From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  ALSO BY JUDY TROY

  West of Venus

  Mourning Doves

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it

  are inventions of the author and do not depict any real persons or events.

  Copyright © 1999 by Judy Troy

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

  by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Random House and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Music Publishing for

  permission to reprint an excerpt from “Hello Walls” by Willie Nelson.

  Copyright © 1961 by Sony/ATV Songs LLC (renewed).

  All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing,

  8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.

  Reprinted by permission.

  Troy, Judy

  From the Black Hills / Judy Troy.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78669-2

  I. Title.

  PS3570.R68F76 1999

  813′.54—dc21 98-53465

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  FOR MILLER AND HARDY

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part I - Wheatley Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part II - Brookings Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude to the Whiting Foundation; to Bob Overturf at the Division of Criminal Investigation in Rapid City, whose help was invaluable; to Frank Walters for his motorcycle wisdom; to Robin Bernstein for his beautiful sentence; and to Georges and Anne Borchardt for, among other things, their faith in me.

  I would also like to thank Mark Siegert for his inestimable help and support; Mary D. Kierstead, always; Miller Solomon, for more than I can say; Jeanne Tift; Beth Pearson; Margaret Wimberger; and Daniel Menaker, whose intelligence and talent have now graced my work a second time.

  PROLOGUE

  EARLY Sunday morning in the third week of August, Michael Newlin left Wheatley, South Dakota, for college. His mother stood in the driveway alone, in her church clothes, to see him off. Behind her was the two-story brick house he’d grown up in, which she would live in by herself now. His father had been missing for more than eight weeks. On June 18, without having done a violent thing ever before, he had shot and killed Mary Hise, the young woman who’d worked as receptionist at his small insurance agency. Then he’d disappeared. He’d been seen in Kansas, but that was back in July. By this time he could be anywhere.

  “Concentrate on your own life now,” Mike’s mother said. She was almost as tall as he was, her short hair blown back by the dry wind. She kissed him through the open window of his pickup, and he backed down the driveway, drove down Edge Street, and turned onto the interstate.

  South Dakota State University, in Brookings, was over four hundred miles east, not far from the Minnesota state line. It would take him seven hours to get there. He’d brought cassettes to listen to, including one that his girlfriend, Donetta Rush, had made for him.

  “Don’t listen to it until you’re on the highway,” she’d asked him the night before. “You have to promise.” He’d promised, and then he’d listened to the beginning of it on his way home from her house.

  The first thing on the cassette was her voice. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I can’t dream, and I can’t stop thinking of you.”

  “Miss You,” by the Rolling Stones, was the first song.

  PART I

  WHEATLEY

  ONE

  IN the spring of Mike’s senior year, months before graduation, he was working long hours at Neil Schofield’s cattle ranch. He was bored with school, and Josh Mitchell, his closest friend, had moved to Wyoming in February, with his father, after his parents’ divorce. Josh’s mother was with somebody else now.

  Mike had worked at the Schofield ranch every summer since he was fourteen, and this year, in March, he began working mornings before school, getting up in the dark and riding his motorcycle—bought despite his parents’ objections—out on Route 8 through the cold dawn. On those days he ate breakfast with the Schofields—with Neil, his wife, Lee-Ann, and their two-year-old daughter, Janna. Often Neil’s brother, Ed, who lived in Buffalo Gap, would be there, too, having driven over in his old Corvette. He was an artist; he made pottery that he sold in Rapid City. Two other men, Arthur Strong and Louis Ivy, showed up after breakfast. They looked older than they were, and neither of them could read very well. If they got there early, they waited outside, next to their pickups.

  “I can make you breakfast here,” Mike’s mother had offered. “I’m up early anyway.” She taught high school biology and did her class preparations in the mornings before school.

  “I don’t mind eating with the Schofields,” Mike had told her, not saying that he preferred it to being home. The previous summer, when Mike had left home for the ranch before sunrise and not come back before nine at night, he’d said that he liked being alone on the tractor, listening to his father’s old rock-and-roll tapes on his Walkman. He’d kept quiet about Neil Schofield, whose first two strikes against him, according to Mike’s father, were that he was rich and hadn’t had to work for it. Neil’s wealthy father had bought the ranch for his retirement. Now he lived in California, and Neil ran the ranch for real, sort of. He could hire as many people as he needed and could afford having bad luck. “Money just doesn’t mean that much to me,” he’d told Mike.

  “Let’s see,” Mike had said once. “If I work half an hour longer, I can afford to buy Donetta popcorn tonight at the movies.” Neil had given him an extra twenty dollars with that week’s pay. “I’m bullshitting you,” Mike had had to explain.

