by Mindy Mejia
“He’s in Denver until tomorrow. Says he’s been there since last Wednesday. We’re confirming, but it sounds like a pretty tight alibi.”
Damn. Now my suspect list was down to Tommy.
“I want to talk to him when he gets back.”
“Should we bring him in?” Jake asked.
“No, I’ll go to him. Anything from the forensics team?”
“No, not yet, but—”
“What about Hattie’s computer?”
“You’re not going to believe what I found.”
“Well, you’ve been calling me like a spurned woman all morning. Must be something worth telling.”
“Jesus, Del, I’ve got a lead on the killer. Did you want me to wait around until you’ve had your Dairy Queen?”
I pulled into the Reevers’ driveway and bumped over the mud ruts to park in front of the house.
“What do you have?”
“It looks like Hattie was talking a lot to some guy named L.G.”
“The hell kind of name is that?”
“It’s a handle.”
“A what?”
“I’ll explain it to you when you come in. Pick up some Dairy Queen, will you?” And he hung up, the little shit.
I’d known the Reevers since they’d found out they were pregnant with Mary Beth. The whole town could spot them coming a mile away—John hustling to open doors and lift grocery bags, Elsa rolling her eyes at him with one hand hugged to her belly, both of them well into their forties and grinning like fools on their first date. Happiness like that was polarizing—it either drew you in or pushed you out, and in those years after the war, I didn’t know how to be drawn in. I was a patrol cop, which was the only thing I was good for then—handing out tickets and laying down the law, everything in black-and-white—and it got to be whenever I saw the Reevers coming down Main Street, I found something that had to be done on the other side. It wasn’t until I pulled John over for speeding a few years later, Mary Beth bouncing and babbling in her car seat, and John looking bashful, saying, “It makes her giggle” that I found myself laughing, standing outside their Pontiac on the shoulder of Highway 12. I finally got drawn in.
“Why, Del, what brings you out here?” Elsa answered the door, wearing an oxygen line in her nose and looking like a mild breeze could knock her down. She’d been fading more and more ever since John died.
“I’m looking for Mary Beth.”
“Oh, she’s over at Winifred’s.” She braced a hand on the doorjamb and squinted toward the woods that separated the two farms.
“I don’t think so. I stopped by there and saw her leave.”
“Oh?”
“Looks like her truck’s in the driveway.”
The evidence of it seemed to confuse her, so I switched gears.
“I met your son-in-law up at the play yesterday.”
“The play.” She said it like she was trying to bring a memory into focus. “I think we were supposed to go see a play this weekend.”
“Must be nice to have some extra hands with the farm.”
“Mary Beth does it all. He doesn’t do enough around here to fill a thimble.”
“The fields and the animals, huh? That’s a lot for one person.”
“No, she doesn’t work the fields. We rented them out when John passed on. Just the chickens and the gardens.”
“Nice to have fresh chicken on the table.”
“Exactly.” Elsa pointed at me, inexplicably vehement. “That’s what any regular man should say.”
“Mind if I check around for her?”
“Go on ahead. I better not. She gets after me when I try to pull this oxygen tank through the mud.”
I touched my hat and headed across the way, poking my head in a few buildings until I found Mary Beth in the chicken barn collecting eggs. A group of hens pecked around her feet, some white, some brown and orange, all of them scratching and clucking away. They weren’t packed in like I’d seen in some farms, where you could barely see the floor through the sea of animals. This flock looked more like a mismatched extended family gathered around their matriarch.
“Mrs. Lund?”
She yelped and jumped about a foot out of her skin, scattering the chickens in all directions, but managed to hold on to her basket. She had the look of her dad, now that I knew who she was—fair and sturdy, the kind of bones built for weathering storms, and it seemed like she was in the middle of one right now. The basket trembled on her arm and her breathing didn’t quite settle down, even after she saw me.
“Sheriff. My God.” She put one hand over her heart and checked her harvest for breaks.
“Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“That’s okay,” she said without looking up.
“How are things going out here?”
