Below the Tree Line Page 14

  “I get it, I suppose. To add it to all the other useless land I have and can’t sell.” Helena didn’t look pleased. “Sasha accompanied me when I went to update my will and she had one done at the same time. She said she should, now that she was a landowner.” Helena brushed a wisp of hair from her eyes. “That was so typically Sasha—she’d do what she was supposed to even if it seemed silly. She had property, so she got a will.”

  “Was Kyle in the will?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Do you think Kyle knew?”

  “Oh, yes, he knew. She told him she was doing this.”

  “Was he angry?”

  Helena stifled a laugh. “Probably. He didn’t like people disagreeing with him.”

  Across the room, the almost ex-boyfriend leaned against the door jamb; his worn hiking boots testified to his love of the outdoors. His jeans were neatly pressed and his jacket tidy if old, perhaps secondhand. But his white shirt and sweater looked new. As she watched him, he listened intently to one of Padma’s stories. After a moment Felicity realized Helena was staring at her.

  “I wish she’d left him sooner.” Helena glanced over at Kyle.

  “I’ve never met him and I’ve wondered what he was like. From what I’ve heard about your daughter, he seems such an unlikely partner for her.”

  “She could have had someone with a real future,” Helena said, her sadness rolling through each word.

  Thirteen

  Felicity crossed the church parking lot, still thinking about Sasha Glover’s prescient decision to draw up a will after she took possession of the lot from Clarissa Jenkins. Helena Callahan had promised to let Felicity know if she decided to take any action, such as selling the land or leasing it for timbering. Felicity hinted she might be willing to purchase it.

  Her thoughts drifted to her last image of Kyle, and then to the way he and Lance had book-ended the church pew. From that she jumped at once to her new image of Lance as someone who played a lot of scratch tickets. Was he someone who would gamble on a piece of land rumored to hide a treasure? It sounded absurd, but then seeing him the other day with all those losing tickets seemed absurd. Felicity wondered what she would do if she suddenly found herself in competition with Lance for the same property. She was mulling this over when Josie Halloway fell into step beside her.

  When they reached her car, Josie unbuttoned her dark brown jacket, slipped it off, and folded it so the pink lining became the outside. She dropped it onto the back seat. “My funeral outfit. It depresses me.” She pulled out a light cotton golf jacket and slipped that on.

  “No Bruce,” Felicity said.

  “Would you believe me if I told you Kevin asked him not to talk to anyone? So he decided it would be better to stay home.”

  “Yes, I believe it. He didn’t want me around when he found me there at the garage looking over Clarissa’s sedan. Kevin’s afraid that if word gets out something was wrong with the car before it crashed, the rumors will get out of hand.”

  Josie winced. “I have a big mouth, I know. But I do know when to keep it shut.”

  Felicity slipped off her own jacket, draped it over her crossed arms, and leaned against Josie’s car. She wore black flats with almost no heel, a habit she’d picked up years ago when she missed a train in Albany because she couldn’t run fast enough in heels. She didn’t mind missing the train, but she did mind not being able to run. The heels went into the Salvation Army donation box.

  Josie fished in her pockets and pulled out a roll of Life Savers. She offered them to Felicity, who took a red one. She popped it into her mouth.

  “I wonder if they tested Clarissa for alcohol,” Josie said. Felicity squinted at her. “I mean, would they assume she was drunk because she was driving so erratically?”

  “I think they would test her for lots of things including alcohol.” Felicity rolled the Life Saver around her tongue. “Kevin said he didn’t notice anything when the EMTs were moving her out of the car.”

  Josie folded up the Life Saver package and slid it back into her pocket. “Sometimes I hope they find she was sober and then I hope they find that she wasn’t.” She frowned when she caught Felicity’s eye. “If she was drunk, then maybe what Bruce found means nothing. But then I’d hate to think Clarissa went so far downhill that she was getting drunk at seven in the morning. So maybe it’s better that something happened to her car, but then I can’t stand the thought of someone tampering with her car. And then I’m even more terrified to think that someone was skulking around our garage tampering with cars.” She clenched her fists inside the jacket pockets.

