He whispered into Taylor’s ear.
Taylor looked up beneath his hat brim.
Golly nodded and let go of Taylor’s jacket collar.
Slowly and uncertainly, Taylor descended the concrete steps and drifted squinting into the blazing sun. Then he tried to sprint so abruptly that he tumbled, rose with his face in a mask of naked terror, and sprinted again until he crashed into his mother’s duty belt and gripped her waist.
“The future,” Golly said. “That’s why.”
He flicked the lighter and exploded into flames.
CHAPTER 47
As Golly had planned, water from the hoses arrived far too late to save him. He flared, sizzled, and toppled below the window frame as flames jumped up.
The price of delay was the building. Fire tore across the spilled gas on the floor and hit Fanta’s desk, which acted like a heap of dry tinder. Those flames reached the paper-crammed balcony before the hoses were even unrolled. By the time the water arrived, the windows of the upstairs rooms were blowing out and raining glass shards down upon the firemen in the street.
Quickly, the only goals left were to keep the fire away from the fuel tank in the basement and to stop it from spreading down the block. After five minutes, both seemed attainable. The firemen soaked the insurance office on one side and the vacant former pizza parlor on the other. They pumped the basement full of water so that if the floor collapsed it would fall into a pond. Meanwhile, the fire moved up and back, sweeping through the old hotel rooms. One brave volunteer scampered up a long ladder just in time to hack through the roof so that water could rain down. Steam hissed high into the sky. Flames shot back out the windows. Charred scraps of newspaper floated everywhere. An already hot day in downtown Farmstead had become a steaming inferno, and Leroy Fanta’s old Broadcaster, all of it, was lost.
Sheriff Kick had drifted out of body. The adrenaline, the heat, the loss, the salvation—maybe she was in shock. At some point Taylor had released her waist and Harley had retrieved him. While another old woman warbled “Amazing Grace,” she could hear her mother-in-law squawking at her to come and give her brave boy a hug, and of course, drifting that way, she wanted nothing more.
But it didn’t feel over.
Still, warily, she let herself be drawn toward family. Her little boy had been saved. There could be celebration. But her guts still churned, her fists still closed and opened, her eyes still searched. It just did not feel over.
“C’mere,” Belle commanded her heartily, “hug your little hero.”
She and Taylor were just reaching for each other when Barry Rickreiner squawked, “Get away from me!”
She looked over her shoulder. He had been marching toward his El Camino, running his mouth, but now he found his way blocked, first one direction, then the other, defiantly, by the barefoot kid in the filthy cargo shorts. Just as Taylor grasped her hands, she stiffened. Paired with the action of harassing Rickreiner, the kid’s face made sense.
Patience Goodgolly!
The sheriff pulled away and sprinted.
“What is this shit?” BARRY HER squawked. “Get away from me!”
Now the backpack dropped to show the sawed-off shotgun. Then the girl showed its purpose. He recoiled, stumbling on a fire hose as she trained her weapon on him at point-blank range.
“Who the fuck are you?”
She held the shotgun steady. He backpedaled toward empty space, starting his El Camino remotely with a key. She stalked, culling him from the innocent.
“Patience.”
“The fuck?”
“Patience,” she was telling him a second time when he turned and ran for his vehicle. Her gun barrel followed, aimed from the hip. Coming at a cross angle, Sheriff Kick launched herself and dove, twisting through the shotgun’s path, ducking her head as she tackled BARRY HER out from under the blast, feeling shot rip through her hip and lower ribs in the same instant when the El Camino exploded.
Except for steam hissing high into the air from the Broadcaster building, there followed a ringing, sweltering silence. Sheriff Kick half rolled and tried to rise. But Deputy Luck had corralled Patience, who was not resisting.
She fell back. As BARRY HER struggled beneath her, this was what she stared at: black ash and white vapor climbing in a harsh blue sky.
