He lifted a corner of his bedsheet and wiped his tears.
“Later I found one of that girl’s blue hairpins still in the back of my truck. I kept it.”
“So your brother burned her at the yard? Is that why you have ashes in a mustard crock?”
“He was supposed to burn her. That’s what he agreed to. I just took them ashes from his burn pile.”
“But he might not have?”
“Lyman’s got a big mouth, but he don’t mean hardly anything he says. So I don’t know.”
Dr. Patel stood in the doorway. Coach Beavers saw her and said, “I’m gonna die now,” and closed his eyes.
“You are not going to die, Mr. Beavers,” said Dr. Patel as she entered.
“Angus and Brandy, them poor kids can have my things . . .”
The sheriff bore in on him. “Coach Beavers, listen to me now. Your niece was at that party last night. She’s alive. Sophie Ringensetter died at a party just like it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“Now I’m going to ask you about another girl, and a man who calls himself King Cream. There was a girl with long black hair who danced at the party last night. Yes?”
He nodded.
“She’s missing.”
He nodded.
“You knew that?”
“No. But I ain’t that surprised.”
“Apparently you spend a lot of time online, on Backpage.com. Is that right?”
“Some.”
“Have you ever seen King Cream on there?”
Walt Beavers nodded. He gathered a breath. “He’s a fella,” he said, “always trying to buy girls. The way he talks, he’s some kind of trucker, takes the girls out west. I . . . I ain’t with that, Sheriff. I just like it when the girls dance. I don’t ever touch them.”
“Someone said he might be from around here. Is he, Mr. Beavers?”
“He seems to be.”
“How do you know?”
“He talks about you all the time.”
“He talks about me? Like what?”
He lifted the sheet and wiped his eyes again. “Folks at the bar show around them cell phone tweet things. Last one I seen, he talked about your body. I don’t want to say them words.”
He hung his head.
“When you go to those parties, Coach Beavers, you’re part of that. Even the words.”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff.”
She was out the door and into the hallway before she understood what still nagged her.
“One more thing, Coach. Then you can rest. You shut that book of newspapers and ran out of the library. You didn’t even try to help Mr. Snustead. Why?”
“What that girl said,” he answered weakly. He looked toward the window in his room even though a heavy curtain blocked it. “The last time there was any conversation about the night we’ve been talking about, I got myself busted up almost as good as this, never even saw who hit me, and they got Lyman pretty good too. Coach Clausen kinda sideways let me know my little niece was next, Brandy. Anytime any of them guys gets worried about what they did, it comes down on us Beaverses. When that girl at the library called emergency and then she said Deputy Lund was coming, I shut that book and I scooted.”
“Did you talk to Ladonna Weeks after that?”
“I went to get my ticket for the party and she said, ‘What’s the matter, Coach? You look like Hollow Billy chased you in here.’ But no. I didn’t say nothing to her about it.”
“Does she know there was a murder at the party?”
He still stared away at that thick curtain, thinking about it.
“I’ll bet she did. Them are hers and Dermit’s parties. She was at that one, serving the drinks that girl was having too many of. I’m gonna guess . . .” He finally looked at her. The fear was unmistakable in his pain-exhausted face. “I’m gonna guess that what happened at their party got known to her and Dermit. Aw, hell, I’m done now. You get on the wrong side of Lund and Clausen and then you add in them two . . .”
On the way out, she called her dispatcher.
“Denise, contact La Crosse PD. Request a guard outside Walt Beavers’s room . . .”
* * *
Hard to say what she thought about on the drive back to Farmstead . . . a swirl of mudslides and floods, signatures on nomination papers, freight trains, bullets exploding from the barrel of her gun, dead girls, live girls, lost girls, the person she was before she was lost, the Dairy Queen, happy and complete, right up to the instant when Mrs. Wisnewski said . . .
As she pulled into her parking spot, where the yellow paint on the asphalt still said SHERIFF R. GIBBS, her headlights struck something sprawled over the cleat. It looked real, and she recoiled with a gasp.
