Necessary Evil (20 page)

Even now, when I
was too old, too tired to believe in such thing, I could still sense magic in
the atmosphere, even if somewhat dissipated with time and experience.

Once in the
shelter of the tree-cast shadows, I expelled a sigh of relief. Randall, who was
consulting his tablet, looked up and grinned at me.

“Out of earshot at
last,” he said.

He stopped to take
a picture and I found myself wishing that I’d come here alone to think. Then
again, I was always thinking that when I was with Randall.

“It’ll only make
things worse,” I groused, running a hand through my hair before remembering
that I hadn’t washed it since putting Graybeard out to pasture. I withdrew it
with a grimace. “They’ll be imagining all kinds of things. If this was
eighteen-sixty, I’d be worried about a scandal.”

“Mmm hmm,” he said,
concentrating on his lens. “Although from what I’ve observed, your life could
use a bit of scandal.”

Not with you, it
couldn’t.

I considered
continuing our conversation about Aunt Susanna, but he seemed to have forgotten
about it and I didn’t really relish another argument. Much better for me to
advise Aunt Susanna on the sly that her help wasn’t needed. Randall was right
about one thing: she didn’t have enough to do. Maybe I should talk to Darlene
about that…

But that was a
problem for another time.

While he focused
on the tablet, squinting at the screen, I said, “We’re facing south. This is
the western edge of our property. The property line follows the road almost
exactly and has done so since eighteen-thirty-two. At least, that’s what my
uncle said. But as you pointed out, he wasn’t very good at citing sources.”

He either missed
the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “It doesn’t matter – I’ve already scheduled
a trip to the town land records office for this week.” He took another picture,
then stopped, frowning again. “Road? Was this a road once?”

“Still is,
technically.” I swatted at a black fly. “I used to play here all the time. I
got to know each side of the road pretty well. I used to like to tell my school
friends that I played in the middle of a road all the time, no big deal.”

“It’s a wonder you
weren’t the cause of any accidents,” he remarked and I grinned.

“That’s what Uncle
Michael used to say.” I began to walk, Trusty trotting beside me. “Our neighbor
took lessons with Uncle Michael, and she would take a shortcut through these
woods. There’s an old foundation somewhere. Whenever I saw her coming, I used
to hide in it.”

Randall snapped
another picture before following me, pulling his glasses back on as he walked.
“Was this part of the farm property back in Alexander’s day?”

“No,” I said.
“This was Hill property then. According to Uncle Michael, they lost interest in
it when they discovered gold in the Black Mountains. It’s been forested ever
since the eighteen-fifties, I think. This road leads – led – down to the back
property, which was ours for a while, but that was lost in the twenties. Don’t
bother searching there, though,” I said quickly, when his face lit up. “It was
left wooded for the sap and the hunting. And because both Obadiah and Avery
were too cheap to hire help.”

“When was this
road closed? Or was it?”

“Forties, I think?
I don’t know. It is closed, though, and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t draw
too much attention to the fact that it’s not private property.”

 “Afraid
they’ll open it again?” he asked.

“It’s a
possibility,” I said. “The back property is untouched, hemmed in by the
surrounding properties. Right now, the owner doesn’t want to sell - but if some
bright developer discovers that he has access just by opening the road, he may
make an offer the owner can’t refuse.”

“Do you think
Darlene would sell?” he asked.

“Darlene?”

He gestured to the
land on our right. “I thought your aunt said that Darlene Winters was your
neighbor.”

“She is. She owns
all that land on the west side of the trail. Her husband bought it decades
ago.”

“They aren’t into
development, I guess?”

“He had a plane
and built an airstrip on the property. He liked to keep the trees up to keep
the plane and the strip hidden. I don’t know if he was afraid of theft or nosy
neighbors or what, but it works for us. Being surrounded by woods on three
sides gives the farm a nicer feel and keeps things quiet.”

“I wonder,” he
said thoughtfully, “if
Winters
would be willing to
give me an aerial tour.”

“She doesn’t fly,”
I said. “And before you ask, Rich took the plane with him in the divorce.
Darlene kept the land and Allison and turned the strip into a tennis court.”

I smirked at the
memory. Darlene, true to form, inaugurated the court with a “Freedom Party”,
celebrating her finally-official divorce. Uncle Michael and Aunt Susanna were
invited, and since I was staying with them at the time, they’d brought me
along. I was young and overwhelmed by the crush of people. I remember Aunt
Susanna telling Uncle Michael that she didn’t want me around people who’d been
drinking so much.

“No one’s fallen
in the pool yet,” he’d said, which confused me very much.

But what remained
sharpest in my memory was Allison’s face when she came over to talk to us. She was
older than me and much taller, and I looked at her in awe.

She resembled her
father, but had her mother’s dark hair, and she was nervously fingering the
necklace she always wore, a rustic looking accessory with a blue stone. The
contrast between her black hair and her pale complexion was striking. I
couldn’t hear much in the din of the party, but I remember her saying, “It
doesn’t seem right, you know? We’re celebrating the death of a relationship.
It’s weird…”

“Who’s Allison?”
Randall was oblivious to my ruminations.

Now I was the one
who stopped, looking at him in disbelief. “Allison Winters? Daughter of Darlene
Winters?” When he shrugged, I shook my head. “You haven’t heard of the
Allison
Winters case?”

“Should I?” he
asked.

“It was only the
biggest story around here until the great and ongoing traffic light debate,” I
said. “Allison Winters, the girl who disappeared just after she had gotten
accepted to Oxford for graduate studies. I can’t believe you don’t know – there
was a nationwide search. The FBI got involved and everything.”

