Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  She began describing the process in numbing detail: the effort to salvage blinds and carpets that were beyond hope, the terrible chest ailments children suffered the winter after the flood, the handouts from the white churches. “Canned food that no one had used that Thanksgiving and clothes with moth holes in them.”

  She stopped speaking. I sat silent for a few moments, not sure where her mind was, not sure what I felt able to ask, but finally I said, “What happened to Lucinda Ferring?”

  Albritten didn’t look at me. I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me. The silence stretched as if it were a living thing, pushing into me, keeping me from moving or talking. The only motion in the room came from the silent images flickering across the television screen.

  The phone rang, and Albritten jumped on it. A man was on the other end, deep voice but soft. Albritten only contributed “Yes” several times, and then, “God’s will. Not always easy to accept.”

  When she hung up, she put her hands on her knees and took a breath, bracing herself. The caller had told her to put all her money on Stewball, and she wasn’t sure it was good advice. I tried to put on a Kansas face: honest and empathetic.

  “The plywood was the last straw for Lucinda. She demanded a real floor, concrete over the dirt, and the landlord evicted her! So Lucinda took little Emerald and moved out to the country, east of town.

  “There was a woman there had a farm, widowed like Lucinda. Even though she was white, she rented rooms to black students up at the university, because the university wouldn’t let them live in student housing. Lucinda had grown up on a farm up north someplace—Minnesota, maybe, or South Dakota.

  “When she heard about Miz McKinnon, Lucinda went out to see about exchanging room and board for helping on the farm. Address wasn’t in Lawrence but the little town next door, Eudora, so Emerald could go to school there. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but they’d never gone in for segregation in Eudora the way they did in Lawrence.”

  That explained why the Ferring name had disappeared from the phone books. A blot on the detective’s record—she should have thought of looking at other towns nearby.

  “McKinnon?” I interrupted. “They mentioned her over at Riverside, a Doris McKinnon whose farmland the government seized for the missile silo. Is that the same one?”

  Albritten’s lower jaw moved, the way it sometimes does in the old, but in the pause that followed, it looked as though she were chewing her words, trying to decide which ones to keep, which to spit out.

  “Yes, the McKinnon farm is out there near the silo. I don’t have a car, so I didn’t go there often, even before Lucinda passed.”

  “Emerald went to the University of Kansas, right?” I said. “But she kept living on the farm?”

  “The student housing was still segregated when Emerald started at college,” Albritten said. “So she kept out at the farm, until the week Jarvis Nilsson showed up and discovered her. Lucinda was a technician up in one of the science labs at the university. Sounds fancy, but it was a lot of dirty work. Still, it paid better than housecleaning, with regular hours and benefits, health insurance.”

  “Nathan Kiel’s lab,” I said slowly.

  “Might have been. I didn’t pay attention to the name. Even after Emerald went to Hollywood, Lucinda kept working. Emerald was making a good living, but nothing like what a white star made back then. Lucinda knew better than to think her daughter was riding on a gravy train.”

  Her jaw worked again as she thought about the past. “Two women together, one black, one white, it caused a lot of talk at the time. Even I—my old minister was very old-school. . . . Well, you didn’t come to hear about that. And when Lucinda died, he didn’t fuss about holding her funeral at St. Silas. Of course, Emerald had given him money for a new roof, so that softened his theology some. Our new pastor, he’s a different generation, different views.”

  “Where was Lucinda buried?” I was thinking again of Sonia and her lover’s grave. If Lucinda had worked for Dr. Kiel . . . Although Kiel and his wife both denied ever hearing Ferring’s name—but that could be for a lot of reasons, including that they didn’t want to think about their daughter and the old anti-nuke commune.

  “Over here, in Maple Grove,” the old woman was saying, meaning that perhaps tomorrow, when it was light, I should go look at the cemetery. Although what would it tell me? I could hardly sweep the ground looking for Sonia’s DNA.

  “Does Ms. McKinnon still live on the farm?” I asked.

