See Also Murder (25 page)

“I left Hilo's, and someone came up on me and rammed into me. Spun me off the road. I nearly rolled the truck, crashed. I could have been killed, Duke.”

“Hit you, ya say?”

“Rammed me on purpose is what I said Duke. Came after me. I didn't know what was going to happen.”

“What'd ya do?”

“I shot at them.” I glanced over to the Remington, then back to Duke. “I took out my varmint rifle and I shot at them. What else was I supposed to do?”

“You probably shouldn't a done that, Marjorie. You coulda killed someone.”

“They rammed me, Duke,” I said through my teeth. “I just let them know that I wasn't going to wait for them to do anything else. I had to get home to Hank.”

Duke Parsons stood back from the truck's window, taking the smell of his dinner with him. He squared his shoulders, pulled the flashlight off of his utility belt, and turned it on. The sudden burst of light caused me to blink and hurt my eyes. When I opened them, the beam of the flashlight was directed to the rear quarter-panel of the truck, away from me. For a moment, I thought he was going to treat me like a criminal. That's the way he looked at me, like I had done something wrong, broken the law.

Duke walked around to the rear bumper, bouncing his head up and down with every thought, and examined it like a doctor seeing a new patient for the first time.

I watched him in the rearview mirror, seething.
What else was I supposed to do? Sit in the field and wait for a killer to come and ask me if I needed help, you idiot?

“Yup, there's a dent and a scratch all right,” Duke said as he turned off the light and walked back to the driver's side window. “Hard to say if it's fresh.” He seemed nonchalant.

“What? You think I'm making this up?”

Duke shook his head no. “No, ma'am, not at all. Nothin' that happens these days surprises me. Seems like every day somebody else is comin' up dead around here. Kind of like a plague of locusts has fallen from the sky. Something Biblical has descended on us, if you ask me. People always look for the signs of the end times so they can change their ways, get right with the Lord. Seems to me if you did that every day, you wouldn't have to wait until there was a mad killer on the loose and you was scared to death he was knocking on your door—or bumper in your case.”

“I'm sorry? What are you saying?”

“You haven't heard?”

“Heard what, Duke? I haven't heard nothing. I've been over at Hilo's.”

“Oh, yeah, right, you have. There's been another one, Marjorie. Sure gonna be a busy few days at the funeral home.”

My entire body went cold. “What do you mean
another one
, Duke? Please don't tell me . . .”

He nodded. “Yup. Another murder. Makes four. Can you believe it? Makes a man wonder what set this one off, don't it?”

I gripped the steering wheel as tight as I had when I looked up in the rearview mirror and saw someone coming up on me. The Studebaker's engine idled, but I could smell it getting hot. I glanced down to the gauge on the dash and saw that the temperature was rising. It would only be a matter of minutes before steam starting seeping out from underneath the hood.

“Who?” I asked. “Do they know who was killed?”

Duke nodded yes. I braced myself.

“A professor at the college,” he said. “Been dead for a couple of days the way I hear it. House smelled to high heaven,” Duke said.

“No,” I whispered, looked down to my lap.
Raymond.
I thought about the last time I had talked to Raymond. It could be him. “It wasn't Professor Hurtibese was it?”

Duke shook his head no. “A fella by the name of Strand. Phineas Strand. You know him, Marjorie?”

It was my turn to shake my head no. “That's terrible.”

“It is. Same as the rest, too,” Duke said. “Throat slit wide open.”

The news snapped my head up. “You think it's the same killer?”

“Sure, everybody does, Marjorie. Everybody does.”

I let Duke's words settle back to silence, then glanced down at the temperature gauge again. I either needed to turn off the engine or go park the truck. “I need to go see to Hank,” I said.

“All right, then. Just lock your doors and windows. Know that I'll be here for you the rest of the night if something comes up.”

“I appreciate that, Duke.” I eased my foot off the brake and started to roll forward.

“Hey, Marjorie,” Duke called out.

I stopped. Looked back. “Yes?”

“Postman came by with a parcel. Hold on, I got it in the car. I got strict orders not to let anyone on your property, not even Wally Howard.”

Duke trotted back to the police car, opened the rear door, and pulled out a box big enough to put a pie in. Even in the dark of night, I knew what was inside of it: The properly paginated proofs of Sir Nigel's headhunter book.

The deadline clock had started to click again, and it wouldn't stop until I put the index in the mail, no matter whether there was a tornado or a mad killer on the loose, slitting people's throats as he goes.

Shep started barking as soon as I shut off the engine of the truck. The engine complained, rattled, and groaned, and let out a puff of steam, but I was glad to be home. I didn't feel safe, but I didn't feel alone, either, and that meant something more at the moment than it had a little while ago.

I grabbed up the rifle and made my way to the front door of the house. Shep was on the other side of it, inside, pulling guard duty, watching over the house, Peter, and Hank. It struck me at that moment that we had suddenly all become prisoners in our own homes. We were all like Hank, blind and unable to move. I had tried to understand how he felt, but now I really did, fully, completely. I almost started to cry again, but I steeled myself and pushed inside the house, so happy to see Shep that I didn't shush him one time.

There was a light on in the front room, but no sign of Peter. Shep danced at my feet, barking, both ears up. His bushy tail swished so fast that the black and white transformed into a gray blur. I set down the rifle at the door and sighed, glad to be inside, glad to step behind walls that held books, pictures of my parents, and the lingering smell of lefse.

“All right, that's enough,” I said, and Shep, exuberant and happy, understood my tone immediately. Not that it was nuanced, but I wished most people would respond in kind.

