Blood Country (2 page)

2

T
here are good things and bad things, Meg thought as she pushed open the back door and felt sunshine on her face. In her mind she kept a list and reviewed it often. This morning would count as a good thing. Mom had made pancakes for breakfast. She had time to make them, because she didn’t have to go in to work. She sang, “Honey in the morning, honey in the evening, honey at suppertime. Be my little honey and love me all the time.” She even let Meg pour her own maple syrup. Meg liked a lot of syrup on her pancakes. Her mom would tease her and say her pancakes were islands floating in a dark sea.

Meg walked down the driveway, keeping an eye out for agates. Agates were very good. Her dad had taught her how to find them. The bigger the better. They reminded her of jawbreakers split in half, red with thin lines running through them. A bad thing was a dead animal by the side of the road. She tried never to look at them. She didn’t want to know if it was a fox or a possum or a deer, but especially not a dog.

She kicked at an ordinary rock and turned onto the main road. Mom told her she had ten minutes before the bus came, so she wasn’t in a hurry. School could be either good or bad. Day to day it changed. Yesterday it had been pretty good. Her teacher had smiled at her, and no one had called her any weird name. For one whole week, Brad Peterson had called her “Meggly Peggly.” She had tried to do what Mom had said and just ignore him, but it hurt her inside. Then he had stopped.

The worst thing in the world was when Mom cried in the middle of the night. Like last night. Meg woke up and heard her and pulled the covers up to her ears. She’d pretend it was a bird calling in the night, like the owl under the bluff. She and Mom would stand out in the backyard in the dark and listen to the hooting that would rise up into a howl. Her mom told her the owl was trying to find another owl. She wondered if her mom was trying to find her dad in the night, only he had gone too far away.

She was going to cut through Landers’ garden. He had said she could. He liked to see her come home from school, and often he would wave from his kitchen window. She pushed open the gate and walked down the stone path. No agates here, only gravel. Landers was a good man. He knew so much about flowers and nature. She remembered the time he told her that hummingbirds could fly in reverse, and then she had seen one do it.

Someone was lying on the ground at the back of the house. Meg slowed her feet. She knew it was Landers, but she didn’t want it to be. He never lay down on the ground. But there he was, looking as if someone had pushed him so hard he was never going to get up again. She took two more steps but didn’t need to get any closer. She knew death when she saw it. The earth would grow over him. She wondered if God was watching. Looking up in the sky, she saw the sun pouring down from the clouds. It could be God. Then again, she was never sure God was really there. She didn’t have a good feeling about God. She set her books down on the ground, because she needed to run. She turned around and looked back at her house. Her mom was coming around the corner. Her mom would take care of it Her mom would know what to do. Meg opened her mouth and screamed. No words, just a rush of wind like birds howling, like crying in the night, like calling to a god who never answered.

C
LAIRE STOOD IN
the bare garden, surrounded by a low white fence. She had sent Meg on to school. She hadn’t known what else to do with her. She had explained that Landers was old and ready to die. She had knelt down in front of her daughter, taken her pinched white face in her hands, and said, “This is not like your father. Old people die, and it’s okay. We’re sad they’re gone. We will miss him. But he was ready to go. He was getting tired.” She hoped Meg had believed some of what she said, though she herself believed little of it. But her real reason for sending Meg off to school was so she wouldn’t have to see her mother cry again.

The morning sun slanted through budding oak trees. Claire wore a large white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans cut off at the knees, and red rubber boots. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face with a twisted bandanna. Crouching down on her haunches, she stared at the pale face of the old man.

She had loved him, and she was so angry at him she could spit. Why had he done this? It was easy to see what had happened. He couldn’t wait for her, even though she was on her way over right at eight like they had agreed. No, he had to come out with the shovel and start messing around. She could see where he had been digging, fussing around with the little green sprouts that were starting to appear.

The heart attack that had been flying loops around him all winter long had finally landed. Attack, that was a good word for it. Dropped him like a sack of potatoes. Small man with thin white hair curled into the earth. She hadn’t seen him until she was almost on top of him.

She wasn’t ready for him to die. He was going to teach her how to grow roses. Pass on to her his secrets—the way to prune dead branches, when to give them the right amounts of fertilizer, how to cut the roses and keep them fresh in the house, and finally how to prepare their beds for winter. He had promised. This summer was to be her time, the time he had left to give her. Hours of talk. Him sitting in the shade with a straw hat. Her in the sun sweating and slathered with sunscreen. His wisdom filling her bones. She wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him, screaming, “I’m not ready. You can’t go yet. Only give me a few more days, another week. I’ll make you tea. Come back. Why have you gone away?”

