by Mindy Mejia
“I’ve got to talk to the sheriff.”
“Again?”
“Just get Josh ready, okay?”
She shook her head and collared the boy, taking him back down the hall and slamming a door.
Carl gestured me into the kitchen.
“Not a morning person, is she?” I asked pleasantly.
“What is it, Sheriff? I answered everything your deputy asked me and lost an entire period of class doing it. You know how people are looking at me?”
“How’s that?”
“Like I was—” He shook his head. “Like I had something to do with this mess.”
“Did you?”
“What are you asking me?”
“What do you know, Carl?” I put my hat on the table and stared him down.
“I know Hattie Hoffman’s dead, that’s all. I had her for history two years now. American history last year and European this year. She liked Europe better.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at. Why’d you lie to Jake?”
“Lie!”
“I want to know what you talked about in your basement on Friday, and you’d better not say the Twins.”
He stared at me, frozen for a minute, before going to the doorway and glancing down the hall. Then he dropped into one of the chairs at his kitchen table and spoke quietly.
“Lanie.”
“What about her?”
He sighed. “We talked about her a bit. When Peter came back with me on Friday she was upset. We started fighting. We’re always fighting these days. And after she stomped upstairs, Peter and I talked about it.”
“About what?”
“About getting married young. Not knowing what the hell you’re getting into. He got married right out of college, too.”
“Was he having marital troubles? Did you talk about that?”
He was quiet for a second. “No. Not exactly. He asked me something, though, and I’m not proud of what I told him. That’s why I didn’t tell your deputy.”
I waited and eventually he came out with it.
“He asked if I would’ve stayed with Lanie before Josh was born. If I could’ve done it over again when there weren’t any kids to think about, would I have stayed?”
His voice dropped even lower. “I said no. I said I thought even Josh wished we were divorced sometimes. The stupid things we fight about . . .”
“What kinds of things?” I smelled a domestic brewing.
“Everything. You ever been married, Sheriff?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that. What happened?”
“Vietnam.”
“She left you while you were gone?”
“Nope. About two minutes after I got back. Turned out she liked me better on the other side of the world.”
I never talked about Angie. Not that I was torn up about it anymore. There was a time, a long time, when I was bitter about how she left, but that all faded. She hadn’t known what to do with an angry war vet anymore than I knew myself. She just wanted a happy, regular life. Before I shipped out, she’d begged me to go to Canada with her. I took the honorable path, though; I put my country before my girl. Her letters were one of the things that got me through my tour and that’s what I remembered about her now. When I heard she’d died in a car crash outside Dubuque a few years ago, I pulled out all those letters again. It was a strange thing, reading all the warnings to be careful and not let myself get hurt, all that concern pouring out of Angie’s dead hand. I put them away in the box with the medals and the note from the president and hadn’t looked at any of it since. No need to dig up the past, except I felt for Carl. Angie and I had been kids ourselves, no property or children to muck up the divorce. There was just a See you later and a few papers to sign. But Carl and Lanie had a life together—a home, a son.
“That’s horrible, Sheriff.” He looked mad. “Leaving a war hero as soon as he gets home.”
“What’s done is done.”
I picked up my hat and made my way back toward the front door. “Lund never complained about his wife?”
“Not really. Mostly his mother-in-law. Seems she doesn’t care too much for him.”
“You talk about Hattie that night?”
“No.” He opened the door and walked me out to the cruiser. “No, I would’ve remembered that.”
“Okay. Thanks for taking the time this morning.”
He nodded and Lanie appeared in the screen door behind him, her face pinched and closed. Whether or not she heard what Carl had said in the kitchen, it looked like they had some more fights ahead.
I found myself driving toward Bud’s house, but what could I say? I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know, which was who to point his gun at. This was an active investigation, not to mention a media nightmare, and the less Bud knew the better.
Passing the turnoff to Bud’s, I headed out to the lake. On the way I called the crime lab to check on the samples. They told me the file was still pending and they couldn’t give me a date on when it would be processed. They were working through an “unusually large number of files,” according to the pissant who finally answered my call.
I pulled into the lot where Hattie and Tommy went parking on Friday night, looking across the lake to the Erickson barn with its old roof bowing down toward the water. There were a few trees along the shore next to the barn, enough cover to hide in even without the long grasses that would wave up in a few more months. According to Tommy’s story, she’d gotten out of his truck and walked to the barn on her own. Meeting someone. Why would she go there if she wasn’t meeting someone? It probably would have been around 10:00 p.m. Lund could easily have met her out there after he left Carl’s place. Someone could have followed her, too—Tommy, or even someone else, but whoever it was had to have a reason to be out here in the middle of the night. I rubbed my face and thought through my short list of suspects. Lund and Tommy both had motive, both might have had reason to want her dead.
