Critical Mass (25 page)

I don’t know the etiquette for visiting a working farmer in the middle
of the morning. I walked across the yard and watched at a respectful distance—close enough to talk, but not breathing down his neck. He wasn’t working on the tractor, but a piece of machinery attached to it, something with wide, sharp teeth. One of the teeth had broken and he was having a hard time getting it out of its slot. He kept slamming at the bolt with a hammer, not bothering to look across at me.

“Need a hand?” I asked politely.

He looked up. “You a mechanic?”

“No, but I can hold the bolt in place while you whack it with your hammer.”

“Can you, now? You ready to get grease all over those fancy clothes?”

I was wearing a jacket and a blouse over my jeans, but I had a T-shirt in my car. I went back and changed under cover of my open car door, draping the jacket and blouse across the passenger seat. As I returned to him, I saw movement behind the picture window in the Prairie Market. A woman about my own age, with skin sunburned a reddish brown, was hurrying out to join us.

“The market isn’t open on weekdays once the school year starts,” she said.

“I didn’t come for the market; I came to talk to you and your husband, if you’re the Wengers.”

“Who are you, anyway?” she said.

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “Are you Ms. Wenger?”

“You out here selling something? We have all the insurance we need.”

Frank Wenger, as I assumed he was, said, “She’s set to help me undo this bolt, Bobbie. If she’s selling something, wait until we’re done before you throw her off the land.”

I squatted next to the machine. The ground was baked hard, with deep ruts from all the big wheels that had come through when the soil was wet. I made sure I had both feet planted in one of the ruts before taking the bolt wrench from Wenger. I kept my arms bent so that my biceps would absorb most of the shock. Even so, it took every ounce of
strength I had not to let go when he whacked it. Five furious strokes, and I felt the bolt turn.

“Okay, got it,” he said. “You’re stronger than you look. You a farm gal?”

“Nope. City all the way. I don’t even know what this thing is we’re working on.”

“Disc harrow. Need it to chop and mulch the stalks, such as they are, once we’ve got the corn harvested—such as it is. What can we do for you, city gal?”

I sat on the edge of one of the deepest ruts, rubbing my arms. “I’m a detective, from Chicago. I’m the woman who found Derrick Schlafly’s body in the cornfield.”

“You tell Doug Kossel you were out here?” Frank asked.

“Yes, sir. I stopped at his office first thing. Of course, we’ve been speaking on the phone off and on since I found the body. He sent me to find one of Ricky’s old Chicago playmates, which I did, but now I’m back here, looking for a missing person.”

“Only missing persons in our lives are our daughters,” Frank said.

“Oh?” I pretended I hadn’t looked up his family. “How long have they been gone?”

“Since we saw them at Easter,” Roberta said sharply, while Frank laughed. “We don’t know anything that can help you, and I’m in the middle of making up Halloween displays.”

My hands were covered with grease, but Frank had a roll of paper towels near him. I wiped off as much as I could and went back to my car. Using one of the towels I kept for the dogs, I pulled a photo of Martin out of my case and walked back to the Wengers.

“His mother was one of the people living in the Schlafly place,” I said, holding it out with the towel still in my hand. “He’s been gone for some weeks now. I’m wondering if he came down here to see her.”

“You look across the field here and tell me how much you see, then ask me again what I notice about my neighbors,” Roberta said.

I followed her finger to where she was pointing at the Schlafly house, a small gray structure in the distance. People like to be thought above nosiness and gossip. City or country, the ones who protest most about it are the ones who are probably the nosiest, but I murmured sympathetically.

“You farm these fields, Sheriff Kossel told me. It must have been a worry, all those chemicals Schlafly and his pals were cooking with.”

“Oh, yeah,” Frank said. “Couple-three times they blew out some windows. First time, I thought Al-Qaeda was attacking us. And the dogs—I went over there once to ask them, nicely you know, to cover up that chemical pit behind the house. You can smell it over here when the wind’s blowing. We have a kid; we don’t want him breathing that stuff.” He hammered the bolt again for emphasis.

