SAFELY BURIED Chapter 9: Car Trouble

There were two parties named Dubbs in the Campbellsville phone book. Both lived in Brickton, but neither of them was Esther. I phoned both of them to see if I could get a line on Esther, but neither one answered.

I had better luck with Clyde Cooper.

His wife answered the phone and told me he was out in the barn, tinkering with the combine. She told me how to find their farm, which lay east of Brickton: “You go right at that new carpet place before you get to Brickton and then you go till you get to the first road on the left—it’s about a mile. Then go left, and then you make another left on the second gravel road you come to. That’s our road. Our name’s on the mailbox. You can’t miss it.”

“See you soon,” I told her.

It was hot outside. The sign on the bank across from the courthouse said 89°F. It had shot up since noon. My car’s air conditioner did not help much when the temperature reached the high eighties.

I found Mr. Cooper lying on his back halfway under a three-row cornpicker. It looked as if a bright-green dinosaur was eating him alive.

“Be with ya in a minute,” he called from under the machine. More like ten minutes went by, punctuated by grunts and bangs. Finally he slid out dragging a long wrench after him. “That oughta do ’er,” he said.

The upper half of his body was covered with chaff from last year’s harvest. He used the long wrench to push himself up. A stout man in his late fifties, he had a jowly face that had not been shaved that day. He straightened up slowly and then reached into his coveralls for a tin of chewing tobacco. He stuck a gob inside his cheek. “What can I do for ya?” he said. Like his movements, his voice was slow.

Pigeons cooed in the rafters while we talked. I told him who I was and explained that I was doing an article about the murders in Blind Horse Hollow. He said he was pleased to make my acquaintance and had seen my stories in the paper. He took down a couple bales of straw for us to sit on. We sat facing each other, with our feet surrounding a dried cow pie. Dust motes glittered in the golden planes of sunlight that penetrated the sides of the barn.

“I understand you rent some farmland from Esther Dubbs,” I said.

“Yes, sir, you understand right.”

“And did you buy some property from her?”

“I did. She’s sold off a few pieces of her land since her husband passed away.” He cocked his head and squinted at me. “What’s that got to do with them folks that was killed?”

“Since you farm out there, I figured you might be able to tell me something about them.”

“Like what?”

“Do you happen to know if they owned the house they were living in?”

“Far as I know, a feller by the name of Boofey owns it—unless he sold it to them.”

“Do you know when he bought it?”

“No I don’t. I know it was before she sold me the field I was renting from her. It’ll be three years ago this fall. I was interested in buying the ground where the house is too, but I had no use for the house.” He got up to spit some tobacco into a rusty barrel under the hay loft. Then he started snickering. “You know why I remember Boofey’s name? Because it sounds like Goofy. That ain’t nice to say, but I can’t help it.”

I pretended to laugh. “Have you ever met Mr. Boofey?”

“No, sir. I got his name and address from Mrs. Dubbs once because I wanted to get in touch with him and see if he was interested in rentin’ his field to me, like Mrs. Dubbs. So I wrote him a letter. I got a note back sayin’ he wasn’t interested. I didn’t really care because it was only twenty acres or thereabouts. But it seemed like a waste of good farmland to me—the woods have started takin’ over.”

“By the way,” I said, “while I think of it—is Mrs. Dubbs’s name in the phone book?”

He thought a moment. “I can’t rightly say. It was there last time I looked, but that was some time ago. I don’t deal with her directly anymore, not since she went in the nursin’ home. She’s up in years now.”

“Who do you deal with?”

“Mrs. Judy Dubbs, her daughter-in-law. She was married to Esther’s son, Frank Junior, but he got killed in a car wreck.” He shook his head. “It was a real shame. Esther lost her husband and her only son within a year of each other.”

“That is a shame.” We observed a moment of silence, during which a drop of sweat trickled down my chest. Then I said, “Where does Judy Dubbs live?”

“Over in Brickton.”

