The Reconstructionist (21 page)

He walked over the site again, starting at the tyre mark and moving in widening circles, and eventually discovered a small piece of white paper hung in the weeds. A receipt for gasoline with a name at the bottom:
John Boggs
.

A ball of snakes writhed in his stomach. Now, after all, here was a new point of data. The gas station address named a town that he found on the map. The date was yesterday. The town lay in the east, and east was the direction he would have gone next, but apparently Boggs had been there, so he turned west.

He made two brief stops – one at the scene of a collision between a street sweeper and a scooter, the other at the place where a garbage truck had crashed into a pickup with two kids in the bed playing with a set of magnetic chequers – before he came to a curve of roadway under a high hill. He and Boggs had spent most of a day working here, surveying, photographing. Not far away, perhaps a half-hour by foot, stood a mate to the hill, a little taller, with three windmills rising off it. Eight months after working below the first hill, they had been brought out to work on a second accident that occurred at the foot of the second hill, with the windmills.

The air here blew hot and dry, despite a lake that lay not far away. From the road he could not see the water; he remembered it from looking at aerial photos of the site. He had a bottle of soda that he sipped from but could not rid his mouth of a parched sensation. His chest ached vaguely. Tremors moved through his hands and arms, into his jaw and eyelids. His eyes, too, felt dry. Near the road the soil was sandy with tufts of grass, and he scuffed around with his foot until he found a swathe of broken glass. He picked up a piece the size of a housefly and felt its edges, watched it catch the sunlight. By examining the thickness and laminated qualities of a piece of glass it was possible to determine whether it had come from a windshield or a rear window or a side window. This appeared to be windshield glass, and he likely stood where the front of the
van
had come to rest. How many years ago now? Four? Six? The van, a rental, had burned, killing five of fourteen inside. They were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, children, out on a weekend holiday. With so many dead and burned, some of them children, large amounts of money had been at stake. He and Boggs had worked a long time on this case and came to know it in great detail. They had never uncovered anything unexpected – after the first day’s work, they probably could have predicted their ultimate findings to within a couple of mph. But they had produced reports and diagrams and animations, and Boggs had prepped for weeks to provide several hours of deposition testimony.

Traffic now moved on the two-lane road at about sixty, rattling the brush around Ellis. A double yellow line indicated a no-passing zone on the curve around the hill, but a small silver Plymouth had nonetheless been passing, and so came head-on toward the rented van. Both drivers swerved, so that the front left corner of the Plymouth struck the front left corner of the van and the left side of the van pushed upward, as if it had hit a ramp. It fell onto its right side and slid into the sand and grass. The deformation of a frame cross-member under the van punctured the fuel tank, and the gasoline ran down, pooled under the van and began to burn.

Ellis sat sifting sand and shards of glass. He picked out the shards and examined them one by one and set them aside in a little pile. He kept thinking that he needed to call someone, then losing track of the thought.

On the hill across the road a sign advertised Texaco gasoline, which contained useful additives.

He looked at the sand he held with thoughts of examining the grains individually. Boggs claimed that there was so much information in photographs that if you studied a job’s book of photos long enough, you would always eventually see something new and useful. In Ellis’s experience that was sometimes true and sometimes not, but there was always the possibility that in those cases where he had failed to find anything new it was because he had failed to study long enough. He turned the sand a little one way and then another to see how the sun played on it. Certain grains
were
black, others red or orange or white, their size inconsistent, with some nearly pebbles.

He walked down the road to a fading two-track trail that disappeared into a wire fence. At the time of the accident, there had been a gate. Two men had been sitting in a truck in front of the gate, talking about a possible cellphone tower, to be placed on the hill – Ellis saw now that it had never been built. One of the men in the truck, an ex-marine, had run to the burning van, found a window broken out of the rear doors, and reached in. Fighting through the smoke and flames thickening in the van, unable to see, grabbing hands or legs or shirts or belts, he dragged out seven people. He was a hero, but in his deposition he was taciturn and grim and spoke at length only of the screams of those he had had to abandon.

Two more occupants kicked through the windshield and crawled out on their own. The rest died.

A wind hummed in the fence, and Ellis put his hands on it to feel for the vibrations, but his hands only shook the wire. He walked back to where the van had come to rest and scoured again for caught pieces of paper or fabric, a thread, a hair. He worked his way through the weeds until he came again to the fence. From here he could see a few bright glimmers of the lake surface.

He climbed the fence and pushed through brush. The water lay further away than it appeared, and the brush caught him as if to drag him back. His legs began to shake. He had to stand waiting until it passed.

Nearer the water, he bulled through tall sharp-edged grasses and came at last to an open place along the shore. He crouched. The water was clear, faintly rippling, shallow. He cupped a handful and smeared it onto his face. The opposite shore was also enclosed in reeds and grasses, and the narrow lake stretched away to uninhabited distances right and left. A few ducks loitered on the water.

A short squeal of tyres startled him, but no noise of impact followed. He stood to look at the road, and as he did he glimpsed a human shape to his right, near the water. He stepped through
some
weeds, wetting his shoes in mud. Someone face down at the water’s edge – someone drinking from the lake or washing in it, as he had just done. But the figure did not move.

‘Boggs?’ Ellis called.

He stood watching, waiting for Boggs to raise himself, and the trembling took him so absolutely that he could hardly move for fear of toppling. After a minute he shuffled forward a few steps, and then he saw that it was not Boggs – too short, too thin, wearing clothes that Boggs would never wear. He stepped from one thatch of grass to another, until he stood over the body of a small, thin man, perfectly dead. Waves came across the lake to jostle it.

