Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “What were—what are the stones? How do they—?” Boyd wasn’t even sure what the question was. “How do they work? Who makes them?”

  “The way it was explained to me,” Tel said, like he’d learned it in a classroom, “the stones hold magic. Like a sink. A magic sink.” Which Boyd already knew, but it didn’t tell him much.

  “Where do they come from?” Boyd asked.

  Tel leaned against one of the windows and didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his boots. Everything he wore fit like it had been tailored, but nothing was new, like he bought his shirts and his jeans and his boots to last, then he used them up and wore them out. Tel was a working rancher, albeit one of the few with money. He looked up.

  “You don’t know this, neither of you.” He looked from Boyd to Gerson. “You know my son, Brian,” he said to Boyd, who nodded. “I had a daughter too, would have been twenty-five the end of next month. Christmas kid. Or, just two days after. But she got her own day. We made sure she didn’t feel like her birthday wasn’t a big deal. She was our oldest, you know, and we thought, then, we’d have a big family—five, six kids, maybe. Ranch has got room, you know, for kids. Things to do and they keep each other company. Pat and me, we both—” He stopped, shook his head, one sharp motion, like waking himself up.

  “Well, none of that matters now. Nothing gets done or undone that’s already happened. Barbie—that was her name—Barbie had a brain tumor. Inoperable. We’d more or less just found out about it when Prue Stalking Horse come around talking about magic stones and there was Laddie with one of these stones and I believed Laddie because Laddie doesn’t—didn’t—” He corrected himself. “Didn’t know how to lie. If Laddie Kennedy told you something, you could believe it. He might have been better off if he had lied.” He paused, considered the man and woman in front of him, and continued. “I thought it was worth a chance, you know. Like Mayo Clinic and this place in Mexico we looked into. You try everything. I thought, what the hell.”

  He stared into the fireplace. “It was the money and it wasn’t the money. If it worked, if something magic could cure her, then the money didn’t matter. If it didn’t work, then the money didn’t matter either, but it was all tangled up together like somehow helping Barbie depended on helping Prue and Laddie and whatever it was they were trying to do. You understand?”

  His expression held a sort of mute appeal, like he knew there was no logic, hadn’t been at the time, but Boyd nodded because he did understand—sometimes you did everything you could think of precisely because you knew none of them would work.

  Tel left the fireplace and went over to the window. Snow swirled, but not heavy, light enough that it might have been blowing off the ground rather than falling from the skies.

  “What happened?” Boyd asked.

  “I’ve never been entirely sure,” Tel said. “The way it was explained to me, the stones have to be a certain type—granite, some particular proportion of quartz and feldspar. There’s a lot of it up in the Black Hills, but it’s not anything special in the regular scheme of things. If it hasn’t been ‘charged,’ I guess you’d call it, with magic, it’s just rock. So what Prue and her sister were trying to do—oh, and Billie Packer—was figure out how to charge the stones. They thought they could use Laddie’s stone. Reverse engineer it, so to speak.” He laughed. “That should have told me something right there. Because magic isn’t something you can engineer. Think about it. If it works at all, it’s not going to work like engineering.”

  “So, Prue and her sister figured out how to—what? Store magic?”

  Tel wiped his hand down his face. “You know Jasper? The tornado?”

  Boyd nodded.

  “You know that happened in the fall, right? Practically winter. They said it was a freak storm, came up out of nowhere. Yeah, it wasn’t natural.”

  Boyd leaned forward. This was a new thing, something he’d never heard talked about. And Taylor County was a place that talked about things. “That was Prue Stalking Horse?”

  Tel shook his head. “She says—said—not. And I gotta say, it was right after that they took Lillian Harper Jones away—that was Martin Weber’s grandmother. Always figured it was her somehow, though I didn’t really know how—well, she pretty much said it was even if no one believed her. Except apparently the Weber kid. No, it was what happened after. I was out of it at that point, desperate, sure, but…” There was something haunted in his expression as he looked at Boyd. “You don’t talk about it straight out. You get hauled away, you do that. But, people died in that tornado. They never had a chance. I figured it was past time to walk away.

