see the facts for what they are. With Transom Shultz, all the evidence is suggesting that he didn’t just disappear. He’d just gotten engaged. He’d made arrangements—paid for them—to go somewhere with someone he cared about. All of his personal effects were in his vehicle. Now, as an outsider who doesn’t know anyone personally, I can see that Chase Hardy very likely had a falling-out with Transom over the farm—he would’ve felt betrayed, angry—and he probably decided to do something about it. Plus, like I said before, Chase Hardy is the beneficiary on Transom’s will. Now, it could be that they went at it and there was an accident. I don’t rule that out. But I bet there’s a body out there at the farm. Trust me, I don’t like the idea of it any more than you do, but I can feel it. Somewhere in that ground, there’s a body.”
BEFORE
March. Chase sat in his truck, watching the large yellow machine rumble its way through the field, dragging another load of four long, branchless logs, leaving deep, muddy ruts in its wake. Within a week of his camping trip with Transom, the loggers had arrived at the farm, and that’s when Chase realized Transom had never taken a second look at things to determine whether the trees might somehow be saved.
For two weeks now, the crew had been working from dawn until dusk. Chase could hear them, the whine of a chainsaw, the great crash of a tree hitting the ground. There was a skidder, too, and two log trucks that came and went. The first half of the month had been cold and wet, with alternating snow, sleet, and rain, and the field was torn up and crisscrossed with deep, black channels. Progress had been slow. Now, though, with the weather warmer, the work was in full-swing. A large pile of logs, thirty feet high, sat in what was called the landing. The loggers and the skidder, the machine that dragged the felled trees from the woods and into the field, had returned the day before. All day, the log trucks, one with a red cab and the other with a dark green one, had been heaving their way up the newly shaled road to the landing, where the drivers loaded up the wood.
In a few weeks, it would be turkey season, spring gobbler. Typically, Chase would see turkeys throughout the winter. They foraged in the fields, gathering scraps of corn that hadn’t been harvested; they scratched among the crumpled brown leaves in search of acorns. Chase would count them and keep track of their numbers, and usually, there were at least two flocks on the property. Last year, there had been a flock of twelve and a flock of seventeen. This winter, however, he hadn’t seen the turkeys, not once. He wondered if the loggers had caught sight of them while they were in the woods. Every time he saw them dragging out more and more trees—robust oaks, tall and straight; hard maples; walnuts—his gut churned with disgust. He hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to walk the part of the property where the men had been taking trees. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see Church Hollow; he didn’t know that he could handle it.
What had been the cruelest blow of all, the thing that had truly set Chase over the edge, had just transpired the day before: Transom had signed with an oil company. Frackholes. Worse yet, he hadn’t had the guts to tell Chase face-to-face. Instead, he’d left the contract on the kitchen table, where he knew Chase would find it. Chase came home to see the stack of papers, a lot of jargon that he didn’t understand but which stated, at the top of the first page, that it was a lease agreement. Transom’s signature was at the end.
Aside from brief, forced interludes, Chase hadn’t spoken to Transom since their camping trip. He worked to avoid him, making sure he was in town, or in the barn, or, more and more often, at Laney’s, whenever Transom was home. When Chase found the contract on the table, though, he confronted Transom about everything: about Transom misleading him, about promising to try and keep the trees. Transom hadn’t denied any of it. He’d started to formulate an answer, a lie, Chase could tell— that twitching to the left that he always did—but then he’d caught himself.
He insisted that Chase had to ride it out, that things looked ugly now, but that, with time, it wouldn’t be so bad. Different, yes, but not bad. Once they got the well pad in place, once the logs were cleared out and all the equipment was gone, there’d just be three metal tanks, a few pumps, about an acre of the whole farm. And that was the beauty of it, Transom explained: once everything was set up, you had a source of income for years to come. No more fretting about what portion of the crop was getting destroyed by whitetail, no more worrying about the fickle Pennsylvania weather, no more struggling. What Transom didn’t seem to understand, though, was that it wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t just about the income; it wasn’t about forging an easier way. There was a sense of pride in tending the land, in knowing it and caring for it, that was gone, that Transom had taken from him. There was no getting that back.
There were risks, too, with fracking, hazards that could unfold, troubles Chase heard about on the local news from time to time. A truck carrying fracking fluid toppling on a sharp bend, spilling thousands of gallons. As the person whose yard had been flooded by it told the reporter, pointing to a well pump, that stuff went somewhere, and in his case, it was right into his drinking supply. Recently, one channel had been featuring a family who said their children had been perfectly healthy, until an oil company put a compressor station on their farm. Now, the father explained, his arms draped protectively over his girls’ shoulders, they were sick. And just last week, a woman had held a match to the well pump by her garden, and the water—or whatever it was that came out—had caught fire. The chances of any of those things happening were probably slim, Chase understood, but still: in his mind, no amount of money was worth risking your home or health.
