BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) by Edward A. Stabler Read Free Book Online Page B

explain his actions nine years later,
on the night Drew was killed.
    Passing fence post after fence post, I try to
remember what Zimmerman looks like. The image I can conjure is a
hazy childhood view of him at Rock Run on that afternoon in 1893.
I'd seen him again during the days after Jessie's death, and once
more during the weeks before Drew's, but I have a hard time
picturing him as a man nearing fifty. Will he recognize me? How
could he? Before Drew's death, I was young and unscarred.
    A small shape sprints away from me into the
grass and I veer off-course, startled. My heart rate spirals up as
I picture Zimmerman waiting for me in an abandoned scow beside the
canal. I stop for a gulp of whiskey and the thumping in my chest
dissolves into a warm glow.
    I don't remember exactly when I learned that
he had returned to the area from his long exile in California. It
was a few years ago at least, while I was working in New Mexico
under Ted Kidder at the Pecos pueblo excavation site, a day's
journey east of Santa Fe. My sister Penny (who moved out to a farm
near Frederick, Maryland with her husband) mentioned in one of her
letters that a man named Henry Zimmerman had met a friend of hers
at the Great Falls Tavern a few weeks earlier. And Penny said that
Zimmerman was seen at the Cabin John Bridge Hotel soon after that,
but hadn't been spotted recently.
    When I wrote back, I asked her to let me know
if she heard more about him. But in subsequent letters she said
there wasn't much more to tell – Zimmerman seemed to appear around
Cabin John and Glen Echo at unpredictable intervals, circulate for
a few days, then disappear for weeks or months. There were rumors
that he was involved with either bootlegging or drugs. Engaged in
our work at the ruins, I gradually lost interest in him. That was
before my nightmares started, just over a year ago at the Pecos
pueblo.
    It was a Saturday morning in late March at
the excavation site, and ten inches of new snow was melting under
breezy blue skies. Ordinarily we might have worked that day, but
Kidder decided that the mapping and classification of the eastern
roomblock should be suspended until Monday, by which time the snow
would likely be gone. I was back at the site after three days with
Clara and Winnie in Santa Fe and had no interest in joining my
colleagues when they decided to hop the supply truck into town for
an extended afternoon meal.
    Instead I walked out to one of the
unexcavated ridges at the northern end of the pueblo, then turned
down the hill toward a spring-fed creek that flanked the site to
the west. Water was brought to the camp in barrels from town, but
this creek was a secondary source and there was always a reason to
top off our supplies when time permitted. Carrying a three-gallon
bucket and a shovel, in case I needed to break a layer of ice, I
descended a trail to the drainage.
    Our usual filling site was at a pool further
downstream, but I was pretty sure the trail I followed would lead
to a crossing. Sure enough, two stripped pinon-pine trunks had been
laid side-by-side across the stream, and I could crouch on the logs
and dip the bucket into clear, knee-deep water below the bridge.
But my eyes turned upstream instead, where a few feet from the
bridge a dead rabbit lay on its side in a shallow rapid, its head
pushed halfway under a thin shelf of ice.
    I crossed the bridge and approached it along
the bank, crouching for a closer look. The rabbit didn't look old
or emaciated, and its intact eyes implied that it hadn't been there
long enough to attract scavengers. A red gouge on its scalp at the
waterline suggested it was freshly killed. I stood up and looked
around and saw that I was being watched. Standing on its hind legs
under a sheltering dead pine, a white-furred weasel was keenly
monitoring my discovery of its prize. It must have been hungry,
because after I made eye contact it held its ground for a few
seconds, wet nose sniffing beneath the coal-black eyes in