  Neil was fifteen years younger than Mike’s father. He was tall, light-haired, and energetic, and in good shape from his work on the ranch. Mike’s father, Glenn, was of average height, thin, and dark-haired, and had never been particularly happy. What Mike told himself most often was that his father had gotten lost trying to find what other people already had. Glenn didn’t have the key, somehow. Mike felt that his father was always trying to figure out how he’d come into being, and how Mike had come into being, what point there was to it and how you were supposed to get through your life. Once, late one night, when Mike’s mother was away, Mike had heard his father cry for almost an hour. In the morning neither of them had mentioned it. His father had never hit Mike—or anyone else, as far as Mike knew—but he got his feelings
hurt too easily. And when he got angry it turned into a dark mood that lasted a long time, often weeks. “Mr. Gloom,” Mike would refer to him as then, but only to himself. It would be too disloyal to use this kind of nickname, even with Josh and Donetta. Anyway, his father wasn’t always like that.

  Something else Mike kept quiet about with everyone were his feelings for Lee-Ann Schofield. When he first knew her, when he was fourteen, she had teased him about some things he’d mentioned to Neil, such as getting into trouble with Josh, drunk at the bowling alley, or sneaking out at three in the morning to throw eggs at somebody’s window. But over the years she’d teased him less and talked to him more. She was thirteen years older than he was, thirty the year he turned seventeen. Mike was tall by then—not as tall as Neil but taller than his father, and muscular from high school wrestling and working on the ranch. He’d let his dark hair grow as long as he could before his coach objected. He looked more like his mother’s side of the family: green eyes, a long face, high cheekbones.

  Lee-Ann had small, pretty features. Her brown hair was unevenly cut—collar-length in back, shorter around her face. In the sunlight, Mike noticed, her hair had shades of gold and red. She wore loose clothes and no makeup and seemed to have a private way she felt about herself that was different from what other people thought they knew about her. That was what Mike liked about her. She was secretive, the way he was.

  On an October morning of Mike’s senior year, he went into the Schofields’ house for a Coke just as Lee-Ann was coming into the kitchen after a shower. In the half second before she belted her thin robe, he saw her breasts, her stomach—a fleshiness that the girls he knew didn’t have; they dieted and ran and lifted weights. Even Lee-Ann’s face was softer, and seemed capable of gentler expressions. After that day, with her wet face and hair, her open robe, and the way she’d looked at him when she saw him looking at her, Mike became more sexual around her. He didn’t think about the age difference anymore and hardly thought of her as married. In his mind he separated her from Neil and from his friendship with Neil.

  By the time winter came, the moment he saw her was the moment he came to count on most, though he couldn’t have said for what, or why. Because, as his advanced-placement English teacher would have said—she was always making them read stories about people who weren’t lucky—his life was a lucky one: a nice-enough house, responsible parents, the ability to get good grades. And even that left out something: Donetta having sex with him on weekend nights at Crow Lake. Yet Mike couldn’t change the way he felt about Lee-Ann Schofield; it was a fact, to him, rather than something he might question.

  Instead, he fantasized about her all winter and spring. She was on his mind as he sat in class, watching snow fall on the field outside the window; as he rode his motorcycle too fast on the first warm days when the trees were budding; as he had sex with Donetta in the backseat of his mother’s car. And at night in his house—his mother up late, grading papers in the dining room, his father in front of the television in the den—he lay in bed in the dark and masturbated, imagining that moment in the kitchen with Lee-Ann and picturing her robe coming off. His goal became to masturbate one day in her empty house—the emptiness sexual to him, somehow, as if his own body could fill all that space.

  He didn’t have the nerve or opportunity to do it until an afternoon in late May, when Lee-Ann and Janna were in town and Neil had driven over to Ed’s house in Buffalo Gap. Mike had walked through the house, noticing two things he’d never noticed before: a photograph of Lee-Ann breast-feeding her daughter, and a white plaster cast of Lee-Ann’s hand when she was a child, her name etched into it underneath. He walked upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Neil, with its white curtains and pale carpet. But a pair of Neil’s boots were next to a chair in the corner, so Mike settled for the upstairs hallway, in sight of Lee-Ann’s robe in the bathroom and the blue comforter on her bed. He leaned against the wall and unzipped his jeans, and afterward, using toilet paper to clean himself up, his legs were shaking. He wanted to do it again, almost immediately. But the house was reassuming its identity, which didn’t include him. He felt like an intruder then. He went home that night without coming up to the house to say good-bye the way he usually did, and he didn’t come for breakfast the next morning.

  On Saturday Lee-Ann came into the barn to find him. “Are you mad at me? Did I do something I don’t remember?”

  “No,” he told her. “It’s me. I’ve been busy with school.”

