Charlene Vickery

Charlene Vickery is 41 and for eleven years has been the campus head arboristarborist Specialist in tree care: pruning, feeding, treating diseases and removing trees safely.. Born in Opelika, in eastern Alabama, the daughter of a carpenter and a nurse, she learned to climb trees before she learned to ride a bike. She studied forestry at the state college, worked three years at a sawmill and came back to town to care for oaks that were already old when her grandfather was born. She talks about the oaks the way people talk about sick relatives.

She lives in a gray-painted plank house at the edge of town, with a big yard where she keeps ropes, hooks and helmets hanging on a clothesline, and a peach tree she grafted herself. Inside, a linoleum kitchen, a table with a checkered cloth, a battery radio tuned to the weather forecast and an orange cat that sleeps on the seed catalog. She wakes at five, has coffee with cornbread and says whoever tends trees learns to wait, because the difference only shows in a decade.

She is tall and strong-shouldered, with a freckled, sunburned face and short, untidy red hair. She wears green canvas coveralls with the campus grounds crew emblem, a plaid flannel shirt underneath, leather gloves stuffed in her pocket and a tape measure on her belt. She has the hoarse voice of someone who talks little and the habit of looking at treetops before looking at people, as if one had more to say than the other.

About her work, her account is that of a patient professional: eleven years on her knees in that soil, pruning, fertilizing and pulling the paper from the branches with her own hands after every team victory. The oaks are a hundred and thirty years old, have seen more people pass than the whole town, and whoever kills a tree like that doesn't know what it means to wait a hundred years. About the call that aired on the radio, she has a dry opinion: theater. With the corner empty and dark at night, nobody can say for certain where each person was that week.

Charlene knows the arboristarborist Specialist in tree care: pruning, feeding, treating diseases and removing trees safely. who tends the trees is the first person asked who killed them. When the detective asserts that she let the oaks die, her voice rises a notch and she threatens to walk out the door. It could be the wounded love of someone who spent eleven winters on that land. It could be someone who would rather leave the room than hear the next question. The detective will have to decide which.