by Nick Pirog
His lips pursed under his mustache.
I said, “I was looking into one of their games from a couple years back and I was having trouble getting any stats.”
“You’re not very good at this,” he said.
I laughed.
He said, “So you’re looking into the Save-More murders?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“Curiosity at first. Stumbled on the memorial, and old habits die hard.” I gave him a quick summation of my life in law enforcement.
“I heard about that case up in Maine,” he said. “What was the nickname they had for that guy?”
The case had been three years earlier. It garnered a lot of attention because a woman named Alex Tooms—who would later go on to shatter my heart into a million little pieces—wrote a true-crime novel detailing the murders. It had been on the bestseller list for nearly three months. Only, the murders hadn’t been solved. The killer, Tristan Grayer, had still been out there, biding his time before going on another killing spree. This time, targeting women close to me.
“The Maine-iac,” I replied.
“That’s it,” he said. “Didn’t you get shot and fall off a cliff?”
I took a deep breath. Involuntarily, I could feel my knuckles go white around the beer bottle in my hand.
“Yeah. I got lucky.”
Before he could ask any follow-up questions, I asked, “So why would the receptionist at the Tarrin Police Department tell me to talk to you?”
“I was with the TPD for fourteen years.”
“Did you head up the Save-More investigation?”
“I did,” he said solemnly, leaning his head back against the seat.
I knew he was back there, back at the crime scene, back standing over five dead bodies. Just like I’d been back on that cliff a moment earlier.
“What happened?” I asked.
“With the murders? Or the investigation?”
“More the investigation. And more why you no longer work as a police officer.”
Something told me that if it weren’t for the Save-More murders, Officer Mike Zernan would still be gainfully employed.
“Well, as you would expect, it was a real shit show. Everybody—the TPD, County, and Missouri Bureau—all jostling for jurisdiction. Eventually, the TPD won out, mostly because it wasn’t a whodunit. It wasn’t a hate crime or terrorism—it was a revenge killing. Then the shooter killed himself. It was pretty cut and dry.”
“So it seems.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“What did you find?” I asked.
He glanced outside, then turned back. “Just some inconsistencies.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Still kind of buggy in here.” He sat on the word buggy.
I nodded.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“The Humphries Farm.”
We talked farming for a couple minutes, then we talked actual baseball. When our beers were gone, we exited the car.
On my departure, Mike shook my hand, leaned in, and whispered, “Give me three days.”
Chapter Ten
Saturday’s Revival marathon tuckered me out. I met a lifetime quota of hallelujahs and the tug-of-war did a number on my ribs. So I canceled the second leg, staying home and playing with Harold and May.
I added some water to the now working pigpen, and the piglets rolled around in the mud for over an hour. Then I gave them baths. And, of course, backrubs. And yes, they still slept in bed with me.
Monday morning, as planned, Randall came by and we set up a plan to get the farm back into shape. He gave me a quick rundown on everything we needed to do: buy or rent a tractor, get rid of the overgrown brush, till the soil, fix the irrigation, decide what crops to plant, buy seed, and so forth.
I handed him my credit card and gave him carte blanche, though I knew he would exhaust himself finding the best deals on everything.
He said he had a good chicken guy, whatever that meant.
It was now a little after 2:00 p.m. and I was driving to Page Ranch. As in Victoria Page, the sole survivor of the Save-More murders.
I called my sister, aka my Google, and Lacy did a quick internet search on Victoria, then found her present address easily enough.
I continued over rolling green hills for fifteen minutes, took a few turns, then pulled onto a dirt road leading under a giant sign that read “Page Ranch.”
I expected to see a bunch of cows, but instead I saw horses. The horses were the color of chocolate: milk, dark, white, and even one that looked like that Hershey’s Cookies and Cream. Most were standing still. A few romped around.
I drove up the dirt road for a quarter mile and parked in front of a large house. There were several trucks and horse trailers. To the left of the house was a giant, red wooden stable.
A moment later, I knocked on the door of the house. No one answered, and I started toward the stable. Even from a hundred feet away, I could hear horses neighing and stomping.
I opened and closed a high steel gate, then walked through the wide entrance. A woman and two men were standing with their backs to me. I looked past them into an open stall and saw two horses. The male horse was huge. He was the Dwayne Johnson of horses. He reared up on his hind legs and thrusted what looked to be an old Soviet missile, but was actually his dick, into the girl horse.
I feared for the female horse’s life, but as quickly as it started, it was over.
The woman shook the hands of the two men. She noticed me in her peripheral and turned. She was medium height with a cowboy hat atop unnaturally red hair. She was what people would refer to as a handsome woman. I guessed her to be in her early sixties.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Victoria Page,” I said, though I was nearly certain this was she.
Her brown eyes directed me to the entrance, and she said, “Give me a minute.”
I nodded and exited.
