Before Familiar Woods Read online

  “I know it. No need helping it along.” Ruth waited for Buddy to say something, but he seemed distracted. She heard voices in the background. “I appreciate it, Buddy.”

  “Good luck, Ruth.”

  Ruth hung up the receiver. She paused a moment and then picked it up again and dialed Gordon Sadluck.

  “Hello?”

  “Gordon? It’s Ruth. Did Elam stop in today?”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  Ruth turned and looked out the window. The rain pelted the glass.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I just couldn’t remember if he said he was going deer hunting or not. I figured he would have stopped in the shop to get the reports if he had been.”

  “Well, he hasn’t been in here.”

  “I must’ve misheard ’im.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line.

  “What about Horace?” Ruth asked.

  “Horace?”

  “Has he been in there?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since last season.” Gordon paused for a long moment. “When’s the last you saw him—your husband?”

  “I’m sure I just misheard ’im,” Ruth said. “I’m sorry to bother you, Gordon.”

  “It’s not a bother.”

  Ruth hung up the receiver. The sap boiled and popped in the woodstove and the dogs stirred. Ruth watched them slowly relax until their chins were resting on one another again, then she went to the closet and got her winter coat and her good rain boots.

  * * *

  THE TOWN OF North Falls consisted of twenty-eight square miles positioned on a high plateau in the southern region of the Green Mountain range. It had the highest altitude of any village in the state, which meant the snow came early and it came often. It also meant that the first thing anybody noticed about the town was the church steeple. The rotting whitewashed wood and the slatted oval window and the copper spire all connected to the simple wood framing. It was the highest point in the state, and people liked to say it was closer to God than anywhere else in Vermont. Not that it did the town much good.

  A wide brook ran through the center of town and divided the eastern and western hills, which were populated, mostly, by American beech and sugar maple. That was the second thing people noticed: the trees. The wooded backbone of the town. There had at one time been a bar-iron manufacturing plant, but the plant had closed down almost sixty years ago and the mountainous landscape combined with the rocky soil and the thick forests meant that few people farmed and most people logged, which was a good way for a poor town to stay poor.

  Ruth’s boots stomped out puddles of water held by wide ruts. A wet wind carried the scent of hemlock and pine. She had grown up in a cottage close to the center of town on a quarter acre behind a double stone wall shaded by old-growth maples. Her mother and father had bought the home after selling the hill farm in Rochester for pennies on the dollar. Her father hadn’t known much other than farming, and so he built cider presses and did other odd jobs to pay the bills. He liked living in town because he could go on long walks and observe the other homes and trees that he was used to seeing only from a distance.

  But Ruth’s mother missed the privacy of the hill farm and she hardly left the house. So when Ruth got older, she walked with her father. He pointed out the homes that needed work and told her how he would fix them, and he pointed out the different trees and called them by their names. Ruth calculated one time that she’d probably walked half a million miles in her forty-eight years living in North Falls.

  Della’s house sat less than a mile south of Ruth’s at the end of a wide crushed-stone drive. The moon was bright and shone on the two-story house, and Ruth could see that the paint was peeling, so the clapboard looked like it had been fashioned from birch bark. The chimney was crumbling and the flashing was torn and some of the shutters were missing. Gone to who the hell knows where. Della’s truck was parked in the drive, and a school bus painted the colors of the American flag sat flush on the grass behind it as it had for the last fifteen years, ever since Horace bought it from the elementary school after the transmission tunnel locked up.

  Ruth had met Della at a town potluck after both women were married but before either one of them became pregnant. They were an odd pairing in a lot of ways. Della was deeply religious, and Ruth believed the Bible made about as much sense as the Loch Ness monster, save for the fact that she could at least picture some handsome carpenter talking a bunch of nonsense with enough bravado that people started to believe it no matter how ridiculous it sounded. She’d seen that movie play out any number of times during her life. But Ruth and Della were both private women, and neither one of them had been born in North Falls. To some small degree they were both outsiders. It was probably those things, and the fact that they both wore blue jeans while all the other women wore gingham dresses, that got them talking during that town potluck and kept them talking well into the night.

  Ruth started down the drive and made it three steps before the motion light snapped on, capturing the heavy rain, and a tall German shepherd sprang out from under the porch, growling and barking. Ruth stopped and watched the dog struggle to pull free from the metal chain that held him back.

  The front door swung open, and Della stood there staring out at the drive. A moment later she turned to the dog. “Trigger,” she shouted. “Goddammit. Quiet, boy.”

  The dog took to jumping in place as though it might out-jump the chain. Della went back inside the house and came out holding something in her hand. She tossed it under the porch, and the dog chased after it and disappeared.

  “Come on,” Della said.

  Ruth came down the drive and climbed the sagging porch steps and followed Della into the home. The wood-paneled living room opened into the kitchen. A picture of Jesus walking on water hung above the kitchen table in a rose-colored frame. Some of the tile had been ripped up from the kitchen floor and stacked against the wall near the refrigerator. The hallway light was on, and Ruth could see down the narrow hall to William’s old bedroom, where the door was closed and the NO TRESPASSING sign still hung.

