A Retrospection

On the Tuesday, when the county had gone home and the state patrol had taken the last of the diagrams and there was nothing left to do but wait for a coroner's jury and an inheritance court, Ronan Varley sat down in the front room at Harrow Reach with four of us — Cole Vandermeer, Dr. Willa Cray, Wren Ashcombe, under an agreement of immunity she had signed that morning in the presence of a lawyer from the city, and me, with a notebook, which he asked me to use — and worked through the whole of it, in order, as he had worked it out.

I have set his account down in his own phrasing where I could, and in mine where I could not, and I have checked every fact in it against the county's file and against the documents in the fireproof boxes, and if I have any doubt about one part of it, I say so in the place where the doubt belongs.

The family, first, and he did it standing at the window with the file open on the sill, because he wanted the room to be able to see the paper.

"In 1889," he said, "the head of this house wrote his youngest brother out of his will over a debt and a fire and a girl."

"An embezzlement," said Dr. Cray.

"Over a debt and a fire and a girl," said Varley, "and the brother was a chemist with a college education and no money, and he wrote nine letters asking to be restored." He held one of them up. "This is the second. Nobody answered any of them, and he died in 1897 in Oregon, and his son came back to this county in 1911, and in that same twelve months he buried a wife and changed his name." He laid a photocopy on the table and slid it down the length of it. "The petition is in the courthouse basement. Vandermeer to Ashcombe, on the grounds of a family dispute with which the petitioner declines to burden the court. That is your 1911 woman, doctor — the one found on the beach road, who has been in your list of the twelve for twenty-two years — and the reason the name changed in the same year is that a man who has lost his wife to a thing his family calls a curse does not want his son to carry it into a schoolroom."

Willa Cray read the petition twice, and when she spoke her voice had changed.

"I have had that woman in a file since 2004," she said, "and I never once had the sense to look at the year written beside her."

"It is not a sense," said Varley. "It is an afternoon in a basement. Somebody has to spend it." He turned the page. "Corbin Ashcombe worked as a mechanic and then as a county agricultural agent, and taught his own son to be a man who was useful to other men's land, and that son's son was Emmett Scully, born 1970, adopted 1981, educated on scholarships and state grants, a good student of biology with a talent for animals."

"He did not know," said Wren Ashcombe, quietly, from the window. "I want to say that in this room. He never told him who he was. He applied twice as a biologist out of Quillon and he was refused twice as a stranger, and the second refusal came in the same week that his mother died, and he read that sentence in the kitchen of the house he had then, and he went out and sat in the truck, and when he came back in he was a different man — and I was not in that kitchen and have never pretended to have been, because I did not meet him for years afterward and he told me the whole of it himself, on the third night we were together. I have known him since I was nineteen years old, and I have watched him be that different man for all of that time." She turned round. "That is not an excuse. I am not giving you an excuse. I am telling you the date, because you said you wanted dates."

"April the eleventh, 2001," said Varley. "It is in the file. Read it."

She did not read it. Varley read it, out loud, all three sentences of it, in the flat voice of a man reading a weather report, and when he came to the end of it — "I do not know on what basis of kinship you approach this office, and I advise you not to approach it again" — he let the sheet fall on the table, and nobody in that room said anything for a while, and Cole Vandermeer got up and put another log on the fire, which was a thing that did not need doing, and which I have thought about since.

The dog came twenty years later. Nobody in the Sacramento Valley would have sold a litter of that breeding to a man who kept it in a back yard, and Scully did not keep it in a back yard: he bought the litter in the spring of 2021 on the breeder's permit that came with the station, placed three of the four animals with farmers in two counties, and kept one. He kept the one that by ten months had outgrown every standard for the breed, the one the kennel's own register describes in the margin as oversize and unsound for showing — which is the paperwork of a man who has bought an animal that has been professionally written off as unshowable, and is therefore unremarkable to anybody who looks at the register — and which is why, when a visitor at his own station saw a pale animal standing above the shelter-belt in October and asked him about it, he was able to say "not one of mine" and mean it in every particular except the true one.

For three years, that animal was exercised at night, on a peat bog, by a man with a state survey permit to be on it. And on this point Varley was careful, and I will be careful with him: he got up out of his chair and walked it out while he said it, from the window to the door of that room, at the pace of an animal — three steps and a long pause, three steps and a long pause — and four people who had been in the dark with it understood what he meant.