A minute later, the two men led Dwayne Johnson from the stable with a post-coital twinkle in his large amber eyes. His now flaccid dong hung like the world’s largest piece of strawberry taffy. He glared at me and snorted.
I’d never felt so emasculated.
The two men gave a quick howdy, then led Dwayne to one of the horse trailers. They drove away, and Victoria Page walked from the stable. She had a noticeable limp, dragging her left foot slightly.
“First time you see two horses going at it?” she asked.
“What makes you think that?”
“Just the look on your face back in there, like you saw a ghost.”
“I expected a bit more foreplay.”
She laughed.
I said, “That guy horse was enormous.”
“That’s Diamond. He won the Futurity two years ago.”
“Futurity?”
“The All-American Futurity. Race down in New Mexico.”
“He’s a racehorse?”
“One of the best.”
“He run in the Kentucky Derby?”
She shook her head. “Those are thoroughbreds.” She looked toward the horses across the way. “These are quarter horses. Different breed. They run shorter distances.”
“Got it.”
I thought back to Dwayne/Diamond. “Does that big guy still race?”
“He’s retired. Now he just does what you saw.”
“Goes around screwing.”
“Pretty much.”
“So he’s a gigolo?”
“Basically.”
“How much do his services cost?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“What you just saw cost a hundred grand.”
“That’s some expensive semen.”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“My dad passed away about fifteen years ago and left me some money. That’s when I bought my first horse. Been doing it ever since
.”
She took a long inhale, then said, “But I’m guessing you aren’t here to buy one of my horses.”
I shook my head.
“Then why are you here?”
I told her.
Victoria Page handed me a glass of water and then took a seat on a chair opposite the couch I was sitting on.
I declined her offer for something stronger, but this didn’t stop her from pouring herself a martini with two blue cheese olives shipwrecked at the bottom of the glass.
We were in a sitting room. There were two giant windows, with satin curtains glowing in the afternoon sun. Hanging on the walls were a series of watercolors, beautiful landscape paintings filled with horses. On the far side of the room was a glass display case filled with a collection of trophies and ribbons.
Victoria took a small sip of her martini, set it down, and said, “I can’t believe it’s been four years.”
“Does it seem longer?”
She’d taken off her hat and she ran her fingers through her shoulder length hair, which on closer examination was dyed a near scarlet.
“It’s funny,” she said. “It seems like it happened a lifetime ago, but it also feels like it was yesterday.”
I nodded. I could relate.
She could sense it in my eyes and asked, “What happened to you?”
“Which time?”
Her eyebrows raised slightly.
I explained, “I’m a magnet for mayhem.”
This earned a small smile.
She seemed reluctant to talk, and I decided to regale her with a couple stories, which should give the vodka time to loosen her up.
Truthfully, of all the crazy stuff that had happened to me—being shot, falling off a cliff, drowning, being held hostage by South African pirates, going to third base with Becky “Valtrex” Del Vicio—by far, the most traumatic was being attacked by a pack of wolves.
According to my therapist—my sister Lacy—this wasn’t just because I nearly bled to death in the middle of the forest or because I had to get more than a hundred stitches or because I still couldn’t throw a frisbee very well, it was because the trauma was planted years earlier when I was a child.
Young Thomas Prescott was nine years old when he went on a field trip to the zoo. He thought the exhibit was full of dogs and he wanted to pet those dogs. So Thomas climbed the fence and squirmed his way up the ravine and he went to pet the dog. Which was a fucking wolf.
The wolf was shot by zoo security, and I escaped with only a few stitches. But I did wet my bed for the next five years.
But back to the present.
“There was this big black one,” I told Victoria. “His name was Cartman.”
“Cartman?”
“Yeah, like from South Park.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a show. One of the park rangers helping with the wolves’ release named him. But it kind of fit. You could just feel him plotting behind his eyes, figuring out a way to eat you.”
I ran through the rest of the story. The snowmobile. Only room for Erica. Hearing the wolves howl. Seeing them coming. Running through the open snow to the trees. Trying to climb one but unable to find footing. Then the first wolf leaping. Smashing into me, his jaw clamping on my shoulder. Fighting for my life.
I leaned back on the couch and took a few long, deep shuddering breaths. Okay, so maybe I was exaggerating just slightly, but I wanted Victoria to know I could empathize with her trauma. And, to be brutally honest, the memory of the wolves, with their jaws locked into my flesh, did quicken my pulse.
“Here,” Victoria said, offering me her drink, “take a sip of this.”
I took a sip, then handed back her drink. “Thanks.”
“That sounds terrifying,” she said. “When I tell my story to most people, I know few can relate.”
She popped one of the olives in her mouth and said, “It was the only time in my life I remember having no control over the outcome. I was at the mercy of this man and, I suppose, God’s will.”
I nodded, but didn’t dare speak.