“Fine.” She wasn’t the chatty type, apparently. Mary Beth had never been a troublemaker growing up, so I didn’t know her too well. I think she played volleyball in high school and had been in the paper for National Merit Scholar things now and again.
“I was just up at the house talking to Elsa. She said you do most everything around here these days.”
“I do what I can. I’m not my dad, that’s for sure.”
“He’d be the first one to say thank God for that.”
She parted with a small smile, but it disappeared as quick as it came and she busied herself checking the remaining nests.
“What brings you out here?”
“Eggs, to tell the truth,” I lied, watching the chickens dart in and out of a low door that must have led to an outdoor space. “When I saw you at Winifred’s I happened to remember you’d started selling them again. I used to buy some from John from time to time.”
“Sure.” She went through the last of the nests and then motioned me to follow her to the main barn, where a series of old refrigerators lined one wall.
“How many do you need?”
“A dozen’ll do me fine. How much?”
“No charge.” She handed me a carton and waved off the five-dollar bill I’d pulled out of my wallet.
“Sorry, I can’t take them for free. Got into a bit of a sore spot with that once. Had a bartender who let me drink free for about a year during one of those years you don’t want to remember too well anyway. It seemed like a great deal until I found out he was selling the marijuana his cousin grew in the middle of his cornfields. He thought I owed him. Never forgave me for throwing them both in the clink.”
“I’m not growing marijuana,” Mary Beth said with a nervous laugh.
“All the same.” I held the money out until she took it.
“I don’t have change on me, so you’ll have to take another dozen.”
“Sure, I’ll come back when these run out.” I shifted the carton under my arm and switched topics. “You didn’t know Hattie Hoffman, did you?”
“No,” she answered quickly, starting to unload the eggs she’d just collected.
“She was practically family to me.”
“I’m sorry.” Whatever else she might have been feeling, she sounded like she meant it.
“You okay, Mary Beth?”
“Yeah. There’s just a lot going on right now.”
“Mmm. Your mom and the farm and everything.”
She nodded and kept working.
“Why were you talking about murder with Winifred?”
“What?” Her head shot up and she finally looked me in the eyes. Hers were surprised and tense, the kind of tense that builds up over months and years, where the muscles don’t even remember how to relax. Winifred had said something about marital troubles.
“I heard the two of you before she open fire on me. She said murder has its place.”
“It was nothing. Not what you think.”
“How about you tell me what it was and then I’ll tell you if it’s what I think.”
“It was just . . . Peter, my husband.” She swallowed and stopped, then her eyes darted around the floor. “He’s a ve
getarian. Thinks it’s wrong to kill animals. Winifred was trying to reassure me.”
Even though it explained Elsa’s comment, the rest of the conversation still didn’t jibe.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“It’s between me and her. I don’t . . .” Her mouth became one firm line and I knew I wasn’t getting any more out of her.
“I need to see your knives.”
“Why?” Her eyes flashed, but there was no fear in them.
“Hattie was stabbed to death.”
She nodded and silently obliged. The autopsy report had come in last night and it said the wounds were caused by a straight, single-edge blade about six to eight inches in length. I measured each of Mary Beth’s knives and none of them fit the specs. The only one with the correct length was curved and none of them had the right blade width. I didn’t think I was going to find the murder weapon on Mary Beth Lund’s tool bench, but there was something she wasn’t telling me.
She walked me back to the cruiser and lifted a hand to Elsa, who watched us through her lace curtains.
“Hey, does a handle mean anything to you?” I asked. Mary Beth was only a few years older than Jake.
“Like a bucket handle?”
“No, like a name.”
“Sure, that’s what people call their screen names for websites and blogs and stuff.”
I thanked her and started whistling as I backed out of the driveway, ready to put my chief deputy back in his place.
I pulled into Pine Valley proper and cruised down Main Street, nodding to the men outside the feed store who usually stood around jawing about the price of hogs and corn seed. They watched me for the whole stretch of road with cap-shaded eyes and grim mouths, leaving no doubt about today’s topic of discussion.
