He stopped. Oppo’s message from 4:33 this morning echoed in the gap.
Throat slit, May 2003 (body in vehicle pulled from manure pond).
As for guessing Jim Golly’s Schedule II drug, the sheriff had figured it was cocaine. Denise too, at first. But no, he had been arrested with over two hundred doses of thirty-milligram Adderall, prescribed to other people, stolen and black-marketed. And the charge was just possession. No intent to deliver. He was eating it.
“So Jim did what?” the sheriff demanded of his twin. “What did he do about your debt to Ronald Rickreiner? One false word, Mr. Golly, and our deal goes away.”
“All Jim’s idea.”
“Sure.”
“I worship God the Father. Jim… the law of nature, Mother Earth, survival of the fittest. We argued. But, as usual, Jim was right. He followed Rickreiner out of a tavern and ran him off the road. Sliced him like a hog. Rolled him and his truck off into Gullickson’s manure pond. Gibbs talked to us as suspects. Jim acted offended by that. After we were cleared, we left.”
“What do you mean, you left?”
“We didn’t really leave. We didn’t have one red penny to leave on. We had nothing but the land and those few buildings. But Jim told people we were moving back to Florida, said we’d take hurricanes over being suspected for crimes we didn’t commit. Faith was with us by then. We moved way back inside that land and started as pioneers all over again.”
Patience had to have a mother. Was this her? Faith? The sheriff changed angles.
“Faith who? Does she have a last name? Where is she from?”
“I couldn’t say except Jim met her in a bar over in Iowa.”
She paused to swallow back a wave of disgust that left her throat stinging.
“ ‘With us,’ you said. Faith was with who?”
“Us,” he said again.
“Mr. Golly, whose partner was Faith?”
He closed his eyes. “We never really did decide that.”
She gritted her teeth—resisted cracking his face with the back of her hand—calmed herself enough to stay with the purpose of her question. “Whose child is Patience? Yours or Jim’s?”
She watched his answer, a shrug beneath the sheet. Her stomach rolled and her right hand closed into a fist. Let it go, Heidi. Unless and until it matters.
“But Patience lived with you.”
“Patience went with me when I came back out to the farm after a year and a half. Jim had another break, in his mind. He wouldn’t tolerate the crying and he made Faith give her up. But he was still my brother. I came back out looking Amish like this and told any English who were curious that I had bought that farm. I kept folks untangled from Jim as best I could, the way I always have, and nobody ever asked twice about it.”
“You tried to join the Amish?”
“For show. I knew they wouldn’t have us.”
“You spoke German?”
“Our mother was German. I studied from an Amish Bible. I only spoke German to Patience. Pidgin German. It’s all she’s got.”
“Why the name, Mr. Golly? You were trying to hide in plain sight. Why not Gabriel Smith?”
“Gotteskinder.”
“What?”
“I only ever said that I was Gabriel Gotteskinder. It was the Amish who started calling me Goodgolly, with a wink. Those people never say directly what they know. I played dumb and went along. No one cared anymore. It just stuck.”
“How old is Patience?”
“Seventeen.”
“Where is her baby? Or babies?”
“Born dead.”
“One untrue syllable, Mr. Golly…”
“One was born dead. The other didn’t last a week.”
He turned his face away. She turned it back.
“To whom do I owe the rape charge, Mr. Golly?”
“It’s because of the lien.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They still have the lien on our land. They’re the only non-Amish who knew we never left.”
“Who do you mean, they? The Rickreiners?”
“She still holds the lien. The son waited until Patience turned thirteen before he told us he would repossess the property unless… unless he could ‘take her to the bowling alley for a hamburger,’ the son said. He said that because his mother had just bought the bowling alley. He took her out again and again, every time saying he would take the property away if she didn’t go with him to the bowling alley for a hamburger.”
She took his beard in her fist, then felt repulsed and let it go, let him turn away and shake with shame.