It was hot in the barn, but a light breeze blew through the open doors now and then. “Getting back to Mr. Boofey,” I said, “did he ever live in the house he bought from Mrs. Dubbs?”

His brows furrowed as he tried to recall. “I’m not sure about that. Seems like he may have from time to time, while he worked on the place. I think he came and went. But I’m not over there all that much, so I don’t know everything that goes on.”

“Did you know the people who were murdered—Mr. and Mrs. Garth?”

He stuck out his bottom lip like a duckbill and shook his head. “Barely. I stopped and talked to him once when I was diskin’ the field next to his. I told him I was glad to see somebody was finally puttin’ that land to use again—they had horses pastured on it. And before that I seen his wife plantin’ wildflowers. She was workin’ in weeds up to her waist. I told her to watch out for rattlesnakes, but she just laughed. I said, ‘Okay, if you ain’t afraid of rattlesnakes, then watch out for chiggers. They itch like crazy.’ She seemed like a nice young lady.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “It’s kind of ironic. They leave the big bad city—they were from Indianapolis—for peaceful Meridian County, and they get murdered here.”

“It ain’t as peaceful as it used to be.” He spat into the oil drum and sat down in front of me again. “You know what the problem is—we’re lettin’ too many of them Mexicans in. They bring their drugs with ’em and take our jobs.”

I did not need to hear the usual complaints about Mexican immigrants, but I picked up on one of his points. “Do you think the Garths’ deaths may have had something to do with drugs?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me none.”

“Me neither. I was talking to our former sheriff, Chuck Martin, and he recalled that the sheriff’s department, about eleven years ago, found a good-sized crop of marijuana near the house where the Garths lived.”

His temperature shot up unexpectedly. “I don’t call it a crop. I call it crap. That shit was found on the land I was leasin’ from Mrs. Dubbs. I didn’t know a thing about it. And I hope you’re not sayin’ I did.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Because if that’s what you think, then you can get your tail outta here right now.” He pushed himself up from the bale of straw and walked around cussing half under his breath. “I’ll have nothing to do with drugs. If it was up to me, anybody caught sellin’ that shit would be taken out and shot.”

Crop/crap, shit/shot—he was something of a poet.

“I’m sorry if I said something to upset you, Mr. Cooper,” I told him.

“I farm a lot of ground. That’s a mighty isolated place there in the holler. Maybe I should have kept a closer eye on it, but nobody ever done somethin’ like that to me before, sowin’ marijuana in with my corn.” Silhouetted against the bright glare of the doorway, he looked like a walking shadow. “What else do you think I did? You think I murdered them two people while they were naked in the bathroom?”

It was time to go. “Thank you for your time, sir,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

“Bullcrap.”

He wanted to stay mad, so I left him fuming in the barn. The way he had protested his innocence was almost enough to make me think he was guilty of something.

Back in the car, I opened the windows and turned on the air conditioner full blast to blow out the hot air. It was too early for supper, and I didn’t feel like going back to work. As long as I was here, I might as well pay another visit to the Garth house, on the other side of Brickton. The drive would calm my frazzled brain, and it also occurred to me that it might be a good idea to see what I could see from the top of the hill behind the house. What better time to climb a steep hill than on a humid August afternoon when the temperature was in the nineties?

As the car cooled down a few degrees and I put some miles between myself and Clyde Cooper, my mood improved. In twenty minutes I was winding through the knobs again. I was getting to like it in the knobs. Maybe I’d move out here someday. Retire. Live like a hermit. I could grow persimmons. I could get a goat to take care of the lawn. I could run my dogs.

I parked in front of the house and opened the windows a crack. I locked the car and made sure my BlackBerry was in my pocket in case Lieutenant Bakery called. The phone should work on top of the hill. Thinking, always thinking. A warm late-afternoon breeze swept down the hillside and flapped the leaves of corn like stiff pieces of paper.

