He was shaking now. Tears of a clown. Stacy Metzger was backing through that side door with a black bull by the nose.
“You passed her off to another predator. You know what the police chief in the Dells said? You ‘sold her up the food chain.’ A child.”
Hans Kling slumped. The camera remote dropped from his hand. Stacy Metzger stopped with the bull. She called back through the doorway, “Dad, get in here.”
Kling said, “The guy . . . his handle . . . I didn’t hurt her, OK? . . . He must have been close by, I put her up online and, boom, I got a response, and he wanted to pick her up right away . . .”
Kling kept shrugging and mewling and peddling his phony, dithering innocence until the sheriff lunged, shoved him by the throat against a hay bale—Stacy Metzger gasped—drove his greasepaint chin up into the barn’s high fluorescent lights.
Kling choked, “OK, sure, you betcha. His Backpage name was ‘King Cream.’ ”
48
The semi tractor rumbles down a long curve. Pepper hangs from her wrist by the chicken handle and stares at segments of the guardrail ticking past. She sees WATER OVER ROAD again. The guardrail is puny, a thin weft of wavy metal on rotting wooden posts, a gesture at safety and a lie about what will happen when things get out of control. He is belligerent with his Jake brake and uses it at the bottom of the long grade as if to shatter the bones of anyone sleeping in the few drab houses with vehicle-cluttered yards on the bottomland. But no one sleeps. Pepper sees dim shapes with flashlights, staggering shapes in pajamas and boots, carrying children and possessions, loading pickups. He hits the water and it explodes sideways into a man carrying a large girl-child and washes over the hood and windshield as his truck decelerates with a backward surge that throws Pepper against the dashboard, leaves her dangling with her knees just touching the floor.
He bulls the truck through the water that’s flooded the valley bottom and gears down as the road starts to climb again. He’s been talking on a cell phone, losing coverage, getting it back. She should listen. It could be useful. He wants his trailer loaded right now. It’s on low ground, he says. On the other end someone tells him it’s on high enough ground that it can get loaded in the morning. He turns to her and says, “OK, then I guess you and me will have our fun early. Boocoo good times, girl, coming up.”
Her wrist hurts, her shoulder, she feels a searing pain between her hips, she knows she shouldn’t say this but she does: “When you say boocoo you sound like some douche bag in a casino, OK? It’s pronounced bowcoo. Just so you know.”
“Huh.”
He says this thoughtfully, gripping the Dickel neck with a hand that holds a burning cigarette between two fingers. The truck is just now leveling onto a ridge, its headlights long across a rain-swept field.
“Another girl with your kind of spice, I’d have to name her. Yours comes with.”
A little ways along the ridge he takes a short spur off the road and stops at a gate. He finds a tool behind his seat, carries it through rain and headlights. His elbows bend as the tool scissors and a chain drops off the gate. He drives through the gate onto an uphill dirt road hardly wider than the tractor. He leaves the truck in neutral with the yellow emergency brake knob pulled out while he swings back out to close the gate. When he returns, Pepper hears his exertion, little Jake-brake rumbles coming from his heaving chest.
He steers uphill, the road becoming more and more narrow. Wet branches rake the windows. He keeps up that rheumy purring like a sick cat. He wants to speak, she thinks, but his lungs are shredded—meth, she thinks—and he can’t catch his breath. At last they reach some kind of peak. The forest thins. The road opens into a little park on a bluff, against a void of rainy sky.
He seems familiar with the place. He backs without hesitation toward the void, pulls forward, reverses again into the void, pulls forward once more across the pitched surface, until the truck is turned around and almost level. Pepper feels its nose tilting slightly back down the road. Now its headlights shine on a shingle-roofed shelter over a picnic table. He pulls his brake knob, jumps down to chock his wheels. The door on her side opens. He stands on the running board, unkeys the cuff from the chicken handle, and claps it on her free wrist behind her back.
“Party time.”
He pushes her through fat vertical raindrops toward the shelter. With both hands cuffed behind her she feels off balance. She stumbles and his hand comes up beneath her skirt.
“I gotcha.”
“You think so.”
He keeps it up there, pinching her.