“Now we know why she stuck that filthy tool in your chest.”
And now we can guess where Patience is headed with a shotgun. And why the Rickreiners are so desperate to BARRY ME.
“His mother, Babette, she knows about all this?”
“The lien is hers, legally. What the son was doing, she maybe didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t she collect on the lien years ago, before Barry started taking Patience for hamburgers?”
He shrugged faintly again. He was losing strength. She took her phone out and re-studied Oppo’s most recent message, by now nearly four hours ago.
Silver Alert: Leroy Fanta not responding to multiple contact efforts since asking for information yesterday PM about Golly Bros. property in Town of Leavings.
“Is your brother still ‘way back inside the land’?”
Jon Golly nodded and she let him rest. The sky in his window—pink-orange scorch marks on high cirrus clouds—reminded her that time was slipping away. She still had to check on Deputy Luck down the hallway. She still had to brief her night-shift deputies. And—oh, by the way—she had a family, one she hadn’t eaten supper with for over a week.
She stared out at the escaping day. It would be a terrible idea to arrest Barry Rickreiner—on just Jon Golly’s word—and then not make the charge stick. She needed Patience for that. As hideous as she found the idea, she had to give BARRY HER a heads-up. There was a plausible threat to his safety. She had to be a sheriff here.
Her stomach clenched. Her tongue stuck. Her head spun.
“Mr. Golly, is your brother still somewhere on that land?”
“Yes,” Jon Golly whispered finally. “Jim is still back in there.”
“Where?”
“Hollow of that middle feeder creek.”
That told her nothing. Hollows. Feeder creeks. There were hundreds. The Gollys owned hundreds of acres. The forests would darken in an hour.
“What kind of man is Jim these days, Mr. Golly?”
“What kind of man?”
He was fading fast. Again she hadn’t asked the right kind of question. A nurse’s shoes squeaked behind her. Yet somehow it was the question.
“What kind of man, Mr. Golly?”
It felt familiar, what Jon Golly whispered fiercely as he closed his eyes.
“You said it yourself. Jim is my brother.”
CHAPTER 30
“He’ll do nicely, yes,” Fanta said.
He sandbagged Jim Golly one more time, after the man’s monologue on martyrdom, global population shift, and coral reef bleaching had rounded back to the homeless young man hired to water Golly’s sod roofs.
Fanta’s pig valve fluttered dangerously. Night approached. Between gypsy moth shrouds, he could see a lopsided moon rising in a darkening blue sky.
“But Jim,” he resumed cautiously, easing into the twist he hoped would tilt Golly off course, reviewing in his mind’s eye the famous Life magazine photographs of Thich Quang Duc’s suicide in the middle of a Saigon thoroughfare.
Every person Fanta knew had seen the photos. He had been with friends in junior high school, appalled and enthralled at a table in the school library. First the elderly monk’s religious brothers had doused him in gasoline. Then Quang Duc had set himself ablaze, slowly turned black, and tipped over.
“You realize,” he said to Golly now, “that Thich Quang Duc lit himself on fire
in 1963. I’m guessing that you think his sacrifice ended the war, but it was only 1963.”
Golly frowned and stiffened. Fanta glanced behind. The dog had departed. He clung to his purpose. Golly’s timeline was off. His understanding of the burning monk’s motive was apocryphal, twisted to serve his self-interest. Fanta knew the history well. Quang Duc had protested the Diem regime’s mistreatment of Buddhists, not the war. His death had sparked change, but not the kind that Golly falsely remembered.
“From the standpoint of U.S. involvement, Jim,” Fanta continued, “Quang Duc’s suicide represented actually more of a beginning. More of an accelerant. That was the moment when John F. Kennedy stepped into quicksand and sent in ‘military advisers.’ That happened just months before Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. Quang Duc on fire ended nothing. His death was a beginning.”
