Riverwatcher Page 3

  Stroud led her back down the path to his car. When they reached it, he leaned against the side, tilted his face to the sun, closed his eyes. “Don’t suppose you have a smoke,” he said to her.

  “You know I don’t.”

  “We’re hunting for footprints before everything’s all messed up. Probably is already, ambulance boys clomping around.” Stroud opened his eyes, looked at her. “Footprints are a waste of time, my experience. But you have to hunt anyway.”

  “He’s dead?” she asked even though she knew it was pointless.

  “Before we got here.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “We’re waiting on Slocum Byrd before the boys move the body. I’m guessing he’s been dead a while.”

  “How?”

  “Looks like a shotgun was blasted through the tent. He was on the cot, maybe reading. You know how he was. He had one of those battery lanterns with neon tubes, still on, pretty faint, when we went inside. If it was night when it happened, that battery strong, the tent would have been lit up like a church. He was a sitting duck.”

  Mercy raised a hand. “Charlie was murdered?”

  “You think it could be something else, shotgun blasted through the tent? It’s why we’re hunting for footprints.”

  “But no one would murder Charlie.”

  Slowly, Stroud shook his head. “No one should, you mean.”

  *  *  *

  STROUD ASKED MERCY to wait in her Suburban while the medical examiner did his preliminary work and the body of Charlie Orr was removed to the ambulance. When he came back to her, Stroud opened the front passenger door, got inside.

  “I was about right. Slocum thinks he’s been dead six, eight hours, give or take, so it happened sometime between midnight and first light. But Slocum says, the look of things, there was more than one shotgun blast. Maybe a double barrel.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Stroud looked at her closely. “You going to be all right?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I got you out here—you probably figured it out.”

  “Because we’re in a state forest campground, and the Ossning field office of which I’m the director has immediate responsibility.”

  “That’s part of the reason. I’m closing off the campground for a while. There were three campsites occupied last night, besides Charlie’s and the campground hosts’. I want to keep those folks in here. And I don’t want new folks coming in. We agreed on that?”

  “You think Charlie was murdered by a camper?”

  “You’ve got to start somewhere, is all. But it’s possible. Someone who knew he was camped here.”

  “Plenty of people knew.”

  Stroud nodded. “Another reason I wanted to talk. You knew Charlie.”

  “So did you.”

  “But you knew his situation out here, how he got here, what the arrangement was with the DNR. If he wasn’t killed by one of the campers, we might have to start looking into that.”

  “The campground hosts can tell you some.”

  “They’re the ones in the big fifth-wheeler?”

  “Burt and Billie Berry.”

  “She found him.”

  “Billie did?”

  “Probably her footprints we’re going to find. We had a little talk when I got here, but she wasn’t all that coherent. Couldn’t seem to remember Charlie’s name. Kept calling him the Odd Fellow.”

  *  *  *

  AFTER THE AMBULANCE left for Ossning and his deputies were finished examining the murder scene, Stroud led Mercy up the path to the campsite. They stood together on the edge of the clearing, silent, looking across at the white tent. Stroud pointed in the direction of the shredded sidewall, the side through which the shotgun blasts had obviously come, and Mercy nodded. Then Stroud said, “I haven’t been out here in a while. There’s a few questions, if you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine,” Mercy said.

  “The tent’s the same? The one he always had here?”

  “Of course it is. Charlie wouldn’t change anything, not as long as it still worked. He found it at some military surplus store way back when. It was a bear to put up, old wall tent, all that heavy canvas, no shock-cord poles. Once up, though, it could handle anything.”

  “Except this,” Stroud said.

  “You know what I mean—the weather. Charlie saw it all from that tent. At first he didn’t have any heat, except for a wood fire outside. Then Verlyn or Calvin or somebody like that told him about those little propane outfits you can use both for cooking and heating, and Charlie got himself one. He was snug as a bug in there, heavy old tent with the propane going.”

  “He cooked inside?”

  “Mostly outside on a wood fire. Mostly beans and rice. And peanut butter sandwiches. Charlie lived on peanut butter. He’d go over to the Kabin Kamp now and then for a real meal or into town, but mostly he stayed out here, eating beans and rice and peanut butter sandwiches. He wasn’t what you’d call a gourmet.”

  “Everything else about the campsite the same, then? The way it was before? Nothing changed?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Take your time.”

  “I think so,” Mercy said when she finished looking, “the same. Charlie might have been in the military himself the way he kept his camp. Neat as a pin.”

  “Take a look inside.”

  “The tent?”

  “I could tell you, you’d rather.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “The tent fly was closed when we got here. No sign the inside was entered. There’s books, fly tying material, trunk with clothing, couple bottles of whiskey, one unopened, some money in traveler’s checks, writing paper, personal items, fishing stuff—but not as much of that as you’d think.”

  “Charlie went light. He thought most fishermen had too much of everything. He’d refined things down. Just a couple rods, a couple lines, not that many flies. He reminded me some of my uncle Louis. Louis was a golf nut, but he’d refined things down to playing with a single club, a two iron. He wasn’t bad, either.”