EPILOGUE
The miscarriage occurred in her surgical recovery room at 4:47 the next morning while she was alone watching cable news on mute, specifically during a commercial for a device that allowed you to pedal your feet in tiny circles from a sitting position while you watched TV.
The surprise event began as a swoon that she thought was exasperation with human weakness, but then it took her deeper than that, into a full minute of synesthetic heartburn that tasted like coyotes howling.
She thought, Uh-oh.
Heidi, your wires are crossing big-time.
She turned off the TV while experiencing a cramp that bit just like a menstrual cramp except it hung on.
Then she felt a deep inner spasm, followed by a slow, trailing wetness that when she looked—incompletely able to bend over her shattered rib and repaired skin—had carried out of her a blurrily shaped magenta clot the size of a soybean.
She wept until just after sunrise, when a nurse came to bring her crackers and apple juice for breakfast, then cleaned her thighs, changed her underpants, gown, and sheet, fixed her with a pad, and took her baby away.
* * *
Her shotgun wounds, the pesticide she may have ingested, the heat, the stress—one of those, or some combination, or all of them together could explain it, Dr. Patel told her. Or possibly some other cause entirely. There was no way to be certain.
Later in the day, she had visitors, each one bringing something she could focus on. Denise came by before her dispatch shift and smacked a kiss onto her forehead and delivered to her, first, Leroy Fanta’s file folder of Jim Golly’s letters to the editor, and then a joke.
“How do the Golly brothers tell when a girl is old enough to breed?”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“You do. They make her stand in a barrel. If her chin is over the top, she’s old enough. If she isn’t, they cut the barrel down a bit.”
“Oh, God, that hurts. You are so bad, Denise.”
“Builds scar tissue, hon,” Denise told her. “How we women survive.”
It was the subtext of the ugly joke that made them both quiet for a while. They had no place to put Patience Goodgolly, no relatives to take her, no confession or expression of remorse, nothing beyond the eerie calm yet angry stare of an abused young woman that the sheriff had first seen when Patience explained in German that she was walking on Liberty Hill Road because she couldn’t fly.
At least she hadn’t killed anyone.
At least she wasn’t dead like Kim Maybee.
At least, according to security footage, she had gotten drunk, played with dolls, plucked out her mustache hairs, drank soda, rolled bowling balls, and had sex that she wanted with a boy her age—kind of a scrambled, high-speed childhood, it seemed, before she planned to pay back Barry Rickreiner for the pain he had caused. She would have to testify against him. Based on motive and opportunity, she would likely face charges for stabbing her father-uncle, Jon Golly. It wasn’t clear yet whether Faith could have done it, and there were no other suspects. Perhaps the boy in the security footage would know something, but so far Patience either didn’t know or wouldn’t say who he was or how he was involved. He had been seen last night wearing her dress and traveling on her horse through a pasture in Richland County. Deputies there hadn’t found him yet.
“So I read your mind,” Denise said finally.
“You are way too good at that.”
“I took a detour coming in to work and stopped by your neighbors the Glicks. I kind of had to beg them, but Dawdy Glick made the call, and he said that for now, yes, until we figure things out, Patience can stay with them…”
* * *
But he gave himself away by bringing her a cold Mountain Dew, which she pretended to drink while he filled her in on the aftermath yesterday at Golly’s compound, as he had been calling it. The dog had been a problem, he told her remotely. She got his drift and didn’t pursue. He kept talking.
“EMS tore the muffler off the ambulance getting Faith Golly out of there.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“She didn’t make it.”
“I know.”
“I had to.”
“Yes.”
“But there will be questions.”
“There will.”
They were quiet awhile. She pretended another sip of Dew.
“People are real hurt about Grape Fanta,” Bender went on finally, his difficulty with the statement showing that he was one of them.
“I am too,” she said. “The Bad Axe will never be the same.”