52
“That’s a rattlesnake.”
Olaf the Handsome was back from Iowa with everything the Allamakee County Sheriff’s Department had on file and in memory about the disappearance four years ago. He looked somber.
“A rubber rattlesnake. Wearing Sophie Ringensetter’s hair clip.”
“Why?”
“Hell if I know. Except somebody’s leading you.”
The sheriff hollered out her office door, “Denise! We need you!”
Yttri dropped the barrette into an evidence bag and dangled the snake by its rattle. It bounced in its coils, dusty and damaged by age but still lifelike. “You’re getting led. The necklace. Those photos you received. Now a rubber rattlesnake with a hair clip. The problem with getting led—”
“I know what the problem is.”
A headache spiked between her eyes. She reached across the Sophie necklace to pick up her coffee. “If someone had a straight story that checked out, they’d just tell it.” She pushed the necklace open with her finger, as if to make room for a head. “This is not that simple.”
“Or maybe you’re supposed to be intimidated, to back off. You, specifically.” Yttri tossed the snake onto her side table. “Which isn’t gonna happen, I can see that. Are you ready for what I have?”
She studied him over her foam cup. Was she being led? Or was it simply that Ladonna Weeks and Pinky Clausen believed she could be made to mistrust Harley and give up? But if that were true, why the snake and the barrette, which seemed to lead her toward, not away from, a crime?
“Go ahead,” she told Yttri. “Who’s the witness?”
“Otto Koenig, of Red Mound. I’ve met him on dedicated rounds. Odd guy, bachelor, lives alone, about fifty years old, used to be a successful dairy farmer, not anymore, drinks a lot, and three different women in three different counties have filed restraining orders against him. One of them is an ex-wife here in the Bad Axe.”
“Koenig means ‘king’ in German,” the sheriff said, thinking King Cream.
“Right. So maybe he’s our guy. Four years ago, August 12, according to Allamakee, Koenig claimed to have seen a girl who looked like Sophie Ringensetter on the grounds of the Ease Inn the afternoon before the stag party. The detectives I talked to said they weren’t sure if they should believe Koenig or not. They suspected him for a while, thought he might be smoke-screening them. I called the number Allamakee gave me on the drive home. Disconnected. I called his ex-wife. She suggested he was dangerous. She also believes he goes to stag parties.”
“We’d better pay a visit.”
“Right.”
As she eased her sore arm into her jacket, her printer started up. She heard, “Yes, my queen, you called?” and Denise entered, spitting Skoal juice into her soda can. It took the sheriff a split-second to recall what she had wanted from her dispatcher.
“Would you please research Angus Beavers for me, find out where he was playing baseball, what the team colors are, whether he might have a big blue bag, and when he left the team to come home?”
“Can do. And now for something digital, by way of inoculation. You ready? So the husband says to the wife, ‘We know that Google is a female. And how do we know? Because she star
ts suggesting things before you can even finish your sentence.’ ”
Yttri looked quizzical. The sheriff braced herself.
“And the wife answers, ‘That must mean Bing is a man, because he tries to convince you he’s superior, then does a shit job of pleasing you.’ ” Denise continued right through Yttri’s chuckle. “News from the cyber world. Grab those printouts.”
Sheriff Kick took the pages off the printer.
“Twitter took us seriously. The Jerry Myad profile was phony, like I thought. Get it? Jeremiad? A list of grievances against the world? The best defense is a good offense? Attacking you first? Because you threaten him? The IP log shows those tweets coming from the cell phone of a creep you crossed paths with pretty recently.”
Denise’s stubborn cheer had vanished. Here came the hard part, apparently. Based on ‘pretty recently,’ the sheriff was guessing the Rhinegold truck, the snowplow, The Scream. “S’more,” her old flame Perry Gardner had called the man with the melted face.
“Jerrold Mickelson?”
