Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  Mad Dog didn’t look as pleased as Doc might have expected.

  “Doc, can you tell how old this baby was. Months, weeks?”

  “No, no,” Doc corrected. “Look at the way the sutures between the occipital and the parietals are still open. I don’t think this kid had been born yet. If it was, it was a preemie and delivered by C-section.”

  “Aw, geez. But what about the other bodies?”

  Doc rolled his eyes, patience gone. “You found more bodies? Mad Dog, are you insane? Of course Englishman’s got to be told. And he and I should see what’s out there in situ. This skull’s a little stained like you’d expect of bones that have been in the earth for a while. There’s no soft tissue left, and no evidence that it was taken by scavengers, so we’re talking years here, but there’s nothing to indicate these bones are old in the sense you mean. Not unless you found something buried with them to tell us when they went in the ground. That’s what Englishman and I need to look for. Artifacts, clothing, something to give us a hint who’s in there and how it happened.”

  Mad Dog looked embarrassed. “You mean like, if an identification card had been found with the bones?” He reached into another pocket and produced a battered plastic ID. “I didn’t have my reading glasses with me so I’m not sure what this proves.”

  Doc took the ID and held it under the light and a magnifying glass. “Jesus H. Christ!” he whispered. “This looks like Supervisor Hornbaker, brother-in-law to the corpse you stole.”

  “But for the nose,” Mad Dog replied.

  The two men looked at each other and back at the photo. Doc nodded. “I suppose he could have gotten a nose job…” He handed the card and the magnifying glass to Mad Dog. “Say, how’d you get blood all over your jacket?”

  “Oh yeah,” Mad Dog replied. “I meant to ask you to take a look. Somebody tried to shoot my ear off.”

  ***

  Boris the German Shepherd took advantage of their visit for a quick dash into the yard and the chance to write his name in the snow. He settled on the canine spelling, a series of yellow dots and dashes, in his effort to hurry and get back inside the warm house.

  “Mrs. Kraus.” The sheriff wasn’t bothering with codes. “This is the radio we’re going to leave here in case the girls come home. Judy’s writing them a no-nonsense note, explaining that they’d better use it to check in the moment they get here. Can you hear it OK?”

  “Perfect,” she responded.

  “And I got you loud and clear out here in the street,” Chairman Wynn chipped in.

  “Then we’re on our way to where the black and white got stuck, then to Mad Dog’s. Let us know if my brother puts in another appearance, or if the crowd in the back of the courthouse makes any trouble.”

  “You can count on me, sheriff.” The sheriff knew he could.

  He and Judy gave Boris apologetic pats as they abandoned him to his own devices for another stretch of the day, closed up the house, and joined the chairman in the Cadillac. It felt strange to lower your butt into a heated leather seat while a CD serenaded and the wind gusts that whipped the branches of the trees beside the street hardly affected those within the sumptuous interior of the upscale SUV.

  Years ago, the sheriff had been bounced into first class when the airline he was flying oversold tourist. They took pity on a poor soldier, desperate to get home on leave. Only the hearts of palm salad and the filet mignon he’d been served in that plush seat kept it a notch above the Caddy’s bucket. He half expected a flight attendant to materialize out of the rear compartment to take their drink orders.

  Chairman Wynn’s SUV was several levels of pretention beyond what the sheriff would look for in a new vehicle—assuming he and Judy could justify shopping for one instead of putting away for the Heathers’ college funds—but it was a marvelously efficient means of getting about in the middle of a Blue Norther. The Caddy dug through drifts up to two feet deep on its way down Cherry, then back south to Main.

  “Can’t we hurry more?” Judy complained from the back seat.

  The sheriff was about to tell her they couldn’t, only the chairman proved him wrong. They plowed west on Main, toward the intersection with the north/south blacktop.

  “I wish I could have talked to Mad Dog,” the sheriff muttered. “I’d sure like to know what he was doing back in the office, and what kind of trouble he’s gotten into.”

  “He’s probably halfway across the county by now,” Judy said.