“Anyway, they had that gate all locked up. When I rang the bell, they didn’t even bother to answer, just saw me on their video camera and sent out the dog from hell, pardon my French. They released the gate by remote and the dog tore through. Got back to my truck right before it took my throat out. After that, I never went out without my shotgun in the truck, tell you that much for nothing.”

I thought of the dog I was supporting in Chicago. Maybe not such a sweet disposition after all.

“You told Sheriff Kossel?” I asked.

“What, big-talking, do-nothing Kossel?” Roberta said.

I didn’t speak, just cocked my head hopefully.

“Come on, Bobbie,” Frank protested. “I told Doug, but it’s not like Ricky’s is the only meth house in the county. There are three over by Hansville.”

“And when does he ever shut down any of them?” She glared at him.

“Is Kossel getting a piece of the action?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Frank said. “He’s not that kind of man.”

“No, he’s not corrupt, he’s just lazy. He was a lazy tackle back when you played football at Palfry High, which is why you never got the
scoring numbers that might have won you a scholarship. He hasn’t gotten any more energetic just because he’s a glad-hander who gets people out to vote for him. Look how he got this woman here—what did you say your name was? Warshawski, look how he got her to track down one of Ricky’s drug dealers in Chicago.”

I let the argument run another few minutes, but didn’t hear anything that made me believe Kossel might be on the take. Before Roberta got so angry she stormed off to her Halloween displays, I held out Martin’s picture again.

“His mom was one of the people living in Schlafly’s place, so it was his grandmother who raised him. I was holding her when she died two nights ago. I need to find Martin, to tell him about his granny, and to make sure he’s okay. Any of those times you were disking or harrowing or whatever it is you do with this lethal thing”—I nudged the broken tooth with my toe—“near Schlafly’s place did you see him?”

Frank looked at his wife, who turned redder under her sunburn. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, but all she said was that she never worked the big fields. “I do the greenhouses and the truck farm out on the other side of the house; it’s where we grow the organics for the Prairie Market. I’ve got to get back to work; you wouldn’t believe it in this heat, but Halloween’s just around the corner.”

She turned back to the building that housed the market. In a city woman, I would have said she scuttled, but in her case, I suppose she was only hurrying back to her displays.

I asked Frank, but he said when he was on the tractor there was too much noise and dust to notice much of anything. “All I can tell you is people come and go there all the time, although since they shot each other the place has been empty.”

He busied himself with the bolt I’d helped loosen. When he spoke, he kept his head down as if he was talking to the harrow tooth. “Go check out the market. Roberta does amazing things in there.”

22

THE PITS

L
IKE THE OTHER
outbuildings, the market was made out of unfinished wood that was showing rot at some of the joins. This made the interior all the more startling. It was a clean, bright space, with wide windows that overlooked the fields to the north and the Wenger house and barns to the south. One side was filled with refrigerated shelves for the produce. The rest of the space was taken up with “notionals,” everything from “locally sourced organic goat’s milk soap,” to birdhouses, baby blankets, lavishly decorated flowerpots, even quilts, all guaranteed handmade in Palfry County.

Roberta was busy at a long worktable. She glanced up when I came in, but she was intent on her work, inserting a series of tiny figurines into a dried gooseneck gourd. A large wicker basket filled with gourds was on the floor next to her; two completed ones sat in front of her.

She had cut squares in the side of the gourds and filled them with witches dancing around a cauldron. They had tiny cats and pumpkins at their feet, while a harvest moon festooned with bats hung overhead.

“These are amazing,” I said. “How on earth do you make the witches?”

“Pipe cleaners wrapped in gauze. The faces are the hardest because I paint them on fabric. They go on sale this weekend. Eighty-five dollars if you want one now.”

I wandered over to the window that faced the Schlafly place. I
heard her suck in a breath; when I looked over at her, she was staring at the shelf next to the window, but she quickly returned to her work.

The shelf was filled with packets of dried herbs, but next to the window a blue baby blanket covered something lumpy. I lifted it to find a pair of binoculars. When I picked them up and looked across the field at Schlafly’s, the whole ugly yard behind the house rushed forward to greet me: the deep pit with its toxic brew, the broken gate, the back door hanging on its hinges. I could even make out wasps circling under the eaves.

