Buried Alive (16 page)

“What power are your binoculars?” I asked innocuously.

“What? I wasn’t spying on no one.”

The blast of red to his face confirmed my diagnosis. I figured Mr Paltry had been hoping to see a little action. A darkened parking lot just off the highway seemed the perfect venue for a fast pullover for high school kids with dates, or older types who can’t take the date home because the spouse would object.

It might have even been Paltry’s hobby: see a vehicle in the back lot and run for the binocs hoping for suggestive head bobbing or - joy of joys - a drunked-up couple that stumbles from the car and does it on the hood.

I gave him my squarest chin and most stentorian voice, the image I employ - infrequently - when receiving commendations from professional and civic groups.

“I encourage citizens’ watch groups to use the best equipment possible to assist in the fight against crime, sir. People should always pay attention to strangers in the area.”

Paltry puffed out his sunken chest, held up a finger, meaning
back in a second,
and padded into the next room, returning with a stubby black tube mounted on a tripod, stroking it like a kitten.

“Here’s my baby, a Bushnell spotter’s scope. See a gnat at a hunnert paces.”

I pretended to admire the instrument. “And you say the couple never got out of the car?”

“I had to pee a time or two while I was watching. It takes me a while cuz I’ve got the prostrate. And sometimes I couldn’t see them but figured it was because, ah, they was, uh …”

“Engaged in seditious acts of horizontal alliance,” I said. “Flagrant concupiscent involvement.” I took his scrawny claw and shook it. “God bless citizens like you, sir.”

He puffed out his chest even further. “One time I even saw a buncha Mexicans being sneaked down the highway. I called the cops.”

“Really, sir?”

“They was in a farm truck fulla dried cob corn. It was night and I was looking for, uh, things like you said. The driver got out and lifted a tarp on back. The corn started moving and three Mexicans stood up. They were eating and drinking some stuff when the cops rolled up.”

I flicked a
well-done
salute and walked away. Stopped. Something moved in my mind, but I didn’t see what it was, just that a thought had been ignited somewhere. I frowned its direction, saw Mexicans pushing from corn.
Farm. Hidden. Farms have tractors and… hay.

I pulled my phone and called Harry Nautilus, my partner back in Mobile.

“I think I know how Bobby Lee Crayline got away,” I said.

“That was over six months ago, Carson. It took you this long to figure it out?”

“I’m not missing your humor, Harry. Odd, I know. The farmer’s name was something like Oakes. That’s it, Farley Oakes …”

“You think that really happened?” Harry Nautilus said after I’d laid out my thoughts.

“If it went down as I suspect, there are two possible reasons: coercion or a willing accomplice. Either way, the best approach assumes willingness.”

“He just drove away?” Harry confirmed. “The farmer?”

“It was dumb, but everyone got so busy with the dead guards and chasing a motorcycle with Crayline aboard that … well, it just happened.”

“I’ll see if I can’t get Babe Ellis and Sandhill in on this,” Harry said. “Could be fun. How’s the vacation?”

“Right now I’m helping look for a corpse that walked away from a funeral home.”

“Aren’t there more vacation-type things to do? Are there no pretty women in the area?”

“There’s one. I’m helping her look for—”

“—a corpse that escaped from a funeral home. Gotcha.”

Cherry was leaning against her vehicle when I walked up. “Anything?” she said, face hopeful.

“Thanks to the old letch, I might have figured out how a psychotic named Bobby Lee Crayline escaped while being transported to prison.”

“How does that help us here?”

“It doesn’t. And neither did anything else.”

We got back on the road and were on the Mountain Highway just east of Stanton when Cherry pulled out a notepad, studied it, exited down a ramp.

“Where we going?” I asked.

“Quick trip to tie up a loose end. I want to see if anyone’s home at the house on the lane leading to Tandee Powers’s death scene. The creek. No one was home the day we checked.”

I recalled the small house. It was probably too far from the road for an occupant to have heard anything.

“You said you knew the occupant?”

“An elderly lady. Hell, for all I know, she passed. Like
I said, she was in her eighties. This’ll take a few minutes, then I’ll get you back to your packing.”

Looking over at Cherry I had a moment of doubt. But staying here would mean being sucked deeper into the black hole of my brother’s mind.

“I’ve got to get on that,” I affirmed. “I want to be Mobile-bound at daybreak.”