I got out of the cruiser and retraced Hattie’s last steps—across the parking lot and then along the lake that lapped up the shore with a warm, lazy wind. It was cooler and partly cloudy last Friday, in the low fifties and dropping after sundown. She would have been cold, probably walking fast, both from the chill and to put distance between her and Tommy. There weren’t any houses or barns on the horizon in any direction. The security light in the parking lot would have been on, but it didn’t have enough wattage for more than a hundred-foot radius, so she only had a partial moon to light the way. Was she afraid? I didn’t know. If she was alone, no. Walking alone in the cold and dark wasn’t anything to a country girl. Maybe Hattie was aiming toward the city, but she was as much a part of this land as any other Pine Valley kid, and the land comforted folks here. Its openness and vastness were a balm. No, if she walked to her death alone, she walked unafraid. I crunched along the trail and scanned along the edges of the grass again. Nothing was trampled, no mud kicked up. There were no signs of any struggle. We’d already been over this ground; me, the forensics team, and Jake to boot, but it never hurt to retrace your steps, especially when you were thinking things over or waiting for a lab tech a hundred miles away to squirt something into a vial.
Halfway to the barn I stopped and looked back. The parking lot had disappeared under a slight rise in the land. I couldn’t see the cruiser anymore. Had Hattie looked back? Was Tommy—alibi-less Tommy, who didn’t know why she’d broke up with him; horny, angry, hormone-riddled Tommy—following her?
I hadn’t followed Angie. When she left, over thirty years ago, I’d let her go. I was angry, maybe even angry and drunk enough a few of those dark nights to kill somebody, but I never pursued her. She made her choice just like I’d made mine. I’d chosen war. She chose Iowa. She sent the divorce papers in the mail and got herself married to a pharmaceutical salesman the next spring. I went to school on the GI Bill, got a patrol job in Wabash County, and didn’t have anything good to say to anybody until Bud started wav
ing at me from across Lake Crosby.
He was only a few years younger than me, but it was the difference between being drafted or not. He and Mona were newlyweds starting out on the farm and that first summer all we talked about was fish. Just a quick wave and confirmation on what was biting. I could handle that. By the next summer, he got me to come over a few times and Mona would fry up our catch. The year after that we took our first trip to Lake Michigan. He was the first person to put up a Goodman for Sheriff sign in his yard, until he realized no one would see it and then he stuck it on the back of his pickup truck instead.
By the time I heard from Angie again, when she sent a letter congratulating me on getting appointed sheriff, all the hard feelings were gone and that was probably all due to Bud. I wrote her back and she sent me a Christmas card every year after that until the year she died. There was usually a picture included of her and her husband and some kids who were on the chubby side. She was a handsome woman, stayed that way, too.
I turned back toward the barn and kept walking. It had been awhile since I’d had Angie on the brain, but I supposed it made sense. Carl and Lanie. Hattie and Tommy. Relationships hitting their breaking point. Tearing apart.
The yellow tape was still all over the barn, courtesy of the crime scene boys. I ducked under it and went inside. Stagnant water, mildew, and rotting wood were the smells that greeted me, just like they would have greeted Hattie. She’d left Tommy and walked to the barn. Then she’d had sex with someone in the barn. Then she was killed by someone in the barn. That was up to three different people who could’ve interacted with her. Or just one.
I paced, not caring one bit about the wood hollering under my boots. It could fall if it wanted to fall. I was narrowing in on the timeline, the story, but it didn’t mean anything if I couldn’t put it with a suspect. I needed that DNA back, needed to know who was lying to me so I could lean on them until they told me exactly what happened, not to mention get a warrant to search every inch of their life for that murder weapon.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the number before I could think about it too much.
“Sheriff Goodman,” she greeted me on the third ring.
“Fran, I need that DNA. Who do you know in the Minneapolis crime lab?”
“I’m well, thank you. And you?”
“I’m serious.”
She dropped the sarcastic tone. “And why is your murder any more important than any of the other thousand bodies that come through my morgue every year? Because it’s yours? Because Cowboy Goodman needs to save the day?”
“There’s no day to save, Fran. She’s dead.” I kept pacing, trying not to curse because I knew it riled her. “This isn’t about me. You can take shots at me until the cows come home, okay? You’re probably right—you always are—but this is my friend’s child. His baby girl. I’ve got two prime suspects for the semen and I need to know which one it is and I need to know today, while there’s any shred of evidence left.”
She was quiet after my rant. I kept walking, ready to argue with whatever she said next, until she sighed.
“All right, Del. I have a few contacts. I’ll make a call.”
“Good. Good.” I ducked out of the barn and started making a sweep along the perimeter of the building. It was old ground, already covered, but the momentum soothed me. “You tell them I need it today.”
“What you need and what they can do are two unrelated things. I’ll ask them to expedite the samples. That’s all.”
I squatted down by a tuft of dead grass outside the window, pushed it aside, and saw a mouse skeleton. It was picked clean and almost completely intact. “Thanks, Fran. I owe you one.”
“One what, exactly?”
“I’ll take you out in the cruiser someday. We’ll give tickets to out-of-staters.”
She laughed—actually laughed out loud, which was a small miracle—but then became suddenly serious again and sent me in an entirely new direction.
“If you really want to track down this murderer, Del,” she said, “there’s someone else you need to talk to.”
