The Highway

by C. J. Box

  He didn’t respond. Just stood there.

  “Ronald, I know you’re there. I know you can hear me, you rude son of a buck. I know you’re right there.”

  He nodded to himself as if answering.

  “Did you fill my car up with gas like you promised? If we’re going to have a nice Thanksgiving I need to go into town and stock up. I don’t want to run out of gas, Ronald.”

  Then, “Are you going on another run? Is that why you started that truck? Does that mean you won’t even be here to share Thanksgiving with your old ma? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Pergram reached out with his free hand and placed it on a column of newspapers, magazines, and folded empty brown grocery sacks that rose from floor to ceiling. He put some weight into it, and it leaned a little. Dust motes floated down from the top level into the shaft of light from the front-room window. He leaned the stack toward the open aisle that led to her chair in the alcove of debris.

  “Ronald, what are you doing? You be careful there.”

  “What did I say about all this shit?” he said finally.

  “I’ll clean it out. I told you I’d get rid of it.”

  He sighed.

  “What about Thanksgiving, Ronald?”

  “I guess you’ll be able to spend it with JoBeth.”

  She paused.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I guess you’ll be able to spend this Thanksgiving with JoBeth, Ma.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Tell her I never could stand her.”

  She gasped, speechless for once.

  “Tell her I couldn’t stand her friends, neither.”

  “Ronald, don’t say that. Don’t say it.”

  He put more weight behind his hand against the stack. A few of the newspapers from the top fell off into the aisle.

  “This place is a fire hazard,” he said. “How many times have I told you that?” Mimicking her tone and cadence.

  “Ronald, be careful. That ain’t funny.”

  “It’s kind of funny,” he said as an aside. Then, “You told that highway trooper you thought there was something wrong with me. That I was up to something.”

  “What highway trooper?”

  “The one who pulled you over a few years ago. Legerski.”

  “I don’t even remember, I really don’t.”

  “That being the case,” he said, “I wonder how many other folks you talked to about me you can’t remember, either? Just because what you say doesn’t mean nothing to me, that doesn’t mean other people might not listen to you. Ever think about that?”

  He shoved hard and the column collapsed, sealing the aisle.

  “Ronald!”

  All he could see of her back there among the garbage was the top of her silver head. It rocked back and forth as she yelled.

  “Ronald, I told you that would happen. Now you’ve got to help dig me out of here. Some of them things fell on my legs.”

  He stepped back and reached into his breast pocket with his free hand and withdrew a book of matches that read JUBITZ TRUCK STOP/PORTLAND OREGON. That was one of the good ones, he thought. No lot lizards there.

  He opened the cover, fingered back a match, and rubbed it across the strike strip. The smell of sulfur was sharp and a curl of smoke hung in the stagnant air.

  “What are you doing, Ronald?” she asked, finally scared.

  He tipped the book so the flame spread to all the matches. It flared and he nearly dropped it because the heat singed the tips of his fingers. Then he flicked it toward the fallen stack.

  “Ronald…”

  He backed out the door and could already feel the heat on his face.

  * * *

  He checked his side mirrors as he ran through the low gears and the Peterbilt pulled away. The mirrors were filled with flame and roiling black curls of smoke coming out through the windows and doors of the old house. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before the Buick went up with it and rendered any hair or fiber evidence to ash. Already, the dense Russian olive bushes on the side of the house were crackling with flame.

  * * *

  Pergram slowed as he approached the junction to the highway, checking both lanes. He took the turn wide as he had hundreds of times, careful not to let the end of his trailer clip a delineator post, and pointed the snub nose of the Peterbilt south toward Gardiner.

  Looking for that fat lady cop from Helena.

  39.

  11:46 A.M., Wednesday November 21

  THE YELLOWSTONE QUILT SHOP was a former residence on Scott Street, the main road through town. It stood between a white-water raft outfitter company closed for the winter and a pawn shop with a sign that read GUNS! It was a neat Victorian, narrow with a steep roof of wooden shingles and a covered wooden porch on the front. A hanging sign made of quilt squares hung in the window and indicated it was open.

  Cassie parked the Expedition along Scott Street in front of the shop and climbed out and brushed crumbs from her lap and the front of her coat. She’d filled the tank and eaten a half-dozen miniature chocolate donuts at a convenience store near the bridge that crossed the Yellowstone River. The clerk behind the counter, a bald man with a full beard who wore suspenders, said he’d never heard of the quilt shop. A woman customer behind her chewed the man out for being oblivious and gave Cassie directions.

  She could hear the roar of the river behind the row of shops. It was far below them in the canyon, but the sound of rushing water carried.

  White lace curtains on the inside gave it a homey, quaint feel, Cassie thought. It stood out from the elk antler look of the rest of the town. The shop, like all the buildings on the block, was close to the street. Only a narrow strip of brown grass behind the white picket fence separated if from the sidewalk.

  A small bell rang as she pushed through the door. The shop was small and filled with fabrics on tables and displayed on the walls. A slim dark-haired woman looked up and smiled shyly from behind a sewing machine at an antique desk at the front. The machine she was working with went silent.

