I saw a sign reading “Braynor 5” and began looking for the lane into my father’s camp. I knew he was about three miles south of town, and before long I spotted the crudely painted sign up ahead, yellow letters painted onto a brown background, reading “Denny’s Cabins: Fishing, bait, boats. Next right.”
I slowed, saw the opening in the trees where the lane wound down from the highway, and turned in. It didn’t amount to much more than two ruts with a strip of grass growing in the middle, and I could hear the blades brushing along the bottom of the car as I navigated my way in. The grass on either side of the ruts was matted down, where drivers had pulled over when encountering a car coming from the other direction.
Not far down, the lane branched into two. You took the left to go to the farmhouse Dad had opted not to use, but I couldn’t have driven that way had I wanted to, because only a few yards ahead the lane was blocked by a wide wooden gate that was flanked on both sides by a neck-high chain-link fence.
The gate featured a collection of signs, some made from wood and sloppily printed, others commercially available metal signs, dimpled as though shot with BB pellets. They read “Keep Out!” and “Private!!” and “Beware of Dogs!” That last one had originally said “Beware of Dog!” but someone had painted a snakelike “s” at the end to make it plural. As if all those weren’t enough, there was another that said “No Trespassing!” and a homemade one reading “Tresppasers Will Be SHOT!”
I caught a glimpse of the two-story farmhouse and the large barn beyond it as I passed, taking the lane to the right and down over a hill, where the woods opened up and the five small cabins, lined up like little white Monopoly houses, presented themselves.
As did the police car, the ambulance, and a couple of other vehicles parked at random on the lane and on the lawn behind the cabins. The dome lights on the police car and ambulance rotated quietly.
As I pulled ahead, I saw several people gathered on the other side of the ambulance, a couple of them having a smoke, like they were all waiting for something. I parked, got out, my legs feeling a little rubbery not just from what I feared I was about to learn, but from the drive.
They turned and looked at me. Two were dressed in paramedic garb, there was a young dark-haired woman clutching a notepad I figured was the freelancer Tracy, a gray-haired man in a dark suit, tie, and wire-rimmed glasses who had to be the doctor doing coroner duty, three other men in plaid and olive civilian attire that suggested fishing, and a woman in her sixties in a kerchief, hunting jacket, and slacks.
Finally, there was the law. A man in his mid-thirties, I figured, black boots, bomber-style leather jacket, and a felt trooper hat. He took a step toward me.
“Can I help you?” he said. I had a closer look at him, his receding jaw, thin neck, eyes that blinked almost constantly. There was something about him, at first glance, that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“I’m Zack Walker,” I said, and cleared my throat. “I got a call. This is my father’s place.”
The young woman with the notepad spoke up. “Mr. Walker? Sarah Walker’s husband?” She was bordering on cheerful.
“That’s right.”
“I’m Tracy McAvoy. This is the guy,” she told the cop. “The one’s whose wife is the editor? At the paper?”
The cop held up his hand for her to stop, as if to say, “I get it.” He extended a hand my way. “I’m Chief Thorne. Orville Thorne.”
We shook. His hand was warm, and damp.
I said, “I was told you haven’t been able to find my father, and that you have a body to…” I seemed unable to find the words I needed. “That there’s, that you have…”
Thorne nodded, poked his tongue around the inside of his cheek, pondering, I guessed, whether I was up to the next step.
“Mr. Walker, we have had an incident. A man’s body was found in the woods just over there.” He pointed. The trees looked dark and ominous. “One of the guests here was out for a walk and discovered him this morning. We haven’t been able to determine just whose body it is, you see, but all the guests here at your father’s camp have been accounted for. But,” and Chief Thorne paused to swallow, “we’ve not been able to locate your father, Arlen Walker.”
“Maybe he’s away,” I said. “Did you consider that?”
Chief Thorne nodded. “There’s his pickup over there.” I looked over by the first cabin, the one I knew Dad lived in, and spotted a Ford truck. “And there’s no boats missing, according to the guests here.”
“I see,” I said.
“It’s an awful thing to ask, but maybe, if you wouldn’t mind, you could take a look for us.” He tipped his trooper-hatted head toward the woods.
I felt weak.
“Of course,” I said.
He led me toward the woods, everyone else following, silently, like we were already in the funeral procession. As I began to be enveloped by trees, the air felt colder.
There was a small clearing, and on the ground, a tarp, maybe seven by four feet, with something under it that couldn’t be anything but a body.
“Are you okay?” the chief asked.
I definitely was not. I said, “Yeah.”
Chief Thorne approached one end of the tarp, gingerly grabbed the corner, and lifted it up, revealing a body, as best as I could tell, from head to waist.
Like they say, nothing prepares you.
What I saw under that tarp looked like something that had been dropped to the ground through the blades of a helicopter. Flesh ripped away, bone exposed, blood everywhere.
Some flies buzzed.
I turned away. I wondered if maybe I was going to be sick. For anyone to die that way, it was unimaginable. But for my own father…
“I know it’s pretty impossible to tell,” Thorne said. “But did you notice anything, clothing, anything at all, that would tell you whether that’s your father?”