"Not to bite him. To come at him, high on the shoulder, out of the fog, on a line, without a sound, and to keep coming. And to break off if the man stands still." He stopped at the door. "That is not a killing. That is a drive. A small animal that runs away is driven toward the pens. A man who runs is driven the same way, and he runs west or south, because that is where the ground lets him run, and in Mercy County everybody knows what happens to a man who goes off the flags on the Drumble."

"He did not need the dog to kill the young man," said Varley. "He needed it to move him ninety yards off a path. The bog has been killing people on that coast for four thousand years and the county reads every death in it as the family's bad luck, which is exactly the verdict he wanted, and it needs no accomplice, no weapon and no body." He looked at Cole. "He put the animal on your great-uncle because your great-uncle was seventy-four years old and had a bad heart, which the whole county knew, and because a man who is written to by a friend he trusts will walk out of his own door in the dark without a torch, a quarter of an hour before he was asked for, because he was ashamed of being seen going. And he put the animal on you, on Saturday, because you are thirty-four years old and in good health and it was never going to stop your heart. It was going to make you run, and the ground was going to do the rest."

"And Denny Roux?"

"Denny Roux," said Varley, "is the reason this case is closed. He is also — I am going to say this once, and Simon, you may put it in your report, because the county is going to have to hear it — the reason Mr. Vandermeer is alive. He had been living on that ridge since March, and he was, in the language of the county, a fugitive, and he had spent nine days of October in a room at the Quillon hostel with the curtains drawn and had been up and down that lower path at night more times than anybody will ever know, and he took one boot out of a pair out of a car on the evening of the twenty-eighth of October because he was a hungry man who had seen a bag and put his hand in it and been interrupted. I built a theory on that boot in the first week that was wrong, and I want the record to show it, because the theory cost me four days and put the young man in more danger than he need ever have been in: I told Simon that a stolen boot was a scent sample, and I was wrong, and the truth is that it was a thief, and the reason I know it was a thief is that the man had been treated at the county clinic on the second of October for weight loss and for a cough, and a man who is buying galvanised chain and animal repellent at a hardware store in Eureka is buying chain to tie a shed door shut and repellent to put on his own skin, because he was living in a blackberry in a peat bog in October and he was frightened of the thing he had heard out there at night."

"Then settle four things for me," I said, "before the county takes the file."

"Ask."

"The man at the Anchor. The one in the suit who left his fish half eaten."

"Emmett Scully, shaved, in the only suit in Mercy County, on the evening before the man he intended to kill went up his own drive." Varley looked at Cole. "He had seen your photograph. The trust's lawyer sent the surveyor next door a copy of the disclosure as a courtesy, and the lawyer did not know what he was doing, and nobody in this county has ever been able to imagine a reason why a neighbour would want to look at a photograph of a man. He came down to the Anchor to watch you eat, and he was seen doing it by the one person in that room who has spent thirty years watching other people work, and I have not yet thanked Dr. Ashby for it."

"And the west gate?"

"Opened twice in the week before you arrived, Mr. Vandermeer, and locked by Hollis Nord every night with his own hands, and Nord told you so on the first evening because it frightened him. It was opened by a hungry man who was living four hundred yards above the drive and who came down through the orchard in the fog to stand in the dark and look at a car and put his hand in a bag. That is the whole of the mystery of the gate. The groundskeeper did not report it because reporting it meant explaining his brother-in-law, and I have never in my working life seen a crime reported by the one person in the house who was frightened of the police. And the dogs at the station barked for ten days before the old man died, which Nord told you on the first night: that was the animal being walked past them in the dark on the other side of the fence, and it is the only piece of this that the county had in its hands a fortnight early. As for the cameras — he told you he had it on his cameras. There is no film in that station. Ask the marshal for the inventory: three cameras, no cards, and a card reader nobody has ever plugged in."

"And whether he laughed."

"You never told me." Varley looked at me with some amusement. "I asked you for one observation at a pier and you gave me eleven days of weather and a medical report."

"He did not laugh," I said. "He asked the man at the airport what the house was like, and when he was told about the dog he asked for the number of the survey licence and the name of the county engineer."