I wondered if one of the sheriff’s deputies was still staked out somewhere near the house. If so, I should be able to spot his car from the top of the hill. Then I thought of the horses again. I kept forgetting to find someone to feed them. Maybe I should do it myself.

I walked toward their pasture and was pleased to see them munching on a bale of hay. The horses looked up at me as I approached. Maybe the deputy on stakeout duty had brought them the hay, or it could have been Glenn Neidig. I was glad someone had done it.

The horses did not come over to the fence to get their heads rubbed this time, so I headed for the hill. At the edge of the hill was a nearly dry creek, little more than a trickle of water between puddles, though judging from the smooth, steep banks, it was sometimes a raging torrent. In the woods above me, a committee of crows broke out in raucous squawks as I crossed the creekbed. I grabbed onto exposed tree roots to pull myself up the inner bank.

It was cooler in the woods, but also more humid. Within minutes the back of my head was wet and my shirt was soaked. Tiny flies buzzed my face and tried to get at my eyes. The way I kept flapping my arms at them, I must have looked like a pinwheel. I was tempted to give up the climb, but I kept going. I wanted to see what the hollow looked like from the top of the knobs.

Before I was a third of the way up the hill, I was huffing and puffing. Every few minutes I had to stop to catch my breath. A few years ago I would not have run out of breath so quickly. I was out of shape. For the first time in my life it hit me that I was not a young guy anymore. I made it my challenge to keep climbing.

The hill was a lot higher and steeper than it appeared from below. When I finally made it to the top, my reward was a panoramic view of the surrounding country. I took off my shirt and sat on a flat boulder on the narrow ridge. The breeze fanned my face and chest as I soaked up the scenery.

I wondered how high the hill was. Two hundred, three hundred feet? Maybe even more? I ought to look it up. Now and then a tiny car or truck appeared on the county road. Through openings in the trees I could see Glenn Neidig’s cabin and Don Grapevine’s ranch home. They looked like miniature houses on an electric-train layout. I tried to find the Garth house, but it was too close to the hill, with too many trees in the way. I also looked for a hidden police cruiser, but I did not see one.

The sky was hazy blue, with wisps of cloud on the horizon. To the north and west was a vista of receding ridges as high as the one I was sitting on. In the opposite direction the land was a flat quilt of forests and farms in various tones of brown and green. As I sat there looking out from the back side of the hill, a black pickup truck came speeding along a dirt road. A small cloud of dust trailed behind it. The truck slowed down to turn onto another dirt road and then moved toward the hill I was on. It disappeared in a stand of trees and emerged on the other side. The feeble sound of its engine began to reach me.

The truck slowed to a crawl. Although the road came to an end, the truck continued across a wide field that looked more like a smooth green lake. As the pickup got closer, I saw that it carried a pile of scrap, but then the trees blocked my view. Moments later the engine stopped. Two doors slammed. Faint voices came up the hillside. I heard the crash and rattle of junk.

Old man Neidig had said there used to be a county landfill on this side of the hill. Some local yokels must have been using it as their private dump.

I watched the pickup drive away. Then I pushed myself up. Let’s go, Larrison. Back to work.

Getting down the hill was almost as hard as climbing up. My legs weren’t used to this. I constantly held myself back as I went down so my feet wouldn’t go out from under me. It was a tense, stiff descent, and my calves felt sorer by the minute.

By the time I got down, I was so hot, sweaty, and mosquito-bit that I felt like sitting in a puddle in the creek. I splashed some water on my face and resisted the urge to take a drink.

As I pulled myself up out of the creekbed, I heard a car trying to start. I thought it must be the cop who was staking out the place. I angled toward the house. Everything looked the same as yesterday.

The car engine cranked again, and this time it caught. I came around the corner of the house and saw my car turning around on the lawn. I felt my pocket—the keys hadn’t gone anywhere, so how could the car be moving? I couldn’t see who was driving, but who else could it be? . . .

“Paula!” I yelled.

The wheels churned in the gravel, and a cloud of blue fumes filled the air.

My car disappeared in the corn.