See Also Deception (15 page)

“The police are smart men, Marjorie,” Hank whispered. “They have to know what you know, had to see what you saw. Probably more. But I think you should say something to Duke if it would make you feel better. You won't be able to restrain yourself.”

“I don't trust the police,” I offered. “What if I really am right, what if Calla didn't kill herself and they let it go, don't do anything about it? Someone is out there who did a bad, bad thing, Hank, and they will get away with it scot-free. Someone is getting away with murder.”

“Then you should let the police do their job and keep your nose out of it once you've raised your suspicions to Duke. It's not your business, Marjorie. You've enough to worry about.”

“You sound like Guy.”
Damn it, no filters are dangerous
.

“For good reason, Marjorie,” Hank snapped back at me. “That ugliness over the summer came too close to us the last time. I could have lost you. Do you realize what
my life
would be like without you? Do you? If there's someone out there that hurt Calla, Duke and his boys'll figure it out. I know you don't think much of him, but he's smarter than you think he is.”

“I never said such a thing.”

Hank relaxed his throat and rolled his head to me so we were facing each other. I couldn't hide how I felt about Duke Parsons. I thought Guy would have made a better sheriff. Hank knew that, and agreed, even though he'd never come right out and said it. “Promise me two things,” he said.

I had to resist the urge to be angry about being treated like a child. Hank's tone was not malicious or demeaning in any way, but I was frustrated by being warned off of something so important. “What?”

He ignored my petulance. “That you'll talk to Duke if you feel like you have to and leave it at that and let him do his job.”

“Is that it?”

Hank shook his head. “No, I want you to go home and get some rest. You have a long day tomorrow with Calla's funeral and all. Sleeping in your own bed will do you good.”

“I'm not leaving you.”

“Marjorie, you're exhausted. You need some rest, some familiar surroundings. I'm fine. I feel better than I have in months.”

“It's those shots Doc's been giving you.”

“I don't care what it is. I feel fine. I'll sleep better if I know you're resting.”

“You're sure?”

“As sure as anything I've been of before. I'm fine. Go home. Get some rest,” Hank said, with as much of a smile and nod as he could muster. It wasn't an order. He knew better than that, but it was as close as he could get without demanding that I leave. He was concerned about me. His desire was out of love. I understood that. I wanted to resist, but I couldn't. All I could do was nod, then without regard to where I was, I eased into the hospital bed and snuggled up as close to Hank as I could get until he drifted off to sleep.

CHAPTER 24

I wrote an index for a book about the stages of paranoia early on in my indexing career. The book was a dissertation and had all of the bells and whistles of academic writing—loads of footnotes and an extensive bibliography that led to ramblings that were distantly relevant to the reader but somehow very relevant to the pompous author. Mostly, the book was a really boring read, clinical and dry, but I never minded that kind of reading, really, especially when I was being paid for it. The troubling part of that book had been the personal information that I came away with after I'd finished indexing it. Plain and simple: I had identified with nearly every stage of paranoia that was described in the pages of the book.

I had, at times in my life, suspected that I was being exploited or deceived by people around me without sufficient cause. Strangers showed up on the doorstep trying to sell something all of the time. It didn't matter whether it was the
Encyclopedia Britannica
or Jesus, the truth was I'd always suspected that they were just trying to find their way into my purse and nothing more with their sales pitches. And, of course, I'd always been reluctant to confide in others. I doubted the loyalty of friends and family and constantly read demeaning or threatening meanings into remarks that could not be mistaken for anything other than benign. I supposed it might be different if I held a library sciences or teaching degree instead of a correspondence course certificate from the USDA. The sting of my father's disappointment of me for not finishing college, for marrying Hank and becoming a farmer's wife, still chased after me like a hungry piglet missing its teat all these years later.

Questioning everything in my life had had its price, I supposed. There were more stages of paranoia, but I'd taken away more doubts about myself than I'd needed to from that book, and I swore right then and there that if I ever had the luxury to say no to an indexing project, say no to an editor, I would definitely do so if there was any kind of medical content included in the text. I was sure I would recognize the symptoms of dengue fever at the bare mention of it, and a new strain of paranoia and fear would send me running to Doc Huddleston at full speed for a cure. I didn't need that kind of madness in my life, and neither did Hank.

Of course, at that moment, dengue fever was not a major concern. The dry weather and the time of year had thankfully sent North Dakota's squadrons of mosquitoes into retreat. Paranoia, on the other hand, remained a concern.

It didn't take long to drive from the hospital to the courthouse. The building that housed most all of Stark County's government offices sat off of 3rd Street and had been built in the mid-1930s to help keep the men in Dickinson employed—a WPA project that had stood the test of time. It looked like a square, four-story wedding cake, fortified with blonde brick and accented with limestone-inlaid columns. It was an understated building, like most others in town, and I didn't think it was Art Deco at all, even though it was purported to be. The courthouse looked like a normal North Dakota building to me.

The building sat on a couple of grassy acres, surrounded by a few pine trees and a thin copse of tall cottonwoods that had lost their leaves weeks ago. I wheeled the Studebaker into the parking lot hoping to see Duke Parsons's squad car sitting in its normal spot but was immediately disappointed. There wasn't a police car to be seen for miles.

A few cars that I didn't recognize sat next to the side entrance of the building, and I had no idea what Duke's civilian car looked like, so I held out hope that he was still inside the building, even though the day had gotten long and evening was swiftly falling into the dark of night. I wasn't so sure of or familiar with Duke Parsons. But he was the man to express my concerns about Calla's death to and no other. Guy Reinhardt had no power, and, to be honest, after our last uncomfortable encounter I was in no mood to speak with him anytime soon.