When Claire bent down to touch his face again, she noticed a bruise by his ear. Had he hit the shovel when he had fallen? But it didn’t look new, it looked at least a few hours old. How long had he been lying here? She touched it and saw that the cut was over the bruise and that the cut extended into his hairline, dried blood coating his hair, turning it brown.

She stood up to get some distance from this and felt her job taking over, the cop in her coming out. Like blood seeping from a deep wound, knowledge of what she was seeing leaked into her mind. Here was a body in an awkward position, lying on the ground, blood dried on his scalp. The blood was old. He was cold. It was obvious to her he had not died in the last hour or two. She knew that if she examined the body, she would find lividity mottling his back from blood settling. The cut was over the bruise. He hadn’t fallen on the shovel. It looked more like someone had hit him. The chop of the shovel coming down, cutting into his cheek, bruising the skin underneath. But she couldn’t believe that. Who would want to hurt Landers Anderson?

She needed to report this. With all her heart, she wanted to call her old partner, Bruce Jacobs, and have him look at the crime scene—but she didn’t live in Minnesota anymore. This death had taken place in Wisconsin, and she needed to call Sheriff Talbert and let him decide who to call next. She was no longer a detective, simply a deputy sheriff.

Landers’ door was never locked, so she walked up the steps to use the phone. She was careful to disturb nothing as she moved through the kitchen. Taking an extra precaution, she stopped and opened a bottom drawer. A good guess. She took out a plastic bag and slipped it over her hand. After she punched in the numbers, she waited for the call to go through and slumped into the old nubby couch she always sat in. When she had first moved to town, Landers had let her come and use his phone for a week before the phone company could get around to having her line connected.

Randy answered, “Pepin County Police.”

“Sheriff Talbert in?”

“He’s just down the hall.”

“Get him.”

Again, Claire waited. She could hear Randy moving away from the phone. No fancy switchboard for this office. Talbert was probably having a smoke outside.

“Yeah?” His voice snapped on the line like a towel cracking.

“Sheriff, this is Claire. We’ve got a death in Fort St. Antoine. Possible homicide.”

She heard him breathe, then snort. “April Fool’s?”

“No. I found Mr. Anderson, my neighbor, dead in his garden.”

“Lord forgive him, so early in the morning. I’m only on my first cup of coffee.”

“I need someone down here right away. Secure the place.”

“I’ll have Paul come right down, and I’ll get hold of Tom. Can you hold down the fort until we get there?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll be right there.” He hung up.

Quiet in the room. Claire caved in on the couch. Tears peppered her eyes. Wiping them away only caused more to come. She gave herself a minute. Cry and cry and get it over with. You have a job to do. If someone had killed Landers, she would find them. No more unsolved deaths in her life. But she hoped that, in the end, the earth had simply risen up to greet him.

3

B
ridget rode hard. She could hear the horse breathing in surges that connected with her own heart pounding in her chest. Was it the wind she was feeling, or were they moving so fast over the field that the air stirred all around them? Would she make it to the edge of woods in time to get to work? She leaned down close to her horse’s neck and clucked. Jester did his characteristic skip and then moved into a full-fledged gallop, legs eating up the ground.

Bridget felt her eyes watering from the speed. Run it all out, she thought. Chuck said she ran away from everything. Maybe she did. What was so bad about that? She aimed toward the woods. Sun fell on her shoulders, but she flew away from it. The rhythm of Jester’s shoulders rolling under her made sense. The old wintered-over grass lay down over the field like a bad haircut. The woods loomed in front of them, trees holding out branches to the sky, a path that wound back to the house. If she took it fast all the way, she wouldn’t be late for work.

Another minute, and she would be in the woods, but suddenly the world tilted, the sun fell down, the trees swarmed through the sky, and her shoulder plowed into the field, her fece full of hay. Bridget rolled over onto her back and waited for something to hurt Her shoulder, no surprise. Then the pain poured down her arm and settled into her wrist. Damn, what had she done now? She raised her head and looked for Jester. He was nowhere to be seen in the field. That was good; at least he hadn’t broken a leg. But how the hell was she going to get hold of him?

Taking a deep breath, Bridget sat up. Her left arm hurt like hell. She should never have been riding that fast in this field. Gopher holes. She whistled for Jester, and he whinnied back. She looked toward the sound and found him tucked into the woods, standing right at the entrance to their path. He batted his tail impatiently, and she was glad he was there.

