Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “I was sitting there in the fire station, and it’s only about a five-minute walk.” Brett drained her coffee, then sat with the mug in her hands. “I guess I thought maybe there was something I could do. Like someone might need something, though God knows what. So, I walked over.

  “No one paid any attention to me. There were lights everywhere, of course, and one or two neighbors in their yards, not even talking to each other, just standing there looking at the house and the deputies going back and forth across the road. It looked like they’d already gotten all their pictures and taken all their measurements. They kept Boyd standing outside—or, at least, he kept standing outside—and Ole kept walking up to him every few minutes and poking him in the chest. Mostly he just stood there, though.”

  She paused.

  Hallie wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, whether Brett just wanted to lay it out for its own sake, which was fair enough, or whether she was building up to something, some point that had brought her to the ranch on this particular afternoon to tell this particular story.

  Brett got up and grabbed the coffeepot and refilled both her mug and Hallie’s, didn’t ask if Hallie wanted more coffee, just did it. She returned the pot to the counter, but didn’t sit back down. Instead, she leaned against the wall next to the living room doorway and said, “The coroner arrived and went in the house and I realized that I didn’t want to be there when they brought Prue out. Not because it would have been awful; there wouldn’t have been anything to see. But it would have been real, like I could pretend it was a dream, standing there at four in the morning in ten-degree weather because someone here, someone in West PC, for God’s sake, because they’d been shot in the head in the middle of the night. It had to be a dream—how could something like that be real?

  “I walked back the long way, not really thinking about much except Prue and what happened and wondering why, was it someone who hated her that much or just a random thing? And I didn’t really think anything of it at first.”

  “What?” Hallie had been thinking about Prue too as they talked, thinking about that moment—had Prue even had time to know, to recognize what was happening to her? Probably not, because death would have been instantaneous, not even one minute to the next, just there then not. Blinked out.

  “Past the actual cemetery, there’s mostly empty fields to the north, streetlights just on the one side, and I was walking on the field side because I hadn’t crossed back over yet.…” She paused, took a long sip of coffee. “And I was maybe halfway down the second block when Tel Sigurdson went by in that white pickup he has—or it could have been someone else’s white pickup, because you know there’s a ton of them around here. In any case, after it went past me, it stopped up the street and just sat there with its lights out for, like, two or three minutes. Not close enough for the deputies to notice it, I don’t think, but whoever was inside could have definitely seen Prue’s house and everything. That was when I started thinking maybe it wasn’t Tel Sigurdson’s truck at all. Maybe a little older?” She said the last like a question, more to indicate she wasn’t sure herself than that Hallie might have an answer.

  She downed a giant swig of coffee, then grimaced at the bitterness. “When they turned around and came back down the street, they still didn’t have their lights on, like they really didn’t want anyone to notice them. I kind of stepped farther off the street into the field and the moon was down by then, so I don’t think they saw me, at least not on their way back.” She hesitated, leaned forward in her chair so that she was looking at Hallie with a sort of painful intensity that wasn’t normal for Brett, who was usually laid-back and unflappable. “Do you think that was it? The killer?”

  Hallie could tell that she was shaken by the idea, that a killer was there, that they’d come back, that she—Brett—might have seen them.

  “It could have been,” Hallie said cautiously. “But it could have been someone curious, someone who didn’t want to talk to the deputies for whatever reason. You couldn’t see who was driving?”

  “No.” Brett leaned back in her chair again as if saying it out loud—was I on the same street as a killer?—had helped in some way to make her feel safer again. “That was weird too, don’t you think? I mean, Tel would have stopped. At least when he went by me the first time. So, maybe it wasn’t Tel, because he didn’t offer me a ride or anything either, and I know he saw me when he drove in.”

  “Did you talk to the sheriff?”

  “Do you think I should? I mean, what am I really saying? That it might be Tel’s truck? It might not be.”

  “It might have been the killer,” Hallie said. “You need to tell someone. Boyd’s coming to supper. Do you want to come? You could talk to him about it first.”

  Brett nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” She gave a quick half laugh. “At least this time it doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”

  “My kind of thing?”

  Brett waved a hand. “You know. Ghosts and devils and things.”

  Brett knew about Martin Weber and his blood magic, about the ghosts Hallie saw. She knew what had happened with Travis Hollowell and Boyd’s wife, Lily. She chose not to believe it, to reconstruct reality so there wasn’t any room for ghosts or blood magic, or anything else that wasn’t concrete and knowable and everyday.

  “Someday you’re going to see something you won’t be able to explain,” Hallie said. “And then what are you going to do?”

  “Get you to take care of it for me,” Brett said promptly. She got up, set her coffee mug in the sink, and crossed the room to retrieve her coat from its hook by the door.

  “Supper’ll be around seven,” Hallie said.

  “Can I bring Sally?”

  Hallie wasn’t sure who Sally was, but, “Bring anyone you want. Bring salad or something.”

  Brett settled her hat on her head, zipped up her coat, and left with just a quick wave of her hand to say good-bye.

