“Alta?”
“The third girl; Darlene and Rosemary’s younger sister.”
“I didn’t think to look in the yearbooks for a third sister,” I said.
“Oh, no; Alta wouldn’t be in any of the yearbooks. She quit going to school in seventh or eighth grade, around the time the father took off. Hard luck all around, in that family.” She leaned forward. “Insurance money would sure help Darlene. She stayed on after Alta died, though I’ll never understand why. She should have left. She was a pretty, bright girl. She could have fashioned a better life for herself, somewhere else.”
“Alta died?”
“I told you: hard luck all around in that family, especially that year.”
“When did Alta die?”
“September, three months after Rosemary took off.” She pursed her lips, thinking back. “Their mother died the winter before. There was talk about sending the girls—remember there were three of them, with Alta being disabled in some fashion—to state care, but Darlene, being the oldest, fought that. She said she could manage the family.” She reached for the yearbook copies and held one up. “Yes, see here? Darlene was an active girl during her first three years of high school, but senior year, she did nothing. She dropped out of everything to keep that family going.”
“By then the father was gone.”
“Long gone, the bastard. Hand it to Darlene, she was tenacious. After the mother passed, she and Rosemary alternated the days they went to school, so that one was always home with Alta. But the impact was hardest on Darlene. She was the oldest.”
“Alta was disabled?”
“Mental or physical, no one quite knew what she suffered from. She contracted something and after that was never seen. Folks supposed Martha Taylor, the mother, thought it inappropriate to put her youngest child on display. Things were like that, then.”
“What did Alta die of?”
“A virus, I think. Anyway, folks expected that would be the last straw for Darlene, but she stayed on, cleaning at the school, and farming some. It must be difficult, being out there all alone. Of course, she doesn’t really farm, just tends a plot for her own needs. She has a man stop by, now and again, I hear, to help with the heavier chores.”
“Does Rosemary ever come back?”
“Oh, how I wish she would. She was charming, utterly charming. She had such—” She stopped, hunting for the right word. “Hope,” she said finally. “Rosemary had such hope. It came through so strong in her stories.”
“Stories?”
“She was always writing stories, and not just for my English class, either. They were romantic, and tragic, but underlying, there was always hope. She wrote a whole novel, her junior year. It was about a man who entertained kids, I think. Got a mention in the local paper for that, and the school mimeographed a bunch of copies, thinking it would inspire other students to take up writing. It’s not that the writing was particularly good; it was her tenacity that made the impression, her willingness to write such a long thing. Then, as now, young people were not known for their powers of concentration.”
Something faint nagged at the back of my gut. “A story about a man who entertained kids?” I asked, hoping I sounded merely conversational.
“I think he got killed, toward the end of the story. Romance, tragedy, and hope. Young Miss Rosemary’s heroine rose above the tragedy, and went on to work with ill children.”
“How did he entertain the kids?”
“Well, I don’t quite remember—”
“With balloons? Did the man entertain children with balloons?”
“It’s been years since I looked at it—”
“You have a copy?”
Her eyes narrowed, seeing through the lies I had told. “What are you after, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Do you still have the story?”
“Somewhere, I suppose.”
“I need to see it.”
“Why on earth would you want to?”
I couldn’t lie anymore. “Something more than idle curiosity.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “Best you ask Darlene about these things—and that insurance you say you’re here about.”
She gave me directions to the Taylor place, and I walked out into the sunshine. It took some time to put the key in the ignition, because I had to sit for a while, in that truck cab that smelled of grease and gasoline and sweat, and think about the death of a gas station attendant, and the death of a clown … and wonder what might have been set in motion over forty years before.
CHAPTER 41.
I followed a road that had once been gravel but was now worn to rutted brown clay, flecked only faintly with the gray of a last few embedded stones. I passed no houses. It was empty country.
The Taylor place was four miles outside of Hadlow, a leaning cottage stuck on more hard brown ground, surrounded by once-cleared fields that were now thick with thin, spindly trees. Whatever Darlene Taylor had grown in the small plots had curled up and died, giving way to weeds.
Weeds, and perhaps a twisted idea of how words of romance and murder and a clown, written by a high school girl long before, could be used for blackmail.
The house appeared deserted. A piece of cardboard had been taped inside to cover a shattered front window. The screen door was canted outward, about to fall off its hinges. The place looked as it should, if Darlene Taylor had abandoned it to come to Chicago.
Except for the weeds in the front. Someone had trampled them recently, walking up to the house. They were only now beginning to spring back up.
I left the truck on the road and came up on foot. I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. No one answered.
I tried the handle. The front door was locked tight, and all the windows looked to be latched. All but the one covered by cardboard.
I walked around to the back. An old water pump stuck up out of the ground, five yards from the house. An outhouse stood fifty feet past that, near a sparse copse of trees. It leaned in the same direction as the cottage.
The rear door was locked, too.
I rubbed a window made filthy by blown dirt and pressed my face against it. I was looking across a kitchen sink, at a plate of beans, half eaten, set on a porcelain-topped table. The beans looked fresh, not dried or discolored. A smear of gravy beneath them glistened in the sunlight coming in diffused through the window.
