I eased the back of my head against the empty gun rack, closed my eyes, exhaled again, releasing more vapor into the cab, then gathered myself to go back outside, back up to the Jacobsens’ house to find someone to give me a jump. Dead batteries were as common as snowflakes in January. Finding help wasn’t the issue. I was aggravated. I should have parked in the courthouse parking lot this morning, plugged in the block heater, and walked over to Anna’s. But I was worried about being late. The curse of an indexer. Tardiness wasn’t allowed. I’d always been on time, even before I was an indexer. But the habit of being on time was worse now. Being late meant losing a job, a publisher. My obsession with being late had consequences. I obviously needed a refresher on that lesson.
I got out of the truck, opened the hood, and left it open; the universal sign for I need a jump. Still frustrated, I looked down the street at Anna’s. I was certain somebody would be willing to help me. But I had to wait for an oncoming car to pass before making my way back.
I recognized the driver, and he recognized me.
Guy Reinhardt tapped the brakes and signaled with his finger that he saw me, that he was coming back to my aid. I waited and watched the sheriff’s brown and tan Scout turn around in the nearest driveway, then head back my way. I had mixed emotions about seeing Guy. I had plenty of questions that were none of my business waiting to be asked.
Guy pulled up alongside the truck and stopped, almost kissing the corner of my front bumper with his. All he had to do was pop open his hood, hook up the cables to his battery, and give the key a turn. He knew the drill, probably gave someone a jump ten times a day.
Guy stood up out of the car, instantly towering over the roof. “Hey, there, Marjorie. What’s the matter? Truck won’t start?”
I didn’t have the energy to offer him a smile. At least he didn’t give me a weather report.
“Well,” Guy said, “go on, get in my truck and keep yourself warm. I’ve got this.”
“The jumpers are under the passenger seat,” I said.
Guy headed to the truck, and I headed to his Scout, more than willing to take up his offer to get out of the cold. I slid into the passenger seat and was greeted by a blast of air that was hot enough to melt the makeup off my face. My foundation and lipstick had probably worn off hours ago. I wasn’t too fussy about refreshing my face; there’d been too many people to keep up with in the Jacobsens’ front room for that. Not that a made-up face would have mattered. Being presentable wasn’t something I had to put a lot of thought into during the day.
I watched Guy go through the motions as he hooked up the jumper cables. With both batteries connected, he headed to the cab of the truck. He had to turn the key a couple of times, but the engine finally fired.
Guy left the truck running and the cables connected, then returned to the Scout. “I’m gonna let the battery charge off mine a little while before I send you on your way, Marjorie. That all right?”
I looked up at the sky, calculating what bit of daylight was left. “Sure,” I said. Even if I drove home in the dark, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the battery.
I hadn’t seen Guy since we’d found Nils. I really didn’t know what to say to him without asking questions that weren’t any of my business. “Thanks for stopping,” I finally said.
Guy reached over and turned down the heat. “I wasn’t gonna leave you standing there on your own.”
“I was going back to Anna’s. Someone would have helped.”
He looked down the street toward the house full of mourners. He looked tired. Any boyishness in his square-jawed face had vanished. Weary red lines crisscrossed the whites of his eyes, which were covered with a glassy sheen. I felt bad for consciously smelling for whiskey, but I did it anyway. There was none. The whole interior of the Scout smelled like stale cigarettes and nothing more. I guess I wasn’t immune to rumors any more than anybody else, but I worried the stress of the job might be too much for Guy.
“I’ve been wonderin’ how you were doing,” Guy said.
“Same here,” I answered.
“I’m sorry you had to see Nils like that.”
“That’s not your fault. We went looking for a missing girl. Finding her dead would have been difficult, too.”
Guy agreed. “But still. I should have told you not to come with me.”
“I didn’t give you much of a choice.”
A slight smile flashed across Guy’s face. “Things would have been easier if we would have found Tina instead of Nils.”
“For who?”
“Nobody, I guess. That was a silly thing to say.”
Y’betcha, I thought, but didn’t say. I sucked in a deep breath instead and said, “I called dispatch last night.”
“I heard. George told me you thought you saw Tina Rinkerman. By the time I was free to call you, I thought the hour was too late. Then things started in this morning as soon as the rooster crowed.”
I was relieved. George Lardner had done his job. I was worried that the dispatcher had taken me for a foolish woman and hadn’t told Guy about what I thought I’d seen. “Someone did call me. They called twice and hung up both times. I think someone dialed a wrong number.”
“You’re sure?” Guy pressed down on the accelerator, racing the engine of his truck to help the battery charge faster.
“As sure as I can be.”
“If you notice anything odd, you call the station right away, okay?”
I’d noticed a lot of odd things since we’d found Nils’s body, but I couldn’t make sense of most of them. “I could have sworn I saw Tina Rinkerman in the backseat of that car, but I didn’t really get a clear look. I’ve only seen her a few times, anyway.”
“She’s kinda hard to miss, if you know what I mean.”
“I do. But George said she’s probably not the only girl around like her. I guess I never put much thought into such a thing.”