  “Or gone back to his farm,” Wynn Senior offered. “Good chance we’ll find him there.”

  They went by Klausen’s, throwing a bow wave of snow that the wind turned into a rolling breaker in which the sheriff surfed, nestled in luxury.

  “I don’t know,” he said, glancing back to where Doc’s station wagon was rapidly being drifted in. “Somehow I’ve got the feeling he’s a lot closer.”

  ***

  “What’re we gonna do with them?” Levi asked. He had found Two of Two upstairs—almost literally with the skeleton in the Hornbaker closet.

  Simon Hornbaker wasn’t in the best position to consider the big oaf’s question. He was awkwardly perched on a butcher block while Judah tried to cut a pair of handcuffs off his wrist and ankle with kitchen tools. Heather thought she recognized the cuffs as her dad’s. Englishman must have come in contact with them, then they’d gotten away. She hoped he was looking for Simon and his boys, and not lying in a ditch somewhere, the victim of their escape attempt.

  Everyone was crowded in the kitchen. It was roomy enough, though the deer rifle that Levi kept aimed in the direction of Deputy Wynn and the Heathers made it feel more confined.

  “You shouldn’t have gone off and left them,” Simon said.

  “She made me go with her. You didn’t argue none when she sent us all back to get you freed up.” Judah’s butcher knife and meat cleaver were seriously the worse for wear. Simon kept flinching whenever Judah swung. There had been more misses than hits to the chrome chain that kept him bound like a calf in the roping event at the annual Pretty Prairie Rodeo. Chunks were missing from the meat cleaver, but the chain showed no damage.

  “Probably ought to let that Heather pick these for us, since she’s already shown a knack for it,” Levi suggested. He was the smart twin, though smart was measured on a different scale for them. He was the smaller one too, huge, but not as enormous as Judah.

  “The door was unlocked, honest,” Two protested. Actually, anyone in the room could probably pick the lock on the cuffs, One knew. If those were Dad’s, that’s how he opened them, with the blade of his pocketknife or a handy screwdriver. They were for show, or the occasional violent drunk down at the Bisonte Bar. She didn’t tell the Hornbakers, though. Somehow, she didn’t think friendly gestures were going to buy them off, especially not after what Levi had threatened when they found Two upstairs.

  “There’s bolt cutters in the tool box on the porch,” Levi said. He set down the rifle and went out the door and got them. “We need someplace safe to stick these three until she gets back,” he said as he came in again. “She’ll know what’s to be done.”

  “Why not just kill them?” Judah wondered.

  “We could lock ’em in with the witch,” Levi countered, applying the tool to the chain. Suddenly Simon was mobile again, though still wearing a shiny bracelet and anklet.

  “No. We won’t do either,” Simon said, stretching his arm and hopping around on a leg that had gone numb in its awkward position. He was about her dad’s size, with a beer belly tacked on, but his twins dwarfed him. “I got me a idea. Judah, get the rifle and keep them covered. You three, you wanted to see the house. OK, follow me. There’s more you haven’t seen.”

  He led the way through the door Two had picked, into the office, and up the stairs to the second floor. The door behind the cage cracked open and a thin voice gibbered at them.

  “The game’s afoot…”

  Neither Simon nor the parade of Hornbakers paid attention. Heather found hersel
f wondering why a deputy sheriff was allowing himself, and his employer’s daughters, to be ordered about so cavalierly. There was only one armed Hornbaker. Surely Wynn Some had been trained to disarm a dumb farm kid with a deer gun following too closely up a set of dark stairs.

  Judah tripped and went to one knee. Sure enough, Wynn was on him in a flash, offering a hand and helping him back to his feet. Heather slammed a mental hand against her forehead and decided his training ran more to helping serial killers cross the street.

  They went into a room on the north side of the house. A couple of unmade beds lined one wall. There was another door on the far side of the room. Simon opened it onto the ice-cold sleeping porch. A pair of mattress-less bunks and some snow-covered metal chairs stood along its length. Most of the wire mesh that screened occupants from mosquitoes on summer nights was clogged with snow, but there were still enough holes for the wind to remind Heather of every inadequacy in the outfit she’d chosen for their jaunt with Wynn.