  “You’re going around in circles, Josie. But I know what you mean. We all leave our cars in Bruce’s lot. And the keys inside them.”

  “I don’t want to think how easy it was for someone to tamper with the car in the lot.”

  “I just can’t see Clarissa Jenkins or Sasha Glover in the middle of anything that would get them killed.” Felicity stood away from the car. She brushed down the back of her pants automatically, and then brushed off her hands. “Sasha came by the day after the accident to talk about Clarissa, how she felt the land was special and things like that.”

  “Hmm. Strange.”

  “Maybe. There’s a man offering a lot of money for farmland around here.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Felicity laughed. “Exactly. Those of us who live here don’t think the land’s worth anything.”

  “Have you met him?”

  Felicity shook her head. “But Sasha’s boyfriend thinks there’s something valuable on her land.”

  “Do you think Kyle and this buyer are after the same thing?”

  Felicity shrugged. The thought had crossed her mind, as well as the fear that Mr. Franklin Gentile had enough money to buy some local help, although that wasn’t what Josie had asked her. “What would it be, Josie? It’s not like we have minerals to exploit or a history of buried wealth or something to attract treasure hunters.” But Kyle and the buyer are definitely chasing after something, she thought.

  The evening could not come soon enough for Felicity. She led the sheep to the barn for the night, fed the animals inside and out, made supper, and built a small fire. When she settled in her chair in the living room, Miss Anthropy jumped into her lap and Shadow circled the rug in front of the fire. Felicity needed this time to shed her feelings of sorrow over Sasha’s death and the sadness lingering from the funeral. But then came the doubts about the two deaths.

  “You’re going to help me work this out, Miss Anthropy.” The cat purred and rubbed her nose along Felicity’s chin, and Felicity took that as a sign of agreement.

  In front of her, on the floor, lay a large map covering almost the entire town. To this had been added several hand-drawn property lines and odd scraps of historical information written in small cramped letters. Felicity leaned on her arm and peered down at the tidy or not-so-tidy blocks of land. She wondered now that she’d never paid that much attention to the map. Her sense of space and location stemmed from following her parents around the property, and she had absorbed their sense of place.

  As she looked at the individual blocks, she noted how the farm had been pieced together over the years, a wood lot this year and a wood lot a decade ago, and another wood lot decades before that. Little pieces here and there, more during years when times were good, and then decades of nothing. Several pieces had been added during the Great Depression, which made sense because people were desperate for cash. And then in the late 1950s a small piece of land that seemed too poor to care about, but it linked to another, larger piece that Felicity’s father had timbered every few years. A productive piece and a scrub lot together. Both came onto the farm while Felicity’s grandparents were still alive, before her parents married.

  Her father had told her stories about each piece, turning the patchwork quilt of low-value farm and woodland
into a mythic space. She leaned back in her chair and Miss Anthropy, annoyed at being disturbed, sat up and squinted at her. She blinked once and settled down again to continue her nap. Felicity scratched the cat’s head and behind her ears. And then she remembered the notes she’d taken in Sasha’s apartment. Sasha, or perhaps someone else, had marked four spots on the map Felicity had found in the bedroom.

  Felicity scanned her notes and then located the four spots on her own map. One sat along an old fire road. She had no notes for this piece. A second piece stood far to the north of her property and, again, she had no notes on it. A third piece seemed to fit the location of Zeke Bodrun’s cabin, and the fourth piece fit the description of the location of the plot Zeke had given to Clarissa.

  She got a magnifying glass from the desk and held it over the notes on various plots, moving past the four marked on Sasha’s map to plots she was familiar with. She paused at one plot to read the crabbed handwriting, which she recognized as her dad’s. The note read simply, Huston to Z. Bodrun, 5.5.51. The date seemed significant. Zeke had purchased that plot before her parents were adults, but perhaps around the time when Zeke and her granddad had been friends. This piece abutted another piece her grandfather had purchased a few years later. She put away the magnifying glass.

