Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Did you ask for help? Do you know if one of your brothers asked Dr. Dennen for help?” she whispered as she patted the horse’s neck.

  The boy shook his head.

  Madison should have asked him about his father’s alibi, she should have asked him about the previous day. Instead something else fluttered into her chest. “How many of you are there? How many brothers and sisters?”

  Madison could hear Brown and Tanner speaking behind her by the barn door and tried to gauge their distance and whether they were coming closer. Tanner had eluded her question, he had not answered, and as Madison turned to look there were only shadows behind the cabin’s windows.

  It seemed as if Samuel would not, or could not, answer. And then—when Madison had lost hope and the silence between them had stretched to over a minute—the boy dragged the tip of his stick through the mud by the horse’s hooves.

  The number remained etched in the dirt for a heartbeat and then the boy scraped it away.

  “How many under eighteen years old?”

  It occurred to Madison then that she should stop that very instant. What would happen to the boy if the father found out he was telling her anything at all about the family?

  Samuel thought about it for a while, and Madison realized that he was counting in his head. People’s ages, people’s names. At last, he scribbled.

  And just as quickly that number was scraped off too.

  “Thank you. How old are you, Samuel?”

  How much time did they have? What should she ask him?

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Anything I could help you with?”

  “There’s something you should know,” Brown said to Jeb Tanner as they left the barn and he paused by the door. It was a kind of confidence, not quite a secret but definitely something that should only pass between the two men.

  When he had the man’s attention, Brown continued and his voice was soft in the open yard. “Chief Sangster is going around telling people that you argued with both victims before they were murdered. With the doctor because he wanted you to take your kids to the clinic. And with Edwards because of I don’t know what business in the man’s store. Seems to me he just hates your stinking guts and is trying to find evidence against you.”

  Tanner blinked. “He’s been saying that, has he?”

  “Yes. My partner and I think we should look elsewhere, but the questions have been raised. Is it true you had a confrontation with the doctor and with Ty Edwards?”

  Tanner’s eyes were pinpoints of hard blue. “You live in a place long enough and you’ll end up disagreeing with this person or that person, Detective. That’s just human nature. The doctor was obsessed with talking to my children, with finding fault with how I’m raising my family. He’s got his own ideas . . . had his own ideas about how a family should be run, and I have mine. I don’t go around to his place telling him to take away his kids’ computers and their televisions, and he shouldn’t come to my home to tell me how to raise my flesh and blood.”

  Tanner shook his head. “Ty Edwards sold me a cracked tire gauge. Probably didn’t realize he had. We argued about it and he wouldn’t exchange it. I left. He was a decent man, and I’m sorry he’s dead, but I’m not going to kill a man over a cracked tire gauge. Do you know anybody who would?”

  Brown smiled: Jeb Tanner’s questions were never straightforward. “You would be surprised,” he said.

  There was no sun in the sky but the low clouds were washed-out white and heavy, and they filled the sky from one end of the horizon to the other.

  “There’s something else,” Brown said, “and there’s not much I can do about it . . .”

  Jeb Tanner’s temper was a foul thing, and Brown knew that—within ten minutes of meeting the man. He had no problem nudging him into a fit, and yet he didn’t want to provoke him into taking it out on his family.

  “There was blood recovered at the scene of one of the murders, and it doesn’t match the victim’s. Chief Sangster is working on a warrant to get you tested.”

  Brown wanted—needed—Tanner’s reaction to this more than he needed his alibi. A DNA test in court in the hands of the right prosecutor is as good as a color picture of the defendant at the crime scene.

  Tanner’s sleeves were rolled up and his arms were bare. He didn’t appear to feel the cold at all. His skin, which was February pale, was crisscrossed by old scars. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you might want to get that test done and get Sangster off your back.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It’s a distraction and I have a double murder to deal with. If you did the test for exclusion purposes we could all get on with our jobs, and the chief would have to stop harassing you.”

  Tanner bent down and picked up a handful of dry earth. He crumbled it and let it slip through his fingers. The breeze picked it up and it blew away.

  “There’s going to be a snowstorm, Detective. You’d better get back into town, you don’t want to get stuck up here on Jackknife. People have been known to get lost in the whiteout a couple of yards from their own front doors. Never made it back.”

  “That’s a shame,” Brown said, and they both knew what he meant.

  “I don’t trust the chief, Detective Brown, and quite frankly I don’t really know what to make of you and your partner with the knife skills. I think it would be a dangerous thing to give the chief anything that he wants, because he will try and crucify me with it, even if I’m innocent.”

  “You have an alibi for both murders.”

  “I do, but I wouldn’t be the first innocent man put in jail.”

  “If you do the test, I’ll get Sangster off your back myself.”

  “You’ll go back to Seattle, and the chief will find a way to twist the science to fit his purpose, as most men like him do. He’s a liar in a world of liars.”

  Brown couldn’t disagree with him; today they all lived in that world.