The surrounding pines seemed to be waving back and forth, as if in a high wind, but there wasn’t even a slight breeze. The blue sky was below me, the grass above, and then, seconds later, everything was back where it was supposed to be.
“No,” I said.
“We couldn’t find any sort of ID on him, so I was wondering…”
I came out of the woods like a man stumbling out of a burning building, desperate for air. I went to my car, threw my hands out and leaned over the hood, trying to catch my breath. One of the ambulance attendants was saying something to me, but I couldn’t seem to hear it.
There was the sound of a vehicle approaching, of rubber crunching gravel, and I looked up the hill I’d driven down moments earlier, and saw a blue sedan with a sign attached to the roof. I blinked, saw that it said “Braynor Taxi.”
It came to a stop behind my car, and a man I recognized got out of the back, came around to the driver, who had his window down, and handed him a couple of bills.
“Thanks,” he said, then turned and took in all the activity. The ambulance and police car, all the people standing around.
“What the hell’s all this?” he asked as the cab started backing up the lane. Then his eyes landed on me. “Zachary?”
I looked at him, stunned. “Hi, Dad,” I said.
“That a new car?” he said, pointing at the Virtue that was still holding me up.
“Fairly,” I said, just now taking my hands off the hood.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You didn’t bother to rust-proof it.”
“It’s got lots of plastic panels,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” Now he’d noticed Chief Thorne. “Christ, Orville, what’s all the commotion?”
“Hi, Arlen. Jesus. Have to say, it’s a pleasure to see you today. Where the hell have you been?”
Dad bristled. “Uh, just in town, Orville.” He sounded defensive.
“How early did you go in? We been here some time now.” Orville Thorne was sounding a bit defensive himself. “Did you, were you in town overnight?”
Dad sighed with annoyance. “Orville, I have to paint you a picture, for Christ’s sake? What the hell’s going on here?”
The others—the ambulance attendants and the doctor for sure—were looking at Orville with some disapproval, like maybe he’d missed something he should have thought of. He must have sensed it, because he coughed nervously.
“Well, shit, Arlen, there’s something here in the woods you should have a look at,” he said tentatively.
As Dad glanced toward them, Orville took his arm to lead him that way, but instead, led Dad right over his foot, and Dad tripped, one of those fluky kind of things, and went down.
He yelped, and when he tried to get back up, couldn’t.
“Jesus,” he said. “My goddamn ankle. I think I must have twisted my goddamn ankle.”
People shook their heads, rolled their eyes. “Nice one, Orville,” one of the ambulance attendants said.
3
I RUSHED FORWARD, but moved aside for the older gentleman in the suit and tie, who creaked like an old door as he bent down to assist my father. Dad was on his side, his craggy face twisted in pain, raising himself up with one arm and reaching back with the other toward his foot, even though he couldn’t get anywhere close to it. “Shit,” Arlen Walker said. “Jesus, that hurts.”
“Don’t try to get up,” I said.
“No chance of that,” Dad said. “How ya doin’, Doc?” he said to the man in the suit.
“Just take it easy, Arlen,” he said. He glanced up at me. “I’m Dr. Heath. I’m your father’s regular doctor.”
“Hi,” I said, moving farther back so Heath and the ambulance guys could do their thing. I drew back up next to Chief Thorne, who was looking uncomfortable and embarrassed.
“I’m really sorry, Arlen,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“Sure, Orville,” Dad said, wincing. “I know. These things happen.”
“I was just trying to help,” the chief said. He suddenly looked very young to me, with soft white skin, a few freckles around his eyes.
The rest of the crowd was taking in the show. There was the sixtyish woman in the kerchief and hunting jacket, a guest I figured, her arm linked with a man of similar age, both of them on the short side. Her doughy face was clouded with worry, but he was a bit harder to read. Just watching. Next to him, only slightly taller, stood a man in a dark green felt baseball cap, with what looked like a basketball hidden under his unzipped windbreaker and striped pullover shirt. His clothes must have cost a bundle to make someone his shape look so good. Even in casual garb, he was the best dressed of all of us. I glanced back at the cabins, spotted a Cadillac STS parked at one of them, and knew that one had to be his.
Next to him, an old-man-of-the-sea. Tall, his face lined with deep creases, a toothpick dancing back and forth between his lips. He was dressed in olive pants and a plaid flannel shirt, and he smiled at me when our eyes met.
“Bob Spooner,” he said, extending a hand. I took it. “I’m glad your dad’s okay,” he said.
“Me too,” I said.
I turned to Chief Thorne and said quietly, “Didn’t anyone call around to see if my dad might be in town? You two spoke to each other by first names, like you know each other pretty well. I had a two-hour-long heart attack driving up here, expecting the worst. You couldn’t have asked around?”
Thorne’s tongue poked around the inside of his cheek. He was taking his time to come up with an answer, like maybe he hadn’t expected this to be on the final. After a few seconds, he said, “We’re basically in the middle of our investigation here, Mr. Walker. Our first concern was finding out who this man over here is, and when we couldn’t immediately locate your father, well, you can understand why we were concerned.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Couldn’t you have made some calls?”
