SAFELY BURIED Chapter 6: Cloudy Window

When I came around the bend in the cornfield, I was surprised to see a steep hill so close to the house. Last night I had not even seen the hill. A van and four police cars were lined up next to one another facing the house. I took my camera out of my pocket and grabbed some shots. It felt strange to be standing there again, and for a moment I thought I was dreaming. Everything that I had been through last night seemed to have happened long ago.

A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and sharply creased blue slacks crossed the lawn to meet me. He was a few inches shorter than I was, but built more solidly. I might have taken him for a pro football player if it weren’t for the ID badge hanging on his belt. Then again, he was probably too old for the NFL. As he came closer, I could see a long scar at the edge of his left eye. It was the only mark on a smooth, closely shaved face whose skin seemed too tight for the bones underneath.

“Mr. Larrison,” he said, extending his hand. “Jim Bakery, Indiana State Police.” His voice was as sharp and crisp as his pants.

I made an effort to match his grip. “Nice to meet you. Sheriff Eggemann said you wanted to see me.”

“That’s correct. I appreciate you coming out here. You saved me a trip back to town.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “I planned on coming anyway. I’d like to get some pictures for the paper.”

“I read your story this morning. You had quite a night last night.”

“That’s for sure.”

“How ’bout telling me about it.” He took a small tape recorder out of his shirt pocket. “You don’t mind if I use this, do you?”

Leaves of corn rustled in the breeze, and giant white spaniels floated over the knobs. Standing in the sun, I described how I had picked up Paula and how she had led me to the house. The detective did not interrupt until I described how Paula had broken the glass in the door.

“The crime-scene team found some blood on the broken glass,” he said. “Did you get any cuts? What I’m getting at is, could any of the blood be yours?”

I held up my elbows. “No cuts.”

“Why did you go in with her?” When I didn’t answer right away, he added, “You delivered her where she wanted to go. You could have just dropped her off and gone home.”

I nodded. “True. I guess I got caught up in the moment. I wanted to make sure she was all right before I left her there by herself.”

“Did you have any reason to think she might be in danger?”

“Not really. The house was dark . . . isolated.”

He wagged his head slowly from shoulder to shoulder as if weighing my response. “I can understand how you felt, Phil. She was a damsel in distress, and you were—”

“Not a knight in shining armor.”

He made a mirthless laugh. “Okay—a nice guy. Were you ever here before last night?”

“No.”

“Go on with your story, please.”

I told him about everything else: the stench in the house, the dead cat, the bodies in the bathroom, Paula’s disappearance—everything up to the arrival of the sheriff and the deputy. At the end of my story I said, “I know it was breaking and entering, but if we hadn’t gone into the house, then we wouldn’t have found the bodies. Would that make things better?”

Bakery said, “You’ve got a point,” but he didn’t seem to mean it.

I asked him if his investigation had turned up any leads, but all he said was he “couldn’t comment at this time.” I asked if it would be all right if I took some photos in the house, and he said the CSIs weren’t quite finished yet. Then he stuck out his hand and gave me a fake smile to signal the conversation had ended. That was fine with me.

I went back to my car and drove across the road. The log cabin had a steep peaked roof like the ones in hillbilly cartoons. The old weathered logs were dusty gray, but a few bands of white chinking looked brand new. A bent stovepipe jutted out from one side of the cabin and rose a couple feet above the roof.

As I hauled myself out of the car again, a pack of hounds began barking and howling in their pens on the right. Between the cabin and the pens was a rickety wooden outhouse, and I noticed a man with a beard standing in front of it and watching me. I hoped he was coming out of the privy rather than going in—I didn’t want to hold him up. I raised a hand and called, “Mr. Neidig?”

“That’s me.”

“Do you mind if I talk to you a little bit?”

“Do I get a choice?” he yelled back. “You’re only about the tenth one that’s been here today. Just gimme a minute to duck in here.” He snarled at the dogs, “Hey yarrr mutts, knock off that racket,” and the racket diminished slightly as he disappeared into the outhouse.

I wondered if he owned any of the farmland that surrounded his cabin and the acre or so of clear ground on which it stood. I saw no barn, no farm equipment, just an old light-green pickup truck with bulbous fenders that was parked in front of the cabin.

A few minutes later he came out. His narrow shoulders rocked from side to side as he slouched across the crabgrass and dandelions that comprised his lawn.

As Jodie had said, he had a long beard. Thick and gray, it hung down to his sternum. What I could see of his face was dark red from the sun. His eyes looked like thin antique china, but they were as quick as a ferret’s. The skin around them was lined and creased like an old leather shoe.

“Howdy,” he said. “What can I do for ya?”

I introduced myself, and we shook hands. We looked straight into each other’s eyes. He was short and wiry, somewhere between seventy and ninety years old. A few strands of bluish-white hair stretched across his head.