After a time Ellis crouched. Then he sat. The splayed feet wore white tennis shoes scuffed and greyed by use. The legs wore khaki slacks. A bit of exposed flesh could be seen at the ankle, vaguely obscene. A dark blue sweatshirt, soaked with water. Thick dark brown hair, wet and plastered to the head. The arms extended loosely, hands dangling in the water. Because the hair had no grey in it, the dead man did not seem to have been very old, but otherwise it would have been hard to say how young or old he was. A few hairs on his neck bristled out of the water. The noise of the road gathered volume for a time, then diminished.

The air of the day slowly cooled.

A pair of coots swam the shoreline and shied from the body and moved along. A magpie landed in the brush nearby, then startled away. Ellis looked up and watched, in a leafless dead tree some distance down the shore, several large black cormorants standing motionless.

He fell asleep – knees drawn up, head on knees – and woke in the night. In the distance, when vehicles rounded the curve of the hill, their headlamp beams revolved spasmodically forward and back. The sky glowed magnificently with stars. He was cold. A breeze touched him and jostled the grasses, and he became aware of someone seated a few feet away. The dead risen – this was his first thought – from the lake water to sit there and ruminate on him. But the stars made light enough to see that the body still lay where he had found it, face in the water, feet on the sand. And
as
Ellis studied the form of the person seated beside him, a car arced past and he saw the eyes gleam. He moved a dry tongue in his mouth and felt an eyelid twitch. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you think you’re stealthy and clever as a ninja or a Comanche or something.’

‘You look awful, Ellis.’

Even in the dark Ellis could see that Boggs did not look well, either – his eyes watery, his clothes rumpled, his posture poor. But his hair was trim, and he appeared to have been eating more than Ellis. Ellis turned, in a sensation of daze, uncertain of import, toward the body. ‘I thought he might be you.’

‘You keep doing that. Who is he?’

‘I have no idea. Do you?’

‘Have you looked in his pockets?’

‘I don’t want to touch him.’

‘There might be an ID.’ Boggs looked at the sky as he talked. ‘There might be a medical-alert bracelet or a bottle of pills.’

The water slapped against the body.

‘Anyway, now you found me,’ Boggs said.

‘You found me.’

Boggs shifted and the sand under him made little mouse squeaks. ‘It comes to the same thing. What do you want to say?’

‘I want to say that I’m sorry.’

The waves came in like the intermittent clapping of a child.

‘That’s it?’

‘I betrayed you,’ Ellis said.

‘It’s what’s happened.’

Ellis let that wander out over the water into the night. He didn’t feel capable of the enquiry that it implied. He hardly felt capable of breathing. The twitch in his eyelid grew worse. He asked, ‘Did you slash my tyres?’

‘I noticed that your rear tyres looked fresh. Nice deep tread.’

‘Middle of nowhere. And as I walked out, I was jumped by a couple of thugs in a Jeep.’

‘That’s terrible. Makes you wonder why anyone even leaves the house any more.’

‘Did you do the tyres?’

Boggs’s brow contracted. ‘No. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to say, this is a disappointment.’ He stood. He grabbed the body by an ankle. ‘Come on. Help me.’

Ellis stared.

‘Let’s get him out of the water. I can’t stand looking at him like that.’

‘The police won’t want him disturbed,’ Ellis said.

‘I don’t care.’ Boggs lifted the other ankle, stood between the two and heaved.

‘You’re nuts,’ Ellis said, but with a sense of obligation he stood, shaking, and clasped a leg – thin and clammy cold, making him glad his stomach was empty – and together they dragged the man onto shore.

‘He sure is dead,’ Boggs said.

Ellis very gently put down the leg that he’d been pulling. ‘Someone might be looking for him,’ he said. ‘He could have kids.’

‘We should roll him and get a look at his face.’

‘Don’t do that. Let him be.’ Ellis felt near to weeping.

Boggs did not reply, but neither did he move toward the body. ‘Might be that no one even knows he’s gone,’ he said. ‘A solitary guy, wanders out here, dies, and no one notices. The universe as he understood it is extinguished, and it’s the passing of a mite.’

‘You really don’t know anything about him?’ Ellis asked.

‘How would I?’

‘It just seems strange that I’d stumble onto him here. And then you turn up.’

Boggs laughed. ‘You think I planted a dead guy here?’

‘What’s your explanation?’

‘It is what it is.’

‘You have to admit it’s unlikely.’

‘That never stopped anything from happening.’

‘That’s not true.’

Boggs scoffed. With the point of his shoe he prodded the dead man’s foot. It was difficult to look away from the body. The man’s shoelaces were still tied.

‘If you did set this up, I don’t expect you would admit it.’

‘No. That’s true. I’m too smart for that.’

Ellis laughed. ‘All right. Fate put him here.’

‘Absolutely not. I’m not sure why you think it’s so strange. People die all the time.’

Ellis laughed again. ‘You know, it’s good to see you, Boggs.’

The shirt had ridden up as they pulled the body from the water, showing a thin, pasty waist.

‘Maybe he fell from an airplane,’ Boggs said, scowling.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Ellis asked.

‘Maybe he’d hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck, and he flew out on that curve and crawled here to die of internal haemorrhage.’

Ellis was silent.

‘Maybe this is just a place that had some meaning to him and he walked over here and ate a handful of pills and waited for an end. Some connection here. You remember that guy who climbed through the windshield? Maybe this is him. The passenger seat occupant. The one who said the hero guy was a liar.’

‘Really?’ Though he had forgotten it, it did seem that Boggs might have told him this before, years ago.

‘He said that the ex-marine hero man actually didn’t do much. A number of people were helping, and this guy said that he pulled several people out himself, and it pissed him off that this other guy was made out to be the hero with the help of some cop buddies.’