The sausage was a mix of pork, ground beef, potatoes, onion, salt, pepper, and a hint of cloves. It aged well over the winter, too, and was a perfect mix with the lefse, when it wasn’t used as a treat, but the store-bought sausage paled in comparison to the sausage that came out of my own meat grinder.
I stood in the kitchen warmed by the stove and the sound of Peter and Jaeger tinkering with the Gleaner. Life was far from normal, but I allowed myself to be comforted by the rote movements required to make the lefse, the sound of wrenches turning and men cussing as they busted their knuckles, trying make something run the way it was intended to.
How do you put the world back together when it is so broken? I couldn’t even begin to answer that question and tried not to think at all as I continued my work.
Shep was in the bedroom with Hank, lying at the foot of the bed, not allowed in the kitchen while I was cooking. The house was filled with the wonderful aroma of fried flatbread, and it was difficult not to be transported to the holiday season, to the slower days and longer nights of winter when work on the farm sometimes ground to an achingly difficult halt. It was then that indexing filled my hours with pleasure and labor and guaranteed a consistent flow of money—as long as the projects continued to come in. Indexing projects were as dependable as the crops, though less reliant on the weather—as far as I knew.
My ear was tuned to the road, listening for the mail truck. It was hard to say when the new set of page proofs for the headhunter book would show up. Once they did, the clock would start ticking again on my deadline, regardless of whether there was a killer on the loose or not.
I almost chuckled out loud at the thought. I had to wonder if anyone had ever used that as an excuse for missing an indexing deadline? How would Richard Rothstein react to such a thing? It was terrible of me to think such a thing, especially with the victims being so close to me—but it crossed my mind, almost made me laugh out loud, and I nearly burned the lefse on the griddle.
I hurried up and flipped the piece that I was cooking and was able to salvage it. That’s what I got for allowing my sense of humor to turn morbid. Still, I would’ve liked to have seen Richard Rothstein’s face at the suggestion of missing a deadline because there was killer lurking about.
I sighed out loud, then went back to rolling, flipping, and cooking, glad to be feeding the boys and Hilo, even under the most desperate circumstances.
I packed the last dish of sausage and lefse into the truck, then turned to face Peter. “You’re sure you’re up to this?” I asked. I couldn’t have hid my nervousness if I’d tried.
He stood on the stoop, his hands jammed in his pockets, his head bent down toward the ground. Shep sat at his ankle. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered as if he were talking to the grass.
“I’m not convinced.”
Peter Knudsen looked up at me, and in that moment I saw the little boy I had always known; accustomed to being second, surrounded by people, mostly his father and brother, telling him what to do and when. Now he was being left alone with the full knowledge of what had happened when I was away last time. Jaeger had gone home to tend to the house, to the well-wishers who were still dropping off food, offering their condolences, and snooping about a bit if they could.
How could Peter not be uncomfortable, scared?
“I’ll be fine, Mrs. Trumaine.” Peter said. “I hope they do show up. I’d like to get my hands on them for what they did to us. I sure would. I’d offer ’em the same thing in return. A knife across the throat.” His bottom lip trembled, then he bit it to make it stop.
Please don’t cry, Peter, I silently begged. “I don’t have to go,” I whispered.
“Yes, you do. Hank and Jaeger said so. It’s the right thing to do. You got to go for us all. Sheriff Jenkins’ and his wife’ve been kind to us all my life. My father held them in high regard.”
I couldn’t argue with Peter. I had to go to Hilo’s. I had taken pies to the boys, and taking Hilo lefse was all that I had to offer—but being away from home and being out by myself didn’t sit well with me. But what was else was I supposed to do? Hide until the killer was caught? What if that never happened? I would have to leave the house sometime. I couldn’t hide under the covers with Hank forever.
I turned to leave, then turned back to Peter as something settled into my mind without a place to file it away. “What about your mother?” I asked directly, wishing I could take the question back as soon as it left my tongue.
Peter looked surprised, flinched. “Ma’am?”
