The Home Place: A Novel

by Carrie La Seur

  “He seems to think that your sister was under some kind of pressure from Burlington. Would that be related to what your grandma says, about the mineral lease?”

  Alma turns a little toward Ray in her seat. “Chance and Brittany both say that Vicky had a copy of the lease with notes all over it, things she found out about Rick’s dealings with the landowners. Did you ever find anything like that?”

  “No sign of it.” Ray reaches between the seats and pulls out a notepad. “It could be an important piece of evidence, depending on what’s on it, and the fact that it’s missing may be important too.”

  “I’ve been starting to think it could’ve been a motive, but I couldn’t figure out how Rick could’ve been there that night at exactly the right moment when she wandered out. And then this morning Brittany told us he was there. She said they argued and he followed Vicky outside. That’s why we were all so upset when Rick showed up at the Murphys’.”

  Ray turns his head toward her and raises one slender black eyebrow. “It’s sure inconsistent with all the other information we have. Rick’s got an alibi from a woman in Billings he’s been running around with behind his wife’s back while he’s up here from Denver. She says they were in bed asleep at her place. What do you think?” Ray flips through his notes. His tone is curious, not sarcastic. “Does Brittany lie? Why would she lie?”

  Alma sits back. Pete’s words rise up: Brittany’s got a little of it too, when she really wants something. And her motivation to lie? It suddenly seems clear as the high country pools that gave the Stillwater River its name. Alma’s eyes snap up to Ray’s. “She’d lie to protect the home place.”

  “Hmm.” Ray meditates over his notepad for a moment. “But if she’s not lying and Rick was around, it opens up different possibilities. Your sister could have told Walt what she knew, and then he’d be—”

  “No, that wouldn’t have happened,” Alma interrupts, pulling her arms in tight around herself.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Vicky and Walt hated each other.”

  Ray lowers his pencil. “Hated each other? Nobody’s said that to me. Why would they hate each other?”

  “Walt and Helen raised Vicky after our parents died. They never got along. Oil and water. She moved out as quickly as she could, and then they broke off contact a few years later, except for the way Vicky kept coming back to all of us, asking for help, playing games. When I saw him Sunday evening, he told me to go back to Seattle and leave them the hell alone.”

  “Wow.” Ray sets his pad and pencil on the dash. “You never mentioned that. He’s got an alibi from your aunt, but that doesn’t sound very good for him. You think she’d lie for him?”

  Alma rarely thinks about Helen, but now that Ray asks—of course Helen would lie for Walt. “I don’t know,” she tells Ray.

  CHAPTER 20

  THURSDAY, 2 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Back on the road, there is nowhere to go but the Itching Post. Alma can’t face Helen yet. She needs to talk to Pete, hear him tell her what to believe, what is real and what is insanity. An unholy instinct grips her as she pulls off the interstate. The way Pete reacted this morning, the unfamiliar hardness. Alma feels the clockwork pieces slip into place so that a mechanism comes to life with an evil hum and purr. Who else could have gotten close enough to Walt to do this? Who else could have found the cabin, let alone the stand? Her beloved Petey, her big brother, her protector, what has he done?

  She parks and runs up the sidewalk toward the Itching Post without bothering to lock the car. Halfway up the block, she slips on black ice in the shadow of an insurance agency awning and falls hard on her left hip—the sound is the sort of crack that will mean a giant yellow bruise along the bone. She curses at herself and gets to her knees, then her feet. The pain is raw and deep. She is crying. Her hand is ripped open and bloody—she had her hands deep in her pockets and barely caught herself as she went down. Her coat is pebbled with sidewalk salt and gravel.

  She staggers along the sidewalk, waving off an offer of help from the insurance agent who rushes out in shirtsleeves. She rubs desperately at her tears with the sleeve of her coat, trying to make it all go away, as she reaches the front window of the Itching Post.

  Pete sees her from inside. He stops tamping down coffee for the next latte and races around the end of the bar toward her as she steps through the door. “Alma, what happened to you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she protests. “I fell down. I just need to sit for a minute.”

