Broken Heartland

by J. M. Hayes

  The little corpse had been dead a while. This must have been done shortly after he left. He was surprised the kid he’d hired to keep an eye on the place hadn’t cleaned it off.

  Mad Dog tested the front door to be sure it was still locked. It was. And the windows all proved to be closed, unbroken, and secure, as he made his way around to the back door.

  That’s where he found Hailey. By the water tub, along with more dead squirrels and a few dead birds. Hailey’s hackles were up. She was staring at the tub and growling deep in her chest. Mad Dog wanted to join her. The water was green from the discarded bottle of antifreeze that had been dumped into it.

  Jesus, she hadn’t drunk any, had she? No, she couldn’t have. From her stance and attitude, she’d recognized the threat and the evil behind it. He didn’t take any chances, though. He turned the poisoned water over and got a hose and diluted the stuff until he’d turned his back yard into a muddy mess. He still wasn’t satisfied, but he didn’t know what else to do. He’d have to ask someone, the local vet, maybe. But first, he needed to make sure Hailey came inside and got fresh water, safe water, straight from the tap. And he needed to call Englishman. Tell his brother about the greetings he’d found in his yard. And warn him, because Mad Dog was pretty sure that however viciously he’d been attacked, Englishman was the real target.

  ***

  Heather English parked her Honda Civic in the lot behind the Benteen County Courthouse. It was a dazzling fall morning. She stepped out and stretched, a bit stiff after the three-hour drive home from Lawrence. She was a first-year law student at KU. Bright sun, gentle breezes, lots of color in the leaves welcomed her. It was always good to come home, but it was odd to drive past so many election posters urging voters to pick someone other than her father for Benteen County Sheriff. He’d been getting reelected by narrow margins for as long as she could recall, but this year’s signs had a nastier quality than she remembered. Politics in general had been moving that direction for years, but when it was your dad, that made the insults personal.

  Englishman’s Chevy pickup wasn’t in the lot, but Mrs. Kraus would know where he was. Heather went in through the back door, anxious to find him. She was sure he was all right, but she’d woken with the oddest feeling this morning. Her dad had talked her out of skipping school to come home for Election Day. He’d suggested she wait and maybe stretch out the Thanksgiving break. But the moment she opened her eyes this morning, she’d had no choice except to come back. She’d never felt anything like it before. It was woo-woo stuff, like Uncle Mad Dog was always talking about. She believed in the spiritual stuff her Uncle Mad Dog described, but nothing like it had ever happened to her no matter how hard she tried. Not until this morning.

  “Heather!” Mrs. Kraus stood behind the counter in the dusty old sheriff’s office and greeted her with a smile as big as the Kansas sky. “What are you doing here? Does Englishman know you’re coming? Did you hear about Wynn?”

  She felt a little reassured. If something had happened to her dad, Mrs. Kraus didn’t know about it. And that wasn’t likely. Heather decided to answer the last question first.

  “I heard on the radio as I was driving back. Is there any word? Do you know how Wynn’s doing? Or the kids who were on that bus?”

  Mrs. Kraus’ smile disappeared. “Wynn’s critical, but stable. I was on the phone with his wife not long ago. They flew Wynn to a hospital in Wichita. The doctors think he’s got a good chance to make it, but he won’t be telling his side of the story anytime soon. Would sure help your dad if he could.”

  “Is Dad okay?” Heather had wanted to lead with that question, but she’d been trying to persuade herself that the feeling she’d woken with could be explained by the anchovy pizza her study group had split last night, along with some pithy thoughts on the limitations of tort liability.

  “Oh, sure, honey. I mean, you know he’s not been sleeping well and he’s shook up by all this, and overwhelmed as usual, but he’s fine. He’d be better if I could find him a deputy to help sort through this mess.”