Roberta glared at me. “You can’t come in here and dig through my things; this is private property.”

I put the binoculars back on the shelf. “If I had a house full of crazed dopers that close and a sheriff who couldn’t get here fast in a crisis, I’d be keeping an eye on the place, too. You see whoever shot Ricky Schlafly?”

The flush underneath her sunburn died away. “I heard a shot as I was starting to get up, but it wasn’t five o’clock yet, which is still dark this time of year. I went down to put the coffee on, then I heard another shot. Of course, like Frank said, there were always explosions and such coming out of the house, but a gun doesn’t sound anything like a window blowing out. I slipped out and came into the market here.”

She gave the ghost of a smile. “Frank and Warren, Warren’s our son, he’s a senior over at the high school, they think it’s wrong for me to be looking at the neighbors. Spying they call it.”

“Could you see anything?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It was still too dark. If I’d known they were murdering Ricky, of course I would have called the sheriff, but I guess they killed him out in the north field. I didn’t even hear the shot, with the Schlafly house being between us and all. The only thing I did see that early was a car taking off. SUV, I’d guess, from the height of the headlights. I know now it must’ve belonged to the killers, parked
by where they cut the fence out when they went in. I suppose the gal took off in it, because I heard all this shouting, and more shots.”

She started twisting a pipe cleaner round and round in her fingers. “I told Frank when I went back in to make breakfast, but he said not to get involved, if drug addicts were shooting at each other they wouldn’t thank me for interfering. Of course, he was right. If I’d driven over, like I had half a mind to, they would have murdered me just like they did Ricky.”

“Very likely,” I agreed: whoever had torn that house apart had been way more savage than Ricky’s poor dead dog.

“Ricky Schlafly was bad news from day one, but I went to school with his older sister. She died of breast cancer three years back, or the house would have gone to her. I hate to think of how she’d feel, knowing Ricky had lain out in that field all day getting eaten by crows.”

The pipe cleaner broke in her fingers, but she kept twisting the ends around. “All day long I kept looking over there. One time I saw this woman—” She broke off and the flush returned to her face. “That was you, wasn’t it? I thought you looked familiar. You have any idea what happened to that gal who’d been living there, the one who took off in the SUV? She didn’t go through town, or someone would have told us.”

“She drove up to Chicago, to a drug house on the city’s West Side,” I said, “but she ran from there to her mother’s place. Whoever was after her caught up with her there. They shot her, but she’s still alive. Her mother, Martin Binder’s grandmother, died protecting her.”

Roberta’s face softened in pain. “The things we do for our kids, even when they keep breaking our hearts. I know that story, beginning to end.”

“Did you see Martin over there?” I asked, pointing toward the Schlafly place.

She picked up a fresh pipe cleaner and started to wrap a piece of
gauze around it. “I may have done. So many kids came and went there, buying drugs, you know, that I didn’t pay attention to one more than another. Still, a couple of weeks ago, about the time you say this Martin disappeared, there was a kid out there got into a fight with the woman. Judy, you say?”

“Physical fight?”

“Not exactly. They were arguing over some papers, an old envelope full of papers. He was pulling them away from her and she was hanging on to them. He ended up with them and took off.” She paused. “I don’t know if it’s any use to you, but a couple of ’em fell into that waste tank they’ve got dug out back.”

I groaned. The last thing I wanted to do was climb into that pit. Besides which, after thirty minutes in that stew, paper would dissolve. Would anything be left after fifteen days?

After watching me silently for a moment, Roberta put down her pipe cleaners and left the market. She came back about ten minutes later. She was carrying a bundle that opened up into a set of waist-high waders, arm-length rubber gloves and an industrial face mask.

“We used to keep cows, until it got to be too much work. I kept these from when I went in to clean out the waste tank. You’re a bit taller than me, but these things are built generous.”

I thanked her, without feeling any real gratitude. Still, I knew if I didn’t go into the pit, I would be haunted back in Chicago by the thought that I’d let an important clue go begging. I tried on the waders, just to be sure. She was right, they were built to cover layers of clothes and shoes. They went on over my jeans and running shoes with room to spare.