Denise was surprised. Then she winced. “Oh. Him? He’s another monster. But no, not him.” She sighed like something was hurting her, something worse that she didn’t want to say. “No, it’s a guy named Baron Ripp.”
“Who’s that? I crossed paths with him recently? How do you know?”
“He took a picture of you. Look.”
One of the printouts was another Twitter screen shot. To accompany a tweet that said drag that queen, I got the chain, the creep with the Twitter handle Jerry Myad had posted a photograph of the sheriff standing behind her kids at the video game along the back wall of the Ease Inn mini-mart while she had been talking to Ladonna Weeks.
Her face burned, but she felt a chill.
“Though funny you should mention Jerrold Mickelson,” Denise was saying. Her face had gone blotchy. Her voice sounded out of rhythm. “Because I went vertical on this, down in the direction of hell. One of the websites linked on this Jerry Myad account is Mickelson’s, sovereign citizen bullshit with a side of snuff porn. Ripp and Mickelson retweet each other. There’s a network of these guys. Ripp took the name Jerry Myad from a character in some nasty internet cartoon they like. In one of those tweets, Ripp says to Mickelson . . .”
She stopped and shuddered.
“Never mind. But it involves a body part of yours . . . and a nozzle . . . and guess how many psi?” Denise had gone red in the face. “If it’s a joke, I don’t know it yet—but the tweet gets a couple dozen likes.”
A weird numbness had swept through the sheriff. She looked up from the picture of herself and her kids. “Either of you know Baron Ripp? I mean personally?”
“Only heard of him,” Yttri said. “Big-name family, decent people. Don’t know how they made a loser like him. How about you, Denise?”
Denise said nothing. In fact, out of character, she stood frozen, only blinking. At last she forced a little smile. She tried to speak but couldn’t. She widened her eyes and blinked fast, then forced a bigger smile, but tears came anyway, filling her lids as she tipped her head back to contain them.
Yttri was turned away, getting his coat on, ready to visit Otto Koenig. He said, “Are you sure you don’t know the guy, Denise? Don’t you know everybody?”
Denise’s lips had curled, bitten from the inside. She still tried to smile, but her face wouldn’t play along.
“I’m OK,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Then she began to tremble, shaking her head no-no-no and fighting the tears. Sheriff Kick rose and put her arms around her friend.
Yeah, Denise knew Baron Ripp.
Poor Denise, she knew him.
Yttri had frozen with his coat collar rucked up around his head. He let the jacket slide down over his shoulders. “Maybe I should step out . . .”
Denise scorched him. “You think? You think I’m not freaking naked here?”
53
Pepper Greengrass screams her silent oath under water.
You can’t hurt me!
Her cheek hits the rim of the tall plastic bucket. Her ear rakes the bail attachment. He drives her down, always a triple dunk, like there is a school of thought that he follows, a training for this that he has attended.
This is the fourth overall time that he has drowned her within the slow, rain-drilling hours. In between he smokes and raises the bottle neck to sip Dickel while she lies gasping on her back beside the bucket and the dirt becomes mud. He has brought out the sack of items he bought at the store and arrayed them on the picnic table: Bic pens, baby wipes, a snap-blade box cutter. He rants. One time in the middle of the goddamn night a lady got into his wallet. One time this poor dumb cunt believed she could run. One time four of his ladies got in a catfight over who was his favorite and the beaner bitch lost an eye to the jig bitch who thought she could damage his property but she had another thing coming, yes, she did. And speaking of property, one time this sad cock-hat thought it was hers to give away, and so he corrected her and it wasn’t his fault she couldn’t take what she deserved.
Pepper hears all this looking up into two bright black eyes, a cliff swallow silent in its mud nest in the shelter roof. She stares into those alert black beads. Then he jerks from a Dickel daydream, the bird shoots from the nest, and Pepper can’t hold back a sob.
“There we go, darlin’. That’s what I’m waiting to hear. Now you’re getting the idea.”
He reaches with his boot, the point of it, and just nudges her nipple, cold and tented up beneath her wet top. He leaves his boot there.
