Aspen Allegations - A Sutton Massachusetts Mystery Read online

  Chapter 2

  I jolted straight up in bed, my heart pounding in my chest, the vision burned into my eyes. The dead man had been lying on his blanket of dark brown oak leaves, their crenelated forms lacing around the edges of his body. Then his glazed eyes had narrowed into focus, his head had turned, and he had stared right at me.

  I could feel it, still, the power of his gaze, the pleading and desolation in his eyes. He had not wanted to die. He had so much still to share, to tell the world, and he had been cut short. I knew it with every cell in my body.

  It took a few minutes before my breathing slowed, before I could blink into awareness of my surroundings. A gentle glow eased in around the double-shades that kept the room as dark as possible. I often worked late into the night, with the website maintenance tasks I handled from my home office, and the only way I could get ample sleep was to keep my bedroom as dark as a crypt. Glancing at my clock, I found it was nearly noon.

  I pushed aside the heavy comforter and wearily pulled my yoga pants from the shelf, along with a robin’s-egg blue top. I knew from years of experimentation that if I did not do my yoga session right when I got up that it would quickly become lost in the whirlwind which was my day. Email messages would flash urgently on my screen, software would crash, and a myriad of other problems would keep me engaged until I glanced out my window and realized the sun was, yet again, easing its way up over the horizon to signal a new day had begun.

  I padded my way down the stairs, poured myself a tall glass of water, then unrolled my lavender mat before the sliding glass doors of my dining area. The view looked across my back deck and out over the tree-ringed yard. I gave thanks again to the life path which had brought me here. My neighbors’ homes were barely visible on either side through the dense trees, and beyond the back yard the forest ran for a half-mile before it came up on Route 146. My quiet corner of the world was lush with wild turkeys, inquisitive chipmunks, and even the occasional deer.

  I began my routine. First some gentle twists, loosening the ligaments, and then into tree-pose, the one-legged stance that Masai men used for hours when watching over their grazing animals. I stared out at the elderly oak tree, balanced, and let my mind go. The dark hole in the tree’s center was where the local squirrel family raised its young. I recalled the early summer morning when I had been enjoying my routine on the back porch. I had watched their little heads peer eagerly from the dark recesses before streaming out, one after another, to explore their world.

  A flash of color awakened me from my memories. A red-tailed hawk eased serenely across the center of the yard, pulling up with a careful wing adjustment to land in a nearby maple. I smiled, admiring his beauty, while also feeling the familiar twinge of worry for the many birds which came to my bird feeders. I sometimes felt as if I were putting a buffet out for the hawk as well as the smaller birds. And yet I could not bring myself to take down the suet, thistle, or sunflower seeds. Plenty for everyone, hawks included.

  The sun salutations were next, and, as she always did, my striped cat Juliet came to take advantage of my helplessness while I held downward facing dog. She was nearly fourteen now, and I could still remember the snowy morning I had found her on my back stoop, plaintively eating bits of suet I had dropped while filling the feeder. She had been rail-thin and shivering. I fed her outside for the day, thinking she was a neighbor’s cat, but soon my concern increased and I had taken her in. I had put up signs, called the local vets, and talked with the neighbors. They told me this happened all the time. “City folk” from Worcester, tired of their pets, abandoned them in our woods thinking the domesticated animals would instantly turn into mouse-hunters and live a gloriously free life. Instead, most ended up being eaten by coyotes and raccoons.

  So Juliet had become mine, and I had dealt with the allergies as a small price to pay for the steadfast love she had provided. Even now my skin tingled as she meandered between my arms, making sure to delicately trace her tail over every inch of my face and neck.

  Into warrior pose II. This always reminded me of an archer, drawing back the string on her bow, focusing all of her attention on the shot ahead of her.

  The shot.

  My breathing caught. I wavered for a moment, then shook it off. This practice was about releasing thoughts – about losing oneself in the moment awhile. That training served me well through each day, helped me to focus and move through challenges as smoothly as I could.

  I finished the warrior poses and sat down on the mat to do my seated twist. I loved this action; I could feel the vertebrae in my spine lifting and relaxing, settling more properly in their alignment. It felt good in a way few things did.

  Then it was cat-cow, which to my amusement some yoga instructors were now calling relaxed cat and arched cat. Apparently women didn’t like being called “cows”. Were we that concerned about our appearance that even the names of simple animal shapes could hurt us? I did not mind at all the thought of being a serene, contented jersey in a highland meadow, breathing in the fresh breezes, nibbling on heather flowers and soaking in the joy of living.

  And then, extended child pose. A relaxing of everything, forehead to the mat, arms stretched forward in an ultimate release to the universe.

  The sobs came on slowly at first, a hiccup in my breathing, then they were shaking me loose, the tears streaming from my eyes in a river, my palms pressed flat against the mat in surrender. I could not tell where the emotion had come from; it simply was there, densely surrounding me. It was as if from a peaceful, blue day a roiling thunderstorm had materialized, the slate-grey clouds filling my senses, the rolling thunder going on for long minutes without rest.