  “You can’t leave us out here,” the deputy said, finally speaking up. Only he was wrong. They could. He was addressing a solid oak door, behind which a latch was being thrown.

  ***

  “I think we can save your ear.”

  Using a cotton swab and alcohol, Doc cleaned the dried blood, along with fabric from Mad Dog’s parka, that clung to the wound. Wounds, actually. There were half a dozen places where shattered plastic had encountered flesh and pierced it. None of them were very significant.

  “If you’ve ever thought about an earring, this might be the time. There’s gonna be a little notch in here, but a nice thick ring would hide it completely. You say somebody shot a phone out of your hand?”

  Mad Dog nodded, and winced when the action caused the alcohol swab to rub against a raw spot. “Yeah. Somebody shooting from a white pickup truck. I couldn’t see who, or tell much about the truck. It was already snowing pretty good, and, once the phone exploded, I didn’t spend much time trying for a better look.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s what I was planning to ask you, Doc. I figure it was probably a Hornbaker, considering where I was and what I was up to. But I don’t know that. And I don’t know who this skull or those other bones belong to. Zeke Hornbaker’s not in that hole. Not the Zeke I know. But it might be about whoever is, and not about what I was doing with Tommie. Though how would some outsider associated with the skeletons know I was there or what I’d found?”

  “Maybe they just knew it, same as you.” Doc regretted the wise-ass remark, but not enough to apologize. He moved his attentions to Mad Dog’s hand. It had a few scrapes and scratches too, though the mitten he’d been wearing appeared to have absorbed most of the damage. “Hell of a shot, especially under those conditions.”

  “I don’t think they were aiming for the phone.”

  Doc poured a little alcohol onto the deepest scrape and Mad Dog yanked his hand back and shook it while he sucked air and tried to act manly about something Doc knew hurt way out of proportion to the size of the wound.

  “I just can’t make sense of it, Doc. I guess the Hornbakers are looking for that ugly old ring of Tommie’s. But why not just go take it off him before he died? It’s not like he had anybody else to leave anything to, or like it could be worth enough for a shooting. And this girl’s skull, those other bones, that ID… I keep thinking there must be something else. All I can come up with is that dead baby Englishman found over at the Towers after I left. Maybe somebody thinks I had something to do with that. What do you think? You know anything about that mess?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Mad Dog. Even if I knew something, hell, even if the mother of that baby were to come through that door over there right now and…”

  Doc stopped dead in the middle of his speech. The mother of that baby was coming through the door trailing a naked plastic dolly from one hand. She looked as pale as a ghost, and as scared as Doc suddenly felt.

  “Mary,” Doc whispered. “What on earth are you doing here? Are you all right?”

  She stood peering around the doorway into the mortuary lab from the hall, and, if the scene wasn’t already surrealistic enough, Mad Dog’s wolf peeked into the room beside her.

  “I got scared,” she said, offering an excuse. Then she focused on Doc. Her eyes began to glisten. “Doctor Jones. I changed my mind. I’d like to keep my baby after all.”

  ***

  One memorable spring evening some twenty-five years before, a tornado had passed this way. Not just any tornado. This had been one of those behemoths that occasionally roam the plains. It was what they now term a force five event, with wind speeds exceeding 260 mph. Back then it was just a big mother, half a mile wide on the ground. At the crossroads, where you turned off the blacktop to go to Mad Dog’s, there had been lines of hedge trees, traps to catch the wind and deter it. And there had been a pair of farms, big two-story homes with a collection of outlying buildings and picturesque barns, one red, one white. Had been. The monster devoured them.

  After the storm passed, none of it remained. Every tree in those windrows was gone. Every building had disappeared; nothing but concrete slabs and basements were left to mark where they’d been. Shrubs, bushes, flowers, trees from which ropes with tire swings hung. All gone. One of the families had been at a funeral in Hays. The other was home, heard the warnings, saw it coming, and fled to their basement. They were joined there, during the terrifying moments it took the vortex to pass, by a tractor that had been parked in a field several miles away. After it was lifted out, the owner was able to drive it home. It didn’t even have a flat tire. The family came out virtually unscratched as well. Tornadoes were capricious. That titan of destruction was a master of property damage, but it hadn’t claimed a single human life. The county had known many smaller ones that reversed that profile.

