Page 24 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

“But the fact remains,” she went on, a stubborn look on her face,
“that this is virtually the only spot where you can see the place he fell
from.”
“Miss Gramercy,” Fassner rumbled, “you are not describing some
sort of unlikely coincidence. Your teacher obviously was waiting for
someone—probably anyone—to come into view so he could
communicate whatever great discovery he had made.”
“Perhaps. Can we go see the spot where he fell?”
The question was rhetorical; Fassner knew it and the two set off
again at a good clip. It wasn’t rhetorical to me: I could clearly see the
sort of ledge across the chasm where Ross Ewidge met his fate. But I
wiped my brow and followed the mismatched pair as quickly as my
anatomy and clothing would allow.
It took quite a long time to reach the other side. We went up,
down and around the sides of what seemed to me like huge
mountains. I’m sure fifteen minutes elapsed, a very long fifteen
minutes for me, filled with the sort of self-recriminations usually
reserved for the wee hours of the morning.
Labelle was looking at a tree near the edge of the precipice when I
arrived. Fassner, hands in pockets, kicked at a stone.
“What do you make of this, Captain?” She pointed at some marks
on the trunk of the tree near its base.
He looked. “My diagnosis, without removing the entire tree to the
police laboratory for analysis, would be plain, garden-variety
vandalism of the type practiced by your classmates.”
His irony was ponderous, but it passed lightly over Labelle
Gramercy. “Well, I can see where people have carved their initials in
the past, but these weren’t made by a knife.”
“Maybe some juvenile delinquent was practicing his swing with a
bicycle chain or a crowbar. These old trees take a lot of hard
knocks.” His empathy with the battered tree was quite evident to me.
Labelle turned away for a moment, her mouth formed into the sort
of grimace children often wear when ignored by their parents. She
paced the distance from the tree to the edge, got down on her hands
and knees to peer down into the gorge, then stood up. Fassner waited
by the tree, smoking a cigarette and glancing at his watch from time
to time. He and Kerr must have been very good friends.

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