The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.
Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.
“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.
The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”
Orwell Brennan, Dockerty’s chief of police, is partial to classic Motown, autumn sunrises, and most kinds of pie. He dislikes ceremony, squabbling with the Mayor, and being told to stay clear of matters that don’t concern him.
It doesn’t matter if it’s murder or a hunting accident, the dead man in the tree is the responsibility of Metro Homicide. Orwell has been ordered off the case. He would be happy to do just that if the pat solution he’s been handed made sense. But there are far too many unanswered questions to suit him. No matter whose toes get stepped on, he can’t and won’t let it go until he knows what really happened.
The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.
Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.
“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.
The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”
Orwell Brennan, Dockerty’s chief of police, is partial to classic Motown, autumn sunrises, and most kinds of pie. He dislikes ceremony, squabbling with the Mayor, and being told to stay clear of matters that don’t concern him.
It doesn’t matter if it’s murder or a hunting accident, the dead man in the tree is the responsibility of Metro Homicide. Orwell has been ordered off the case. He would be happy to do just that if the pat solution he’s been handed made sense. But there are far too many unanswered questions to suit him. No matter whose toes get stepped on, he can’t and won’t let it go until he knows what really happened.
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Overview
The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.
Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.
“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.
The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”
Orwell Brennan, Dockerty’s chief of police, is partial to classic Motown, autumn sunrises, and most kinds of pie. He dislikes ceremony, squabbling with the Mayor, and being told to stay clear of matters that don’t concern him.
It doesn’t matter if it’s murder or a hunting accident, the dead man in the tree is the responsibility of Metro Homicide. Orwell has been ordered off the case. He would be happy to do just that if the pat solution he’s been handed made sense. But there are far too many unanswered questions to suit him. No matter whose toes get stepped on, he can’t and won’t let it go until he knows what really happened.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781554906871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2010 |
| Series: | An Orwell Brennan Mystery |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 349 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Marc Strange is a writer and actor. He is co-creator of the hit television series The Beachcombers, and between 1972 and 1990 wrote, directed, and/or story edited over seventy episodes. He has appeared in many Canadian and Hollywood feature films and television series, most recently ReGenesis. Strange is the author of Sucker Punch, a Joe Grundy Mystery (Dundurn, 2007) and Body Blows, a Joe Grundy Mystery (Dundurn, 2009). Sucker Punch was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.
Read an Excerpt
Follow Me Down
An Orwell Brennan Mystery
By Marc Strange
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Marc StrangeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55490-926-1
CHAPTER 1
DAY ONE - Monday, October 11
Orwell Brennan rarely missed a sunrise. He figured any miracle you could set your watch by was worth proper observance. On this October morning the sun was scheduled to come up, if not actually appear, at 7:37 but it didn't look promising: the wind had picked up again, and the sky was thick with impending rain. Orwell was about to advise the dogs that their customary walk would be a short one, when a shaft of purest light kissed his face and he lifted his eyes to watch the sun come up over the rolling hills of Newry County under the hem of low-lying clouds hiked just high enough to reveal the brightness — whole, and perfect, and right on time.
Orwell allowed himself a brief look directly at the sun before turning to see how far his shadow might stretch across the pasture to the west, but in that instant clouds claimed the light and the course was set for yet another in a long series of dark, wet and moody autumn days. Nonetheless, he knew that he'd been blessed and he was smiling as he settled his hat on his big head, for he had doffed it to the dawn. It was something he did every time.
Dockerty's Chief of Police lived on a farm about ten klicks outside town, and a circuitous drive to work was another of his routines. His stately tour over the tar and gravel county roads afforded him time to think and showed him how things were going in what he often thought of as his parish. It was one of his conceits that he might have made a good priest, had he not been so fond of women and were he not so angry with the Catholic Church. He varied his route according to whim, but his speed remained constant. Orwell Brennan drove like a parade.
