CENSUS_What Lurks Beneath Read online

  “Mr. Reynolds?”

  Dave realized that he had wandered off. “Sorry. No. There isn’t anyone I can think of who would want to cause me harm.”

  Dave met the Deputy’s eyes, and he came away thinking she did not believe him. Was this just a cop-thing they were trained to do to make people nervous? If so, it was working.

  Deputy Evans stared at Dave, trying to figure out what it was that did not ring true. She dealt with enough liars to know that he was mostly telling the truth, but there was also something off about him and how he was reacting. Perhaps part of it was the fact that this was not the same Dave Reynolds she had originally met. There was no joy or humor within him. He looked like he had just survived an ordeal of some kind, or perhaps was still in the midst of one. She let silence do her work for her and waited to see what he would say next.

  Dave had the sinking feeling that he had once again invited the police out to help him with a problem, and had once again become the target of their attention. Was she going to ask him next how many drinks he’d had this morning? The answer is none, unless coffee now counted. He needed to put the focus back on solving his problems. He needed to be the one asking questions.

  “Has anyone else around me had problems?”

  “I’m not aware of any other landowners having issues with their ponds

  …or their game cameras.”

  Dave tried to think of a way to ask if anyone else had reported strange incidents or odd interactions—but realized that this question would only be turned back to him. It appeared that one question was all he was going to muster without drawing further attention to himself, so he too decided to sit back and let silence prompt the path of the conversation.

  Both of them sat at the table, staring at one-another for what seemed like several minutes but was in reality probably more like thirty seconds. Dave stared at the line of her jaw, noting how attractive it made her otherwise plain face. She noted that he was looking somewhere other than her eyes, but could not figure out his focus. Was it her chin? She fought to continue staring at his eyes and tried to ignore the fact that she was once again somewhat enjoying the attention and proximity to Dave.

  With neither of them flinching, the deputy decided to break the tension by pushing a blank piece of paper over to Dave.

  “I’m going to go get a sample of your pond water so we can have it tested. While I’m there please write down everything you can think of regarding this most recent problem. When I come back I’ll review it and then write up my official report, which you will be asked to read and verify.”

  Dave nodded and started to get to his feet as Deputy Evans stood, but she waved him off and turned her back to him as she walked to the front

  door. Her boots were loud on the tile surface and she left behind a small trail of dirt and grass as she shut the door behind her.

  Dave stared at the debris she had left on the floor and made a mental note to sweep before he left. He then briefly debated the merits of a clean house when it sat next to a fecal pond, but shook that argument out of his head. He turned his attention back to the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He put the point of the pen against the paper and sat that way for several minutes, rubbing his temple, unable to muster coherent thoughts.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Heavy

  Work

  Dave drove back to Houston after his meeting with the deputy to keep his promised meeting with a client, but then turned right back around and returned to the farm. There was no reason to go home. What would he say? What could he say?

  And so, alone, he spent Saturday morning at the lower pond raking and piling up the remains of the fish carcasses. The work, though rank and unpleasant, was easier than he had thought it might be due to the fact that the ants, vultures and other scavengers had eaten almost all the flesh off the dead fish. The worst of it ended up being the still-floating car- cass of the large catfish, which had thus far escaped the attention of the turtles.

  He would soon get the tractor and dig a large hole in the pasture. Into this hole would go the fetid remains of the fish. He would then use the rest of the daylight to finish mowing around the house and, light permitting, pull down the pictures from all the remaining game cameras. Several times during this menial work he had experienced a deep sense of self-loathing and remorse. He was unsure as to why he was having those thoughts but the mindless activity did help push them back down.

  He tallied the time needed in his head and gave himself a mental nudge to get back to work. As his rake hit the ground, his phone vibrated in

  his pocket. Dave debated whether or not he cared but old instincts die hard, and it might have something to do with Adam. He missed Adam. He peeled off the glove on his right hand by biting the dirty end of the leather covering his index finger and then pulling. He clenched the dirty glove between his teeth and, wearily, dug into his pocket to retrieve his phone.

  The phone continued to vibrate as he held it up and squinted in the glare of the sunlight to see the screen. The caller was his client contact for the conference call he was supposed to run tomorrow morning. This client had originally asked for him to drop everything and make the eight- hour roundtrip drive to their office for a face-to-face meeting. Dave had, uncharacteristically, pushed back and said the best he could do was a call. He watched as the call timed-out and went to voice mail. He then flipped over to his email and scrolled through several screens of messages

  —all of which had arrived in just the past couple of hours.

  He looked past the phone at the pile of rotten remains, and then at the rest of the carcasses still dispersed around roughly half of the pond. The dead catfish in the middle splashed and Dave saw that one of the turtles had indeed decided to start in on this feast. He pushed down on the button on the top of his phone and, for one of the first times in recent memory, turned it off. Still gripping the now blank phone in his hand, leather glove still dangling from his mouth, he looked behind him at a portion of the dam wall furthest away from the piles of dead fish.