“I also like mine all denty.”
“You want to say alfresco.”
“Do I?”
“Nothing you can do will hurt me.”
“Gonna be fun to hear that when I’m up in your tonsils.”
“I will bite that limp shit off.”
He whips her around, slaps her hard across the face.
“I will bone you stupid, child.”
“You can’t hurt me.”
“Tell you what.” They have reached the shelter. “I do like all the big talk,” he says, wheezing, “all the spice and the pizzazz, as I said, I like it, but then I get tired of it.”
He shoves her under the roof. She stands on dry dirt, on her own long shadow. He whips her around. He is a black shape in a halo made by headlights through the rain.
“So here is what you and me are gonna do.”
He leaves her at the picnic table, returns down his high beams to his truck. It occurs to her to run. Which way? She darts inside the rain curtain coming down around the shelter. Five seconds. Ten. Then his shadow pierces the curtain and that hatchet face looms back in wet and wheezing with a ruined cigarette dangling. He spits it to the dirt.
“Since I’m already tired of your bullshit . . . and your sass . . . and since you and me need to be . . . friends . . . here’s what we’re gonna do.”
He carries a five-gallon bucket, plastic, orange, empty. He sets it under the shelter. He returns to the truck and comes back wobbly-legged under that shrink-wrapped bale of bottled water. Panting raggedly, he positions the bale by the bucket. He tears the wrap, a few bottles topple out. He lights a new cigarette, calms his lungs. He sits on the picnic table bench, unscrews a bottle, and pours the water into the bucket. He does the same thing again. Again.
“Turn around. You’re gonna help me with this.”
He takes the cuffs off her wrists. She sits down. He hands her a bottle. She unscrews it, pours the water into the bucket.
“You see this?”
He lifts the tail of his shirt: a silver pistol holstered squarely in the caved-in center of his chest. He hands her another bottle. She unscrews the cap, upends it over the bucket. The bucket fills another quarter inch.
“You like a smoke?”
She accepts one. Marlboro Red. He scorches it with a Zippo. She unscrews, pours, unscrews, pours. The rain lets up. Coyotes howl nearby. When the bucket is full, water slopping over the rim, he grabs Pepper Greengrass by the hair and shoves her head down into it.
49
Angus had just mentioned Harley Kick to an old-timer on a stool at the VFW who was drunk enough that he might not remember who asked him.
“Do you know where he lives nowadays?”
“Him and the Sheriff Dairy Queen moved out to Hank Pederson’s old place. Hell, you look familiar. Aren’t you that Beavers kid playing pro ball?”
Angus was out the door. He would have to ask someone else where the Pederson place was. At Kwik Trip, the big red-haired lady said to him as he came through the door, “How’d them chicken nuggets suit you? Ain’t those the best?”
“Chicken nuggets?”
“Cheesy taters is on special today. You ain’t by taxi like last night.”
She recognized him too. He was leaving a trail.
She answered his question. “Where is the Pederson place? On Pederson Road, son, where else? Off County J. But watch out. I heard on the scanner the J bridge i
s under water.”
He took Highway 14 to Military Road along the Vernon County border and dropped down north of the County J bridge. On Pederson Road he found the mailbox, H&H Kick. He parked Brock Pabst’s sputtering shit can in a dark spot off the road and came down the long and winding driveway, wading through puddles, listening for dogs, not hearing any. He figured that minivan might be in the barn, and he was right. He looked on the windshield. The Sophie necklace he had left for her to find was gone. So maybe that had worked. She might have guessed it was him, but at least she knew something was up. So try it again.
He had just pinched Sophie’s blue butterfly hair clip onto a coil of Buster H. Johnson and laid the crumbly rubber rattlesnake on the hood of the sheriff’s van when a light came on in the yard. A half second later, a light switched on in the barn. A screen door banged. Harley Kick’s voice called, “Is somebody out here?”
Angus darted deeper into the barn and lay down behind a feed trough. Harley Kick’s feet in rubber barn boots appeared. Then a small pair of bare feet appeared beside them.
“I said stay inside. Go back in.”
“I want to talk to you.”
