Watkins - 05 - Poison Heart

by Mary Logue

  Margaret stood up and said, “Well, I’m his daughter. I’ve loved him a lot longer than you.” Then she slammed out the door, leaving Claire standing on the porch.

  Patty Jo turned to Claire. “I’m sorry you had to witness that. Margaret is a little unstable. She and her father had a falling-out not long before his stroke. I don’t think she’s forgiven herself. I know this is hard for her. I’d hate for her to take this to court. It would be a terrible waste of money.”

  Claire found Margaret sitting in the front seat of the squad car, clutching at her dress, tears streaming down her face. “Don’t mind me. I cry all the time. It’s the change. You know.”

  “Menopause?”

  “Perimenopause, that’s what my doctor calls it. That’s when all the hard stuff happens. I get real sensitive and cry at any little thing.”

  “Your father’s stroke is no little thing,” Claire said as she started the car. “Especially if you had a falling-out right before he got sick.”

  Margaret sat very still. “Is that what she said?”

  “Isn’t it true?”

  “No. My father and I always got along. Until Patty Jo . . .”

  Claire didn’t know what to think. She started the car and headed down the driveway.

  Margaret turned to her and asked, “So what do I have to do to stop her? Take her to court?”

  Claire didn’t want to get her hopes up. “Let me talk to the county attorney.”

  “Would you?” Margaret’s voice lifted. “I’m sure my father doesn’t want her to sell the farm. I’m supposed to inherit it.”

  “If he can write, can you get him to write down what he wants to do?”

  “I could try.”

  CHAPTER 4

  You have to let me pay rent, just like anyone else.” Bridget had known Claire might pull this on her, telling her she could stay in the house for next to nothing. It was the day after she had asked Claire if she could rent her house, and Claire was giving her the grand tour. Bridget set Rachel’s car seat down on the floor in the living room of the old house.

  Claire turned in a circle in the nearly empty room. “You don’t even know how long you’ll stay.”

  “Claire, this is really happening. Chuck and I are breaking up. Rachel and I will not live with him again.”

  Claire sat down in one of the chairs she had left at her house. Bridget watched her stare at the windows. Claire ran her finger across one, and it left a clean streak. “How did it happen?”

  Bridget looked at her darling daughter, Rachel, and then said what she had just recently figured out. “Chuck wanted to be an only child.”

  Claire lifted her head to look at Bridget, and then a small laugh burst out of her. “You’re terrible.”

  That set Bridget off. She started laughing, and Rachel joined in, clapping her hands at the good joke. Bridget collapsed on the floor next to her baby and laughed until she was exhausted.

  Claire looked at her. “What are you going to do?”

  Bridget rolled over onto her back and stared up at the beadboard ceiling. She loved this old house. It would be a pleasure to live in it. “First, find a good babysitter. Move into this house. Cut back my hours at work. Get ready for winter.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “I want to chop up a whole cord of wood. I think that would be a good way for me to work out my anger. I’ll move my horse into the field.”

  Claire sat on the floor next to her and Rachel. “I still don’t understand. Where did Chuck go?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more as it was happening, but it was just too hard. He just went away. Started staying out later and later, and then not even coming home.”

  “Another woman?”

  “I hope so. That way he won’t be so apt to come running back to me.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Glad Mom and Dad aren’t alive to see this. Isn’t that funny? I think it would be harder for me to get a divorce if they were still around.”

  “I understand.” Claire looked at Bridget. “A divorce?”

  Bridget decided not to tell her she had already started to check out lawyers. She needed to break things to Claire slowly. “I think we’re headed that way.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  Bridget pulled Rachel out of her car seat and had her stand up. “That’s what you have to stop doing—you have to stop worrying about me. It’s not your duty, even if you are my big sister.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Now, Rachel has something she wants to show you. Hold out your arms.” Bridget aimed Rachel in Claire’s direction and let go of her hands. One sturdy foot in front of another, Rachel stepped across the floor to her aunt’s waiting arms.

  “Wow!” Claire hoisted Rachel up in the air. “You’re amazing. I think you beat out Meg by about a month. She didn’t start to walk until she was nearly fourteen months.”

  “I think crawling frustrated Rachel—simply not fast enough.”

  “Not much of a view either.” Claire looked around at the house. “I can get in here and give it a good cleaning.”

  “Let’s hire someone. You don’t have the time and neither do I.”

  “When are you planning on moving in?”

  “Within the week. I’m ready.”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. We’ve got company at our house.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Harvey.”

  Bridget felt her heart stir. “Is he as cute as Rich?”

  “Cuter.”

  What Claire would always remember about the Reiner house was its front entrance. Where most houses in Pepin County were thought to be the bee’s knees if they had a mudroom for your boots, the entrance to the Reiner estate was more like the lobby of a grand hotel. It seemed especially incongruous after driving down a winding dirt road that meandered around cornfields and over trout streams. The neighboring houses were old white farmhouses. One already had bales of hay tucked up against the foundation as additional insulation against the coming winter. The Reiner house looked as though it belonged in Edina, the richest suburb of the Twin Cities, not in the depths of this rural county.

