Bellhaven Again

Dale Sedgwick had driven that road eleven thousand times and he had never once driven it with a lie in his mouth, and the lie sat in him the way a swallowed coin sits in a dog, all the way down Mill Road and all the way along the river and up over the Cedar Hollow grade, where there was a van parked on the shoulder with a dish on its roof and two men standing beside it looking at the valley with their hands in their pockets.

Bellhaven on the Tuesday after the Monday was not Bellhaven.

There were nine vehicles on Vine Street, which was more vehicles than Vine Street had held since the closing of the mill, and four of them were not from the valley: a news van from Portland 2, a gray sedan with a state plate, an unmarked pickup that belonged to the county attorney, and a big black truck that belonged to nobody and that everybody agreed was probably the county's evidence people. The porch of the Wayfarer had yellow tape across it and the tape had come unstuck at one end and hung, and the front window of the second-floor room was a black hole with a sheet of plywood over two-thirds of it, and the plywood had a handwritten sign on it that said NO ENTRY BY ORDER OF THE COUNTY, and the sign had been written by Roy Nunn, and the handwriting was the handwriting of a man who had not slept.

Sedgwick parked in front of the church because there was nowhere else.

He sat in the truck for a while and watched the street, and what he watched, more than the news van and more than the deputy standing on the corner with his arms folded, was the ordinary-ness of it, the way forty people with nothing to do can turn a mystery into a town fair. Danny Wexler was on the porch of the feed store telling it to two men and a woman. Wes Corliss was in the doorway of the store with his apron on and his arms crossed, and every second person who went by stopped at the store and said two sentences to him and went on. Bernie Kaminski had the Bitterroot open at nine in the morning, which he had never done, and there were five men in it, which was more than it held on a Saturday night in January.

And on the corner of Second and Vine, outside the rectory, there was a woman kneeling in the snow with a camera, photographing the lilac.

Sedgwick got out of the truck and went over to the store and bought a pack of cigarettes and a can of coffee he did not need, and while Corliss was making change, he said the line exactly the way he had been told to say it, in a voice that came out flatter than he wanted and slower, and the line was: "You know who buys the Simplot place?"

Corliss looked up. "Nobody buys the Simplot place."

"Fellow from Seattle's looking at it. I'm doing the work for him. Clearing, mostly." Sedgwick heard his own voice and hated it. "He don't like visitors."

Wes Corliss looked at him for a long second, and in that second Dale Sedgwick understood the second hardest thing he was going to learn all spring, which was that he was a bad liar and that he was going to have to be a bad liar on purpose, consistently, at every counter in the county, because the man in the barn had said consistently and had not said well.

"Fellow from Seattle," Corliss said. "Huh."

That was all. That was the whole exchange. And Dale Sedgwick went out of the store with a can of coffee he had paid four dollars for and stood on the sidewalk and felt the back of his neck go cold, and it was not from the weather.

Vera Pell was in the kitchen of the Wayfarer with the door open and her coat on and her hands around a mug, and she was not doing anything, and she looked up when he came to the door and she did not say good morning.

"Dale."

"Vera."

"You're the fourth person today's come to look at the house."

"I'm not looking at the house."

"Then what are you doing in my kitchen."

Sedgwick took his hat off. He had rehearsed the sentence on the drive in and he had rehearsed it eight times and it came out of him differently anyway: "I left a crate in your woodshed."

Vera Pell put her mug down and looked at him, and Sedgwick had known Vera since they were both in the same second-grade class at the Bellhaven school, and he knew the exact set of her mouth that meant she had smelled it. "A crate."

"Back in January. My aunt's plates. I couldn't take them home on the bike."

"You don't have a bike."

"You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," Vera said, and stood there, and did not tell him to go around the back, and did not tell him not to, and the whole of the thing between them was in that stillness: a woman from a town where everybody had known everybody for ninety years, standing in her own kitchen on the day after, deciding not to ask the question, because she had already had one man lie to her that winter and look where it had gotten her.

"Go around the back," she said at last. "If Roy sees you he'll ask you what you're doing."

"Roy's not going to ask me anything."

"Roy's going to ask everybody everything for a year," Vera Pell said, "and you're going to want to have an answer, Dale, and so am I," and she turned her back on him and ran the water and did not watch him go.

The woodshed was behind the kitchen, under a lean-to, and it had a door that had not closed properly since 2004, and the pallets were where they had always been, on the gravel, with the winter's firewood stacked on the near half and a blue tarp over the far half, and the tarp was the reason nobody had found it, because nothing convinces a searcher like a tarp that has been sitting on pallets since the fall.

The crate was under the tarp, at the back, against the wall.

He pulled it out and it weighed more than he expected, and he got the tarp off it and the top board off it with his pocketknife and he stood in the doorway of the woodshed in the cold with his hands on the edge of a wooden crate looking down at the things that had cost the town its week.

On top, folded, was a gray wool suit. Under it, a black overcoat. Under the coat, shirts, and under the shirts, at the bottom, the three marbled notebooks and the brown manila envelope, and the envelope was thick and had been folded over twice and there was a rubber band around it, and Sedgwick took the rubber band off and looked inside, and did the thing he had come to do, which was to check it, except that checking it took him about six minutes in the cold with his fingers stiffening, and when he was done he knew three things he had not known in the barn.

There were four thousand three hundred and forty dollars in new twenties. The man had said four hundred — eleven thousand four hundred out of the rectory, less what the valley had already cost him.

And the notebooks had rubber bands on them too, and masking tape on the front of each with a date on it, and he opened the first one, and what was inside was not writing.

It was writing the way a page of music is writing. Small, level, dense, in black ink, running down the page in a hand so even that it looked printed, and then, every page or so, a drawing, and the drawings were of glass: a tube, a bulb, a coil, a thing like a bassoon drawn in exploded parts across a whole page with little arrows labeled in letters that were not letters. There were columns of figures with commas in decimal places he could not make sense of, and there were three pages of a table that had the word for the organs of the body in a column on the left and numbers in a column on the right, and there was one page — one page, torn at the corner, with a date two years old on it — where the writing stopped and there was only a diagram of a circle with a smaller circle inside it, and under the smaller circle, in the same even hand, the words: The first time, the man comes out whole. It is the second time that is the difficulty.

Dale Sedgwick read that sentence standing in his own woodshed doorway in the cold with the man's money in his left hand, and did not understand it, and put the notebook back in the crate in the order he had found it, and put the board back on the crate, and carried the crate to the truck, and drove out of Bellhaven with his hands shaking on the wheel, and it was not the sentence that was shaking him.

It was the money. He had spent the drive in telling himself the man in the barn was a man in trouble. Four thousand three hundred and forty dollars in new bills in an envelope under a bag of flour is not a man in trouble.

That is a man who has been somewhere he should not have been, and Dale Sedgwick had a hundred and forty acres of frozen stubble and a mortgage rewritten twice, and had been handed, in the space of a single morning, the exact problem that his whole life had fitted him to solve badly.