Prairie Gothic (8 page)

“Gack!” she decided, was probably not an affirmative response.

***

Judy was out of the door before the Taurus stopped rolling. The wind finished the job she hadn't completed with the brake pedal, bringing it to rest inches short of their front fence. The wind did its best to finish her, too, strafing her with snowflakes and tugging on her clothes as it resisted her frantic efforts to get to the front door.

Boris met her with a delighted bound into her arms that almost knocked her down but seemed gentle in comparison to the buffets dealt by the wind.

“Heathers!” Judy shouted. Relative silence was her only reply. Boris panted and tried to cover her with slobber. The house creaked and groaned as the storm probed it for weakness and rattled the windows. There was no sign of the girls, only the note on the dining room table. She had just finished reading it, crumpling it with rage, and was about to let loose a scream that would have been nearly as wild as her fears when the doorbell rang. Boris launched himself, madly barking, ready to battle the forces of darkness or welcome his wide circle of friends.

It was the nosy woman from next door, so wrapped up in her parka that it took Judy a moment to recognize her. Boris exchanged barking for tentative tail wagging. He knew her but she wasn't a dog person, not worth his time.

“Is everything all right, Judy?” the woman asked. “The way you drove in, and after all the excitement over here today, well, I'd begun to worry.”

“Excitement?” Judy pictured a band of armed terrorists seizing her house. She could see the fire trucks, visualize the row of ambulances, hear Englishman directing his
SWAT
team. Too bad Buffalo Springs only had one volunteer fire truck, an ambulance would have had to come from outside the county, and Englishman didn't have enough deputies to police the roads, let alone put together a Special Weapons and Tactics unit.

“First the deputy came by in the patrol car and left with the girls. Then your husband drove up and was in and out in a minute. Now you. I mean, I was concerned, especially after I noticed the girls letting themselves into your house just before dawn. I couldn't imagine what they might have been up to.”

Maybe her neighbor couldn't. Judy's imagination began selecting among a variety of disasters.

***

Mad Dog's Saab made it as far as the third bridge after the first turn south. Only the third bridge wasn't there anymore. Mad Dog spent a moment thanking
Maheo
, the Cheyenne All Father, for the Swedish engineers who'd designed the Saab's brake system. His tires were right at the edge, but on the right side of that edge.

When had the bridge washed out? He'd driven this road not long ago, well, maybe a couple of years. Whether last year's spring floods took it, or those of the year before, didn't matter. What mattered was his only options were abandoning the car or going back. His throbbing left ear convinced him. He threw open the door, stepped out, and squinted back up the road into the wind. There was too much snow in the air to see anything. Maybe, if the truck were some color other than white…

The nearest farmhouse was Tommie Irons', about half a mile distant. Any other choices were all more than two miles away.

Would whoever shot him know that? And, hell, who would want to kill him? Half the county was upset with his protest over the election's results, or his vociferous support for other unpopular political causes, but he couldn't imagine anyone actually shooting him because of that.

Some of Tommie's relatives might be ticked off. Not that any of them had cared enough to visit the old man while he was still alive. Again, Mad Dog couldn't picture them coming after him with a gun.

He slid into the ditch, climbed a barbed wire fence, and tested the ice on the stream. It was plenty solid, as well as plenty slick. He proved both, simultaneously, when his feet went out from under him and he slid all the way to the far bank. Hailey joined the game. She pounced on him, nuzzled him too close to his sore ear, then bounded into the underbrush beyond. Mad Dog thought he heard an engine coming down the road. He didn't bother to confirm it. He just grabbed a handful of frozen branches and hauled himself off the frozen stream and into the brush, hot on Hailey's trail.

Mad Dog pulled his parka up over his ears as he went. The left was already so numb from the cold that it hardly complained. He stuffed his bare and bleeding hand deep into a flannel-lined pocket. He found wolf prints and followed them. After a few yards of scrub and skeletal tree trunks he found himself on the edge of a pasture. Hailey's prints preceded him, already eroding to invisibility as the wind erased them. The Saab was a dark bruise back where the road should be. He thought he saw a truck-like shape behind it, then the wind and a fresh blast of driving snow made his eyes water and hid them from him. Mad Dog didn't complain. He stretched his legs and began to run.

