Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “On a dairy farm,” her father said, implying somehow in just those few words that dairy farming, unlike ranching, was done by soft men with soft hands who mostly sat on porches and drank lemonade.

  “Nah, come on, Vance.” Laddie joined the conversation, reaching across the table for the potatoes. “We had a Farmall once. An H, I think. Pretty good little tractor. I almost bid on it at auction when we lost the ranch. But we were living in an apartment above the old Laundromat in Prairie City at the time and I didn’t have any place to keep it. Or any land to use it on,” he added.

  Hallie’s father looked at him, like he couldn’t understand a fellow South Dakotan choosing to side with an upstart Iowan. But Hallie could see he was relaxed, that this was the kind of conversation he liked, and she could see a taste of normal was important to him right now.

  “Maybe you should get a Farmall, Dad,” Hallie said. “Fix it up.” He’d lost his old Allis, the tractor he worked on all the time, but which had never actually run as long as Hallie could remember, in the equipment shed fire in September. He’d bought another Kubota and a small Ford, but he hadn’t yet picked up anything to work on in the evenings when everything else was done.

  “Nope,” he said definitely. “Got my eye on a 1947 Ford pickup over to Lead. Been sitting out back of some guy’s barn for fifty years. Going to give him two hundred bucks for it as soon as I can talk Tom into going over with me and towing it home.”

  13

  Hallie made coffee in Pabby’s old stovetop percolator, and as the smell drifted from the kitchen into the dining room, people began to rise from the table. Brett insisted that she and Sally would clean up, though she spent a few quiet minutes talking to Boyd first, who nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. Hallie’s father took a steaming mug of coffee, put on his coat, and went out on the front porch, something he’d done after any big supper with lots of people since Hallie could remember.

  Laddie followed Hallie to the kitchen, then back into the dining room. Boyd watched him and started to approach, but Hallie touched him on the arm and held up a finger—wait. He put his hand over hers and stepped out of the room, like they’d just had an entire conversation.

  Hallie watched Laddie walk around the dining room, pick up a small metal figure—a cowboy on a bucking bronco—turn it over in his hands, then put it back down. He ran his hand along the edge of a small side table, straightened a chair, and then stopped, his hand still gripping the chair, not looking at Hallie or much of anything.

  Hallie couldn’t read him. He seemed to be wound just a little less tight than he’d been that morning, but there was still something there. She could see it in the way he fingered the third button on his denim shirt and every once in a while when he’d stick his hand in the watch pocket of his jeans like he was checking something was there.

  After a long stretch of silence, he said, “You know Martin Weber, you know the kind of magic he did. Prue never did that, never messed with blood or sacrifice, and you gotta appreciate that, because it’s always there, that way of getting power. But she studied it, everything about it. She was convinced that there was another path. Convinced she was going to find it. She could be pretty persuasive. Back when I first knew her.”

  “She’s the one, isn’t she?” Hallie asked. “The one you talked to about the stone, way back?”

  Laddie pulled out the chair he’d been gripping the back of and sat down at the table. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cards. He shuffled them, flipped the top card over, stuck it back in the pack, and said, looking at the cards more than at Hallie, “Yeah. She came from a family that had their own magical traditions and she definitely had an affinity. But still, you know, she could maybe start a fire with damp wood or unlock a padlock or something. Nothing big, nothing complicated. And it took a lot of effort, more effort than making a key from scratch or hunting up dry wood. That’s the way small magics are a lot of times, a way to stay in touch with the land or with a way of life, but not big enough to make a difference in how things work. She came here, originally, because of the reservation, wanted to study another magic tradition, learn everything there was to know and how to use it.

  “I come back from the army not long after she’d moved here, had the stone, and I did a lot of—well, I did a lot of drinking. We were in Cleary’s one night and I showed it to her, or she asked me about it, like she could tell I had it before she’d even seen it.”

