VIRGIL FOLLOWED HER past the kitchen into the tiny living room. Reynolds wasn’t overweight, but rather was morbidly obese. Virgil thought she must weigh three hundred pounds, though she was no more than five-four. The house stank of starch and fat, and doors and windows not opened. In the living room, a plate with three cold surviving French fries sat next to an open jar of mayonnaise. She picked up one of the French fries, dipped it in mayonnaise, pointed it at a plush-magenta La-Z-Boy, said, “Sit down,” and ate the fry.
Virgil sat down and said, “I’m talking to people who had relationships with Bill Judd Sr. back in the late sixties and seventies. I’m not trying to mess anybody up, I’m trying to figure out if there was anything back then that could have led to these murders. All the people were of the same age…”
“Seems like you’re a generation too late, then. They’re all twenty years older than us girls were.”
“Yeah, but you’re what I got,” Virgil said. “Let me ask you this, privately between the two of us. Did the Gleasons or the Schmidts or the Johnstones have anything to do with…this whole relationship thing with Judd?”
She was taken aback: “The Johnstones? Are the Johnstones dead?”
“No, no. I should have made that clear. It’s just that they were people of this age who might have been involved in something that would snap back—we’re thinking it had to be serious. Revenge, something that festered. Since Gleason was a doctor, and a coroner sometimes, and Schmidt was the sheriff, and Johnstone was the undertaker…”
“I see where you’re going,” she said. She thought about it, and then said, “The only things I can think of, are the Jerusalem artichoke business, and then the sex. Maybe somebody’s husband just found out about the sex and couldn’t stand the thought, but this was a looonngg time ago. People get over stuff like sex: it’s just a little squirt in the dark. No big deal.”
“Some people think of it as a little more than that,” Virgil said. “Michelle told me that it might have been the best part of her life. The most fun, anyway.”
A wrinkle spread across the lower part of Reynolds’ face, and Virgil realized that she was smiling. “She was a crazy one,” Reynolds said. “She liked everything: boys, girls, front, back, upside down.” She shook a finger at Virgil: “Here’s something. Polaroids were a big deal back then, and Bill used to take some pictures. You know, homemade porno. You could even get Polaroid slide film, and take pictures and develop them yourself, and then have slide shows…”
Virgil was getting uncomfortable. “You think some of those pictures…”
“Well, suppose somebody’s daddy or brother or husband got a picture of some guys getting his little girl airtight. That could set something off,” she said.
Airtight. He’d Google it later. “Michelle said she only knew of one other guy who…took part. The postmaster…”
“There were more’n that,” she said. “Two or three more, but not all from right here. Not all the girls were from here, either, there were some that came down from Minneapolis, one used to come down from Fargo. But: like I said, those things fade away. Who cares, when you’re fifty-five and fat? If I were you, I’d be looking at the Jerusalem artichoke scam. That’s what I’d do.”
“You think that might be more combustible…?”
She shook her finger at him again. “Listen. You’re not from here. That thing…you had to be here. There were old men crying in the streets. People lost everything they had: borrowed money against their homes and farms…lost every damn dime of it. Lots of people. If you lost your farm in the eighties, you wound up working in a meat-cutting plant somewhere, or going up to the Cities and working the night shift in an assembly plant, five dollars an hour. Can’t even feed your kids. That’s what could come back on you. That’s what could come back.”
“You think?”
She nodded. “Us girls…we were playing. It was in the sixties, and everybody was playing. But the artichoke thing…that was real, screaming, insane hate. There were people who would have hanged Judd if they could have gotten away with it, and I’m not fooling. He was lucky to live through it: you’d hear people talking about taking their deer rifle out, and shooting him down. Talking out in the open, in the café.” She stopped talking for a moment, and Virgil watched her, and then she said, “And what made it worse was, Bill was laughing at them. His attitude was ‘too bad, losers.’ He was laughing at them, and there was little kids eating lard sandwiches. Lard sandwiches.”