I watched the beans. Things moved across them, like they’d moved across the corpse of Andrew Fill.
Flies.
I went back to the truck and drove away.
I’d come back after dark, to see if Darlene Taylor had come home.
* * *
The little rental Chevrolet sat in front of Ralph’s service station, its driver’s side front wheel bent at exactly the same angle as the night before. Hearing the familiar sounds of his truck clattering up to its rightful home, Ralph came out of the bowels of his station, wiping his hands, and struck a pose in front of the wounded Chevrolet like he was studying sculpture.
“I’ve been thinking on this all morning,” he said. “I’m not sure if I can make it drivable.”
I squeezed the last of Koros’s cash in my pocket, sensing Ralph was about to squeeze me. “What will make you sure?”
“I’ll have to start pulling off parts. It’ll take days, and big money.”
“We’d better tow it, then.”
“Where to?”
“The rental place in Minneapolis.”
His voice brightened. “That’s a long, long ways.”
I gripped the cash in my pocket tighter. “How much?”
“I’d have to think on that.”
I knew what he had to think about. He had to guess how much I was clutching in my pocket, and what he could rationalize that into, in per-mile towing charges.
“Let me know, Ralph,” I said, hoping he couldn’t hear the defeat in my voice. I went back to the smells of grease and gas and sweat percolating in the cab of his truck.
* * *
I had the afternoon and early evening to kill. I decided to begin by stabbing at it with a plastic knife and fork. I pulled into the parking lot of a fast food place at the edge of town called the Would You? and ordered the chicken basket.
It was after lunchtime. There were no teenagers loitering in front. There had been, though—years and years of them, judging by the carvings on the wood planks of the picnic tables. Love had been memorialized there, in initials filled with chicken and burger grease sure to protect it from the harsh Minnesota winters, likely to last longer than the love itself.
I would have bet most towns had such hieroglyphs. My town, Rivertown, certainly did, though instead of being carved into tables, ours were cut into the sides of Kutz’s Wienie Wagon, a wood-slatted trailer that had been pulled beneath one of the overpasses when FDR was president and left to sink on deflating tires. My own initials were there, paired with a girl’s, inside a heart. Years later, she’d come back to cut another heart, larger, to surround the first one. It had taken me too long to learn about that second heart.
My chicken—a leg, a thigh, and a breast—came with a biscuit and french fries, enough goodness to clog even the most elastic of arteries. As I ate, I studied the carvings on the table, wondering if Rosemary Taylor’s initials had been carved at the Would You? Or whether the tables from her high school days had been discarded, their initials lost, and the whole process begun all over again.
The chicken, biscuit, and fries were excellent. When I turned in my tray, I was tempted to tell the young lady behind the Would You?’s grease-smeared glass that I would again, if allowed. I didn’t, because I worried she’d misinterpret my play on the name of the place and call the police.
I walked to the truck, leaned against its fender. It wasn’t hard to see Georgie Korozakis, cocky and young, breezing along that Main Street in his father’s convertible, with Darlene Taylor nestled beside him, her blond hair blowing back, both of them laughing at the wind and the notion of ever growing old.
I called Amanda. Her secretary told me she was out at a luncheon and wasn’t expected back until much, much later. I didn’t want to wonder if that was true.
Leo didn’t answer his cell phone. He was probably in a meeting somewhere.
I called Jennifer Gale. She sounded glad to hear from me.
“Want to have dinner after the news tonight?” she asked. “I can tell you how I’ve struck out, trying to trace Sweetie Fairbairn’s background.”
“I’m in Hadlow, Minnesota. I got into an altercation with a truckload of pigs.”
“Are you all right?”
“I am. The farmer who caused the accident is angry, as will be George Koros when he finds out his credit card is being charged ten grand against car repairs. The pigs, though, appeared to be ecstatic. They took off across a field and might now be in Mexico.”
“Why are you in Hadlow?”
“I got a lead into Sweetie Fairbairn’s background.”
“I thought you were going to keep me current on all this.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Things have happened so fast there wasn’t time.”
“Did she come from Hadlow?”
“You’re not going to broadcast this yet, right?”
“Right.”
“Sweetie came from here. So did her sister, a woman who I saw at George Koros’s building. So did George Koros.”
“All three of them?” She inhaled sharply. “Big news, Dek Elstrom.”
“Indeed.”
“When can I use this stuff?”
“When I’m sure none of it incriminates the missing Ms. Fairbairn.”
I told her I’d check in with her when I learned something new.
I didn’t say that hearing her voice made me feel not so alone.
CHAPTER 42.
The moon was a thin sliver in the sky. There were no headlamps moving in either direction; no house lights lit the fields. Not even Winnemac showed his spotlit head. I was alone in that black part of Minnesota.
Still, I cut the headlamps a half mile before the cottage and coasted to a stop. I wanted to come up to the Taylor house on foot. In case Darlene had returned to finish her beans.