Guy stiffened and let up on the gas, allowing the Scout to settle back to a steady idle. “Girls like Tina are rare. From what I understand, most folks send them away to let other people take care of them.”
“To the Grafton State School?” Anna had called the school a hospital for the feebleminded, which was the original name when the place was built. They changed names more than thirty years ago, but feebleminded stuck.
“That’s where the Rinkermans kept Tina, but they brought her home recently.”
“Do you know why?” The question slipped out of my mouth without my permission. I really didn’t want to do that.
Guy shot me a look that I knew all too well. He couldn’t say. Or he wasn’t going to tell me. “Toren and his boys have all cooperated with the investigation.”
I let Guy’s words settle between us. His focus was still on the Jacobsen house. I wondered what he knew about them that I didn’t.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I can’t help myself sometimes. You know that,” I said.
“I do,” Guy said. “You’ve been a big help to me in the past, Marjorie. To be honest, I’ve wanted to talk to you more than once. But I don’t want to involve you in something that might lead to trouble. And besides, I guess I really need to show everyone in the county that I can handle both of these investigations on my own.”
“I’ll help if I can, you know that.”
Guy looked away from the house, back to me. “Have you heard anything that might be of help, Marjorie? You know, since you’ve been in town? Between you and me, I keep runnin’ up against dead ends. I’m startin’ to get worried the killer’s trail is going cold, and if I don’t come up with something soon, you know what’s gonna hit the fan, especially if somebody else comes up hurt. That’d be the end of my job. So, you see, I really have to figure this out. Whoever did this to Nils is still out there.”
“I need to organize my thoughts, but a few things have troubled me. Did you know Nils and Anna had an argument the night before he died?”
“She told me. So did Frank. They argued fro
m time to time from what I understand. Makes sense to me. I got an inside track on how hard marriage is. People argue. That’s the way livin’ with someone is, you know that. Is there more to this than a bad spat?”
“I don’t know Anna well enough for sure. To be honest, the only time I saw Nils and Anna together was at church, and, well, I haven’t attended much in the past few years.”
“No, I don’t imagine you have.”
I had more questions. Guy had asked, so I felt like I could let him know what I was thinking, what bothered me. “Do you know why they argued? You don’t have to tell me. Honestly, I really don’t want to know. But you should know. That way if there was more to the spat, something serious, you can work on that.”
“Marital stuff from what I understand. Anna hasn’t been too coherent or talkative. I figure she’ll come around once the shock wears off. I plan on talking to her again if time allows. I hope I don’t have to. I hope I find out who did this before then and lock them up where they belong.”
“Frank told me there was tension at the store a few days before Nils died.”
“Sounds right.”
I took a deep breath, then said, “I’m hesitating to say anything about this, because I don’t know that what I’m thinking is true. This is just a suspicion on my part, but Anna sure looks like she’s pregnant to me. I’ve wondered all along if that’s what the two of them argued about. They have a lot of mouths to feed, and Anna seemed at the end of her rope with everything she had to do. Maybe that was why they fought.”
Guy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “No one has said anything about that to me.”
“I can’t say this is true. Something seems off, though, and I always end up back at that. Darlys suspects that Anna is pregnant, too, but she doesn’t know for sure. You might want to talk to her.”
“Yeah, I should do that. See, that’s why I like talkin’ with you. I’ve come to trust your insight, Marjorie. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Why? It’s the truth.”
“Hilo used to say that.”
“Oh.” Guy shifted in his seat again, then said, “I’m going to go unhook the cables. Are you in a hurry?”
“I have to go by Jaeger Knudsen’s to pick up Shep, and then go home to try and get some indexing work done. I have a little time, no worry.” I didn’t want to rush Guy along.
“Good. Stay right here. I have a favor to ask of you.” Guy jumped out of the Scout and scurried over to the Studebaker, which nearly died once he took the jumper cables off the battery.
I wasn’t left to wonder what the favor was for too long. Once Guy was sure the Studebaker was going to stay running, he came back to the Scout.
“That’s a sturdy old workhorse you got there, Marjorie. But you might have that battery looked at.”
“I’ll talk to Jaeger.” I stared at Guy expectantly. My curiosity was pushed to the limit of my restraint. What’s the favor, Guy?
He looked at me, and I saw the same uncertainty in Guy’s eyes I’d seen the first time we’d gone off on a search together. He was struggling to ask me something. “This is a big favor, Marjorie.”
“Well, go on, ask. I’ll say yes if I can.”
“I said I needed to do this on my own, that I didn’t want to pull you into this any more than I already had, but the thing is, I’m new at this. I mean, I was a deputy for a long time, and I thought I knew my way around the department. Then we lost Hilo as sheriff and Duke stepped in, and now Duke’s out, and I’m in. Stark County is a small department, and there’s people who favor Duke over me and some that favor me over Duke. But not so much me. I understand that people are uncertain of me. I’ve got a limp and two bad marriages in my wake. That doesn’t say much about my ability to make things work out.”