  Over the years she had walked with her dad through the woods, on the little trails he built, some of them linking deer paths. When he bought a lot that Felicity’s mother thought was worthless, and she rolled her eyes to let him know just how worthless, he only smiled and said, “It’s a buffer zone. Always good to have a buffer zone. Never know what might be out there.” Charity would shake her head and go back to whatever she’d been doing. Walter would wink at his daughter.

  “There’s always timber, Lissie. Even if it looks useless, there’s always timber.”

  This was mostly true. Their part of the state had never had a glorious history that left behind a residue for later searchers to uncover and resurrect. There were no elegant mansions, no grand hotels, no historic sites, no eccentric recluses hiding out. No rock piles suggesting early Nordic visitors or Indian settlements. It was poor farmland that had attracted those who couldn’t travel farther or who thought they could make something out of nothing. They were mostly wrong. The heyday had ended in closed mills and a notch on the rust belt.

  Her dad had been right, but not many people outside the area could have known that.

  “People are so greedy and so deluded,” Felicity said to the cat. Miss Anthropy opened one eye, purred, and went quietly back to sleep. Only then did she notice that Shadow was watching her, sprawled on the floor with both eyes focused on her, unblinking and still.

  Later that evening Felicity followed Shadow down the driveway, letting him snuffle his way along at his own pace. The dog had grown calmer, Felicity was getting used to the animal, and Miss Anthropy seemed to have accepted him.

  At the mailbox, she pulled out a manila envelope and opened it. She peered in and read Lance’s name at the top of a sheet of paper. Guessing this was the revised cutting plan, she pulled it out. She was right. She’d meant to speak to Lance at the funeral, but he’d left soon after the service and she hadn’t seen him at the funeral meats. It was good of him to come, Felicity had thought, even though he’d seemed unwilling to linger. And then she’d put him out of her mind.

  Under the ambient light, she scanned the description of work to be done. She thought she recognized the change in location but she hoped she was wrong. Curious and impatient, she dragged Shadow back to the house long before he was ready.

  After clearing the dining table of piles of miscellaneous clutter and papers, for the second time that evening she spread out the map. With Lance’s cutting plan in one hand, she leaned over the ridged and crumpled paper to get a clear sense of where he planned to work. Despite his earlier assurances, he wanted to come in from the northeast and cut a path through to a plot that had never been timbered, near where the bobcat had taken up residence. She recalled her dad’s comments about various plots, including this one.

  The three of them had gone out one spring to bring in blown-down trees for firewood, and her dad had pointed into the forest. “I tell people it’s of no use and you will too,” he told her. “Wood’s no good, land’s no good.” She was perhaps ten years old at the time, and she’d looked up at him and nodded, solemn with her new responsibility though she wasn’t sure what it was. She didn’t see anything special about the trees, and she hadn’t been able to decipher the smile on her mother’s face. The jagged-toothed saw rested on her mother’s shoulder. “She’ll remember, Charity. When the time comes, our little girl will remember. She may not understand now, but she will later, when we get there, and then she’ll remember.”

  That was what she’d been trying to recall when they’d come across the bobcat den.

  Felicity looked closer at the map. It was a small lot, marked as scrubby with no special trees, and it sat in the middle of the property. It wasn’t always the center of the farm, but over the years her parents and grandparents had bought up bits of land, so now the old plot was almost dead center. The plot itself had been forgotten until Lance told her she had to include it in the cutting plan now or in the near future. Which meant he’d been studying her farm more closely than she had.

  Identifying the lot Ezekial Bodrun had given Clarissa, and she’d given to Sasha, had been easy. That one was located on Old Town Road, and was just another part of the woods left to grow as they would. She had passed it most of her life without even thinking about it. It wasn’t her property, so she had paid no attention to it.