  Pete helps her to an upholstered chair, gets her settled, then spots her left hand. He hurries off for the first-aid kit and orders Alma a coffee from the teenager who’s busy clearing tables.

  “Here we go,” Pete says with calming authority as he opens the kit on the low table next to Alma. He’s talking her through it, talking her down. “We’ll just clean that off, get some Neosporin on it, bandage it up, you’ll be good as new. You got any other wounds I should look at?”

  Alma looks at him with eyes still full of tears and puts her hand to her heart. Pete makes a funny little pout, trying to make her laugh. “Problems with the boyfriend?” he inquires. He wipes away grit from her bloodied hand with a cotton patch soaked in alcohol.

  Alma hisses at the pain, then leans over, still grimacing. “Pete, where’s Walt?”

  She can hear him swallow. “You think he ran?” he says, very quiet and still.

  “No.”

  “Then what?” Pete puts the first-aid kit in his lap and starts to dig for antiseptic cream.

  “Pete!” She grabs his shirt with her less fragile right hand and yanks him back to her. “I know!”

  Pete looks her in the eye for only a second before bending back over her hand. “What are you talking about, Alma?” His Adam’s apple bobs, the only sign of discomfort as he answers her.

  “Do you want to have this conversation here?” she hisses.

  Pete carries on with his first aid, spreading cream, measuring gauze. “What are you going to do?” he asks, still not meeting her eyes.

  This sudden frankness drains her. Alma leans back into the chair, trying to come up with something that would explain Pete’s actions. She winds up back at the home place, on a spring day when Pete was working with the ranch hands, branding and castrating. He hated it, but his way of dealing with the revulsion was to work harder than anybody, force himself to do better and faster all the ugly things that had to be done. He was up before dawn every day, pushing through, refusing to look at Alma. When he came in the door the last night, stinking of blood and dirt and sweat, she hadn’t recognized him. He had transformed himself in the service of what had to be done. This capacity would have made him a very good soldier if it hadn’t also driven him to drink himself half to death.

  Pete swings his head around to take in the busy shop. “Come on,” he says, and grabs her arm. He leads her past the bar to a small door into the windowless storeroom. He locks the door, overturns two buckets, and gestures for Alma to sit.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she whispers so softly that even Pete, crouched beside her in the tight space, can barely hear. “You and I, we’re the only ones who could have found him out there.”

  “I did what I had to do,” Pete says, moving on to Alma’s less damaged hand. “This is a family matter.” He tapes the last bandage across her hand with professional efficiency. She’d forgotten about his medic training in the Marines. His hands are steady, but just like that spring on the home place, he won’t look at her face.

  “Did he kill her?”

  “Who else?” Pete’s eyes come up for a second, not quite meeting hers, still hiding something. Her raw hand contracts painfully in his.

  “But Petey, why?” It’s a child’s lament, a little voice crying out at the unfairness of it all.

  Pete shakes his head in a gesture of futility she remembers from fights when they were kids, as if explaining things to his baby sister is beyond him. It infuriated her
then too. “Jesus Christ. I don’t know who I’m trying to protect anymore. Alma, don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?” Alma’s indignation is the same instant heat it has been since childhood, when Pete refused to take her seriously. Will he ever give her credit for being a competent adult? “I am not now nor have I ever been psychic. You have to speak the words.”

  Pete sinks back against a set of steel shelves, pale. He looks at her blankly. “Alma,” he begins, then looks down and rubs his brow. Suddenly he drops his hand in a gesture of capitulation and blurts, “Brittany’s his. He had to cover it up.”

  As these words ricochet around the room, neither of them cries out or moves. Alma fixes her eyes on a deep fissure in the cement storeroom floor. Their breathing is loud in the small space. If this is what Vicky told Pete, then in her heart, Alma believes her. These are not the sort of lies that Vicky told. Vicky was wild, but not malicious, and Alma’s memory of being in the pickup with Walt and being afraid, on top of the incident just a few days ago in his garage, now makes her very sure of what he did—what he would have done even to her, Alma the inexorable, had she lived under his roof. She wants to hurt him with her own bare hands.

