She looked helplessly out across the desolate reach of the bayou. “But what for, Pete? What could anybody blow up here?”
He remembered something then, and he was beginning to understand. He stood up, feeling bitter disappointment again. “We’re wasting time, Pat,” he said wearily. “This hasn’t got anything to do with what we’re looking for.”
“What do you mean?” she asked wonderingly.
“Something that Talley girl told me about Max Easter’s being such a good fisherman. That’s all this is. He and some other man were dynamiting fish for the market. They shot at me to scare me off.”
“Well,” she said dispiritedly, “I guess we’d might as well go.”
“Yes. We’ve hit another dead end.”
When they reached the place she had found the lighter, she paused. “Do you want to look at that tree, anyway?”
He shrugged. They’d probably find nothing there either. It could have been coon hunters . . . “All right,” he said without interest. “It’ll only take a minute.”
She led the way. It was nearer a quarter mile than a hundred yards, but she went unerringly to it through the dense timber. The tree was a large red oak, and it had broken the tops out of two smaller ones as it crashed down. It had been felled with a saw, but no attempt had been made to cut it up.
“What do you suppose it was, Pete?” she asked.
Reno walked around the welter of limbs. It had been cut down sometime in the past month or two, for while the leaves were dead now none of them had fallen from the boughs. The trunk appeared to be sound, and had not been cut into anywhere, which ruled out the possibility of its having been a bee tree robbed of its wild honey.
“I don’t know,” he said curiously. “Doesn’t seem to be much point to it, does there?”
He had started to move on around to the other side when he halted suddenly, peering down into the screen of leaves. He dropped to his knees and pulled a few smaller branches aside, staring at the ground, his face puzzled.
“What is it, Pete?” she asked suddenly, standing behind him.
He reached in and scooped up something, and held his hand out. “Loose soil,” he said. “Not fresh, because it’s been rained on since it was dug up, but look.”
She saw it then. One clod of the heavy, black earth still bore the unmistakable flat mark of the spade.
She bent down beside him, excited again. “Then something, has been dug up here.”
“Dug up,” he said tersely. “Or planted.”
“What?”
“You’d better stand back, Pat. I’m going to see if I can break off some of these limbs.”
She stepped back and watched curiously as he began a furious assault on the brush. It was near the crown of the tree, and he was able to snap off most of the limbs by bending back on them with terrific bursts of energy. The ones that were too large to break had their smaller limbs broken off. He was sweating, and he began to pant with exertion.
In a few minutes he had a considerable area cleared. He could see it now, the thing he was looking for. It was a long, narrow, and just faintly outlined depression where the earth had settled. It ran back under the main stem of the tree, but some of it extended out into the area he had cleared.
Maybe I shouldn’t, with her here, he thought. Then he remembered the trailer. Evidence had a way of disappearing in this country. He stood up and took out his cigarettes. He gave her one and led her back to where she could sit on the log.
“I think you’d better stay here,” he said. “This may not be pretty.”
“I can stand it if you can,” she protested. He knew then he wasn’t fooling her any more. She was as aware as he was of what was under there.
He picked up one of the limbs he had broken off, cut a section about two feet long, and whittled the end of it flat. It wasn’t much, but it would do.
She remained where she was, but forgot to smoke the cigarette. It dropped, unnoticed from her fingers. He attacked the ground with his improvised digging instrument. The ground was soft, and came up easily. He threw it behind him with his hands, like a furiously digging terrier. In a few minutes the hole was a foot deep. Sweat ran off his face. Now he was nearly two feet down, bent forward with his hands in the hole, almost suffocated with the heat. He ran the stick into the soft earth again, pried up, and suddenly stopped. He backed away, feeling the sickness in his stomach.
Maybe she didn’t get the odor, he thought. There was no breeze at all. But she would soon. He had to get her away.
The thing to do was send her to camp to call the Sheriff’s office. Whatever was in here was going to be a job for identification experts anyway; he knew that now. It had to be done correctly, by men who knew what they were doing. And men with good stomachs too.
He turned and had started to rise out of the encircling brush when he heard her sudden, choked-off cry of terror. He swung fast, starting. She had her hand up over her mouth, and her eyes were wide with fear.
It was Max Easter. He had emerged from the brush twenty feet away and was watching them coldly, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trousers. And stuck in the same waistband, just in front of his right hand, was the black butt of a .45 automatic.
He removed the gun, caught the action in his other hand, slid it back and then forward, jacking a shell into the chamber, then shoved it back in his waistband.
“Just couldn’t leave things alone, could you?” he asked, without any emotion whatever. “Suppose you get over there with your lady friend and sit down. And throw away that stick.”
Reno had seen deadliness before, and he knew he was looking at it now. He let the stick slide from his fingers, and walked slowly over to Patricia. Easter watched them with the unwinking stare of a cat, saying nothing.
He could feel the sweat on his face and the tightness in his chest. Without looking around, he groped for one of her hands, and squeezed it. He could hear the shaky intake of her breath.
“All right,” he said at last. “Who is it?”
“Just have to know, do you?”
“That’s right,” Reno said. “And we will, as soon as they get him out.”
“No,” Easter said softly. “I don’t think anybody’s going to dig him up. But since there’s not much chance you’ll blab it around, I’ll tell you. His name was Robert Counsel.”
Sixteen
There was too much of it to take hold of all at once. At first Reno could grasp nothing except the incredible fact that he had finally caught up with Robert Counsel. The elusive phantom he had pursued so long was buried under the tangled branches of that tree. The questions were answered. Robert Counsel had been dead all the time, and this big, cold-eyed man with the gun in his belt was the one who had killed McHugh.
“You got away with it for a long time, didn’t you?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Easter said coolly. “I thought you’d get wise to yourself and mind your own business after that trailer disappeared, and you got conked that night.”
“Well, isn’t that too bad?” Reno asked. “So we could just go ahead and let my sister take the rap for killing McHugh.”
“McHugh?” Easter looked puzzled for an instant. “Oh, you mean the guy that actress shot. What’s he got to do with it?”
Reno stared. Was he dealing with a lunatic as well as a murderer? “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Except you killed him because he found out you killed Counsel.”
“You seem to be a little mixed up, friend,” Easter remarked calmly. “I haven’t killed anybody—yet.”
“So I suppose the pixies buried Counsel there, and wrote you a letter?”
“No. I buried him. And I enjoyed every bit of it, even spitting in his face. There’s only one thing I’d have enjoyed more, and that’s killing him. Somebody beat me to the honor.”