When I got into the station, Jake was hunched over Hattie’s computer like it was showing the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series. I dropped a sack of burgers on the desk.
“You’re not going to believe what I found.” He fished out a burger and bit in without a glance at what he was eating.
“So”—I sat on the desk—“Hattie met someone online with a handle named L.G.”
“How’d you know?” Jake managed to look genuinely disappointed with a mouthful of bun. Clearly he’d been looking forward to explaining handles to the old man who knew squat about the internet. I swallowed a smile.
“Stands to reason.”
“Well, I don’t think she saved everything. See? She was copying and pasting messages into a text document. Some of the messages don’t seem to pick up where they left off and there’s no names on any of it, except this one.”
He swung the screen toward me.
HollyG,
I should probably use your real name now, but I can’t bring myself to do it. This last fragment of duality will allow me to say what I must. Our friendship is over. It was a dangerous idea in the first place, no matter who you were, but now that Jane Eyre has unmasked us it’s obvious how painfully wrong this is. Please know that I wish you well and blame myself entirely.
We can never speak of this. Tell no one.
Goodbye,
L.G.
“When’s this from?” I asked.
“She saved it last October. There’s dozens of these files, filled with hundreds of messages. Del, Hattie was having a secret relationship.”
“L.G.,” I muttered.
Jake pulled up the next one and we read, finished our burgers, and read some more.
HATTIE / Tuesday, September 11, 2007
“WHEN YOU think about it, there’s really only three people worth bothering asking to Sadie Hawkins.”
“That’s three more than I would look at twice.” I processed Mrs. Gustafson’s photo order—thirty pictures of ugly kids—while Portia leaned on the counter and examined her fingernails. She’d collected four new shades of polish from the beauty aisle and was consumed with figuring out which one went best with the traditional Sadie Hawkins flannel. Like there was a winning possibility there. Ignoring me, she lifted one of the bottles up to the light. It looked like blue Gatorade, the kind of color that looked awful on me and gorgeous on her with her light-brown skin.
Portia visited me a lot at work since her parents’ liquor store was only a block away. She didn’t like trying to do her homework while people bought beer and asked her mother to repeat herself just because she had trouble with Rs. Even though it took me a while to understand her, too, I’d always loved going to their house. Mrs. Nguyen would scold us in her low staccato while she ladled spoonfuls of spicy pho into our bowls. Portia was embarrassed by all of it, of course. She didn’t understand how amazing it was to be from somewhere other than here.
“There’s Trenton.” She started ticking off date possibilities, lining them up like the nail polish bottles.
“He’s dating Molly.”
“For now,” she conceded. “Sadie’s is still a month away. And then there’s Matt.”
“He’s like three feet tall.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. Not everybody’s a giraffe like you.”
“I prefer the term gazelle.” I slipped the photos into an envelope and stuck on the label. “Or undiscovered supermodel.”
Portia snorted. “Keep dreaming.”
“Who’s your third?”
“Hmm? Oh, Tommy.”
“Which Tommy?”
“Kinakis.” She kind of looked away when she said it.
“Tommy Kinakis? What the hell, Porsche?”
“What? Don’t you think he’s cute?”
He was, sort of. He had nice hair and pretty eyes, but he was dumb as a rock. A giant rock.
“What would you even talk about?”
“Who says we’d be talking?”
I debated before telling her. “He asked me to come see one of his games.”
“Really?” She stopped playing with the nail polish. “Are you going to?”
“Yeah. Rah, rah. You know me. Hi, Mrs. Gustafson.”
Portia disappeared with the nail polish as I gave Mrs. Gustafson her pictures. She told me about every ugly grandkid while I nodded and laughed at her stories about them.
After we’d gone through all of the photos, she laid a hand on my arm. “Now, you’re just about graduated, aren’t you, Hattie?”
“Yep. Next spring.”
“And what are you going to do?”
I knew what the right answer to that question was. My line was supposed to be that I was going to the U, majoring in nursing or something else productive, and delivered with an upbeat smile that ended the conversation. Instead I gave her the real answer.