  But none of that makes him a murderer, necessarily. Alma’s mind produces a sudden, unwelcome recollection of a wooden train set Walt made for all three of them during one of those happy years of their lost childhood. She can see the carefully painted cars laid out around the Christmas tree and Walt standing at the door, embarrassed at the children’s warm attention.

  “How do you know?” She finds that her voice is weak but still present.

  “Oh I knew,” Pete says, still bent over, refusing to look at her. “I think I knew a long time ago. And then when I went out to the cabin, he told me.”

  “So you think he killed her.” Alma’s words are not a question.

  There is no shadow of uncertainty in Pete’s cold eyes when he looks up this time.

  “Yes.” Pete bites his lip and stares back without blinking. She reaches out her right hand and takes his left. They sit there together for several minutes with bowed heads, holding hands, staring into depths in the other that each has only begun to contemplate.

  “You talked to the police,” Pete says, dropping her hand and wrapping his arms around his middle. It’s cooler in the storeroom than out in the shop.

  “Yes. Ray Curtis came out to the cabin.”

  “What did they say?”

  “He thinks it’s suicide.” Alma wraps her coat around her legs.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Not much. I didn’t argue. I didn’t figure out that it had to be you until I got back to town.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You and I are the only ones who could have found him, and strong enough to hike out to the stand. And even if somebody managed to track him there, we’re the only ones he wouldn’t see as a threat. Besides, if Walt were going to kill himself, he’d put a gun in his mouth, not jump out of his stand.” She chokes down a strangling feeling and reaches for Pete’s arm. “God, Petey, he could’ve killed you too. How could you take such an awful risk?”

  Pete relaxes, not entirely, but perceptibly. He takes Alma’s hand again, rubs it. “Where’s Jean-Marc? Was he there?”

  “No.” Alma swallows. “He went home this morning.”

  Pete lifts Alma’s chin to get a better look at her face. “He just got here.”

  “Yeah, well, I fucked it up again.” She pulls away.

  Pete’s face softens in a gentle look of recognition. He doesn’t know the details, but he’s familiar with the list of perfectly good boyfriends she’s ejected at cruising altitude. He leans on the shelving again. “You didn’t have to go out there and find him right away, you know. I was kind of hoping animals would get to him.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.” Her voice is low. What Pete has done is just beginning to come over her, like a chill, a fever, some illness that will never be gone. Of course she understands the impulse. It is such a human reaction to horrors, to lash out, to strike back. But animals obscuring the evidence? He’s thought this through, maybe after the fact, but with a detachment that she feels right down to the ligaments holding her bones together.

  Pete senses her unease and leans in to try to catch her eyes. Reluctantly she looks back at him. “Just to mess up the crime scene, I mean,” he says with sad eyes and open, pleading hands. “There aren’t any marks. No bullet hole or anything.”

  “Signs of struggle? DNA?” Alma sits up straight. He’s right. Whatever Pete’s done, there must be no loose ends. He must never be linked. That is the priority now.

  “Don’t think so. God, I wish this had never happened,” Pete says.

  “What did you see?” Alma realizes that she has a scene already drawn in her mind: Walt leaning over Vicky’s body sprawled on the ice, and Pete watching from somewhere, witnessing the heartbreaking, unnatural crime, resolving to be the swift hand of justice.

  Pete shakes his head. “Nothing. But I chased him out to the cabin Monday morning and he more or less confessed. Told me how she got what she deserved.”

  Alma hesitates. Her shoulder twitches under the bruise from slamming into Walt’s garage door. “He said something like that to me, how he knew she’d end up like this. But Petey, why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Pete takes his head in both hands. “I was beside myself. I guess that’s what I thought at first, that I’d tell the police everything. But Walt just kept talking. She’d ensnared him, tempted him. He did wrong, but it was all her fault somehow. He said—” Pete’s voice catches, and he starts again. “He said it was better this way. Vicky would be at peace, and he and Helen would get custody of Brittany. You hear what I’m saying? That son of a bitch would get away with murdering Vicky and then he’d get Brittany. I couldn’t let it happen.