From his truck, Chase watched the man driving the skidder. He pulled past the enormous heap of felled logs and lined up his new load with them. The logs dropped from the back. The man climbed out of his seat and leaped to the ground. He moved with dexterity and grace, and though he was too far off for Chase to get a good look at, Chase knew that it must be a young man he was watching. The man clambered back onto the machine, at its rear, where he leaned over and tugged at the heavy metal chains that, in the woods, he’d wrapped around the logs. He cranked and wound the chain. The man hopped down, then climbed back into his skidder, and trundled off to the woods again for another load.
Chase glanced at his watch. He was tempted, as he always was, to drive up into the field, and then into the woods, to check it out, see it all with his own eyes. He was supposed to meet Laney soon for their evening walk, but he could go through the woods quickly, not even get out of the truck. He had time. He pushed in the clutch and shifted into first. He climbed the hill and pulled into the woods with caution, navigating the deep ruts and trying to avoid the high spots where he might bottom out. He realized that he was following a sort of road—a route that the loggers used consistently to pull out the logs. The truck swung back and forth as it crept into the woods.
And then he saw it, as he crested the plateau: Church Hollow stripped almost entirely of the tall, straight hardwoods that Chase had loved since he was a boy. It was so much worse, so much uglier, than he’d imagined it would be. Large stumps jutted up from the ground, and small trees, trees without timber value, had toppled and lay strewn about like pieces of a shipwreck. Limbs that the loggers had sawed off the trees had been collected into tall, precarious stacks. The ground was completely torn up, like a battle had taken place there. If Chase were to try to get out of the truck and walk, he would only be able to do so by climbing over the debris slowly and carefully—there was no clear area where a person could walk in a straight line for more than a few yards. He scanned the area, trying hard to get his bearings, but without the landmarks he’d always relied on—the white oak with wide, ambling limbs; the enormous boulder he’d sat on when he decided to sell Transom the land; the patch of mountain laurel—he was lost. He began to sweat, his heart hammering. When he saw the skidder headed toward him with yet another load of logs, he turned off the truck and jumped out. In a blinding fury, he navigated the ruts and heaps, quickly hoisting himself over the fallen trees. The driver of the skidder raised a hand in a wave and halted to a stop. Chase tugged himself up onto the machine, just as he had seen the driver himself do earlier, and tapped at the door. The young man, seeing the anger in Chase’s eyes, cautiously opened it. Chase reached in and grabbed the man by his jacket. He pulled him in so that their faces were close.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said, teeth clenched.
Clearly stunned, the young man swallowed. “Sir?”
And then suddenly Chase saw the man’s fear and confusion, saw his own knuckles white as they clenched the guy’s jacket, saw himself standing on the skidder, throbbing with rage. All at once he remembered the things he’d done, the days in the woods after his parents’ death: his vow to keep his emotions at bay. He let go and stepped out of the skidder. Besides, he told himself as he drove away, that driver—he was just doing his job. Though he was the one dragging trees from Church Hollow, he wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was the man loading the logs and hauling them off the property, or the guy running the chainsaw. It was Transom’s. Transom was the one behind all this.
Laney was waiting for Chase on the front porch of her house. Kip sat at her feet, his ears perked, watching her with excitement. The dog understood that she was waiting, that they were both waiting, and that they were probably going somewhere. She reached down and patted his head. The weather had grown suddenly warm over the past few days, and the sunshine, the melted snow, and the first signs of buds on the trees had her giddy and energized. Anxious to get her garden started, she planted some seeds in large, black trays: zinnias, begonias, lobelia, impatiens. She planted a tray of vegetable seeds, too. Broccoli, cucumbers, and some heirloom tomatoes, seeds she’d saved from the garden the year before. She’d never started a garden from seeds, and she realized they might not take off, but still, it felt good to hold those seeds, press them into the dirt, feel productive in that way. There was a hopefulness in the act that she savored.
Laney’s heart was heading into dangerous terrain with Chase, and she knew it. She thought of him constantly, at home, when she was hauling firewood in from outside, or heating herself some dinner, or watching Jeopardy on her couch. At work, it was worse. Her role on the assembly line at the telecommunications parts factory was to shove metal prongs into their plastic housing, three thousand or more times a day. It was tedious work, especially after you got good enough that you didn’t really even have to focus on what you were doing. When she first started at the factory, four years earlier, she would be nervous on the line. At the end of the day, her back and shoulders would be sore from sitting stiffly and focusing all day long. Her eyes would sting; her wrists would ache. But the body could memorize that precise angle that the prongs needed to be inserted, that particular movement that allowed the excess to be snapped off just right, so that after a hundred thousand shove and snap movements, a person barely had to watch what she was doing. Laney’s mind would wander. Her imagination would veer perilously through happy and enticing scenarios: ambling the fields of the farm with Chase, the cheat grass singing. Waking Christmas morning with Chase, having children with Chase.
She saw him approach in his truck, rounding the bend and pulling into her driveway. He looked at her and raised his fingers in a wave, gripping the steering wheel. He turned off the engine and climbed out slowly. When she pulled him in for a hug, he was soaked in sweat.