Angus guessed it was the little girl he had seen inside the sheriff’s van at the scrap yard.
“We can talk inside,” Harley Kick told his daughter. “Go on.”
“We can’t talk about grown-up things in front of the boys.”
“We can’t talk about grown-up things period. You’re five.”
“Daddy. Tell me. Why are you and Mommy fighting?”
“We don’t fight. We discuss.”
“Daddy . . . at your baseball practice.”
“Please go back in the house, Ophelia.”
“What is the story? Who’s Karen?”
“Back in the house, please. Now.”
Harley Kick’s boots moved. Angus watched the butt of a shotgun touch the dry dirt floor. Was he seeing wet footprints that weren’t his? “Who’s in here?” The boots began to circle the back of the van. Angus held his breath. “The heck . . .” Angus heard him mutter.
Was he seeing the snake? No, he was at the rear of the van. But if he did see the snake, then what? Holding his breath, Angus hastily processed his mistake. Maybe, once upon a time, Harley Kick had been more like Scotty Clausen and Wade Gibbs. If he had been, he wouldn’t want his wife to know. If he recognized Buster H. Johnson, instead of telling her the nasty thing it meant and where it came from, he might just get rid of it.
“What the heck,” Harley Kick said again.
He was at the side of the van now. He called after his little girl.
“She washed the car? Opie, when did Mommy wash the car? She never washes the car. Did you guys go somewhere today? Where?”
“Daddy,” she called back sternly, her voice trailing away toward the house, “you’re not the boss of where Mommy goes.”
Harley Kick was silent for a while. Then Angus heard him pump the shotgun. Next thing Angus heard him do, he picked up a bucket and threw it, made a racket, what you did to flush a possum or a coon. Nothing moved. A minute later, at the house, the screen door smacked its frame. The barn light and then the house light went out.
Angus grabbed the snake and the hair clip and he ran.
50
She had been Googling “King Cream.” The futility so far encompassed restaurants, cream ales, ice cream parlors, and Twitter handles for these places. There was a vintage dairy sign, KING OF CREAM, on eBay. Nothing so far. She was spinning her wheels, grinding her teeth. Hans Kling had told her King Cream was local. He said the buyer had picked up Pepper Greengrass right away. She was about to wade once more into Backpage.com.
“Mighty Heidi, whirly girly, how ya doing?”
She looked up to see Perry Gardner, a brief old flame, a guy from up here in the Bad Axe. She had met him while temping at Rhinegold Dairy in the winter of her senior year.
“You left a message? You wanted to ask me something?”
Perry was still handsome, sharply dressed in a business suit, half drunk, grinning.
“You’re the sheriff now, huh? What’d I do? Or you just missed me?”
For a maddening few seconds she couldn’t think of when or why she called him. Then she remembered. The Scream. The guy at Pinky Clausen’s, plowing snow with an old Rhinegold Dairy truck. She had called him after that.
“I thought maybe your memory was better than mine,” she told him. “At Rhinegold, when we worked there, was there ever a guy there that ended up with his face and his fingers burned off?”
He laughed. “S’more?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Naw, he never worked there. He just bought a Rhinegold truck when they went out of business. But yeah, you mean Jerrold Mickelson. He got toasted.”
Her breath caught. Somebody Mickelson, no first name, was on her list. A Mickelson had worked for her dad. But there were too many Mickelsons in the Bad Axe. Now she added a first name. Jerrold Mickelson.
“What do you mean, toasted?”
“You know, marshmallow on a campfire. He blew up a meth kitchen a few years ago. No idea if he ever worked for you guys.”
She saw that face again, melted off center, holes in it, Jerrold Mickelson saying to her, Three thousand psi sounds about right. . . . Hadn’t someone called and said something like that to Harley?
“I hear now he’s a major troll on the internet,” Perry said.
“Does he call himself King Cream?”
Her old friend shrugged. Her phone was blinking. Denise hollered from dispatch, “A Dr. Patel on line one! Coach Beavers is cleared to talk! O the H is still over in Iowa talking to Allamakee County!”
She hesitated.
Denise hollered, “If you’re going, take my truck!”