  “I miss you,” she said, in the sweet voice he’d heard her use only with Neil and Janna; it made tears come to his eyes. “It’s all right,” Lee-Ann said gently, and they put their arms around each other for the first time. She held him so closely that he had to pull back in order to kiss her. But she stepped away then, and walked out of the barn. He didn’t see her again until that evening, as he was leaving. She was watching him from the front yard.

  After that were days at the ranch Mike had to miss because of finals, graduation, and then, on June 18—a hot, bright Thursday afternoon—because of what his father did.

  TWO

  MARY Hise died before the ambulance arrived. It was Neil who told Mike what had happened. Mike, on the riding lawn mower, circling the pond, with the sun low behind him, saw Neil walking toward him from the house. He looked so serious that for a moment Mike was afraid he was going to say, “I know you want to screw my wife.” What he said instead was, “Let’s go sit on the porch. I have to tell you something about your father.”

  Mary Hise was naked. She was lying in the bathroom doorway of room 14 at the Tenderly Motel, in Wausee—a motel Mike had been to twice with Donetta.

  “Your mother wanted you to hear this from me,” Neil said. “Not from the police. They’re already at your house.” He was sitting across from Mike on the screened-in porch, Janna’s dolls scattered on the floor between them. “Your father and Mary met at the motel. They got there at one o’clock, and they were drinking. Afterward your father called an ambulance, then drove off in Mary’s car.” Neil looked at his watch. “It’s been three hours since he made the call.”

  “Why her car?” Mike’s mouth was so dry that it was hard for him to talk.

  “I don’t know. Maybe to buy him time. They didn’t know who she was for a while. Her purse wasn’t there.” Neil stood and went into the kitchen; he came back with a glass of water that he handed to Mike. “Your father even left the gun behind,” he said. “It was registered to him.”

  “It was my grandfather’s,” Mike said slowly. He looked down the hill, toward the pond. He could see the line between what he had mowed and what he hadn’t. It looked as sharp and distinct as the edge of a razor.

  Neil leaned forward, the chair creaking as he moved. “I know how hard it is to believe. It is for me, too. I thought, somehow they’ve got your father confused with somebody else. But they don’t. It’s not a mistake.”

  “I know,” Mike said. But that sounded as if he knew more about his father and Mary Hise than he did. He didn’t know anything. That was what he couldn’t put into words—what it was like to discover that there were things you almost knew but didn’t know. He looked away from Neil. He leaned down and picked up Janna’s dolls. He put them one by one in her red toy box.

  “Your mother wants me to drive you home,” Neil said. “She doesn’t want you on your motorcycle tonight.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I’ll drive you anyway. I promised her.”

  Neil turned toward Lee-Ann, whom Mike noticed for the first time. She was standing at the porch door with the baby in her arms. They were like a snapshot of normal life, Mike thought—something he knew he hadn’t been a part of even before this happened, something he seemed cut off from now in a permanent way. “I’m sorry, Mike,” she said.

  FIVE minutes later Neil loaded Mike’s motorcycle into the back of his pickup. Lee-Ann had come outside with them. “Call us,” she told Mike. She set Janna down, put her arms around Mike, and hugge
d him. It was nothing like before; he knew it couldn’t be. And that scared him almost as much as the news about his father had. What he needed was proof that she wanted to be with him. If he could have that, then he could handle everything else that was happening.

  “Don’t worry about work,” Neil told him on the way home. “Come back when you’re ready, or just come over and talk.”

  “Okay,” Mike said.

  The sun was sinking behind the Black Hills, which were just a few miles away. It was cooler there, and Mike thought about how you could ride up there and get lost for a while on the winding roads, though they all brought you back to Wheatley or Hill City or one of the other small towns. You could never get lost long enough to see what lost felt like. You could never just disappear.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” Neil said.

  He pulled up in front of Mike’s house. There were five policemen standing in the yard. There were seven cars parked along the curb.

  THREE

  THEY asked him questions. Had he seen his father carry anything out to the car last night, or this morning? Some of his father’s clothes were gone. Did he know that his father had been transferring savings into his parents’ checking account and then withdrawing them? He might have as much as four thousand dollars with him. Why did his father have books about wilderness survival? They’d taken those out of the bookshelf and gone through them, even though Mike’s mother, Carolyn, had said, “Glenn hasn’t looked at those in fifteen years.” Had Mike ever seen his father with another woman? Why did his father have a gun? Had Mike ever been afraid of his father? Did Mike love him?

  That last question came from a special agent with the Division of Criminal Investigation in Rapid City. His name was Tom DeWitt; Mike knew him and his mother knew of him. His brother lived in Wheatley and was a teacher, and his nephew had been on Mike’s wrestling team. Mike had seen Tom DeWitt at meets and knew that he had a cabin somewhere near Lead. Once, after a wrestling meet in Rapid City, he had treated the team to pizza.