“What’s wrong?” she said, searching his face. “What happened?” Her mind raced. Had Transom done something else to the farm? Had someone gotten hurt? She swallowed as a third thought came to her: Had Transom told Chase about the two of them? Now that Transom had a new girlfriend—that young, silly, painfully pretty thing, Teresa—surely he could keep his mouth shut. Laney hoped.
Chase leaned against his truck, resting his weight on the front bumper. “I just had a run-in with one of the loggers at the farm.”
“A fight?” Laney paused, confused. “Are you hurt? Did you hurt someone?” She could hardly imagine it.
Chase shook his head. The wind picked up and the branches of the dogwood in the front yard lifted and swayed. “I think I just scared him,” he said at last. He sat down beside her on the porch and told her what happened, burying his face in his hands and hunkering over. “How could I have let this happen?” he said. “How could I have been so stupid?”
Laney leaned over him, pulling his head to her chest. “You weren’t stupid,” she said. “There’s no way you could’ve seen this coming. Nobody could. He was your friend; you trusted him. You didn’t do nothing wrong.”
Kip whined, prodding her thigh impatiently. He watched her, waiting for a sign that they were leaving.
“We better get going,” Chase said, standing up. “Not much time before dark.”
They climbed into Laney’s truck and headed to the woods. Laney wanted to ask more about the confrontation, but Chase didn’t seem to want to talk about it, shifting the conversation instead to her job. There had been talk of closing the electronics plant for over a year. Month after month, people discussed it, said they’d heard there was some kind of meeting scheduled with corporate, said they’d heard they might be sending the work overseas. Laney had given up on worrying about it. On occasion, she thought about what she might do, where she might find work, whether she would have to sell her house and move. But for the most part, her mindset was that there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, so there was no point in losing sleep over it.
“Trina Johnson’s pregnant,” Laney said. Trina had gone to Fallen Mountains High and had graduated a year after them. Although they hadn’t been close in high school, Laney and Trina had become friends while working at the plant. They worked on the same team, on the same shift, so they were around each other a lot.
“Again?” Chase said, surprised. He smiled. “How many is that now? Five?”
“Three. That’s not really that many,” she said, her eyes on the road.
“Seems like she’s been pregnant off and on for six or seven years.”
“They had them close together. She and Denny waited too long, that’s what she says. She’s thirty-one, you know. A woman’s only got so much time.” Too accusatory, the way she said it. She reached her right hand over and squeezed his. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m feeling sort of jealous about it. I know that sounds crazy.”
“Jealous?”
She shrugged. “I always wanted a family. You know, be a mom, have kids. Go camping. Have dinners together. I never had that growing up.” Laney’s mother, Kristen, had been severely depressed for much of Laney’s childhood, after her husband left her. Laney was three.
She flipped on the turn signal and pulled into the parking lot of the national forest. Kip began to whimper, his jaw trembling with anticipation. Chase let him hop out of the truck and then climbed out. Laney slid into a light jacket.
Kip dashed off on the trail ahead of them, and the two followed at a leisurely pace. Buds were just emerging on the trees; the air was thick with the sweet smell of dirt. The wind picked up and an old maple tree creaked under the strain. Laney shielded her eyes from the buds that sailed down and showered her.
“You’ll be a great mom,” Chase said softly. He paused to look at her face and then pulled her close to him. “What you said earlier, about a family.”
Laney pressed her face against his chest. He smelled like the woods, like earth and sawdust, and she breathed him in. She liked this tenderness from Chase, a tenderness she was seeing more often. She loved that the direction they were headed felt like a good direction to her, like progress, finally. They saw each other every day now. They were establishing rhythms, like their evening walks and their morning coffee, and she loved that. They even went out together sometimes, to Wheeler’s for breakfast on Saturday, when it was packed full of nosy people who craned their necks to get a look; or to Johnnie’s Place for drinks on Friday night. People, Laney knew, were starting to consider them a couple. Trina teased her about it at work, and when she said she was waiting for Laney to get knocked up so their kids could go to school together, Laney had blushed and walked away.
Laney and Chase came to the stream that marked their traditional turn-around point in their walk. At the height of summer, the stream would almost dry up: a slow, tired brown that ran intermittently. In an especially dry summer, only the channel would remain, with pools of stagnant water here and there. But this time of year, with all the March rain, the stream roared, and the edges brimmed white. In a few spots, small chunks of old snow gathered at the base of the rocks along the stream. It was cold there, sheltered by the tall, stately hemlocks that towered nearby, and Laney pulled her hat down over her ears. Kip was perched on a rock, his tail hitting a branch of mountain laurel with each wag. He seemed to be contemplating a swim. Laney thought of him, his long hair drenched with the stream water, tromping back and forth in the front seat of the truck, soaking Chase and her and making the truck stink like wet dog. She whistled, and Kip turned to her, then bounded over.