  “She had to stop farming, too old, rents the land—” Albritten tried to drink some tea, but her hand was shaking, and she spilled what was left in the glass on her sweater.

  I started to go to her, but she growled at me to sit. “I’ll fix it when you leave. Last I heard, Ms. McKinnon was still out there. Someone would have told me if . . . if . . .”

  Albritten’s face turned gray, and the glass fell from her hands. I whipped out my phone and typed in 911.

  “No,” she whispered. “No ambulance, no hospital.”

  She tried to push me away, but her gesture was feeble. I found the side zipper to her dress and thrust my hands inside, unhooking her bra, pushing on her chest, phone tucked under my ear. When the dispatcher came on, I gave her Albritten’s address, with a command to come at once.

  19

  Dead End

  It was long past sunset when Peppy and I drove east of town, looking for Doris McKinnon’s farm. I’d spent a tense two hours at the hospital but had finally received a reassuring report on Ms. Albritten.

  I’d followed her into the emergency room, making sure she was getting priority attention, before checking in at the front desk. The ambulance driver was standing there. It turned out he was the same person who’d come for Sonia Kiel twelve hours earlier—he was working double shifts this week.

  “Are you with some kind of Guardian Angels organization?” he demanded with heavy humor. “You go through the streets of Lawrence looking for ladies who’ve keeled over?”

  “Hard to know what you would do without me,” I said, trying to get into the spirit of the exchange.

  Actually, I was tense. Say, scared. I was in a strange town with a woman who had a bitter history with the place. If she or her son claimed that something I’d done had pushed her over the brink, I would be in a lonely spot.

  Albritten had never completely lost consciousness. She’d thrust her pocketbook and phone at me as she was wheeled out of her house, making the crew stop to watch me lock the door before she let them put her in the ambulance.

  “Better you than them. At least I’ll know who stole my money if it disappears,” she said to me.

  At the hospital, while I was filling out forms for them, I went into Albritten’s phone. Her son’s number was fortunately one of seven numbers in her favorites screen. It unnerved me when he answered the call with “Yes, Mother?” but of course her name had shown up on his own phone.

  He lived in a town called Warrensburg, about ninety miles east of Lawrence, he said, when we’d sorted out who I was and why I was calling.

  “Just who are you, and what were you doing with Mother?” he demanded.

  “Do you remember Emerald Ferring?” I didn’t say I was a detective, just that I had come from Chicago looking for her and a neighbor had directed me to Ms. Albritten.

  “She was in the middle of telling me about Doris McKinnon, who owned the farm where the Ferrings moved back in 1951, when she suddenly collapsed.”

  “Mother’s never had heart trouble,” he said. “Nothing wrong with her health. What else went on? Was she agitated? Did you try to get her to do something she didn’t want, like sign over the title to the house? It’s in my name, so you’d be out of luck.”

  “No, Mr. Albritten.” My lips were stiff: this was the kind of accusation I’d been afraid of. “When you talk to the doctors, see if they’ll let you speak to her.”

  When he’d finished worrying and accusing, I turned him over to the doctors. While I waited to see
if the ER team needed me for anything further, I called Lotty Herschel in Chicago. Although it was late afternoon, when she’s usually at her busiest, she let her clinic nurse put me through to her. I’d texted her a few times from the road, but we hadn’t actually spoken since I’d left Chicago.

  “You did the right thing, Victoria,” she said. “Get the doctor’s name. I’ll call him this evening. Try not to worry. You couldn’t do more than what you’ve done.”

  I sat in the waiting area, trying not to worry. I made an effort to occupy my mind with reports for clients in Chicago, but the city, and my life there, seemed to belong to some movie I’d watched years ago, one whose details I couldn’t remember or why they should matter to me.

  I had several texts from Troy Hempel. did you find ms. emerald? what did the woman you were speaking to tell you?

  she collapsed while we were speaking. we’re at the hospital. i’ll let you know if she’s able to tell me anything. did she say anything helpful when you spoke earlier?

  she said she’d seen ms. emerald in lawrence, but she didn’t know where she is now, and is worried about her safety, hers and young veriden’s.

