Face of Evil

CHAPTER FOUR

November 18, 2010

The B. Barer and Sons Sawmill was built in the mid-1800s along a curve in the Chewelah River when the waterway was the best method for transporting logs from the northern forests to the mill and keeping them fresh until they could be cut.

Those forests had long since been stripped, graded, and reforested with tract homes, and the heavily polluted river was no longer used as a timber highway, but scores of logs were still stored in the man-made bay, less out of necessity than as a nostalgic nod to B. Barer and Sons' history.

So Matt figured that practice would end soon. Big changes were being made at the mill by the current generation of Barers in their effort to keep the business from collapsing, and nostalgia wasn't something they could afford anymore.

In desperation, the Barers had finally brought in an outside consultant, whose previous experience had been in the soft drink industry, to modernize their operations and find ways to save money. Roger Silbert was hated by the hard-core loggers, some of whom were fourth-generation workers in the yard, because he knew nothing about wood and had probably never held a saw in his life.

For decades, the mill ran on six circle rigs in four separate buildings. The logs were loaded on a sliding carriage and fed into a circular saw, where they were shaved and squared off into cants, which were turned after each cut by men with cant hooks, then re-fed down the line to the blade to be cut again and again, the lumber off-loaded and stacked with each pass.

It was a manpower-intensive operation that during peak periods required three eight-hour shifts and a hundred men throughout the plant to get the job done.

Matt had worked at the lumberyard since he was a teenager, and had done every job there was to do, before becoming a sawyer, the man running one of the circle rigs, an old Frick mill.

But for the last few days, he'd been running and testing a brand-new mill, a Wood-Mizer 3500, which Roger Silbert had urged the Barers to try out.

With the WM3500, the logs were loaded by a computerized, hydraulic system onto a stationary bed and were cut by a thin-kerf, laser-guided, vertical-blade band saw that passed over the cant on a gliding head.

Matt operated the system robotically from a chair at the head of the mill rig equipped with joysticks at the end of each armrest.

The log was turned hydraulically, and every piece of lumber that Matt cut from the cant was swept away by metal prongs behind the saw head as it slid back into starting position after each forward pass of the blade.

The freshly cut lumber was pushed down the line by a series of incline conveyors, roller decks, and pneumatic kickers and then off-loaded with hydraulic arms into neat stacks.

The WM3500 was a pleasure for Matt to operate. He was attuned to it in a way that he never was with the circle rig. It was all highly computerized, and yet cutting with it felt like an extension of himself and as natural as chopping wood each morning.

But he was ashamed of himself for liking it. He didn't have to be a professional hatchet man from Zippy Cola like Roger Silbert to recognize the savings that the WM3500 represented. The new system was more precise, yielding more lumber in less time. But it required half as many men to operate as the old circle rigs.

It was good news for the company and bad news for log hands and off bearers like Andy, who'd made their living with cant hooks and heavy lifting. It wasn't good for Deerpark, either.

Matt shut down the rig when he saw Rachel Owens come into the mill. She dressed like everyone else, in jeans and a flannel shirt, but she made it look stylish. She worked in the front office handling sales, but Matt knew she could do any job on the line as well as any of the men. Her father had been a logger.

Rachel approached his chair. “I was watching you cut. It looks like fun."

"Come on up and try it," he said.

"Only if I can sit on your lap."

He immediately blushed and looked around to see if anyone had heard her. She laughed at his embarrassment.

"Relax, Matt, nobody is paying any attention," she said. “Besides, it's not like there's a law against flirting."

But the truth was her remark was less flirtation than an honest expression of her desire.

They'd been seeing each other casually, going to movies and having dinner downriver in King City, for a few weeks now, but their romance hadn't advanced beyond some passionate kisses in the cab of his truck.

Something was holding him back and she knew exactly what it was-the simple gold wedding band that he still wore.

At first, the ring made him even sexier to Rachel. It demonstrated that he was a man of passion and deep emotion. But now she wanted to wrestle the ring off of his hand and throw it in the river.

The ring made Matt feel like he was cheating on his wife every time Rachel kissed him. He'd never said that to Rachel, of course, but it was obvious the way he tensed up whenever she touched him.

She thought it was time for him to get on with his life and, more urgently, get it on with her.

"What brings you down here?" he asked.

"You, of course. I'm looking forward to Saturday. Were you able to get us reservations at the lodge?"

He nodded. “It seems like everybody in Oregon had the same bright idea to go skiing this weekend, but I managed to get the last two rooms."

She'd call and cancel one of them as soon as she got back in the office. She had big plans for the weekend. “That's great. Deerpark is the last place we're going to want to be this weekend."

"Why is that?"

"Management is real impressed with the yields they're getting from this rig. They're going to retire the Fricks and order three more WM3500s."

"How many men are they going to let go?"

"Fifty, maybe more," she said. “It'll be in stages as the new rigs come in. But I'm sure your job is safe."

"I wasn't thinking about mine."

"Andy isn't your responsibility. He's barely even responsible for himself."

"That's why he needs me. When are they making the announcement?"

"Silbert is breaking the news to everybody today at lunch."

That gave Matt a whole hour to worry about how Andy would take it.

February 20, 2011

When the emergency operator answered, Lyle was struck dumb. He didn't know what to say. He certainly couldn't tell her the truth, or they wouldn't send anyone, except maybe a couple of cops to take Lyle in for a psych evaluation.

"I'm Lyle Whittaker, a coroner at the Clarion County morgue. I've got a man here suffering from extreme hypothermia and in need of immediate medical attention."

"Did you say the morgue?"

"Yeah, and this is where he'll stay if you don't send the paramedics right away."

So the operator, Roxi Witt, made the call and sent the paramedics.

But even as Roxi did it, something nagged at the back of her mind…

She was at the end of her eight-hour shift. No calls had come in about anybody being found nearly frozen.

The only incident she'd heard about was yesterday, a little girl who'd found the frozen body of a skier who'd been buried by the avalanche.

That had happened three months ago.

But this certainly wasn't a crank. The readout on her computer screen confirmed the call was coming from the county morgue and that an assistant coroner named Lyle Whittaker was scheduled to be on call that morning.

So, after careful consideration, Roxi looked around to make sure no one was watching her, opened her purse, and found the tiny scrap of paper that she'd been saving for years, just waiting for the right moment to come along.

And if this wasn't it, nothing ever would be.

She took out her cell phone and called the National Enquirer tip line to claim her five hundred bucks.

Lyle wheeled Matthew Cahill into the hallway, where it was warmer, and covered him with every sheet he could find to help him generate some body heat.

The paramedics arrived within a few minutes and immediately hooked Matt up to an EKG, which, to Lyle's astonishment, showed a weak heartbeat, in the low twenties. Critical condition for a living person but not bad for a dead man.

They put Matt on oxygen, started an IV, and were about to wheel him out to the ambulance, when one of the paramedics repeated the question that Lyle couldn't avoid answering any longer.

"How long was this guy frozen?"

Lyle handed the paramedic a copy of the forest ranger's report, the morgue log, and a bag containing Matthew Cahill's personal effects, which included his wallet, his watch, and a wedding band.

"Three months," he said and dashed off.

The paramedic was sure that he'd heard wrong, that the coroner had actually said three minutes, but he was in too much of a hurry to get the patient to the hospital to chase after Lyle to confirm the obvious.