  “Of course, if I’m being honest, I have to say I might have gone back. Might have begged. I don’t know. Prue told me they were going forward with or without me. She said she’d come back, tell me how great it worked, said I’d pay anything then. And maybe I would have. But she never did.”

  “Never came back?”

  “Never mentioned it to me again. Her sister disappeared. Billie Packer disappeared. The Jones place burned. And it was like it never happened. We took Barbie over to Mayo about then and we were gone two months altogether and not really talking to anyone for a good while after that. So, I don’t know what people were saying—whatever it was, they weren’t saying it to us.”

  “What do you think happened?” Boyd asked.

  Tel walked back to sit on the desk again. He looked Boyd straight in the eye as he spoke. “I think that tornado charged those stones. I think Prue and her sister and Billie Packer tried to use them. I think something went bad wrong out there at that old farmhouse. I think Billie Packer died and Prue killed him. Or she might as well have.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Tel’s sequence of events was speculation at best, but it made a certain amount of sense to Boyd. The questions he was left with were: What did the events of twenty years ago have to do with Prue’s and Laddie’s deaths in the present, and where was Prue’s sister?

  “This picture,” Gerson said, taking a copy of the photograph from her purse and offering it to Tel. “Can you identify the people in it?”

  Tel didn’t take the picture. Didn’t even look at it. “There’s me and Laddie Kennedy,” he said, “which you already know, and Prue Stalking Horse. The big man in the back would have been Billie Packer. He wasn’t the brightest kid and he never had any ambition, but that’s a hell of a way to end, rotting away in someone’s cellar. Prue said he had the touch, that was why they kept him around, I think.”

  Boyd took the picture from Gerson and looked at it again. “‘All the talents,’ what does that mean?” he asked.

  “It was about the others, not me. I was the money guy. But it was the stone, you know. Prue would hand it to people who came in and ask them what they thought.”

  “What did you think?” Boyd asked.

  Tel laughed. “I wouldn’t touch it. I just looked at it and told her it was not something I wanted to have anything to do with. She smiled, like she already knew everything she needed just from that, like I’d only done exactly what she’d expected, and said that was fine. Wish I’d known then,” he said.

  “The other woman in the picture?” Gerson said. “That’s Ms. Stalking Horse’s sister?”

  Tel nodded his head once, as if he was remembering. “Yep. Shannon. That was her name. Came over from St. Paul or Minneapolis, someplace like that, after Prue had got me to agree to front some money at that point, which was when the picture was taken. They were close back then, she and Prue. Odd gal. Intense. She had this scarf she wore winter and summer—well, you can see it in that picture.” He finally took the picture and looked at it. “You can’t tell in this anymore, but it was this incredibly bright blue. She’d wear it with everything—flannel shirts, fancy dress, whatever. Meant a lot to her, I guess. It’s the thing I remember most about her now.”

  “Wait,” Boyd said. “What?” He took the picture back and looked at it again. Tel was right: It was impossible to tell what c
olors things had been from the picture, but Boyd could see now what had looked so familiar when he’d seen this picture the first time. He hadn’t seen her hair and she’d been wearing a heavy coat. “I’ve seen her,” he said. Though he hadn’t or it hadn’t exactly been her, couldn’t have been, because the woman he’d seen would have been about the same age as the woman in the picture.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  He stepped outside, called Ole on his cell phone, and asked him to check a license plate, giving him the plate number he’d noted last Friday outside Prue Stalking Horse’s house. When he was finished, he went back into the office, where it looked like Tel and Gerson hadn’t said one word or even looked at each other while he was gone. He picked up where he’d left off.

  “Did Prue’s sister have any children?” he asked.

  “Shannon? I don’t think so,” Tel said, as if the thought hadn’t ever occurred to him. “She wasn’t that old when I knew her. Maybe your age, maybe a little younger. No, she didn’t. I’m sure she didn’t. Hell, I don’t know.”

  Boyd looked at Gerson, but he didn’t want to say more until later.

