“The lights, then?”
“They might be moving the stuff out, bringing it out to Pomeroy Road or one of the old logging roads.”
“The bloodstains?”
A stick snapped in his fingers, and his hands suddenly felt moist. “Well, if they’re into drug smuggling, maybe…”
“Yeah, I know. They gotta protect what they’re growing.”
The chief tapped out his pipe on a tree trunk, the noise sounding like he was tapping something hollow. Even though it was now completely dark, he knew what the chief was doing, just from the sounds. The scritch-scritch as he cleaned the pipe’s bowl with his penknife. The rustle of paper as he refilled the bowl with tobacco. And the scratch-growl as he lit a match and the sucking noise as he puffed the pipe back to life. It was a comforting sound, and even though it was going to be a cold night-it was a week until Halloween-he felt quite warm. But then he shivered, remembering a news photo he had seen of some captured marijuana growers from out West. They were all armed with automatic weapons. Now he wished he had worn his bulletproof vest.
“Chief,” he said, his voice sounding loud in the dark. “Do you want me to get the shotguns from the cruiser?”
There was a pause, and Jay wondered if the chief hadn’t heard him, and then he said, “Nooo, I don’t think so, Jay. I think we’re all set.”
“All right.”
The log he was sitting on was suddenly uncomfortable. It felt as though a piece of broken-off branch was now jutting into his right thigh, but as he started to move, he stopped. His feet were rustling the leaves and branches on the ground and it was making too much noise. Someone (or something, a part of him thought) might hear him, and he didn’t want that, not at all. It had gotten so dark that he had a hard time making out the shape of the chief sitting near him, even with the glow from the pipe’s ember, and the police cruiser was a dark bulk in the shadows. He suddenly remembered all those childhood stories, the tales told around Boy Scout campfires, of terrible bears and creatures in the forests, the abandoned mines that held crazed hermits, and the ten-foot-tall Windigo, which ate human flesh.
Jay tried to push the dark thoughts out of his mind, and he touched his holstered pistol, but it was small comfort. He looked all around him, seeking a light, something warm, something familiar, a streetlight or a headlight or a lit window from a house miles away, but there was nothing save the darkness and the faint shapes of the trees. He remembered what the chief said, of hundreds of miles of woods stretching all the way into Canada and beyond, and he thought again of what type of people just might live in those woods, hiding themselves and everything else from the outside world. He had a feeling that he and the chief were outnumbered and exposed, being watched and evaluated, and he wished they were in the cruiser, the engine running, the radio playing, and the doors locked. He looked up at the sky and saw a few stars and the darker bulk of the nearby hills, and he was about to make up his mind to ask the chief if they could go into the cruiser.
Then the lights came.
About six hours earlier they had stopped at the home of Agatha Tate, who had called the chief about the lights and who was also the mother of Brian Tate, the chairman of the three-member board of selectmen. He had gone with the chief and as they drove in the old Ford cruiser (the odometer was on its second trip to one hundred thousand miles) the chief explained the complaint.
“Sure, she might sound nuts, Jay,” he had said, steering with one hand and holding his pipe in the other. “Martians landing in her backyard and killing people. But she is a taxpayer, and she is the mother of Brian Tate. Brian’s got a lot of power here in Crawford, and my budget’s coming up for review next month. Brian and I get along all right now, but come budget time, he’s also gonna remember that we helped out his momma, and that might help us get a new cruiser. This is Crawford, Jay, not Brockton or Medford. People take their police work seriously up here.”
Which certainly was true, Jay thought. Complaints here in Crawford that wouldn’t have even been logged in at his old job in Massachusetts-like bent car radio antennas or broken mailboxes-not only were they reported here, but the people in town actually expected you to go out and investigate them. And follow up with a phone call or a visit a week or so later, to give them an update.
Mrs. Tate’s house was the last one on the dirt road, a two-story wooden structure that looked as if it was at least two hundred years old. Any paint on the thin clapboards had faded away to a dull gray, and the yard was full of a mishmash of old barrels, rotting boxes, piles of rusting chicken wire, and scraps of wood. Cats and chickens prowled and pecked around a rust-colored 1940s-era Ford with no wheels and no roof.
Inside the house it was tough going, with piles and piles of yellowed newspapers and magazines, tied together with twine, blocking the floors and hallways. The floors were made of wide, rough-hewn planks, and even more cats had the run of the house inside. Mrs. Tate was sitting at a wooden kitchen table, puffing on a cigarette. She was in her late eighties, thin and stooped over, wearing a shapeless flowered dress. Her skin was wrinkled and looked dry, and her eyeglasses had thick lenses. Her hair was so thick and blond it had to be a wig. She was hard of hearing, and the chief had to almost yell at her to be understood. Mrs. Tate shouted back, as if she thought everyone had the same level of hearing as she.
“It’s been like this, Frank,” she yelled, her hands quivering as she moved an ashtray closer to her. “Every goddamn Saturday night the past month they’ve been landing up there in the ravine. I seen the lights, every Saturday night. ‘Course, I ain’t dumb enough to take a peek up there at that moment, so I goes up Sunday morning, before my son Brian picks me up for church. Sure enough, there’s bloodstains up there on the ground. It’s a scary thing, Frank, to think of what they’re doing.”
“Who do you think’s up there, Aggie?” the chief asked, his voice still loud, his hands politely folded in front of him on the table.
“Hmmph,” she grunted. She reached behind her on a cutting bench and pulled down a few newspapers. Jay recognized them instantly as the tabloids one saw at the supermarket checkout line. One headline read: UFO ALIENS KIDNAPPED MY TWINS. Jay felt like rolling his eyes. What a way to spend a day.