Shy One

The frozen earthen furrows and busted stalk stumps of the cornfield crunched under the wheels of my Lark station wagon. Over the next rise, I could see the scene of the accident. Golden sunbeams painted the bare frosty limbs of the forest to the north, gleamed on the weedy fieldstone boundary between this property and the next, and lit up what looked at first like a pile of scrap lumber. Beside that I could see, as I drew closer, an orange Dodge A100 pickup, and a white Ford ambulance, both streaming exhaust plumes like fluffy tails in the frigid air.

But the sheriffs hadn't made it yet. This did not surprise me. Americus was thirty miles off. If the call had hit at shift change, they'd have had no cars in our corner of the county. Which made me the first law on the scene.

Parking near the ambulance, I got out, and hoofed over that way, as always favoring my bad leg. The rescue guys exited their idling ambulance, where they'd been keeping warm while they waited. Both wore white uniforms and car coats, black ties and bus driver hats. One was a bear, the other a toothpick. "Nobody's touched anything," Bear, whom I recognized slightly, told me, his breath fogging the chill still air.

"Where's the casualty?" I asked.

"Still inside just the way we found him," Toothpick answered. Just then the Dodge pickup's doors opened like orange wings as a man and a woman climbed down. "Want us to bring him out?"

"Let me see first." From the pickup came toward us a man and woman I recognized. Chuck Shankle looked even grimmer than usual. And Mandy Miller had clearly been crying. No surprise, considering. "You two stay back, please," I called over to them.

"I want to see Matt," Mandy sobbed. "Could you please get him out of there."

Chuck went over and took her in his arms. "We'll do that directly," I said, as kindly as I could. "Just give me a minute, please."

"You ain't gonna like this," Bear murmured.

I turned to the wreck. It had been a hunting blind, one of the newfangled ones, an eight foot wood cube bolted to thick wood posts a dozen feet off the ground. The boys had slapped it together from recycled planks and salvaged windows, and positioned it with a commanding view of the fields to the north and south, the meadows to the west, and the forest to the east. Now, toppled to the ground, it was a mangled funny-sided jumble of splintered boards and busted glass and ripped shingles.

Stepping over the twisted remains of the handmade wood ladder, I went to the door, now aimed darkly toward the sky, Bear and Toothpick at my elbows. The blind's insides were chaos. I saw a small ice chest, dumped over. Thermos, chip box, and tin cups. A couple of coats and a football helmet. At least two hunting rifles and ammunition.

Matt Miller lay where gravity had left him, in a crumpled rag-doll ball at what was now the low end of the blind, blue-trousered butt facing up, face averted. He had that absolute terminal stillness that I had seen overseas hundreds of times. For all of that he looked all right. Aside from a little blood, there were no signs of fatal violence, at least from my vantage point.

"Move left," Bear murmured. "Bend a little."

I did so, stooping, and there it was. From Matt's blood-soaked abdomen emerged the wood handle of a steak knife. I took a deep breath and stepped back. "Okay. Pull him out. Careful of the knife; make sure it stays put."

Leaving them to their work, I went over to the orange pickup. Mandy sat sideways behind the wheel, facing out the open door. She was a hefty gal in her late thirties, honey-haired and sweet-faced with hard-working hands. She wore a pea coat, dark pants, and work boots. Chuck Shankle had been half-kneeling on the ground at her feet, smoking a cigarette. At my approach he rose and shuffled toward me as if to intercept. His moves were calculated and physical like the athlete he had been: basketball, I remembered, and a bit of a star, way back when. "He's dead, right?"

Glancing toward Mandy, I just gave a single nod. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders quivering. Her fingers muffled the keening. From behind me came a vehicle sound. I turned to see a black Chrysler Enforcer rumble across the frozen furrows, light bar dark, County decals gleaming. It parked by my car and from it emerged Brian Haven, solid and natty in his winter blues. As he walked toward us, leather creaking, hardware jingling, he put on his Mountie hat, squaring it to perfection. He was young, very able, and always seemed pleased to be on the job. "What do we got, Constable?"

I briefed him with terse words, then turned back to Chuck. He was a knotty little guy with a thin hawkish face and dark shaggy hair under his black ball cap. He wore jeans and denim jacket and did not seem to mind the cold. I nodded toward the fallen blind. "So you were in there with him?"

"Yessir," Chuck said, eyes darking back and forth between me and the deputy. "Deer hunting."

"Pretty late in the morning for that, isn't it?" Brian asked, gum bouncing in his jaws.

"This was a couple hours ago," Chuck said. "We were about finished up. Hadn't gotten nothin, not even a shot."

"And this contraption of yours, this hunting blind," Brian said, using his big hands to illustrate, "the sucker just, you know, up and fell down, huh?"

I signaled time-out. "Hey Chuck, just tell us the story your way."

"Right," he said, pronouncing it rat. He screwed up his narrow face, concentrating. "We were both up inside. I was unloading my rifle. And the wind was blowing pretty good. And the blind, she just all of a sudden started, you know, did a wobble over this-a-way, and a wobble over that-a-way. And me and him look at each other. And then she commenced to twisting, and, uh, snapping sounds from down below. And I'm thinking jeez Louise, and Matt, he yells something. And then downstairs she made like the cereal, you know: snap crackle pop. And then over we go and hit the ground: boom."

It was a tale I knew he planned to tell in the Pink Palace for the next forty years. And as things turned out, the tale has been told there – has become the stuff of legend.

Though not exactly the way Chuck expected.

---

I turned slightly so I could see the progress of Bear and Toothpick as they carefully, almost reverently, extracted Matt Miller from the wrecked blind. Outside, in the light, he was bloodier. "What happened then?"

"Wellsir, I was knocked out pretty good," Chuck said. "Don't know how long. I come to, I crawled myself out, I got in the truck and ran for the house to get help." He glanced from me to the deputy and back. "But when I got back, I found something you need to see."

The ambulance guys had Matt on a stretcher now. As they picked him up, Mandy ran over and bent and hugged her husband, her wails filling the cold air. "The knife," I said to Matt. "First tell us about the knife."

"The one in Matt's stomach?"

"There some other knife we should know about?" Haven grunted.

"I don't know how that happened," Chuck said. "Just before we went over, Matt was cutting hisself a hunk of cheese."

"And the knife ended up in his gut," I finished.

"I don't know. Stabbed himself by accident, I guess. I was knocked out." Chuck's jaw clenched. "But listen up, there some, uh, evidence you gotta see."

He led us over to the blind. From over the hill came another car, the coroner this time. Getting congested out here, I thought. Much more of this and I'll have to stripe off parking spaces. Chuck stopped on the section of ground over which the blind had stood, between the busted-off stumps of the four wood legs. Bending to one of them, he pointed. "Check that out."

Haven and I huddled over it, looked at each other, and straightened. Chuck said, "See? It's a booby-trap. "And I know who done it."

"Just hold the phone," the deputy said. He and I checked the other three stumps. Same story. I felt sick. Another deliberate killing, second one this year, right in my lap.