  Englishman hadn’t been sleeping or eating well since her mother died. Before, really, while he was sheriff and caregiver and searcher after miracles. Heather knew about her dad’s deputy problems, too. Englishman had only had one qualified deputy in all his years in office. The woman had saved Heather and her sister from a bomb. After that, she got lots of better offers from other law enforcement agencies. Then Benteen County’s finances turned so desperate they stopped issuing regular paychecks. Heather didn’t blame the woman for moving on.

  “Dad’s working this case by himself?” She hadn’t thought it would be that bad. The county budget included three deputies—not trained police professionals, but nice guys who did their best. Wynn was in a hospital, but that still left two. “Where are Gaddert and Frazier?”

  “Gaddert’s on leave to deal with his folks. Frazier’s latest experiment in gourmet cooking missed the mark. He’s out with food poisoning.”

  “How can Daddy investigate the car Wynn was chasing and the bus accident, all by himself?”

  “Well, he’s got me.” Mrs. Kraus squared her shoulders and pulled herself up to her full four-foot-ten. Heather knew the old woman was a huge asset, no matter how tall she stood.

  The phone rang. “Dang!” Mrs. Kraus said. “I had the state troopers on one line and the hospital in Hays, where they took the people from the school bus, on the other. Somebody’s gone and got impatient on me.”

  “I’m sorry. Deal with business. You get that line and I’ll see if I can keep the people on the other one happy.” Mrs. Kraus grabbed a phone and Heather started around the counter.

  “Heather?” someone said. Heather turned and discovered a neighbor, who lived a block down from the English house, standing in the doorway behind her.

  “I was just about to vote,” the woman said, “only someone told me the most disturbing rumor. Maybe you can help.”

  That phone needed attention, but Heather had been taught to be polite. “Yes?”

  “That person told me Englishman is an atheist. Is that true?”

  Heather tried to decide how to answer that. Englishman wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with God. She’d once heard him say he and God shared mutual doubts. And that was before Mom died. The God Englishman believed in wasn’t much interested in tracking the flight of every sparrow, or even humanity in general. In this woman’s world, that was atheism.

  “Uh, no,” Heather said. She thought that was technically accurate. “Daddy’s no atheist. My sister and I were raised as Episcopalians, if that helps.”

  The woman’s face turned prune-like. “Oh my,” she said. “Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”

  ***

  The sheriff pulled his Chevy out of Klausen’s parking lot and turned right on Main Street. It was too warm for fall. Indian summer, he supposed. Mother Nature teasing you with what she was about to take away.

  There wasn’t much traffic on Main. Good thing, since he was working his cell phone as he drove. He hated people who did that, but he needed to do several hundred things at the moment, among them making sure the authorities in Hutch realized the driver of the Dodge was probably a kidnapper.

  There never was much traffic on Main these days. The street was empty of cars, but littered with the first dead leaves of fall. That and the black walnuts kids liked to roll out in front of motorists. When you ran over them, they exploded with a sound like the crack of a rifle. The sheriff recalled strewing a few walnuts in his own youth. He and his friends had thought it was great fun to watch people duck and start searching for snipers. Since 9/11, the prank had a new edge to it. Not that that had stopped anyone.

  There hadn’t been a hard enough frost to bring down all the leaves yet. Bright yellow and red, they clung to the tops of the mature trees that lined the street. Lower down and nearer the trunks, they were still a tired green. The condemned, awaiting execution.

  The sheriff ran over a couple of walnuts a
nd finished his call before he turned in at the high school. The first of its buildings had been erected on the east edge of town back before the Great Depression. The school was still on the east edge, since the city had pretty much stopped growing soon after. The sheriff found a spot in the parking lot, not far from the signs that indicated the gym was a polling place today.

  A single crow sat on a ledge above the entrance to the high school. It watched him silently as he passed through those familiar doors. The bird looked like it wanted to tell him something. Since this was Election Day and the evangelical right had targeted him, “nevermore” would be appropriate.

  The sheriff turned down the hall toward the principal’s office before he remembered the cotton Doc had packed in his nose. He wasn’t about to walk in there sounding like Elmer Fudd. Instead, he stepped into the boys’ room and carefully removed the packing from each nostril. The right one started bleeding again. The dispenser was out of paper towels, so he stepped into a booth to look for toilet paper.