“Heck…” Bender was struggling, his thin, badly shaven throat pulsing. “Heck, my birth was announced in the Broadcaster. My marriage. My wife’s passing. Janice always loved to read Grape’s…”
He had to stop.
The sheriff said, “He touched a lot of lives. In the end, I think he saved some.”
“There’s a goddamn bunch of bones in there,” Bender said in almost a moan. “Bodies same as poor Fanta’s under them vegetable gardens. He was a stone-cold killer and a goddamn cannibal until he found a better way.”
It was her turn to struggle. She would never stop seeing gas-splashed Taylor in Jim Golly’s grip, her child’s terror-stiffened face, then his pell-mell sprint toward her with madness and flames tight on his heels. She imagined the moment had been burned into the memories of the millions who by now had seen it worldwide.
Then Bender said, “You won’t be surprised that suddenly a certain kind of folks are coming forward to tell us they’ve seen Faith Golly driving Hubbard’s truck all over for the last couple months and felt something might be wrong. Or to tell us that they’ve known for years that those sod buildings were back in there and something bad might be going on. They had trespassed through there, hunting or mushrooming or joyriding on snowcats, and they had got shot at, or chased by that dog, and now they’re proud to be part of the story. Just this morning some old guy called us from Chaseburg and said Faith Golly fits the description of the woman who has been picking up his recycled newspapers for years. On the subject of tips, I went and spoke to the Amish bishop, Stoltzfus. I said you people need to talk to us. See something, say something. How he answered was, ‘Ja, that might be a good idea.’ Which in Amish I think means, We’ll keep minding our own business.”
Bender stared at his hands and seemed to be gritting his teeth. Enough silence passed that she went back to skimming Jim Golly’s letters. The man wanted to be heard but not caught. His more recent letters, probably once he started killing people and using them for fertilizer, were salted with misdirection in case someone came looking. They ship my grain to China… He grew no grain. The great river I see from my bluff used to be wild and clear, not dammed up and muddy… His sod home was on low ground thirty miles from the Mississippi.
After a few quiet minutes, Bender recovered to complete his report. A volunteer group was heading out to retrieve Fanta’s body. Vigdis Torkelson had begun making memorial arrangements and she figured the event would fill Farmstead’s baseball stadium if they could get a permit. Until the sheriff was stronger, Bender would be directing the interrogations of Patience and Jon Golly, and organizing a forensic search of Golly’s compound. At last he dropped a sour little Benderism: “I guess we’ll find out just how hard the top job really is.”
She smiled at him.
“Well, when you find out, Dick, let me know, OK?”
* * *
Yesterday’s remarkable display of team spirit aside, Lyndsey Luck wasn’t feeling well enough yet to work a duty shift, but after Bender was gone she stopped by in jeans and her DEATH ROE SURVIVOR T-shirt. She brought a flower arrangement that she must have driven sixty miles round trip to acquire. The sheriff and her young deputy had their first real conversation.
“What I wonder,” Deputy Luck said as they concluded, with the sheriff’s family waiting in the corridor, “is, like, I’m starting out, and things just seem so complicated, and every week stuff seems to get even more complicated, and I’m starting to wonder when I’ll ever stop feeling like a rookie. You know?”
The sheriff thought for a moment.
“I do know. Yes. So, when you become sure that things are truly far more complicated than they ever seemed when you started… that’s when you’ll know you’re not a rookie anymore.”
Just then Dylan burst into the room ahead of Taylor, shouting, “Mommy! All the stupid signs are gone!”
“All the stupid signs are gone,” Taylor added.
Harley confirmed.
“Every last one. You are now officially unopposed. It’s a couple months early, but congratulations on your reelection.”
