by Mindy Mejia
Since school started I’d been sleeping in on Saturday mornings, but even after grading papers late into the night I staggered out of bed at 5:30 today and trudged along behind her through the yard, which wasn’t even touched by the gray before dawn.
She showed me how to collect, wash, and store the eggs, how to clean up the excrement, and how to replace the straw as needed. We fed them while they lurched around and pecked at our boots, following us with their blank, beady stares. She lectured about how to look for disease and sickness and then she picked up one of the hens and carried it to the back of the main barn and killed it.
I didn’t even realize what was happening until Mary had the knife in her hands.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Her voice was matter-of-fact. The blade flashed pink from the sunrise and the bird struggled to free itself from her grip.
“Is it sick? What’s wrong with it?”
The bird’s eyes were rolling frantically now and I couldn’t seem to focus on anything else.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Winifred’s coming over for dinner tonight.”
And with that she severed the bird’s head from its body and blood spewed onto the ground. The body flopped and rolled, as if unaware of its own death and frantically trying to recover the piece it had lost. I stumbled backward until I ran into the barn wall. If there’d been anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it right over that fountain of blood. Mary went to a nearby hose and washed off the knife like she’d been slicing a birthday cake, angling it to one side and then the other until I could see her face in the blade.
The bird bounced over to me and I ran away from it, which made Mary roll her eyes.
“It’s just a chicken, Peter. You don’t run away from them in the grocery store.”
“They don’t run at me in the grocery store!” I yelled.
“I’ll probably roast it with some potatoes, but I’ll throw on something separate for you.”
I didn’t answer. She stood on one side of the headless chicken and I stood on the other without any idea how to respond to her polite offer to make me a vegetarian meal.
The thing was, most of my friends would have been impressed. Chick’s got brass balls, I could hear them saying. Even when she’d outmaneuvered them with her easy logic on whatever issue being debated at the bar—raising minimum wage or the literary effect of Harry Potter on the millennials—she always bought them a beer and made them laugh in the end. If I told them about what happened today, they would’ve raised her status to legendary.
I didn’t know why it bothered me so much. I’d probably seen Mary eat a hundred chicken wings during those times at the bar. Would I be okay with my wife eating dead animals if she couldn’t bring herself to kill them? It was ludicrously hypocritical. I knew that. But that damn chicken’s eye wouldn’t go away. It stared up at me from the lifeless head, surrounded by a pool of its own blood.
Someone laughed in the living room and then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mary appeared in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, mirth infusing her features.
“I found an Old Maid card set and thought it might be fun. Then Winifred said there were too many old maids in the room already.”
“They’re old widows, not old maids.”
“True.” She shrugged and grinned. “Do you want to play?”
“I don’t know that game.”
“It’s easy. Even Mom can handle it, I think.”
“No, I don’t feel like playing.”
“What’s the matter?” Mary came into the room and sat on the edge of the desk next to me. She brushed some hair out of my eyes.
“Nothing.” I pulled back.
“Are you still upset about the chicken?”
“You could have at least warned me beforehand.”
“Oh, come on, Peter.”
I pushed away from her dismissive tone and paced the edge of the room. “It didn’t bother you even a little, did it?”
“What do you want me to say? This is how I was raised.”
Everything about her demeanor told me I was the one with the problem. I was the aberration in the room. After seven years she either didn’t understand my moral choices or she didn’t give a shit. I shook my head and picked up a book on top of a stack by the window, turning pages like there was something important inside, if only I could find it.
“You’re not coming down?” I could hear the hurt in her question and I didn’t care.
“No. I think I’ll pass on the exciting card game with the seventy-year-olds.”
“Would it kill you to be part of this family?”
I advanced on her, jabbing the book in the direction of the barns outside the window. “What do you think I was doing this morning? You think I was collecting eggs and hauling straw bales for fun?”
“No, I know you hated every second of it. You couldn’t have made it more obvious if you tried.”
I barked out a laugh. “Oh, trust me, I could have made it a lot more obvious.”
“I didn’t think it was going to be like this.” She blinked back tears. “I knew it would take some adjustment to move here, but it’s like you’re not even trying.”
Shaking my head, I turned back to the window. If she thought “some adjustment” would turn me into a butcher, there was nothing else I could say to her.
She lingered and drew a breath, as though on the verge of saying something else, then I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hallway and her slow descent down the stairs.
I sunk into a chair and dropped my head to the book in my hand, drilling the imprint of the spine into my forehead. The truth was, I did want to be part of this family. What wouldn’t I give to relax and joke away the evening with Mary, or the Mary of before? To unlearn what I knew about her?
Aggravated, I sat up and tossed the book on the desk and that’s when I noticed the title for the first time. Shakespeare’s Complete Tragedies.
Nothing suicidal, the principal had said, sitting jovially in front of his glass cabinet full of model tractors, each green body carefully polished to catch the light. I don’t like putting suicide out in front of teenagers. Don’t want to give the misguided ones any ideas. He didn’t want to disturb teenagers who were learning to behead chickens on their fathers’ farms, who were guiding cows and pigs into trailers and driving them to their deaths.