He took the River Road that morning. A glimpse of open water was always welcome, even when the ospreys were elsewhere and their forlorn jumble of sticks atop the telephone pole looked as inviting as a crown of thorns. RiverView Lodge too looked abandoned — the parking lot empty, three canoes and two aluminum outboards stashed under tattered blue tarps, a for sale sign by the front entrance. So much for scenery, Orwell thought. He could feel winter lurking, waiting on the other side of Halloween. It had been the worst summer for a hundred years, the farmers said, and they said it as if they had all been around the last time a year had been as bad. "There's no hay," they said, meaning that what hay there was, was dear.
Orwell drove over the one-lane bridge by the boat launch and continued around the bend onto County Road 18, heading east toward the highway. It was raining again. Wet leaves wiped side-to-side across the windshield. He could feel the east wind pushing against the broad front of his old Ramcharger. He wondered, in passing, whose car that might be, sitting outside Dan Warren's place, with vanity plates that said "Stalker."
It was an electric blue Camaro. The driver's side window was fully open and Saturday's newspaper was soaked on the front seat. The car was parked outside Dan Warren's front gate, off to the side, under the big Manitoba maple whose yellow leaves were plastered thickly on the roof and hood.
Dan Warren wiped his breath off the cold front room window and went into the kitchen. "Heard the weather yet?"
Irene Warren handed him his sweet tea. "They just gave it," she said. "More of the same."
Dan sat at the kitchen table to drink his tea and wait for his eggs and toast. "That car's still out there," he said again. "Left the front window open."
"Bad day for it," Irene said without much sympathy. It was none of her concern if some city fool wanted to park his car in the rain with the window open. She called up from the foot of the stairs. "Terry? You want eggs?" There was no answer from above.
"He get to the south field yesterday?" Dan asked.
"Said he had other things to take care of."
"That spreader's got to get back to Fern Casteel's for tomorrow," Dan said.
"I'm not going to wake him," Irene said.
Dan grunted when he got to his feet. The weather wasn't helping his sciatica. He carried his tea into the front room and looked out again at the blue Camaro sitting in the morning rain and wondered about the driver.
"Expect he's still back there," he said.
Terry Warren hunched on the edge of his bed, scanning the lawn and the gate and the road. He had slept in his clothes and he was damp and chilled from sweating in his sleep, and from the wet socks still on his feet. He could hear his mother and father moving about downstairs, one or the other of them fiddling with the dial on the kitchen radio, searching for optimism. From his bedroom window he had watched Orwell's Ramcharger roll by, as he had watched every other vehicle since before first light. Terry looked at his hands. They were in need of a wash.
This is Terry's Law: See and not be seen, hear and not be heard, follow and leave no tracks.
He is a shadow, a movement of air, the fading echo of a sound half heard. In his high school yearbook he is hard to find, a blur on the back tier with a stroke of white where an eye might be. The picture on his driver's license too is vaporous. When Terry wants to, he disappears. He has the power. It is his gift, his faith, his calling.
He was five years old when he first heard his father chasten him for "sneaking around," "lurking." He was always angling for a glimpse of something he wasn't supposed to see — his mother's breasts, naked for the briefest flash as she got ready for bed — eavesdropping on whispered conversations, gossip, revelations, family lore. By nine, before he was old enough to know what he was finding, he had been through every drawer in the house, every closet, every top shelf and cubbyhole. The most mundane details consumed him, the cryptic particulars of old letters with illegible greetings and farewells, yellowing photographs of ancestors long dead, deeds and policies, birth announcements and death certificates. He had rifled through a hundred boxes filled with odd bits of clothing, broken tools, forgotten schoolbooks, keys to anonymous locks. He left no trace.
Terry's Grandpa Max had first taken him hunting in Breithaupt's Bush when he was six years old, and when he was nine, Max gave him a single-shot Cooey .22. "It's good to be able to put some food on the table once in awhile," Max said. "That way it doesn't look like you're wasting your time in here."
Terry was an apt pupil. By age seven he could skin a rabbit, set a snare, dress a deer and crawl, silent as a snake, to where the brown trout rose for flies in the heat of day. He had an uncanny talent for interpreting tracks and sign, and could read them like street maps. He knew where the animals were, and where they were going, and when they would be back. In time, he perfected his art of quiet, became a part of all around him, could merge with the atmosphere. Disappear.
