Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “Yeah,” Ole said. He scratched at something on the surface of his desk. “Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”

  He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. “Here’s what we know: Stalking Horse didn’t have any next of kin. She was originally from St. Paul or Minneapolis, one of those. She had a sister who apparently disappeared about twenty years ago. Eventually had her declared dead, but no one knows what really happened. Family name was Shortman—Stalking Horse changed it when she moved to South Dakota. Patty out front says she used to know the sister, long time ago, when Stalking Horse first moved out here. Used to visit all the time. No other family that we can find, though Teedt is looking.

  “She didn’t have any other jobs than the one at Cleary’s, but she had a lot of money in the bank, over thirty thousand dollars, and we don’t know if she had any other accounts that weren’t local. DCI’ll check into that.”

  “What about the skeleton?” Boyd asked. When their conversation began, he had leaned back in the battered vinyl chair he was sitting in, one of two that Ole kept for visitors, but as Ole talked, he leaned forward until he was at the edge, his back muscles tensed as if for a punch. Something cold seemed to have settled along his spine, like there was a persistent breeze in the room even though the door and all the windows were closed.

  “Cross and Gerson—or, I guess, the forensic team—took it back to Pierre. They’ll try to identify it from dental records, that kind of thing. I told them if we knew about when they think it went into the cellar, we could turn up missing person reports. I mean how many people go missing in a place like this?”

  More than anyone cared to think about, Boyd knew. He said, “She must have known the bones were there.”

  “Yeah.” Ole drew the word out like a curse. “I think we can assume Prue Stalking Horse either put them there or knew they were there. Or knew who put ’em there.” He studied Boyd for a minute. “How well did you know her?” he asked.

  Boyd sat back. “How well?” He had to think. “We were acquainted,” he finally said, not sure what Ole was actually asking. “I knew her from Cleary’s, sure. And she called dispatch once in a while, but I never knew her on a personal level.” He’d known her from people around the county talking about her, because people did, some odd thing she’d done or some place she’d been that someone hadn’t expected her.

  “Never thought I’d see her away from that bar,” people would say, though it wasn’t shocking, as far as he knew, any of the places people saw her. It was more that Prue convinced you to see her in a certain way and even if you saw her at, say, the grocery store on the edge of town, it seemed odd and out of place and a little bit uncertain. Hallie had talked to her several times in connection with Martin Weber and with dying and, probably, Death, but just to talk? To sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee? No. He’d never known her like that.

  The cold along the back of his neck persisted.

  Ole leaned forward in his chair, the springs creaking madly as they adjusted. “You’d hear things about her,” he said. “You know, like she was a witch or something. But who the hell believes that? I mean, aside from that stuff I’m not talking about and don’t believe in and shouldn’t be happening.”

  “As far as I know,” Boyd said, the tension in the room a fraction lighter than it had been a minute earlier, “aside from the Wiccan religion, there’s no such thing as witches.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you say,” Ole grumbled. He reached sideways and opened one of the desk drawers, drawing out an evidence bag that looked like the one Boyd had. “Gerson left this for you.”

  Boyd recognized the bag. It was the one he and Gerson had used for the two other stones from Prue’s house.

  “Why?” This casual handling of evidence was a problem. A big problem that no one but Boyd seemed to recognize or be concerned about.

  “She says they can’t go into the regular evidence pool. Says it screws everything up. She wants you to handle that side of things since she’s gone back to Pierre. She and Cross will take care of the lab and autopsies. And apparently, we’re going to do all the goddamned legwork.”

  “She doesn’t know me,” Boyd said.

  “I vouched for you,” Ole told him, as if that were sufficient for anything. “I told you, you’re my guy.”

  All his life, Boyd had resisted acknowledging the prescient dreams he had, had avoided admitting that they made him different or made the world stranger. But in the last five months, everything had become strange; strange had grown from dreams to encompass ghosts, reapers, black dogs, and blood magic. And he’d been in the middle of it all.