She wanted her arm not to be broken. Everything in her life was falling apart—her marriage, her job, her hopes—not her arm too. Not something so mundane and simple as a limb on her body. Something she’d actually have to fece and deal with. She touched her wrist. She could feel her arm pretty easily through the cotton turtleneck she was wearing. “Where does it hurt the worst?” as her dad used to ask her. Actually it was a bit higher than her wrist, maybe a third the way up her arm. Now she needed to remember her anatomy class. The bone that was aching could be either the radius or the ulna.

As she pushed on it, it felt sore but nothing more. She would be careful until she could get it checked, but she needed to retrieve her horse. She stood up, pushing off with her right arm. Jester was still standing, but he was half turned away from her. Catch his attention.

“Hey, Jester, my man. Good boy.” She walked toward him. He didn’t move. Please, don’t let him start with his games. If he ran, she would not be able to catch him. Maybe if he thought she had something for him. She bent down and pulled out a clump of hay. “Come and get it.” She waved the wand of hay over her head. He faced her. She was about ten feet away from him. She stood still. Better to make him come to her. “Come on, my sweet boy. My court Jester.” At his name, his ears pricked up. She held the hay out at his head level and told him to come. He took a step toward her.

Bridget knew herself, knew she’d make a leap at Jester before he was close enough to catch, and she couldn’t afford to do that and scare him away. So she closed her eyes. She held out the hay and kept her eyes tight shut and waited to feel the horse nibbling on the ends of the grass she held out. She kept talking to him, low and gentle, saying his name often. She heard him whinny, and then she felt a tug. The true blue, sweet boy had come back for her.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATE
to work, Bridget ran into the Rexall Pharmacy in Wabasha. She hadn’t had time to change, so she was still wearing the navy turtleneck. But the fact of the matter was, she hadn’t wanted to try pulling it off over her hand. Her arm throbbed and was starting to feel tight in its skin. She knew she had hurt it.

Mr. Blounder was there. He worked mornings. She took over for him at noon several days a week. At fifty, Mr. Blounder walked as if he was eighty. His skin shone the color of skim milk. He belonged to the old school of pharmacy—you give the customer what they order, you don’t tell them anything about the pills because they won’t understand anyway, and you take their money. But he didn’t own the pharmacy, so he didn’t have to approve of her.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Right.” He took off his white smock.

“I probably broke my arm.”

“Right.” He put on his blue suitcoat.

“I’m not sure I can work.”

“Right.” He walked to the door of their cubicle.

Bridget gave up. He either wasn’t listening to her or really didn’t care, and she didn’t want to know which was true. She picked up her white smock and noticed a red stain blopped near the neck. Must be from the ketchup on the french fries she ate yesterday. Why hadn’t she taken it home last night to wash?

“Oh.” Mr. Blounder turned back from the door. “Your sister called. She wants you to call her. Said it was an emergency.”

No, not Claire. Everything else in her life could be going bad, but not Claire. She needed to get out of here; she couldn’t stay and work her shift. So she did the only thing she could think of doing that would stop Mr. Blounder in his tracks. With her good hand, she lifted up the old apothecary bottle that was Mr. Blounder’s pride and joy. Written across the bottle in old script was the word
Calendula.
Its solid glass stopper was a perfect orb on top. She held it up precariously high. Mr. Blounder released the door handle and licked his lips nervously.

“I think we need to talk,” she told him.

B
RUCE JACOBS’ CHAIR
was driving him crazy. He was ready to go out and buy a new one and pay for it himself. He was no featherweight, but a chair shouldn’t break just ‘cause a guy weighed over two hundred pounds. Well, closer to two-fifty, but he was also six feet four inches tall. This was the third chair he had destroyed in a month. He wasn’t sure Acquisitions would send him another one. After a while the air just seemed to go out of the pneumatic lift, and they wouldn’t pop back up to the proper height anymore. So here he was sitting about a foot off the floor. The phone rang.

Reaching up to his desk, he picked up the phone and said politely, “Hello. This is Bruce Jacobs speaking.”

“I have to tell you something,” a young boy said.

Jacobs guessed the kid was fourteen. His voice was deep but clean-sounding. Nothing had roughed it up yet. “Try me.”

“Well, it’s really about two things.”

“Start with one.”

“Which one? One’s a killing, and one’s a drug deal.”