He tapped his
tablet meditatively, nodding slowly. “It’s starting to sound familiar… That was
about ten years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said,
very slowly. “Ten years.”

In some ways, it
still felt like it had happened yesterday. Cloaked in the security of our
landlocked existence, we didn’t realize anything was wrong until the news came
over the radio. Allison disappeared while on a road trip to visit a friend in
California. No one even knew that she was missing until a friend called
Darlene, who was overseas, and asking where she was. Knowing Allison’s
wanderlust, Darlene didn’t immediately call the police, hoping she’d show up.
By the time the authorities got involved, Allison hadn’t been seen in eight
days. The trail was cold.

Naturally, the
press made much of the “absentee mother” angle. Darlene was a celebrity travel
columnist then - a shining star in the dying art of reporting, as she liked to
put it - and a regular on the talk show circuit. Allison was the bright, neglected
daughter, with all-American good looks and a friendly, down-to-earth manner
that made everyone like her. She’d just finished her degree and was working
towards her Doctorate, eying a future in Forensic Pathology. Naturally, some
friends reported that she was unhappy with her mother’s frequent absences, and
from this came the suggestion that Allison may have harmed herself.

Darlene staunchly
denied the allegations, stating that her daughter was far too intelligent to be
upset by her mother’s career. She never stopped insisting that her daughter had
come to harm, and pushed the authorities hard. But there was nothing to find -
and eventually, other, newer cases took priority.

Like my uncle’s
death, Allison’s disappearance left deep scars. The fight for her daughter and
her own reputation sapped the strength out of Darlene. When the authorities
informed her that the search was suspended, she responded by quitting her
column, cancelling her appearances, and moving home, beginning a decade-long
self-imposed exile from the world. She’d become convinced, she told my aunt,
that if Allison were to turn up, it would be at home. She hasn’t spent a night
away from the house since.

“
Darlene
Winters!”
Randall exclaimed now, again ripping me out of my memories. “I remember. She
was that globe-trotting columnist-turned-hermit, right? I met her a few times
when I was starting out, but I never would have recognized her.”

“Time does that to
people,” I said shortly, and began walking again.

Randall caught up
with me and matched my stride. “I wouldn’t have known, to look at her,” he
said. “The hermit life seems to agree with her.”

In a way, he was
correct. Darlene refused to act the martyr - or the saint - and took great
pains to dress and maintain a normal level of activity.

Nevertheless, I
shot him a disapproving look. “She has never forgiven herself for Allison’s
going missing,” I said. “For all her bold displays, she’s still a grieving
mother.”

He nodded.

“It shows,
however, in her writing,” he said softly.

I was startled by
his observation, and yet he was correct. The time alone, the soul searching,
and the crush of grief produced a remarkable vintage, if you will. Darlene’s
books were dedicated to and based partially on Allison, and the prose was
poetic and achingly beautiful. Even readers who did not know Darlene’s story
would review the book with words like “haunting”, “soulful”, and “tragically
gorgeous”. The carefree divorcee might have been a good columnist; but the
grieving mother was a novelist of the highest order.

Randall met my
gaze with a sad smile. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I occasionally read fiction too,
you know. All work and no play, and all that.” After a pause, he observed,
“Tragedy has seemed to hit this neighborhood rather hard.”

He walked forward
a few paces, kicking at the weeds. The stalks swayed and bent under his
strikes, but they always stood again, bright green, without a kink in their
straight lines. I envied that.

A pall seemed to
have fallen over the warm day. We’d kept a brisk pace, and the sounds of the
farm had given way to that of the woods, and gloom weighed on the otherwise
pleasant atmosphere. Randall seemed to feel it too, for he walked with his head
down and a pensive expression on his face. Only Trusty seemed unaffected. She loped
up and down the trail ahead of us, like a puppy who’s just discovered the great
big world for the first time.

Watching Trusty
play, the gloom dissipated. We came to a bend, where the trail separated from
the road. Randall lifted his head, then his tablet, and snapped a picture.

“All right,
Warwick,” he said. “Before we get into another fight, tell me something about
your family history.”

After the
heaviness of the earlier conversation, both of us made a concentrated effort to
keep our discussion strictly on the historical puzzle he was trying to solve. I
pointed out the areas that Mark Dulles’ film crew visited, and showed him the
paddock that we thought used to be the wheat field. I showed him where the
orchard had been, where Alexander and Reuben Hill used to climb the trees and
steal the apples, more to upset Obadiah than to enjoy the fruit. I showed him
where the fields were, pointing out the one that Avery’s body had been
discovered in.

“He dropped dead
of a heart attack, apparently,” I said.

“Dulles covered
that,” Randall nodded. “Some said that he was digging a hole, looking for his
brother’s treasure.”

I snorted. “More
likely he was digging up yet another stone. They don’t call this ‘The Granite
State’ for nothing.”

Like most old New
Hampshire farms, finding the outline of old fields is often as simple as
following the rock walls that the farmers built around them. They were built as
much to get the stones out of the way as to divide the properties. New
Hampshire is rocky, hilly country that prefers trees to wheat, bushes to potato
plants, and the early colonists led a hard, meager life. Once land opened out
west or down south, and trains began to freight food into Boston, the farms in
the area closed up and were left to go to seed.

The trees were
quick to move in. Walk through any woods in Southern New Hampshire and you find
pines, maples, and birch trees, most about the same age, growing amidst broken
threads of rock walls and abandoned foundations. For all the lush greenery of
the summer, this part of New England does not like the farmer.

When we were
finished and heading back to the house, Randall said, “This has been very
helpful, but I may call on you again for more information or another tour.”

“Fine,” I
shrugged.