  After Mrs. Reiner let her in, the first thing to greet Claire was a bronze statue of Hiawatha, much larger than either woman. Two landscapes of the Mississippi River hung on each side of the statue. The landscapes were old and lovely, with a quaint, romantic air. Other than the somber colors of the landscapes, the entrance was done in white: glass chandelier in the middle of the room, white marble floors with white walls that went up two stories. No dirt ever dared cross the threshold, Claire figured.

  Mrs. Reiner looked out of place in this museum of a room. She was dressed like a normal suburban housewife in jeans and a big sweatshirt that said Minnesota Twins on it. Dark brown hair in a bob and moccasins on her feet. A pretty woman in a bouncy sort of way. Claire figured she was probably in her late thirties. Claire explained who she was and why she was there.

  “I’m Candy. Come on in. Daniel’s anxious to talk to you. He’s on the phone. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  She led Claire into the living room and offered her a seat on a couch that was so white Claire automatically swiped at her pants seat before she sat down.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I didn’t know they had women cops down here.”

  “Well, we’re a little behind the times, but we’re trying to catch up.”

  “I’ll try to wrench Dan away from the phone.”

  “Great.”

  The room that Claire was left sitting in was bigger than the main floor of Rich’s house. She had to admit that someone had a sense of quirkiness. Above the mantel of the floor-to-ceiling two-story limestone fireplace was an old wagon wheel. It looked genuine, showing the wear of several decades.

  “Where’d the wheel come from?” Claire asked when Candy came back.

  “We found that in t
he back of the barn when we were tearing it down. Dan wanted it on the mantel. I told him it could stay there until I found the right piece of art. But I’ve grown fond of it. The old place . . . you just gotta love the history of a place like this.”

  Claire wondered why, if they loved the history so much, they had so completely destroyed it.

  “He should be with you in a moment. I hope you don’t mind if I leave you alone. We’re getting ready to go back to the Cities.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll just catch up on Architectural Digest.”

  The woman gave a quick laugh, then left the room.

  Claire picked up a magazine and was looking at apartments on Central Park with leather and chrome interiors when Daniel Reiner came in the room. He was a short, stocky man with a shock of tawny hair that made him look like a beaver, and one that, at the moment, wanted to chew on something.

  She stood up and told him who she was and that his elk was boarding at her house.

  “So you’re a deputy and our animal happened to wander over to your house. How convenient.”

  Claire wasn’t sure if he was kidding. Then he smiled.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re the one who’s going to find out who did this?” Reiner asked.

  “That’s my job,” Claire assured him. “Would you like to know how Harvey is doing?”

  “Harvey?”

  “Oh. I thought that was his name.”

  “You’re probably right. I’m not on a first-name basis with him. My caretaker is in charge of the herd. Do you know how much that animal is worth?”

  “No, sir.” Claire was curious.

  “The going rate for a bull elk his size is about fifty thousand dollars.”

  Claire nodded. No surprise that money was important to this man. “I wonder why someone shot him. They wouldn’t be able to get fifty thousand dollars for him when he was dead.”

  “It’s senseless.”

  “Do you have any enemies down here?”

  “No, we don’t even know anybody.”

  Claire realized the guy had no idea how much animosity he had stirred up in the farm country around his estate. “What about the men who worked on your house? Any trouble there?”

  “Oh, no. I’m still working with most of them. We brought them all down from the Cities.”

  That wasn’t such a good idea, Claire thought. Bringing in more-expensive labor from the Cities when there were contractors begging for work in Pepin County.

  “I know you’ve been buying up a lot of land. Any chance this could be tied to one of your deals?”

  “I doubt it. I’m offering over market value. Everyone seems real happy to work with me.”

  “Well, I’ll keep checking into it. The vet said the elk could be moved anytime. The wound is superficial.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the caretaker, Jim Bartlett? Set it up with him when he can come and get the animal. That’s what I pay him for. He can show you where the elk was when he was injured. What do I owe you for keeping the elk?”

  “Not a thing. We’ve enjoyed having Harvey, once we knew he wasn’t going to die on us. The vet said she’d just send you the bill.”

  Reiner pulled out his checkbook. “I insist on giving you a little something.”

  Claire shook her head again. “Just being neighborly.”

  “I hate to be in your debt.”

  Claire looked at him, wondering. “Why is that so awful?”

  “Just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Well, if you’d like, you could bake us a cherry pie.”

  Claire drove back down the long winding driveway to the caretaker’s house. She parked, and at the sound of her car, a stout tree trunk of a man came out of the garage. He wiped his hands on his jeans as he walked toward her.

  Claire introduced herself and told him that Reiner had said she should talk to him.

  The first words out of his mouth were what she had expected to hear from Reiner. “How’s the elk?”

  “Good. The vet said he doesn’t have an infection in the wound and didn’t lose that much blood.”

  “Scared the shit out of me.”

  “What?”

  “Come and see what I walked into.” He turned and led the way around the back of the garage and over to a pen. “We keep Harvey in here, separate from the females. Until he’s needed.”

