Part 3 (2/2)
”Y-yes. He-he had been in a few times and he, um, he emptied my septic tank last summer.”
”Oh?”
”Well, he didn't, but his crew did. Weston never handled the field work. Not that he couldn't, mind you,” she added quickly, ”but he was more focused on the business end of things. Speedy Septic didn't live up to the speedy name by any means, but they got the job done. Hank Reid, however, had all sorts of trouble. They tried to empty his septic tank in the middle of mud season, and the dang thing floated up out of the ground. Poor Hank called in Jake Brunelle to replace all the pipes. Cost him thousands, which Hank doesn't have-or at least he'd like us to think he doesn't have it, what with the way he keeps that house of his.”
”A regular trip down memory lane,” Mills remarked. ”He must get a decent pension from the school, though. He worked there as a janitor all his life.”
”Mmm,” Alma agreed. ”So what happened? Did Allen fall into the well and break his neck?”
”He was shot,” Nick stated.
”Shot? You mean he was murdered?”
”Could have been an accident,” Mills once again a.s.serted.
”Not if someone didn't report it. You remember that case in Jacksonville a few years back? The kid was tried for second-degree murder because he left the man wounded and crying for help.”
Mills raised an admiring smile at both Alma's memory and her understanding of the legal system. Smiled, that is, until he recalled that her knowledge stemmed from personal loss. ”He sure was.”
”And, despite all the guns out there, fatal hunting accidents don't happen as often as you'd think. So either way, this is gonna wind up as a murder investigation,” Alma announced and then folded her arms across her chest triumphantly. ”So you still gonna claim you're looking into an accident?”
”Nope. I'm gonna ask you all to leave.”
”Leave? But this is our home,” Stella argued.
”You can come back once we do what we need to do. Until then, you'll have to stay elsewhere.”
”But Weston was shot outside, by the well,” Nick spoke up. ”Why do we have to leave the house?”
”Weston's body might have been found out in your yard, but we don't know for certain he was shot there. That open back door gave Weston, or his shooter, full run of the place. Heck, if it was premeditated, the shooter could have been waiting in your kitchen. Now look,” Mills's face softened. ”I know you folks are eager to move into your new home, but I can't let you trample over potential evidence. I promise we'll try to wrap things up quick. Until then, Alma can help you find a motel-”
”Motel?” Alma interrupted. ”Why, Charlie Mills, it's nearly Columbus Day-you know the whole state's overrun with leaf-peeping flatlanders!”
”Flatlanders?” Stella asked.
”Oh, all the people who come here from New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and think they own the place.”
Stella flashed Nick a worried glance.
Alma drew a hand to her mouth. ”Oh, I am sorry! I didn't mean the two of you! I mean the folks who come up here and block up the roads with their SUVs, expect traffic to wait for them when they walk into the middle of the road, and pollute the place with noise and trash. By the end of the season, you'll be sick of 'em too. My point was that inn and motel rooms are as scarce as hen's teeth right now. But don't you two worry; I can put you up, at least until deer season starts.”
”I thought it already had.”
”No, that's bow and arrow deer season,” Mills explained. ”Alma's talking about deer rifle season, which is the second week of November.”
Stella couldn't envision shooting deer with anything other than a camera, but she kept her opinions to herself. ”It's very sweet of you to put us up at your place, Alma. Thank you so much. I promise we won't inconvenience you for long. As soon as we can get a room elsewhere, we'll be out of your hair. Right, Nick?”
”Absolutely. Once the flatlanders are finished decimating the town, we'll check into whatever decent motel is still standing. Unless, of course, we're able to move in here by then.”
”Oh, you're not gonna be in my hair at all,” Alma said pleasantly. ”Our place is barely big enough for me and my brother, Raymond. No way I could fit another person in it, let alone two. But Raymond has a hunting camp just a few miles from here. It's just one room, and it's not winterized, but it's not so cold at night that you two can't manage. What do you say?”
Stella and Nick once again exchanged worried glances before replying in unison, ”Hunting camp?”
CHAPTER.
4.
DECIDING THAT IT was easier to leave the moving truck at the farmhouse than to attempt to steer it through the woods surrounding the hunting camp, Nick and Stella retrieved their suitcases from the truck's cab, flung them into the back of Alma's black Ford F-150 pickup, and followed her back through town in the Smart car.
Lined with a mix of two-story brick storefronts and white clapboard buildings, Teignmouth's Main Street was the quintessential New England thoroughfare. Marble sidewalks and granite curbs provided pedestrians with a safe path between the many shops and eateries. A center median separating the two lanes of traffic had been planted with rows of yellow and rust chrysanthemums.
Indeed, Teignmouth could easily stand in for the setting of one of Norman Rockwell's famous paintings. Stand in, that is, if the sparkling white sidewalks and the newly paved road weren't awash with rain, swarms of tourists, and close to one hundred idling automobiles.
The brake lights on the F-150 glowed red in the gathering twilight as Alma slowed behind the long queue of cars that clogged Main Street, all of which bore license plates from places other than Vermont. She thrust her head out of the driver's-side window and motioned to the Buckleys to do the same.
Nick rolled down his window.
”See what I mean? Two weeks every October. Two weeks! And Sheriff Mills thought you'd get a hotel room. Ha!” she shouted before pulling her head back inside the cab of the truck.
Nick closed his window and wiped the raindrops from his face. ”She's right. This is like midtown during rush hour.”
”Or any day the president is in town.”
”Gridlock for the president, I understand,” Nick complained. ”But these people are here to look at leaves.”
”I don't understand it either. The traffic wasn't this bad when we drove through this afternoon.”
”Probably because it wasn't raining then. And it wasn't supper time.”
”Ah, yes. Feeding time at the zoo,” Stella noted sarcastically.
The two vehicles traveled at a snail's pace through the b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper traffic before finally turning onto a side road that led to a dark, empty section of Route 4. After driving fifteen miles, they turned left onto a narrow dirt road that cut across the nearly thirty acres of pristine woodlands that surrounded Raymond Johnson's hunting camp.
During daylight hours, the scene was undoubtedly breathtaking, but without the sun's glow or even a street lamp to illuminate their brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges, the local sugar maples, yellow birches, ashes, and elms blurred together, forming an inky black canopy against the starless evening sky.
”Where the heck is this place?” an eager Stella asked from the pa.s.senger seat. ”It feels like we've been driving forever.”
”It's a hunting camp, honey. You're not going to find it alongside a strip mall,” Nick explained as his knees banged and sc.r.a.ped against the dashboard with every twist and b.u.mp in the road.
Nick seldom drove their car. Whereas Stella's job sometimes required her to travel to museums in the outlying boroughs, Nick's position at the US Forest Service's New York City Urban Field Station had been a short subway ride from his and Stella's Murray Hill apartment building. And, while most of Stella's friends had married and settled in the suburbs, Nick's buddies either lived locally or just over the bridge in New Jersey.
The decision to purchase an automobile was therefore entirely Stella's, and the moment she spotted the bright yellow coupe, she fell in love. Fuel-efficient, easy to park on crowded city streets, yet youthful and trendy in appearance, she thought it the ideal vehicle for an urban couple in their mid to late thirties. Nick, on the other hand, was left wanting more-of everything. Likening the experience to piloting an airplane from a coach seat, Nick was never comfortable driving the Fortwo. Indeed, even its bright yellow color had spurred him to dub the car ”the pee-mobile.” Yet, for the sake of marital harmony, he agreed to the purchase and silently suffered through taking Stella on the odd shopping trip or visit to his mother-in-law's.
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