We wound down roads growing tighter and tighter. Turned on to the long slender band of crumbling asphalt that ended at the creek where Crayline had left Tandee Powers’s body floating in the water. We both knew nothing would come of the trip, but it was one of those investigative motions that had to be made, a box checked off.

“This is the only house on the road back,” Cherry said, slowing at a bend. “Let me see if the lady’s home.”

It was the small and rickety frame dwelling with a big silver propane tank at its side and the maples filled with birdhouses. A single rocking chair sat on the porch. As we pulled in the drive I thought I saw a motion at a window curtain, as though the occupant had heard us a mile back.

“Wait in the car,” Cherry said. “Some folks live deep
in the woods because they fear, or don’t particularly care for, people. Strangers, especially.”

I did aghast. “Are you telling me I’m strange?”

“Sit, cowboy.”

I waited as Cherry knocked on the door. It occurred to me to put on a big yellow happy face so as not to threaten whoever, but I figured Cherry kept the happy face in the trunk with the bullhorn.

The front door opened. Cherry spoke for several minutes. I couldn’t hear her words, only her tone, like a traveler bringing news to an isolated settlement. I figured Cherry’s accent - which I was beginning to view as “richly textured” instead of “grating” - permanently marked her as a member of the mountain tribe, a powerful asset in a culture where outsiders had always been viewed with suspicion, generally for good reason.

Cherry walked back to the car, told me to come to the house. She stayed tight to my side as we approached, a hand over my shoulder. She’d never been so close or touched me, and I realized her nearness symbolized sanction. Cherry was giving me her approval so that Miz Bascomb could see that I was safe, a man who brought neither shadow nor harm.

Leona Bascomb was a tiny woman with bottle-thick glasses and few teeth remaining in a head that had seen at least eighty years of life. Her gray hair was full and fell past her waist. She wore a faded gingham dress under a starched white apron. Her brown and gnarled hands seemed constructed entirely of knuckles.

The room was Spartan in furnishing: a rocking chair, a small sofa, a pair of TV trays beside the furniture. It was the walls that drew my eyes. They were covered with sheets of cheap simple paper, the kind run through copiers. Each sheet displayed colors arranged in a variety of ways. Some colors were hard and disparate shapes, others merged and flowed. Many pages recalled works by Kandinsky, others Chagall.

There were at least a hundred such paintings taped to the walls. It took a moment to catch my breath, startled by the surprise.

“Your walls are covered with beauty, Miz Bascomb,” I said.

“They’re my birds,” she replied.

“Birds?”

She looked embarrassed. “I know they don’t look a bit like birds, an’ I cain’t he’p it. Whenever I tried to draw a bird like a pitchur, it didn’t look right. I couldn’t see birds real good anyway cuz my eyes was always on the low side. So I started drawin’ how they sound.”

I studied the walls again and began to see the music, the rhythmic bursts of color. The shading of notes gliding into others, or tapering off as a trill must have tapered into the air. One compelling picture displayed a three-color arc: blue, becoming a sideways, bottom-weighted crescent of purple, transmuting into a wavering series of lines, blue again. The background was coal black, providing a stillness behind the color, the sense of a night sky. I’d heard those colors recently.

“This one,” I said, pointing to the picture. “It’s a whip-poor-will, right?”

Cherry’s eyes turned to me with surprise. Miss Bascomb stared through the thick lenses, canting her head as if bringing me into focus. She walked to me, took my hand in hers. Her hand felt like driftwood.

“You’re the first person to ever see one right,” she said, leading me past the walls like at a gallery opening, pointing out towhees, starlings, robins, crows - a nervous jitter of black and yellow - martins, several varieties of thrushes and finches, bluebirds, cardinals, willets, grebes, plovers, and dozens more. When the tour was finished, a smiling Leona Bascomb went to fetch tea and cookies.

“How did you do that, Ryder?” Cherry whispered when the bird artist had retreated to her tiny kitchen, clattering dishes. “How did you know those splotches were a whip-poor-will?”

“I couldn’t imagine it being anything else.”

When Miz Bascomb returned, Cherry steered her into our questions. I sipped tea and nibbled a sugar cookie, happy to be out of the limelight.

