Free A Vineyard Killing by Philip R. Craig Page B

you want to find out where John Reilley lives,” she said, “tomorrow morning go up there where you lost him and park yourself someplace where you can see the road. When he goes to work, you’ll see where he comes from.”
    Smart Zee.
    â€œUnless,” she added, “he actually lives somewhere else entirely.”
    Unless that, of course.
    She frowned. “I don’t like this business of people following you.”
    â€œI don’t even like me following John Reilley.”
    â€œI don’t either, but you’re doing Maria a favor. I don’t know what those Saberfox guys are up to. You be careful.”
    Early the next morning I drove back to Airport Road. No one followed me. Maybe I’d embarrassed them into staying home.
    I parked the Land Cruiser a hundred yards in on the entrance road that led to the state forest headquarters, walked back to Airport Road, and found a tree to lean against while I looked up and down the highway and watched early risers drive to wherever they were going. I was chilly and wishing that I’d remembered to bring a jug of coffee with me when I turned my head to look back toward the blinker and saw a moped coming toward me along the highway. I slid behind the tree and watched John Reilley go by, apparently headed back to work in Chilmark.
    I waited until he was well down the road, then got into the truck and drove slowly in the direction John had come from. I hadn’t see him emerge onto the blacktop, but he hadn’t been there just moments before, so I knew about where he had to have come out.
    The problem was that there wasn’t a road or path where he’d come onto the pavement. I turned around at the blinker and drove back, studying the ground and foliage.
    Nothing.
    Traffic was picking up as starting times approached for most working people. Unlike them I had no obligation to be anywhere. It was one advantage of not having a real job. A compensating disadvantage was that I also had little money. All in all I preferred the freedom to the cash, as did the hoboes looking for the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
    I parked beside the road and walked first on one side, then the other, looking at the ground for spoor as I’d been told the African trackers do when leading game walks and drives and as the American Indians and other hunters no doubt also do.
    I’m not Lew Wetzel or Trader Horn or Abraham Mahsimba, but I’m not blind either. I had walked several hundred yards up the road and was coming back when I saw the track of the moped’s tires in a small patch of soft earth on the west side of the pavement.
    I looked in the direction the track had come from, then walked that way seeing hints of tire marks on the grass. Beyond the first line of trees and scrub oak a paved bike path paralleled the highway. On the other side of the bike path, where the real forest began, there were no tire tracks. Careful John Reilley had apparently driven along the bike path for a while before cutting out to the highway.
    I followed the bike path back toward the blinker but saw no sign of a moped track leading from the forest. Returning, I was almost opposite my parked truck when I finally saw where John had come out onto the path. His trail was faint and led from between two pine trees that would have hidden him from the view of anyone on the path or on the highway. John could study the public world for a while and enter it only when there was no one to see him do it.
    I looked into the forest. Many of the trees and bushes were still leafless, and I could look deep and see places I could never see in the summertime.
    I saw nothing related to human beings: no house, no shed, no half-fallen stone fence. A hundred years before, all this forest had been grassy grazing land for sheep and cattle, where farmers had walked and worked. Now it was wilderness.
    I went into the woods, moving slowly through scrub oak and blackjack pine, following what had now