The Case Against Owen Williams Read Online Free PDF Page B

back towards the woods and entered along one of the trails that led out of the parking lot, following the route that Williams had described to Drost the day before. At what had been the edge of the original, much larger clearing, the overgrowth of bushes gave way to taller evergreens, and then the track came out into a long, narrow clearing that was growing up in bushes and small evergreens.
    â€œThis is the end of the Birch Road,” Carvell said. “The land here wasn’t any good, and the road was just left to grow up. It comes out over that way onto the Hannigan Road.”
    â€œThis is where they went, according to Williams,” Drost said.
    They wound their way through the small trees. A little further on, they came out onto the Birch Road proper although it still wasn’t much of a road, more dirt than gravel, with a strip of weeds down the middle. A quarter of a mile or so from the back of the dance hall, they emerged onto the Hannigan Road.
    â€œThis is where Williams says he left her,” Drost said. “She went off up the road towards home, and he went down the other way.”
    They stood and took stock. To their right, toward the Bangor Road there were houses, and Drost could see a woman in an apron standing on a front porch watching them, her eye caught no doubt by his uniform. To their left, the Hannigan Road swung away uphill toward the Coile place. Fifty yards from where they stood it was joined by another road that ran away from them eastwards back towards town. This was Broad Street although it wasn’t broad here or anywhere else. But then neither were there any birch trees on Birch Road nor had anyone named Hannigan, so far as anyone knew, ever lived on Hannigan Road. On the upper corner of the intersection of Broad Street and Hannigan Road, there was an abandoned church and its graveyard. Drost and Carvell crossed the road and wandered, more or less aimlessly now, up past the end of Broad Street and turned into the graveyard over a crude cedar-log culvert.
    The doors and windows of the church had boards nailed across them, and the graves around it were untended, overgrown, as if their occupants had long passed out of memory. At the back of the churchyard beyond a weathered cedar-rail fence, the ground dropped away sharply through a tangle of alders and chokecherry bushes. A couple of hundred yards away, where the ground rose again, Drost and Carvell could see through the trees the roofs of some houses and a squat church steeple roofed with sheet metal that shone silver in the sun.
    â€œYou can’t see it from here,” Carvell said, “but there’s an old gravel pit down there where people sometimes go to drink. Do you want to have a look?”
    â€œOkay,” Drost said. “Then we’ll go back. I’ll let it sit for a day or two, and if she still hasn’t turned up, I’ll put it on the wire.”
    They walked back out of the churchyard and around onto Broad Street. Down the Hannigan Road, the woman who had been watching them from her verandah had been joined by another woman and an old man. A hundred and fifty yards along Broad Street, they came to the road that led down into the gravel pit. It was more a track than a road. The grass had begun to creep into it from the edges, and there was a deep channel down the middle where the rain was eroding it away. There were recent car tracks all the same, straddling the erosion channel.
    The pit didn’t look big enough ever to have been a government or commercial operation. More likely it had been used by farmers as a source of gravel for their own driveways, but it didn’t look as if anyone had hauled out of it for a long time. The ground in the middle was still bare, but grass and weeds and small bushes were growing around the edges under the broken banks, which like the road were eroding away, exposing the roots of the small hardwoods at the top. In some places, the banks had collapsed