* * *
Through the nine more long days that she had to wait before going home, the heat wave persisted while her department’s investigation proceeded and the gears of justice turned slowly and squeakily. She mixed work-related visits with family time, and between naps she spent hours on the phone. The remains of three bodies were recovered, then five, then six. Father Paul McCartney was helping with the effort to identify those he could. Denise and Bender gave her updates. District Attorney Baird Sipple had called her. Pending results of the ongoing investigation into Barry Rickreiner’s alleged crimes, he was working on charges of murder (Kim Maybee), statutory rape (Patience), destruction of police property (Bender’s Avenger), and he was considering a charge of attempted murder (Lyndsey Luck, via poison meant for Patience). But he had mostly called to bark at the sheriff, to say that he was countermanding her promise of immunity for Jon Golly, that every scrap of information Golly had provided would be disallowed in court, and to scold her for thinking on her feet in the heat of battle.
She didn’t care. Lives were saved. Anyway, Jon Golly had heard his Miranda rights, and in an effort to secure himself a deal for what he knew about Rickreiner and his brother, he was telling his story all over again. The sheriff read transcripts and listened to recordings that Bender played for her.
“What I don’t understand,” she told him, “is why the Golly brothers still owned that land at all. This whole time, Randall Rickreiner’s heirs, Babette and Barry, still had a legal lien on it? Right? But they never collected on the lien?”
“Legal is debatable,” Bender said. “I talked to Kevin Smallwood, Babette’s attorney. The debt was all in one brother’s name, Jon’s, and the lien was on joint property. Smallwood told Babette years ago that it probably wouldn’t hold up in court.”
“But the Golly brothers never knew that.”
“Of course not,” Bender said. “But eventually that girl got old enough and Barry figured out how to use the threat of it.”
“Do we know whose daughter she is?”
“Faith’s,” he said. “By one brother or the other.” He seemed embarrassed. “I asked a bunch of times. Jon Golly truly doesn’t know.” He moved on. “He said Faith hated both of them and wanted her girl back. From that I gather that she was out looking for Daniel Greevey, who got away from her and Jim, when she came upon the buggy crash, where you were, and then the scene at the farm. It must have been obvious to her that Patience had beered her courage up and stabbed Jon. So Faith staged that crime scene and took the girl to Derp Hubbard’s empty house for safekeeping. She hoped to blame the gimlet to Jon Golly on Greevey, and blame Greevey’s gunshot wounds on Jon Golly, like they got into something together. I guess that’s why she dumped a shovel and that rifle down the outhouse. When we get the ballistics, we’ll find out if that’s the r
ifle they used on Greevey. Then all she had to do was let Jim die of whatever the hell his problem was, and she’d have her little girl back at the end of it.”
Let Jim die…
Faith had not survived to tell her story, and Jim Golly was ashes. There would be no postmortem. But was it possible that his sickness wasn’t from bacterial tick bites and infected deer prions, which was what he complained of in his letters? Was it possible, part of the pattern, that Faith had been poisoning a man who abused her?
“Dick,” she said, on a hunch, “has Jon Golly said why he booby-trapped his house and his barn? Maybe Faith was trying to get at him?”
Bender appeared exhausted as he sorted through his pages of notes. “No,” he concluded, still scanning. “I thought of that, but no.”
After a minute, he summarized, his voice wooden with disgust.
“Patience had started resisting Rickreiner, refusing to go with him ‘for a hamburger,’ sassing off and acting like she might tell someone. So Rickreiner started coming around and threatening her and Jon Golly.” He flipped pages. “That was what the booby traps were about. But once Rickreiner started running for sheriff, Jon Golly was afraid the guy would kill them both to keep his fairy tale alive. Golly finally told us yesterday that he hid some motion-activated cameras. We’ll look through the footage.”
“When you do, you’ll see Barry Rickreiner putting pesticide in the buttermilk,” she predicted. “To shut up Patience, same as he did Kim Maybee. That’s the piece the DA needs.”
“We’ll look,” Bender promised.
The sheriff closed her eyes in anger.
“Sex crimes, exploitation of underage girls. We’ve been down this road in the Bad Axe before.”
“That’s what makes it a road,” Bender said.
Bad Moon Rising Page 20