“Hey, Bo. You’re getting to be a regular visitor. Come on in.”
The sheriff settled himself in a chair next to the desk. “Well, I was in the neighborhood, and a little bit more sober than the last time I was. Sorry about that. I’d had a bad night.”
“I know the feeling. Coffee?”
“No thanks, I just had some. Tell you the truth, this isn’t entirely a social call.”
“Oh? Something official I can help you with?”
“Well, not exactly official, either, I guess. I hear you’ve taken an interest in cartography.”
“Boy, word sure moves fast, doesn’t it.”
“Small town. Word doesn’t have far to go.”
“Yeah, I was trying to locate a map of the area before the lake was built.”
“And one after it was built.”
“Oh, I located that. A Mrs. O’Neal down at the courthouse had one squirreled away. I must say, she wasn’t too eager to help me find an earlier map.”
“Well, Nellie O’Neal’s been in the courthouse for so long, she sort of takes a proprietary interest in her records, I guess.”
“I mentioned my interest to Enda McCauliffe,” Howell said, beating the sheriff to the punch, “and he wasn’t too anxious to help, either.”
“Oh, there’s nothing real significant about that. Most folks hereabouts would have the same attitude. Y’see, this area around here was just an unproductive backwater before the lake came. Folks’ memories of that time are pretty hard, I guess. It wasn’t easy to scratch out a buck around here. Now, it’s different, of course. We’ve got the lake and everybody’s real proud of it. I guess we like to think of our county the way it is instead of the way it was.”
Howell wanted to yell bullshit at Scully and demand to know what was going on. “I see,” he said.
“I hear you took an interest in Eric Sutherland’s office, too,” the sheriff said, still friendly.
“The little place down from his house? I had a brief peek in there from the outside; just wondered what the place was.”
Scully’s demeanor changed ever so slightly. “Looks like somebody might’ve had a little peek on the inside.”
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“I mean a little breaking and entering.”
“Was a lot of stuff taken?”
“What do you think might get taken from Eric Sutherland’s office?”
“Beats me. What’s he got in there?”
“Maps.”
Howell let the word sit right there.
“Tell me, John, you acquainted with a H. M. MacDonald?”
“H. M.? Don’t think so. Went to school with a Bob MacDonald. Don’t remember a MacDonald since. Local fellow?”
Scully shook his head. “Nope. Nobody around here by that name. Not a MacDonald in the county.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, Mr. Sutherland found a credit card from a store with that name on it, right at the door to his office. Card was bent, sort of. Looked like it might have been used to jimmy the lock. Tell me, what did you do after the Sutherland party the other night?”
“Came back here, cooked a steak, ate it, passed out pretty early. We had a lot to drink at Sutherland’s.”
“Scotty with you, then?”
“Yep, for dinner.”
“What about after dinner?”
“Is that an official question, Bo?”
“Not really.”
“None of your business, then.”
“Did you go out at all after you came back from the party?”
“Nope.”
“Take your boat out?”
“I just said I didn’t go out again.”
“Sorry, John, I don’t mean to make this sound like a third degree.”
Howell grinned slightly. “That’s just what it sounds like.”
Scully chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it does. Why did you want the maps?”
“Oh, I just got to looking out the window, there, a lot, and I wondered what was under the lake, that’s all. I’d about forgotten it until you brought it up.” Howell leaned forward. “What is under the lake, Bo?”
Scully threw back his head and laughed. “So that’s it, John. Well, you’re not the first. People seem to think that when a big lake like this gets built, there’s all sorts of stuff under it. There are still stories among the schoolkids around here about houses and farms and trees being down there. They used to say that when the lake got down low in the winter, when they were using a lot of water for power, then an old bridge and a church steeple would surface again. That the sort of thing you had in mind?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, let me tell you what they do when they build a lake, buddy. They tear down all the houses and sell what scrap they can; they cut all the trees for timber and pulp, and to keep ‘em from being hazards to navigation later, and they painstakingly demolish every standing thing in the whole area that’s going to be underwater. So if you want to know what’s under the lake, the answer is a plain, old-fashioned nothing.”
“What about the O’Coineen place?” How-ell asked, and watched Scully closely for his response.
The sheriff didn’t bat an eye. He shrugged. “Well, I guess that was a little different. By the time Mr. Sutherland and Donal O’Coineen had done their deal, the water had already risen against a roadbed that cut across his place. Right after that, before the crew could get in there to break the place up, the roadbed gave way, and the place was flooded.”
“That’s Sutherland’s story, is it?”
Scully blinked. “I never had any reason to doubt it. Do you?”
Howell leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “Well, let’s see, now,” he said. “O’Coineen, who’s held out bitterly against Sutherland for years, suddenly gives in and sells; his house vanishes under the lake, then he and his whole family disappear and are never heard from again. Come on, Bo, you’re a lawman; doesn’t that sound just a little too convenient?”
Scully looked at him in surprise. “But they were heard from again,” he said.
Howell sat up straight. “By whom?”
“By me, for one. Listen, I don’t know whether you knew this, but I was engaged to marry Donal O’Coineen’s oldest daughter.”
Howell sat back in his chair. “Joyce? The blind one?”
“That’s right. We went together since high school, then started making plans to marry after I got out of the service. I was working for the county by then – I was a deputy – and that meant Eric Sutherland to Donal O’Coineen. He was pretty much of a hard case. Anyway, the whole business about the lake started to get in our way. Old Donal looked at me as being on the other side, which I guess I was, technically, but I never went against him; I stayed out of it. Still, things got tenser and tenser, and finally, Joyce backed out of the engagement. I guess it got to the point where she figured she had to choose between her family and me, and she made her choice.”
“How long was this before O’Coineen finally sold out?”
“A couple or three weeks, I guess. Less than a month, anyway.”
“And you heard from them afterwards? Personally?”
“That’s right. A couple of weeks after they left the county I got a letter from Joyce – her little sister wrote it for her.”
“Kathleen?”
“That’s right. She was Joyce’s eyes in a lot of ways. Anyway, I got this letter from Joyce saying goodbye. It was postmarked in Nashville, and she said Donal was taking them further north, maybe Virginia or Kentucky, to look for some land, and we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Donal had money in the bank here, of course. What Sutherland had paid him for the land. But Joyce said he was bitter and wouldn’t touch it. He’d drawn out just about everything else he had – and believe me, he was pretty well off – several months before he left. They’d stopped doing business in town, they took Kathleen out of school, and they just wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody local anymore.”