“About Hilo? Did she hold him in high regard?” I couldn’t stop myself, because honestly, I couldn’t ever remember Lida Knudsen saying a kind word about Hilo Jenkins. I couldn’t remember her saying anything about him other than that she always referred to Ardith as “Hilo’s long-suffering wife.” I’d always assumed it was because Hilo was the sheriff, was gone from home a lot of hours of the day, was used to being in charge, and had a strong personality. But now I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t sure of anything.
Peter shrugged. “Can’t rightly say.” Then he looked to the sky, blinked his eyes, and grew distant. It wasn’t clear if he was looking for an angel in heaven or begging me to stop asking questions and leave.
I was missing something. Like there was an important index entry missing, but I couldn’t find it even though it was staring me in the face. That happened sometimes when you looked at text for too long and too late into the night.
“Was it because of her cousin?” I pressed.
Peter looked back to me, his cheeks held tight. “I’m not sure what you’re gettin’ at, Mrs. Trumaine? My mother never said one way or another how she felt about Sheriff Jenkins. And I don’t know about no cousin that might change things.”
“Hilo’s best friend. At least, when they were young, before the war. Herbert Frakes told me about him, that he was wounded on D-Day and then moved to Minneapolis after the war. That cousin. You’ve never met him?”
“Oh, him,” Peter said. “Uncle Roy.”
I nodded—now I had a name. “So, you do know of him?”
Peter mimicked my nod. “My mother didn’t hardly speak of him, or to him. Ever. I only saw Uncle Roy once, and that was at his mother’s funeral when Jaeger and me was little boys. He limped and smelled like moth balls drenched in whiskey.”
“Lida’s aunt?”
Peter nodded again. “My mother didn’t speak to Uncle Roy then, either, and corralled Jaeger and me away from him every time he came close.”
“Why’s that? Do you know why, Peter?”
“It hurts to talk about her, Mrs. Trumaine. I wish you could go ask her these things yourself.” Peter’s lip trembled again.
“I wish I could go ask her, too, Peter. But if she was still here, I wouldn’t need to know the answer to my questions.”
“Why do you need to know that?”
“I don’t know. It just seems important. There are things going on that none of us understand. I’m just trying to make sense of everything, that’s all. I just want to understand what’s going on.”
“Maybe he’ll be here. Maybe Uncle Roy’ll come for the funeral. You can ask him these things yourself. That’d be better. The showings are tomorrow. You know that? You can ask Roy at the showings if he has the gall to show up.”
I nodded. I hadn’t looked at the paper or read Erik and Lida’s obituaries, but I knew the timing, two days or three; it was time to start burying them. I had been avoiding the reality of what was to come. “Maybe,” I said about Roy. “But I’d like to know what you know. Then I’ll go. I promise,” I said, looking past Peter to the western horizon as the sun dipped toward the edge of the earth.
He nodded one last time. “She said that he was a thief, that Uncle Roy had taken something really important and really valuable, then lost it. That’s all she ever said, but I could tell it really made her mad. Momma wasn’t that kind of person, didn’t have a mean bone in her body. But she didn’t like him, that was for sure. Not at all.
She didn’t like Uncle Roy.”
“What’d he steal, Peter?” I pushed. My spine tightened like a piece of iron had just been inserted in it.
“I don’t know, she’d never say.” His voice trailed off, and Peter looked the opposite way from me, away from the setting sun, toward his empty home. There was nothing but ghosts there now. Ghosts and specks of blood that shouldn’t have been there.
“If you remember, you make sure to tell me, okay?” I said.
“All right, Mrs. Trumaine, I will.” And with nothing else to offer, Peter Knudsen walked into the house, set on taking his place as guard and protector over the dominion of Hank and glad, I was sure, to be as far away from me as possible.
CHAPTER 24
I settled into the Studebaker’s worn bench seat, closed my eyes, and ran through an imaginary checklist to make sure I had everything that I needed. It was a habitual exercise, an unprovoked response that came as a natural to me as walking and talking. But one that wasn’t foolproof. I’d been known to forget things from time to time. I’d lost trust with myself in the last few days.