I paged through until I landed on Macbeth.
Macbeth—arguably the most violent play Shakespeare ever wrote. I could pour buckets of red corn syrup all over the stage, let them kill and feast on each other’s blood. No romantic suicides here; Macbeth was pure carnage fueled by greed and madness and revenge. The Bard always reveals our natures and in this play he’d said that in the right situation, with the right motive, all of us are murdering monsters.
I marked the page and pushed the book to the far side of my desk, away from everything else, as if afraid of what was inside.
DEL / Monday, April 14, 2008
BY SEVEN o’clock Monday morning I had Jake digging into Hattie’s laptop and was knocking on the Kinakises’ door. Mrs. Kinakis was none too pleased to see me again, especially when I explained that I needed Tommy to give DNA samples that morning. Both parents were royally ticked off that Tommy’d landed on the suspect list, but Tommy himself didn’t have anything to say about it. He was as quiet as yesterday, sitting at his mom’s kitchen table and poking at a bowl of oatmeal turning to concrete in front of him.
“I’ll do it.” He finally spoke up, killing his parents’ arguments mid-word. He put his varsity letterman’s jacket on without a backward glance at either of them and we were on our way to Rochester.
Tommy stared out the passenger side window the whole ride, wiping his eyes every once in a while. He’d asked if he had to sit in the back before we got in and that was the last he’d spoken.
When we were almost into the city, I told him he was doing a good thing. “I could’ve easil
y gotten a warrant, you know. You saved me the trouble.”
He nodded and a minute later asked, “Will the blood clear me?”
“Semen.”
“Semen?”
“Found some on her body. You sure it wasn’t yours?” I wanted to ask him without his parents staring him down.
“No.” He was mighty quick to answer. “I already told you, she wouldn’t let me.”
Another pause, while the fact of it must have sunk in. “Someone . . . raped her?”
He seemed to have trouble with the word.
“Can’t say.”
“So my . . . stuff . . . won’t match and then you’ll clear me, right? That’ll take me off your list?”
“We’ll see.” I didn’t tell him that, apart from Gerald Jones, he was the list.
He was quiet for the rest of the morning, letting nurses lead him around like some overgrown pup. After dropping the kid off back home, I swung by the Erickson place again. Winifred’s Buick was in the garage and a Chevy pickup was parked out front. I banged on the screen door for what felt like ten minutes with no answer and then headed around to the outbuildings. Winifred leased most of her land to one of the big farming cooperatives and I’d never seen her set foot in the fields since the day she shot Lars, but she had to be here somewhere.
I poked around until I heard voices coming from the machinery shed.
“—don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You’re not going to say a word, that’s what.” Came the reply. The first person was kind of muffled, but Winifred’s old, crackly voice carried clear as day.
“Can’t keep it a secret forever.”
“Can’t say nothing till you decide what you’re going to do.”
“We’re not talking about this.”
“You have to talk to someone and I know exactly what you’re feeling.”
“It’s murder.”
“Murder has its place, just like everything else. When I was—” Winifred’s voice cut off and there was a pause. Then a gunshot deafened me.
I threw myself against the side of the shed, my gun already drawn.
“God damn it, Winifred!”
“Who’s there? You better get the hell off my property before I let another one fly.”
“It’s Sheriff Goodman. I’m coming in there and if I don’t hear a gun hit the floor in five seconds, I’m going to come in shooting. Do you hear me?”
Silence.
“Winifred? I’m counting.”
There was a thud and a grunt. “Fine, then.”
I crept into the half-lit building, my aim trained on the two women by the right wall. Winifred was dressed in a checkered housedress. She had stringy, tight curls all over her head, a pipe in her mouth, and a put-out expression on her face. An old rifle lay by her feet. The woman next to her was at least forty years younger and drawn up into herself like a fetus perched on a stool. She had a blond ponytail and round, tear-streaked cheeks. Neither of them posed any threat, but I kept a bead on them just to make a point.
“You shooting at all your visitors now, Winifred?”
She crossed her arms and sniffed at me. “Sure, when they’re sneaking up on me and there’s a murderer on the loose.”
Sighing, I holstered my weapon and fixed a stare on the younger woman. Even though I didn’t recognize her right off, she seemed familiar.
“I got a few questions for you, Mrs. Erickson.” One of the most pressing ones was why these two had just been talking about murder, but I had a feeling I’d get more out of the younger one on her own.
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“No, no. I’ll go.” The woman uncurled herself and was trying to leave when I stepped in her path.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“It’s Mary Beth Lund, Sheriff.” She reached out a hand. “Or Mary Beth Reever, you probably remember me as.”
“Sure, sure.” I shook her hand, which seemed strong enough despite her red eyes. “You and your husband moved in with your mom last year, right?”