AT THREE-THIRTY, he was back at the motel; got cleaned up, thinking about Reynolds in her dark living room, with her French fries, and lard sandwiches. She’d once been a pretty girl, he’d been told.
He met Joan at four o’clock. They stopped at Johnnie’s Pizza, found that they agreed on sausage, mushroom, and pepperoni, and the inherent evilness of anchovies. “Little spooky going back to the farm,” Virgil said, as they rolled out of town. “Keep an eye out the back. See if there’s anybody trailing us.”
“You don’t have to trail anybody out here,” she said. “If you see Joan Carson heading out of town on this road, it’s ninety-five percent that she’s going out to the farm. There’s not much else out here.”
“Didn’t think of that,” he said.
“Besides, we’re not going to the farm,” she said. “We’re going up the hill behind it—that’s as nice as the dell in its own way, and I want to see where that guy was when he was shooting at us.”
“I was already up there,” Virgil said. “First thing this morning.”
“You were?”
“It was a shooting site, Joanie. I had to go up and look around,” Virgil said. “Didn’t find a thing.”
“Did you go to the flat rock?” she asked.
“What flat rock?”
“Ah—didn’t go to the flat rock.” She was being mysterious about it.
THEY WENT PAST the farm, followed the road around behind the hill, cut into the hillside where the shooter had gotten off, and where Virgil was that morning. Joan looked over the spot where the shooter had hidden his truck. Then Virgil got the shotgun out of the back of the 4Runner, and walked her along the now-faint track through the weeds to the stump where the shooter had made his nest. The day had turned hot, the humidity climbing, and far down to the southwest, they could see the puffy white tops of clouds that would become thunderheads; the world smelled of warm prairie weed.
“He might not have known the hillside that well,” Joan said, when she saw the shooting nest. She pointed far down to her left. “There’s a spot down there where you can come in—that’s where kids come in when they’re sneaking out to the dell. Good hidden place to park, too. Then, you’d come up from the side of the dell, where there’s a really sharp break. We never would have seen him. He would have been right over our heads.”
“So he messed up in a couple of ways,” Virgil said. “I was wondering if he meant to miss us…but I can’t see why he would. And he wasn’t that far off. If he meant to miss us, he was playing a dangerous game.”
They probed around some more, then headed back to the truck. Joanie pointed him west, to a clump of shrubs where they left the car, out of the sun. “Ground’s too broken up above here, you can screw up a tire,” she said. “Get the pizza. I’ll get the blanket and cooler.”
She led the way up the hill to a formation that almost looked like an eroded castle, a natural amphitheater in the red quartzite, at the very summit of the hill. They found a spot with shorter grass, in the shade of a clump of wild plum trees, and put down the blanket. Virgil braced the shotgun against one of the trees.
“I need pizza,” Virgil said. “Beer. Hot out here.”
“Get a beer. I’ll show you the flat rock. Put the pizza on the rock in the sun, it’ll stay warm…”
HE FOLLOWED HER across the hillside to a narrow bed of flat red rock, twenty feet long, six or eight feet wide, sloping just a few degrees to the south. When he saw it, Virgil thought, “Blackboard,” and Joan said, “Look.”
/>
He looked, but he didn’t see for a moment. Then he saw a handprint, a small hand, the size of a woman’s. Then another, and another, and then a cartoon arrow with a tip and fletching, and a turtle and a man with horns, and then more hands, and circles and squares of things that he didn’t recognize.
“Petroglyphs,” Joan said. “Chipped out of the rock. Pecked out with another stone. Something between three hundred and a thousand years old. There are older ones at Jeffers, but these are pretty old.”
“Jeez…Joanie.” Virgil was fascinated. He got down on his hands and knees, crawling around the rock. “How many people know about these things?”
“The Historical Society people, and folks who are interested in petroglyphs and who won’t mess them up. My grandfather told a reporter that there used to be a circle of stones here, not this red quartzite, they looked like glacial rocks, or river rocks. They were arranged around the flat rock like a clock, and each stone had a symbol on it. People stole them over the years. Nobody knows where they are now—probably some big museum, or Manhattan decorator shop or something.”