He ran nearly every day, though usually not in heavy boots on frozen pasture. On the days when he didn't feel like running, he reminded himself he was nearing sixty and aerobic exercise might add to life's quality and quantity, then ran anyway. He liked to tell people he was running for his life. Now, suddenly, he really was.

***

Every school child has encountered, by whatever name and sex, a Simon Hornbaker of their very own. Simon was two years older than the sheriff. When the one-room school, where English attended his first five grades, finally closed and he and his schoolmates were packed off to immense Buffalo Springs Elementary, Simon was the first student he met.

Simon had been a scrawny, small-for-his-age, dull-normal sort—a natural target for the jokes and taunts of his own age group. But two years gave Simon a nice edge on a boy just entering sixth grade and without friends to offer the strength of numbers. On his first day, the boy who would be sheriff had approached the building overburdened by a load of books and anxieties. Simon picked young English out, recognized his fear, and struck, knocking everything from his hands as he fought through the crowded entrance. The sheriff still felt the humiliation, scrambling about on hands and knees, trying to rescue his belongings from beneath a stampede of students. Some had paused to smirk or giggle—maybe even grin a little wider because of the way Simon stood there and mocked him. One year was all it lasted. Less, really, because by the end English had friends. There wasn't a middle school at Buffalo Springs then. Next year, Simon was suffering his own humiliations as a mere freshman at the high school next door. Their paths seldom crossed again, until English became a freshman himself. By then, he was nearly Simon's size. Too near for the harassment to continue. But for one brief year, Becky Hornbaker's darling Simon was the sheriff's worst nightmare.

“Finally got here, eh, Sheriff. Took your sweet time. You find that thieving brother of yours yet?”

Simon was sorting through the contents of a dresser drawer he'd brought into the hall. Well, not really sorting, more like tossing, piece by piece, into a pile at his feet.

“Simon, what are you doing?”

“Looking for our family's property. Your nut-case brother made off with it.”

“If Mad Dog took something, why search here?” He noticed the drawer contained women's lingerie. “And whose room did that stuff come from? That's not your uncle's.”

“Any of them old biddies who helped Mad Dog cart Uncle Tommie off coulda stole it. When there ain't no law around, sometimes we gotta make our own.”

Simon stirred the silks and satins with a foot, then turned toward the door. It led into Alice Burton's room.

“Simon. You don't have permission to search this room. Mrs. Martin and Mr. Deffenbach said they've asked you to leave. Now I'm doing the same.”

Simon had put on weight and muscle over the years. He probably had twenty pounds on the sheriff, though most of it hung over his belt. He tried to suck it all back into his chest as he swung around.

“Who's gonna make me?”

The childishness of the remark took the sheriff right back to grade school. Hadn't Simon matured at all?

The sheriff edged to the side, getting a look around Simon and into the room, trying to reassure himself that Mrs. Burton was OK and Levi wasn't waiting just inside to back his father's play.

The old lady was in her rocking chair by the window, but someone had tied her hands to its arms. Her eyes met his. “Get these filthy Hornbakers away from me, Sheriff!” she yelled.

The sheriff let his hand drop near his holstered .38. “I want you to raise your hands, turn around, and put them on the wall.”

“Like hell, you Englishman's bastard,” Simon shot back, ever the master of juvenile repartee. His hand darted under his coat, like he was reaching for a gun of his own. The sheriff stepped in, pivoted, and kicked. Though the toe of his boot connected a foot lower than it would have when that sergeant taught him the move, the sheriff's Army training paid off perfectly. Simon Hornbaker folded in half and collapsed against the wall with a crash. He wasn't reaching for anything anymore, except maybe his breath. The sheriff stepped in, grabbed him by his hair, and straightened him out on the floor. A quick pat down revealed a cozy little 9 mm automatic. The sheriff dropped it in one of his own pockets and connected Hornbaker's right wrist and left ankle with handcuffs. Simon tried to say something. It didn't resemble any of the languages spoken in Benteen County.