George Lardner came to mind. I could see the dispatcher taking Duke’s side since he was dating Duke’s sister, Theda. There was probably more inside stuff than that, but I’d heard the gossip, seen how people reacted to him. I knew what Guy was saying was true.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I can’t say this to anyone but you, but I’m not sure who I can trust. Not only in my department, but the state police are helping, and the US Marshal for this territory is on his way. There’s a lot of people in and out of my office and on the phone that I don’t know. I trust you, Marjorie. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
“This is a big favor.”
“You said that already.”
“At least the weather’s cleared up,” Guy said, looking to the sky.
I stared at him and didn’t say a word.
Guy looked back at me. “You mentioned Grafton.”
“I did.”
“Well, I asked Grafton for their papers on Tina and a report about her. Who she associated with, why she left, any trouble with her running off, that kind of thing. I think Tina’s life in Grafton is important to know about. Maybe she ran off to go back there. I don’t know,” Guy said, perplexed. “But I need to know everything about her that I can find out. If I wait for this report to come in the mail, it might be too late. They won’t tell me much over the phone.”
I furrowed my brow. My mind raced ahead of Guy’s words. “I don’t understand what the favor is.”
“I’d like you to go to Grafton, Marjorie, and bring me back that report. But look around while you’re there, too. Toren said they got a call to go get Tina, and that’s all there was to her coming home. He might not be tellin’ me everything, though I don’t know why he wouldn’t.”
“You want me to drive up to Grafton?”
“I don’t know who else to ask, Marjorie.”
“That’s a six-hour drive on a good day.”
“The weather’s clearing. The roads ought to be decent.”
I sighed. “When?”
“Tomorrow, if you can. I don’t know that the report will help me find Tina, but if I could get one of the investigations solved, then it sure would be a big help, not just to me but to Toren and his family. I’ll call the school to tell them you’re comin’ in my place.”
“I’m scheduled to help out with the Ladies Aid tomorrow, but I guess I could call Darlys and tell her something’s come up.”
“You need to keep this between us, Marjorie. Don’t tell Darlys or anyone else that I asked for your help.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do,” Guy said. “I know you do.”
CHAPTER 22
Daylight slipped away, and the world before me turned blue. Without the clouds to trap the light and cold air, all I could see was the sky and its fading reflection off the snow. The sky looked as if the whole universe was nothing more than a glass bowl turned upside down. Blue was a sympathetic color, and the comforting sight was a relief from the long, blank white and gray evenings of the prior days. This sky was in a good mood, and it offered me a glimpse of a world capable of change at any moment. Beauty and peace were right around the corner—but I didn’t believe that for a minute. Things were worse now than they were when the day had started. I wasn’t sure that I could help Guy. Or that I should.
I couldn’t tell him no.
The drive to Grafton worried me. But there was more to my discomfort than simple worry. I’d said yes to a sheriff once before when he came to me looking for help, and that hadn’t turned out so well. The world had turned blood red then, and I still hadn’t recovered.
Before I could fully digest the comforting color in the sky, the light faded away. Darkness fell in front of my eyes like a heavy iron curtain. My headlights cut into the suddenness of night like white-hot knives, allowing me to see the snow-covered road in front of me but not much farther.
Instead of driving to pick up Shep, I drove right on by the Knudsen farm until I was at home. I decided that I would call Jaeger once I got settled and ask him to keep Shep another day, until I got back from Grafton. I hated to be separated from th
e dog, but more than that I hated to be in the house by myself, alone, without another living creature nearby. I couldn’t remember a time when that had happened in recent memory.
What’d you get yourself into now, Marjorie?
I had to punch the gas pedal to plow through the drifted driveway.
The first thing I did, after surveying the snow and property to make sure no one had visited the house while I was away, was plug in the block heater to the truck. Then I went inside and called Jaeger straight away. I didn’t even take off my coat.
Jaeger said he’d be happy to keep Shep another day, and didn’t pry, either, to ask where I was going or why. I was glad I didn’t have to make something up and lie to him.
With those two things taken care of, I set about warming up the house by restocking the Franklin stove. I wanted out of my dress and boots, so I changed into some comfortable clothes, thick flannel pajamas, and put on three pairs of heavy socks. Then I started thinking about what I was going to eat for supper. To my surprise, my stomach was growling. I had worked up an appetite serving others. Darlys had predicted that would happen.
The thought of her made me realize that I was distracting myself from making one more necessary phone call. I had to call Darlys. I had to tell her I wasn’t going to be at Anna’s.
I picked up the phone, checked to make sure no one else was using the line, then dialed the number. The phone rang four times before someone answered.
A man said, “Hello. Oddsdatter residence.”
I assumed the man was Darlys’s husband. “Doctor Oddsdatter?”
“Speaking.”
“Hello, this is Marjorie Trumaine. Is Darlys available?”
“Oh, hello, Marjorie. How are you?” Henrik Oddsdatter had a deep, soothing voice, which I was sure came in handy when he had to calm someone down in the dentist’s chair.
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