Cause of Death

4

The drive to the Martinsville County Public Safety Office takes a half hour.

Inside, the décor is nondescript. You’d expect Wanted posters everywhere. But there are none. This place looks like where you’d buy insurance or have your taxes done or get a flu shot. Only here there are no magazines, and a formidable bulletproof-glass window shields the desk sergeant or whatever her rank.

In a gray, pressed uniform, Deputy Terry Garner appears in the doorway and gestures for me to follow him. We arrive in his cluttered office. He’s stocky in the way of men a dozen years past school linebacking. His scalp is fuzzy, early bald. His bleary eyes suggest little sleep. The Public Safety Office is small and I know from the local news that this has been a busy week. While I have been focused on one particular fatality, another death would be under investigation: a young woman was found in the Oneida River and the evidence suggests someone drowned her.

“How’re you holding up, Jon?” This part of Massachusetts, far west, has plenty of New York and Pennsylvania transplants but Terry’s voice attests to his roots in South Boston.

I can’t fire off the one-day-at-a-time cliché. I give a shrug. We were in high school together, friends, though not close. Future historians can be bully fodder, especially string-bean teenagers, and more than once Terry, a boy of much muscle, intervened on my behalf; apparently justice and law and order intrigued, even then.

“What can I do you for?”

“Just saw Detective Bragg.” I look around. “His office near here?”

“No, detectives’re on the other side of the building. With the brass. We’re in the grunt pen. You need him?”

“No, just he was asking some questions and that brought up something kind of funny.”

“Funny?”

“Funny odd. Patience’s things you brought over? That box and her gym bag? And thanks for that.”

“Nothing.”

“You were at the scene?”

His voice lowers in volume. “After they took her away, yeah.”

“Well, her phone was missing. Computer was too.”

His frown is the equivalent of a head scratch. “Really? Fire gave me everything they found. Popped the trunk, glove compartment. Looked under the seats even. She had them with her, you’re sure?”

“Like everybody. Never without the electronics.”

“Would she stop on the way home? A gym? I know she was athletic.”

“No, she didn’t do gyms. She ran. Calisthenics.”

His body shifts and I think he’s about to joke, along the lines of “She’s a better woman than I am.” Decides it’s in bad taste.

“Maybe left ’em at a restaurant?”

“No, she told me she was coming straight home and we’d have a bite when she got here. Anyway, even if she did, forgetting both of them, phone and computer? People don’t do that.”

“Well, Jon, the windows were open. The sunroof too. Maybe they flew out, you know, when the car rolled.”

Pax loved driving fast, with the wind in her hair. She drove a motorcycle in college and for a little while after. She longed for a convertible. But we ended up buying her Baby, a Nissan sedan of the sort that retirees drove or was handed down from an older brother or sister to younger when the latter turned sixteen. But, with the optional engine she’d wanted, it could still move.

Detective Bragg had been right about her driving “pretty fast.” When she plowed off the highway on Palmer Mountain she’d been doing close to seventy. In a fifty-five zone.

“Let me ask you, Terry. After an accident, people come by? Look for things. I’m talking, to scavenge.”

“Hell yes.” His round face dims. “Damn hyenas.”

“I never asked, you look for witnesses?”

“Was nobody around that time of night, that part of the mountain. Just the driver who saw the wreck, after, and called. Couldn’t’ve been him. He stuck around. And stealing a phone and computer? Why go to jail when you get brand new ones on Amazon for not that much.”

After a moment I say, “Think I’ll go over there and look around.”

He hesitates. “You sure you want to?”

“I’m sure I don’t.”

“Tell you what. I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Pretty much I do.” His jaw is staunch. “If something got took, stealing from an accident scene? I would love to pay that fellow a visit.”