  “I drove back down the road and parked out of sight of the cabin, waited for it to get dark. Walt was drinking, so I knew he wouldn’t hear me come back. I got the key and looked inside. I was about ready to turn back then, but—God, I couldn’t believe it—that bastard had a picture of her out there. Brittany. One of those posed school pictures. He must have gotten it from Helen. Right there on the window ledge, like he’d been out there by himself thinking about her.” The contortion of Pete’s face is alarming. He leans to one side and reaches for his wallet, pulls out the photo and shows it to Alma. Brittany is beaming at the camera, her hair glossy and her pretty face open like it hasn’t been in all the time Alma’s been back. “I couldn’t leave it in that place.” His fingers grip the photo so tightly that it crinkles at the edges. Alma unwraps his fingers and takes it.

  “I thought I knew where Walt might have gone, just for a night, if he didn’t want to be found,” Pete goes on. “I hiked out that way. I could tell I was on the right track. It looked like Walt did it on snowshoes, dragging a pine bough to cover his tracks. He always liked Last of the Mohicans crap like that. The snow was hard pack and I was almost on tiptoe trying not to leave prints or make noise. For all I knew, he was up in that stand, drawing a bead on me, and he’s a good shot when he’s sober.

  “I get to the tree. No shots, no noise. I was starting to think maybe I was wrong, but the snow was knocked off the lower branches and his little hidden footholds. I climbed up. It’s just this little platform, you know, smaller than I remembered it, and Walt’s lying there all zipped into his mummy bag, sound asleep. I grabbed him by his feet and yanked them up so he was hanging upside down off the side of the platform. And he is a big fucking heavy man. I almost couldn’t hold him. He woke up and couldn’t get out of the bag, so he’s going crazy, clawing at the bag and cussing me out. I think he thought I just meant to scare him. He was mad, not scared. I was shouting at him that I knew what he did to Vicky, and then he started saying, ‘I didn’t mean it. It was a mistake, I didn’t mean it to happen.’ Like he thought I would understand.” Pete’s face contorts and his f
ists clench. “There’s—there’s a bald side to the tree where it’s a straight drop to the ground. I just swung him over that way and let go. Once he hit the ground, he never made another sound. Then I thought, well, he wouldn’t commit suicide in his sleeping bag, so I took it back to the cabin and stowed it.”

  They sit in silence, staring at the floor, the reviving smell of coffee all around them. Then Pete stands and offers a hand to Alma. “Better get back to the front.” She hears his double entendre.

  Alma stretches her arms around her brother and hugs him tight. “I love you, Petey.”

  The road to the heights is clear and dry. Maybe Helen will be willing to say more about Walt, now that he’s gone. There was always more to Helen than people saw. Next to Walt’s intimidating size and intensity, she was the quiet wife who never demanded much attention. Her passive nature made room for the tortured past he carried. They fit together like jagged, deformed puzzle pieces.

  To give her aunt some small measure of warning, Alma calls Helen as she drives along the rims. Helen picks up after several rings, there as always.

  “Come right over. I didn’t know if you’d make it back here. Maddie says you’ve been running all over, taking care of things. Did you go talk to Walt?”

  “I drove out there, like I said I would. Listen, I’ll be there in a minute and we can talk.” Alma hangs up and tries to piece together words to tell Helen that Walt is gone, talking to herself as she drives. Then there are Pete’s words about Vicky. If Helen knew—she had to know, how could she not know?—then Alma’s sincere anguish at her aunt’s loss is turned inside out. She can’t do this. She can’t face Helen and hear whatever she’s going to hear. Navigating the suburban maze distracted, Alma finds nothing but dead ends. She’s dry-mouthed and her heart is beating too fast. Helen has to have known something and kept quiet. Finally Alma stops, collects herself, and maps the route to Helen’s on her phone, resolved to put on her most professional persona as armor.