Watkins - 01 - Blood Country

by Mary Logue

  BLOOD COUNTRY

  A CLAIRE WATKINS MYSTERY

  Mary Logue

  I would like to thank my writing group: Deborah Woodworth, Tom Rucker, Becky Bohan, Marilyn Bos, Pete Hautman, and two past members—Andy Hinderlie and George Sorenson. Also, special thanks to readers along the way: R. D. Zimmerman, Kate Green, Ruth LaFortune, Dodie Logue, and Mary Anne Collins-Svoboda.

  She had told her mother most of it. How the dark green truck had roared out of the night, how the wheels had screeched, how her father had been hit, had flown up, and then had landed on the street. She had even told her how Dad had lain there stretched out flat on the black tar and so quiet that it hurt. How the thought that Dad might be dead had come into her mind then and bloomed, and she hadn’t been able to stop it from growing. She had told her mother all that but not everything.

  A year later, the secret she kept still weighed her down. It rubbed at her and bugged her. It never went away. She thought of the secret every day. She worried. Sometimes her mother would reach down and rub her forehead and say, “Meggy, you are getting worry lines already. You’re too young. Go out and play.” And Meg wasn’t able to tell her mom that she was afraid. All the time. Because she knew her mother was worried too.

  But since they had been living in the country, Meg had started to relax. Maybe she had gotten away. Maybe it was all over. Maybe the man didn’t care anymore. Meg had started to think that he wouldn’t come looking for her.

  That’s why it was so hard to feel the fear creep up into her heart again. She had felt someone watching her when she left school today. She had purposely dropped a book and bent over to pick it up so she would have a chance to look around. She hadn’t seen anything suspicious. A truck was parked way down the street, but that wasn’t unusual. Yet her blood was zinging through her veins like it was made of metal. She sat by the window on the bus ride home and watched. But she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  When the man in the truck hit her father, her mom thought that Meg had stayed in the house and hid behind the curtains. What Meg never told her was that she had run out the front door. After a moment, Meg had turned around and gone back into the house and hidden in the curtains. When her mom came into the room, that’s where she found Meg. Because of this, Meg was in danger. Even though her mom was a cop, she couldn’t save everybody from everything. After all, her dad had been killed.

  For Meg had seen the man. She knew what he looked like. And he had seen her. Meg had watched his eyes light on her and grow larger for a second. He looked through the truck window at her, and then she ran. He knew what she looked like. She knew he was going to come and get her someday.

  1

  As Claire stepped out of her house into the fading sunlight of an early-April day, she looked back over the roof. The bluff rose up into the pale blue sky like the walls of a fortress. One of the reasons she had bought this old farmhouse was that it had that protection. The bluff was formed when limestone that had been carved away in the ancient bed of the Mississippi River. Its sides were covered with prickly red cedar, slashes of birch, black walnuts, and oak.

  Meg, her ten-year-old daughter, tugged at her jacket. “Mom, I’m going to run over to Ramah’s. She’s standing at her door. I’ll be right back.”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “But watch me, Mom. Watch me until I get there.”

  “Of course I’ll watch you.” She ruffled Meg’s hair and sent her on her way. Her darling daughter. Probably the most important reason they had moved down to Fort St. Antoine. Meg had been afraid in their old house in St Paul.

  The two of them had lived in Fort St. Antoine for nearly nine months. The town was about an hour and a half southeast of the Twin Cities, nestled between the shore of Lake Pepin and the surrounding limestone bluffe. It was situated halfway down a natural lake that had formed in the Mississippi River. The town was named after a French fort that had been built in the eighteenth century, although little of the fort remained. The town had peaked around 1910 with a population of 730, having both a railroad station and a ferry. Neither existed now. Where the town had once been a vital transportation center for the formers in the surrounding area, it was now just a pleasant day-trip destination for tourists from the Twin Cities. The current population was around 180.

  She pulled her eyes down from the bluffs and watched Meg wave from Ramah’s doorway. Ramah was an older woman who watched Meg for an hour or two when she got home from school.

  Claire saw that her other neighbor, Landers Anderson, was sitting out in his garden, so she walked over to chat. “What’s up?” she yelled at him as she got closer.

  “Pondering,” he told her. He sat smiling up at her, his wisps of white hair sticking out from under a green-plaid tam and an old Green Bay Packers sweatshirt snugged over his belly.

  “Good thing to do on a night like this.”

  “Yes, finally winter is letting loose of us. A fine day. It makes me wonder how many more springs I’ll see.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid you’ll be around for a while.”

  “Keeping an eye on you.” Landers patted the chair next to him.

  “I can only sit for a moment. Meg and I have a big night planned. We rented a video, and we’re making popcorn. Since I don’t work tomorrow, we thought we’d have a little party. Would you like to join us?”

  “No, thanks.” He lifted up the tam on his head and plopped it back down, making his white hair fly out at the sides. “I’ve got a good book going.”

  “What are you reading?”