There was just enough moonlight to show me the edge of the road. My feet made no noise as I hurried along the hard clay.
Then there was a light, off the road ahead, to the right.
It was faint and flickering, barely visible in the darkness. I moved forward slowly until suddenly the light disappeared.
I’d gotten to the front of the Taylor cottage. The light was flickering from the back, and was now blocked by the front of the house. It was candlelight I’d seen; the house didn’t have electricity.
The realization tingled at the back of my neck. I didn’t want to wonder what such a hellishly poor place had done to Darlene Taylor, living out her nights in such blackness, so far out of town, and so alone. With only a candle to keep away the dark.
There was no car on the rutted drive. Whoever was in that cottage had been brought there, or had come up as I had, on foot.
I crouched down and moved around the side of the house to the back. I remembered the three windows. The dim, flickering glow was coming from the middle of them. The kitchen window.
The kitchen window I’d rubbed, to see through. Whoever was inside would know someone had been there.
That couldn’t be helped now. I stayed low as I passed beneath the first window. At the one in the middle, I eased up slowly for a look.
The plate of beans was still on the porcelain-topped table, but now the stub of a candle, guttering, had been stuck in the center of it.
Something rustled low, ten, twenty feet away.
In that instant, I understood. A candle stuck in a plate of beans, not for a light but as a beacon, to draw someone who should not be there.
I caught my breath and turned.
A flash lit the darkness, followed by an explosion. My right side went hot. I’d been shot.
I turned, to run. The wound in my side had a thousand tentacles, each one clutching a dagger. Pain in my legs now, pain in my arms; too much pain to run. I fell.
Then he was on me. His boots kicked at my arms and my head. I rolled onto my right side, trying to protect the wound. He kept kicking, again and again. I raised my left arm, to fight off the blows. He kicked it down and danced back, a black shape crouched against the charcoal sky.
I rolled away, somehow got to my feet. He came at me low, breathing heavily. He was tiring. I slapped out with my left hand, hit his head, caught his hair. It was oily, greasy, and long. My right side was on fire, but there’d be more pain, more bullets, if I let go. Death would come.
He thrashed away.
I turned, to run. It was all I could do.
His hands were too fast. He caught me around the waist. The hard metal of the handgun beat at the wound on my right side, once, and again.
Enraged at the pain, at the life that was leaking out of me, I beat at the side of his face with my left fist. Something crunched. Maybe his nose, or his cheek. He screamed. It was the loud wail of an animal. I swung at the sound of him. He moaned. His hands let go. He fell.
He still had the gun.
Hugging my right arm against the blood at my side, I began to run. Each footfall sent an iron rod of fire into my right side. I wanted to scream at the jarring and the pain, but to cry out would draw him right to me in the dark. My only chance was to reach the trees back of the fields before he recovered enough to come after me.
After a minute, after an hour—time was lost; there was only pain—I found a tree, then another. I was in the woods. I clutched at their thin, spindly shapes, one to the next, finding my way deeper into the woods with my good left arm.
The darkness would hide me, if I stayed quiet.
I heard something, stopped and held my breath. He was thrashing nearby, loud. I tugged off my belt and cinched it around my left hand, metal buckle dangling a foot at the end. It was the only weapon
I had.
His footfalls faded, and then they were gone. I started up again, careful to feel ahead of me for the next tree. He could have stopped, to strain for the sound of me.
Each step was a new hammer blow to the wet wound in my side. Pain was good, I had to believe. Pain would keep me moving. I would live if I could do the pain.
A tree root seized my foot, and I fell hard to the ground. Panicked, I lurched up. He’d heard me now. I started to run, hit a tree, went down. I bit at my lip until I could taste blood, but I made no noise. I got up, went forward.
A hundred more times I fell, got up, and fell again. Then I had no strength to get up anymore. My whole right side was drenched, wet down to my shoes. Maybe there was no more blood. It was all right. I would lie still, and the darkness would keep me.
* * *
Someone came, and took my good left hand. I had no strength; I could only breathe. My arm jerked, there was an explosion—and then the person went away without helping me at all. I wondered if I’d been shot again, and was supposed to bleed to death, in those black woods.
I had the thought that I should laugh.
Surely there was no more blood.
CHAPTER 43.
Something small dragged itself across the skin of my hand.
I blinked my eyes until they’d cleared enough to see a fuzzy rectangle of light high up, past my feet. I blinked some more. Hospital light. Hospital bed.
A technician was swabbing my left hand. She finished and stepped away.
“What’s that for?” I asked, through a mouth full of cotton.
A different woman came to stand next to my neck. “Gunshot residue,” she said.
“Then swab my side. That’s where the bullet went in.”
“You’re damned lucky, Vlodek Elstrom, you didn’t put that bullet into your heart.”
I strained to look up at her, but her face was a blurred circle in the glare of another fluorescent fixture, this one mounted right above my head.
She moved back so I could see her. She was attractive, in her early forties, Nordic blond and blue-eyed. She wore a tan uniform shirt, dark green trousers, and a black leather gun belt.
Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) Page 19