Thorne said, “We saw his vehicle over there, the boats were in, there was no reason to think he might be in town.”
“And why would he have taken a cab back?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t he have taken his truck into town?”
Thorne ignored that. A few steps away, on the ground, my dad said, “Christ on a cracker, that hurts!”
Thorne tipped his hat back a fraction of an inch and said to me, “I’m sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced, Mr. Walker.”
“Inconvenienced?” I said. “Inconvenienced? Is that what you call dragging me into the woods to show me a corpse I had every reason to believe was my father?”
The chubby guy in the nice threads said, “Orville, didn’t you call your aunt, see if she might know where Arlen was?”
Thorne coughed again. I said, “Your aunt? Why would your aunt know where my father was?”
I suppose it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to be as angry as I was. I mean, I’d just learned that my father was alive. I should have been relieved, perhaps even joyous. Leaping about, even. But instead I felt enraged at being made to look at that body hidden under the tarp, to have been led to believe by this incompetent rube, for however briefly, that it was my father, looking like he’d been fed through a meat grinder. Maybe, too, I was reeling from the shock of it all. Losing a parent and getting him back all within a matter of minutes. How often did that happen?
Whatever it was, I was losing my cool.
“Mr. Walker,” Chief Thorne said, trying to put some authority in his voice and placing a hand on my arm, “I think maybe you need to calm down and—”
“Get your hand off me,” I said, shaking it loose and—I honestly don’t know how the hell this happened—shoving Thorne away from me at the same time as he actually grabbed on to my arm, and his foot caught on a small rock, and then he was going down and taking me with him. The guy was a one-man tripping industry.
I was just going along for the ride at this point, but from Thorne’s point of view, I was attacking him, so he scrambled wildly to get out from under me, scurrying sideways like a crab, looking wild-eyed, his hat gone, and then, suddenly, there was a gun in his hand and he was shouting at me, his voice squeaking a bit, “Freeze!”
Well, I froze. Except for the parts of me that were shaking. I may not have actually appeared to be quivering, but I sure felt that way inside.
Thorne’s gun was visibly shaking. He put a second hand on the gun to help steady it, both arms outstretched, and there was something very Barney Fife about him at that moment. Not as thin and spindly, but equally erratic. He might not intend to shoot me but end up doing it anyway.
“You just hold it right there!” he shouted, glancing at me and then over to his hat and then back to me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, a bit winded from the fall. I shook my head back and forth slowly, raised both my palms to suggest a truce.
“Christ, Orville, put that fucking gun away!” my father shouted from the ground. “That’s my goddamn son, for crying out loud!”
“He started it!” Orville Thorne whined.
Even with a twisted ankle, my father had the energy to roll his eyes. “Orville, for God’s sakes, put that thing away before you hurt yourself.”
Thorne got to his feet, lowered the gun slowly and slipped it back into his holster, brushed himself off. I went over and got his hat and handed it to him.
“Sorry,” I said.
Thorne snatched the hat away and put it back on, shielding his eyes, unwilling to look at me after being scolded by my father.
“Yeah, well,” he said.
“It’s just, I thought my dad was dead. And then he drove in. I guess I went a bit crazy, having just seen that body and all.”
“Sure,” he said.
I stuck out a hand. Without being able to see Thorne’s eyes, I wasn’t sure he saw it, so I took a step closer.
“Go on, Orville,” said Arlen Walker. “Shake his hand.”
He took my hand, half shook it, then withdrew. We both had reason to be embarrassed, I guess, but Thorne looked particularly red-faced.
“Okay,” said my fat
her. “Now that that’s settled, could someone tell me what the hell is going on around here?”
Bob Spooner spoke up. “Arlen, there’s a body in the woods. A man’s body.”
“Jesus,” Dad said. “Who is it?”
“We don’t know,” Orville Thorne said. “It’s no one from here. Now that we’ve found you, everyone from the camp here’s been accounted for.”
“For a while,” I said, “everyone thought that it might be you.”
“I wasn’t here,” Dad said matter-of-factly. “I got a ride into town last night. I’d had a bit of wine with dinner so I didn’t want to drive.” That would be Dad. As long as I’d known him, if he had so much as a drop of wine, he wouldn’t get behind the wheel.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Where were you going? Who gave you a lift into town?”
He was up on one foot now, an ambulance attendant on either side of him, about to lead him in the direction of the ambulance. He winced instead of answering.
“I bet I can guess,” said Bob, a sly grin crossing his face.
“Bob.” My dad glared at the man, said his name like a warning.
Bob seemed unafraid. “I’m just saying.”
I noticed that the older woman and her husband had slipped back into the woods. I could just make them out, standing by the tarp. Then I noticed him holding up the tarp at one end so that his wife—I guessed she was his wife—could take a closer look.
Ghouls, I thought.
“Hey, Doc,” Dad said to Dr. Heath as the paramedics moved him closer to the ambulance, “couldn’t I just go lie down and put an ice pack on it?”
“Arlen, just come in to Emerg. We’ll get an X-ray, make sure nothing’s broken, confirm that it’s just a sprain.” There was a small hospital in Braynor, I remembered.