“Look at this…” He was pointing. “That looks like an elk. Did they have elk here?”
“That’s what they say. There are three buffalo over in the corner up here.”
“THERE’S A MAGAZINE article in this,” Virgil said, eventually. “Something about plains hunting in the Indian days…take a lot of photographs, mess them around in Photoshop, make a story out of it.”
“Leave them alone,” Joan said, shaking her head. “It’s nice to know that they’re out here. That they have nothing to do with magazines or television.”
SO THEY SAT under the plum trees and talked, ate pizza, drank beer, and watched the thunderheads grow from white globes into pink anvils, as the sun slid down in the sky. Joan gave him a talk:
“I was thinking about us last night, and I don’t think this is a real relationship. You’re my transition guy. You’re the guy who gets me back into life, and then goes away.”
“Why am I gonna go away?” Virgil was feeling lazy, lying back on the blanket, fingers knitted behind his head as a pillow; and he didn’t disagree.
“Because you are,” she said. “We’d be serious about as long as one of your marriages was serious. You’re a good guy, but you’ve got your problems, Virgil. You manipulate. I can feel you doing it, even if I can’t figure out what you’re doing. That would drive me crazy after a while. And I have the feeling you’re pretty happy when you’re alone.”
“That doesn’t sound so good,” he said.
“Well, you’re gonna have to figure yourself out,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not giving you the gate. I’m just saying…”
“…we’re not for all eternity.”
“We are not,” she agreed. “But the sex has been grand. I didn’t even remember how much I used to like it. My husband…I don’t know. It just got tiresome. He was more interested in playing golf than playing house, that’s for sure.”
“Good player?” Virgil asked.
“Not bad, I guess. The last year we were married, one of the most intimate things we’d do is lay in bed, and he’d tell me about every one of seventy-seven shots on the golf course that day—the club, the ball flight, what happened when it landed, bad breaks, good breaks, what he was thinking when he putted. But you know…someday, you just gotta grow up.”
“Why’d you marry him in the first place?” Virgil asked.
“He was good-looking, hard worker, available,” she said.
“There are worse things in the world.”
“Yeah, but he just didn’t flip my switch,” she said. She plucked a long grass stem and nibbled on the butt end. “I thought we’d grow into it, but we didn’t.”
“A lot of women think men are like raw lumber—something that you can build a house out of, with a lot of hard work,” Virgil said. “But some guys, you know, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. Can’t work with them. They’re not good lumber.”
“Is that what happened with your wives?”
“Oh…no. I just married them because they were hot and I was stupid. Actually, all of us were stupid. Didn’t know what we were doing. Somebody had to work. Couldn’t go dancing all the time…”
THEY WERE STILL talking about it, watching the birds, arguing about whether the thunderheads were coming in or would slide to the south, eating pizza…
And a slice of a woman’s laughter slid over the hillside like a butterfly, fragile, attractive, and definitely there.
“Who’s that?” Joan asked, sitting up.
Virgil shrugged. “I haven’t seen anyone…”
“Somebody in the dell,” Joan said. “Come on. Let’s sneak up on them.”
Virgil thought: Oh, no. Stryker. “Joan, maybe it’d be better, you know, let it go.”
“Don’t be retarded,” she said. “C’mon. We’re missing something.”
“Joan, I think it might be Jim. And Jesse.”
She looked at him for a moment, a wrinkle appearing between her eyes, then, amused, she said, “So what? Let’s go, you sissy.” And she was off across the hillside, using the scrub brush as cover, moving through the weeds in a crouch, a country-girl sneak. Instead of approaching the dell from the top, she led the way around to the north side, and then got down on her hands and knees as she crawled up to the edge of the bluff, where they could look down into the pool.
When Virgil eased up beside her, she whispered, “Oh, my. I never suspected Jim even knew about that.”