  She hadn’t been gone five minutes when Beth came back into the kitchen in a rush, grabbed her messenger bag, and was out the kitchen door before Hallie could even say anything.

  Jesus.

  “Hey!” Hallie shouted out the back door, the wind cutting through her shirtsleeves like a knife. Beth stopped and turned, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket and her shoulders hunched, like that would keep her warmer. “Where are you going?”

  “To check a couple things out,” she said. “If I have to do this myself, I’ll do it.” She shoved her chin forward, like a challenge.

  Hallie sighed. “Tell me what you find.”

  Beth straightened, took a step back toward Hallie. “You’ll help me?”

  “No, I won’t help you. I mean…” For once she didn’t know what she meant. She let the door swing closed behind her. “I mean, tell me and we can talk about it.” Which didn’t mean she’d do it, because she wouldn’t do it. Let Beth go into the under? Let Beth become Death, some nineteen-year-old who didn’t even know what she was thinking? No. But maybe it was a way for her, Hallie, to talk to Death. Maybe it was a way to figure this thing out, for both of them.

  “Just … talk to me. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Then she was gone.

  11

  Boyd woke from the middle of a dream into the gray light of his own bedroom with the curtains half-drawn so that the dull light of early dusk softened the edges of the room and gave everything a timeless muted quality. He sat up, blinking against the abrupt transition. In his dream, the world had been split in two—darkness and light. And he’d been the one, the person who was going to have to choose—one or the other. It seemed like a simple choice, seemed like something anyone could choose. Light, of course, light. But in the dream, he’d been sure there was a trick, been sure it was particularly important that he understand, that he make the correct choice.

  It had been impossible to see what lay in the light, and that seemed dangerous, everything sharp-edged and illuminated, no secrets in t
he light, but so bright that it all seemed to be one thing, one color, blended together forever. Darkness promised shadows, shades of gray, reflections in moonlight, and privacy.

  He wouldn’t choose, shouldn’t have to choose, but the world would end, they told him. Who told him? He didn’t know.

  Choose, they said.

  Then he woke.

  He felt as if his heart were pounding in his chest, though he checked his pulse with a finger on his wrist and it wasn’t, felt like he’d been running a marathon, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. It was just past four. He had another hour or so before he had to leave for Hallie’s. He needed more sleep, but he knew it would be impossible. He reached for the notebook he kept beside the bed, wrote down his dream—dated and numbered. He flipped back through the last three weeks of notes, but he couldn’t see that this particular dream related to anything that had preceded it. Maybe it did; maybe he couldn’t see the connections yet.

  He got up, took a quick shower, shaved, and pulled on a clean pair of jeans. Still barefoot, he cleaned the sink and the bathtub, took the towels he’d used and put them in the laundry, laid out clean towels, carried the laundry basket to the basement, and ran a quick load of wash. Back upstairs, he added laundry detergent to the grocery list he kept on a small marker board on the refrigerator. He got the mail, sorted it, filed three bills to be paid later, checked his email, responded to a question from Ole from the day before about whether he could pick up an extra shift on Saturday, and one from his mother about whether he’d be home for Christmas. He shut down the computer, went back into the bedroom, put on a shirt, tucked it into his jeans, took socks and a pair of boots back into the office, and sat back down.

  It wasn’t until after all that, that he pulled the evidence bag with the stone he’d taken from Prue’s house off the shelf where he’d put it earlier, and placed it on the desk. He still wasn’t comfortable having it in his possession. It was evidence in a murder investigation. And yet, he understood Gerson’s reasoning, even if he didn’t understand Gerson herself—what she knew and what she wanted. To investigate the stones, regular police procedures wouldn’t help. He and Gerson had dusted the stones for fingerprints before the forensic team had been allowed downstairs. Boyd had insisted and Gerson hadn’t argued. There was nothing; he hadn’t expected anything, but it was procedure and important. It was the way you got to the end.

  From the center drawer of his desk, he pulled out a new notebook and a ballpoint pen. First, he noted down his observations from Prue’s house. The cellar with the buried bones and the three stones. The stones had been separated from each other, as if the distance were important? He’d measured the space between them and made a sketch of the way they’d been placed. The three stones had been exactly twelve inches apart—twelve, twelve, twelve. They were buried, but both he and Gerson felt that they couldn’t make any conclusions from that until they knew how long they’d been there. There had been the weird flash of light, light that only he and Gerson had seen. Light and thunder, like something had been asked and answered. Gerson had seen only the light. She hadn’t heard the thunder. And that meant something too. It all meant something. The task was to figure out what.

  He looked at the stone itself still in the evidence bag.

  He’d used his cell phone camera to take a picture of all three stones, in position, but with the dirt wiped off. He pulled his phone out now and laid it, with the picture he’d taken earlier on-screen next to the bag. All three stones were oval in shape, though not identical, the two Gerson had kept smaller than the one in front of him. They looked smooth, like stones that had lain in a creek bed for years. He wanted to touch the stone on the desk in front of him, could almost feel the smooth coolness in his hand. But he was patient. He could wait.