  “Not much fun for him.”

  “I know. He gets everything he needs—food, shelter, even a harem. But not a lot of excitement, no reason to use his antlers.”

  Claire looked into the enclosure and saw that the two trees that stood inside of it were rubbed barkless at about Harvey’s head height. “He’s been using them on the trees instead.”

  “Yeah, it looks like it feels good. An itch satisfied.” Jim pointed. “I walked out to feed the herd and saw the fence line was broken. I can’t figure why they would cut the fence when they were going to shoot him.”

  The strands of barbed wire flopped free, three strands cut through and hoof marks leading out of the pen.

  “They also cut the wires into the fence that held the whole herd. When I first walked out, I saw the cut fence, I saw Harvey was gone, and then I saw the other fence was cut too. I couldn’t see the herd, so I wasn’t sure if they had discovered the break and taken off. I walked back over the hill and there they were, grazing. But Harvey was gone.”

  “Any ideas who might have done this?”

  “Not really. I’d say just some prank a kid would play, but there really aren’t that many kids around here.”

  Claire looked at the big guy. “Anybody mad at you?”

  “Oh, I suppose. But not mad enough to do this. And I don’t know how they think this would hurt me. Harvey’s not my elk.”

  “You’d be blamed?”

  “Is that what’s happening? Does Reiner think I did this?”

  Claire hurried to reassure him. “I didn’t get that impression at all.”

  “To tell you the truth, I think he’s getting a little bored with the elk. At first when he bought the herd, he’d come visit them most every time he was here. Now he hardly ever stops by, and he’s been complaining about their feed bills. Says the market has not been good to him. He’s no longer worth a hundred million, just seventy-five.”

  Claire walked around and checked the barbed wire. Not much to see, but it was obvious the wires had been cut. The breaks were clean and right on top of one another, and the wires weren’t pulled away from the fence. “Did whoever did this leave anything here?”

  “I didn’t find a thing. Not even a footprint. They were plenty careful.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Must have been late Friday night, early Saturday morning.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “I was gone Friday night—didn’t get home till late and didn’t check on the animals before I went to bed. I had settled them before I went out. It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I noticed the elk was gone. I called Reiner, but he was up in the Cities. I was thinking of calling the sheriff when you called Mrs. Reiner and she called me.”

  “All the other elk okay?”

  “Yeah, I went out and counted heads right after the call. They all appear fine.”

  Claire looked around. “Not everyone in this community is real happy about what Mr. Reiner is doing here. This whole setup. Buying up all this land.”

  “Sure, people are jealous.”

  “You think that’s all?”

  A little anger showed in his face. “What do I know? It’s not my business to think about it. It’s just my job. A man’s gotta make a living.”

  “Sure. I know.”

  He looked at her, then reflected. “You know what’s weird, though? There’s no blood anywhere. Not in the pen, not outside the pen. You said it was dripping off his neck. Whoever shot him didn’t do it here.”

  Walter couldn’t see very well anymore. He looked and looked out the window, but all he coul
d make out were lumps of color floating in a sea of light. The lumps moved sometimes, and he followed them with his eyes—if he wasn’t sleeping. What he did was not really even sleeping; it was not being awake. When he went deep, sometimes it felt like not being alive.

  A nurse came in and talked to him. “Hi, Walter. How’re you feeling?”

  He could hear her words, he could even understand them. But he couldn’t make any words himself. When he tried, his tongue tripped him up, and the sounds that came out of his mouth were garbage. He had quit trying. He knew the words, but they didn’t travel through him the way they used to.

  He nodded, and the nurse stuck a thermometer in his mouth. He had never been sick a day in his life. That’s what good hard work did for you. Until this complete disintegration of his body. Now nothing worked right. His one hand tried to keep at it, but the rest of his body had gone kaflooey.

  She pulled the thermometer out of his mouth and looked at it. “Normal.” Then she leaned in close to him, and he could see that she was young and pretty. “Do you want anything?”

  He wanted so much. But he shook his head. Better not to try.

  “Oh, look who’s here. Your wife.”

  For a crazy moment, he thought Florence had finally come to get him. He felt as though he was waiting so hard for her. But then he saw that it was Patty Jo. Could get a little snappy sometimes, but she had been there for him.

  “Hi, Walter.” She sat down in front of him and talked loud. Patty Jo had always had a voice on her, and since his stroke, she insisted on shouting at him.

  He nodded to her.

  “I had a visitor yesterday. That daughter of yours.”

  Margaret and Patty Jo had never gotten along. Or at least not after he had married Patty Jo. He wasn’t sure why. Patty Jo had explained to him that Margaret was jealous, thought she could keep her dad to herself. “You spoiled her, Walter. It’s your own fault.”

  Somehow so much was his fault. Patty Jo delighted in pointing out his mistakes. But she had helped him out so much when Florence died. He didn’t know what he would do without her.

  Patty Jo tapped him on the knee. “Margaret is trying to tell me what to do, Walter, and I don’t care for her tone. She seems to think she knows better than me. I’m your wife, after all. I make the decisions. She can’t seem to understand that.”