  Hallie remembered that Prue had been able to see a mark on her, had seen Maker or not actually seen, but seen the spot where Maker was sitting, like a dark smudge.

  “So, we talked. About the stone, about the dead, and everything. And it was great, you know, someone who understood what had been happening to me.” He paused, laid out a set of five cards, then straightened the edges so they aligned perfectly with each other. “She said I was lucky, that not many people had access to that kind of power. I said she was welcome to it.”

  “So, you gave it to her,” Hallie said, because that seemed where things were going. But Laddie still had the stone. And Prue was dead.

  “I … gave it to her, but—” He gathered up the cards he’d laid out, shuffled the deck again, and laid out one card, studied it, then laid out three more. “—I was a little bit sorry afterwards and I kind of wanted to know more about it and the other stuff and I started hanging out with Prue and her sister—she used to visit from St. Paul. I was young and stupid. I should have walked away. Just given her the stone and left it all behind.” He gathered up the cards again, then laughed. “What am I saying? I did walk away, at the end when it was too late.”

  “What happened?”

  He shook his head. “She got to liking the … the power of it. And, you know, she wanted this powerful magic that wasn’t perverted by death or sacrifice and all, but in the end, even her way, the magic perverted her. Her and her sister both. I tried to tell her, get her to see what was happening. But she wouldn’t listen. I finally took it back, the stone. Stole it back, actually. I figured it was better I have it than her.”

  “And what? She just let you?” If the stone was power, why had Prue let it go? And how did a Prue who was hungry for power fit with a Prue who’d told Hallie she was neutral in all magical things, who’d refused to help even when the world was at stake?

  “Her sister came to see me after I’d taken it back,” Laddie said. “And she … laughed at me. Said they’d figured it all out and they didn’t need me anymore. Which was, you know, fine. I just wanted to be left out of things. Though it was right after that, things went all to hell. Her sister left. With this guy, I think. In any case, I never saw her again. Prue never talked about any of it. Like it never happened.

  “She came to me a few days ago and said she needed it back. The stone, I mean. Which, I don’t have to tell you was tempting after all this time, no matter what had happened twenty years ago. I wouldn’t give it to her, I’m smarter now than I was, but it got me thinking about it again, about giving it away. You know, though—” He dealt out twenty cards, like he was looking for something, for a particular card in the deck. “—it’s never going to happen. I can talk about it, about getting rid of the stone, but it’s like the ranch I haven’t got anymore: It just is.”

  “You can give it to me,” Hallie told him again. It wasn’t that she wanted it. She didn’t. But the dead already talked to her. Okay, not talk exactly, but they followed her around. She’d figure it out. She felt like someone ought to do something for Laddie, just once. This was something she could do.

  Laddie shook his head again, gathered up his cards, and stuffed them back into his shirt pocket. “No,” he said. “It’s different now that the dead are talking all the time, but I’ll get used to it. And I trust you, Hallie, I do, but I know I won’t use it wrong. I don’t even have the ability, I don’t think. It’s safer if it stays with me.”

  He got up to leave.

  “You’re going to talk to Boyd before you go,” Hallie said,
not like it was a question.

  Laddie looked at her like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “About the fight you had with Prue, about the fact that she called you last night. Don’t wait, Laddie. Don’t make Ole come find you. Take care of it now.”

  Laddie sighed, then nodded. Hallie led him out into the living room, where Boyd was hanging a set of pictures Hallie’d brought over from her father’s ranch the week before. Hallie heard an unfamiliar laugh from the kitchen—she assumed it was Sally—followed by a low-voiced response from Brett.

  Boyd looked at Hallie, then at Laddie.

  “I got something I need to say,” Laddie said.

  Boyd nodded. “Good, because as it happens, I have something to talk to you about too.”

  “I’ll go—” Hallie pointed vaguely toward the doorway. “—out.” She went to the kitchen and grabbed her barn coat. Sally and Brett were discussing a research paper one or the other of them had read recently. Hallie departed through the living room, pulling on her coat as she went, and stepped onto the front porch.

