Walking Shadow

CHAPTER 12

It was a bright day in Concord. The sky above the old house was the kind of bright blue that you see in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The sun was strong and pleasant and the foliage was turning color.

The grounds around the house seemed to have been landscaped by Tarzan of the apes. Bushes, vines, saplings, weeds, decorative plantings run amok, all looped and sagged around the house, clustered in front of it, clung to it, and concealed far too much of it.

"This is ugly," Susan said. She had on jeans, and sneakers, and a lavender tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sweat had darkened the tee shirt. Sweat ran down her face under the long billed Postrio baseball cap. A sheen of sweat defined the small, hard muscles in her forearms.

"They'd never recognize you at Bergdorf s," I said.

She paid no attention, focusing as she always did on the question before her. She was wearing tan leather work gloves and carrying an axe.

"We need a chain saw," Susan said.

"Jesus," I said.

"You don't think I can handle a chain saw?"

"They're sort of dangerous," I said.

"If I weren't totally fearless, I'd be a little afraid of chain saws."

"Well, it would speed things up," she said.

"What's the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this."

"You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry."

"Almost always," I said.

"Except then."

Pearl came galloping up the slope from the stream, and jumped up with both feet on Susan's chest. Susan leaned forward so that Pearl could lap her face, which Pearl did vigorously. Susan squinched and endured the lapping until Pearl spotted a squirrel and dropped down and stalked it.

"God, wasn't that awful," Susan said.

"You might tell her not to do that," I said.

"She likes to do that," Susan said.

The squirrel zipped up a tree, and when it was safely out of reach, Pearl dashed at it and jumped up with her forepaws against the tree gazing after it.

"You think she'd actually eat the squirrel?" Susan said.

"She eats everything else she finds," I said.

Susan took a big swing with her axe at the base of a tree-sized shrub. What she lacked in technique, she made up in vigor, and I decided not to mention that she swung like a girl. I went back inside and worked on demolishing the back stairs with a three pound sledge and a crowbar.

I had a radio playing jazz in the kitchen. Pearl moseyed around in the fenced-in fields finding disgusting things to roll in. She came back periodically to show off her new smell, negotiating the debris with easy dignity. I could see Susan through the front windows.

She had her axe, her long-handled clippers, her bow saw, and her machete. She hacked and cut and clipped and sawed and stopped periodically to haul the cuttings into a big pile for pickup. Her tee shirt was dark with sweat. But, she was, I knew, tireless. For all of her self-mocking parody of the Jewish American Princess, she loved to work. And was rarely more happy than when she was fully engaged.

I got the crowbar under one edge of the lath and plaster wall and pried away a big chunk, exposing one of the stair stringers. With the three-pound sledge I knocked the stringer loose and the stairs canted slowly and then came down with a satisfying crash.

This is a lot better, I thought, than trying to find who killed Craig Sampson.