“On top of that,” Margarite was saying, “Dolf Cook lied to me and said he had never met Oglivie when clearly he had. Cook says he owns restaurants in fifteen states. I’m guessing Illinois is one of them. He has a home address in north Chicago. That’s three. Now here’s piece number four: before I left home tonight I got a call that places Oglivie in suburban Chicago around the time of the murder.”
She flattened the chain-of-custody envelope so Shunk could see inside. When the sheriff looked back, Inkster’s record had come up. Now where were his reading glasses?
“A gas receipt from the Schaumburg Road Ranger. Exactly the amount deducted from the thousand. Management down there had to track down the clerk and the security guy working that shift. They both saw Oglivie, no question. So he went down to Chicago and back, and then we had a corpse. We have no clue yet where Kock was that night. I can’t find Danny Tervo, either. I need to go back and ask Dolf Cook where he was two nights ago, and I have to be prepared for him to lie again. Now … ready for piece five?”
Out came a larger chain-of-custody bag with the pale-orange fly line from around Kock’s neck. She played the leader out through her fingers, handing Lodge the narrow end because his hand was out, searching under papers and files for his glasses.
“See? Wind knots.”
Wind knots?
“Sure,” Lodge said, not sure what he was touching. They were rock-hard bumps in thick monofilament. They were simple, too. A twist or three. Not the loose and messy Chinese arithmetic that came off his spinning reel about once a week.
“What the hell’s a wind knot?” Shunk said.
“You make one by mistake.”
Margarite put her right arm in the air.
“By bad casting. There’s supposed to be an open loop up here.”
Her arm went back and forth in an elegant motion. “You get sloppy, your loop collapses and your fly goes through it, making a knot. You blame it on the wind. Sometimes it is the wind.”
Her arm came down. Lodge found his glasses behind the takeout container. Margarite passed the line to Shunk, who shrugged. “So?”
So … Inkster, Julia. DOB July 3, 1983. Sex: F. Records: 13. “So Oglivie’s a trout bum,” Margarite said. “He’s been fishing almost every day for five years. He wouldn’t cast this badly. I counted seventeen wind knots on this leader. Maybe if the guy was fishing drunk, blindfolded, in a hurricane, in the dark …”
“Maybe he was.”
Lodge glanced up to see Shunk scowl and work his mustache back and forth.
“Small chance,” Margarite said.
Record 1: December 14, 1997. Class Code Description: Possession. Status: Closed.
So … age fourteen. Over in Schoolcraft County. When kids got started that early, Lodge reflected, they were going to be on the radar a long time.
“Maybe the guy was broke and couldn’t buy a new line,” Shunk said. “Maybe that line was five years old.”
Now Margarite lifted another out evidence bag with spools of line and what looked like a measuring tape for sewing inside.
“I don’t think so. He was broke, and the line itself looks ancient, but he had leader-building stuff in his cupboard. He made his own, for pennies apiece. One wind knot and he would have built a new leader. It takes five minutes, and I don’t think he was watching TV at night.”
Record 2: June 3, 1999. Class Code Description: Possession with Intent to Deliver. Status: Closed.
Record 3: Sept. 10, 2003. Class Code Description: Aggravated Battery. Status: Closed.
Record 4: Sept. 16, 2008. Class Code Description: Attempted Arson. Status: Dropped.
The county attorney said to Margarite, “You don’t think Oglivie killed Kock.”
“No. I don’t. I think someone else did.”
Shunk tossed his folder on Lodge’s desk. “Well he must have done something he didn’t want to pay for, or he wouldn’t have been rolling a body into the river.”
“Right,” Lodge’s deputy said. “With a thousand bucks minus a tank of gas in his glove box. Just upstream from Cook’s place. After leaving the campground and driving to Chicago and back the night before. With Danny Tervo nowhere to be found. With Kock’s vehicle in his garage. With a piece of ancient line around Kock’s neck. Only he wasn’t really strangled. Not with any force.”
Shunk scowled. “Shit. I’m in the dark here.”
“Exactly,” Margarite said. “And no light switch.”