“Yeah, Mom’s not doing too well and she won’t move off the farm.”
“Lot of stubborn old people out here.” That got a snort out of the one standing next to me.
Mary Beth smiled. “Anyway, we’re just up the road and Winifred’s been so great, always letting me borrow something or stop by to chat.”
“I’ll walk you out, sweetling.” Winifred put her arm around the woman and used her free hand to puff on her pipe. “Del, you can head on up to the house.”
I watched them go, walking slow and talking quiet. There was no reason the two of them couldn’t be friends, but their conversation didn’t sit right at all. You didn’t come talk murder with Winifred Erickson for the hell of it.
I glanced out at the strip of woods on the north side of the property where Winifred shot Lars twelve years ago. I remembered it like it happened that morning, which is always the way it is with killings. They stick to you after everything else falls away.
I found him laid out on his back, shot clean through the side with a .308 Winchester. It was a bad year for coyotes and the Erickson chickens were suffering. Lars had been coming home from the Reevers’ at the same time Winifred was chasing a coyote away from their coop. She told the jury she shot at it and hit Lars by mistake. Even though she inherited a $500,000 life insurance policy and the entire farm, which Lars owned free and clear, unlike most in these parts, the jury still let her off on account of the number of chickens she could prove they lost plus the fact that she shot Lars in the side from a distance. Apparently the jury thought that to want to kill someone, you had to be facing them and up close.
Lars was a regular son of a bitch, always going on about who was cheating him today and raising stinks about every little thing. Most people figured it was on account of losing both his boys so young—one to pneumonia and the other to Vietnam—but for my money Lars was just born like that. Nothing good enough for him. Didn’t think anyone was on his side. Winifred told the jury, as plain and sober from that witness stand as when I found her standing by him, that there’d been nothing she could do to help him. And I think she meant it, except I doubt she was talking about that morning.
“I don’t know a thing about it, so you can save your breath.” Winifred stumped up the porch steps as Mary Beth’s truck kicked up a dust cloud over the driveway.
“What was she crying about?” I nodded in the direction of the road.
“That’s her business.”
“Everything’s my business in a murder investigation.”
“Marital troubles didn’t get the Hoffman girl killed.” Winifred opened the front door and waved me in behind her.
“You must know a lot about it then, if you can say what did or didn’t cause it.”
She poured out a cup of tea that must have gone cold and set the kettle on for another.
“I know as much as the next person about Hattie Hoffman.”
“The barn’s on your property.”
“When’s the last time you think I made it out there? My arthritis wouldn’t let me get halfway.”
“Oh, I think you could do anything you put your mind to, Winifred.”
She cackled at that and slapped a second cup down on the table. “It’s Earl Grey or go thirsty.”
“Earl Grey’s fine.” I sat down and watched her fix the tea. After she got everything situated, she puffed at the steam over her cup and her tongue loosened up some.
“Course I knew the kids were using it, that’s why I put the No Trespassing sign up on the east side over there, so no one could sue me if the roof fell in on one of their heads. But I haven’t been out that way in years.”
“You didn’t see or hear anything strange on Friday night?”
“Not a thing. Came home from the play and went to bed.”
Something sank inside me when she said it and it wasn’t only because I knew she was telling the truth. I should’ve been up at the school, too,
cheering Hattie on, watching her shine for the last time. Drinking in silence, I watched a cardinal land on one of Winifred’s bird feeders out the window. The tea was bitter.
“Mona must be beside herself,” she said after a while.
“She is.”
“I been there. Something shifts inside you after your child dies, like things that were liquid before turn hard and brittle.” She nodded out the window absently, lost in an old, familiar sorrow that was as part of her now as the curls on her head.
I finished the tea and made my way to the door. “Nothing else you know offhand about Hattie, is there?”
“Seemed a little uppity this last year, talking about going to New York and being on Broadway, but I didn’t think so on the way home on Friday. That girl could act. It was something to see.”
“Well, I’m not going to rule out making more sweeps of the property, and the barn’s off-limits until I tell you personally otherwise.”
“Sure, sure.”
“And stop shooting at people or I’ll confiscate your rifle.”
“Mm-hmm.” She walked me out to the cruiser, not worried at all about losing her gun. She probably had five more where that one came from.
“Is Mona still out at the house or did she go to her mom’s?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She was there yesterday.”
“I’d better go see her.” Winifred pulled her worn sweater around her middle, even though the sun was warm today. She looked up at the sky and then around the horizon, sighing. “Kids leaving all the time and the ones that haven’t are getting killed. Men dropping off with heart attacks every other day. Pretty soon this is going to be a country of nothing but old women.”
I flashed her a cheeky grin. “That suits me fine.”
She gave me a nice slap on the shoulder for that as I got in the car. “Oh, go on.”
As I followed my nose over to the Reever farm, I saw I’d missed two calls from Jake and phoned in at the station on the way.
“Del, where are you at?”
“Checking a few things out. Did you find Gerald Jones?”