“Where’s the fire, hon?” Charley asked.
Okay, even for a Kankakee movie, that dialogue had seen better days. Was she going to have to direct, produce, star, and do the rewrite?
“Where’s Nick? He called and said you were … that someone had shot at you,” said Jane, a little more breathless from her dash out of the car than Cameron Diaz might have been.
“Misunderstanding,” said Charley. “He overheard me talking to Fuzzy and Lula. I was presenting a hypothetical situation, and he jumped the gun, so to speak.”
Jane had been with Charley for over twenty years minus a few months here and there for some marital questions and answers. She acknowledged that she had a prickly, sensitive side and that she often worked through her own self-doubt by overreacting to any little thing her husband said, willfully misunderstanding the well-intentioned remark, defending herself against an innocent Charley who, most of the time, had no idea what she was so upset about. But Jane had been working on that. She recalled their early years when they could read each other’s moods and body language fluently. And this outwardly calm, almost lethargic Charley was sending her a message.
Neither had ever needed the sitcom gimmick of a secret word or a funny gesture to signal to the other that one wanted to leave a party. Charley knew that when Jane ran her hand through her hair that she was pulling on the roots to stifle a yawn, and he also knew that when she bit her bottom lip she was really listening to what someone was telling her. Jane knew that when Charley softened his voice and spoke with a slight shaking of his head, he wanted that conversation to end. And she knew that when Charley called her “hon” and held himself very still, she should pay attention because something was terribly wrong.
“May we know the hypothetical situation?” asked Oh.
“Let’s suppose someone walked along that cornfield, at the spot where the path from the cabin ends, where Sullivan was found, directly south,” said Charley, inclining his head in a southerly direction, but not pointing—as if he didn’t want anyone who might be watching to know what he was talking about—then he continued, “and they kept walking, you know where they would end up?”
Jane looked south. One could barely make out some buildings, but she knew the closest neighboring farm belonged to the Sullivans. Charley nodded when she said their name.
“Well, if one found something that might be incriminating or illegal, but one didn’t know if it had anything to do with what had happened the other night, what would one …”
“Charley, drop the hypothetical one nonsense right now,” said Jane.
“Look, Munson’s going to call me in to talk in a second. I think he’s pretty suspicious of Fuzzy—him being out there when Sullivan got shot and not being himself lately and all. Nick heard me talking to Lula about what I saw when I went walking … damn it … Munson’s waving me in.”
Charley waved and nodded. “Nick misheard me when I was talking to Lula and I think he panicked a little, maybe it finally hit him that someone was killed right outside the tent. I know it’s hitting me….”
“Professor?” called Munson, giving another wave.
“I’ll finish all this later,” said Charley. “Nick’s fine. I haven’t had a chance to explain everything to him either—not that I know what any of it means—but keep him in sight, okay?”
Jane nodded and watched her husband slowly walk over to where the police seemed to have started their investigation all over again.
“It’s the discovery of those guns,” answered Oh, before Jane had a chance to ask a question.
“During an investigation, the only surprise you want is a discovery that moves you forward. Finding those guns in the barn takes Munson back around to the beginning,” Oh said.
“Where’s Nick?” said Jane. “Charley said keep him in sight, but he didn’t say where he was.”
Oh gestured for her to check the farmhouse while he went in the direction of the cabin and shed.
Lula was checking something she was baking, her right hand on the oven door, the left hand rubbing against her apron, when Jane startled her by asking if she had seen Nick. Lula stepped back from the stove and looked at Jane as if she had interrupted some secret act. Perhaps to Lula, cooking was a kind of private ritual, but Jane didn’t have time to pay homage to the kitchen gods right now.
“Nick,” she repeated. “Have you seen him? He called me.”
“I want you to remember something, Jane. I did not ask you to come and help us here. It was those bones that Fuzzy made a big deal about. Your own mother and father called you. I told Fuzzy to stop talking about everything, stop telling everyone everything he knows.” Lula stopped and took a breath, “Not that he knows his ass from his elbow.”
