Watkins - 01 - Blood Country

by Mary Logue

  Last night, he had woken up when Claire walked into Meg’s bedroom. He watched her through hooded eyes while she checked over her daughter. Then he had feigned sleep while she stood and stared at him. He didn’t know why he had done that, why he hadn’t let her know he was awake. But he felt like he was bait in a trap and hoped she might be lured in closer. She did take a step toward him and bend down, then she whispered his name and he opened his eyes.

  Finally, at four o’clock the next afternoon, he caught himself thinking again about Claire as he finished his chores. He decided he better get up to their house or his little pheasant would have eaten all his feed, and Meg might start to fret about that. So he filled up a quart container of food, enough to keep them going for a couple days—that way he’d have to stop by from time to time—and walked down the road toward their house.

  As he walked, he thought about what his next move should be with Claire. She reminded him of a forest animal—not one specific animal, a deer, a fox, but rather the embodiment of them all, the soft way they moved through the forest, the sure way they saw and smelled danger, and the decisive way they acted when it was upon them. He decided he would give Claire time to get to know him. The worst thing he could do was rush her. She would run, and he would never see that opening in her eyes again. He knew how she could vanish while remaining in the middle of a room. He didn’t want that to happen.

  So he decided he would drop by every few days, let things develop naturally between them. The next move would be more like an amble. If he hung around, she might invite him over for dinner. He could ask her to stop by his house and have a cup of coffee.

  As he walked down their road, he could see Claire and Meg out on the front lawn and watched the two heads lift to the sound of his footsteps—both of them projecting fear, then attention, and quickly, gladness. Their faces showed they were happy to see him. Meg left little doubt as she ran out to the road to greet him. Her face shone, and she was prancing as she came up to him.

  “He ate some food right from my hand,” she told him.

  Rich dropped down to her level and gently tweaked her nose. “I’d probably eat food from your hand.”

  She giggled and danced alongside of him. “Like popcorn?”

  “Something like that.” He stood, and they continued up to Claire. When he saw what they had made for the pheasant, he roared with laughter. They had brought out an old doll crib, and the pheasant was curled in the crib in a bed of straw. Then they had made a fence around it, with an old lace curtain as the covering. “This is quite a fancy castle King Tut has got here.”

  “Nothing’s too good for our Tut,” Meg said, looking down possessively at the sleeping bird.

  They set up a water and feed tray for King Tut, and then Claire asked him to join them on the porch for fresh lemonade and brownies. Rich stayed for an hour and then decided it was time to leave. He was working hard not to become a pest Claire told Meg to stay in the house, and she walked out with him.

  “Could I ask you something?” Claire said as she walked Rich to the road.

  She seemed embarrassed, and Rich smiled to make whatever she was going to say easier. Nowadays, he had heard, women often asked men out. That was something he would give up with gladness. He had always hated putting himself on the line. Rather stay home with his pheasants than ask for something he might not get. So he smiled and said, “Sure.”

  Claire looked down at the ground and kicked at a rock. “You know, Meg really likes you. She talked about you a lot today. Giving her that pheasant was about the nicest thing you could have done for her.”

  Rich wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but he tried to keep smiling.

  “So I was wondering if it would be possible for you to come and stay with her for a few hours tomorrow while I run into town.”

  “Stay with Meg?” Rich wasn’t sure he had heard right. “You mean, like baby-sit?”

  “Yes,” Claire nodded. “Usually I ask Ramah, but with all that has happened, I’d feel a lot more secure knowing you were with her.”

  Rich nodded and said sure. ‘What time would you like me to come over?”

  “Late afternoon.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Her eyes dropped from his face, and she kicked at the dirt. “I have some shopping I need to do.”

  He nodded again and said, “See you.”

  As he turned to walk home, he decided that Claire might be good at a lot of things, but she was a lousy liar.

  CLAIRE HAD CALLED in that morning and asked for the day off. Sheriff Talbert had said, Of course, don’t even think about it After a couple harrumphs, he asked how everyone was. Claire cleared her throat too and told him. Then she thanked him for the day off and said she’d see him next week.

  “You’ve got one precious little girl there. You take as much time off as you need to make sure she’s all right. And if you need anything, Claire, you don’t hesitate to call. Anything in this sheriff’s department is at your disposal. You know that.” He fell silent, as if the words had emptied him.

  “Thanks, Sheriff. I needed that.”

  She and Meg had gone grocery shopping, she had caught up on all the laundry, and Rich had stopped by to show them how to care for the pheasant. Such a normal, safe day. Claire made a nice dinner for the two of them—all Meg’s favorite things, spaghetti and corn and blueberry muffins. They had even walked down to the lake after dinner. Their sunset walk. Each day the sun was setting later.

