Lot’s return to Sodom

by Sandra Brannan

  I slammed on the brakes and glued my eyes on my rearview mirror, praying Mully wouldn’t slam into the back of me, tip his bike, and slide underneath Jens’s truck. Sporting a new road rash from head to toe would really piss him off. I saw him grip his handlebars and hold on for dear life, as did the other dozen bikers with him. For an instant, I envisioned myself slammed into the camper ahead and them crashing into me, like magnets stacked up on my crumpled tailgate.

  At the very last possible instant, I swerved into the oncoming lane and whipped around the camper, thankful that the approaching cars were far enough away that I could squeeze through the opening without incident. The woman in the camper flipped me the bird and leaned on her horn as I righted the wheel of the pickup and drove off in front of her. The old man in the lead car of oncoming traffic did the same. I didn’t hear any metal scraping or see any bodies scattering behind the camper. My eyes darted back and forth from the road ahead to my rearview mirror, waiting to see cars stop for scattered bikes and bikers. But no one did. The camper was getting smaller and smaller in my side mirror, as was the long line of cars, motorcycles, and campers headed in the opposite direction.

  I sped past the intersection of Norris Peak Road, careful not to let any merging traffic pull in front of me, and whipped through the S-curve that followed, taking a sharp left and doubling back up the hill on Wide View Drive to the Sun Ridge Road development on the outskirts of Rapid City. I speculated that Mully would assume I’d stayed on Nemo Road and prayed that he and his followers hadn’t closed the distance in the last harrowing seven or eight miles since my Norris Peak Road maneuver. I turned right onto Sun Ridge Road and pulled into the first driveway I saw that had a camper, pulling my truck around it so I couldn’t be seen easily. I left the truck idling just in case and I recited the only thing that came to mind to calm my nerves. After nearly twenty minutes and taking down my eighty-eighth of ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, my breathing had slowed and my shaking hands steadied. Wiping my brow on my sleeve, I took down and passed around the last of the bottles in my mind, then slowly pulled out from behind the camper, thankful that the homeowner either hadn’t been home or hadn’t noticed my use of his space.

  I never saw Mully or the Lucifer’s Lot bikers again in my rearview or on the streets of Rapid City, and I slowed to a more manageable speed as I headed back to Jens’s house. Just to make sure I had lost them for good, however, I turned left on Canyon Lake Road and backtracked in a circuitous route onto Jackson Boulevard. I took a deep breath when I glanced to my left and saw that Teepee Street was free of any motorcycles.

  The clock on the dashboard read nearly one thirty. No garage for me to hide Jens’s truck in, so I just left it in the small driveway. I stepped down out of his truck and made my way to the front door, which was unlocked.

  Jens was sitting in the living room, his head cradled in his hands. No music, no television, nobody else with him.

  “Jens? You okay?”

  “What’s there to be okay about?” he asked, never lifting his head.

  “Where’s Catherine?”

  “She just left.”

  “Have the authorities been by to question you?”

  “No,” he mumbled. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Kinda busy,” I said, helping myself to a beer to calm my nerves. I took a seat in the living room where I could look out the picture window down the street, misbelieving my good fortune in having shaken free of the Lucifer’s Lot. I twisted off the cap and asked, “Want one?”

  He finally lifted his head, leaving his elbows propped on his knees but dropping his hands, wrists limp and long fingers dangling down, as if all his energy had been zapped with the simple movement. His eyes and nose were rimmed in red.

  “You look like crap,” I said, taking a long draw from the bottle.

  This brought a hint of a smile to his parched lips. “Been doing a thousand Hail Marys with Catherine.”

  “Did it help?”

  “A little.”

  I tilted my beer toward him, raising my brows inquisitively. His smile grew. A little. “Haven’t had one since breakfast.”

  I pushed myself out of the chair and felt every muscle rebel at once. It had been a long morning of breaking nearly every rule of trauma recovery in the book, not to mention every rule of the road. I retrieved a beer, opened it, and handed it to him, saying, “Pray for us sinners.”