  Her father stood on the edge of the porch, looking out toward the horse barn. It was maybe twenty degrees, but the wind had died completely. The sky was clear, and the air was crisp and dry. “Ole says the county will probably be making the funeral arrangements,” Hallie’s father said. “She didn’t have anybody.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said.

  They were both quiet. Somewhere down on the main road, Hallie could see the lights from a big truck, the entire cab outlined in red. “Did you ever—?” she finally said. “I mean, was she—?”

  Her father laughed, like he’d been waiting all his life for Hallie to ask him awkward questions about his social life. “She was a friend. Nothing more. Never saw her much outside Cleary’s. Few times at the Dove. Maybe at the Bob when I used to go there which was … was a long time ago.”

  “Will you miss her?” Hallie asked.

  He looked at her, but he didn’t answer.

  Hallie leaned against one of the porch supports and studied him in profile. He didn’t leave the ranch often, went to the Dove for breakfast once a week, the farm supply store in Templeton and the Viking in Box Elder when his friend Norman Henspaw bullied him into it. He’d taken Hallie and Dell on vacation once three years after their mother died to the Kennedy Space Center to watch a shuttle launch. He’d dropped the two of them off at Disney World while he went to look up a guy, had some new breed of cattle from Bavaria or someplace. The whole thing had actually been kind of fun, but it was the only vacation the three of them had ever taken together.

  He didn’t have many friends, though the ones he had were good ones.

  “I mean,” Hallie said, “you knew her a long time.”

  “Of course I’ll miss her,” her father said, looking out across the yard as he spoke. “Things happen. You get used to it.”

  Hallie was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but she also knew that was what you said, how you dealt with things around here.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked, the question so abrupt that it was a minute before Hallie could even figure out what the question was.

  “About talking to you?”

  “About this,” he said impatiently. “This ranch. This place. This.

  “Your mother used to talk about living on the coast,” he continued after a minute. “We’d had that one vacation back before you and Dell, and she loved it. I knew this was my place—that I belonged here. But I never knew about her. She said it was enough, that that vacation would be enough to last her. And, of course, we thought we’d go again. Maybe with you kids. Maybe a second honeymoon. But we never did.”

  They’d gotten a long way off the subject of Prue and her death.

  Or, maybe they hadn’t.

  “I’m not sorry to be here,” Hallie said. “And this ranch is … I like fixing things,” she said. Which wasn’t quite the same as saying she was happy. She’d have liked, in a more perfect world, for it to have been an real choice, for the army to still be available to her, for the decision to reenlist or not to have belonged to her. But it was what it was. There were plenty of things she liked about the way things were right now—Boyd and the ranch, her father and Brett, maybe even the biter. But she wanted to know that it would mean something. That her life would mean something.

  And, of course, Death, which had to be settled one way or another. But that wasn’t something she was going to talk to her father about.

  “You need to get that paddock fence fixed. Should have done it back in the fall,” her father said, by which he meant, “Well, we’re pretty well done with this topic, aren’t we.”

  “It’s just the gate,” she said. “Not the whole fence. I picked up supplies last week.”

  “I’ll come over Saturday,” he said. “We can do it then.” He handed her his coffee cup, pushed her right shoulder, which was almost, sort of like a hug, stepped off the porch, and crossed the yard. As if he’d said it out loud, she knew he was glad she’d stayed.

  Laddie, Brett, and Sally came out, all of them together in a group. Laddie didn’t say much, just thanks and got to go. Brett gave her a quick hug and said, “I’ll be over next week. We can start working with that mare.”

  Sally said, “Nice to meet you.”

  Brett and Sally were already in Brett’s old pickup and turning around when Laddie came back across the yard, his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, his face hunched against the cold. He handed her a card, which she couldn’t see in the shallow light.