"Then he is the second kind," said Varley, "and the second kind is the only kind I have ever been able to work with. That was the whole of my first question and I have waited a fortnight for the answer."

"And the fourth?"

"The fourth you will not like, and it is mine." He was quiet for a moment. "Denny Roux spent eleven nights on that ridge with a cough and a bad chest, writing down the hours, and he was the only person on this coast who knew the animal's pattern, and he was killed for standing in a place where a man who ran would have been killed instead. If I had understood the paper he left under his mattress on the twenty-ninth of October instead of the first of November, he would be doing his six years and you would have nobody's death on your conscience but Scully's. I have been doing this for thirty years. It is the second time I have been four days late and the first time it has cost a life, and I want it in your report."

"Then the letters."

"The letters were cut out of a bound volume," said Varley, "and the volume is the reason we can prove it." He put a book on the table — a bound year of the Journal of Coastal Ecology, 1961, taken off the station's own shelf — and opened it at a page that had been mutilated with a blade. "There are six complete sets of this journal in this county and this is one of them, and the letters that came up your drive are cut from pages seventy-four and seventy-five of it."

"The glue," said Ozer.

"A vinyl acetate emulsion sold in a tube at any art shop."

"And the paper."

"A sixty-pound offset stock," said Varley, "which one printer in Eureka gave to the station in 2019, in two reams, and has sold no other reams of it to anybody on this coast since. The receipt is in a shoebox in that office, which is why I have been in this county nine days and not three." He closed the book and folded his hands. "It took him forty minutes a letter, and he wrote six of them, and he used scissors for the reason a careful man does: because he could not be sure he would not be asked for a handwriting sample by a police force that had not yet been invented in his own mind. He was right about the police and wrong about everything else, and a man who plans for a thing that has not happened yet is a man who has decided in advance that he is going to be hunted."

There was one more thing, and Varley left it to the end, and it is the thing I have thought about most.

"You asked your great-uncle's lawyer for a disclosure of the family's circumstances," he said to Cole, "and the lawyer, being an honest one, sent you a letter in which he told you that you have a condition of the heart. That letter is dated the fourteenth of October. It was posted to an address in Chicago on the sixteenth and it arrived, by the county's own postmark records, on the nineteenth, which is the day before your great-uncle died. There is a copy of it in the file of the trust, and the file of the trust is in a cabinet at the lawyer's office in Quillon, and the lawyer's clerk — the only other person with a key to that cabinet — is Emmett Scully's cousin on his mother's side, and has been since 2011, and it is the copier in that office, over four years, that the 1911 petition and the cancelled letters of administration came out of. The clerk has been charged, and the charge is not a footnote and I have been asked to leave his name out of this account, and I have. What he never did, and the postmark records settle it, was tell his cousin what was in a letter that was addressed to a man in Chicago." He closed his notebook. "Emmett Scully did not know. That is the last part of it and it is the part that makes the whole of it make sense. He did not know about the gene. He thought he was putting an animal on a healthy young man and driving him into a bog. If he had known what is written in that letter, he would never have gone near the path at ten o'clock on a Saturday night with Mr. Vandermeer standing on it, because he would have understood that the very thing he was trying to stage — a heart stopping in a man of that family, in the dark, with the marks of a dog about him — is a thing that a physician would have been able to prove, in nine minutes, with a blood sample and a piece of paper."

The monitor Dr. Cray had taped to Cole Vandermeer's chest was read off on the Monday, in the field station's little office, with the machine on the desk between the three of us. His heart had run at a hundred and eighty for four minutes in the fog and had not gone into anything at all, and she printed the strip and put it in the cardboard box with the rest of her equipment, and said, in the tone of a woman closing a file: "There. That is the thing your family was supposed to have. It was never going to happen."

And there is one more thing out of that transcript, and it is the reason I have written any of this down at all. The manuscript says that Absalom's own grey hound was shot in the yard in that winter of 1811 and ran, dying, into the trees, and was never found. Every death in that column afterwards was read on that coast as the dog coming back. Varley put it in one sentence, standing under the stairs at Harrow Reach in front of the portrait of the man in the long coat with the dog at his knee: "A hundred and forty years of people waiting for an animal that got into the woods. That is all Emmett Scully ever needed from the past — somewhere an animal went and did not come out."