  “Now and at the hour of our death.” The smile Jens had worn quickly faded and he guzzled the whole bottle in one long draw.

  “What the hell! Didn’t Catherine feed you or anything?”

  “She tried,” he said, slumping back onto the couch. “After each decade in between every single mystery.”

  “Every mystery?”

  He nodded. “She’d whip out a snack after every ‘Glory Be’ and told me it was part of the deal, had to keep up her energy.”

  I had to think about this. It had been a while since I had said a rosary, and, I admit, I missed the cadence and trance-like peacefulness unique to it. I knew the rosary was intended to help people focus on certain events in the history of salvation, or what Catholics call “mysteries.” And I remembered there were four categories of mysteries, each with five events, and a decade, which consists of one Lord’s Prayer, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be To The Father. Doing the math, that meant Catherine and Jens did something like four complete rosaries, pausing to eat twenty times.

  No wonder as I was going to St. Ives I passed my sister with forty chins.

  “And you didn’t eat? Not one of those times?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I’m glad she at least stayed with you this whole time.”

  “I tried to get rid of her,” Jens admitted. “Just wanted to be alone.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “That’s not going to happen. You’re a Bergen. Eighth of nine. You don’t even know what alone is.”

  I was rewarded with another brief smile before it disappeared. His eyelids drooped. I thought I was going to lose him to sleep brought on by hefty doses of grief, adrenaline, and cold beer.

  “Did you call an attorney?”

  The long fingers of his right hand shot up to his forehead and raked through his short, brown hair, then falling to linger on the back of his head. “I haven’t showered yet today.”

  “Call Jason Stone. He’s your friend. He can find someone for you.”

  I was rewarded with a nod. “I’ll do that. What’d you learn about Michelle? Did you find Char?”

  There was no way I was going to share anything with Jens before the authorities talked with him. In his condition, he might not be discreet or able to distinguish what I told him from what he already knew before all this happened.

  “Jens, listen. I need to ask you something.”

  He tipped his bottle and drank the other half of his beer. I did the same.

  “Okay. Ask.”

  “What were you doing up at Nemo General Store yesterday morning?”

  He cut his eyes at me and dropped his arm back on his knee. “Ironic, huh, Boots? Michelle only a couple miles away and I never knew.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “This is bad. Really bad. They’re going to think I killed her. But you know what? That’s not the worst part. The worst thing is maybe if I knew, I could have saved her, helped her somehow. Maybe she was still alive. But I didn’t know.”

  Leaning forward, head bowed, elbows to knees, limp wrists, he twirled the lip of the empty bottle with his fingers just inches from the floor.

  “Jens, Clint said he saw you. Early. What were you doing?”

  He let the empty bottle drop and watched it teeter on the carpet, tumbling sideways with a soft bump. He took a deep breath and straightened his posture. “I was helping Brody. We brought up trucks from Rapid City for a small pour on a foundation for the new addition to that restaurant behind the store. Brody said the owner wanted to make sure the fewest number of guests were disturbed
by the construction and by our large trucks driving in and out of there. So he wanted the work done while bikers slept. He said he’d rather have guests pissed off from being awakened than one wrapped around our ready mix truck axles. But everyone was tied up on projects yesterday morning, being Monday and all. He asked if I was willing to oversee the pour, since one of the two drivers was a new hire. I told him I’d help.”

  “And you got there at what time?”

  “Five o’clock, when the trucks started arriving. I left by seven or so.”

  “Clint said he saw you around six,” I said.

  Jens nodded. “I went into the Nemo General Store to get a cup of coffee between loads. Clint was getting a pack of cigarettes.” He sighed again. “They said a guy found her about five hours later.”

  I grew still, emulating Jens. The silence whistled in my ears as loud as death.