  At long last the storm began to break, glimpses of sky appeared through the rain, and my breathing was more than a desperate gulp amongst the cries. I lay slumped against the mat, pulling my shirt up to blot away the dampness of my face.

  The phone rang.

  I gave my head a shake to clear it, then pushed myself to my feet, taking the two steps to where the phone sat alongside the sliding glass door.

  “Yes?” I asked shakily. Confusion laced through my thoughts. Nobody ever called me. My friends and family all understood I preferred email, especially with the odd hours I kept. For all they knew I was still sound asleep after doing a server upgrade until six a.m.

  “Morgan Warren?” asked a deep voice which seemed strangely familiar. I could not place it and sagged with the guilt of my inability to recognize who it was.

  “Yes,” I said again, my mind not processing thoughts in a linear order. Was I supposed to say something else?

  “This is Jason, the ranger you met yesterday,” he supplied.

  Suddenly the dominos began to settle into a line, the world adjusted itself into a clearer pattern. Yes. That had been the voice alongside me as the waves of police arrived, as the EMTs came to examine the body, as the hunter was taken off to answer questions at the station.

  His voice came again in my ear. “Morgan, are you all right?”

  I realized that I must have left a pause; my brain was not quite moving forward. “Yes,” I lied automatically, for it was what people always said, wasn’t it? Things were fine. Everything was going to be fine.

  Now he paused for a moment, and when he spoke again a trace of worry had roughened his voice. “Morgan, do you have someone you can talk with?”

  I ran a hand distractedly along my hair, smoothing it back into place. “I was going to go by Matthew’s tomorrow.”

  His voice was short. “Oh.” Another pause. “Well, if you need anything, you still have my card, right?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. I remembered now, the clean edges of the piece of paper, the whiteness of it against the twisting browns of the forest floor. The feel of his fingers against mine as he handed it to me – warm, sure, steady.

  “I will let you go, then,” he murmured, and his voice sounded far away. “Have a … well, hang in there.”

  “You too,” I answered, and then the
re was a soft click as the connection ended.

  I put the phone back into its cradle. I had meant to see Matthew, it was true. He was in his late sixties and volunteered at the Sutton Senior Center, running computer training and repairing PCs for the community there. I was on a de-cluttering push and had found some spare power supplies and DVD drives that I knew he would put to good use. Besides, Matthew and his wife Joan were wonderful people to spend time with. Their home faced out over Ramshorn Pond. I’d spent many delightful afternoons sitting on their back porch, sipping tea, watching the resident heron glide slowly across the water.

  But I did not know if I could bring myself to face the world quite yet, not after what had happened.

  I finished my yoga routine, ending by sitting cross-legged and staring out into the yard. There was a gentle carpet of leaves, this one different from the forest, for I had a selection of maples in my mix which was mostly absent in the deeper woods. The edges of the lawn were a beautiful watercolor of yellows, crimsons, and fading greens created by the Virginia creeper which billowed there.

  In the center of the lawn a square was marked off by black wire fencing; within it the remnants of the summer’s tangerine-orange day lilies were held in place. A double shepherd’s crook sprouted from their center. In warmer weather it held a pair of hummingbird feeders, and my yoga sessions were delightfully punctuated by visits of these buzzing helicopters of crimson and emerald. But the first frost had already come and gone, and now suet feeders hung there, luring in the nuthatches and chickadees.

  Namaste.

  I stood and made myself a protein shake for breakfast, as I always did, then walked the twenty steps into my home office, settling down before my computer, preparing to start my day.

  I scanned my email, the normal litany of concerns and questions and suggestions jostling for my attention. But it was only moments before I had opened a browser window and hopped to the Worcester Telegram’s website. Sutton was not large enough to have a paper of its own – we were but a small part of Worcester County, and only when something fairly exciting happened here would we get mentioned in the paper. I imagined that this might qualify.

  Even so, it was not the lead story. A large section blared about “Election 2012,” while the other feature was on how Hurricane Sandy’s path through our region had not seemed to affect gas prices. The US unemployment rate rose to 7.9%. I had to look down further before I found a mention of it. “Tragic Hunting Accident in Sutton.”

  I paused for a moment before clicking. How would they reduce a life of a man – a life cut short in an instant – to simple black and white words?

  They did their best. His name had been John Dixon, aged 71. He had grown up in Sutton and had worked as an ad executive for many years. He had enjoyed fishing and reading. He was survived by one son, also of Sutton.

  I stared at John’s photo, striving to replace the scene in my mind with this happy, smiling man. John had embraced life, had relished time with his son, had likely cast from the banks of Lake Singletary seeking the elusive rainbow trout.

  At least his death had been quick, or so had murmured the EMTs as they bundled his body into the black bag. Straight through the heart, instant, perhaps even painless. Compared with other scenes they had visited, and given the myriad of choices life tended to offer, not a bad way to go after all.

  I closed the browser window, pensive. I wanted to learn more about this man and how he had come to this sudden end.