The lefse and potato sausage were packed up in a basket like it was going to a church picnic. There was no way to rid the cab of the smell of food—of distant pork ground to a pulp, mixed with cloves, and stuffed in a pig’s intestine—but I was far from hungry. I had hardly been able to eat since I’d first heard the news about Erik and Lida.
Usually, I found comfort in the aroma of food, the consistency and presence of it, the memories it evoked, but I was less than thrilled with the journey I was about to take. I feared that this memory would be what would return to me in the future when I smelled the flatbread and sausage. Lefse would be associated with the death of Ardith Jenkins from now until the end of time. Instead of a holiday celebration, it would be a reminder of the ugliness of man, of hate, and of bloody murder. Just a whiff of lefse would make me sad as an old woman—if I were lucky enough to live that long.
My purse sat next to me, filled with all of the appropriate necessities and unmentionables to get me through the visit; my reading glasses, multiple handkerchiefs, a fresh compact, my opened pack of Salems, matches, and the amulet, which I planned on returning to the sheriff as soon as it was politely possible.
I didn’t know what state I would find Hilo in, but I imagined that at some point he would still remember he was sheriff, that he had asked me to investigate the amulet—without telling me why or that it was possibly stolen. Of all things I would have liked to have forgotten that happened over the last few days, my visit with my cousin Raymond was one of them. He’d put a splinter in my shoe from the moment I walked into his cottage.
I’d just as soon have thrown the amulet out the window or drowned it in the closest duck pond, but I couldn’t do that no matter how much I wanted to. It was on loan to me. A secret possession that had brought nothing but bad luck since it had first touched my skin.
In between my purse and the basket of lefse was the .22 rifle, the barrel pointed down to the floorboard, the butt wedged in between the basket and purse, and easy to get to if the need arose. Hank’s orders. He wouldn’t hear of me leaving the house without a gun. I didn’t argue. I took it to make him feel better, so he would worry less, but I took it for me, too, I suppose, though the presence of the rifle was cold comfort.
Of course, Hank himself was the big thing that was missing. It should have been him sitting behind the Studebaker’s steering wheel, driving off to Hilo’s to offer support and love in a time of grief, and me sitting in the passenger seat, dutifully bereft, sad beyond compare. But that wasn’t the case. Instead of me, it was the little Western Auto Remington, sitting in wait, emotionless and unforgiving. I had my doubts that the varmint gun could protect me from whatever it was that was out there, but it was all I had.
I’d thought of dressing up, putting on my one fine black dress and pillbox hat, but I would be wearing it plenty in the next few days. It wasn’t like I had a huge wardrobe to choose from. Dress up occasions had always been rare: weddings and funerals, mostly. I had on my best everyday dress, a light shade of gray with a broad white collar, cut below the knee—another McCall’s pattern that I’d sewn myself a few years ago. The dress went with my best shoes—the black ones with the thick sensible heels that had been originally bought for Sundays and expected events.
Most of my clothes were utilitarian. Fashion was the least of my worries on the farm. I always wondered if Sir Nigel, or any of the other authors I worked for, for that matter, would have been offended if they’d known that the woman who wrote the index for their books walked around with chicken shit crusted on the soles of her two-dollar Sunday shoes.
I hadn’t thought much about church visits recently. They were even rarer than weddings these days. My lack of visible faith was frowned on by some and not considered by others. We’d always toiled far more than we’d worshiped. Hank’s parents were stricter than mine about attendance at the Lutheran church up the road, about demanding a true belief in the Lord—prayers before supper and at bedtime, that kind of thing.
The distance from the church came with regrets in certain times, especially when the triumph of good over evil, light over dark, or an invisible savior’s gentle touch was in serious demand for the hope of some kind of comfort. Unfortunately, my faith had suffered through a deep drought even before Hank’s accident, and the roots of it had never recovered, mostly since the loss of my parents. I had a hard time believing that they were dancing on streets paved of gold, out of sight, up in the clouds joyfully while I was still down here on earth all alone, missing their voices, their direction, their constant presence, especially when a killer was lurking about and slashing peoples’ throats.