  Tornadoes are a fact of life if you live in Kansas. Maybe that’s why Kansans tend to have a conversational relationship with their god. Watching a spinning serpent descend from heaven to strike at your home and family has a way of eliciting requests of the almighty. Some hear answers, others think the tornadoes are God’s response. This was, apparently, the opinion of the families whose homes once stood here. Neither rebuilt. Not that this location was any more likely than any other part of Benteen County to suffer cyclonic winds, or heavenly whims, again. One family moved to California, the other to Utah. They felt distance improved their odds.

  No one else built here afterwards, nor did the farmers who followed replant the windrows. In fact, they tore out the occasional volunteer that sprouted along their fence lines. That made this spot a peculiarly open one. The place drew tourists. The sheriff had discovered them, stopped alongside the road here, on several occasions. He remembered the first ones best. Their tags were from Pennsylvania, a land of mountains and forests. Even though vast numbers of people packed together there, sometimes neighbors couldn’t see each other because of a sudden change in elevation or a brief profusion of trees. This couple had pulled their car off the highway at the intersection. They were standing beside it, clinging to each other. The sheriff stopped and got out to ask if they needed help. The man hadn’t been able to answer. His wife waved her free hand in a gesture that took in everything around her, or more accurately, the absence of things.

  “We didn’t know it was so big,” she said. There were tears on her face. There were tears on her husband’s, as well. “We didn’t realize…how insignificant we are.”

  From this corner, there was virtually nothing to block the horizon in any direction. The only rise in elevation was so slight it wasn’t noticeable, and this corner was its peak. A few grain elevators, baby teeth, nibbled at the vault of heaven. Sky couldn’t get bigger than this. To those who weren’t accustomed to it, it could induce a kind of reverse claustrophobia, a sense of how small they were and, perhaps, how meaningless. Visitors sometimes stopped here at night as well, when a profusion of stars glowed bright enough to demonstrate the depth of that expan
se of emptiness. They stopped, they marveled—they were afraid.

  The view was very different today, but the sheriff thought he could finally appreciate what strangers to this open country felt when they paused here. There were no horizons today. The Cadillac seemed to drift on an infinite sea of tumultuous gray and white. Nothing outside the SUV looked real, not even the fence posts and phone poles that faded in and out of existence as thick flurries of snow slalomed between them. This view might be similar to what a sailor would see in a heavy fog—sea blending into sky, an infinity of nothingness into which one might slip and never be found again. This mist was white and swirled madly, but it felt equally bottomless. The sheriff had to reach back and pull his soul into that warmed-leather bucket seat when Chairman Wynn slowed to a stop and suggested they install his chains.

  The road to Mad Dog’s wasn’t there anymore. Just two lines of fence posts on the far sides of ditches. The edges would be a guess.

  The sheriff opened his door to help. The wind tore it out of his hands and he had to struggle to get it closed. Wind and snow stung his eyes. That must have been the cause of his freezing tears when he met the chairman at the back hatch.

  ***

  “You better let us back in,” Wynn threatened, without specifying what the consequences would be if the Hornbakers failed to comply. The door remained closed, and continued to do so even when the deputy backed up, got a run, and slammed his shoulder against it. Solid core in a well-made frame, evidently. It held up, but Wynn sort of oozed down to the floor and lay there, ineffectively beating it with his fists.

  “There’ll be other doors,” Heather English suggested. She and Two checked them, and both proved locked and as solidly built as the one by which they’d entered the porch. Equally impenetrable shutters covered windows and were bolted from the inside.

  Heather was already starting to shake from the cold. Neither she nor her sister had dressed warmly enough to be outside today, and Wynn’s parka was still in the living room. At least he had a thick wool sweater.