Jacobs stood up from his chair. “That is a hard choice.”

“I’ll tell you the killing first. Because that’s really what started all this. Don’t tell my mom I called, though, because she told me not to. I know about you, and I read about you in the paper, how you caught those guys that had taken that money away from the old woman. Well, that was my grandma. So that’s why I called. She said you were a very polite man. That goes far with my grandma.”

“So who got killed?”

The boy didn’t say anything. Jacobs realized he wanted to get a tape on this. “Is it okay if I turn on my tape recorder?”

“Yeah, I guess. Listen to my whole story before you say anything. Don’t laugh.” The boy started in, “Two weeks ago, my dog died. At first, Mom tried to persuade me it was nothing. The dog was old, she said. Hah! Jack was only ten. That really isn’t old in dog years. I mean seventy is hardly old anymore, when the life expectancy of a woman is now eighty-three. Do you think dogs’ life expectancies go up as humans’ go up? I do. Jack felt fine that morning. When I got home from school, he was dragging his tail. Then he just lay down and died. Of course, I couldn’t persuade Mom to do an autopsy, so we had to just bury him. Well, I went and looked in the backyard. See, Jack stays outside while I’m gone at school. We have a fenced-in backyard. There was this white paper plate next to the fence. I could see the stains of some meat on there. So I think that the neighbor fed it to him.”

“Why do you think your neighbor would do that?” Jacobs paced around the room as far as the telephone cord would let him. Hard to work on a phone with a cord these days. Didn’t allow for the movement his cordless phone at home did. He paced when he needed to think. As long as he was hitting them up for a new chair, he should try for a new phone too.

“There’s this new guy living next door. He rented the place about two months ago. People are kind of coming and going from his house. Jack barks at everybody. I think he doesn’t like the way they smell. The guy’s name is Red. Don’t know his last name. He’s kind of a skinny, sleazy-looking guy. Sometimes he’s gone for a while. Then, when he comes back, people start coming around again.”

Bruce leaned over his desk and wrote
Red
on a scrap piece of paper. He underlined the name three times. “Where do you live?”

“Buchanan, you know where that is. Just off of Hennepin in North Minneapolis.”

“Yeah, I know.” Marginal neighborhood. Lots of families, but could be pretty rough. “That’s over by where they dug up those bodies, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that was pretty cool. Anyways, I figured they poisoned Jack because they didn’t want him making so much noise when all these people came over. So I put it together and figured they must be dealing drugs.”

“Any proof?”

The boy cleared his throat and then said in a quiet voice, “I heard them.”

“You heard them?”

“Yeah, I snuck over there and sat under his dining room window when some people came over. They said they got a big deal going down. Sounds like cocaine. Is that what they make crack out of?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Someone’s bringing in a big shipment in a week or two, and they were lining up their dealers to come and get it.”

“Okay. I’ll check on this.” He realized he didn’t know this boy’s name. “Son, what’s your name?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you that.”

Jacobs could find out by talking to the boy’s grandmother. A fine woman, Patsy Lingon. She had made him a whole plate of
lefse
when he told her she would be getting her money back. At first he didn’t know what to do with the
lefse
, but she explained, put a little butter on them and some jam and have them for breakfast. The plate had lasted him a week, and he missed having the
lefse
. Maybe he should go back and visit her anyway.

“ ‘Spose I can tell you. It’s Brandon, but my friends just call me Brand.”

“Okay, Brandon. We need to make a deal here. I won’t say anything to your mother at this time if you promise me that you won’t go near that house again, not look at it, not walk near it, nothing. That clear?”

“Yup.”

“Do you keep promises?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“So you promise me you’ll stay away from that guy?”

“I promise.”

Jacobs got the address and told Brandon he would keep him posted. When he hung up the phone, he sank back down in his chair. Maybe he’d just keep it like this. Sitting a foot off the floor would keep a person humble. He stared at the piece of paper where he had written the name
Red.

S
UCH A LITTLE
bird and so full of itself. Claire watched the wren land on the tip of Landers’ satellite dish and sing its liquid warble. Its song made the world a better place, which it sorely needed to be this morning. She was standing by the gate at the end of Landers’ walk, waiting for reinforcements, as they say.

She wasn’t sure what her role would be in all of this. So far on the squad, she had been just one of the guys, ticketing speeders, checking on intruders, supervising parades. But the sheriff knew she had worked on homicide cases. She wouldn’t let go of this one if she didn’t have to.