  The restroom door opened and someone entered.

  “Are you crazy?” a cracking adolescent voice asked. “What if someone finds us in here?”

  The sheriff could remember sneaking into this very room several times when he should have been in class. Secretly making plans to raid a girls’ slumber party, for instance. In his day, those raids had been pretty innocent. Boyfriends stole a kiss from their girls, would-be boyfriends tried to get attention by setting off firecrackers or sneaking up to windows and holding a flashlight under their chins to look spooky. No one ever got hurt. Except when one of his buddies had run from an angry chaperoning father, an impressive burst of speed that was spoiled by the clothesline in his path. And then, it was mostly hurt pride, though his friend had spoken with a peculiar squeaky voice for a few weeks afterward.

  “Don’t worry about it,” another voice said. “Worry about what happens if you talk about last night.”

  That got the sheriff’s attention. Wynn had run into a school bus during that night. But that wasn’t necessarily what the boys were talking about. The sheriff decided his nose could use a bit more quiet pressure here in the stall.

  “I won’t say anything,” the younger one whined.

  “Swear to God,” the other demanded.

  Whatever it was, it was serious to these two.

  “I swear.”

  “And I condemn my soul to eternal damnation if I break my word,” the older prompted. “Say that, too.”

  Everyone in the sheriff’s class had been Christians. Everyone in the county was, with the exception of Mad Dog, a couple of Jews, a converted Buddhist, the Muslims who ran the hardware store over in Cottonwood Corners, and a few closet agnostics and atheists. But English and his classmates hadn’t worried much about eternal damnation. That was something new. The sheriff didn’t like it much. English didn’t like anything that required everyone to believe the same as everyone else. When you had a brother like his, you tended to be aware of stuff like that.

  “I….” The first voice didn’t care for that version of the oath.

  “Swear it,” the second boy said. “Swear you’ll never tell anybody where you were last night, Chucky, or I’m gonna personally shove you through the gates of hell myself.”

  Chucky. That must be Chucky Williams—his old man had only been a couple of classes behind the sheriff. English was pretty sure there wasn’t another Chucky in the county, though there were several Chucks.

  How many times had he heard lives threatened in these hallowed halls while he was growing up? None of those had been serious threats. This probably wasn’t either, but it did seem to be getting out of hand. He dropped the bloody toilet paper in the bowl and took hold of the handle of the stall. The door stuck and he had to yank a couple of times to get it open.

  “Holy shit,” Chucky said.

  “Somebody’s in here,” the other finished.

  Both of them were out the door before the sheriff could get a look at them. And no one was in the hall when he exited the restroom. He knew how many potential escape routes they had. He’d never catch them, but Chucky should be easy to find. And he’d recognize the other voice if he heard it again.

  Could something else have happened last night that required such a solemn oath of secrecy? It could when you were in your teens, he decided. But when he looked across the hall at the windows facing Main Street, the crow was sitting on the sill. It was staring in, watching the sheriff and turning its head from side to side as if it couldn’t believe he’d let a clue like that get away.

  ***

  Heather answered the line Mrs. Kraus wasn’t on. “Benteen County Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Who’s this?” The brusque voice was an older man’s.

  “My name’s English,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Oh, sorry, Sheriff,” the man at the other end of the line said. “I wasn’t expecting a woman.”

  He thought she was Sheriff English. What a kick. She should tell him, but he still hadn’t identified himself.

  “And you are?”

  “Sorry. Hell of a morning here in Hays. Can’t remember the last time we had to expend so much energy doing some other jurisdiction’s work for them.”

  This guy had an attitude. She hadn’t told him she was the sheriff. His mistake. Let him live with it. She didn’t say anything and he correctly interpreted her silence.

