White River Burning. John Verdon

second was that there was no one in it.

      He looked around. He saw no one.

      “Hello?” he called out.

      There was no response.

      He walked around the barn. The lush spring grass was moist with dew where the old apple trees shaded it, but there were no footprints.

      Back by the car, he scanned the surrounding area—the pastures, the pond, the cleared swath along the edge of the woods. No sign of anyone.

      As he was deciding what to do next, he heard a faint scraping sound. He heard it again—sharper this time and coming, it seemed, from the thicket above the pond. The only thing he could see up there that wasn’t part of the natural flora was the tractor he’d been using to clear his little archaeology site.

      Curious, he headed up the trail that led to the excavation. The scraping became more distinct. He came around a bend in the trail and the broad rectangular hole came into view. But it wasn’t until he reached the excavation’s edge that he discovered the source of the sound.

      A man, intent on his work, was using a hand trowel to probe a crevice between two foundation stones. He was wearing beige slacks, expensive-looking brown loafers, and a tropical sport shirt garishly printed with palm fronds and toucans.

      The man spoke without turning away from the ground. “Seventeen hundred, I’d say. Give or take twenty years or so. Could be as early as sixteen eighty. Interesting rust deposits along here.” He tapped the area in front of him with the point of the trowel, which Gurney recognized as the one he kept at the site. “Four separate deposits, at three-foot intervals.”

      He straightened up now—a lanky, stork-like man with thinning hair the color of his beige slacks. As he gazed at Gurney the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes. “Those remnants of chain links you mentioned in your message? They were distributed along the base of this wall, am I right?”

      Some people were put off by Dr. Walter Thrasher’s mildly autistic avoidance of the social graces, but Gurney—for whom getting to the point was a virtue—was quite comfortable with the man’s approach.

      “Right. Directly below the rust spots,” Gurney replied with a puzzled frown. “I thought you said you were coming here tomorrow. Did I lose a day somewhere?”

      “No days lost. Just happened to be passing. Coming from White River, going to Albany, took a chance you might be home. Drove up to your barn, caught sight of your tractor, figured that’d be the site. Interesting. Very interesting.” As he was speaking he put down the trowel and scrambled with surprising agility up the short ladder out of the excavation.

      “Interesting in what way?”

      “Wouldn’t want to answer that prematurely. Depends on the nature of the artifacts. You mentioned baby teeth? And a knife?”

      “As well as some glass, bits of rusted metal, hooks for stretching animal hides.”

      There was a peculiar intensity in Thrasher’s magnified gaze. “No time to examine it all right now. Maybe just the knife and the teeth. A quick look?”

      Gurney shrugged. “No problem.” He thought of asking Thrasher for a ride up to the house, but the chance of the low-slung A7 bottoming out in the pasture ruts was too great. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

      Thrasher was standing by his car when Gurney returned with the knife and the tinted-glass jar containing the teeth.

      Thrasher gave the knife, especially what appeared to be a fingernail-sized crescent moon carved in the black handle, a close but rapid inspection. Ending with a nod and a grunt of satisfaction, he handed it back to Gurney. He took the tinted jar with greater care, almost a kind of trepidation, at first holding it up to examine the contents through the glass, then removing the top and peering in at the tiny teeth. He slowly tipped the jar, carefully letting just one tooth slide out onto his palm. He tilted his hand this way and that to view it from different angles. Then he tipped it back into the jar and replaced the lid.

      “Would it be all right if I borrowed this for a day or two? Need my microscope to verify what we’ve got here.”

      “You’re not sure they’re baby teeth?”

      “Oh, they’re definitely baby teeth. No doubt about that.”

      “Well, then . . .”

      Thrasher hesitated, looked momentarily troubled. “There could be more than one way they ended up in this jar. Until I take a closer look, let’s leave it at that.”

      11

      There were two paths from the barn up to the house. The more direct one that they used as a driveway went up through the pasture. The roundabout one meandered through the woods below the pasture, then curved up around it to the far side of the henhouse and the bluestone patio.

      Gurney chose the second route. He paid attention to the forest sights, sounds, scents—the rustlings and chirpings, the sweetness in the air, the tiny blue flowers among the lush ferns—trying to dispel a vague sense of uneasiness created by Thrasher’s parting comment.

      As he was heading for the house by this alternate route, he heard a vehicle approaching on the town road. Soon he saw a small white car coming around the barn. It slowed and began to make its way haltingly up through the pasture.

      It came to a stop forty or fifty feet shy of the side door, where Gurney’s Outback was parked. A woman emerged from the car and stood for a moment by its open door. Assuming it must be Kim Steele, Gurney started across the pasture toward her. He was about to call out when she got back in the car and tried to turn it around—an attempt that ended when a rear wheel sank into one of the pasture’s groundhog burrows.

      He found her sobbing, hands gripping the steering wheel. Her dark curly hair was disarranged. Her face was drawn.

      Gurney blinked, confused for a second or two by the fact that the woman in the car was part African American, which didn’t jibe with the mental image he’d constructed from the fact of her being married to an upstate white cop. Feeling some chagrin at the narrowness of his expectation—and the not-so-subtle prejudice lurking under it—he cleared his throat.

      “Mrs. Steele?”

      Her eyes had the exhausted red puffiness that comes from hours of crying.

      “Mrs. Steele?”

      She sniffled, her gaze fastened on the steering wheel. “Damn . . . stupid . . . car.”

      “I can pull your car out of that hole with my tractor. Come up to the house. I’ll take care of your car for you. Okay?”

      He was about to repeat his suggestion when she suddenly opened the door and stepped out. He noticed that her shirt was unevenly buttoned. She pulled a loose khaki jacket tightly around her despite the warmth of the day.

      He led the way to the patio and gestured toward one of the chairs at a small metal cafe table. “Would you like something to drink? Water or coffee?”

      She sat at the table and shook her head.

      He sat in the chair opposite her. He saw grief, exhaustion, indecision, anxiety.

      He spoke softly. “It’s hard to know who to trust, isn’t it?”

      She blinked, looking at him now in a more focused way. “You’re a retired police officer?”

      “I was a homicide detective with the NYPD. I took my pension after twenty-five years. My wife and I have been up here in Walnut Crossing for three years now.” He paused. “Do you want to tell me why you wanted to see me?”

      “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.”

      He smiled. “That may be a good thing.”

      “Why?”

      “I think doubt is a realistic approach to situations where there’s a lot