“Larrison,” he said. “You must be the feller that found the bodies over there last night.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.

“I was in the house, but it was a friend of the murder victims who found them.”

“The woman with the broken leg. I read all about it in the paper this mornin’. I picked up a copy at the general store in Hampstead—I needed some bread and milk. I wondered what all that ruckus was last night. I looked out the window and seen the police cars comin’ and goin’. I had half a mind to go over there and see what the fuss was all about, but I didn’t want to get in their way. I asked about it at the store, and they told me there was a story in the paper, so I bought me a copy.”

“Have the police been here yet,” I asked.

“Have they ever. The sheriff showed up before seven, but I get up around five, so that was all right. Then the state police started comin’—not one car, but four, five of ’em, one after the other, all mornin’ long. My tongue’s been waggin’ so much, it feels like it’s gonna fall outta my mouth.”

He gave his tongue a rest. A breeze came cascading down the hillside, and an old oak tree on the far side of the cabin began to stir.

The old man said, “I suspect you was the first one I heard drivin’ around in there last night. I thought nothin’ of it at the time. Thought it was Mr. and Mrs. Garth comin’ home from wherever they was at. It’s been mighty quiet over there lately—until last night. Now I know why.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I feel like my head’s ready to catch on fire. What say we go set in the shade?”

I had been standing with my hands on my hips, airing my armpits. “Lead the way,” I said.

I followed him to the sagging porch on the front of his cabin. A white rocking chair with a seat cushion stood on one side, a heavy metal lawn chair on the other. He took the metal chair, which bent back and forth with a springy rocking motion. I watched the sun flicker in the leaves of the oak tree. It was hypnotic. If I had wanted to, I could have fallen asleep.

“After I seen the police come back, I walked over there,” Glenn said. “A couple deputies was there. They looked at me suspicious-like. I told them who I was, and they said they’d want to talk to me later. I hung around a while, but I stayed outta their way. I would’ve liked to get a look around inside the house. I reckon them bodies was pretty far gone.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said. To put him in my debt, I gave him a lurid description of the corpses.

He shook his head. “It’s terrible. Nowadays there’s no tellin’ what might happen next. There’s too many nuts on the loose.”

“Tell me, Glenn, how well did you know the Garths?”

“I got to know ’em some,” he replied. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but they wasn’t real neighborly. I don’t mean to say they was hateful or rude, but they didn’t go outta their way to be friendly, at least not with me they didn’t. Excuse me.” He stood up and shouted at the dogs again, which had started barking at the deputy across the road. He sat back down and said, “I’ll give you an example of what I mean. One day I was runnin’ my dogs on the hill behind their house. I been doin’ it for years. I don’t hunt no more, but I still like to run my coondogs. They’re blueticks. Nice dogs—I’ll show you, if you want to see ’em. Well, what happened was they picked up a scent and went tearin’ down the hill toward the house, and just where his property line is, he’s standin’ there, watchin’ us. I stopped to have a little talk with him, but the first thing he says to me is, real huffy-like, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your dogs out of these woods.’ Now, I’m not the only one that runs dogs around here. Like I told ya, I don’t hunt, and they need to run once in a while. There ain’t no fences around here. ‘Come again,’ I says to him. He says, ‘I don’t want the dogs to scare the deer away.’ That made me laugh. There’s so many deer in these hills, it’s gettin’ so you can’t go outside without bumpin’ into one. I told him so, but he stood his ground, and the next time I was back up in there, above his house, I seen where he had put up a mess of No Huntin’ and No Trespassin’ signs all around his property. I said to my dogs, ‘You fellers better learn how to read.’”

For a man whose tongue was about to fall out, he kept it flapping pretty well. He must have rehashed every conversation he had ever had with Garth and his wife. “She was more friendly than him,” he said, “but she kept her distance too. Some time back—I think it was last summer—she was pickin’ flowers in the field next to her house—and I asked her what they was buildin’ over there—there was a lot of hammerin’ goin’ on. She said her husband and a friend of his was puttin’ some solar panels on the roof to keep their electric bill down. You know what’s happened to the price of electricity this past year or two—it’s gone clear through the roof. The electric company’s bleedin’ us dry. So they put some of them solar things on the back roof of the house. I said to her, ‘Ain’t the house too close to the hill? It’s in the shade early of an evening.’ She said her husband thought it would work just fine—like it was none of my business. I tried to tell her they’d miss several hours’ worth of sunshine every day, but she was one of them people who has an answer for everything—she said they was thinkin’ of puttin’ up a windmill too. ‘To pump water?’ I said, and she said, ‘No, for electricity—to make up for days when it was too cloudy, or not enough sunshine. They never built the windmill though. I think they was some of them en-vi-ro-ment-a-lists. I got talkin’ to the two of them one afternoon. I was sittin’ out here, and they come ridin’ down the road on their horses—which reminds me, I wonder how them horses are doin’ if the owners have been dead for the past few weeks, like your story says. I wonder if there’s enough food for two horses in that skimpy little pasture of theirs. I just happened to think of that. Anyway, what I was goin’ to say is, they stopped and asked me if I knew anything about an old dump on the other side of the hill from their place. ‘Sure,’ I said to him, it used to be the county landfill, but it’s been covered up for years.’ He cussed and said he never woulda moved down here if he’d’a known they’d be livin’next to a landfill. ‘Our well’s prob’ly contaminated,’ he says to his wife. I says to him, ‘The water ain’t harmed me none. If the water was poisoned, I woulda been dead a long time ago.’ But they didn’t wanna hear nothin’ I had to say.”