“See? Practice makes perfect.”
As if he’s been teaching her to swim, like there is a life skill here, important for her to know. She will never sob again, ever. She seeks out her memory of the time when Bennie really was teaching her to swim.
It becomes the afternoon of that game up here, hot August . . . and they stop at a river along the way to cool off. The Kickapoo River. The Here-and-There River, in the language her ancestors spoke. She is laughing because Bennie himself swims terribly, tries to do it in blue jeans, like any Ho-Chunk ever, and he can’t even put his head under water, skims his face across the slow brown Kickapoo current and comes up sputtering and slinging his hair. In an hour Pepper swims better than he ever will, like an otter, he says. She attacks his ankles with fingernail bites from under water, sends him screaming back to the shore. They sit there getting warm and dry, twelve years old and twenty, and Bennie says, I love you, girl. He says, If the current ever gets you, don’t fight it, just go with it, keep your head up, keep breathing, stay alive, everything washes up eventually. I love you. They drive on, and then, like the total freak that Bennie was, he hits six home runs. Six!
“That’s a good girl. Real nice and easy.” He draws his boot back from her nipple. “Now get them clothes off and wash up. You got a whole bucket of washup right there. Go on.”
He watches her strip nude. He staggers, half the Dickel bottle inside him. He picks up her muddy clothes, walks off into a lull in the rain, and hurls them off the black edge of something. She hears them slapping down through tree branches. He comes back out of the dark passing that snap-off blade through the flame of his Zippo. He tells her to lie facedown on the table. She feels his high beams shining up her ass, feels his shirttail dry the skin above her tailbone where the fat lady wrote with the Sharpie, feels him use a baby wipe, then spit Dickel on the spot and trace what the fat lady wrote with his finger. Then Pepper feels the blade.
“Just you relax, darlin’. This is gonna take awhile.”
54
“Shit!”
Her face against the sheriff’s shoulder, Denise snarled to stop herself from crying.
“Like you said, Heidi. We don’t have time for this!”
The sheriff turned her head to keep her chin clear of the bitter-smelling frizz of her dispatcher’s perm. Her view now was of the rubber rattlesnake on her side table. If she was supposed to understand what the snake represented, she did not. Denise pushe
d away.
“But seriously, what is wrong with me? Am I not the biggest ATV you ever heard of?”
“I don’t know what that means, but—”
“All-terrain vagina! Come on, Heidi. Baron Ripp! You read what he wrote about you. I screwed that piece of shit! On a picnic table!”
She pulled away. Her mascara had smudged from the corners of her eyes.
“I’m fine. Never mind. A day in the life of Denise. We don’t have time for this.” She reached for the tissue box on the sheriff’s desk. “But, Heidi . . . while we’re here?”
“Yes?”
Beyond the wall came the sound of coins trickling, then a thunk. Olaf the Handsome was getting a soda. Denise gave Yttri time to move away. When he was gone, she said, “While we’re alone for a minute, I have to ask you a favor.”
“Sure. I owe you like crazy.”
“Well . . . it’s . . . OK, here’s the favor. Please don’t fuck up.”
“What?”
Denise blew her nose. “I want you to be the sheriff, Heidi. I need you to be the sheriff. If you’re not the sheriff, then either Boog Lund cans my ass, day one, or I rip his balls off, day two, and I cram them down his throat. The whole Bad Axe needs you to be sheriff just about that bad. You gotta be the sheriff, Heidi. Please do not fuck up.”
“How am I . . . ?”
Denise just looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“OK, I know. I lied about last night.”
Here came Yttri’s change, rattling through the machine. Olaf the Handsome was still out there. Had he heard? Now he would go. The sheriff gave him time. Then more time.
“I lied. I do remember what happened. I got my wires crossed. I’ve been that way since Bishops Coulee. I can barely stay professional, and there’s more than you know, even worse than pulling on Randy Brundgart. I’m a danger to myself and others.”
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