  I leaned back in the uncomfortable chair and tried to concentrate on my breathing and not on the yammer of the television. One of the torments of modern medicine, besides incomprehensible bills, endless sessions on phones or in waiting rooms, and outrageous drug prices, is the constant blare of a television in every room.

  At length one of the interns came out to give me good news about Ms. Albritten: all her cardiac signs were stable. They would keep her for twenty-four hours to monitor her, but she should be fine. Yes, I could go back for five minutes to give her her phone and handbag in person.

  Albritten was dozing. Even the strongest-hearted old woman gets worn out by an ambulance ride and an hour of poking and X-raying. They’d given her a mild sedative, so that when I gently touched her arm, she stared at me with puzzled eyes.

  I reminded her that we’d been speaking about Emerald Ferring, that I was in from Chicago looking for Ferring.

  Albritten tried to struggle upright. I pressed the buttons on the bed, but a nurse who’d been hovering outside the cubicle came in.

  “No disturbance for you, Ms. Albritten.”

  “One thing,” Albritten said through narcotic-thickened lips. “What I say ’bout Em’ral’?”

  “That she and Lucinda had moved out to Doris McKinnon’s farm east of town.”

  “I say ’bout McKi . . . Kin?”

  “No more,” the nurse said, taking me by the arm.

  “Need know,” Albritten insisted.

  “You said she was a white woman who rented to black students. You said you hadn’t seen her for years. And then you collapsed.”

  Albritten relaxed into the bed and shut her eyes. “S’right. Not see. Long time.”

  The nurse nodded significantly toward the exit. I bent to assure Albritten that her son would be arriving soon, and a corner of her mouth twitched into a smile.

  Before leaving the hospital, I made my way to the intensive-care unit. I identified myself to the charge nurse as the detective responsible for getting Sonia Kiel and Naomi Wissenhurst to the ER. Had that really been early this morning? I felt as though I’d already spent months in Kansas, as if finding Sonia belonged to an earlier age, when I was jumping double Dutch with my friends, not jumping through flaming hoops for my clients.

  “Oh, yes, Detective. We were able to release Naomi. She needs medical attention but can get that at home. She’s taking a leave of absence from the university for the rest of the term. Sonia is still unresponsive, but of course she was in worse shape before she took the drugs, and at least she’s able to breathe on her own. The next twenty-four hours will be important.”

  “Have Sonia’s parents been here?” I asked, curious. “Or anyone from St. Rafe’s?”

  “A man phoned around noon. I think he said he was one of her brothers, but you’re the first person who’s actually come here. Would you like to see her?”

  She led me into the back, where Sonia seemed like an appendage to the computers surrounding her. Her breathing was slow and shuddery. At the end of each exhalation, there was a dreadful pause, as if she weren’t sure she should start up again.

  They’d bathed her, of course, and put her into a clean gown. Her face was slack, so it wasn’t easy to imagine what she would look like if she were awake and animated. She had her father’s square face and dark coloring, not her mother’s pale skin. Her wiry black curls were also like her father’s, at least in the pictures of him as a young man that I’d seen online.

  Drugs and street life had coarsened Sonia’s skin. She had some old bruises on her arms, but I didn’t think they were track marks, more like the residue of blows. Someone at St. Rafe’s or someone on the street?

  I picked up one of her flaccid hands between my own and knelt to talk to her. “It’s V.I. Warshawski, Sonia. You called me this morning, to say you’d seen Emerald Ferring. You saw her on Matt Chastain’s grave, you said. Matt Chastain.”

  She might have twitched when I repeated his name, but it was probably wishful thinking on my part.

  “If you wake up—when you wake up—you call and tell me where he’s buried. I want to see Matt’s grave, okay?”

  I held her hand a bit longer, massaging it lightly. Her fingers were rough, the nails cracked. An obscure impulse made me brush the curls away from her forehead.

  The nurse gave me an approving nod as I left. “You’re the officer the police should send when they need to question a patient. You have a good touch.”