"Animals know when you're sneaking," the old man told him. "They're not stupid, they can tell you've got evil intent if you're all crouched over and creepy. Just be naturally quiet, like a respectful person in a library, going about your business, calm, like you belong here."
Max walked without haste, stopping frequently to listen, eyes open, nostrils too, careful where he put his feet. He employed the tip of his hawthorn walking stick like an instrument, to lift a leaf or scratch the dirt or plumb a depth of mud. And Terry followed him, learning how to see through veils of foliage, how to sniff the earth and read the dark through his fingertips.
The swamp in Breithaupt's Bush stretched a mile or more in bog and silt, following the winding course of a beaver creek, one of the Snipe River's feeder streams, never named, forever flooding, branching, dammed and breached according to the dogged whim of a clan of beavers as destructive as they were industrious.
"Stick a body in that swamp, nobody'll ever see it again," Grandpa Max used to say, and before he died he made a list of all those who had done him a hurt or used him ill, and contented himself in his waning days with plots for the unmarked disposition of their worthless bones.
"Sink him so deep in mud he'll cease to exist in the world as we know it" were his dying words, but exactly whose worthless carcass his fast-fading mind was then disposing of was left to God to ascertain.
Grandpa Max had been searching for something. Often he would hint to Terry that there was buried treasure in the ground. In the spring, they would say they were foraging for fiddleheads and morels, or later in the year, berries and puffballs, but Terry knew that there was something else in Breithaupt's Bush. One time they found a silver half-dollar dated 1904, and another time they found a brass belt buckle crusted with verdigris, but whatever else the old man sought, he had not found it by the time he took to his bed for the last time and left Terry Warren, then thirteen, to hunt the bush by himself.
Terry believed that the bush was his. He owned it because he knew it, all of it, as no one else ever had, or would. He knew the beaver's skid roads, the wide deer highways, the tight passages and the half-buried fence lines. He knew where the iron-pin markers were sunken at the lost corners of the Warren property, and where the Coughlans' and the Footes' property lines lay to the west and south, unsurveyed in more than a hundred years. He knew all the ways to slip in and to slip out. Three hundred acres of tall, mixed hardwoods, steep wooded hills and sudden bogs in the dark bottomland where thick, gnarled cedars, as old as the valley they grew in, still held fast to the damp black earth with roots as long as country lanes. He knew the trees as if by name, and every foot of Breithaupt's Bush, in bright of day, or dark of night, was more familiar to him than his mother's kitchen.
The resentment he felt whenever his father and brother would invade his preserve to hunt or chop was visceral, and filled him with righteous irritation. He would watch the pair of them, hacking his garden like butchers, tearing up the earth, maiming the maples and scattering their limbs. He watched them from a shadowed ridge, or a dense thicket, invisible, embittered, hearing them shouting back and forth, never listening to the forest, oblivious to the shifting underbrush, to the quick evacuations of threatened burrows and nests. When finally they departed, dragging the next year's quota of firewood, they left behind a mess that was unbearable. He would clean up after them, drag the lopped and discarded branches into a neat pile for the beaver to use, pare the brutalized trunks close to the earth, blend the chips and sawdust into the living forest floor. It would take him weeks to return his property to its natural order. Neither Billy nor his father, from one year to the next, ever noticed that the bush had magically healed itself. To his father and brother the section of bush belonging to the Warren place was a hunting preserve, a source of lumber, firewood and occasional revenue.
It wouldn't always be that way, Terry knew. His father would grow old and die. Inevitably, Terry would own it.
Terry built his first fort when he was seven years old. It wasn't much, an extension of a deer blind that his grandfather had helped him locate. It was cramped and unfinished inside, but even at that young age, Terry grasped the essential principle — it was invisible.