The sheriff unsnapped his holster and pulled his Smith & Wesson. After Simon's attempt to draw a gun on him, he had no intention of giving Levi the same opportunity. The sheriff flattened his back to the wall beside Mrs. Burton's open door. “Benteen County Sheriff! Levi, come out with your hands up!”

No one came. No one answered. The sheriff gathered himself, silently counted down from three, and threw himself inside. As he cleared the door he found himself face to chest with the mountainous Hornbaker boy. That was when his radio squawked.

“Englishman!” it demanded in a tinny imitation of Judy's voice. “Where are the Heathers?”

It surprised the hell out of both the boy and the sheriff. They stood there, exchanging baffled looks, until something heavy popped the sheriff on the head and things went dark and dreamy inside.

***

Judy tried again. “Englishman! Damn you! Answer me!”

Mrs. Kraus ran the sheriff's office with an iron hand. Nobody came behind her counter without an invitation. Nobody touched the department's radios without her say so. Nobody strode through her crowded reception room, filled with people demanding to know about a baby murderer on the loose, shoving them aside in single-minded determination to get an answer to her question…except Judy English.

Mrs. Kraus recognized the look in her eye and got out of the way.

Supervisor Bontrager, back with his followers for more, didn't. He got bumped. He'd been explaining to folks that Supervisor Hornbaker had already reported from his personal reconnaissance. He had shared knowledge about the case they couldn't release just yet, but that they had things under control. The collision knocked his hat off and Bontrager lost his balance and stepped on it. Bontrager's blood pressure spiked as he came around the counter and tried to take the radio away from Judy.

“You just hold on now, Ms. English. That's county property. Not for personal use. And you can't use language like that over the public airways.”

Judy twisted away from his ineffectual grab for the radio.

“Englishman, damn it! Are you out there? Is anybody?”

Bontrager reached again. “Now see here, missy!” Mrs. Kraus could have told him not to do that, but, deep down, she thought she would enjoy the results more if she didn't interfere.

The radio made Rice Krispy noises as Bontrager got a hand on it, then found Judy English's face right in his. “Bontrager, you kumquat. You are a pompous, incompetent, bureaucratic joke. If you don't take your hands off me, I'll break them.”

Mrs. Kraus smiled a little, even though she knew she could kiss one vote for the budget that might have funded her raise goodbye. That vote had been pretty unlikely anyway. A few of the folks crowding the sheriff's office nodded in agreement with Judy's outburst.

Mrs. Kraus didn't have any kids of her own, but she knew you put yourself at risk if you got between a worried mother and her children.

“Mr. Supervisor,” Judy continued, backing Bontrager against the counter with the power of her maternal rage. “Unless you can tell me where my daughters are, you will stop bothering me and get out of my way.”

“I don't know what's wrong with the radio, Judy,” Mrs. Kraus said. “The sheriff was about to check on something over to the Sunshine Home, last he called in. That was just minutes ago. I'm sure he must still be there.”

Judy turned her back on Bontrager. “The Sunshine Towers?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kraus.” Judy flipped the radio over her shoulder and Mrs. Kraus caught it just before it smacked Bontrager in the face. Judy headed for the exit. Everyone in the room scrambled to clear her a path.

***

“Oh, oh!” the Heathers chorused.

“That's Mom,” One of Two said.

“She knows,” Two of Two agreed.

“Do you think we should answer?” Heather English's question was directed at Deputy Wynn. He was the adult. He was the responsible party, or so she suddenly hoped, given the tone of their mother's voice. Also, he had the radio. Or, rather, it was down on the floor between his feet where it had fallen when they spun around twice and ended up in the ditch, hood deep in a snowdrift.

Their father didn't reply to Judy's harangue. That surprised all three occupants of the immobile sheriff's department black and white.

“Maybe you better talk to her,” the first Heather suggested to Wynn.

Wynn wanted to do no such thing. As he picked up the radio they heard Judy English clearly, though less distinctly, threaten the person of Supervisor Bontrager.