  “Good thing you made it,” the woman said. “I was planning to close at noon today for the holiday. But not to worry. You can browse as long as you like. The fabric on the tables is marked twenty percent off, and I’m running a nice special on fat quarters.”

  Cassie was embarrassed not to know what a fat quarter was and didn’t ask. She always felt guilty about knowing so little about quilting and other sewing crafts. Instead, she squared her shoulders and said, “Are you the owner?”

  “Yes.”

  Sally Legerski looked gentle and almost elegant, Cassie thought. She had high cheekbones, a wide mouth, and large blue eyes and she was slim and petite. Cassie could see very little of Edna in her facial features or build. Although she guessed Sally to be in her late forties, it wasn’t hard to imagine that she’d been quite a beauty in her teens and twenties. Quite the contrast with Edna.

  Cassie dug into her purse and withdrew her wallet badge and let it flop open.

  “Mrs. Legerski, I’m Investigator Cassandra Dewell from the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department. I’m in the area investigating the disappearance of two teenage girls last night and I hope you can answer a couple of questions.”

  “Oh, dear.” Cassie could tell it was an expression of concern for the girls, not alarm that Sally was being questioned. Cassie had deliberately not mentioned Cody. For some reason, she didn’t think that would help her.

  “Two girls from Colorado on their way to Helena were last heard from after they passed through town. Since then, we’ve not been able to locate them or their vehicle. It’s been over eighteen hours.”

  “I see,” Sally said, obviously puzzled where the line of inquiry would go from there. After a beat, she asked, “Are you wondering if I saw them?”

  Cassie raised her eyebrows. “Did you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sally said. “It’s possible, though. There is quite a lot of
traffic that passes down that street out there right outside my window. You know, people going to and from the park. Right now it’s very quiet, but in the summer it gets kind of ridiculous. It gets noisy and I tend to just tune it out. What time did you say they came through town?”

  Cassie checked her notes. “After nine.”

  “P.M.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m sure I didn’t see them. I was home by then. I live up on the hill where I can’t see the road. I hope someone saw them, though, and you’re able to find them. This whole town is dead by that time in the winter. I get so worried about young girls driving alone on the highway. Are you asking me because they were quilters or something?”

  Cassie felt a flush of embarrassment in her cheeks.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Sally Legerski nodded, and said, “Well, okay,” as a polite way of saying, Then why are you here?

  Cassie took a deep breath and chanced a concerned smile. She said, “I should probably just come clean with you.”

  Sally cocked her head slightly to the side, puzzled.

  “I want to ask you some questions about your ex-husband, Trooper Rick Legerski.”

  At the sound of his name, Sally’s eyes and expression iced up. It was a visceral reaction, Cassie thought. Sally pushed back from the table and folded her arms over her breasts.

  “What about him?”

  “Mind if I sit down?” Cassie asked, gesturing to a folding chair on the side of the table.

  Sally nodded her okay.

  Cassie sat down so the two were much closer, so it would seem more like a conversation than an interrogation.

  “I met with him this morning about the missing girls since he’s the only patrolman on this stretch of highway,” Cassie said. “I guess we didn’t hit it off very well. I came away with the feeling he was holding something back on me. I got the feeling there were things going on behind the scenes he didn’t want to tell me about. I’m new to this job and I’m a stranger down here in Park County. So I was wondering…” she faltered. What is it exactly she wanted to know? Did she want an ex-wife to dish dirt on her ex-husband? What was the point of that? To get revenge on the man who called her a horrible name?

  “Let me guess where you met,” Sally said, “The First National Bar in Emigrant, right?”

  Cassie nodded.

  “And was the owner there? A tall creepy guy who kind of hovered around the whole time saying inappropriate things?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Yes, Jimmy,” she said, and her top lip curled slightly as she said the name. “If I ever see Jimmy again for the rest of my life it’ll be too soon.”

  “I didn’t like him, either,” Cassie said.

  “He’s bad news. I always hated going in there, even with Rick. Those two…” She didn’t finish, but looked up suddenly at Cassie. She seemed startled at her own vehemence. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re dredging up some bad memories for me.”

  “That’s not my intention,” Cassie said. Although it was.

  “What do you want to know about Rick?”

  “I’m not sure,” Cassie said. “I guess I want to know what kind of man he is.”

  A shadow passed over Sally’s face and it turned into a mask.

  She said, “I’ve closed that chapter in my life and I really don’t want to open it up again. I’ve moved on, and I’m not the kind of woman who gossips about her ex-husband. I’ve got no respect for women who trash their ex-husbands as if they didn’t bear any responsibility for choosing them in the first place. I hope that’s not what you expected of me.”

  “I’m not meaning to pry.” Cassie took a breath, unsure how to proceed.

  “It sounded like you were.”

  “No. Let’s keep this entirely professional and not personal. You were with him as he advanced in rank and moved around the state. So he must be a good highway patrolman?”