Jane wanted to know why Lula was so upset and why she was giving Jane this caution, but first she wanted to see Nick. She walked past Lula and through the dining room to the parlor, where she had tucked those crocheted blankets around him … when? Yesterday. Had Johnny Sullivan waved to her from the cornfield just two nights ago?
“Lula, where’s Nick?”
“Fuzzy was out walking the field and the Munson boy wanted him, so Nick said he’d go get him,” said Lula, pointing out to the field and waving her arm in the direction of the Sullivans’. Charley’s walk. “The corn path,” added Lula, “that’s what we call it.”
Jane ran out the door and headed down to the cornfield. A uniformed officer was still at the perimeter of a taped-off area at the end of the yard, but Jane turned and headed off at a right angle from the crime scene, walking along the edge of the cornfield toward the Sullivans’ farm. Whatever Charley had seen, he had seen it walking this way.
Whatever Nick had heard his father say, whatever had stirred Nick enough to call Jane had its roots somewhere along this path. And this was where Lula said Fuzzy had gone and where Nick had followed. Something about shooting. Nick thought Charley thought … if someone had heard shooting and Nick was … Jane tried to stop thinking. Honestly, where had thinking gotten her lately? She needed to look around and figure out what they all found out walking, where this path took them.
The cornfield was on her left, and on her right, the mown lawn and separate vegetable gardens that Fuzzy had nurtured had given way to less cared for property—scrubby trees and a rusty tractor, engine parts and tires. It was so obvious where Fuzzy’s land ended. Or at least where the land he cared about ended. The farm equipment junkyard and chaotic tangle was land unloved. Not a farm, not a garden, just weeds and dirt.
Jane noticed the cornfield on her left; that grid of order and mazelike intensity had broken its geometry by a widening between rows. Was it a lane for a truck or a tractor to go into the field or was it a road to whatever Charley had found? She noticed a fencepost with a tiny wooden square nailed to the top. On it was painted a red circle. Within the circle was another, wider red circle. An agricultural symbol? A certain hybrid of corn planted there? Jane didn’t recognize it but wasn’t sure why she thought she might. Just because she had grown up surrounded by farmland, she wouldn’t know her field corn from her bicolor extra sweet. At least not until an ear of it was on her plate, buttered and salted, with a vintage red Bakelite cornholder sticking out of each end.
Jane turned left and walked down this wide row about twenty feet and saw another fencepost with another small red circle sign. There was another wide path to her right, so she turned and in the distance saw something that took her breath away, but she wasn’t at all sure it would have affected Charley in the same way. Quilts. Dozens of them. It appeared to be a clothesline hung with stunning variations of appliquéd patterns in red on white. Quilted studies in solid color geometry, circles within circles, and squares within squares. So beautiful and unexpected, hung out here in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornstalks? Why would anyone go to the trouble of hiding them? Some kind of rural Illinois sweatshop labor deal? An undercover seamstress operation?
Were Fuzzy and Lula running some kind of killer
quilting bee?
Somehow this made even less sense than everything else that Jane had seen and heard since arriving at Fuzzy’s farm. Jane didn’t see Nick yet but figured she ought to go closer and see if there was anything else here in the clearing, any place he might be. She did see off to the side a few prefabricated storage sheds, the kind one puts together from a mail-order kit. No activity around them. As she approached the stretch of red and white, hung against the green of the corn, she realized they were not what she had first thought them to be. The size was all off. They were small—crib quilts? Smaller. Doll quilts?
It was only when she got within about eight feet of them that she saw them for what they were. Not quilts at all. They were paper signs of some kind with red circles and squares. They were clipped onto old weathered boards that in turn were propped up by hay bales. Some of the paper squares were torn, their corners flapping in the light breeze. A few were riddled with holes.