  “Okay. I know. Little county like yours hasn’t got much manpower, but we don’t exactly have a generous budget either. I’m Under-Sheriff Pugh. Sheriff passed your request on to me, not that I ain’t got more open cases than Carter’s got liver pills.”

  Carter? Liver pills? And manpower? This Pugh must be a serious coot with a tint of misogyny.

  “And?” Heather said.

  “Yeah, I’m getting to it.” He paused and she heard him thumb through a notepad. “I questioned everyone who was on that bus your deputy rammed. A couple are gonna be kept for more treatment. Rest should be released by this evening.” He recited a brief litany of their injuries.

  “They all say they were coming from choir practice at Bible camp,” he continued. “Kinda early for choir practice, if you ask me, which you didn’t. Your bus driver didn’t end up here. You’ll have to check, see where another ambulance might of took him.”

  “Names?” Heather kept it short and sweet. She didn’t trust him not to recognize how young she was. Twenty-two, now, but she didn’t feel like a full-scale grownup. Not most of the time, anyway.

  “You mean the kids? I didn’t ask who was driving the bus. Figured you would of established that at the scene.”

  “Yeah, kids,” she agreed. He read off the list and she wrote them down on a sheet of scratch paper. She didn’t have to ask him how to spell them. She knew them all. She and her sister had been babysitters for every single one.

  “Anything else?”

  He sighed, like she’d demanded he give up the rest of his precious day. “Well, they all agreed your deputy was running without lights until just before he rammed them. Why’d he do that, Englishman? Why’d…?” He paused a moment. “Say,” he said, “if you’re a woman, why do they call you Englishman?”

  “Inside joke,” she said. “You got anything else for me?”

  “Ain’t that enough?”

  “Thanks for your generous cooperation.” Heather hit the disconnect button. Beyond his rudeness and attitude, there was something about their conversation that bothered her.

  “Mrs. Kraus.” The woman had just hung up her own line. “Didn’t you tell me everyone from the accident but the driver of the Dodge and Wynn-Some were transported to Hays?”

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Kraus was making notes of her own and the phone had just started ringing again. “Why?”

  “Then where’s the bus driver?”

  Mrs. Kraus raised an eyebrow and shook her head. Then she raised her phone and answered it.

  So who was the bus driver? And what was this crap about choir pra
ctice at Bible camp? The county’s only Bible camp was never open except in summer, and a church choir shouldn’t have anything to do with Buffalo Springs High. You couldn’t use a school bus to transport a church choir, could you? Wasn’t that mixing church and state?

  Then, what Mrs. Kraus said destroyed her train of thought.

  “Mad Dog. Calm down. What d’ya mean, attempted murder?”

  ***

  The sense of impending doom that had brought Mad Dog speeding down from the Black Hills was nearly forgotten by the time he got off the phone with Mrs. Kraus. His brother, Englishman, she’d assured him, was alive and well and out there trying to solve the mystery behind this morning’s accident. When Mad Dog told her he might check in with Englishman on the sheriff’s cell, Mrs. Kraus advised against it. Englishman needed a free line so he could get updates from the office and the localities to which the injured had been transported. And he needed to be left alone to do his job since he was a one-man department this morning.

  Mad Dog decided he’d found what he dreaded. What pulled him off that mountain must be that obscene political muck in his front yard and on his door, and the attempt on the life of his beloved Hailey. If Englishman was too busy to help him solve those crimes, Mad Dog would do it himself.

  Armed with his own cell phone, so he wouldn’t have to drive back to the house to contact Englishman or Mrs. Kraus, he and Hailey started back to the Mini Cooper. Halfway across the front yard, Mad Dog changed his mind. He sprinted back past the house toward the barn and a view of the pasture beyond. Antifreeze in Hailey’s water could as easily be duplicated in the cattle tank where his small buffalo herd drank.

  The water in the trough also looked green, but just from the moss that lined it. The liquid itself was as clear and pure as always. There weren’t any dead bison lying around, either. The ones he could see all looked reassuringly fat and sassy. He couldn’t see all of them, of course. They had a full section to graze on.