  Landers laughed silently, his head bobbing up and down as if on a gentle spring, and then told her. “The Yearling. Seeing all the deer this year, I remembered that book that I read as a boy. Took it out from the library. It’s still good.” He paused, then asked, “How’s Meg doing at school?”

  “She has her ups and downs. Last few days, she has seemed upset about something, but when I ask her, she says it’s nothing.”

  “Meg thinks a lot. It always makes everyday life a little harder when you do it with full consciousness.”

  Looking at Landers, Claire was surprised by how much she loved this old man. He had been such a help to her when they had first moved down. Cups of tea when she was tired from stripping wallpaper, water when their well pipes burst, a telephone before the phone company put theirs in, and a shoulder to cry on when she felt alone and disheartened and didn’t want Meg to know. He was one of those rare people who had taken growing old as a chance to reflect on both his life and others and, in doing so, had grown wise. A simple sentence from him often put the wrangled mess of her life in perspective.

  He cleared his throat and folded his hands. She knew this meant he was ready to make a pronouncement. “Someone called me up and wanted to buy my house.”

  “Oh, what did you tell them?” Claire felt her heart stop. She couldn’t bear to think of Landers moving away. He was so much a part of this place that she was sure the sun wouldn’t shine as much if he were gone.

  “Hey, I’m no dummy. I asked him how much he’d give me.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  “Sure. He said a hundred and fifty thousand. For the house and the land.”

  Claire was surprised. Landers had quite a nice parcel of land, but the price seemed exorbitant. She had bought her house and one acre of land for forty thousand a year ago. She knew that property values down along the lake were rising much faster than the stock market, but the offer still surprised her. “Wow.”

  “That’s what I thought too. Wow. But I didn’t say it So then he offered a little more. I told him I’d sell over my dead body, and that might not be too far off. He told me the offer would only be good for a short period of tim
e. I wonder if it has anything to do with that new development they are thinking of putting in down here. People get so greedy when there’s a little money to be had.”

  “Are you considering selling?”

  “Not really. I don’t need the money. But sometimes I do think I should move to one of those senior apartments. Then I wouldn’t have to go fussing around in the garden all the time.”

  This comment made Claire feel better. Landers loved his garden. She didn’t think he could live without one. She saw Meg was running down the road and stood up to go.

  “You ready to get your hands dirty tomorrow?” he asked her.

  “You bet.” They had a date to work on his garden. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Don’t arrest anyone tonight,” he said, and chuckled at his own joke.

  LANDERS ANDERSON PICKED up a handful of black soil and squeezed it. The earth formed a soft ball in his hand, like crumbly pie dough. He leaned back on his heels and smiled. Spring filled him with glee. There was no other way to think about it. Anticipation of all that was to come, all the green that would burst out of the ground, all the color that would swirl out of the green. Buds and flowers and leaves spurting out of this black goop he had created. He looked up into the fading blue sky and, in this his eighty-first year, was glad for spring to be here again.

  He dropped the dirt ball back onto the garden bed and straightened up. Standing took an effort, joints rubbing together like tools left out in the rain. He wasn’t supposed to be out here in his garden. Or rather, he wasn’t supposed to be working in his garden, according to the doctor at the Mayo Clinic. Triple bypass surgery ten years ago had not cured him, only pushed the problem off. Although the doctor was a somber man, he had waxed eloquent for a moment when he declared that Landers’ heart and arteries were shot, describing his heart as “one of the worst traffic jams I’ve ever seen.” Landers laughed at the description but hadn’t been pleased by the prescriptions: no heavy lifting, hardly any walking, lots of tiny pills always handy.

  But the way he looked at it, this effort of living, either you enjoyed it or you might as well dig your own grave. He had given up tennis, then he had given up golf, but he’d be goddamned if he’d give up puttering in his own garden. It would hurt him every day to see it neglected and Landers was persuaded that this pain would do him more harm than a few moments of shoveling, a little extra effort bent over weeding.

  Besides, he was asking for help. Claire would come over tomorrow morning and help him uncover all his beds and stir up his compost heap and put some manure on the gardens. He could trust her to do it well. Of course, he would watch her and direct her. She didn’t know much about gardening, but she was learning, and she had the love of it. She knew that you needed to touch the soil, get your hands dirty, run fingertips over flowertops, pinch the leaves, clip the branches, deadhead the old blooms. The gardening seemed to be good for her, calmed her down. She was so jumpy. Must be hard to be a cop. He looked up again at the sky and was thankful she had moved in next door.

  The light was fading. He could see the blue leak out of the sky, the gray trees around him lose the little green they had in buds. He wiped his hands on his pants and was turning to go into the house when he saw what he had been looking for. Bending forward so quickly he almost toppled over, he caught himself on the fence and then leaned in closer. Yes. Oh, yes, it was the first spear of the new tulips he had planted last fall. Tulipa greigii. Small frilly plants with purple-striped leaves, long-lived, hardly like what one thinks a tulip to be. All winter he had been looking forward to watching their leaves shoot out of the ground and then the swell of bloom and finally the red blossom. They would probably last more years than he would. He reached over and touched the tip of the new shoot. Then he heard a sound, the gate creaking. He had been caught. Again, he stood and felt unsteady.

