Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “Yes, lying is almost always an unskillful decision. The trouble is, I’m a stranger here and I don’t know who I can trust. I don’t know who was shooting at me, and I don’t know why. And as for telling you the truth—I have no way of knowing who you’d talk to if I did.”

  He nodded grudgingly. “If you’ve committed a violent crime, I’d tell the sheriff, for sure, but if you haven’t, I’ll keep it to myself. No reason for you to believe me, but that’s a fact. Now try me. Why are you here in Ellsworth?”

  Eddie squatted on a discarded fender; I sat on the Mustang’s tailpiece, Bear in front of me, alert to stranger-danger.

  “The shooting at the Tallgrass Meet-Up four years ago,” I started.

  “What do you have to do with that? You writing another book? We had about eight people in love with gory stories come through for local color on their books.”

  “No, I’m not writing a book. But this is about Lydia Zamir. Did you see the news stories about her, the recent ones? You know she’s been living in Chicago, out on the streets?”

  “Yeah, we all watched that story when it broke. Don’t know why no one in a city that big had an extra bed for her.”

  “Her, well, mother-in-law I guess you could call her—her murdered lover’s mother—put her up in an apartment, but she became less and less able to cope with daily life. The trauma, she stopped being able to connect to the bigger world. She stopped speaking. She moved out onto the streets. She ran away; I found her barely surviving in a hole in the ground. She disappeared and I wanted to find her, make sure she was okay. I also wanted to find out why a big Chicago law firm handled Artie Morton’s defense.

  “Someone told the Salina LEOs I was coming down here, and I’m pretty sure it was the law firm, but I can’t believe they’d shoot me, or hire someone to shoot me. Someone thinks I know something, or have something, but I don’t have any idea what it could be.

  “And then—when I limped into Ellsworth, I thought if I let the woman at Tales of a Traveler, and you, know I’d been shot at, you’d start talking and the word would fly back to whoever was after me. I’m out here alone and naked. My gun is in Chicago. And my only defense is this dog, who, to be fair, saved my life this morning, but he’s not a match for a bullet.”

  Eddie mulled my story over in his mind. “Why’d you stick your neck out to begin with? You’re not a cop, right?”

  “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for a killer who murdered two people a hundred yards from where Lydia Zamir was hiding. One of the dead men was dating one of my goddaughters. I don’t expect Lydia to identify him, because she isn’t talking to me or anyone. But if the killer thinks she saw him, she’s at risk all over again.

  “In the last two days, I’ve told three people why I’m here—Franklin Alsop over in Black Wolf, Clara Digby at the old rail hotel in Tarshish, and a lawyer named Gabriel Ramirez. Maybe one of that trio became angry enough to shoot me back to Chicago. Now you’re the fourth, and you know I’m an easy mark.”

  Eddie grunted. “I know Clara. Least, I know her old man. He was in town this morning looking to buy some of Rufus McIlvie’s chickens. I can’t believe either of them would shoot you. Franklin—he keeps himself to himself, out on the Nicodemus Prairie he manages. He was in school with my older brother and he always went in for nonviolence. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, he was always talking about them. Must be the lawyer.”

  “Could be,” I agreed politely.

  “But if all these people know, they’ve told people. Not Franklin—he’s clammed up since the massacre, but Clara likes to chat with people who stop at her hotel.”

  Eddie’s coworker came out to give him an update on the Ford pickup, but stood watching me.

  “’Night, Rick,” Eddie said. “Good work on the tailgate. See you in the morning.”

  As Rick walked away, I could see him taking my picture and texting. Great.

  “I know most people who live around here or grew up in the area,” Eddie said. “I don’t know this Coop, but I wonder if he used to work for Cassie on her Clarina Prairie. It’s next to Franklin’s Nicodemus Prairie—the two of them are hanging on to almost five hundred acres, and it isn’t always easy.”

  “Because they don’t have enough help?” I asked, thinking of Clara’s story.

  “Because someone wants to farm them.”

  “I thought all this land was the prairie.” I gestured vaguely toward the world beyond the Ellsworth town limits.