  Apparently, he’d always been the guy.

  He rose and picked up the evidence bag. It felt as if something hummed along his bones, like an extremely low-level electrical current.

  “Who makes—?” He hesitated. “If she didn’t have family, if Prue didn’t have any family, who takes care of the arrangements?”

  “Maybe us,” Ole said. “We’ll see if there’s a will first, though. And go from there.”

  12

  When Boyd left the sheriff’s office through the double-glass main doors, two of the big lights in the lot were flickering, one of them making a noise like the snap of an electric fence. A cold north wind scattered loose dirt and pea gravel like dry leaves, then died as suddenly as it had arisen. It was already twenty to seven and he was running late, which he rarely did.

  A car pulled out in front of him from the street just past the parking lot and sped up as soon as they passed the town limits. Three miles out of town, the only thing he could see of the car ahead of him was the dull red of its rear taillights. Two cars passed him going the other way before he turned. It was full dark, nearly seven o’clock now, a Wednesday night in early March.

  He could see the headlights of a car down the long straight stretch of road coming toward him. They appeared, disappeared, appeared again as the road rose and fell so slightly that in the daytime it looked completely level, the only set of lights, other than his, on an empty road. It wasn’t until the approaching vehicle came over the last shallow rise, maybe a quarter mile ahead of him, that he realized it was coming straight at him. He honked his horn. Nothing. Laid on the horn hard, the sound nearly deafening in the enclosed space of his SUV. The lights came faster. A blast of cold across his face like—

  Ditch.

  Thinking it and doing it at the same time. He was in the ditch, through, and out, as the car screamed past. One big thump, into the field, turning as he came, grass striking against the undercarriage of his SUV. Back through the shallow ditch, still turning, but the car was gone.

  Boyd sat for a minute, SUV idling, foot hard on the brakes. The car had either turned off, gone into a ditch itself, or turned off its lights. He backed around, pulled the Escape to the side of the road, and got out. With the headlights angled to light the asphalt, he walked up the road in the direction the vehicle had come. No skid marks.

  He got back in the SUV, turned again, and drove slowly back up the road. He didn’t see a car in the ditch, though there were two gravel roads it could have turned off on. He reversed again, heading back toward Hallie’s ranch.

  He called it in.

  “You didn’t see the car?” Ole was running dispatch, which was unusual but not unprecedented. He filled in when there was no other substitute. “Keeps my hand in,” he’d say if anyone asked. But everyone knew it was because his son and his daughter were both in college out of state and his wife worked in Rapid City during the week and was home only on the weekends. Mostly home on the weekends. Ole would never say it, but everyone knew he hated an empty house.

  “Headlights only,” Boyd said. “It was dark. Not big, judging from the height of the lights. Maybe a small SUV. But that’s about all I can say.”

  “Think they were drunk?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll tell Mazzolo to keep an eye out,” Ole said. “She’s on tonight.”

  “Thank
s.” Boyd replaced his phone in his belt clip, drove on, and turned into Hallie’s long driveway fifteen minutes later.

  Ole was right. They’d probably been drinking. Or fell asleep at the wheel. Probably. The problem with that was how they’d disappeared. They hadn’t ended up in a ditch or the middle of a field. Either the close encounter had sobered them, woken them up, or there was something going on that he didn’t yet understand.

  He parked in the yard next to a tan and blue pickup he didn’t recognize. On the other side was Hallie’s little pickup, a newer truck he thought might belong to Hallie’s dad, and an old squarish Chevy Malibu with primer spots on the trunk and rear passenger door. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a big group, had been thinking it would just be the two of them. Wanted that desperately, to relax, to spend a few minutes or hours not thinking about Prue Stalking Horse, about who shot her, about the sound of the bullet as it hit or the infinitely slow way that she’d fallen.

  But maybe this was all right too.

  Maybe this was better.