  They had found the two boys on the east ridge about a hundred yards west of Sandy Pond. The trails in the southwest section of the Green Mountain National Forest weren’t well maintained, but you could find the ridge if you stayed close to the stream and followed it north from the Sandy Pond turnoff for about three miles to a fallen red maple that came out the side of a hill and stretched across the stream. Elam knew the area best. He had taken Mathew a couple of times to fish for brook trout and to camp on the ridge at night.

  The morning they found the boys was hot, and the sun was high enough that it shone through the branches and in their eyes as they walked the stream. Still, the orange two-person tent was visible on the ridge. It was Elam who spotted it. The remnants of a campfire were outside, and the rain fly was up and secured to the gravelly soil even though it hadn’t rained the night before. Elam was the first to reach the tent, and he pulled the zipper down and climbed under the rain fly and opened the side door. He called to Ruth to stay where she was, but Ruth didn’t listen. She pushed right past him and pulled back the side door.

  Her son lay on his stomach stripped of his clothes, his shoulders covered in purple bruises. William was on his back on the other side of the tent. His right eye had been ripped from the socket, which was caked in dried blood, and he had bite marks up and down his legs and around his genitals.

  Ruth didn’t remember seeing the needles or the beer cans, but she knew they were there. The medical examiner said the heroin had been laced with fentanyl and it could have been that or the loss of blood that killed them. Either one would have done the trick. The only fingerprints belonged to the boys, and the official story was that the boys had gotten drunk and then they had gotten high, and once they were high they had hallucinated and attacked each other. That was what the newspapers ran with. It was only when some people started to ask just where the hell two
fifteen-year-old boys living in North Falls had gotten their hands on a bundle of heroin that the state trooper Leo Strobridge got it in his head to tell a reporter from the Bennington Banner that he suspected Mathew had loved William and that he had lured him into the tent with alcohol and drugs and that things had turned ugly. He sat right down at the Whistler and told his reasons for it. Told how the boys weren’t known to hang out with each other and how the bite marks were mostly around William’s privates and how they had found Mathew’s ejaculate in the sleeping bag.

  The bartender, Buddy Cole, heard most of it. Though he didn’t need to because the whole thing was reprinted almost word for word on the front page of the Banner with a picture of Leo and the headline “Love and Violence: Responding Officer Describes the Grisly Scene in the Death of Two North Falls Teenagers.” From there the Burlington Free Press picked it up, and they printed just about the same story with a couple more quotes from members of the community and one from a professor down at the college. Ruth knew Leo meant to distract the town from the fact that two fifteen-year-old boys had been camping out right under his thumb with a tent full of heroin, and she showed up one evening at his front door to tell him as much. He was wearing the same brain-dead cowboy hat he had worn in the black-and-white newspaper photograph, even though he was in the middle of supper. Ruth told him what she thought about him, and he told her that she was just upset and that grief had a way of making the truth never seem quite real enough. Then Ruth said something more, and though she couldn’t recall what, it was bad enough that Leo’s wife stood and started to clear the table.

  Of course it didn’t much matter whether the story was true or not; it stuck. William was the crown jewel of North Falls. A good-looking athletic boy who took after his father, who had played college ball at Southern Vermont before blowing out both knees and who, despite his later failings, held on firmly to his position as top turd on the North Falls wheelbarrow. Mathew was a different sort of boy altogether, and to some the story helped make sense out of someone they’d never been able to understand. It all sat just fine with Della, who made sure to get her own quotes in the paper in support of the story the town had come to believe. She told a reporter that William wasn’t much like Mathew and that he’d only hung out with him on a couple of occasions because Ruth had told Della that Mathew was lonely and that he didn’t get invited to things like the other boys did. Della said all that even though she knew it wasn’t true. Even though when the two boys were out of school they were tighter than bark on a tree. It wasn’t long before people came to see Mathew as some sort of predator, and those same people could only stare wide-eyed at Ruth or else avoid her like she carried some rare illness that just might be contagious to other parents.

  Of course, there were people who couldn’t help themselves. Ervine Schwartz, one of Horace’s softball buddies and the father of the first baseman on Mathew’s baseball team, went as far as to carry a used condom into church the week after Mathew’s death and put it in the collection basket when Elam came to his pew. It was after Mathew died that Ruth saw a side of the town that had always been there but that she had never seen before—and once she saw it, like an uneven line in the wallpaper or a scuff mark on an oak table, it was all she could see. She never forgave Della for her role in it, the way she just abandoned Ruth and Mathew in favor of fanning the flames, and she didn’t think she ever could.

  “It leaked,” Della said.

  “What?”

  “The refrigerator.” Della motioned toward the corner of the kitchen. “That’s why those tiles are piled up the way they are. Horace’s been working on it. But it’s still a mess.” She opened the cupboard next to the refrigerator. “You still drink bourbon with water?”

  Ruth wiped the rain from her forehead. “I’m not staying.”

  Della paused a moment and shut the cupboard door. She was wearing a long flannel shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned, and Ruth caught a glimpse of a scar running the length of her thumb that she couldn’t recall being there three years ago.