  As he turned to face his visitor, he heard a whistle in the air and then saw something coming at him. He tried to make it what it wasn’t—the wing of a blackbird, a tree branch falling, something natural and explainable—and then the shovel hit him.

  THEY WATCHED BLACK BEAUTY, and at the end Meg told her that it was her very favorite movie in the whole world.

  “But last week I thought Charlotte’s Web was your most favorite movie.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  Claire wrapped an arm around her. “Oh, Meg. It’s time for bed.”

  “But it’s only eight-thirty. I don’t have to go to bed until nine.”

  “I’m exhausted. So that means you have to go to bed. You can read for a while, though.”

  Claire followed her up the stairs and tucked her into bed. She kissed her daughter on the forehead and said a silent prayer to carry her safely through the night. Meg turned the light on by the side of the bed and propped herself up on her pillow. Claire stood in the doorway and gazed at her for a moment. Meg was caught in a pool of light, her dark hair shining. Her eyelashes dipped over her eyes, reading. A beautiful child.

  Claire turned into the darkness of the hallway, glad again that they had moved to this quiet community where the most violent act she would do in a day was to bend and pull a weed from the ground. She hoped it would stay that way.

  2

  There are good things and bad things, Meg thought as she pushed open the back door and felt sunshine on her face. In her mind she kept a list and reviewed it often. This morning would count as a good thing. Mom had made pancakes for breakfast. She had time to make them, because she didn’t have to go in to work. She sang, “Honey in the morning, honey in the evening, honey at suppertime. Be my little honey and love me all the time.” She even let Meg pour her own maple syrup. Meg liked a lot of syrup on her pancakes. Her mom would tease her and say her pancakes were islands floating in a dark sea.

  Meg walked down the driveway, keeping an eye out for agates. Agates were very good. Her dad had taught her how to find them. The bigger the better. They reminded her of jawbreakers split in half, red with thin lines running through them. A bad thing was a dead animal by the side of the road. She tried never to look at them. She didn’t want to know if it was a fox or a possum or a deer, but especially not a dog.

  She kicked at an ordinary rock and turned onto the main road. Mom told her she had ten minutes before the bus came, so she wasn’t in a hurry. School could be either good or bad. Day to day it changed. Yesterday it had been pretty good. Her teacher had smiled at her, and no one had called her any weird name. For one whole week, Brad Peterson had called her “Meggly Peggly.” She had tried to do what Mom had said and just ignore him, but it hurt her inside. Then he had stopped.

  The worst thing in the world was when Mom cried in the middle of the night. Like last night. Meg woke up and heard her and pulled the covers up to her ears. She’d pretend it was a bird calling in the night, like the owl under the bluff. She and Mom would stand out in the backyard in the dark and listen to the hooting that would rise up into a howl. Her mom told her the owl was trying to find another owl. She wondered if her mom was trying to find her dad in the night, only he had gone too far away.

  She was going to cut through Landers’ garden. He had said she could. He liked to see her come home from school, and often he would wave from his kitchen window. She pushed open the gate and walked down the stone path. No agates here, only gravel. Landers was a good man. He knew so much about flowers and nature. She remembered the time he told her that hummingbirds could fly in reverse, and then she had seen one do it.

  Someone was lying on the ground at the back of the house. Meg slowed her feet. She knew it was Landers, but she didn’t want it to be. He never lay down on the ground. But there he was, looking as if someone had pushed him so hard he was never going to get up again. She took two more steps but didn’t need to get any closer. She knew death when she saw it. The earth would grow over him. She wondered if God was watching. Looking up in the sky, she saw the sun pouring down from the clouds. It could be God. Then again, she was never sure God was really the
re. She didn’t have a good feeling about God. She set her books down on the ground, because she needed to run. She turned around and looked back at her house. Her mom was coming around the corner. Her mom would take care of it Her mom would know what to do. Meg opened her mouth and screamed. No words, just a rush of wind like birds howling, like crying in the night, like calling to a god who never answered.

  CLAIRE STOOD IN the bare garden, surrounded by a low white fence. She had sent Meg on to school. She hadn’t known what else to do with her. She had explained that Landers was old and ready to die. She had knelt down in front of her daughter, taken her pinched white face in her hands, and said, “This is not like your father. Old people die, and it’s okay. We’re sad they’re gone. We will miss him. But he was ready to go. He was getting tired.” She hoped Meg had believed some of what she said, though she herself believed little of it. But her real reason for sending Meg off to school was so she wouldn’t have to see her mother cry again.

  The morning sun slanted through budding oak trees. Claire wore a large white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans cut off at the knees, and red rubber boots. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face with a twisted bandanna. Crouching down on her haunches, she stared at the pale face of the old man.