  “It was cold yesterday morning. Cold, Boots. You know how cold it gets in the Hills at night in the summer. And Michelle must have been freezing and scared and lonely and … so cold.”

  He buried his head in his hands. I moved beside him on the couch, glancing out the window as I did. No Mully. No bikers. No police. No FBI. Just my brother and me. I gave him a hug and rubbed his back.

  “Jens, there was nothing you could have done for her. Nothing. She was dead. Someone killed her and it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Wasn’t it?” he said, snapping his head upright and looking at me accusingly. “The last thing I said to her was that she needed to see a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist, for God’s sake!”

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “Oh, I was just fed up with her obsession over Char. It’s unnatural. Even as a sister.”

  I thought about how vested I was with my siblings and wondered if he was right.

  “She stormed out of here so fast I couldn’t do a thing to stop her. Didn’t do a thing to stop her. I should have. Don’t you understand? I should have stopped her and if I had, she’d be alive.”

  He pushed up from the couch and started pacing. I glanced over my shoulder out the window again, retrieved his empty beer bottle, and retreated into the kitchen. There was nothing I could say that would help him get through his grief. He had to take that lonely journey on this own. But one thing I could do was to honor his request of me and figure out what happened to Michelle and Char. I started a pot of coffee and looked in the refrigerator to see what I could feed him, finding the plate Catherine had made: some kind of pasta dish, a salad, and four fudge brownies, all neatly covered with plastic wrap. Thank you, Catherine.

  “Eat,” I said shoving the plate toward him along with a fork.

  He stopped pacing and stared at me, like I was handing him a two-headed snake or something.

  “I said eat. Catherine went to a lot of trouble. Plus, if you don’t, I’m going to fix you up some of that famous goulash those lunch ladies used to make for us in grade school. It’s the only thing I know how to cook. And I’m going to force feed it to you.”

  Talk about a motivator, for sure, but it didn’t earn me a smile.

  He took the plate and fork from me and settled back onto the couch. I picked up my beer, drained it while I stole another quick look out the window, and went back to the kitchen for two cups of coffee. Back in the living room, I handed him a cup.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, taking a seat across from him. “Now let’s talk. I have places to go. You told me I have work to do, so I’ve got to get it done.”

  He nodded.

  I sipped my coffee as I watched him shovel the food into his mouth and turn on his CD player. Out floated the soothing sounds of Rachmaninoff. Jens flipped on the ceiling fan and settled back onto the couch with his cup of coffee.

  I hadn’t noticed how still the summer air had been until it was stirred by the fan blades above me. The smell of afternoon barbecues drifted in through the screened windows of Jens’s kitchen, and my stomach growled; it was wishing now that Jens had saved a little bit of that plate of food for me. I’d eat something later.

  The roar of distant motorcycles, hundreds of thousands visiting the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Classic Rally, rumbled in the background, its tempo incongruous with the orchestra’s magic. But with each glance out the front window, I assured myself that Mully had not found me.

  “Tell me what happened. From the beginning. Start on Sunday and take me through every step until this morning when you got the call from the Freeburgs.”

  He did.

  Jens told me about going to work for a few hours Sunday afternoon, driving around to different job sites to see what the status would be for the upcoming week, stalling until Michelle got off work at eight. He told me about being impatient, waiting in the truck for Michelle to go to dinner with him, and how he’d wondered what prompted him to be so impulsive as to go inside Barker’s Market to see her at work, which was totally out of character. He told me about finding Michelle busy helping some bikers find stuff, and that he overheard one of them inviting her to join them at the Sturgis Rally. He explained how Michelle graciously avoided the question but that her boss was infuriated with her. He described what happened when Michelle tried to clock out and how he’d overheard Roy Barker threaten her. He told me how he’d lost his temper, which was uncharacteristic for Jens, and how he’d threatened the boss. After what had happened at the grocery store, Michelle had told him she was in no mood for dinner and would meet him at his house later because she had to talk with her sister, Char, who had dropped by Barker’s Market as Michelle was getting off shift.

