Dead Echo

  Chapter 3: The Neighborhood

  Three months after the debacle at Leszno’s Acres, the novelty of the catastrophe was sidelined by a child kidnapping in Bank’s Ridge, a little burg forty miles northeast. The child was an Honor student and daughter of a local district councilman, and by the time she was found a month later and twenty pounds lighter, the focus had shifted from the farm for good, or so people thought. The parish erected a new cattle gate to replace the old broken one in hopes of deterring late-night excursions by horny teenagers and the matter of succession was left to the courts. This was the Jimmy Carter years and with prices out of control and continuing to spiral out of sight no one was much interested in acquiring or developing over 700 acres of land largely in the middle of nowhere. The children were parceled out to foster families, Meeta Leszno wasted away in the bowels of the New York hospital, and the selectmen of the area agreed amongst themselves to let sleeping dogs lie. Or better still, die.

  And die the Acres did for the next decade.

  It lay unvisited but fecund; its vast pastures slowly reclaimed by wilderness. The burnt-out remnant of the farmhouse rotted slowly into the earth, leaving scarce reminder except for the odd shard of timber or crumbling foundation. The lakes spread in black washes of turbid water that carried a crown of scum on their surface. The cattle gate entrance was overrun by crabgrass and great banks of poison ivy. The barbwire rusted and dipped to the ground over vast areas, allowing whoever, or most likely whatever, to come and go as it wished. The towns and hamlets around its perimeter continued to limp along despite their sluggish economies, and it seemed at times that every ill will that washed across the land, either from a recent firing or simple bad luck, resonated simple and deadly from that dead, black plot of land which ran the gauntlet of Highway 27. Once again, inevitably, it resorted back to its former enigmatic self, a thing best talked about and scorned if the distance were great, but never on the nights, when alone, some soul would travel the length of barbwire fence lining Highway 27, and suddenly remember every word spoken about the place from their infancy; and, with the witching moon high over the land, have very little trouble believing every one.

  And then, like a half-dead body left for a moment unattended on an examination table, it coughed once more to life. The date was October 29, 1988.

  Meeta Leszno was found dead in her basement room. Strangled, apparently, from the proliferate bruises on her neck, the horror expressed on her face. The door to her room was locked as usual; there was no sign of a struggle. She was found at shift change and ultimately the security guard for the ward was implicated in the crime. However, he’d worked in the institution for going on fourteen years and his record had been exemplary. He swore he’d heard nothing and, indeed, no physical evidence ever did link him to the murder. The cameras marked him at his desk, accountable for every move, save when he left for his punctual attention to rounds. And these absences were nothing out of the ordinary, hardly providing enough time to systematically strangle a woman in her bed. But still he would have probably been convicted had the bruises on her neck matched his fingerprints. Because herein lie his salvation; they were not. In fact, they could be linked to no one on staff, both those working during the time of the murder and those who were not. Ultimately, the whole mess passed away; Meeta was cremated at state expense, the guard, still shrouded in the stink of mystery, was forced out and left the state entirely, thanking his lucky stars he was not to do the rest of his life behind bars. All was done, it seemed, everything could be put to rest, until a G1 clerk going through Meeta’s personal file rediscovered the land in Louisiana. The economic climate had changed dramatically during the Reagan years, and that much land, anywhere, was nothing to scoff at. Especially since the file specifically mentioned the fact of the two children. Gone these many years into the foster home circuit. So, in order to satisfy the law and put the whole matter to rest (it was still unclear as to just how the children were related to the diseased), the children had to be found and notified of their right of succession. The older of the two, the boy, looked, as far as the scant information from the files provided, to be nearing legal age. His last recorded entry indicated a Vermont residence, the girl’s somewhere in St. Louis.

  Daniel Martin, the G1 clerk, made the appropriate calls, provided directives for the children to acquire their rightful property, or at least for an investigation to commence, and let the matter go. This caused further scrutiny of the land to which the fact that property taxes in the amount of several thousand dollars had yet to be paid since the incident with the Fire. Both families agree (in the interest of the children, they said) to sell off several tens of acres to satisfy the fees and penalties and provide a working budget for the children to receive. The rest would have to wait until both were of legal age and it could be determined just what their relationship had been to the deceased. The paper trail had long since gone cold and the lengthy gaps commanded unwelcome attention by public servants not known for their delicacy or diligence even on their best of days.

  The children had come from Colombia, at least as far as the passports were concerned, but beyond that there was very little to go on. Record-keeping was far less advanced then than now, and with the added burden of years, the trail became moldier still. While the lawyers and child-services employees wrangled now over something that had been unknown and unworthy of their attention years earlier, twenty-five acres were auctioned off in the direct center of the property (some said to attempt to force the hand, later, of the sell of the rest of it) with a right-of-way extending all the way to Highway 27. Even before the ink was dry on these proceedings, another round of earth-movers arrived to push the land again to economic purpose.