  Meg had climbed into bed at a reasonable hour, only to come popping down the stairs again to check on Tut They had compromised and put him out on the back porch for the night Meg had wanted him in her room again, but Claire explained that little birds needed to be closer to nature than that However, Claire couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to the bird, and she knew coyotes and foxes skulked in the woods above their house. So they moved his castle to the porch, and Claire latched the door to the porch. Claire checked on the pheasant as he roosted on the edge of his cardboard box. Then she walked up the stairs to check on her daughter. Meg sprawled across the bed, her covers wrapped around her limbs like sea foam. Her little night swimmer.

  Outside the window, the darkness swelled. Claire stood by the window for a moment, feeling the night press against the glass, and then decided it was time to go to work. She worked, as she always had done, on the kitchen table. No matter where she set up a desk for herself, she was drawn to the kitchen table, the center of the house.

  Claire turned on her working light and laid out all the scraps of paper she had picked out of Landers’ wastepaper basket She had loved working jigsaw puzzles as a kid. Usually over Christmas her mother would buy one with a thousand pieces, she and Bridget would set up the card table in the living room, and they would all work away on it. Her mother always started with the edge pieces, trying to frame in this world of chaos.

  And so Claire started with the edge pieces. They were harder to discern than in a cutout puzzle, but anytime she saw a straight edge, she put the piece in a pile. In the Cities, if she was working on such a case, she would turn these pieces of paper over to an official questioned-document examiner. It was their job to put such documents together again. But she didn’t want to send it to Eau Claire and wait to get it back. If she couldn’t easily solve it tonight, she would send it off.

  There must have been some anger in Landers when he tore up the paper; he had ripped it into rather small pieces. She had gathered over a hundred scraps, some of them only the size of a dime. Her eyes were drawn to the words, and she could make out lines running through some pieces, but she kept looking for the straight edges. Do it methodically, in the end it will be faster and more successful, she had been taught.

  When she raised her head to look at the clock on the stove, it was after eleven. She had been piecing the paper together for over an hour, but it was almost done. The problem was, she was missing some pieces. Still, with what she had she would be able to go to
a legal stationery and find out what the document was. It appeared to be something about property.

  This did not surprise Claire. She couldn’t help but feel that Landers had been killed because of his land. There was such a greed for it down on the lake these days. People wanted land with a view, hopefully of the lake, preferably off the bluff. Landers’ piece of property commanded a view of the lake from the second tier of land, about one hundred feet up from lake level. Far enough away from the lake to not be bothered by the highway and the railroad tracks, but close enough to have spectacular views.

  Something Mrs. Langston had said kept niggling at Claire. Something about Darla and Landers.

  Landers owned ten acres. They all extended off an alley and could be cut into quarter-acre lots. That would mean a lot of money for Darla and Fred. She had noticed them over at Landers’ house today. It irked her to see them pawing through his belongings. What a funny word. She had never thought of it before, belongings—that which shows that we belong. She wondered if they would have a garage sale. Maybe she could buy some knickknack of Landers and keep it in her house so that he would in some way continue to belong.

  But in reading over the document, she could make out a lot and block number: Lot 12, Block 1–4. She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think they were Landers'. As she recalled, all the lot numbers on this side of the town were single digits. She would ask Stuart to open up the village hall and check it out tomorrow.

  Claire taped the document together as best she could, with special tape that was easy to peel off again. She walked out to check on King Tut once more and stood in the dimness of the porch, listening to the shriek of an owl in a dark tree under the bluff.

  She remembered the memory Bridget had of the two of them screaming as loud as they could. Claire longed to do it again, to step out into the darkness broken only by a spattering of pinprick stars, throw her head back, and howl at her own fears. If she could scream loud and long enough, maybe she could empty herself of all her fears. It would be her battle cry, for as sure as she was of anything, she was going to find the red-haired monster and stop him.

  26

  Claire realized she’d been sitting at the kitchen table just feeling the sun fall on her. Her coffee was cold, and she hadn’t gotten anywhere with the crossword puzzle. Time for the day to begin. “Let’s go examine a map.”

  Meg looked up from where she was sitting on the floor, cutting out a paper doll, and asked the perennial question of children: “Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to figure something out, and a map would help.”

  Meg stood up and brushed her jeans off. “Where’s the map?”

  “In the town hall.”

  Stuart had said he would meet her at the town hall at ten-thirty. Meg had to brush her hair before they could leave, and then she had to check on King Tut to see that he was happy in his castle.

  As they walked down the hill to town, Meg babbled on, the sound of her voice like a brook to Claire, happy and full of life: “Only four more weeks of school left, Mom, and then what are we going to do for our vacation this year? We hardly have to go on one, because now we live in the country, plus what would we do about King Tut? Maybe Rich would watch him. I want to take swimming lessons this year. You promised last year, but it never happened. I need a new swimsuit anyways. My old one is too tight. It pinches me on my bottom.”

