Blood Country (4 page)

5

R
ich’s shoulders ached. He had been lugging feed for the pheasants for an hour. After checking a stump over for bird shit, he sat down on it and watched them go at their food. Little chicks. That’s what baby pheasants were called. He thought they looked gorgeous. Small puffs of feathers, huge heads. Funny critters, but not stupid. Not like turkeys. Now, there’s a stupid bird. His dad had raised them.

He got up and strolled toward the house. In town today everyone had been talking about the fact that Landers Anderson had died. Some were saying it was under peculiar circumstances, although Rich wondered why they thought that. Landers was an old man. An unhealthy old man. Dying from heart disease. Slowly, over the last ten years, the disease had circumscribed his life. You never saw Landers walk down to get his mail anymore. He drove his car the three blocks.

Rich stopped at the pump and washed his hands. His mom had taught him well—“Don’t go bringing that bird dirt into the house with you.” He walked into his house the back way and shed his shoes at the door. On the other side, a pair of slippers waited for his feet. He had made them himself from a kit he bought through a magazine. He liked to work with his hands. He had his mom’s old Singer sewing machine set up in his spare bedroom. He could patch a pair of jeans as well as any woman he knew, better than most.

Just as he was about to stick his head into the fridge and see what looked good for dinner, he heard the pheasants raising a din out in the yard. Something must be spooking them. Or maybe someone. He had found a new baseball bat in the woods behind his coop. Now, maybe it was just a kid cutting through the woods, but his place wasn’t on the way to anywhere.

He had thought of calling that new cop, the woman, Claire Watkins. Asking her what she thought he should do about the person who was leaving the footprints. He liked the idea of a woman deputy. He had heard some men at the bar complain about her, or rather any woman taking on a man’s job, as they put it. Rich had started laughing at them. They asked him why he was laughing. He explained his mom was the person who had taken care of law and order in his house, why he thought women were highly qualified for that kind of work. When he thought of Claire, he could almost feel her hair in his hands. That long, thick, black hair. She would be a handful.

The pheasants were still screeching. Why would someone come sneaking around his property? Steal a couple pheasant? Hell, they wouldn’t be ready to eat for months yet. Months and months. Not till September.

He walked out in the backyard but didn’t see anything right away. Then he heard a sound, an almost familiar sound. Like a golf club hitting a golfball. A thwacking sound. Or maybe a stick hitting a small skull. He yelled and went running toward the sound.

He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A mangled, bloody bundle of fuzzy feathers smashed near the side of the barn. So little left of it, he couldn’t tell what had happened. He heard someone thrashing through his woods but didn’t bother to give chase. He scooped up the broken body of the bird and wrapped it in a newspaper. He’d dispose of it later. This was the third body of a chick he had found. The other two hadn’t been so mangled; they had just looked like someone had held them too tight and smothered them.

W
HEN BRIDGET SAW
Meg’s eyes as she got off the school bus, she was glad she had raised a fuss at work and was there to meet her niece. Meg had a way of sucking in her whole face when she was upset until her eyes stood out in it, like one of those awful pictures of waifs standing in the rain with huge eyes, holding puppy dogs with huge eyes.

Bridget threw her good arm around Meg’s neck. “Didn’t have to work, so I decided I’d come and bug you.” Her doctor had said her arm was sprained and to use it sparingly.

“Where’s Mom?”

Of course, that would be the first question. Never far from Meg’s mind. The first few months after her father’s death, she couldn’t leave her mom’s side, wouldn’t go to school. Claire hadn’t forced her. Bridget didn’t know if that had been a good idea, but Claire wouldn’t budge on it. She was clear that Meg would decide when she could handle going back to school. “She’ll get bored, then she’ll go back.” But Bridget wondered if Claire hadn’t wanted her home too. Didn’t trust letting her out of her sight.

“She’s catching up on some work.”

“She wasn’t supposed to work today.”

“Well, that changed.”

“Because of Mr. Anderson, right?”

“I think so.”

“She’s okay?”

“Just talked to her. She’s fine. She’s on her way home. Said to have supper ready.”

Meg stepped back and looked at Bridget, crinkling up her nose. “What happened to your arm?”

“It’s about time you noticed. Slugged someone.”

“Did not” Meg scampered up the road in front of her.

“Did tot.” It was their joke, the game they played that made them both laugh.

“Who?”

“That cranky pharmacist who works with me.”

“Mr. Piss-pot.”

Bridget stopped in the middle of the road and wagged her finger at Meg. “You watch your language, young lady. What would your mom say?”

Meg tossed her hair and said, “She’d say, ‘You sound like your aunt Bridget.’”

B
RIDGET STARED AT
the items on the counter in front of her. She knew you could make macaroni and cheese out of real cheese, but she had never done it. She always made it from a box. Meg had requested the dish, and Bridget thought it sounded as easy as anything. The only cheese was parmesan, but that should be okay. Cheese was cheese.

Bridget had spent eight years getting through pharmacy school: four years pre-pharm, four years for her Pharm. D. She knew how to mix sodium metholate and xeron to get caldium, but she didn’t know how to cook. At home, Chuck would grill some slab of meat and she would stick potatoes in the oven, and they’d call it a meal. They went out to eat a lot and ordered in pizza. Now that they were settling down, maybe she should learn how to cook.