  He picked up the rake and walked slowly over to the grassy spot, gingerly using the rake to poke the grass and check for snakes, or more likely, ant mounds. Finding none, he let the rake fall and then turned and sat heavily in the grass. Pulling the glove from his mouth, he took in the awful scene around him.

  His thoughts went dark as he focused on the phone. He could stay up all night once he was done out here and make no progress on his workload.

  What Lurks Beneath

  The calls and emails came in as fast as he could answer them, and many of his clients worked the same insane hours. There was the unreal, but all-too-true expectation on the part of many of them that an email sent at 2:30 a.m. would receive a response within a few minutes, or at the very least a few hours.

  He tossed the phone down next to him and it immediately disappeared in the tall grass. He gripped his head with both hands and stared down at the spot between his dirty boots.

  What was he doing? He couldn’t stop.

  He should get up. Now!

  The rarely-needed bout of self-encouragement fell on deaf ears and he instead squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his hands tightly, and screamed as loudly as he could. The scream echoed across the pond, and the turtle dropped back down into the water away from the catfish. He ran out of air and the scream ended in a choked sob, and he did his best to hang on to his composure, rubbing his hands, one still gloved, against his face.

  How had he landed here? A tear welled in the corner of his eye as he stared across the pond at the tree where the game camera had once been mounted. He bit his bottom lip and then chewed at it. There were very real problems in his life, he thought to himself as he stared at the tree, then the pile of rotten fish. His thoughts then went to his failed marriage, and then back to his job. All of these things were real, he told himself.

  He squeezed his eyes shut again and thought about all the other things plaguing him—the deer photos, the dark images seemingly stalking
him, the horrific history behind the land that he had purchased to make him- self happy, content. He squeezed the sides of his head at the final ele- ment troubling him—the ongoing headaches.

  251

  He had not yet heard from the doctor regarding the MRI results. He had called this morning and was told that the results might take another three or four days. On one hand, if he truly had a tumor, the last thing he wanted was confirmation that there was something serious, something physical, troubling him. On the other hand, if the results were negative, he had to consider the fact that he might be losing his mind. Did the fact that he could think in these terms mean he was still sane, or could a deranged person hold sanguine thoughts in his polluted head?

  Dave opened his eyes again and crossed his arms over his knees. Putting his head against his forearms, he stared at the ground and gave up his battle to contain himself. He sat, hugging his knees, tears falling in pools, gently rocking as the hot afternoon sun tracked across the sky.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: No

  Response

  Deputy Evans scowled at her phone, which had again ended her call in the now-full voicemail box of Dave Reynolds. It was Tuesday morning. With her cruiser parked behind her, she stood in front of the locked gate to Dave’s farm.

  To appease her own curiosity, she had taken to driving past the Reynolds’ place a couple of times each day—even when she was not on duty. She knew that Dave had spent the weekend at his farm because his truck had been parked out front since Friday night. She had eventually called him Sunday, at which point his voicemail still accepted messages.

  She put one booted foot up on the first rung of the wide gate and took a hard look at the scene in front of her. It was not like him to avoid a call. It was even odder that he had failed to return hers. She had also left him a couple of text messages which had thus far been ignored. In her messages she’d confirmed that the pond water had shown large amounts of Rotenone; a chemical used when someone wanted to kill all the fish in a pond and start over. She’d checked with the four different feed stores in the immediate area, but the most recent sale had been over four months ago, to a wildlife management expert in the area (all sales were supposed to be logged, as a private pesticide license was required to purchase Rotenone).

  This development did confirm that someone had poisoned the pond, but little else. Rotenone is available at most feed stores across the state, and the private license element was a bit of a joke, as the training required is online—or one could simply befriend someone who had already gone through the process. There was also the reality that barns across the state sheltered bottles of all kinds of chemicals that had been purchased over the years, many long before there were such things as restrictions.

  She had tried a larger search of sales in the state but found that budget cuts, the outsourcing of training for pesticide use to the private sector, and a fair amount of incompetence, had taken their toll. All she knew at this point was that the chemical had been used.

  She continued to stare at the various aspects of the property. Something besides the stationary truck and the lack of a return call was off. She saw too many places during her shifts to remember all the details of each, but there was something obvious she was not seeing. Something like a tractor.

  Reynolds had an old Ford tractor that was likely only slightly younger than him. He parked it in the covered shelter, which was open at the back side which faced the road. There was no tractor in the shelter. Where was the tractor?

  She concentrated for a moment and realized that she had been hearing the ever-present growl of a diesel engine the entire time. She scanned the property behind her as well as the adjacent properties and saw no signs of a running tractor. Reynolds must be mowing down by the lower pond.