“I was making cookies for my niece’s bake sale. I make incredible chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies.” Her lips flexed into a smile ever so briefly. “I ran out of butter so I made a run to Save-More. While I was there, I picked up one of those gossip mags.” She let out a long sigh. “If I hadn’t stopped to flip through that magazine, I would have been out of there before Lowry came in. I would have been on my way home, getting ready to bake another batch of cookies.
“I was next in line to check out when Neil Felding came in. Right behind him was Lowry. Lowry had a gun in his hand and he started waving it at Odell, the manager, screaming that he shouldn’t have been fired. Then he forced all of us back to the back freezer.”
“Who is us?” I asked, though I knew the names already.
“Dr. Lanningham, he was the town veterinarian; Peggy Bertina, who I didn’t know personally; Will Dennel, a nice looking kid who worked over at the lumberyard; Neil Felding, who I didn’t know all that well, but had just moved back into town; Odell, the store owner; and me.”
“Did you ever think about making a run for it?”
“Of course. But then I figured that would get me killed for certain. I still thought there was a good chance Lowry was just gonna give us a scare then let us go.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Just that it was Lowry.”
“You knew him?”
“He cut my lawn for five or six years when he was younger. He even stayed the night at my house a couple times when he needed to get away from his old man.”
“You didn’t think he was dangerous?”
“No. I mean, he did some stupid stuff. The things that landed him in jail. Boozing mostly, but that ran in his family, so it wasn’t a surprise.”
Her eyes glazed over, which was possibly due to the vodka, and she said, “I still remember one time when he was cutting my lawn. He found a dead fawn in the leaves. He was sixteen, maybe seventeen years old, but he was crying like the dickens. He dug a hole and buried her, then planted some flowers on top of her.”
“People can change a lot in ten years.”
She was silent for a couple moments, and I prodded, “So he took the lot of you to the back freezer?”
“Yes.”
“Was he talking?”
“Not much. Just giving orders. He made us sit down on the cold concrete.”
“Did you say anything to him, you know, since you sort of knew him?”
“Yeah, I said, ‘Lowry this isn’t you’ or something like that, and he told me to ‘shut up.’” She took a breath, then added, “That’s when I started to think maybe things—”
I finished for her, “—things were going to end badly?”
She nodded.
“Then what?”
“Then he started shooting. Just going down the line.” She shook her head from side to side. “I just remember screaming, then...” She paused, took a breath, “…then pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.”
“Where did you get hit?”
“One in the shoulder, one in my left hip.”
That would account for the limp.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I played dead.”
“Then what?”
“Lowry left. I waited another couple minutes, then I got a cell phone out of Peggy’s pocket and called the police.”
She continued, “It seemed like it took them hours to arrive, but it was only three or four minutes. Once I saw the first police officer crash through the door, everything gets cloudy. I remember them putting me on a stretcher. Then the hospital. I was pretty drugged up for the next few days.”
I’d been there. In the clouds. Floating. Little montages fighting their way into your consciousness. A face. Lights. Lucid dreams.
“How long were you in the hospital?”
“Five days. I made them discharge me so I could go to the funer
al.”
“Did they have a big collective one?”
She nodded. “At the high school.”
“Did the entire town show up?”
“And more.”
“I’m guessing they had private family burials afterward.”
Without answering, I knew she went to all five. I imagined her watching Wheeler give her father’s eulogy.
Suddenly, I found myself furious.
That was stage two.
Stage one: Curiosity.
Stage two: Fury.
I checked the time on my cell phone.
I needed to feed the piglets.
I stood and said, “Thank you for reliving that for me. I know I’m a total stranger and you didn’t have to.”
Her eyes looked heavy. The story and the martini had exhausted her. She gave the slightest of nods.
I saw myself out.
Chapter Eleven
I pushed the door open.
I waited for Harold and May to attack me with oinks and kisses, but they didn’t come.
“Harold! Ma—”
She was sitting in the rocking chair in the living room. She was wearing a low-cut purple dress. Her blond hair was teased and curled onto her shoulders. A glass of white wine shimmered in her left hand.
It took me a long second to remember her name.
Carol?
Karen?
Caroline.
“Hope ya don’t mind,” she said. “I made myself comfortable.”
“I can see that.”
“I thought—”
I cut her off. “Where are the piglets?”
“Those beasts?”
Beasts?
“Yes, where are they?”
“Outside, of course.”
“You let them out?”
“They were in your house,” she exclaimed.
I turned on my heel and ran outside. “Harold! May!”
I could hear Caroline push through the door behind me. I turned back and watched as she navigated the three porch steps in black heels. She didn’t spill a drop of the wine still in her hand.
I took off toward the pigpen, praying that’s where they were, praying they were rolling around in the mud.
They weren’t.
I checked the barn.
Then the chicken coop.