Sheriff Lodge felt her looking at him now—as in, what did he think? He had gone into the Wisconsin circuit court system, where she was from, and typed Margarite DuCharme.
His big ears felt hot. He made some kind of twisted grimace as he hit search.
“Hey,” she said to him. “You’re the one in charge here. You gonna be ok?”
Margarite was yawning almost painfully, her brain dying to shut down as she pulled up outside the old Frens Mansion on East John Street few minutes later.
She sat in the cruiser, staring at Esofea’s place and thinking involuntarily about celery. Who cared, but she had heard somewhere that “celery money” built the fifteen-room folk Victorian, and she was still getting her head around that bit of U.P. history. Iron ore, old growth timber … and celery—before a blight wiped out Otto Frens in the ‘30s. She yawned again. Get out of the cruiser, she told herself. Then two decades later, Esofea’s great-grandfather Elmer Smithback, the guide, had bought the Frens Mansion on the cheap so his family wouldn’t have to winter at the Blind Sucker Resort. That made sense. Esofea owned it now, her piece of Elmer Smithback’s estate. But the next fact was some serious mental celery for Margarite to gnaw on: Esofea had lived there, solo, since her sophomore year in high school.
“Really? What?” Margarite remembered asking her, thinking she must have heard wrong.
“I just moved down here one day and nobody said anything,” she explained.
“Not your Mummo Tiina? She was senile already?”
“No. She was ok then. I think.” Esofea had shrugged. They were in the break room of the Luce County office building, bonding over the theft of two spoonfuls of the sheriff’s powdered Sanka. There was a high window in the room, showing a windy sky. “I guess she just wanted me to go.”
“But only so far, huh?”
“I can’t really leave,” Esofea said. “I don’t know why.”
It seemed obvious. This was after Julia’s public humping of Margarite at the Labor Day Brat Fest. They were talking about lovers. “Maybe it’s Danny?”
She shook her head. “He had this idea to move to Alaska once. I wouldn’t go. But anyway, here,” she said, and she handed Margarite a small wad of tissue paper. Inside was a geode, the size of a walnut, sliced in half to show yellow crystals around a dark, vacant center. “Put that where the sunlight can find it. It will help bring your soul back.”
“Thank you.”
“You know what I mean? When somebody takes a choice away from you, a very personal choice, don’t you feel like a part of you has been lost?”
“Exactly,” Margarite said. “I feel amputated somewhere.”
“But you are so much bigger and stronger than this moment,” Esofea told her. “That’s the thing. You are spiritually huge. We all are.”
“Thank you.”
“I believe that.”
They sipped Sanka for a moment, and then Margarite pushed her cup aside, noticing the thin and bitter taste. That was the moment when she realized Bruce Lodge hadn’t spoken to her since the brat fest, hadn’t even looked at her. Then Esofea had compounded this feeling by saying, “Well, I was wondering how a woman as attractive as you could still be single.”
Margarite had felt prickly and deflated for a moment. She got that line all the time. “You mean, there must be something wrong about a woman without a man?”
“No,” Esofea explained easily. “A woman without love.”
“Oh.”
“But now I see you have Julia. So it’s ok.”
; “Right.”
Then after a sigh and a long silence, Esofea said, “Don’t you want to have a baby?”
“I don’t know.”
This was true. Margarite had no idea. All thoughts in that direction became tangled in memories of herself cooking for her dad, washing his clothes, getting him to work on time. She couldn’t fathom what a child was, exactly, or a parent. “I haven’t decided,” she told Esofea. “But what about you?”
“I want to have a baby back,” Esofea said, and then she had told Margarite a sniffly, elliptical tale involving a sailboat, a moonlit night, a happy accident followed by a negotiation, an abortion …
At this point in the story the sheriff had walked in. Bruce the Moose had come to a clumsy stop inside the doorway. He blinked at the two women holding hands across the break table, then turned and took his coffee cup elsewhere.
“So now he wonders if you’re gay too.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, I know,” Margarite assured Esofea. “Not even.”
She left the cruiser finally. The celery mansion’s run-around porch groaned under the deputy’s step. The small gray cat called Mr. Nilsson rode Esofea’s shoulder as she answered the door.