“I wasn’t here that morning the poor woman’s body got found,” Miz Bascomb said to Cherry. “The health service came by real early and took me to the clinic for my six-month look-see. I’m good, praise God.”

“You mentioned hearing a car the night before?”

“It was almost midnight. I was up, puttering. Cain’t never sleep no more, just doze. I heard a car out on the road. Sounded big. I can tell by the sounds of the motors.
I cain’t see hardly none any more, but God gave me ears as good as they git.”

“Is that common, Miz Bascomb, nighttime traffic on the road?” Cherry asked.

“Any traffic ain’t real common. Nothing back there but the ol’ logging camp. In the daytime, local kids sometimes go back there in summer to splash around. But most of ‘em goes to the divin’ rock over in the Red River. Water’s deeper and there’s other kids to show off for. I did the same myself, when I was a girl.”

“So the vehicle on the road caught your ear?” Cherry asked.

“I was waiting for it to come back out. It did, ’bout two hours later.”

“The same vehicle?”

“No way to tell that perzactky. Same kind of one, to tell by the sound.”

Cherry made some notes in her pad. “So a vehicle went in around midnight, came out around two. Possibly the same vehicle.”

The old woman nodded.

Cherry looked at me. It fit the timeline, given what we’d learned from the lab about time of death. Tandee Powers was probably taken from her home around eleven, driven past Leona Bascomb’s house, then another desolate mile to the creek. She’d been dressed in a sexually suggestive manner, dragged into the water, tortured by being pulled under and then released back to the surface. This could have gone on for an hour and a half. Perhaps longer.

“No other vehicles went back down the road after that?” Cherry asked.

The birdsong artist frowned, trying to discern a memory. “I drowsed off around four in the morning. Something popped my eyes open just afore six. I’m purty sure it was a car, but I was sorta drifty. It seemed like it was going west toward east, like driving away.”

Cherry looked at me and shook her head.
Not the car.
It didn’t fit the timeline, the sun rising by six. It was the midnight ride that carried Tandee Powers to her death.

We stood and bid our farewells, Miz Bascomb seeming loathe to see me go, offering more tea and cookies, or dinner. I again complimented her work as we withdrew toward the door. I paused, turned, a sudden thought lighting my head.

“One more thing, Miz Bascomb,” I said. “The sound the earlier vehicle made. Do you think you could draw it for me?”

A smile crossed her face, as though the challenge was amusing.

“Why not? Lemme git my workings.”

Leona Bascomb walked to a cabinet, withdrew a sheet of paper and a box of bright pastel crayons.

“I got a daughter lives up in Louisville sends me my colors from an art store,” she said, sitting in the rocker and placing the sheet on the TV tray. She thought for a full minute and I saw her lips move as the sounds replayed in her head. Her ancient fingers whisked over the colors, selected.

The gnarled hands began drawing.

Two minutes later she handed me the paper. I saw a vibrating line that ran a few inches in yellow, turned green, jumped into blue and stayed the same until running off the edge of the page. I peeked out the window and confirmed the bridge that had slowed Cherry’s vehicle three hundred feet away. After crossing the bridge the vehicle would have accelerated to the speed the potholed road could bear, twenty-five or thirty miles per hour. The colors in Miz Bascomb’s drawing shifted abruptly, as the sounds must have changed.

“A standard transmission,” I said. “I see it shifting.”

Cherry stared at me.

Cherry dropped me at my cabin. We climbed out, stood on separate sides of the car. “Well, Ryder, it looks like this is it,” Cherry said over the hood, her smile strained. “I’m sorry your vacation turned into work. And for the record, I truly wasn’t the person who called you.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Thanks for all your help. And your company. I just wish that we’d had the time to—”

I turned to the cabin. Something was missing. Mix-up was nowhere to be seen.

“You all right, Ryder?”

“Mix-up. Where is he? Mix-up!” I yelled into the trees. “Yo … Mr Mix-up. Come here, boy!”

Nothing. I turned to Cherry. “This is strange. He never goes far.”

She clapped her hands, yelled, “Here Mix-up!” I joined
in and we walked up and down the drive, calling. I told Cherry I was heading into the woods and I’d let her know when he came back. I whistled, clapped, banged a wooden spoon on his metal food bowl, playing his favorite music. I hiked a mile up the creek, a mile down, yelling and banging until my hand hurt and my voice was a painful rasp.