After she had put on her jacket and hat, Perry Gardner was still leaning in her doorway. He said, “So anyway, other than sheriff, what’s new with you these days? You ever want to get a drink and catch up?”
“Good to see you, Perry.”
51
An hour later, Walt Beavers squinted through medication-blurred vision at the sheriff’s cell phone picture of his shrine: the calendar page, the blue butterfly barrette, the mustard crock with ashes. Dr. Patel had cleared him to talk. But was he even hearing her?
“Her name is Sophie Ringensetter,” she repeated. “She was sixteen. She’s never been found. You need to tell me what happened, Coach.”
He released his bandaged head into the pillow. Finally he answered, “I dunno . . .”
“You do know something. This looks to me like a shrine to her, like the shrine you made for your daughter who died.” She showed him Sophie’s picture from the Polaris Project website. He skimmed it with half-open eyes. “Do you know what happened to this girl?” she asked him.
“I just dunno. . . . Lyman . . .”
“Lyman what?”
“My brother. I dunno.”
“Is she dead?”
He nodded faintly. Yes, Sophie Ringensetter was dead. His confirmation forced her to hold still for a moment.
“Did she die that day? August 12, 2012?”
He nodded yes, Sophie Ringensetter had died that day.
“Was she a stripper at the party in Emerald Faulkner’s barn? After the Rattlers lost to the Dells? And the team was there?”
Yes, he nodded, to all of that.
“Is this her? Coach Beavers, look again. Are you sure? Is this the girl?”
She held the Missing/Runaway photo in front of him. He took a longer look. A tear trickled down his ruined face. He smeared it sideways with the back of his hand.
“What happened?”
“We didn’t kill her.”
“That’s good to hear. Who did?”
“Dunno. They tried to make it look like me and Lyman did.”
“They?”
“Dunno. She was at the party, you know, getting with the men. The team was real drunk that night ’cuz they lost a big one and there was a fig
ht. Some of the guys took her outside. She, you know, she could hardly hold herself up to walk, but I guess she pulled a train . . .”
The sheriff flinched. “They gang-raped her?”
“Dunno what you call it. Yeah.”
“You saw this?”
“Me and Lyman was pretty ripped. But we saw them take her off somewhere.”
“Do you remember who ‘some of the guys’ were?”
“Wade Gibbs, Sherman Ossie, Scotty Clausen, Curtis Strunk. They took her away from the party into another one of Faulkner’s buildings. They were big-talking after. Next thing I really remember, I was waking up at Lyman’s place and there she was.”
“There she was? What do you mean? Where?”
“Aw, God, I just hate to remember it.” A new tear leaked down his face. “Me and Lyman was drunk as skunks after. I decided not to try for Dog Hollow. I slept over at the scrap yard . . .”
He paused. His nurse had come in. She exchanged his drip and went away.
“Angus came inside yelling in the morning. Turns out, see, I had driven home with a girl’s dead body in the back of my truck. Somebody had throwed her in there. I had seen my own daughter dead because of my own damn fault . . . and I had seen this poor girl at the party, so drunk she could hardly stand . . . and I shoulda . . .”
“What did you do?”
“Well, Lyman, he called Sheriff Gibbs directly. And Coach Clausen. Said them two’s families was in on this. Gibbs and Pinky came out with Boog Lund. Their idea was they could make us get rid of her body, or else they’d charge us with killing her. But, well, Lyman—see, my brother, he will just dicker you to death. He just will. And he got a deal out of them.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, Lyman had already called Clinton Knobloch.”
“Who is Clinton Knobloch?”
“He’s just another fella that seen Gibbs’s nephew and Clausen’s boy and them others taking that drunk girl out in the dark. Knobloch don’t even lie about fishing. Gibbs and Clausen, Boog Lund, them guys knew Knobloch would say what he saw. Next thing you know Lyman had a deal. He was going to get rid of that girl’s body, sure, but only if Angus got a hunk of Clausen’s money to go to that same baseball academy that Scotty went to, and only if I got to be first-base coach on the Rattlers. Lyman didn’t take nothing for himself, just the satisfaction. But I guess me and him really shoulda . . .”
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