  “Where have you looked?” Ruth asked.

  “I been to the Whistler. I already told you that. I drove up and down Main Street, too—seeing if maybe they’d had a wreck.”

  “Have you looked at the top of Holcomb Hill? At the lookout over the brook?”

  “I looked up there—looked all along the brook. I made some calls, too. Nobody’s heard a thing.”

  “Who’d you call?”

  “Guys from the Whistler, mostly. Most of the loggers. I was getting set to go down there again. See if maybe I could talk to some of the guys I couldn’t get ahold of on the telephone.”

  “You talk to Leo?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. I don’t want you to.”

  “That’s not your decision to make.”

  “Fine. Keep Elam’s name out of it.”

  “Like I said—I’m headed down to the Whistler. I’m not at the point of calling the police.”

  Ruth removed her glasses. She pulled the handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed her eyes. “What about the hospital?”

  “I called. They got no record of either one of them—so that’s good, I guess.”

  Ruth repositioned her glasses. “Does Horace still hang out and drink beers in that bus?”

  “He’s not in there now, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m wondering if maybe there’s something in there that would tell you where he went.”

  “You think maybe he keeps a day planner in there—one of them leather-bound ones with the holidays listed out?”

  “I don’t know what he keeps in there.”

  “He hasn’t been in there in some time.”

  Ruth thought to say something about how Della might not have any idea whether Horace had been in the bus or not. About how even when the boys were living under their roofs Horace had always done his own thing. But she stopped herself. “So what is it, then? What is it you think happened?”

  “I’ve got no idea. I don’t know what they were doing together, and I don’t know where they are. I’m going to the Whistler because it’s the only thing I can think to do. You can ride with me if you want—but I’d just as soon not work against you on this thing.”

  * * *

  THE CENTER OF North Falls consisted of a four-block stretch of road lined with elm trees. The post office and the two-hundred-year-old general store were on the south side of the first block. Henry’s Diner and the hardware store were on the north side. The footpath that led to the brook ran between the two buildings, and the grass there was worn and littered with plastic wrappers and rusted fishing hooks. On the second block was the town hall, with its flood-stained brick facade and faded flag hung from a steel flagpole. Across from the town hall, on a plot of elevated land behind an old Norway maple that had been damaged by fireworks during a town parade, was the church. After that was the library and the fish-and-tackle owned by Gordon Sadluck, who lived in the apartment above. Then, farther down the road, a little out of the way from the rest of the buildings, was the Whistler.

  That was it. If you wanted something more, you had to drive down Main Street for thirteen miles until you reached the blinking traffic light in front of the gas station. If you turned onto Route 7 and headed south, you’d find a Donut Shop and finally Hinman’s Grocery Store. There used to be a department store in the lot with the grocery store, but it had closed two summers ago, and if you wanted clothes that didn’t come from a catalog, you had to drive another ten miles to Woodford. There were no police officers save for Leo Strobridge, the resident state trooper, who lived in a small house with a big old front porch on Wicket Street just behind the church.

  The truck jumped over frost heaves. Della readjusted her grip. A preacher with a voice like a busted crankshaft pushed Bible verses through the rattling speakers.

  “This weather can’t seem to make up its mind,” Della said. “I wish the snow would just get on with it
already.”

  Ruth stared at the empty road that unfurled in front of them. The rain was still coming down and the wipers beat against the windshield. “I guess it’ll be getting around,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That our husbands have gone missing.”

  “I guess it will.”

  They entered the center of town and passed the post office and the general store where Ruth had been working as a teenager when she first met Elam. He had come up to the counter as she was adjusting the dial on her transistor radio and told her that if she put the radio in the window facing south and turned it to 1570 just after dark, she could pick up a man named Wolfman Jack all the way in Mexico who played the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and ate vinyl records live on air. She tried it that same day before closing the store, but all she picked up were Pentecostal preachers. Elam came into the store the next morning, and she told him about the preachers. He promised to return that evening to help her find the station, and he did. He showed up that evening and every evening after that.

  “I heard Elam stopped drinking,” Della said. “Heard he just drinks soda at the bar—has been that way for a couple months now.”

  “Had been.”

  “Maybe it still is.”

  The truck crossed the small truss bridge and slowed as it ascended the hill toward the Whistler. The lights were on in some of the old homes tucked along Main Street. Only one or two windows lit in each home. Smoke rising from the chimneys. Nobody hell-bent on wasting electricity, least of all in the beginning of November when the winter was just settling in.

  “People are going to be surprised to see you,” Della said.

  “Life is full of surprises. Most of ’em a hell of a lot more interesting than me.”

  “Not in North Falls. In North Falls you’re probably it.”

  The Whistler was a one-story building with horizontal clapboard siding. It sat low to the ground and looked more like a cowshed than a place that had been given a license to serve liquor and food. The only sign was a brass horse that hung crooked over the door, which didn’t make an ounce of sense. Four motel rooms were attached to the rear of the bar. Larry Grogan lived in one with his mentally disabled son, and the other three were occupied from time to time by men who drove up from Hartford to run heroin and didn’t bother making a secret of it.