I had not quit considering the news that Duke Parsons had given me, though I tried to hold it off, push it away, like I hadn't heard it. I was in no mood to make sense of anything.

I looked to my other hand, felt the weight of the page proofs, stared at the red printing on the top of the brown package: “URGENT!” it said in bold, dramatic writing.

I didn't need to be told that. I knew the delivery of the index was urgent, just as I knew the sun had fallen from the sky and left us all in a cold, unpredictable darkness.

I was tempted to hurl the box out the door, stomp on it, set it on fire, then call Richard Rothstein and give him a piece of my mind. But I wouldn't do that anymore than I would strike a match inside a library. I had made a commitment, I had unknowingly staked my reputation on this index, and if I hoped to continue working in that field with a correspondence course education, I would have to meet that deadline come hell or high water, tornadoes, or a madman on the loose. The repagination wasn't Richard Rothstein's fault. It was just the way it was. Some years, the ground's too wet to plant, and when the time comes every farmer in the county is pushed to get their seed work done before that magic window passes. This was no different, but knowing that didn't make the stress of the deadline any easier.

I sat the box down, and Shep immediately had to investigate it, see if it moved, lived, could be herded. Too bad he couldn't type.

I looked up and Peter appeared in the doorway that led into the bedroom. He stood there, staring at me. It was easy for a light-haired boy to look pale in dim light, but across the room, in the shadows, he looked skeletal, frail. I could hardly see any of his parents' warm features in him at all. It was like all of the life had been sucked out of him, taken by his parents as they'd left this world.

“I was hoping that was you,” he said, then leaned back to put the shotgun in its rightful place. It had been at his side, tucked away in the darkness, ready to be hoisted. I hated it that guns had become so prevalent in our lives. Everyone was afraid.

I nodded and stared at him. I heard the regulator clock tick, the wind push at the door, and the roof sigh with a familiar groan as it stood up to the weather. “Are you all right, Peter?”

He looked down to the floor, then back up at me. Peter Knudsen shook his head no, and I swear he looked like a seven-year-old boy who had woken up in the middle of the night from a bad nightmare. “There's been another killing,” he whispered.

“Duke told me. A professor in town. I don't think that has anything to do with us,” I said. I wasn't sure I believed that, but Peter didn't need to know that that.

He shrugged and stared at me in a way I had never seen before. I shivered and felt like something was wrong. “I need to go,” Peter said. “Is that okay?” He started pinching the skin on his wrist quickly.

“Yes, sure.”

Peter looked over his shoulder, nodded a good-bye to Hank, then made his way to me, toward the door. I put my hand on his arm to stop him. His skin was clammy, like he was feverish, but he didn't look sick—he looked nervous, like he was about to throw up, stricken.

“You're sure, you're all right?” I asked as warmly as I could. I had a motherly tone that was rare in its use, but Peter had been the most direct and consistent recipient of it.

Peter stopped. His eyes were bloodshot, more tired from the last few days than any unrelenting planting or harvesting stint could have ever made him. He knew the tone.

“Did you know the professor?” I pressed, uncomfortable by the boy's reaction. I felt like I was demanding the truth from a troublesome child, not my sweet Peter. “Did you?”

“Yes, I knew him,” Peter said. “I knew that professor. Me and Jaeger did some work for him not too long ago. What's next? What's next now?” He didn't wait for an answer. Peter pulled from my grasp and made his way out the door in more of a hurry to leave my house than I had ever seen before.

I imagined him crying all the way home, a little rabbit lost from its mother for the first time in its life, seeing an owl's wing in every cloud, hearing a coyote's step in every snap of the grass, certain that death was waiting at every turn. And he might have just been right about that. He might have just been right . . .

CHAPTER 29

I watched Hank breathe for a long second before I said anything. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling, his chest rising up and down steadily, without any struggle. At least he was all right, the same as I had left him. No better, no worse. It was always the “no worse” part of that thought that carried more strength, more worry. The “better” part was a wish, a miracle, a fantasy that would never happen, while the other was a journey into loss that I did not want to consider at that moment. Up until a few days ago, my biggest fear was walking into the bedroom and finding him gone, slipped away on his own without me there to bear witness to his passing, my heart broken, never to be healed again.

I knew it tore Hank up to lie there, not to be in the thick of things. His jaw was set tight, his lips pursed. I was just waiting for him to scream. It wouldn't have been the first time.

“Hilo resigned,” I said, standing over Hank, watching his face for a reaction. There was none. He didn't flinch. Even in his withering I recognized the boy I once knew, but even that familiarity was fading, wasting away into a fallow field I feared I would not know.

“He's lost everything then,” Hank finally said. There was no edge to his comment, no sadness or judgment, just matter of fact; typical of Hank, even in a weak body and weaker voice.

I nodded. “Everything but the ability to breathe and stand, and I'm not sure how much longer he'll have that. He seemed to be on the verge of collapse.”

“Wouldn't want to be Hilo right now.” Hank's voice was firm, lucid, the volume low. He licked his lips, and without thinking I picked up the glass of water that always sat near and guided the straw gently to him. He sucked on it like a man who had traversed the desert on the harshest of days.

“You knew about the killing in Dickinson,” I said. It wasn't a question.

I pulled the straw away, put the glass back where it belonged, and checked the pitcher. It was half full.

“Duke came in, told me and Peter about an hour ago,” Hank said.

“Peter's awfully upset.”

“Wouldn't you be?”

“I am.”

“Did you know that one?” Hank asked.

“No,” I said. “I'm worried about Raymond.”