A few years later Terry made a tree house that he still used from time to time. It was thirty feet up a first-growth eastern hemlock, a solid nest large enough for him to sleep in, sheltered by a roof of woven branches. It too was invisible. A bird watcher staring straight up from the base of the tree would have seen nothing more than a fan of living branches and a lightning scar ending at the scorched stump of a missing limb. Lightning had never touched that hemlock, and the living branches were attached to the tree beside it, carefully bent back year by year until they hid the aerie as artfully as a fan dancer veiled her privacy.
Terry relished being high in the air, scanning like an eagle, sleeping like a squirrel, his perch swaying with the wind. But the nest had its drawbacks — a limited field of view through the branches, restricted space, difficult access, no room to store his treasures. His treasures were mounting. Some were hidden in the barn, some in the root cellar, some in the attic, and in Terry's eyes they were all vulnerable and exposed. Worse, he couldn't touch them when he wanted to, couldn't handle them, inhale them, study them. So he dug a treasure cave to hold his collection.
The entrance to his tunnels had been a gift from the forest gods. The spring that Terry turned seventeen, the rains were unusually heavy. The clean, meandering trout stream became a muddy torrent, undercutting both banks along its length. Sometime in April, upstream of the largest beaver dam, a first-growth cedar, a hundred years old and four stories high, after hanging on through countless generations of beaver projects that weakened both its damaged roots and the earth they clutched, finally relinquished its hold and dropped into the surging water. Swept downstream, root-wad first, it punched a hole the size of a garage door in an overburdened beaver dam releasing half a million gallons of water. The sudden wall of water scoured away the accumulated silt and sediment of a century, laying bare the secrets of the riverbank.
Terry found the stream spanned in a dozen places and he crossed the swirling grey water on a haphazard bridge of toppled cedars and birches to the twisted fan of roots on the far side. The roots had not easily given up their hold on the riverbank upstream. Many of them were snapped and wrenched as arm bones from a shoulder socket. Through the broken tangle of roots Terry looked down and saw, half-buried in the deep and sucking wound of the riverbank, a broken, bony claw, a scapular and collarbone, shards of a rib cage, and, still under earth but for a mud-choked grin, the skull of a long-dead man.
Terry had grown up with the Hermann Breithaupt stories. The generally accepted version had his great-grandfather, William Warren, coming home from the Great War to find his wife Lillian in bed with a tractor salesman named Breithaupt and shooting him dead on the spot. In another account, Breithaupt was merely attempting to "interfere" with Mrs. Warren when he was dispatched. This was the preferred rendering insofar as the family was concerned. The fact that Breithaupt was known to have been in the area for some months diminished its credibility. The story no one inside the family spoke of, the story that pointed out that Max was born seven months almost to the day after Dan's return from the Great War, was common knowledge among those old enough to still care about local history. It had once crossed Terry's mind as he rifled a box of birth certificates and family documents how strange it was that in a family of Bobs and Davids and Williams, his great-grandparents had named their first child Max. And although his grandfather had never mentioned the matter, Terry was sure that what Max had been hunting for so many years was the body of his real father.
With the bones piled out of the way, a natural doorway was revealed, an entrance to a cave inside the riverbank, a space of dark wet odours, snarled with roots, littered with the droppings and leavings of creatures who live underground. That cave became Terry's vestibule. As the years went by he added a passageway deep into the belly of the ridge, widening it at intervals into chambers and alcoves, rooms large enough to sleep in and a stretch within the brow of the ridge in which he could stand upright and scan the forest below through a string of windows barred with rootlets and curtained with leaves. And after that he kept digging. The wooded ridge within the forest became a honeycomb of burrows and chambers, passages, compartments and bolt holes. There was a treasure room where he kept Trina's things, and the money, an armoury where he kept his .22 rifle and ammunition, his machete and axes and mattock and adze and Swede saws and blades. His stronghold inside the wooded hillside coiled like a great hollow worm with fat rooms and connecting passageways. Terry's bedroom in his father's house was Spartan, held little that was personal; he slept there when he had to, and only then. Terry's true home was with those burrowing creatures who frequented his lair and shared his reticence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Follow Me Down by Marc Strange. Copyright © 2010 Marc Strange. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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