He watched Golly seethe at the correction. But Fanta’s accuracy was personal. Seven long years after Thich Quang Duc’s martyrdom, as Fanta lay broken in a mud puddle iridescent with swirls of Agent Orange, the insanity of the war in Vietnam had just been peaking.
“It was Kim Phuc,” Fanta continued his correction of the record. “It was the picture of Kim Phuc that ended the war. Much later, 1972. Remember her? She was the naked little girl burned by napalm, wailing in pain and terror as she ran down the road.”
Golly trembled, glaring at Fanta.
“It was a live child, Jim, not a dead martyr. The spirit of the war died with the suffering of Kim Phuc. She lived. Her life changed history.”
He pressed on.
“Jim, there is no Life magazine anymore, no set of black-and-white photographs that the whole world accepts as truth. No one reads newspapers or magazines anymore, and no one looks out the window. That’s not how it works.”
At this, Golly lurched up. Finding his balance, he wallowed aggressively across the creek, his entire body flushed with fever, his skin tags abruptly crimson and vividly trembling. He slapped the water and howled from William Butler Yeats into Fanta’s face.
“ ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer! Things fall apart! The center cannot hold! Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world!’ ”
“Jim, listen. I can bring the world to you. Tomorrow.”
“ ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed!’ ”
Fanta turned his face away from Golly’s rancid breath. “Yes,” he said, staring up through a mass of caterpillars backlit by the merciless sky. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed… on YouTube and Twitter.”
“ ‘And everywhere,’ ” Golly railed against the aching bones of Fanta’s head, “ ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned!’ ”
“Yes, Jim,” he tried to agree, fighting with a sticky throat, “but this isn’t World War One or Vietnam. Go ahead and burn yourself if you believe you have to. Tomorrow, if you want to. Just don’t eat anyone else. All we need is a video clip.”
“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!’ ”
“Yes. Yes, believe me, I know. I’m looking at it.”
“I will live!” Golly roared.
Between them, another great gout of gas broke the surface. Fanta stopped his in-breath, waited, waited, refusing to inhale the digested out-breath of a cannibal.
“Somebody knows that I came here,” he wheezed at last, remembering yesterday’s call to Vigdis Torkelson at the library. “I’m a friend of Sheriff Heidi Kick,” he added. “I promise you she’s looking for me, and she’ll be here soon.”
Golly floundered back, pushing waves, and whistled sharply through his teeth. In moments Tippy appeared out of the deep forest shadows, Faith trailing with her rifle.
* * *
“Kneel,” Jim Golly told Fanta minutes later, after Fanta had hobbled at gunpoint across Hell Hollow to the shallow grave that must have been dug and escaped from yesterday by the dead man in the ditch.
“Face away.”
Fanta looked at Golly one last time. Still nude except for his water shoes, he had pinched thick glasses onto his swollen head so that he could see to shoot. Kaleidoscopic. Fanta understood now why the man in the ditch had been shot so erratically from point-blank range. Faith rounded up the victims. Golly did the honors.
Now she handed him the rifle. Fanta knelt, faced away, toward the looming early moon.
“Whatcha think, Faithy? He just seems like potatoes to me.”
She scowled at the ground, her heavy shoulders slumping. She had brought a shovel.
“The sheriff knows I’m here,” Fanta tried again. “I’m a friend of hers.”
“But I’ll be in the history books by then,” Golly told Faith. “So it’s gonna be your medicine, your call. You’ll be on your own.”
Fanta watched her lips move silently.
“You don’t need time, or France,” he told Golly once more. “You don’t need to go anywhere. Just bring the world to you. All you need is—”
Golly cocked the weapon behind him.
It’s OK, Fanta told himself. You were killed a long time ago in Vietnam…
With all his dwindling voice he bellowed his final words—“Jump! Run!”—and the last two things he saw were the fuzz of a live child vaulting off a sod roof, and the fast-departing swish of Tippy’s tail.
… You just didn’t die until today.