  All three stones were mostly gray, mostly granite he suspected, though he was no expert on rocks. Each of them had distinct undertones, though. The stone he’d kept looked more silver in the light; the two Gerson had were gold, not like precious metal, the colors warmer, like if you touched them, your hands would feel warm. He turned out the light in the room and pulled the shades. In the dimness, the stone glowed. It seemed to vibrate very, very slightly, though if Boyd touched the evidence bag, he couldn’t feel the movement.

  He wrote all these observations in the notebook, not just how the stone in front of him looked, but how he felt, the flash of light in the cellar, the positions of all three stones, the sense of energy or movement or something he couldn’t quite grasp, but which seemed important. He made another sketch—the stones in relation to the bones, the furnace, and the cellar walls, all the measurements taken before he’d left the cellar. He recorded everything Gerson had said, which wasn’t much. He wanted to know more about her, where she’d learned what she knew and what she knew that he did not. He wrote Conclusions: on a line by itself, stared at it, and realized he didn’t have any. Not yet.

  As he walked out of his office, his cell phone rang.

  “Got a minute?” It was Ole. He almost never said hello, never introduced himself. His greetings varied—“Got a minute?”, “Something you might be interested in,” and “Where the hell are you?” among his favorites.

  “I’m on my way out,” Boyd said.

  “Can you come by the office? Won’t be more than five, ten minutes. I’ll catch you up on where things are at.”

  In a reaction that surprised him, Boyd realized that there was nothing he wanted to do less than stop at the sheriff’s office and talk about the investigation. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. That he didn’t want to, didn’t compete with duty and obligation. If Ole wanted to talk about the case, if he thought Boyd could help, Boyd would be there. It was simple. It was what he did.

  The wind was hard out of the northeast when he left the house, locking the door behind him. No snow, though the ground was rock hard, like the surface of the moon.

  It took him less than three minutes to drive from his house to the sheriff’s office, but he let his SUV warm up a full minute before he put it in gear and backed out onto the street. He didn’t do it because the car needed to warm up before he drove it or because he wanted it to already be warm inside when he got in; he did it because it was a habit formed years ago when his father had taught him to drive, when they’d sit in the car and his father explained every dial and button on the dashboard, how internal combustion engines worked, what a solar-powered car would look like. He didn’t think he did it because it reminded him of his father, whom he could call on the phone and talk to anytime he wanted. And he didn’t do it because he wanted to relive his high school years. He did it because it was winter and it was cold and it was what he did.

  As he headed up Main, he noticed that Tommy Ulrich’s Toyota was gone. Sometime during the day when Boyd had been at Prue’s house or writing his report or sleeping, someone had come and towed it away. One thing, just one thing in a crappy day that had been cleaned up and taken care of. It wasn’t enough and it didn’t make up for anything, but it was something.

  The glass doors of the main entrance to the sheriff’s office were etched with ice like an abstract study in white and gray. The reception area was empty with half the overhead lights dimmed. Ole said it kept people from lingering or saved on the utility bill—one of those. He, Ole, was still deciding which sounded better. Boyd could hear voices farther back and walked around the front desk and down a short hall with photographs on one side depicting the three county sheriffs who’d served before Ole, all three photos in black-and-white, including the one from just ten years before.

  Boyd could see a light on in Ole’s office, the windowed door half-open. He knocked on the door before he entered.

  “We’ll look into it,” Ole was saying into the phone. He waved at Boyd to close the door and take a seat. “We’ll do whatever it takes, but my people aren’t investigators. Frankly, that’s your job. That’s what we pay for, isn’t it?” He was silent, presumably listening to someone on the other end of
the line. “Yeah, well,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Budget? Manpower? We sure as hell don’t have any of those problems here. Look, you give me a list of what you want done, and it’ll get done.” He banged the phone down so hard, Boyd was surprised it didn’t crack the plastic.

  “Bureaucrats,” Ole said. “They’re pulling Gerson and Cross back to Pierre until the lab work is done, and they want us to do all the leg work for ’em. Don’t we pay taxes or something?”

  “Everyone pays taxes,” Boyd said.

  Ole looked unimpressed. “Yeah, well, whatever we do, they’ll manage to screw it up somehow back in Pierre and blame me for it later on. But—” He smacked his hands together, the sound loud and hollow in the enclosed space. “—we got a job to do and we’re going to get ’er done. I figure you want to be involved.”

  It wasn’t exactly a question, but Boyd answered anyway. “Absolutely,” he said. Then added because he couldn’t not say it, “I feel like—I know I couldn’t have done anything different, I don’t think I could have seen what was going to happen, but I feel like I should have.”

  “Yeah,” Ole said. He scratched at something on the surface of his desk. “Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”

  He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. “Here’s what we know: Stalking Horse didn’t have any next of kin. She was originally from St. Paul or Minneapolis, one of those. She had a sister who apparently disappeared about twenty years ago. Eventually had her declared dead, but no one knows what really happened. Family name was Shortman—Stalking Horse changed it when she moved to South Dakota. Patty out front says she used to know the sister, long time ago, when Stalking Horse first moved out here. Used to visit all the time. No other family that we can find, though Teedt is looking.