  “I remember Louis.”

  “The point is it’s normal that Charlie didn’t have much equipment around.”

  “Reading lantern beside the cot, radio, propane heater-cooker you mentioned, flashlights, toilet articles. About it.”

  “All normal.”

  “So no outward indication Charlie’s routine was any different? Or he had any visitors that might have stayed?”

  Mercy shook her head. “I saw him maybe a week or so ago. Not here but out on the river, night fishing the South Branch. He was just the same. But nobody ever stayed with him. He had plenty of visitors, but you always knew he wasn’t looking for permanent company. There was always a line you didn’t cross. He was tucked away at the end of the campground, away from other sites as far as he could get, by himself. You know that as well as I do.”

  “I thought so,” Stroud agreed, “but I wanted to check.”

  “So where are we? What do we do now?”

  “I want you to talk to the host couple—that’s one thing—before I do. Tell them the campground’s closed, nobody in or out, that your office and my office are working together on this. We’re in agreement. Then find out why the woman—”

  “Billie Berry.”

  “—was down here, this end of the campground, early in the morning. After that, go back to work. I’ll let you know what develops.”

  “That’s working together?”

  “In a murder investigation, it is. But I may need more help, especially if I have to get into past stuff about Charlie.”

  “You said that before.”

  “You have to figure, first off, that what happened—it’s due to something recent.”

  “So you talk to everyone in the campground.”

  “If that doesn’t work, you spread out, anyone who had contact with Charlie in the last few days. You keep going back, spreading the net wider. The wider
the net gets, the problem is, the bigger the holes for things to slip through. So I don’t want to get into past stuff unless I have to.”

  “All right,” Mercy said. “I’ll stop and see Burt and Billie, then I’ll go to work. But I expect to hear from you soon.”

  “Soon enough,” Stroud said.

  *  *  *

  “THERE’S ONE OTHER thing,” Mercy said when they got back to their vehicles. “The Parks and Recreation people in Lansing are going to be looking over our combined shoulders on this. Bad publicity—a killing in a state campground. They’ll want us talking to the media, pointing out how extraordinary that is, soothing the public. We ought to make sure we’re telling the same story.”

  “Hmm,” Stroud mused.

  “Michigan campgrounds are safe, as a matter of fact, but we’ve got to make people believe that. It might be a good idea to have a news conference, the two of us together, say the same thing to all the media types at once.”

  “Not until I’ve got more information.”

  “I meant that. In a day or two. In the meantime, we have to get out a statement: just the straight facts and that we’re working together and that nobody has to be afraid of the campgrounds. What I’m thinking is we might get Fitzgerald to help. He knows how to deal with the media.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I know you told him not to do any writing behind your back. But he’d be working with us on this. Okay?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Think quick.” Mercy dipped her head, turned away. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Charlie’s dead, and I’m worrying about how to soothe the public. It’s obscene.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Stroud said.

  4

  “HEY, SUGAR,” BONNIE Pym called out from behind the counter when Fitzgerald stopped at the Six-Grain Bakery for Italian bread. He was going to tell her about the picnic lunch he was planning, cheese and wine to go with the fresh bread, when he realized that though Bonnie’s greeting was the same, there was a hollow quality to the words.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Plenty.”

  Bonnie came around the counter, took his arm, led him back to the entrance door. “Mercy’s hunting for you. She’s been calling around.”

  “Now she’s found me.”

  “She wants you to stop at her office.”

  “What I planned. I thought we’d have a picnic at the town park.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  When he looked at Bonnie closely Fitzgerald could see that her makeup was smudged about the eyes, which wasn’t like Bonnie. It looked for all the world as if she had been crying, which wasn’t like Bonnie, either. Bonnie was always primed to face the world. “Tell me,” he said to her.

  “I think she’d rather herself.”

  “Mercy?”

  “Nice day like this,” Bonnie said, “gone to nothing in an instant. Makes you think.”

  *  *  *

  WHEN FITZGERALD GOT to the DNR building, Fern Lax waved him inside Mercy’s office without a word, closed the door behind him. Mercy was on the telephone. She looked at him, then swiveled around in her chair, back to him, facing the window that looked out on a wall of Norway spruce, rich green in soft sun. When she finished the conversation and turned back to him, he could see she wasn’t in much better shape than Bonnie Pym had been.

  “Tell me.”

  “Charlie Orr’s dead.”

  Fitzgerald looked back at her.

  “Last night sometime. In his tent.”

  “Heart?”

  “Willard Stroud thinks he was murdered. Charlie was probably on his cot, reading, a light on, and someone shot him through the tent wall. Billie Berry, one of the campground hosts, found him. I just got back from there.”

  “Nothing could be done?”

  “Stroud had an emergency crew out, but it was way too late. Slocum Byrd thinks Charlie was dead several hours before he was found.”