  Madison put her hand in her pocket and extracted one of her business cards—she always made sure she had some ready for that particular purpose—and then she stopped. Even if she managed to pass her card to the boy, he wouldn’t have any way to call her because they didn’t have a telephone; he wouldn’t be able to write to her because he would have to mail the letters. Someone had already tried that—and he or she had needed to resort to cloth and charcoal.

  “I’m staying in Ludlow, at the Miller house. Alice Madison.” Steps were coming up behind them. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  The boy didn’t reply. The stick carved stripes and crosses in the mud, and then Brown said, “We’re done here.” And there was nothing else she could do.

  Samuel’s eyes had glazed over and he looked as hollow as his brothers had. Madison understood—it was the look of someone who doesn’t want to draw any attention to himself, who wants to blend into the landscape and disappear.

  “Thank you for your help, Mr. Tanner,” she forced herself to say.

  A single snowflake floated down between them and onto the frozen ground.

  “They’re coming back. They’re in the car. They’re leaving the yard right now.”

  The SWAT officers followed the pickup’s journey, and as the car reached the forest they backed away from the tree line. Once far enough away from the edge, they stood and dashed back to the truck. The dirt road was so difficult to navigate that the officers were the first to arrive.

  The drive was quiet. There was much to absorb, and both Brown and Madison needed the silence to metabolize what they had learned on the farm, almost as the brain needs sleep to process the memories of the day. They just exchanged one look when the pickup left the dirt path and turned into the concrete road that would take them back to Ludlow: they were leaving a fragment of the county that existed in a different time zone—and it was not about the lack of electricity or running water. Jackknife Farm lived in medieval times because of Jeb Tanner: nothing had troubled Madison as mu
ch as the lack of the unsettled energy of youth in Tanner’s sons. She had seen four of them, but somewhere on the farm there were other children. Many others. If she closed her eyes she could still see the number carved in the mud. Twelve.

  Madison knew Jeb Tanner’s kind, knew what that type of man could mean in the life of a child. How easy that life could be twisted and bent out of shape by someone like him.

  She needed light, she needed the memory of something good, and her thoughts went back to the boy, Samuel, holding his little brother and the feel of the horse’s brow under her fingertips—the coarse, short chestnut hair. Just then, Madison reached into her coat; there was the black feather she had picked up in the farmyard. It had found its way into her pocket, and for no logical reason at all Madison was glad of it.

  Chapter 35

  Samuel had been the first to hear it: the sound of engines in the distance. A car, maybe two. Someone was coming. Someone had driven through the gate and onto their land. As far as he knew they were not expecting anyone, and the notion of another break in the routine almost made him dizzy with expectation.

  It happened quickly. His father sent everyone inside, except for the four of them—David had been playing on the steps and his father had scooped him up before Abigail or Elisabeth could take him. Luke and Jonah had come back with their rifles and they had all waited in the barn to see who would appear on their doorstep.

  “Stay here,” his father had said, and Samuel had obeyed.

  The voices had drifted into the barn and the boy had crept to the door, leaning against it, watching the visitors as the argument escalated. He couldn’t guess what they were arguing about and there were words he didn’t understand at all. He had seen one of the police officers before, but not the other ones, and the pair who were not wearing a uniform were nearly exotic to the boy for the quiet way they appeared not to be concerned by his father’s temper. They stood and listened and talked back, when anyone in their right mind would have shut up or fled altogether.

  Occasionally Samuel had seen women he was not related to before—acquaintances of his father who had come by the farm, like Mrs. Clay, who smelled like cookies, or Mrs. Taylor, who sold them propane—but he had never seen anyone like her. The woman in his yard looked his father in the eye and spoke to him like an equal. Samuel could read his father’s mood from the angle of his shoulders and the stiffness in his back, and he didn’t like what he saw.

  When some of the visitors left and the others moved toward the barn, he backed away from the door. He was grateful to take David away because the boy was beginning to cry—he gave him to Abigail, ducked her questions, and returned to the barn. He was grateful that no one looked at him or spoke to him and that to them, even to the two strangers, he was no more than a bale of hay.

  Samuel tried to follow the conversation, but there was too much that appeared to belong in a world he had no experience of, and all of it made him nervous.

  Were they after his father? What had he done?

  He considered it, and the answer was relatively simple; nevertheless, for Samuel it carried the weight of his whole world. His father could have done anything, anything at all. If laws existed that could stop him, the boy didn’t know about them.

  Moods ebbed and flowed. When Samuel prepared the bucket for the horses’ feeder, he felt reassured that things in the barn had mellowed.

  “Your horses are pretty,” said the woman leaning against the paddock’s rail.

  Samuel was only going to finish pouring the feed into the bin and leave, he wasn’t going to look at her or speak to her, except that he did look. He looked, and in the palm of her hand there was a raven feather.

  He had asked for a sign. He had asked for a way to tell good people from bad people. In the palm of this woman he had never seen before, who had come to him from a world of killers, beggars, and thieves, Samuel saw what he needed to see.