“Hi,” the deputy said. “Any sign of Danny yet?”
Mr. Nilsson vaulted off and skittered away. Margarite watched the cat dart down a dim hallway into a lighted kitchen with enameled sink and pine sideboards, a cast iron stove, old gingham curtains limp above a firebox.
“Nope,” said Esofea. “The boy is laying low. Or laying Lois. Who knows?”
“Lois?”
“I made her up. She’s easy. Her tits think Danny’s a great philosopher.”
Margarite’s brain felt slow. She discretely sniffed for weed. “No idea where he might be? His tanker is gone.”
“Hauling Wesson Oil, I guess. That’s what he does when his cash is low and he can’t con me—which he can’t right now, due to certain reproductive atrocities.”
“You sound unhappy with him.”
“You sound, hmm, investigative. Wanna come in?”
“I can’t, really. I’m allergic to incense.”
“Oh, shit,” Esofea said. “I didn’t inhale. Really.”
Margarite smiled, shifted questions around in her head, groping for the right one. God, she was so tired. That guilty old stump Lodge had taken over her emergency shift for the night, told her to go home and get some rest. He would sleep in his office. The hospital was locked up for the night, but it wouldn’t hurt to stay close. That was his reasoning. Margarite would bring in Dolf Cook for formal questioning in the morning. What she asked now, though, was this: “You ever fly fish?”
“Me? Never.”
“Ever fish at all, any style?”
“I’m a vegetarian. On moral grounds. I don’t bother animals.”
“That takes a lot of guts up here.”
Esofea raised a lovely thin arm and made a muscle. “Guts and granola.” Her smile was impish. “And coffee. And cigarettes. And chocolate. Plus naps. You look beat, girl.”
“I’ll be ok. The sheriff’s taking my emergency shift. Really, no fishing, not even with Danny Tervo?”
“I’m sorry. Danny who?”
“Tell me you’re not so angry with him that you made a few things up.”
“Of course not. But you’d be angry with him too.”
“I would?”
“You oughta be.”
“I should?”
“Oh, never mind,” Esofea said, stepping out on the porch to retrieve a half-pack of American Spirit cigarettes from a window sill. She lit one. “So, things are good with Julia?”
“Perfect.”
She snorted smoke. “Now who’s making shit up?”
“Nobody in my world.”
“Now that sounded angry.”
Esofea reached out with arms open. Margarite froze for a moment, her eyes falling closed as she felt the hug, long and solid, leaving her in a swirl of cigarette smoke.
Later, heading home, she stopped at the Holiday station and picked up more Pepto. Lovers, she thought, taking a heavy slug of pink about a mile down the highway—but before she could complete the thought she realized her headlights were off and she was driving sixty in the dark.
11
The silver Essence of Soy tanker barreled across the panhandle of Oklahoma, casting its afternoon shadow onto a vast, flat dryness that pleased Danny Tervo very much.
He thought about the Santa Fe Trail, all those folks moving great and perilous distances to be where the resources were. This made sense. This was the only choice up until outfits like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad introduced the idea that folks ought to stay put and let other folks bring the resources to them. Such socio-economic transformations were the work of visionaries, of course, and the making of barons—and such was the arc of yours truly.
But Billy Rowntree had been making Tervo’s prepaid ring every fifty miles or so, disturbing his meditations on fame, wealth, and the admiring, hot-green eyes of Esofea.
Tervo didn’t answer. He wanted no part of Billy Rowntree.
He had to unfuck that shit, fast.
Pardon my language.
Talking to Esofea. Doing ninety, alert to his new GPS detector with “points of interest” programmed into the Trinity database. The thing worked. He had slowed down three times: twice for radar cops in New Mexico, once for a Wal-Mart automatic door opener outside Amarillo. He hit a button, put that Wal-Mart door in the database for “ignore.”