  Claire nodded and clucked in appropriate places, feeling for all the world like a mother hen, herding her little chick down the hill. As they rounded the corner at the bottom, the town opened out in front of them—a row of old clapboard buildings in yellows and white, some with awnings, looking much as it did a hundred years ago. Except the streets would have been dirt, and buggies would be tied up where the cars were parked. The lake glinted through the trees in the park. The bluffs on the far side of the lake offered protection and gave a sense of the world they lived in as having a clear boundary, sheltered from the rest of the world. That was why it worried Claire even more that someone had dared to come down here and try to kidnap her daughter and harm her sister. She needed to make this place safe again.

  Stuart was already in the town hall, a small square cement-block building with a vault. “They needed the vault because they used to put all the deeds in here,” Stuart explained, “but now they are kept at the county seat in Durand.”

  He had the town map used for zoning stretched out on the conference table. Claire leaned over it and oriented herself. The lake was marked with blue, the railroad tracks with a crosshatching, the elevation marked on the bluffline. She ran her finger up Main Street until it intersected High Street and located her property: Block 6, Lots 3 and 4. Across from her was Landers’ piece—Block 8, Lots 1 and 2—and then the field across from that, which wasn’t platted. Looking at the map, she could see clearly that the property in question on the document was not Landers'.

  “What’re you looking for?” Stuart scrutinized the map, then twirled it around on the table in front of him.

  “Block 12, Lots 1 through 4.”

  “Oh, that’s Fred and Darla’s.” Stuart pointed over to the other side of town, just up from the railroad tracks.

  It didn’t surprise Claire that it was their property. It just confused her. Were they thinking of giving it to Landers? That didn’t make any sense. She had seriously misread what she had taken to be a clue.

  “Who pays taxes on that land?” she asked.

  Stuart looked surprised. “Darla and Fred, of course. Late, of course. That’s how they handle everything. Why?”

  “Just wondered,” Claire said, then asked out loud, “Why would they want to give it away?”

  IT MADE A kind of horrible sense to Bridget that two days after her attack she felt the worst she had ever felt. Her shoulder burned to the core of its bone; she felt bruised from head to toe; and she was terrified. She sat in an easy chair in the living room and looked at catalogs of clothes and food and gardens and housewares; anything to keep her mind off her pain.

  Chuck brought her a grilled cheese sandwich. He had been waiting on her in a way that was foreign to him and disturbing to her. He stood in front of her, staring down at her.

  “There’s nothing in the house,” he said.

  At first she thought he was trying to reassure her, but then she realized he was telling her they had no food. That wasn’t good. Even though she was still nauseous, she was hungry all the time.

  “I want some ginger ale,” she commented after taking a bite of her sandwich and swallowing it.

  “I need to go grocery shopping.”

  Without hesitation, Bridget said, “I’ll come with you.”

  There was no way she was staying at home by herself. She had told Red nothing about her life, but he still might be able to find her. After all, he had seen her before, and she never found out where. He knew who she was.

  Being out among people made her feel better. She felt safer, as if no one could grab her in public. And walking seemed to make her body feel better too, as if doing something physical stretched out and soothed the sore muscles.

  She held on to the grocery cart and pushed it slowly through all the aisles while Chuck pulled things off the shelves and put them in the basket. They were a good team. She should always let him do the grocery shopping; he was a natural at this. He bought items in larger quantity than she did. Where she would buy two cans of tomato sauce, he grabbed five.

  When they had snaked through most of the store and were coming into the cosmetics and paper items, she remembered something else she was craving. “I’d really like some yogurt.”

  Chuck turned back for it and left her standing there, staring at diapers. She had no idea they came in all these different forms now. Diapers for boys and diapers for girls. Every month or two the baby needed to change to a whole new shape. She remembered the soft, thick white cloth diapers her mother had used on them and then used for years after to clean the windows of their house. Maybe she should use cloth diapers. She
had read conflicting arguments on the environmental advantage of each. Yet another big decision she would have to make.

  Just then, out of the corner of her eye, Bridget saw a man walk by the aisle she was standing in. He had red hair. Her blood drained into her feet, and she broke out in sweat on her back. She left the shopping cart and started to back up the aisle, away from the end she had seen him pass. She needed to get to Chuck. She reached out a hand to grab onto something and managed to knock a row of formula to the floor. The sound the cans made clanking down would draw everyone’s attention in the store. She turned and ran. Reaching the end of the aisle, she couldn’t remember where yogurt was. She stood still and yelled, “Chuck, I need you.”

  An old woman walked by her and clucked. Bridget was ready to bolt past the butcher’s counter and go out the back way when she saw the red-haired man at the far end of the store, browsing in the produce. She turned in the opposite direction and ran. Her heart had bolted in her chest and her feet were flying when she ran into Chuck full tilt, coming around a corner.