  She spoke as if reciting. “Rick was a great law enforcement officer. He worked hard, put in more than his share of hours, and he didn’t cut many corners. He likes to throw his weight around a little—make sure everyone knows who’s boss—but that isn’t unusual with some state troopers. He maintained that it was part of his job. After all, those men are usually out there on the highway all alone. They don’t have partners and in a state like Montana, backup could be twenty minutes away. Asserting authority defuses situations that might become volatile.

  “Believe me,” she continued, “moving around the State of Montana with him through the years, I met a lot of highway patrolmen. I guess what I’m telling you without saying it very well is his job comes first.”

  Cassie nodded for her to go on.

  She didn’t. “Are we done here?”

  “Yes. Unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

  “I really don’t. It’s personal.”

  Cassie was ashamed of herself. She didn’t know what direction to go. In her mind was a furious tangle of different threads and none of them came together in any logical way. There was Cody’s disappearance, the presence of the church compound, the cigarette butts, the rebuffs by both Legerski and the Park County sheriff, the missing girls out there …

  Sally said, “No one can ever really understand what goes on in the marriage of other people without being there. It’s the most complicated thing in the world. I’ve completely stopped trying, you know? There was this wonderful couple who live right behind me. Married forty-three years. Every time I saw them they doted on each other. The man, Walt, called her ‘honeybunch’ instead of Wilma, her name. I really envied them. Then one day, he says he’s going out for groceries and he never comes back. She won’t talk about what happened, and I have no idea.”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “You always hear the arguments are about money or sex, and that’s probably true. But sometimes it’s just about a bad vibe. Sometimes you can look across the table at someone you’ve been with for years and realize to your horror you know nothing about them. That they are living another life right in front of your eyes. That you have absolutely no idea what he’s doing out there away from home and he won’t even offer a fake explanation why sometimes he’ll roll in looking flushed and used up.”

  Cassie felt her scalp twitch.

  Sally said after a beat and without prompting, “I’ll tell you one thing: he keeps some strange company for a cop.”

  “You mean Jimmy?”

  “Him, too,” Sally said.

  Before Cassie could ask, the silence of the shop was filled with the clatter of a clattering diesel engine outside on the street.

  “This is what I meant earlier,” Sally said, raising her voice to a near shout to be heard, “it’s a great location to catch the tourist traffic but a lousy one when you’re trying to concentrate or carry on a conversation. Especially when it’s those big trucks.”

  Cassie followed the shop owner’s line of sight and turned in her chair. A massive black truck with a long silver trailer was right outside on the other side of the Expedition. It was stopped in the street. She leaned down and tried to see the driver through the lace curtains but the cab was too high from her angle. The truck had stopped in the street near Cassie’s Expedition. She waited for the truck to move on so they could resume their conversation.

  Cassie stood up and walked around the fabric tables to the window and pushed aside the lace and looked outside. A stout, heavyset man in jeans and an oversized tan coat pulled himself up into the cab of the truck and shut the door. She couldn’t see his face or even a quarter profile—only a band of light-colored hair beneath the band of a greasy cap. Why had he stopped and gotten out of his truck?

  With a hiss of air, the truck lurched and rolled away.

  “What was that guy up to?” Cassie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sally said from behind the table. “I can’t see.”

  The clatter of the truck subsided as it vanished from sight down the street. It made a wide turn
on the end of the block and Cassie strained to see the license plate but all she could discern was it was commercial and from Montana.

  She said, “I’ll be right back,” and went out the front door. The bell rang as she stepped out onto the wooden porch. Although she could no longer see it, she could track the black truck by its sound. It had turned and turned again, and was coursing up the next street over, laboring back the direction it had come.

  As she walked out to the Ford, she unbuttoned her coat and reached back and rested her hand on the butt of her Glock.

  She peered into the vehicle through the passenger side window and could see something on the driver’s seat. She hadn’t locked her door and someone—no doubt the truck driver—had opened it and placed it inside.

  Cassie walked around the car and looked in. On top of the seat was a misshapen white square package. She pulled on her left glove and opened the door to retrieve it.

  Three square white envelopes bound by a rubber band. She recognized them as the kind that covered CD or DVD disks. And on the white smooth surface of the outside envelope was spidery writing: There at the Schweitzer place.

  40.

  12:51 P.M., Wednesday, November 21

  CASSIE RETURNED TO THE QUILT shop with her briefcase and the package just as Sally Legerski rotated the hanging sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. She paused on the porch but Sally waved to her through the window to come in.

  “That’s for my customers,” Sally said as Cassie closed the door behind her. “What happened out there?”

  “That truck driver left me something.”

  “You’re kidding,” Sally said. “Do you know him?”

  Cassie stopped. She hadn’t even considered it. “No. But it’s just weird because I’ve been thinking a lot about long-haul truck drivers lately.”

  Sally nodded, understandably unsure what she meant.

  “He left this,” Cassie said, gesturing with the envelopes.

  “Oh, my.”

  “Can I use the table here to check them out?”