  “You have to ask Franklin or Cassie, or the brains over to K-State what makes something a prairie. Some of it has to do with letting the native plants have their way with the land. None of this tilling the soil, putting in herbicides, pesticides, the way we do to grow food for people in Chicago.

  “Anyway, Cassie started restoring her family’s farm to prairie, and early in the process, there was talk about a kid who showed up and helped her for a couple of summers. Wild kid, lot of anger, trying to beat up on guys twice his size if they looked at him sideways. No one knew where he came from, but he was good with animals and apparently took to plants, too. Cassie’s a strange woman, not everyone’s cup of tea, probably the right person for a confused angry kid to turn to.”

  “Was your brother in high school with her?” I asked.

  He gave a reluctant grin. “My mother. Cassie’s the kind of woman gets a reputation for being a little crazy, every year a little crazier, and people steer clear.”

  He took me into the office part of his shop and dug around in a filing cabinet for a county map. It was old, torn where the folds had been opened and shut, but easier to follow than a computer file.

  The Clarina Prairie lay to the north of Alsop’s Nicodemus Prairie. You could reach it from a different county road than the one I’d driven to Alsop’s land. Of course, Alsop had probably already told Cassie about my visit, especially since it had ended in a hail of gunfire.

  If Franklin or Cassie felt murderous about a Chicago detective on their land, I’d end my life in a Kansas cornfield. No, on a Kansas prairie, more ecologically valuable. They’d turn my body to compost and let the worms feed on me, which I guess would make a noble ending.

  Eddie had a beater he rented to me. “You get it shot, you buy it, you pay to repair it.”

  45

  Little House on the Prairie

  Rain started to fall again as Bear and I drove back along Old U.S. 40, the road we’d taken this morning when we were fleeing the shooter. Eddie’s beater was an old Chevy Impala, a boat of a car with a lot of give in the springs and not much tread on the tires: the car slid around on the gravel county road.

  I saw the turnoff to the lane that led to Cassie’s land a second after I passed it. I stupidly hit the brakes. The Impala bucked and fishtailed, but righted itself with the front left wheel dangling over the ditch. I managed to back it up, back it down the county road, and turn on to the lane without actually falling off the road.

  A tractor might have made easy work of the muddy track, but the Impala hated it. We slithered across the mud. I went a cautious five miles an hour but had to gun the engine a few times to make the car leap over the biggest potholes.

  Before setting out, I’d driven to the motel for a few supplies: my oilcloth coat, my boots, my work flash. In case we were stranded, I’d also taken Bear’s food. Some snacks for me. My laptop, too. The locks at Tales of a Traveler didn’t inspire me with confidence.

  I undid the latch on the gate so Bear and I could slip through. As I was refastening it, he stood with his ears pricked, nostrils flaring. I shone my flashlight around, trying to pick out the trail through the prairie grasses, when Bear gave a short, urgent bark and tore off, almost at right angles to the path I was about to take.

  I called to him. He stopped briefly to look over his shoulder at me, then ran again. The gray sky, the wet, the huge open land with its deceptive swales and rises, unnerved me. I abandoned the path I wanted to take and trudged after him. I couldn’t run in the mud and in my boot
s, but he would stop periodically, let me get in sighting distance, carry on.

  We’d gone on about twenty minutes, me with a stitch in my side, the dog loping ahead, when he disappeared into one of the hollows. He began a volley of barks. I picked up my pace and reached the top of the rise to see a door open in the hillside and a woman step out. Bear streaked past her through the open door. She started to follow him in when she caught sight of me, hustling down the path to her.

  “Are you the person who trespassed on Franklin Alsop’s prairie this morning? Just who are you and why have you come back?” She was old, with a lined face and thick white hair that stuck out wildly around her head, but she held herself erect and her voice was firm.

  This was how my day had begun, with Franklin Alsop and his land. I was tired of being spun around, shot at, ignored, and basically stonewalled.

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski. I’m looking for Coop and there’s no point in your saying you don’t know him, or where he is, because his dog, Bear, figured out he was here half a mile back.”