Jane had never seen anything like this—a row of modernart geometric shapes in the middle of a cornfield? Some new kind of scarecrow variation? She peeked around behind them and walked on the other side of the hay bales. No colorful shapes hung on that side, only the cornfield stretched out behind them.
Jane heard a voice then a pinging, popping sound. This had all the makings of an old childhood joke or a line from a tall tale. “Why I remember it was so hot, the corn started popping in the field” had a Paul Bunyan Pecos Bill ring to it. The muted popping sounds continued and she saw the hay bale on the end of the row move, as if it had been punched or hit or …
“Holy frigging mother of … Stop shooting!” Jane yelled, as loud as she could while throwing herself on the ground and trying to crawl around the corner. The fact that she was wearing a red T-shirt made her feel even more like a moving target. “Stop shooting!” she yelled again, as she maneuvered around the last hay bale. At least the two shooters were lined up in front of the target at the other end of the row. That was the good news. The bad news was the fact that Fuzzy was instructing Nick how to hold the rifle, and to Jane’s knowledge, her son had never held a gun before in his life. If he pulled the trigger, he was as likely to move the barrel anywhere in the general vicinity of the targets, and she was certainly in that range.
With all the volume and breath she could muster while lying flat on the ground, she willed herself to be heard. What if she had been walled off behind soundproof glass, and she saw Nick walking out in front of a truck? That was the voice she called upon and let loose on the rural Illinois landscape.
“Nick. Don’t shoot. It’s Mom.”
Nick froze and dropped the rifle, and Jane could see that she had unleashed a Freudian nightmare upon her son’s psyche that an entire team from Vienna would have to be called upon to repair. Nick first looked up to the heavens, then down to his feet.
“Over here,” said Jane, in the same giant voice, raising herself to her knees and waving her arms, hoping that the motion would convince the two of them she wasn’t just another target in the cornfield. “Don’t shoot!”
Fuzzy seemed to finally hear her and turned slowly toward that end of the row. He still held the rifle, and Jane could only hope she was communicating with the Fuzzy she had known since she was Nick’s age and not the aging stranger she had encountered over the past few days.
“What in the hell are you doing out there, Janie? You liked to scared the bejesus out of your boy.”
Nick looked a little wobbly and sat down. Fuzzy told him to stay put and headed off to one of the sheds. He brought out two cold cans of Coca-Cola and handed them to mother and son who were still breathing hard and unable to look each other in the eye.
Jane kept telling herself that it was good news. She now had Nick in sight. She wouldn’t have to tell Charley she had lost him. Of course she had found him out on a makeshift shooting range, holding a gun and taking instructions from an elderly man whose moods were known to shift rapidly and who seemed to have an endless supply of guns fitted with suppressors—not silencers—which she now knew firsthand did not mask the sound of a rifle entirely. Thank God.
Jane wanted to hug Nick and tell him how worried she had been, but she knew this was a tricky situation that demanded more clever and up-to-date parenting. Oh, damn it, what the hell did she care. She grabbed her son and pulled him close.
“I was so worried about you. You called me and I came, and then I couldn’t …”
“Dad said he heard shooting, and I thought he meant someone was shooting at him and so I called and then …”
“Lula said you’d followed Fuzzy …”
“I found Fuzzy by the shed, and he asked me if I’d ever fired a gun …”
“Janie, this boy tells me he doesn’t even own a BB gun. That true?” asked Fuzzy.
Jane was so thrilled to be hugging her son and so grateful that he was hugging her back, that she forgot her canned speech about guns. She couldn’t remember anything except she was against them. Against owning them, buying them, selling them, trading them, admiring them, shooting them, hunting with them, cleaning them, oiling them, displaying them, loading and unloading them.
“Yes, that’s true,” she answered.
“Why?” asked Fuzzy.
“I don’t think they’re needed by many people who have them,” said Jane. “And I think when something’s not needed, no good can come of it.”
“Ever shoot one?” asked Fuzzy.
Jane shook her head.
“How do you know you’re so against it then, Mom?” asked Nick.