While the old man was talking, the county police cruiser that had been blocking the lane drove off toward Brickton. A minute or two later a small convoy of state-police vehicles pulled out of the Garth place, churning up a long cloud of dust that spread over the cornfield. Glenn waved at them, and one of the drivers tooted his horn.

I asked Glenn if he knew if either of the Garths had a regular job.

“They must’ve done some kind of work. They came and went a lot. Usually the two of them went away together, but not always. I asked Mr. Grapevine about them once—him and his wife own that nice house down the road. Now there’s a neighborly couple. A real gentleman and a nice lady, well-to-do, but they never act high and mighty, like they’re better than you. I remember once—”

“I met him last night. He was very helpful to me,” I said. “So you don’t know for sure if either of the Garths had a job?”

“I don’t think either one had a regular job. I never saw them leavin’ in the morning and comin’ home for supper at the same time day after day, and I’m right here almost all the time. I can see everything that goes in and out of that driveway. Mr. Grapevine told me he’d heard that Mr. Garth was some kind of salesman that worked out of his home on the telephone or a computer.”

I had not seen either a telephone or a computer in the Garth house, but I had not been in every room. Perhaps one of the bedrooms had been used as an office.

Glenn’s tongue went on wagging, but I got up and said I had several more things to do that afternoon. I thanked him for the information he had given me, and then I remembered Paula. I asked him to give me a call if he happened to see her.

“I’d be glad to,” he said. “But I’ll have to call the cops first. They asked me before you did. If she’s anywhere in this neck of the woods, I’ll spot her.”

He followed me down the steps. I thought he was going to tag along with me to the car, but he said, “Don’t be a stranger now,” and veered off toward the outhouse again.

I made a U-turn in front of the cabin and crossed the road to the Garths’ driveway. With the police gone, I had the place to myself. I could look around and take more photos. Maybe we’d run a spread tomorrow. The house looked grim and stark against the green shade of the hill. If Edward didn’t want a layout, we could at least run a nice color shot on the front page. Photo captions began running through my head: House of Horror . . . Meridian County Massacre. . . . Hopefully I could come up with something more clever.

I walked around the left side of the house to the back. The dead cat was gone. I wondered if the police had taken it with them or if some animal had dragged it off. A white propane-gas tank stood about twenty feet behind the house, while out in a field to the right was a dust-gray weather-beaten barn. Not far from the barn was a fenced pasture where two brown horses stood staring at me.

I wondered if Paula had spent the night in the barn. I followed a hard-packed lane toward the big sliding doors, only to discover a rusty lock and chain on them. I circled the barn to see if I could find another way in, but there were no missing boards, no spaces large enough to crawl through.

As I came around the other side of the barn, I noticed the solar panels that Garth had installed on the back of the house. The wide array covered half the roof. The Garths must have had some money if they could afford to buy the house and acreage and install those panels.

One of the horses whinnied at me, so I waded through the weeds to see how they had fared the past few weeks. They began walking toward the fence to meet me. They had a small shelter, and a stream ran through the middle of the pasture. They had chewed the weeds to the ground and looked very thin. Besides food, they needed a good scrubbing and brushing. When I reached the fence, I saw a clear space all around the outside of the pasture that they must have made by poking their heads between the boards to reach the weeds. I rubbed their heads and patted their necks. Then I pulled a few bunches of weeds and held them over the fence. They tore the weeds out of my hand.

Their big eyes looked sad and worried. “I’ll get somebody to take care of you,” I promised them. Watch it, Larrison, I said to myself—you’re getting sentimental.

The shadow of the hill was already spreading up the house. I took a few more photos, and then I wandered around the yard. It was turning into a prairie. I searched for some sign of Paula, perhaps a track she had made dragging her cast. The smell of corn wafted through the air until the breeze died.

A chill ran down the back of my head—once again I had a sense of being watched. I spun around and looked up at the windows on the second floor. For a moment I thought I saw Paula, but it was just my imagination. The windows contained nothing but blue sky and fluffy clouds. But the chill stayed with me as I walked back to the car.