  He reached across to the glove compartment and took out a flashlight. The porch light was on and it cast shadows across the yard, intersecting with the big yard light by the horse barn. Boyd walked down both sides of his SUV, looking for scratches or dents, ran the flashlight quick underneath, but figured he’d have to wait until daylight to look for damage there. When he was satisfied that there was nothing that couldn’t be cleaned or touched up, he turned off the light, replaced it in the glove compartment, and went inside.

  When he opened the front door, there was a rush of warm air, the smell of meat and potatoes, garlic and butter, underlaid with the smell of horses and wheat and old dirt.

  Hallie came out of the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late. It’s been a busy day,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said dryly. “Here too.”

  * * *

  There were six of them at the table. Laddie Kennedy had showed up around six thirty and Hallie’d invited him to stay. So, it was Hallie, Boyd, Hallie’s father, Laddie, Brett, and Sally, whom Hallie had met, sort of, at a car wreck in November. It wasn’t quite like being back in the army, where you were always eating with someone and sometimes with everyone, but it was the most people Hallie’d fixed dinner for since she came home.

  It was kind of a big deal. Or it would have been a big deal, if there hadn’t been so much else going on.

  There was an almost-awkward moment when they all sat down because although Hallie knew everyone at the table, and some of the others had known each other for years, the rest had never met. After an odd quiet moment, Boyd reached across the table to Hallie’s father, to Laddie, to Brett, and to Brett’s friend Sally. “I’m Boyd. Boyd Davies,” he said, shaking each one’s hand by turns. He sat back down and started talking to Vance about rebuilding his big equipment shed while Hallie looked at him. Apparently he had social skills.

  Brett sat next to Hallie with Sally across the table. As the food was passed around, Brett began to talk about Hallie’s horses, which she’d finally gotten the chance to look at when she and Sally arrived earlier. Of the horses Pabby had left, two were at least fifteen years old, one was lame, and two—a two-year-old gelding and a six-year-old mare that threatened to bite anything that came near, including Hallie—hadn’t had any training at all.

  “So, it’s like a horse retirement home,” Hallie said.

  “Well—” Brett paused to cut herself a bite of steak. “—the black has potential.”

  “The biter?”

  Brett waved that off. “She wants something to do.”

  “Like bite me.”

  “Did you look at the way she moves?” Brett said, ignoring Hallie’s objection. “She could be awesome. And the gelding, the young one, you can tell he wants to please. He just needs some training.”

  “But the others? They’re basically hay-eaters, right?”

  “The pinto could do easy rides if you get her back in condition. But the Appy needs a lot of rehab for that leg, and even then…” Her voice trailed off. Then, she said, “And the bay, uhm, I think she’s got to be twenty years old.”

  “So, hay-eaters. Jesus.”

  Brett gave her a look, her head tipped sideways, like she was looking over the top of a pair of glasses. “If you were going to sell them,” she said, “you would have sold them without asking me to look at them. So, you know you’re not going to sell them.”

  “So, what? So don’t bitch about it?” Hallie grinned at her. “You know me, first I bitch about it, then I fix it.”

  “Right,” Brett said dryly. “You bitch about it the whole time.”

  Hallie wondered how long it had been since she and Brett had sat at a table and talked like this. They’d both changed in the meantime. Hallie had four years in the army, Afghanistan, and ghosts. Brett had most of a master’s in psychology and was going off somewhere next year to get her doctorate. Different paths, but they still had ranching and the West River, horses and a past.

  “Long-term,” she said, “I’d like to put the older horses in a back pasture, build them shelter and water. There’s a windmill back there, so there must be water. But the gelding and the biter, yeah, I’d like to work with them.”

  “It might help if you stopped calling her ‘the biter,’” Brett said.

  “Yeah, well, maybe she should stop trying to bite me.”