  Chapter 36

  Brown and Madison radioed Chief Sangster, and the cruiser and pickup headed straight for the Clay residence. The SWAT truck hit the highway at full legal speed on its way out of Colville County even before the others had reached the turn of the Clays’ driveway.

  By the time the chief rang the doorbell the snowflakes were falling like so much shredded confetti, and it was clear that very soon no one would be going anywhere.

  The Clays lived in the current time zone and whatever it was that had cemented a friendship with Jeb Tanner was not immediately visible. Their home looked like any other in Ludlow, and they certainly lived their lives with the benefits of electricity and running water. They talked in the kitchen while the deputies waited outside; a small flat-screen television sat on the counter next to the blender. The odds of the Clays not knowing about the doctor’s murder when Tanner had turned up to help fix their truck were pretty much infinitesimal.

  “We went to school together,” Will Clay said. “Lost touch for a while but when he came back to town with his family, we picked it up again. Jeb does things his own way but that’s not a crime in a free country, is it?”

  Will Clay and his wife worked in Sherman Falls but had kept the family home in Ludlow. The investigators had to consider that Clay would tell Tanner of their visit and thus appearances had to be kept up: Brown and Sangster ignored each other, and Madison conducted the interview.

  “No, sir, it sure isn’t,” she said. “Have you heard about the death of Dr. Dennen and the shooting in the square yesterday?”

  “Yes, we were shocked.”

  Mrs. Clay looked genuinely upset; she fluttered around the modern kitchen making coffee and getting out mugs. She was willowy and blonde where her husband was stocky and brown haired.

  “You didn’t go to the vigil?”

  “No, car broke down the night before.”

  “Right. And Mr. Tanner came to help you fix it.”

  “Right.”

  “How did you call him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clay knew exactly what Madison had meant. His wife had turned away to busy herself in the pantry.

  “If your car broke down in the evening, how did you contact Mr. Tanner to come and help you the following morning? We understand that he doesn’t own a telephone.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Maybe he owns a cell phone for emergencies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then how did he know to come and help you?”

  “He just happened to come by. He sometimes comes over for a chat on a Saturday morning, and when he stopped by yesterday he helped me with the truck. He’s very good at fixing things.”

  “That’s what we heard,” Madison said. “What time did he arrive?”

  The Clays looked at each other. “About ten?” he said.

  “About ten,” Mrs. Clay said to Madison.

  “And when did he leave?”

  “Around one o’clock,” Mr. Clay said.

  “And you managed to fix the truck?”

  “Oh yes, wouldn’t want to be without it in this,” and he waved at the window. The snow had begun to stick.

  “Why are you asking us about Jeb?” Mrs. Clay said.

  “We’re trying to work out where everybody was who wasn’t at the vigil,” Madison replied.

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” she said. “It’s going to be some crazy person, like the ones who shoot up the schools.”

  “We’re keeping an open mind,” Madison said in her friendliest voice. “But we have to ask questions in order to exclude people from the investigation.”

  “By the same account you should be asking where we were yesterday, shouldn’t you?” Mr. Clay said.

  Madison smiled as she stood to go. “You were with Mr. Tanner, weren’t you?”

  Deputy Hockley had been eyeballing his colleague in the rearview mirror ever since the chief had stepped on the gas at Jackknife Farm and driven back to the gate like he’d been bitten by a rabid fox. Kupitz had watched the meeting with Jeb Tanne
r play out, and even if he kind of knew what was going to happen he was still uneasy about the exchanges between the chief and the Seattle detectives.

  “You okay, Koop?” Hockley said.

  “Yes,” Kupitz replied, but his eyes stayed on the falling snow. There was nothing to look at in the Clays’ front yard aside from a rickety birdfeeder.

  “You understand that things happened exactly the way they wanted them to happen, right? That it was a setup?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s eating you, then?”

  Kupitz shrugged.

  Hockley felt like he was talking to his younger brother, who was sixteen. Hell, his younger brother was more grown-up than Kupitz any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

  Still, Hockley couldn’t let it go. “What, then?”

  Kupitz looked like he was wrestling with ideas bigger than his brain could contain and he was on the losing side. “I know that it was a setup,” he said, “but it felt like it could really be real, you know. Like they were really that nasty with the chief.”

  “They didn’t mean it, you dope.”

  “Well, they could have.”

  “He was pleased as punch when we got out of there, didn’t you see?”

  “I guess.”

  “Koop, you slay me, man. You really do,” he said, and to make his friend feel better he punched him on the arm.

  “Quit it,” Kupitz grumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Do you think Tanner owns a cell phone?” Sangster said as they walked back to their cars.

  “Yes, and I bet you anything Clay called him on it,” Madison said.

  “Why would he lie about it?”

  “I don’t know. Thing is, whether he does or he doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the alibi. It would look shifty in court, but a good defense attorney could come up with fifty different reasons why Tanner didn’t want it known he had a cell.” Madison wondered what Quinn would do with a Tanner defense, and something in her hoped that Nathan Quinn would not have taken his case in the first place.