I glanced in the mirror. I was still dressed in my second-best, go-to-the-funeral-home clothes, but there was no mistaking that I was a farmer's wife, that I was as frugal as the day was long, not because I wanted to be, but because I had to be. I looked tired and so did my clothes, my hair, and my eyes, and there wasn't a darn thing I could do about any of it other than give a wit less what Duke Parsons thought of me. He needed to hear what I had to say.

I pushed out of the truck and made my way to the courthouse. I was hardly aware of my surroundings, too busy practicing what I was going to say to Duke inside my head. The last thing I wanted to do was come off like some nutcase or put myself in a position to be told to mind my own business and go home, bake a cake, and forget about it like a good woman should. I swear, if Duke Parsons even so much as suggested such a thing, I was going to stomp on his toe. Of course, that'd probably land me in jail, the last place I needed to be.

The inside of the courthouse was lit with dim overhead lights that hadn't seen a duster in ages. The air smelled stale, and distantly like wet paper, another institutional aroma but not sterile like the hospital. Government smelled incapable, broken, struggling.

A pair of footsteps coming my way pulled me up out of my rehearsal for Duke. I blinked my eyes, cleared my vision, and saw a well-dressed woman rushing toward me, I assumed toward the exit. At first glance, I didn't know the woman. She could have been a clerk, a secretary working late in a hurry to get home. More and more women worked outside the house these days. But as she got closer, I recognized her. She was the woman who had taken a tumble down the stairs at the library. I still had her glasses in my purse.

CHAPTER 25

I knew anger and rage when I saw it. The woman raced toward me, her fists balled, her eyes red with emotion, and her teeth clenched tight, holding back a storm of unknown origins. I stopped and turned my back to the wall as if to parry a strike or to give way to a rumbling avalanche, I wasn't sure which. For a moment, I wondered if the woman even saw me, knew that I shared the hallway with her.

Her intention seemed to be to escape the sterile courthouse hallway as quickly as possible. But she stopped when she was even with me. With a deliberate lock step she turned to face me but said nothing, just craned her neck toward my face, examining it, looking for some sign of recognition. She looked bug-eyed, like an insect trying to decide whether I was worthy prey or an attacker, something to be threatened by.

The woman smelled of expensive perfume, a variety and brand unknown to me. It surely had to come from some faraway department store that had a fancy family name, like Macy's in New York City or the A.W. Lucas store in Bismarck. I held my breath, stood frozen like a jackrabbit on alert, and tried not to breathe in the fragrance of her.

“You look familiar,” the woman said, retreating backward a step as her shoulders and jaw relaxed. The clouds in her eyes seemed to dissipate.

I exhaled, relaxing as much as I could. I hadn't been afraid so much as I had been uncomfortable. Still, the woman seemed unpredictable or unstable, I wasn't sure which. Her perfume lingered between us. She looked like she had just stepped off the page of a Montgomery Ward's catalog.

“I was at the library when you took the tumble down the steps,” I said, eyeing a bit of heavily caked foundation under her right eye. It was there to hide a recent bruise, most likely from the fall, I assumed—hoped. “Are you all right?”

She caught my gaze on the flaw on her face and turned her head away from me for a brief second, breaking my line of sight, with a direct attempt to avoid my inquiry as well. Her profile was equine, in a gentle, beautiful sort of way. But there was something else lingering on her face that caught my attention. I knew shame, too, but not as well as I knew anger. That emotion had ceded to something else in this woman, something unknown to me. I needed a field guide to human emotions, just like I needed one to identify musk thistle. My lack of social understanding was one of the many consequences of the isolation of my work as an indexer and my life on the farm.

“Ah, yes,” the woman said, as a softness in her tone appeared for the first time. There had been no denying her perfect put-together-beauty the first time I saw her, but it was the internal glow of her eyes that complimented her choice in clothes, in shoes—which I was envious of and demeaned by at the same time. They probably cost a week's wages for most folks in and around Dickinson. “I'm sorry, I must look a mess to you,” she went on. “That was a terribly difficult day, and I'm sorry to say this one is worse than that, not better like I'd hoped.”

I clutched the strap of my purse a little tighter. I'd felt exactly the same way. “I have your glasses.”

“What a relief. I'm nearly blind as a bat without them. I have an old pair to rely on when I drive, but even at that, the distance is blurry.”

“One lens is shattered. The other is missing. I'm afraid they won't do you much good.”

“Well, that's the way of things right now, isn't it? I'll just have to wait another week for the new pair to come in. Perhaps I'm better off not being able to see things as clearly.”

We had the empty hallway to ourselves. The day of law and justice was over. Only the sheriff's office remained open and unlocked twenty-four hours a day—as far as I knew. I supposed there were other agencies that needed to be staffed around the clock, but the courthouse was dismally quiet, with no distant footsteps, no whirling fans or mumbled voices.

I unlatched my purse, grabbed the woman's glasses, and handed them to her as carefully as I could. I was glad to be rid of them, to be honest. “My name's Marjorie, by the way. Marjorie Trumaine.”

“The indexer?” The woman didn't look at me directly, but took the glasses and handled them as if they were as fragile as an eggshell, threatening to turn to dust at her touch. She stuffed them into her own purse, a leather clutch that looked brand new and unmarred with use and matched her outfit and shoes perfectly. I was certain I could smell tanning oil past her perfume.