She put water on to boil. It didn’t help any that she had only one good hand to work with. Meg was upstairs doing her homework. She was such a good kid. If it were guaranteed that she would get a child just like Meg, she would agree to Chuck’s request and get pregnant. When the water boiled, she dumped in a box of macaroni. The water stopped boiling, so she turned the heat up higher.

Bridget figured Chuck wanted to try to have a baby for two reasons: one, he didn’t want to have to deal with contraception anymore, and two, he’d have someone to play with. One of the problems with Chuck was, he didn’t want to grow up. Right now, she knew he was over at his brother’s, working on some old car. The two of them would drink beer and listen to country music, and if she was lucky he’d come home by midnight.

Some kind of chemical reaction seemed to be going on in the pan. White foam poured over the edge and down into the flames. Maybe she had discovered fusion. Bridget dumped the pasta in the sink, and the drainer kept any of it from disappearing. Then, with her hands, she scooped the pasta into a bowl. She put some butter in the bowl, a bit of milk, and poured a bunch of grated parmesan cheese on top. Looked pretty good. She stuck it in the oven at 350 degrees.

Maybe it could all work out. She would get pregnant easily. She would learn how to cook. Chuck would go to Lamaze classes with her. He would build the baby a crib. He would buy her ice cream. The baby would enter their life gently, slipping into a spot that had always been waiting for it. Labor wouldn’t hurt. She decided as long as she was going to dream, she might as well go all the way. They would be a happy family. She would be able to make macaroni and cheese from scratch.

S
ITTING IN HIS
office, Stewy Swanson had explained to Claire that there hadn’t been a homicide in Pepin County for over twenty years. In his deep voice, he said it as if her coming to Pepin County had something to do with the fact that there had been a homicide. She had just told him the news of Landers’ death, stopping by after the autopsy.

Chief Deputy Sheriff Steward Swanson was the second in command. Because sheriff was an elected position, Sheriff Talbert stayed out of all the cases. Didn’t want anything costing him a vote if it didn’t have to. Claire had been surprised to find out that the sheriff’s job was mainly administrative. Sheriff Talbert had appointed the chief deputy eleven years ago, and Swanson saw that things ran smoothly.

Now, Stewy Swanson was nearing retirement He had been a policeman for forty years. Joined right out of the army, having fought in Korea. Claire didn’t mind working under him, but there was little camaraderie between them. Chief Swanson was about forty pounds overweight, and too much of that fat hung around his neck and face for him to be pleasant to look at Because his face was so broad, his blue eyes looked like small polka dots. But he was a fair man and slow to anger—both excellent qualities in someone who had to command a sheriff’s department of eleven men and, now, one woman.

Swanson leaned back in his chair and appraised her. He folded his arms behind his head and put his head in the cup of his hands. His raised elbows looked like a set of flabby, fleshy wings. “Can you run with this?”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure I can.”

“I am too. Think we’re going to need help from the crime lab in Eau Claire?”

“I’m going to talk to them. I’ve got the crime scene secured. Makes it easier that it’s right across the street from me. I can keep an eye on it.”

Swanson flapped his wings. “Clobbered with a shovel, if that don’t beat all.”

C
LAIRE ARRIVED HOME
just as the macaroni and cheese was done. It still surprised Bridget to see Claire in her tan uniform; she hadn’t worn one her last few years on the Minneapolis police force, since she was a detective. The outfit didn’t enhance Claire’s beauty, but she didn’t have to worry about that. Even in the ill-fitting suit, her long, slender figure showed through. Bridget scanned her face for wear and tear, but Claire looked almost happy.

“How’s it going?” she asked as she walked into the kitchen. “Something smells good.”

“Dinner is just about ready. Meg’s upstairs, doing her homework. How’d your day go?”

Claire sat down on a chair at the table. She opened the top buttons on her polyester uniform and pulled her hair out of the ponytail. “I can’t believe Landers is dead. Not just that—it’s a homicide.”

So that was it. Claire was back in the business she loved—solving crimes. There was little of that to do in a small county like Pepin. “Someone killed him?”

“Appears so.”

“Any ideas who?”

“Yesterday I would have said that everyone loved Landers. But I’ve learned a few things today.”

“Like what?”

“You know, he always spoke so lovingly of his wife. He mentioned her often, Eva was her name. But I guess in their last years together, they didn’t get along so good. The doctor who told me this today said she also had a stroke, which can change personalities. But he said there was something else going on. She was absolutely dependent on Landers, and yet she would hardly talk to him. He waited on her hand and foot, and she ignored him or yelled at him.”

Bridget pulled the hot dish out of the oven. The topping looked a bit burned, but that might make it taste better. The mixture bubbled in the casserole. She threw down a hot pad and set it on the table. “That can be fairly typical stroke behavior.”

“I know, but the doctor said that she was already acting like this before she had the stroke. In fact, he said he thought she was so angry about something that it might actually have brought the stroke on.”

“Wow. What could have happened? Did he have any idea?”

“All he said was that one day he was over and Landers left the room. He was alone with Eva. He asked her something about Landers’ garden, and she snapped, ‘He should stick to putting his seed there.’”