  Gerson gave a small nod and took the photograph back. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Sigurdson,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, please call the sheriff’s office. And we’ll be verifying everything with your wife,” she added. “Tell her to expect our call.”

  When they left the office, the day had turned darker, the wind strong, dry, and bitter cold.

  Boyd didn’t know how he knew, but the minute they walked out the door, he could feel it, not even words, just a thing that he knew in that instant.

  “Get down!” he shouted, and tackled Tel, knocking him into the iron-hard ground as something thwacked into the doorjamb behind them. A startled oof from Tel, and Boyd was up and running, using the cover of his SUV and one of the ranch trucks parked at an angle to his own vehicle and the house.

  Gerson shouted at him, “Davies!”

  Careful, he told himself, the caution unnecessary, but it was the kind of thing he did tell himself. Whoever it was had a gun. Probably a good deal longer range than his service pistol. Careful. He crept around the corner of the house, not because the killer was that close; Boyd was certain whoever it was, wasn’t very close at all—a thousand yards maybe, across the big field, close to the road. But he wanted to catch a glimpse of the car they were driving, and he didn’t want to get shot while he was doing it. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of his own breathing, of the wind burning his face. He put his back against the rough stone wall of the house, looked at the empty road, looked back at the barn, where Gerson was helping Tel to his feet.

  Prue Stalking Horse. Laddie Kennedy. And now, Tel Sigurdson.

  Maybe Tel Sigurdson, he corrected himself. Tel wasn’t dead, after all. It could be a setup. One of his ranch hands? To turn suspicion away from him?

  But why? And how would he have done it?

  Boyd listened, thought maybe he’d hear a vehicle engine even if he couldn’t see one. Though where someone could conceal a vehicle within a mile or even two of Tel’s ranch house, he wasn’t sure. Whoever this was had parked somewhere out of sight, walked up the road, and waited. Even though it was likely that if Boyd hadn’t been here, no one would have looked as he was looking now, their attention completely taken by the sight of Tel on the ground, a bullet through his brain. Even though. They’d planned for it. Prepared for it. Because they were careful.

  Or it was a setup.

  He heard it then, thin and clear on the wind, the sound of a car engine, somewhere west past the line of cottonwoods near the creek. Boyd waited until the sound faded; then he walked back around the house and returned to the barn.

  Tel said, “What the hell was that?”

  “Do you have one of the stones?” Boyd ignored his question. “If you do, you need to show it to me now.”

  Tel bent down and picked up his Stetson, which had been knocked off when Boyd tackled him. “No, hell no. I told you.” He dusted off the crown of his hat. “I got out before things went to hell.”

  “Or maybe you found your own stone and didn’t need Prue Stalking Horse or her sister or any of them anymore.”

  For the first time, Tel looked really angry. “If that were so, my daughter would still be alive.”

  “But she isn’t. Do you blame Prue for that? Did you hate her enough to kill her?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Someone just tried to kill me.”

  “Or you want it to look like someone did.”

  “Oh, hell,” Tel said.

  “Mr. Sigurdson.” Gerson spoke for the first time since shouting Boyd’s name. She’d been watching Boyd steadily, like he was hiding something or planning something, and she didn’t take her eyes off him now as she was speaking. “You’ve admitted that you were acquainted with both the victims and possibly with the person whose remains we found in Ms. Stalking Horse’s cellar, which we’ve confirmed belonged to a William Packer. We have witnesses who can place you in West Prairie City on the nights in question.”

  Boyd looked at Gerson. Tel took a step forward and stopped, as if he didn’t know exactly what to do next. Boyd could see what he was thinking written clearly on his face: Hadn’t she been listening? To anything?

  “Someone just tried to kill me,” Tel said.

  “It certainly appeared that way,” Gerson said.

  “I didn’t just try to kill myself,” Tel tried again.

  “It doesn’t rule out the possibility of an accomplice, however,” Gerson said.

  Tel looked at her, looked hard at Boyd as if he should intervene, but why? He’d just asked the same question himself.