  “The Chicago detective,” she said, shutting the door in case I was tempted to rush inside. “Coop isn’t here, so you might as well leave.”

  “You’re Cassie, right?” I moved over to sit on a short wood bench near her door. A dozen or so chickens scratched inside a coop just beyond the bench.

  The rain pelted my raincoat and trickled down my neck. I longed to take off my boots and massage my feet, but my socks would get wet. I hadn’t brought a second pair with me from the motel.

  “Lies, secrets, and silence, that’s what all detective work revolves around. The lies and secrets here are bigger than a lot that I encounter. Perhaps Coop isn’t here in this literal moment, but he’s been here recently enough to leave a scent along the ground.”

  Bear started barking from the other side of the door.

  “Be quiet, you silly dog,” Cassie said sharply.

  Bear kept barking and scratching at the door. Cassie finally opened it, just a crack, to let him out and keep me from going in. He came to me, pawed at my leg, whined, trotted back to the door, barked at me to follow.

  “Lydia,” I said, my brain turning over. “Coop isn’t here now, but he brought Lydia to you. Bear knows her and feels responsible for her so he went inside to find her. Now he’s making a racket to let me know I should come in, too.”

  “You read dogs’ minds?” Franklin Alsop materialized behind me, as mysteriously as he’d disappeared this morning. Perhaps there was another house in the ground nearby, or maybe he was like the Cheshire Cat, able to appear at will.

  Cassie looked at him, and he nodded his head slightly. “We don’t want you here,” she said. “There’s been too much shooting, too much murder around here, and I don’t allow guns on my land.”

  “I’m not armed,” I said.

  “Shooters came after you this morning,” she said, unarguably. “But here you are, and if they followed you again, we’ll have to deal with them. However, Coop is safe, and anyway, he said that you could be trusted even though he’s not crazy about you, so I suppose you can come inside and get Bear to quiet down.”

  As soon as she opened the door, Bear raced over to me. He scratched my pant leg and rushed back into the house, turning in the doorway to make sure I was coming. His expression seemed to say, Why do they always give me the slowest kids to look after?

  Inside the door was a mudroom with a bluestone floor. I eased my feet out of my boots and put them on a board where Cassie had left her muddy clogs.

  I followed Bear’s toenails clattering on the floor and saw his stump of a tail disappear into a room at the end of a short hallway.

  A skylight let in enough puny daylight to reveal Lydia Zamir. She was tucked into a narrow bed under a blue-and-white quilt. The walls around her were painted an eggshell blue. Bear was licking an arm that lay outside the quilt.

  She lay so still that I had the macabre thought that she had died, that Cassie was keeping her body laid out as part of some hideous ritual. Then I saw a faint pulse in her neck, a throb that barely moved the skin around her carotid artery.

  Cassie had managed to bathe her and to cut the wild mass of hair. In repose, the anguish eased out of her face, Lydia looked younger. I felt a stab of anguish of my own. So much damage done to her.

  I squatted next to Bear. I didn’t try to touch Lydia. Cassie must have figured out a way to feed her because there was a little more substance to her face than when I’d last seen her, but the arm Bear was tending looked like a stick covered with flesh.

  “Lydia, it’s V.I. Warshawski. I’m glad you’ve found a safe resting place. I want you to stay safe. I won’t tell anyone where you are, and I will do my best to find the people you’re afraid of.”

  She flinched. She certainly understood me, even as she lay as still as death. I couldn’t ask her anything. Whatever she knew about the Devlin & Wickham lawyers, or about Leo Prinz and Simon Lensky’s killers, she was keeping shut in some deep basement of her mind.

  I felt an unbearable grief, looking at her, and began to sing the songs of my childhood, my mother’s Italian lullabies. I don’t know if the music helped Lydia, but Bear stopped his compulsive licking and I myself felt calmer.

  “Okay, now we know you can sing, it’s time for talk.” Franklin Alsop spoke from the doorway. Cassie was with him. The two led me into the heart of the house, a big common room buried in the hillside, lit by wall sconces. Bear stayed with Lydia.

