Death in the Pines Read Online Free PDF Page B

cows, gets that stuff into the water, the runoff from the dairy farms.”
    â€œWhat about the boy’s father?”
    Smith stared at the floor for a long moment, then said, “Dunno. Susan never married and we never did see his birth mother again to ask her. This was thirty years ago, understand. For all I know, the boy’s daddy might have been a soldier and died overseas. Country’s been in enough wars in that time. Or maybe she just didn’t know who it was, if you know what I mean. Things was different then.”
    It wasn’t quite my time—I would have been a kid myself when the boy was born—but I remembered enough to nod.
    Smith seemed lost in a reverie. “You know, the white people here didn’t much like Indians back then, either. Rebecca’sfamily and a lot of her kin up near Swanton mostly passed for white. Back in the 1930s in Vermont they tried to sterilize all the Abenaki. Before that, they shot ’em, mostly because some Abenaki were partners with the French during the War of 1812. So they got good at hiding. But they’ve always been here.”
    â€œYour bumper sticker,” I said.
    He nodded. “Yeah. State says the Abenaki don’t exist. Official verdict of the Vermont Supreme Court in 1993, and they read the decision in front of a couple dozen Vermont Abenaki who were standing there waiting to hear what the government was gonna do. The court said they were all killed off or sterilized and because of the ‘weight of history’ for all practical purposes they had no rights to land and legally no longer existed. But they was always here, and they still are.”
    â€œI wonder if I saw one today,” I said.
    Smith blinked at me. “Pardon?”
    OK, I’d started it. I’d climbed into the canoe spinning down this crazy conversational river, so I might as well put my oar in. I said, “I met a woman, dressed in buckskin, sitting on a stone in the forest when I was coming back from looking for the guy who shot at you.”
    â€œThis that Sylvia? Where is she now?”
    â€œThat’s the strange part. I happened onto her, talked to her for a couple of minutes, took my eyes off her, and she was just gone.”
    Smith nodded as if I’d just described a perfectly ordinary everyday event. He gave me a mirthless smile. “You notice if this Sylvia had real big eyes?” he said.
    â€œYes, I noticed that. Her face wasn’t what you would call pretty, exactly, but overall she had a kind of grace, a kind of bearing that made her beautiful. I’d guess she was around twenty, maybe twenty-five, but it was hard to tell.”
    â€œ
Nolka Alnôbak
,” he said. “No, don’t ask me about it. It’s an Indian word from these parts. We’ll talk about it another time.” He glanced out the dark window as if he expected to see somebody looking in. The windowpane was black and only reflected the light in the room back at us.
    â€œI don’t know what she was doing here,” I said. “But somehow I don’t think she had anything to do with what happened to us. She told me she heard the gunshots but didn’t see the shooter.”
    â€œShe talked to you.” It was a statement, but implied a question, and he said it in a tone tinged with wonder.
    â€œA little. I noticed she had an odd way of talking, not an accent, but … odd.”
    â€œBetter to talk about it some other time or in some other place,” he said, glancing toward the window again. “Or not to talk of it at all.”
    â€œAll right,” I said.
    â€œSo!” Smith said, leaning forward in his chair, his tone of voice and posture indicating I’d passed some sort of test. “Considering what somebody done to my truck and tried to do to me, you made up your mind yet? You gonna work for me? How about five thousand dollars as a starter, to give me two weeks of your time?”
    Five thousand