  “You know what? Talk to my goddamned lawyer,” Tel said, slapped his Stetson on his head, and stalked away from them to the house.

  Gerson looked at Boyd. “Sometimes anger is revealing,” she said.

  “I don’t have an evidence kit with me,” Boyd said.

  “What?”

  “The bullet. We’re going to want that.”

  Gerson gave a quick nod. “Right,” she said. “Of course.”

  27

  It was a dry cold morning as Hallie headed toward the Badlands. She had her shotgun and an iron fireplace poker and the empty seat beside her. She could have let Boyd come with her; that would have been easy. She’d have liked him with her, someone she knew she could rely on, who would do the right thing, provided he could figure out what that was—and he would figure it out, because that was part of Boyd, knowing the right thing and doing it.

  As she drove, she saw a dead deer on the side of the road and a dead coyote. She saw a dead Angus steer in the ditch and she stopped, grabbed the iron poker as she got out for a closer look. Roadkill wasn’t unusual, was pretty common—empty roads and fast pickup trucks. It happened. Dead cattle were different, not that they didn’t sometimes get hit, but it did a lot of damage, to the car and to the animal. This steer didn’t look like that. And it wasn’t on the road or even the edge of the road. There were no skid marks and there weren’t any bits of broken glass or plastic. Hallie approached the body cautiously.

  It was cold enough and dry enough that there weren’t many flies—something had chewed a bit on one leg, but the corpse itself was still fresh. Not hit by a car, definitely not. Aside from the leg, the steer was unmarked, like it had fallen where it stood. There was a smell—and not the steer—that seemed familiar. Like gunpowder, but not exactly. Not quite sulfur either. Much of the grass had been trampled—deer and cattle, probably—but Hallie could see a line, less meandering, less like a place something bedded for the night and more like something traveling from one place to another. She moved farther into the field. Maker appeared at her side.

  It sneezed.

  “Do you smell that?” Hallie asked. “What is it?”

  “Death,” Maker said matter-of-factly.

  “Well, you’re here and there’s a dead cow. So, y
es. Death all over, I’d say.” But then she looked more closely at the dead steer and the surrounding area. The grass and undergrowth were all dead, but that was as it should be in March in western South Dakota. She made a circle and she was out almost ten yards from the dead steer when she began to notice it. A dead hawk, three dead voles, a dead rabbit, and some mutiflora rose that looked like all the moisture had been sucked out of it. In the middle of the field now, she looked back toward the road; all of it, the dead animals, the rosebushes, the dead steer, were within a ten-foot path pointing straight through the field to the road.

  Hallie remembered Travis Hollowell, how the reaper magic he wielded drew the life from living things, from birds and animals and even grass and trees, for its power.

  “Is it a reaper?” Hallie asked. “What does it want?”

  “Not a reaper,” Maker said, and sneezed.

  “Unmaker?” God.

  Maker said nothing, which either meant she was right, or it wasn’t going to say.

  “So, unmakers in the world just kill things?”

  “Unmakers being in the world kills things,” Maker said.

  “Abominations.” Hallie almost laughed. In the under she was the abomination. “Why?” Hallie said. “I mean I know what it wants, but why does it come? How does it come?”

  “You.”

  “I know that,” she said impatiently. “Because it wants me to replace Death.”

  “Because you’re here.”

  “What?”

  “It leaves a crack.”

  “What? Me in the world? Because I’m not dead? Is that why you’re here?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Maker said.

  “Maybe you don’t know or maybe you’re not telling me?”

  Maker sniffed the air. “Should go.”

  “Is something coming?” Maker had already gone.

  Hallie turned slowly, but she didn’t see anything except grass, open prairie, and the dead Angus steer. She headed back to the truck anyway.

  A crack. Because she was here. What did it really mean, though? That the walls between the worlds could open up again? That saying no to Death’s offer would thin the walls in the same way Martin Weber’s magic had? There had been a time in her life when the world hadn’t been all that complicated—do the job and get back home. Even if sometimes getting home had been difficult or even dangerous, it was knowable. Doable. Things weren’t that way anymore.