  Cassie clapped her hands, and an overhead light, mimicking sunshine, came on. I’d been expecting the kind of dirt home Laura Ingalls Wilder described in Little House on the Prairie, but Cassie’s dugout was lined with wood and stone.

  A series of beams presumably kept everything from falling in on her, but I still felt panicky at being shut in underground. I took some deep breaths, trying to slow my heartbeat. Lydia’s room had smelled of lavender. The big room had a different scent, citrus-like.

  Before I could ask about Lydia, Cassie demanded, “What do you want with Coop?”

  “Information,” I said. “Which I’d like about Lydia, as well. Did Coop bring her straight here? Has she seen a doctor?”

  “She doesn’t need a doctor. She needs safety,” Cassie snapped. “You saw her yourself. She’s recovering, and she can do it here, not in some noisy institution where they’d put her on drugs that would destroy her mind and her creative spirit.”

  “Her mind and her creative spirit have been pretty well depleted these last few years. She needs to eat, build up her physical strength.”

  “You think I don’t know that? You saying Coop didn’t think that through? A hospital would take what’s left of her poor little veins to analyze her blood. Besides, she doesn’t have insurance. I feed her like an abandoned baby kitten: with an eyedropper. She gets broth, she gets herbs, you saw her: color is better and she’s resting.” She glared at me, defiant.

  “Coop told us how she ran away every time the busybodies put her into care against her wishes. She knows she’s safe with Cassie.” That was Alsop. “She’s better off here, as long as you don’t bring shooters onto the land.”

  “Why were they shooting at you?” Cassie asked.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know who ‘they’ are—do you?”

  They shook their heads, but Alsop said, “Why are you here, really? Why are you looking for Coop.”

  “Coop and Lydia have some kind of connection. He was the one person she would see in the weeks she spent at her mother’s house after the shooting; he followed her from there to Chicago. He tried to look after her when she moved onto the streets.”

  “Coop told us that much,” Cassie said grudgingly.

  “Two men were murdered near where she was camping out. Did he talk about that?”

  “He said the police wanted to frame him for the murders,” Cassie said. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Coop had been going to community meetings where the two men were speaking. He’d gotten angry
with them—he seems to lose his temper pretty easily and he started threatening them, or at least threatening the younger one.”

  “So you are here to locate him for the police,” Alsop said, disgusted.

  “It would be helpful if you let me finish, because you actually don’t know what I’m going to say. This is a story with a lot of parts that don’t hang together well, and information would be a lot more useful than a fight.”

  I waited a moment. Alsop’s eyes glittered with anger, but he shut his lips, tightly, a gesture akin to a sneer.

  I told them about Murray’s story, which had driven Lydia into flight. Unlike everyone else I’d met in Kansas, Alsop and Cassie hadn’t seen the online reports—they stayed off the grid as much as possible, I gathered. I described the hole in the ground where Lydia had hidden, and where I’d found the gavel that might have killed Leo.

  “See? That’s why she needs to be here, with me, not in some hospital!” Cassie cried.

  I gave a tired smile. “You’re probably right. Anyway, after Lydia disappeared, one of the biggest media companies in the country, maybe in the world, Global Entertainment, tried to hire me to find her. Even though I turned down the commission, they were pretty obsessed with locating her, so much that they offered a suitcase full of money to film me searching for her. I turned that down, too, but it made me concerned about her safety.

  “She was so fragile that I didn’t think she could survive long in the outdoors. I hoped Coop could talk her into getting care, but his reaction to me was always belligerent. And then came the night about a week ago when he left Bear outside my apartment building and disappeared. I don’t know how he got here.”

  Cassie nodded slowly, weighing what I’d said. “This has always been Coop’s safe place. He showed up here the summer he was seventeen, when I was first working to build the prairie. He was a runaway, a rural runaway. You don’t hear much about kids like him, but they can be dreadfully isolated by the farm, especially if the parents lay too much work on them and don’t let them hang out with kids their own age.”