  Sally, who looked around the table, not like she wasn’t enjoying herself or she wasn’t comfortable, more like she didn’t entirely understand how she’d gotten there, said, “I don’t know very much about horses. I’m learning—” She smiled at Brett, then looked back at Hallie. “—but, here’s something to think about, her situation has changed recently. Her owner is gone and she doesn’t trust you, her new owner. She might be afraid. And though I don’t know horses, I do know what it’s like to be afraid, to be afraid of change. Sometimes it makes us retreat or hide, but sometimes it makes us aggressive.”

  Hallie wished she could say she didn’t know what it was like to be afraid. And it was true that she wasn’t afraid in lots of situations that terrified other people. If she could act, if there were something to do, then she did it, didn’t think much about whether it was stupid or whether she should do it or even if it might end badly. She did. It was situations where there was nothing to do or she was prevented from doing something or, worst of all, when she didn’t know that whatever was happening was even happening, when she couldn’t do or couldn’t have done anything even if she’d wanted to. Those situations scared her to death.

  Sally—and Hallie didn’t know her last name, though Brett may have told her, had probably told her—was wearing a denim shirt that looked brand-new, or at least ironed within an inch of its life, a pair of jeans that even Hallie, who didn’t notice things like that, figured cost more than the entire pile of jeans she had in her dresser upstairs. She wore two plain silver bracelets on her left hand, a silver ring with an intricate design Hallie didn’t recognize, and a thin silver chain around her neck. Her hair was short and sharply angled to the chin; Hallie couldn’t tell if it had been colored, but its honey brown shade seemed almost too perfect to be real. She was wearing just enough makeup to look like she wasn’t wearing any.

  She didn’t look precise in the particular way Boyd did, but she did look as if she knew what looked good and how to achieve it. She had a friendly smile and she had seemed game earlier when Brett took her out to see the horses in her brand-new hiking boots and brand-new jeans. Hallie appreciated that, that willingness to try.

  And she had a point. Hallie had seen it in Afghanistan, soldiers who’d been so scared, they did stupid-brave things. There hadn’t been anything she could do about them. Couldn’t tell someone not to be afraid of random mortar fire or stupid ways to die. Those things were still going to happen; Hallie couldn’t stop them. And one thing Hallie did know, had learned it from Dell a long time ago—you could ruin a horse by being mean to it, but you couldn’t ruin one by being too kind. Spoi
l it, maybe, but you could both recover from that.

  “Sure,” she said to Sally. “That makes some sense.”

  Sally sort of flinched, more like a flicker in her eyes, an anticipated flinch, like she’d expected Hallie to say something else. Then she smiled, a tight smile that still might have actually been genuine, and took a tiny bite of steak, which she chewed hard on before she swallowed.

  “Sally doesn’t eat meat very often,” Brett said in a low aside.

  “Huh,” Hallie said, because meat was pretty much a big deal around Taylor County, something you could raise or shoot or barter for and lay up extra for winter. Fruit and vegetables were expensive, things that had to be shipped in. The climate and soil made for a short growing season that often failed, so vegetables were mostly potatoes and several kinds of squash and at the brief end of the season a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini.

  “You want to help with the training?” she asked Brett.

  “Sure,” Brett said. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t have my own place to take care of or classes to study for or anything.”

  “It’s not like you don’t want to do it anyway,” Hallie replied.

  It felt good to talk about something normal, like other people on other ranches probably talked about all the time. Felt good to pretend that even here, life could sometimes be normal. Despite mysterious notes that might or might not be threats. Despite Beth’s reappearance. Despite Prue’s death.

  Despite Prue.

  Voices at the other end of the table made Hallie looked toward her father, who was talking to Boyd about … “Are you talking about tractors?” she asked.

  Her father poked a finger at Boyd. “Farmalls,” he said, like it was the worst thing he’d ever heard about the Boy Deputy.

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you,” her father said. “Biggest piece of shit that was ever on the market.”

  Boyd laughed. “My dad has a Farmall my grandfather bought used in 1965. It’s worked every day on our farm for the last forty years.”