  “Don’t take him with you into the Badlands,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? I’m not going to the Badlands.”

  Laddie was already off the porch, heading back to his truck, but at her question, he turned and raised his hands, like, What are you going to do? “I’m just saying,” he told her, like this was the sort of thing people said to each other all the time. Or at least Laddie, who might or might not be able to tell the future, who was sometimes right, though it might just be a coincidence, who probably did say that sort of thing all the time.

  14

  After Laddie started his car with a sharp engine whine, turned it around, and his red taillights disappeared down the drive, Hallie went back in the house. She hadn’t known she was cold until she came inside.

  Boyd came out of the kitchen with two mugs of coffee. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

  “God, no,” Hallie told him, because it was exactly what she wanted, though she took it back into the kitchen, shed her jacket, and sat at the kitchen table, which tipped slightly on one leg because she hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet. He sat with her, but he didn’t say much.

  “What did you say to Laddie?”

  “That he should talk to Ole. Prue called him, you know, last night. And it’s not as if everyone doesn’t already know that he and Prue have been at odds for years.”

  “He wouldn’t shoot her,” Hallie said.

  “You don’t always know what people will do,” he said. Like she didn’t know. Like she hadn’t been in Afghanistan.

  “Yeah,” was all she said. After a moment, she added, “He thinks she was after his stone.”

  “He could have done it, Hallie. Ole says he was a marksman when he was in the army.”

  “So that’s what they think? That Prue called him and after he hung up, he got in his truck, drove over there at three in the morning, and shot her?” Hallie expected better police work than that. She expected it from Boyd, and she expected it from everyone else because Boyd would expect it of anyone he worked with.

  “No.” And for the first time that evening, he sounded tired. “Of course not. There’s crime scene evidence to sift through, people to interview. Laddie wasn’t the only person Prue called last night. There was also a call to the Sigurdson ranch and to a number in St. Paul. That one might have been a wrong number, but it’s got to be checked out.”

  “She called Tel Sigurdson? Why?”
r />   “She called the barn phone. So, it could have been for a lot of people. Foreman said Tel himself was out of town, but now Brett’s saying she saw him in West PC.”

  “I can’t believe it would be Tel,” Hallie said. “I mean, why?”

  “Why would anyone do it?” Boyd asked.

  Why.

  In some ways, Hallie didn’t want to know why. Why made things complicated. Why made things gray. If all you knew was what happened and who’d done it, then you didn’t have to worry about extenuating circumstances or complicated motivations. You could just take care of the problem.

  “Are you staying?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I have to work in the morning.”

  “Really?” Because hadn’t he worked last night? And after everything, she’d figured they’d give him a couple of days off at least. Or that Boyd would take them—which she should have known wouldn’t happen.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do on this investigation, and Teedt’s going to Omaha for his niece’s wedding,” he said. “So, I really—I have to get going.” Though he didn’t get up.

  Hallie’d been carrying the card Laddie gave her since she’d come back in the house. She flipped it over onto the table. It was Death. A tarot card. Which didn’t always mean literal death, if she remembered what Laddie had told her. It meant change. “Doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he’d said. “Could be something good.” Could be.

  Though in Hallie’s case, it probably wasn’t.

  “Do you think they’ll find out who killed her?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Like there wasn’t any other answer. “We have to.”

  “You don’t have to,” Hallie pointed out, noticing that he had shifted from “they”—the DCI—to “we.”

  “We will.” Quiet emphasis, but still. After a brief pause, he added, “There’s another thing. At the house, we found several stones.”

  “Stones like Laddie’s?” That made a certain amount of sense, that Laddie’s stone was not the only one of its kind and that Prue had managed to find others, especially as she’d been interested in them. Maybe that’s what her sister had meant all those years ago, about not needing Laddie anymore, because they’d found others. But then, why had Prue tried to get Laddie’s stone back, at the end?