Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(62)
It was in these hills that the grand old men of Quincy’s past discovered granite so rich with black silicates and smoky quartz that it must have shimmered at their feet like a diamond stream. The first commercial railway in the country was constructed in 1827, with the first rail clamped to the land with swinging spikes and metal bolts in Quincy, up in the hills, so that granite could be transported down to the banks of the Neponset River, where it was loaded onto schooners and transported to Boston or down to Manhattan, New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah.
This hundred-year granite boom created buildings erected to withstand both time and fashion—imposing libraries and seats of government, towering churches, prisons that smothered noise, light, and hopes of escape, the fluted monolithic columns in custom houses across the country, and the Bunker Hill Monument. And what was left in the wake of all this rock lifted from the earth were holes. Deep holes. Wide holes. Holes that have never been filled by anything but water.
Over the years since the granite industry died, the quarries have become the favored dumping ground for just about everything: stolen cars, old refrigerators and ovens, bodies. Every few years when a kid vanishes after diving into them or a Walpole lifer tells police he dumped a missing hooker over one of the cliffs, the quarries are searched and newspapers run photos of topographical maps and underwater photography that reveal a submerged landscape of mountain ranges, rock violently disrupted and disgorged, sudden jagged needles rising from the depths, jutting crags of cliff face appearing like ghosts of Atlantis under a hundred feet of rain.
Sometimes, those bodies are found. And sometimes, they’re not. The quarries, given to underwater storms of black silt and sudden illogical shifts in their landscape, rife with undocumented shelves and crevices, yield their secrets with all the frequency of the Vatican.
As we trudged up the old railway incline, snapping branches out of our faces, trampling weeds and stumbling over rocks in the dark, slipping on sudden smooth stones and cursing under our breath, I found myself thinking that if we were pioneers trying to pass through these hills to reach the reservoir on the other side in the Blue Hills, we’d be dead by now. Some bear or pissed-off moose or Indian war party would have killed us just for disturbing the peace.
“Try and be a little louder,” I said, as Broussard slipped in the dark, banged his shin on a boulder, and straightened up long enough to kick it.
“Hey,” he said, “I look like Jeremiah Johnson to you? Last time I was in the woods, I was drunk, I was having sex, and I could see the highway from where I was.”
“You were having sex?” Angie said. “My God.”
“You have something against sex?”
“I have something against bugs,” Angie said. “Ick.”
“Is it true that if you have sex in the woods, the smell attracts bears?” Poole said. He supported himself on a tree trunk for a moment, sucked in the night air.
“There aren’t any bears left around here.”
“You never know,” Poole said, and looked off into the dark trees. He placed the gym bag of money by his feet for a moment, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at the sweat on his neck, wiped his reddening face. He blew air out of his cheeks and swallowed a few times.
“You okay, Poole?”
He nodded. “Fine. Just out of shape. And, oh, yeah, old.”
“Want one of us to carry the bag?” Angie asked.
Poole grimaced at her and picked up the bag. He pointed up the slope. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”
“That’s not a breach,” Broussard said. “That’s a hill.”
“I was quoting Shakespeare, you vulgarian.” Poole came off the tree and began trudging up the hill.
“Then you should have said, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” Broussard said. “Would have been more appropriate.”
Angie took a few deep breaths, caught Broussard’s eyes as he did the same. “We’re old.”
“We’re old,” he agreed.
“Think it’s time we hung ’em up?”
“Love to.” He smiled, leaned over, and took another breath. “My wife? Got in a car accident just before we were married, fractured some bones. No health insurance. You know what a fracture cost to fix? Man, I’ll be able to retire about the same time I’m chasing perps with a walker.”
“Somebody say a walker?” Poole said. He looked up at the steep slope. “That’d be sweet.”
As a kid I’d taken this path several times to reach the watering holes of Granite Rail or Swingle’s Quarry. It was supposedly off-limits, of course, surrounded by fences and patrolled by rangers for the MDC, but there were always jagged doors cut through the chain link if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t, you brought the equipment to make your own. The rangers were in short supply, and even with a small army they’d have been hard-pressed to patrol the dozens of quarries and the hundreds of kids who made their way up to them on a blistering summer day.
So I’d climbed this ridge before. Fifteen years ago. In the daylight.
It was a little different now. For one, I wasn’t in the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager. Too many bruises and too many bars and far too many on-the-job collisions with people and pool tables—and, once, both a windshield and the road waiting on the other side—had given my body the creaks and aches and constant dull throbs of either a man twice my age or a professional football player.