CHAPTER 31
By the time Sheriff Kick called from the ridge road, heading home in final daylight, the sky was deep indigo, with stars pushing through and hung with what seemed like an oversized and faintly pink gibbous moon. The Charger’s dash said ninety-five degrees.
“Denise, before you punch out, contact that outfit that’s spraying for the gypsy moths. I want to go up with them first thing in the morning. I need to get up high and look for somebody living deep off the grid. Pay them whatever.”
“Ten-four, my queen.”
The obvious struck her. “How did you know that Fanta was asking about the Golly property in Town of Leavings?”
“What?”
“The emails you’ve been sending me. Aren’t you Oppo?”
“Emails? What are you talking about?”
“You won’t lose your job, Denise. Trust me, by tomorrow Rickreiner won’t be running for sheriff anymore. And thank you for the tips. I’m putting it all together.”
The sheriff turned on her headlights and the air exploded with insects, a billion motes of alien energy hopping and swirling and flowing over the Charger, ticking its surfaces like hail.
“Heidi,” Denise said, “check behind your ear for a tampon.”
* * *
At home, Harley met her cheerfully in the front yard and towed her into the porch light to show her the first good news she had seen all day: two sealed white business envelopes that read in scrawly blue crayon from taylor kick.
“He did it, hon! These are his apologies for pushing people at the pool yesterday. This one is for Dylan and Grammy Belle.”
To this envelope, Taylor had attached a red T. rex sticker—favorite color, favorite creature.
“And, of course, this one.”
To the envelope for Becky Rilke-Rickreiner and her boy he had affixed a sticker of a green germ.
“That’s hardball right there,” her husband joked. “He might have a future in politics.”
She put her forehead against his thick chest and listened to his heartbeat.
“Oh, God, Harley.”
“What?”
“Rumors.”
“Of course. What now?”
“You’re snipped.”
“I’m what? Oh, snipped. The hell I am. But so?”
“And I’m pregnant.”
He froze for a moment. Then he pushed her out to arm’s length and looked into her face.
“Are you?”
She had no idea what she would say until her voice came out and she heard herself spackling over the truth. “Harley, it’s a perfect rumor. Don’t you see how it wo
rks? You don’t want more kids because the ones we have already are so bad. Meanwhile, Sheriff Mommy is a fraud and a whore, having an affair with her handsome Latino deputy. Launch that from a barstool and it travels at the speed of light around the gossip universe. You and I are the last to know, of course. But guess where I heard it.”
His chin dropped.
“Mom, right? I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And as always, she has only the best sources.”
“Heidi, I’m sorry. She’s protective. That’s why she believes crap like that.”
“Yeah,” she said, letting go of what had steamed inside her since yesterday, “but let’s not pretend this is not emotional violence by the people spreading the rumors. Let’s not imagine that it doesn’t trickle down to the kids. Play it through the mind of an anxious little boy. Your daddy is sorry that he had you. And your mommy wants a different one of you, and a different Daddy, both. Meanwhile, your beloved sister is off becoming a bigger boy than you will ever be—imagine those rumors, Harley—and all this time everybody keeps saying blah-blah-blah how much they love you.”
She had pushed herself to tears. She had nothing else to say. Harley wrapped her in his arms. Then he turned her body surely and gently, her perfectly practiced lover, until they were shoulder to shoulder, and in that embrace her husband walked her around the corner of the house, where by the light from the family room window Dylan and Taylor played in their plastic kiddie pool. Father and mother stopped beyond the boys’ sphere of awareness and watched. She wondered if every parent of identical twins saw what she did: completely different people.
“We’re going to be OK,” Harley said.
“I think I need a bite to eat,” she answered him.
“Mom made macaroni salad. You can pick out the green onions, I guess.”
“Then I’m going to drive Taylor to Rickreiner’s place and drop off his apology.”
Harley pulled away and looked at her.
She answered the look. “I know it’s late. I know it’s bedtime. But then he’s clear to go on the field trip tomorrow.”
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