I’d read far too many books to be able to tell one story apart from the other, which put me on par with most of the academics in town if the truth was to be told. I wasn’t quite an atheist, but I was as close to a godless heathen as one could be—and the events of late were doing nothing to change my mind.
I started the truck, checked myself one last time in the rearview mirror, then put the truck in gear. I wanted to be presentable. That hadn’t been lost.
There was no avoiding what I had to do, and no avoiding leaving the farm, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to walking in Hilo Jenkins’ front door. I had no choice. I had to go to Hilo and Ardith’s home on this grim evening. It was the right thing to do.
It didn’t take long to arrive at Hilo’s house—about ten minutes as the crow flew, fifteen by the road without regard to a speed limit. I slowed about half a mile away to gather myself.
I had to resist the urge to keep on driving, to be just one more truck in the long parade of gawkers on the tour of death. But I couldn’t do that. I had to stop, I had to pay my respects to Ardith, to Hilo. I just hoped I could leave my guilt in the truck.
I would forever think it was my fault that Ardith Jenkins had been murdered behind our barn—that it should have been me there, instead of her.
Me there, instead of her.
I trembled at the thought, geared down the Studebaker, and pulled onto the drive that led up to Hilo’s house.
A deputy stood beside a brown and tan police car, a familiar Ford, and he waved me through without asking me to stop. It was Guy Reinhardt.
I had to wonder if he’d had any sleep since I’d seen him last, but that wasn’t my concern. I didn’t stop, just kept on driving with a weak return of a wave of my own, but I watched him disappear in the rearview mirror. He stood stiff and watched after me, his hands stuffed in his pockets.
Guy made me uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t felt in a while— not a threatened way but a female way, a distant tingle that suggested betrayal and need. I ignored it the best I could.
The drive was a half-mile stretch that curved up a slight rise, announcing a change in elevation. It was not unusual for the land to roll into a hill, especially when there was a river close, but the incline was unexpected for the most part. A
t least for me. Our land was as flat as the bottom of a skillet, and there was no need to worry about what was around the next bend of the road, or over the top of a rise. Everything was open, easily seen—with the exception of the shadows behind the barns. Recently, the land had betrayed me more than I ever thought possible, and I dropped the transmission into first gear to climb the hill, nervous that I’d come grill-to-grill with another truck. Or something worse.
I didn’t know the drive to Hilo’s house as well as I knew the Knudsens’ drive or my own. Visits to the sheriff ’s house were rare. Hilo came to see us, even when Hank was at his best, standing on two feet, itching to get out into the field to hunt or work. I could hardly remember the last time I was at Hilo’s house. I thought it had been to drop something off for Ardith, and then we’d stood on the porch. An invitation inside had never come.
I crested the rise and thankfully found myself on flat land again. A football field’s worth of cars and trucks met my vision. I was glad I was in first gear. It looked like everyone who had driven by my house had ended up at Hilo’s.
I parked next to a green Ford pickup, straightened my hair one last time, and made my way to the house carrying holiday treats on the saddest day of the year.
CHAPTER 25
Most of the women who populated my life had flour behind their ears, not Chanel No. 5, but Hilo’s house smelled of sweet perfume, musty stale bread, and cigarette smoke.
Upon entering the front door, it was immediately apparent why Ardith hadn’t invited me inside on that long-ago visit: She was embarrassed, or didn’t want me to see how she and Hilo really lived.
Beyond all of the hovering mourners, the house was a wreck: a lifetime collection of newspapers, magazines, skeins of embroidery floss, and knickknacks of all kinds were stuffed wherever they would fit, or left where they were last touched. There wasn’t a clear spot on the surface of any shelf or table or anywhere in the room that I could see. Ardith Jenkins was no housekeeper, and the idea of maintenance or upkeep seemed as foreign as a rag devoted to wiping away dust to her.
See Also Murder Page 16