  “Originally, Michelle had planned to go to dinner with me,” Jens said. “But then after what had happened with the biker and with Roy Barker, she felt less like having dinner with me and more compelled to impart some sisterly advice to Char. Her words, not mine.”

  “Who’s Roy Barker?” I asked.

  “Michelle’s boss at the grocery store. He’s the manager there,” Jens said, curling his lip as he spoke.

  “The one you threatened to kill?”

  Jens looked a bit sheepish. “I didn’t threaten to kill him. I just threatened him by saying he’d regret it if he did anything to Michelle. Something like that. I know I was wrong, but I’d had it with that jerk.”

  “Had it? You mean you two have a history or something?”

  “The guy’s a total stalker, Boots. Has a creepy obsession with Michelle. Had an obsession, I mean. We go to dinner, he shows up at the same restaurant. We go to the movies, he’s sitting behind us. We take in a play, a concert, or a hockey game at the Civic Center, he’s there.”

  I heard more rumbling of bikes and stole a look out the window. No Mully.

  “And you said that Roy threatened Michelle? You’re sure about that?”

  “Definitely,” Jens said.

  “Did she ever tell you why he threatened her?”

  “Uh-uh,” Jens answered. “Later that night, when she came by after dropping off Char at home, Michelle was agitated, not about what happened at the grocery store, but because she and Char had been in an argument. It took me a while to get her calmed down. She never sat still, not for a minute, and she must have been here for at least an hour or so.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe ten o’clock or so? Anyway, I asked her what happened in the employee lunchroom while I was waiting, and she said he got all weird again, talking about how he knew what she was doing every minute, at lunch, what she was reading. Then he said he loved her and she told him he was crazy. It set him off.”

  “And you heard all this? Because this might be really important, Jens. Try to remember the words exactly. Roy Barker might have killed Michelle, and what you tell the authorities when they interview you today might help them a lot.”

  “You mean interrogate me,” Jens said. “I’m their main suspect, remember?”

  “Maybe not, or they would have already been here by now.” I wasn’t about to tell him
what I overheard at the crime scene: Agent Bob Shankley had indicated their prime suspect was Mully, the same Mully who was after me. My eyes shot up to the window again. Nothing but a quiet, small town neighborhood in Middle America.

  “Besides, the only thing I heard was Roy yelling at her, telling her to never call him crazy ever again or he’d make her pay the rest of her life. Those were the words,” Jens said, finishing off his cup of coffee.

  I wondered if Roy Barker had made good on his promise; if he owned a pair of hiking boots and a large flashlight that was missing a lens.

  “If you only saw the way he would look at her,” Jens said. “But she called him a friend anyway and tried to keep him at a distance, saying she felt sorry for him. This time, it spooked her. A lot. He went too far. I asked her to quit her job early, forget about the last two weeks, and move in with me if it was about money for medical school. I told her she should tell Roy Barker where to go.”

  “And?”

  “And she was seriously considering it. She said she needed to think about it but that she was leaning toward reporting to work the next morning and telling Roy it was her last day. She had already given him a month’s notice out of courtesy so he could find a new bookkeeper.”

  “So why did you two get in a fight? You told me that the last thing you said to her was she needed to see a psychiatrist. So far, it sounds like you two were largely in agreement,” I pointed out to Jens.

  “We were. Except about Char,” he said.

  “What about Char made you think Michelle needed to see a psychiatrist?”

  He unfolded his long legs, stood up, and went to the kitchen to get more coffee. I could tell this was a subject he was avoiding and plainly didn’t want to talk about. Jens was a very private person, and revealing any detail about a personal relationship was difficult enough for him, but this seemed to hit a more inflamed nerve than usual. I stared out the window, willing Mully to drive by just once so I could throw my coffee cup at him. Just having this thought made me realize the fear had dissipated and my heartbeat was back to normal.