PETER / Friday, February 15, 2008
IT WAS amazing how life simply kept moving forward. You could do the most despicable, amoral thing you’d ever imagined and just drive home afterwards. Go to work. Get your dry cleaning. Pick up some wine at the liquor store and chat with the parents of the best friend of the girl you’d slept with behind your wife’s back. Pay for your wine. Go home.
Mary scarcely acknowledged my trip to Minneapolis in January. I’d taken the money for the hotel out of my personal savings account, which she would never see. When I got back, she’d asked about the friend I told her I was visiting. I said he was fine and it was good to catch up with him. She went back to mopping the floor and I went upstairs, laid on our bed, and relived every detail of what happened that weekend: Hattie’s confession at the restaurant, what followed on the hotel bed. And on the desk. And in the shower. Dear God, strike me down.
No one looked at me differently. No one even suspected. It made me wonder what else I could get away with, how far I could push this double life, and that question depended solely on Hattie.
In the month since our trip we’d barely spoken. There was no safe channel of communication. We couldn’t use email, phones, or the internet, nothing that could be traced, and so our relationship became a game of silent voyeurs. I watched her eat lunch with Tommy every day across the cafeteria. She watched me make notes on the board during lectures. When we passed each other in the hallways she looked right through me and kept chatting with her friends. I stood at the door to the classroom when the bell rang just to inhale her scent as she walked by. She always smelled light, airy, with a hint of fruit; either strawberry or raspberry, I could never tell. It was maddening, being so close to her. She must have felt the same, because she stopped by the classroom after school one afternoon under the pretext of having a question about the spring play, but I didn’t trust myself not to touch her. I moved the conversation quickly into the hallway, looking beyond her as I monitored the flux of bodies, sensing her mounting frustration. Finally she wrote a note in light pencil on one of her assignments—just a location and a date—that I frantically erased in the upstairs storage room as my blood started racing.
It was a rest stop along the Mississippi, a scenic overlook into Wisconsin, but no one toured the bluffs this time of year. I only saw one other car in the half hour before she arrived. I pulled her into the backseat without a word and we wrestled clothes off, panting, tugging, and twisting until she was straddling me, and then her long, tight body drove me insane.
I wanted her like I’d never wanted anyone. At the same time I was terrified of what she’d do with the immense power she had over me. She thought she looked up to me, that I was the one in control, but little by little she was going to realize that my life was like a house of cards at her feet and all it would take to destroy me was one stray kick from any of her myriad selves. I craved her, I was obsessed with her, and I feared her more every day.
The Friday after the rest stop I got home from work to see Mary walking around the outside of the house with a guy I didn’t recognize. He looked about our age, wearing a baseball cap, snow-covered work boots, and a tool belt, and he nodded in my direction as I headed up the walk to the house. These days I looked at everybody one second longer, just to see if this was the person who was going to raise their finger and expose me for what I was. Not this guy, not today. He resumed his conversation with Mary and I went inside. Elsa was asleep in her rocker in the living room. I grabbed a Coke and drank half of it while staring at the contents of the fridge, wondering how to see Hattie again. She could “visit” another college on spring break. We could go to Duluth, or Chicago. Hattie would love Chicago.
Mary opened the front door and I quickly shut the fridge. She went to the sink without a word to me and started washing dishes with the air of someone finishing an interrupted activity.
I moved toward the door, my
body automatically retreating. Apart from eating and sleeping, I lived in the storage room now. Even if Mary hadn’t acted like an island for the better part of the winter, it was ludicrous at this point for me to make the effort to reach her. Before I disappeared tonight though, curiosity got the best of me.
“Who was that?”
“Harry Tomlin.”
“What did he want?”
“I asked him to come out.” She almost didn’t elaborate, but then she shrugged as she tipped a pitcher upside down into the rinse rack. “He’s an old friend from high school. I’m having him put in some new windows.”
“Windows?”
“It’s too drafty in here. There’s no point in replacing the boiler until the windows are done.”
“Boiler? What the hell, Mary?” I didn’t know what stunned me more—her plans or that she was actually sharing them with me. I paced to the living room door to make sure Elsa was still asleep. “You’re the one who freaks out whenever I spend a dime. Why are you pouring money—my money, I might add—into this crap heap of a house?”
“I won’t touch your precious paycheck, all right? Keep it. Mom’s got her social security and I’ll make my own money.”
“Doing what? Selling eggs at fifteen cents a pop?”
A hint of a smile played with her mouth. “Thirty-five cents, actually.”
“What?”
“Organic, free-range, family-farm eggs.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer at first. It was frustrating, talking to her profile. She wouldn’t even turn around to have a conversation with me. Never mind that she had every right to shove me down, stomp on my balls, and kick me out of her mother’s crap heap of a house. She didn’t know that.
“Remember going to the farmers’ markets in Minneapolis? How you always spouted off about organic this and cruelty-free that?”
I did remember, but the memories weren’t splashed in her sarcasm. I’d honestly—and obviously stupidly—thought those were our good times. We were living in our Victorian walk-up and every Sunday morning in the summer we read the paper over coffee, commenting on and tossing sections until the dining room table was covered with tented and folded stories, cartoons, and the remains of the coupon pages after they’d met Mary’s scissors.