At the Kansas border, drilling rigs infested the horizon to the south. Half of them were dormant, pumped out. Naturally, Tervo had done his case study project with oil. But the parameters held for any finite commodity. A period of unconsciousness, low prices, and profligate waste: dripping faucets, water parks, irrigated crops a thousand miles from their natural habitats—shit, it was Rowntree calling again. He had given his prepaid number out, thinking he might do business with this Sinbad dude, who was dead.
I kid you not, girl. The dude’s name was Sinbad.
Talking to Esofea now. Because come to think of it, she may have been pissed at him before he left. About the issue of reproductive freedom—as in his.
Right.
His offense: vasectomy performed without consent and authorization of girlfriend. That’s what she had been all Miss Overdue Book about.
It had not been much of an argument, actually. Esofea had quoted recklessly from Charlotte’s Web, calling him “some pig.” Tervo had trumped that with Gloria Steinem: “Yeah, and ‘I don’t breed well in captivity.'” Then she had burst into shrieks and tears, right there in the Luce County Library, struck him on the side of the head with the toner cartridge she was holding, threw the inky thing at Tervo as he backed up.
But if she was pissed at him, all he had to do was tell her a story. Show her the strength and quality of his character. And he had a story. Damn, girl. Listen to this.
Tervo pressed the side of his prepaid and silenced the ringer. He got home he would throw the phone in the lake. Meantime, though, he was leaving it on in case Belcher called back with a weather report from the home front, where Heimo Kock had been strangled—and Esofea had told the EMS guys what?
The thought of Belcher out there attending to Esofea mellowed Tervo’s jitters and added a little levity to his thinking. To watch Belcher try to figure out whether, on a given day, he was supposed to be agreeing that Esofea was an insane bitch or tracking down the bookmobile in some lost corner of Luce County and giving her flowers from Danny, who was real, real sorry—that was amusing. Ugly big guy cloaked in Realtree and Scent-Lok, polarized wrap-arounds and a grubby Remington hat, bearing a dozen yellow roses and a voice in perfect pitch for the act of apology, because Belch was born sorry, about pretty much everything that ever happened to anyone, anywhere. And he loved Esofea, guilty-puppy-style.
Quite hilarious, when Tervo thought about it, given that this same guy killed bear like nobody’s b
usiness. Gun, arrow, trap—die, bear, die.
Pizza and Kool-Aid.
That was Belcher’s secret bear bait. Day-old pizza with dry Kool-Aid laced across the top. Belch was always ahead of the curve, once you set him down in the forest. He out-beared everybody, even Donuts Rudvig. That’s where he and Belch hooked up, Tervo thought. They were visionaries, out there alone in the next paradigm.
Southwest of Topeka, over the great Oglala Aquifer, a sky the color of cantaloupe filled Tervo’s two tall side mirrors. He thought of being inside Esofea’s head when she was wearing earrings this color: inside her mind, working brake and gas and gear shift, getting her all revved up. Then he thought of himself barreling in between two flaps of luminous, pink-orange girl skin.
The story was awesome. He had predicted ninety percent of what was going to happen. And the ten percent surprise, what could he do? She should just chill, climb up on his lap, and you know … Baby, just listen to my story.
Around eight that morning, returning across the parking lot of the Saseyama Botanical Garden with a personal check from Brent Takahashi folded behind his cigarettes, Danny Tervo hadn’t been one bit surprised to find Billy Rowntree waiting at the tanker, sitting on the step-up, yawning like it hurt.
“Right on,” he said to the kid. “The man behind the waterfall.”
Billy Rowntree had come to his feet brow first, scowling at Tervo’s chest. But the kid said nothing, just scowled and breathed heavily, and Tervo would tell Esofea that at first the sick little shit had let go of each word as if it would cost him an hour of standing in the hot desert sun holding a cinder block over his head. Arizona Boys Ranch. Look it up.
“What can I do for you, Billy? You holding? You shopping? What’s up?”
Tervo had read the clouds in the kid’s expression as cognitive resistance, presenting as rage, suppressed with some really good skank. Billy Rowntree was stoned, very stoned, but unable to get rasta with it. And that response, Sofi, I’m telling you, it’s rough. It’s lonely. It pisses you off. It’s a killer. Listen … I said:
The Wind Knot Page 14