  Lance had tacked the small plot in the center of her property onto the cutting plan. Perhaps he hoped she wouldn’t notice, but this meant she’d have to revise once again. And she’d watch his reaction while she told him this. He was up to something—she was sure of that. But she didn’t know if he was after the same secret as Kyle. And then she’d walk over to Sasha’s plot and check on the boundaries, and then walk up to that plot that was so special to her dad. Since her father had managed most of the forestry planning until a few years ago, she was discovering there was more work than she’d anticipated. It was one thing to know all the trees and another to manage the paperwork.

  Fourteen

  An early morning shower the next day, Thursday, weighed down the stalks of the daffodils outside Felicity’s front door and lining one side of the barn. The raindrops hung like crystals on the yellow-and-white trumpets, and the color alone put a lift in her step. The shower left the air smelling clean but moldy beneath the canopy along Old Town Road.

  She moved gingerly among the small puddles dotting the nearly abandoned road, avoiding the obvious mud traps as she made her way past a falling stone wall on one side and a slanting shoulder on the other. She checked the GPS on her cell and concluded that in another hundred feet or so she would reach the corner of Sasha Glover’s property. She didn’t need the GPS coordinates, but she decided to learn to use the app in case some day she did need them. And now it was a game.

  The problem with old plot lines on maps was they had no corresponding markers on real land, at least not until developers arrived. She wanted to make sure she found the correct piece of property to explore. Also, she didn’t know how long this would take, but she wanted to give herself all the time she might need. She wore a backpack and carried a picnic lunch.

  The official entrance to the lot was a break in the century-old stone wall, its form changing as the ground around it rose or fell, trees dropped limbs, and snow and ice shifted the rocks. But the more obvious sign was a barely discernible row of ATV tracks going in and out on a narrow path. Felicity followed these into the lot, which looked like any other wood lot in the area. Some pine and arborvitae, a few old hardwoods that would be worth something in the future, and a lot of windblown trees rotting in marshy ground. But as she walked deeper in, she noticed something else, something she would ne
ver notice while walking or driving past.

  It was an old cellar hole, about forty feet from the entrance. She circled it. It wasn’t an unusual sight. And like many of the remnants of abandoned homes from past centuries, the corner of a foundation, set into a once-low hill, still declared itself although the ground had changed, settling and filling in over the decades. But there, in the cellar hole, someone had dug several holes, going deep and piling up the dirt in neat piles. Felicity grabbed a stick, knelt down, and peered into the holes, poking through the loosened soil. She saw nothing that would have told her that the site was valuable.

  She was used to seeing men and women, old and young, with metal detectors, searching for anything of interest in old cellar holes or wherever people might have lived and left behind an artifact or two. They might find an old horseshoe, perhaps a scrap of an iron cooking pot, but she’d never heard of anyone finding anything truly valuable.

  Ahead of her were several more holes. These had been dug earlier, perhaps in the fall, and the displaced dirt showed signs of having sunk into low mounds over the winter months, disappearing beneath fallen leaves and branches. The walls had begun to collapse, but the holes were still fully in evidence. Deeper into the woods were more piles of dirt fanning out in every direction, as though giant gophers had been digging tunnels and their entrances all over the New England landscape. Felicity checked the coordinates for the lot and began walking.

  For the next hour and a half, she crisscrossed the wood lot, approximately fifteen acres, counting holes and piles, but only the one cellar remnant. Each hole was about the same depth, and none was noticeably larger than another. Some of the holes had obviously been dug months ago, before the ground froze, the piles of dirt sinking lower and the walls of the holes beginning to fail. Some piles were more recent, evidently dug when the ground thawed in the warm winter. None seemed to be the last, successful one, and Felicity wasn’t even certain the digging had ended. Every minute she expected to hear someone calling out hey, what are you doing here? But she heard only her own footsteps crunching on the crusty earth.