“I’m moving to New York City.”
She raised her eyebrows. “What are you going to do out there, honey?”
“I’m going to be an actress on Broadway,” I said.
“Well, I guess you will then. Goodness’ sakes.”
I patted her blue-veined hand, rang her up, and told her to watch for me in the newspapers someday. As she left, smiling and shaking her head like I was delusional, a happy shot of adrenaline coursed through me the way it always did whenever I said it out loud. I was going to New York, and for the first time I didn’t care what anyone thought about me. I wanted a life that was bigger than Pine Valley, a life that made everything different.
I wasn’t stupid. I’d probably have to transfer to a CVS in the city and work there for a while. That would be the easiest thing, and then I’d have rent money coming in while I looked for something better. And yeah, maybe I wouldn’t make it as an actress, but I had the rest of my life to figure it out and it wasn’t like anyone had a career anymore the way they used to with one company and a sad little briefcase and a pension. The 2000s were all about recycling, reinventing, and fusion. I could be an actress-photographer–dog walker or a gallery aide-waitress-model. Geez, look at me now. I was a million different things depending on who I talked to or how I felt. All the Mrs. Gustafson’s in the world needed to realize their “What
are you going to do?” pop quiz was completely defunct.
Portia bought a pink polish and a People magazine and went back to her parents’ store. She texted me just as I was closing up the counter, telling me to ask Tommy to Sadie Hawkins and I replied, “Y don’t U?” She didn’t answer.
I went home and ate a sandwich before going to my room.
“Homework first!” Mom yelled after me as I went upstairs.
“I know!” I yelled back.
I shut my door and took out my history text book and a notebook and pulled up a website about the Middle Ages in case Mom checked on me, and then clicked on the site I was really going to: Pulse.
Pulse was a forum for New Yorkers I started visiting this summer because it posted tons of casting calls. I checked out every call and googled the play, the theater, and the director now, too, because since rehearsals began a few weeks ago for the Rochester Civic Theater I’d learned that our director, Gerald, loved to gossip about other directors. So I found directors to ask him about. He really just liked being asked questions so he could give a lot of bitchy opinions, but it was fun to listen to him talk about the New York theater scene.
I logged in with my handle, HollyG, and my avatar popped up on the screen, a picture of two of Heather’s dad’s pigs real close up on their snouts. If you weren’t a farmer’s daughter, you had no idea what you were seeing. It just looked like a smashed, tired pink canvas with sharp black cuts through the frame. People on the forum always commented on it. They thought it was great art. One of them even asked for the link to my portfolio when I told him I took the picture. So I guess it was pretty easy to fool New Yorkers, too.
Although I didn’t comment on all the threads, I read absolutely everything. People talked about plays opening, plays closing, a new building that looked dreadful, the latest restaurant that lived up to its hype, the horrible, ongoing road construction, and the closest subway station to a trendy gallery. They never brought up the weather or television, which were the two main topics of conversation at CVS. I wanted to roll my eyes at all the customers and say, “Who cares if there’s a frost advisory?” except I knew my dad cared and it was important for his crops, so I talked about it like it was the most interesting thing in the world. I even kept a Farmers’ Almanac behind the counter. Still, I think that’s why I liked Pulse so much, because I could act like myself. I could say what I really felt and ask what I wanted to know. Mom said that the internet was dangerous because everyone was anonymous and you never really knew who you were talking to, but I think that’s what gave me the courage to open up. I found myself in the forums. Every day in school I became what my teachers and friends wanted, then I went straight to work or play practice and became what they wanted, then I came home and had to cram in homework and try to figure out what my parents wanted—when, honestly, all they really wanted was for Greg to be home and for me to be about ten years old again (Sorry, Mom and Dad. Not gonna happen.)—and by then it was 10:00 p.m. When I logged on to Pulse, it felt like I was breathing for the first time all day. I let myself relax and look around, and that’s when I saw a post from a newbie that needed to be intercepted.