  She looked down at the gate and noted the bolt-cutter-proof lock and chain that Reynolds had installed after his second break-in. The boys from the fire department likely had something that could get through it, but she knew she did not.

  She reached across her chest to grip the shoulder mic and called in her pending incursion, on foot, into the property. When asked by dispatch if she would like to wait for back-up she declined. This was likely some- what attributable to the female equivalent of machismo, but she took enough grief from the slobbering knuckle-draggers she worked with as it was. No, she did not need someone to walk her to her car either.

  Deputy Evans easily climbed over the gate and proceeded to walk down the caliche road to the house. She noted that the grass on either side of the road, as well as the grass around the house, had recently been mowed.

  As she walked, she began an internal debate regarding her working the- ory. If all was well with Reynolds, and he was just shredding some tall grass, why hadn’t he answered a call or email in days? Was the sound of the tractor engine getting louder? That’s odd, she thought, it sounded like it was just idling in one spot—though she knew that the difference in elevation between the lower pond and the pasture could play havoc with sounds.

  She fought the temptation to pull her weapon in the still, hot air. There was no need for that just yet, and she did not want anyone driving by to see her skulking down the long driveway acting as if she’s afraid of the grass (or hunting a tractor).

  The caliche road petered out in a portion of ground that sat between the house and the ponds. She was now almost 100% certain that the old Ford tractor was running down by the lower pond. She was equally certain the motor was not under any type of strain that would indicate it was moving. This was getting odder by the second. She pulled her phone out and tried Dave’s number one more time, just to be sure. The call went immediately to the message that said the voicemail box was full.

  She put her phone back in her pocket and thought about her next steps. Reynolds would answer a call or email if he could. Maybe the issue was

  that he physically could not. She looked toward the upper pond, then back at the house. She made a decision.

  As she neared the house the sweat pushing to be released from her pores did so all at once and soaked through the T-shirt she wore under her heavy, smothering uniform shirt. The fact that it was November did nothing to dissuade Mother Nature from sending another heat wave through the region and afternoon temperatures hovered in the low 90’s. She flicked away a drop that was hanging from the bottom of her nose as she leaned over to look in the cab of the truck. Through the tinted driver’s side window she could make out a small pile of papers on the passenger seat, what appeared to be charger and head phone cords in- tertwined around the shifter, and a small amount of travel-related debris on the floor.

  Another drop of sweat dropped from her nose and quickly slid down the glass. She absently rubbed the end of her nose as she shifted back a few steps to look in the rear passenger window, which was even more heavily tinted than the front. She was not able to see much in the small amount of light available, but she did confirm that there was no body trapped within.

  She moved forward once again and stepped onto the raised concrete porch. A metal water bowl for a dog was flipped upside down next to the front door, the ground underneath it bone dry, which she took as a good indication that the overly friendly, ever-hungry dog that belonged to Reynolds was not here. She cleared her throat and called out to the house.

  “Mr. Reynolds?”

  She repeated her query at a higher volume but again received no re- sponse.

  She knocked heavily on the door, stepped back and called out his name one last time. Her right hand, which was as sweaty as the rest of her,

  rested against the warm metal of the grip of her service pistol nestled in the holster on her hip.

  After waiting for another minute she approached the door again and peered through the glass. From what she could see, which was not much, as the lights were off and the curtains were drawn to cull the glare and the heat of the sun, the house was empty. She looked down at the door knob and weighed her options. She reached out and almost touched the knob before pulli
ng her hand back. The full sweep of the house could be done later, if needed. Right now she would like to find the tractor.

  As she turned away from the house her gaze was drawn to the upper pond. She began walking in that direction, dodging the ubiquitous fire ant mounds in her path as she went, but veered to the left, using the downward sloping pasture that led to the larger, lower pond where she had just recently taken the water sample. The noise of an idling diesel engine grew as she descended, as did the foul, residual smell of dead, rancid fish.

  The sweat now pooled at the armpits and the collar of her stifling, polyester uniform shirt. She pulled at the front absently with her left hand in an empty, nervous gesture. She looked down to check her footing on the muddy slope leading down to the lower pond and was surprised to find that she was holding her pistol in her right hand. The pistol was an involuntary response to the fear she felt as she left open ground for the seclusion and isolation of the tree-lined lower pond. She decided that her involuntary reaction was the correct one, and in any case was not something that anyone could see—unless there was someone down there waiting for her.

  That last thought triggered the notion of her safety, and she pondered again the merits of requesting back-up versus the ridicule she would ex- perience if this ominous sequence proved to be a non-event. She wiped the sweat from her nose again, then wiped her hand on her polyester

  uniform slacks before squeezing her shoulder mic to call in a request for back-up. She gave the details of her location and received confirmation that back-up was in route.