  “Out on the river,” Fitzgerald said, “I heard the siren.” Then he said, “Murdered?”

  “Shotgun—and more than one shot. What else could it be?” Mercy stopped. “Why’d you say ‘heart’?”

  “Charlie had a heart attack, way back. That was when he started coming up here all summer, staying in the tent. It was a fairly mild attack, but I suppose it brought intimations of mortality. You have to start doing what you want to do.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “You probably did. You’ve just forgotten.”

  “I wish to God it had been his heart.”

  “If anything.”

  “Yes,” Mercy said, and abruptly turned away, giving him her back.

  *  *  *

  SHE DIDN’T FEEL like lunch, but a walk in the town park was better than staying in the office, the two of them trying not to look at one another. She told Fern Lax she would be back in an hour or so in case the sheriff’s office called again. Or if Burt or Billie Berry called.

  In the park, walking the pine-chip path along the placid East Branch, Mercy explained that she had been on the phone with Willard Stroud when Fitzgerald came to the office. “Something he hadn’t got around to asking me at Rainbow Run. Only three campsites were occupied last night. He wanted to know if that was unusual.”

  “Occupied in addition to Charlie’s site?”

  Mercy nodded. “And the host couple’s. I told him it was more or less normal, given the time of year and the nature of the campground. The end of July can be pretty slow before the August rush.”

  “And the trico hatch.”

  “That brings in the fishermen—and usually only fishermen camp at Rainbow Run. That used to be the case, anyway. In the old days.”

  “Before my time,” Fitzgerald said. “You had to have a fishing license to camp, right?”

  “Before my time, too. But that was the deal: fishermen only. Imagine trying to pull that off these days. You’d have civil-liberties types all over you. Back then, the campground was pretty primitive: couple outhouses, water pump, no designated campsites, no fees. All you needed was a license in your possession, not that anyone probably ever checked. You could camp right on the edge of the river, roll out of your tent and go fishing, which was good along that stretch of water. There weren’t any canoe liveries in Ossning then and not as many cabins along the mainstream. The river was pretty much entirely for fishermen.”

  “The way God intended.”

  “Then the park service came in and redesigned the campground, moving everything back from the river, putting in the loop roads and the campsites, improving the facilities. Rainbow Run became a regular fee-required state forest campground, open to anyone. I understand there was some grumbling from fishermen, but they didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Canoeists wanted to use the campground, just plain campers and families, all sorts of folks—you couldn’t restrict it to one group. And you couldn’t have campsites anywhere people wanted. There was some erosion of the riverbank, too much danger of fires. The campground had to be laid out and run in a professional manner. And that’s what happened.”

  “Start with perfection,” Fitzgerald said, “aspire to progress. The American way.”

  “The Ossning field office is in charge, which is why Stroud called me out there. Day to day I don’t get much involved personally, and neither does Stroud. I talk with the host couple a few times during the summer, but our enforcement and maintenance people run the show. Stroud has a deputy drive through the campground on a regular basis, keeping an eye out. High school kids from town out partying are about the only problem we’ve had.”

  “Recently?”

  “A few years ago. Stroud started arresting kids for underage drinking, hauling them before a judge. That did the trick.”

  “They party somewhere else, you mean.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And no other problems out there?”

  “Nothing big that I can remember. Fern is checking the
files to make sure.”

  “What’s Stroud think?”

  “About who killed Charlie?” Mercy stopped walking, turned away, looked out at the river. “You should see the size of the chubs in here. Kids catch them. You wouldn’t believe how big.”

  Fitzgerald said, “I brought a bottle of wine from home. I was going to pick up bread and cheese, but I didn’t get that far. We could go back to the Cherokee, pull the cork.”

  “I’m working.”

  “I know.”

  Mercy turned back to him, took his arm, reversed direction on the pine-chip path. “What difference does it make?”

  *  *  *

  BUT ONCE BACK in the Cherokee, she didn’t want the wine. She just wanted to sit a while longer and look out at the river before she went back to the office.

  “Wine’s better with food,” Fitzgerald said.

  “It’s not that. It’s just—”

  “Charlie.”

  “No one should die like that. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not.” Then Fitzgerald said, “Charlie didn’t care for wine. He was a whiskey man. When I first met him up here, he always had a flask in his fly vest, cheap stuff, Heaven Hill or something. One day I stopped at his campsite with a bottle of Irish, John Jameson, and we tried it out. Charlie said it was okay, which was his way, never too much immediate enthusiasm. But after that, I noticed he always bought good Irish whiskey for his flask.”

  “Charlie wasn’t a drinker.”

  “I didn’t mean that. He just liked a nip now and then. And he liked to puff away on a pipe on the river, keeping the mosquitoes off. Charlie enjoyed life’s little pleasures.”

  “He lived the way he wanted. You can’t say that about many people.”

  “Thoreau comes to mind.”

  “What?”

  “You’re right,” Fitzgerald said. “Charlie was pretty unique. I’m going to miss him.”