Stryker and Jesse were on an air mattress on the same rock where Virgil and Joan had left their clothes and bags. Jesse was naked, on her back, her hands on Stryker’s head, which was between her thighs. “That’s disgusting,” Virgil said. “They’re like a couple of animals.”
“Shhh, they’ll hear you. Did you tell Jim about doing this? Or did he think it up on his own? I’d hate to think you were sharing our little secrets.”
“Believe me, I’m not sharing our little secrets,” Virgil said.
Joan said, “Whoops, here we go. Main event.”
Stryker was moving over Jesse, stopped at her navel, her breasts. Joan pulled at Virgil’s belt buckle. “Get your pants off, Virgil. Jeez, come on, hurry up.”
“Joan, this is terrible…”
“C’mon…” She was slipping out of her jeans. “This is really good…”
What could a guy do, Virgil wondered, as he slid out of his jeans, but try to be polite?
ON THE WAY HOME, Joan said, “I’ve known Jim every day of my life—I’ve got a picture of him holding me, I’m all wrapped in a baby blanket, when I was a newborn. He’s always been…guarded. Quiet. Reticent. One of those guys with muscles in his jaws. I couldn’t even imagine him letting it out like that.”
“He let it out,” Virgil agreed. “He’s also a smart guy, and sooner or later you could let it slip that we were up there. That could ruin something for them.”
She considered that for a second, and then said, “I will never say another word about this to anybody. Including you.”
“Are you planning to think about it? When you’re in bed with somebody?”
“Think about what?” But he glanced at her a few seconds later, and caught her smiling. She said, “Shut up.”
He said, “Incest. That’s what it is. One of those Greek things.”
VIRGIL HAD MOVED to the second floor of the motel, so he could sleep on the bed. He brought up his laptop and checked the National Weather Service radar out of Sioux Falls. The line of thunderstorms that he and Joan had seen brewing to the southwest was about to roll into Sioux Falls, slow moving at ten miles an hour or so; getting stronger.
No talk of tornadoes, but there was a severe thunderstorm alert for parts of northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota, and southeastern South Dakota. Could be raining when they got to Feur’s. Which might not be bad. Rain and wind would cover movement, and scent: Virgil wasn’t worried so much about electronic sensors as dogs??
?
He hit the lights and climbed in bed, looking for two hours of sleep before he met Stryker. A lot going on. He hadn’t fully digested the Feur–Judd involvement, and all its implications. He and Stryker had made some leaps in their assessment. Maybe they’d find out more tonight, and maybe the accountant would have more in the morning…
The killings could easily have been carried out by a crank freak. The shit stirred people’s brains around. Take one of those grim, abused country kids you see from time to time, that thousand-yard stare, mix in some nutcake religion, a convict’s point of view taken from the Corps, plus a little methamphetamine, and you could grow yourself a genuine monster.
But that photograph of the dead woman, that he’d taken from Schmidt’s safe-deposit box…that came from way back, when Feur would have been a kid. What was that all about?
And then, of course, there was Joan’s assessment of his, Virgil’s, personality…a lot to think about.
AS HE WAS DRIFTING OFF to sleep, his alter ego, Homer, popped up in his mind:
The shooter humped over the hill, moving low through the weeds. A hundred yards down the slope, he could see Homer and Joan in the pool, naked as jaybirds, chasing each other around. He eased down behind a stump to look them over with the scope; variable power, two-to-eight, and he took a minute to crank it all the way up to eight. That narrowed his scope picture, but he could see their faces clearly enough.
He’d become aware that he wasn’t quite in the right spot. If he’d come in from the side, if he’d hidden his car in that grove of trees down to the right…
Virgil’s unconscious writer hesitated. Why hadn’t the shooter parked down there, in that grove?
Then he was asleep.
14
THE ALARM KICKED him out of bed at 12:30. He sat up, yawning, jumped in the shower, brushed his teeth, dug a tab of Modafinil out of his dopp kit, popped it, dressed, and was out in his truck at five to one.