A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta Page A

you?” Brewer said.
    “Sure.”
    I stood at the edge of the pond with the deputy while Brewer walked up to meet the new arrivals. I could hear him telling them to get an ambulance down to collect the body, and to make sure the hands were bagged. When he was done talking to them, Brewer called for me to come up to the top of the hill. I passed the uniformed cops in silence, both of them giving me hard, suspicious stares, and joined him on the front porch of the barn. He was speaking softly into his tape recorder.
    “Well, Mr. Perry, I’m going to need to take a witness statement from you. Going to be a pretty important thing, seeing as how you’re the only person who actually saw anything.”
    “Sure.”
    “You ever given a statement before?” The question sounded procedural, but it was also a slick way of finding out whether I’d bumped up against a criminal investigation before.
    “I’ve given them, yes, but I’ve taken a lot more.”
    “Oh?” His eyebrows went up.
    “I was a cop in Cleveland, Ohio, for several years. A detective at the end of it.”
    “No kidding.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And now?”
    “Private investigator.”
    “Private investigator,” he echoed. “Well. The plot thickens, right? Were you down in our little part of the world on business or pleasure, Detective?”
    “Business.”
    “I see.” The recorder was still running, held loosely in his left hand. “Well, tell you what we’re going to do, Mr. Perry. We’re going to run through everything now, you tell me what you can, and then maybe I’ll have more questions later.”
    “Right.”
    He motioned with his hand for me to begin. I told it to him as clearly as I could, and as honestly, leaving out nothing except my personal history with Karen. It wasn’t relevant to what had happened, but I figured he might try to make it fit somehow, and I didn’t want that headache. Instead, I told him all the details that I could think of, simply presenting Karen as a routine client. That’s what she was, now. The ambulance pulled in as I was finishing, but Brewer let the uniformed cops deal with that, keeping his attention on me.
    “Now that,” he said when I was done, “is one hell of a strange thing to happen. I mean, the guy finishes a day of work, gets a note that you’re in town, andgoes to sit by this pond with a bottle of whiskey and a gun. He doesn’t kill himself then, in private, but waits for you to show up. When you show up, he somehow is already aware of the very news you drove six hours to share with him. He tells you this and then kills himself.”
    I didn’t say anything, and Brewer made a little clucking noise with his tongue and shook his head.
    “One hell of a strange thing,” he said again. “You got any theories, Mr. Perry?”
    “Well, it seems pretty clear that he thought I was someone else.”
    “Someone who knew his father.”
    “Yes.”
    “Someone who was not alone, based upon the comments you say he made.”
    “That’s right. He seemed to think there’d be someone else with me.”
    “And he was, what, scared of this third party?”
    I thought about it and nodded. “Yes, I think he was. Well, I think he would have been, maybe.”
    “Would have been?”
    “Had he not already made the decision to put the barrel of that gun in his mouth. That was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. He knew what he was going to do.”
    “But he waited for you to show before he did it.”
    “Yes.”
    “And didn’t wait for this unnamed third party to show.”
    “Apparently not.”
    “He didn’t know you.”
    “Thought he did, though. Thought he knew who I was, or knew who I was with, at least.”
    Brewer stood there and stared at me. I looked at the set of his face, at his eyes, and I knew he didn’t like my account of things. He wasn’t ready to say he didn’t believe me yet, but he definitely didn’t like what he’d heard.
    “Mysterious,” he said.
    “I guess.”
    “No, really, it is. I mean,