The situation seemed to be normalizing. Nick had let go of her and was sipping his Coke. Jane realized her teeth had stopped chattering.
“I don’t know, Nick. Too many bad guys have them, that’s all.”
“Fuzzy isn’t a bad guy,” said Nick.
“I don’t want you shooting out here. In fact I have a feeling that Detective Munson doesn’t know about this, right, Fuzzy? And for God’s sake, you have more guns?” Jane asked, realizing that Munson had nearly had a heart attack this morning when the guns in the barn had been discovered. She had a funny feeling there was going to be an explosion when these sheds were opened. “What is this, Fuzzy?”
“It’s a club. Me and my kids used to come out here and target shoot. Sometimes they’d bring their friends and I’d teach ’em. Sullivan and his boys used to come here. This is almost on the boundary line of our places. Six rows over’s Sullivan’s land,” said Fuzzy. “Kids all grew up and moved away, and Sullivan helped me take the shooting range down. A few years back, though, I thought, why not put it up again, maybe make a few bucks? I invited a few folks to come out, and we collected some money and got the sheds … people pay at the house when they come out and use the range.”
“You keep guns out here?” Jane asked. “Where kids could come out and get them?”
“Soda machine. No guns. Well, I had these two out here. But the rest was all in the barn and now the police got ’em. And no kids out here unless they come with their moms and dads. And they got to be at least twelve,” Fuzzy said, looking at Nick. “That’s Lula’s rule.”
“Who comes out here, Fuzzy?” asked Jane. “The people who were at the pig roast? Are they all members?”
“And guests. I make exceptions if I like folks or if they’re new in town. Dempsey and Hoover, those fellas came out here one day with some real estate people who shoot. You wouldn’t think they’d know what they were doing, but that Hoover’s a pretty good shot. Turns out he was in the army.”
“So all those guns in the barn, they had all been fired recently? And these two?”
“Sure. But most people bring their own. Summer’s the busy season. Folks getting ready for hunting in the fall; dads teaching their boys. And girls, some people bringing wives and daughters now,” Fuzzy said, nodding. “Janie, this is good money. I make more off this than I do selling tomatoes by the side of the road.”
Fuzzy looked off in the distance, and spoke slowly and deliberately.
>
“I’m too old to farm so I lease a lot of the land to other people who farm it and give me part of the crop. I need to leave my kids something so I can’t lose this place. Out on the other side of town, Rutland cut a corn maze through his field. Sells pumpkins in October and makes a haunted house, gives wagon rides and such. Wife goes out to the Jewel and buys apple juice, and they come home and pour it into old jars and sell it as fresh cider. Come November they let somebody from the city drive a truck in and set up a tree lot, and he has his wife buying wholesale cookies and wrapping them up on chipped plates and making ’em look homemade. They make a buck, but it’s a lot of bullshit. I started charging people a fee to belong to my club out here, and all I got to do is make sure it don’t get too muddy out there so people can go out and change their targets without sinking into the ground. And I charge my members something every time they come out here, too.”
“Fuzzy, it’s so dangerous. What if someone got hurt, if somebody had an accident out here?”
“Nobody has. Hell, kid fell off Rutland’s hayride and broke her arm in three places. His insurance went sky-high. Everybody here watches out for everybody else. Nobody’s a hotdog out here. We’re all about safety.”
“Don’t people need a license or something to shoot a gun? Do you check on that stuff?” asked Jane.
“‘Sides, who’s going to sue me? Somebody get hurt out here, I throw the hay bales into the grove back there for the deer, throw the targets in the fire, and park a few tractors out here. Then I accuse them of trespassing and using my land for their target practice.”
“If they don’t even have a license, and all this then gets traced to you …,” Jane began, but stopped herself. Who was this? Not Fuzzy Neilson. This man was a stranger.
“I made all them silencers like I learned about in England so we don’t disturb anybody. Lula says she can’t hear a thing from the house.”
Buried Stuff Page 17