  I smiled in embarrassment. “I’ll talk to Sergeant Everard about that.”

  The sky and land were so dark as I drove out of town that I lost all sense of direction. Pinpricks of light shone from farmhouse windows, but once I left the main highway, I was alone—whatever farmers do in the fall must take place indoors.

  Away from the highway, I found myself on gravel roads that didn’t have streetlamps. I drove slowly, headlights up, staying in the center, trying to avoid the ditches on either side, trying not to hit the foxes and other animals who claimed the night for their own.

  At one point someone showed up on my tail, a dark SUV, maybe a Buick Enclave. I thought I’d seen it as I got on the highway, but the traffic was heavy enough that I couldn’t be sure. Here on the county roads, we were alone. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. Peppy, sensing my unease, stood, growling softly.

  At the junction between East 1900 and North 2800 Roads, the SUV turned south, where a sign pointed to the Kanwaka Missile Silo. I went north, my shoulder muscles relaxing, my breathing easing back to normal.

  After following North 2800 Road for a quarter of a mile, I came to a turnoff with a mailbox labeled McKinnon. My map app had been accurate, always a relief.

  The drive ended in a turning circle about a hundred yards from the road. I pulled up behind an elderly Subaru and looked at the house. It was a square building, two stories and an attic. No lights showed.

  I got out, releasing Peppy from her leash. The dog tore off into the night, after who knows what creature: I hoped not a skunk. I shone my flash over the ground and the outbuildings—two barns, some sheds.

  If Emerald Ferring and August Veriden had come to see Doris McKinnon, they must have turned back and driven on. This was a complete dead end.

  Peppy had raced back from her hunting adventure but had started nosing around the house, snuffling at the foundation. She disappeared again, this time at the back of the house. I called to her, but she started barking and whining.

  “Come!” I said in my sharpest voice.

  She came partway toward me, her eyes glittering in my flashlight, but barked and whined again and turned back to the house. I followed her, my legs stiff, the tingling on my neck moving down my spine.

  The back door was shut but not locked. Peppy can smell ten thousand, or maybe it’s ten million, times better than I do, but when I pushed the d
oor open, even my inferior nose picked up what she had noticed from across the field—the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh, the metallic odor of blood.

  20

  The Short-Tempered Arm of the Law

  “If the house was dark when you got there, why did you go in? You have some kind of message that the owner had been killed?”

  We were in the Douglas County sheriff’s office. The questioning was sort of informal, but when we left the McKinnon farm, squad cars had flanked my Mustang fore and aft. While we rode, I’d called my lawyer in Chicago to see if he knew someone in Lawrence or one of the nearby bigger cities.

  “My dog,” I said now. “She smelled death and was so insistent that I went in to see what was troubling her.”

  In Cook County the sheriff shows up at a crime scene only if it’s an important photo op, so I’d been surprised when the Douglas County sheriff arrived at the farm in person. He also headed the interrogation back at the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center in town. In a jurisdiction without a lot of violent crime, maybe he wanted the excitement of a murder investigation.

  I’d called 911 from Doris McKinnon’s back porch—I’d retreated there as soon as I saw the body. Her body, I guessed, but it was impossible to tell the race or sex with the bloating and the destruction. It looked as though her head had been battered, but even that was hard to be sure of.

  “Are you cause or effect, Warshawski?” That had been Sergeant Everard, who picked up the call from the emergency dispatcher. “In sixteen hours you’ve been Joanie-on-the-spot for four women in crisis and we don’t usually have even one murder in the county each year.”

  “It’s a grim crime scene, Sergeant. This person has been dead for some time, and little animals have been eating the lips and eyes and probably the brains and so on. After you get the body to your medical examiner, you can deploy all the sarcasm you want against me.”

  “Oh . . . right. I’ll let the sheriff know—you’re in his jurisdiction. And then you and I will have our chat, sarcasm and all, about what you’re really doing here in Lawrence and how come bodies are stacking up around you. Ken Gisborne, he’s the sheriff, been in office a lot of years, was a deputy first, so he knows his way around a crime scene.”