Watkins - 01 - Blood Country

by Mary Logue

  In her nine months of living across the street from Landers, Claire had never seen Darla come over to visit, not even when Landers’ brother, her husband, Fred, showed up. But she knew Darla, had met her at various functions: the church ice-cream social, the Halloween party at the Fort, and at the election held in the village hall. Darla didn’t let an event go by without participating in it. As Claire recalled, she had dressed as Eva Gabor from Green Acres at the Halloween party and had even tried to talk like her. After she downed a couple Tequila Sunrises, the accent had improved.

  Claire walked out from the yard to greet her. She didn’t particularly want Darla to see Landers, even if Darla wasn’t one of her favorite people. Claire felt like Landers wouldn’t have wanted Darla to see him either. He had never said a bad word about Darla, but he never said a good one.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Anderson?” Claire stopped her by the hood of the car.

  Darla smiled, and wrinkles creased her face, lining the makeup. The smile stayed on her face after it had died off her lips. “Why, I just brought a little something over to Landers. Is he in?”

  “I’m sorry to have to inform you, Mrs. Anderson, but Landers has passed away.” Claire hated using the euphemism “passed away”—after all, didn’t one pass kidney stones? But, especially in the country, it wasn’t thought polite to say someone had died.

  “What?” Darla blinked hard.

  Claire wasn’t sure what Darla hadn’t understood, but maybe she was digesting the information. “He appears to have fallen in the garden and maybe had a heart attack.”

  “Landers? He’s in the garden?” Darla moved to step around Claire, but Claire took hold of her arm and turned her away from the yard.

  “I think it would be better if you not see him.”

  ‘Why?”

  Good question, Claire thought. “He has been there overnight, I’m afraid.”

  “I need to see him.”

  Now it was Claire’s turn. “Why?”

  Darla drew herself up and handed the cake tin to Claire. “We were related by marriage. I’m family. Doesn’t someone in the family have to see the body?”

  “Only if the identification of the victim is in doubt.”

  “Victim?”

  “I meant that loosely.”

  Darla pressed her eyes with her fingertips. The better not to smudge her mascara, Claire thought “My poor Landers.”

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Anderson.”

  “Claire, you know me, you can call me Darla.”

  “I like to stay professional.”

  “Oh, so you’re here as a police officer?” Darla looked at Claire’s gardening outfit.

  “Well, not really. I mean, yes, as it turns out, I am. I was going to help Landers garden, but when I found him, I called the sheriff.”

  “Well, I need to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if he’s really dead. I was a nurse, you know.” Darla shook Claire’s hand off her arm and sailed past her. Claire went after her, still carrying the cake pan.

  “Stay on the path,” Claire asked as she came up behind Darla.

  “I never thought he’d die. I thought I’d die first.” Darla shook her head while staring down at Landers. She made no move to touch him. “He doesn’t look so bad. He only looks a little dead. I’m not surprised. He was a walking heart attack the last few years. Ever since his wife died. Now what are you going to do with him?”

  “Mrs. Anderson—Darla—can I ask you to go back out to your car? We really can’t have anyone in here, just in case we need to check the grounds.”

  “He would have liked to die in the garden. He spent so much time here.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Darla reached over and took the cake tin from Claire’s hands, then she dropped it on Landers’ chest and turned and walked away. Claire reached down and picked up the cake tin and slid back the cover. A whole pan full of yellow squares with powdered sugar dotting them filled the tin.

  “Lemon bars!” Darla shouted. “He liked lemon bars. Even if I made them.” She got in her car and drove away.

  4

  Claire found herself standing in what she guessed was an old classroom in the basement of a church. The church had been desanctified, the sheriff had explained, and the upstairs converted into a clinic by a doctor. Sheriff Talbert said that the doctor was a soft touch, and he said it with a slight sneer. “I don’t mind he takes care of the kids and the old folks, but when a grown person who can get a job mooches off of him, it gets my goat.”

  The room held the cool air that settles in basements. She guessed that they didn’t heat it much at all, especially when it was being used as the morgue in Durand. Claire didn’t quite know where to stand. The coroner, as he was called in this county, was ignoring her, setting out his instruments. Sheriff Talbert had curtly introduced them when he dropped Claire off. Dr. Lord hadn’t said much of anything to her, just led her down to the basement.

  So she had time to study him. To Claire, he appeared to be aging well. His balding hair was cut short, no nonsense about trying to comb the salt-and-pepper hair over a thinning spot. Dr. Lord wore horn-rimmed bifocals that made him look studious. At the moment, he was studying Landers Anderson’s head. His hands were covered with the thin sheath of latex that had become so necessary in the medical business, yet they moved delicately over Landers’ mottled skin.

  “Quite a lot of trauma here,” he said, but softly, as if he were accustomed to talking to an empty room. Or was he talking to the victim, the dead victim, whom he handled so gently? Without looking at Claire, he asked, “What did this?”

  “A shovel, we think.”

  “Yeah, that explains the large area that is involved. They must have smashed him with the back of the shovel. Maybe we’ll be able to tell.”

  “Smashed him with it? I actually thought he might have fallen on it.”

  “We’ll be able to tell when I examine the meninges.” Seeing her puzzled look, he explained, “The brain lining.” He bent down again and kept minutely searching down the old man’s body. The way he was handling Landers was so gentle and intimate, Claire turned away and studied the room.

  The color of the walls hinted at sunlight, which helped lighten up the space. The four windows beamed down sky from above. What Claire really loved about the room, aside from the fact that it had an old oak desk and a beautiful Mission-style bookcase for all the books, was the music that was filling it. She had never heard anything quite like it—a woman’s voice soaring in a cathedral.

  “I knew him.” Dr. Lord turned away from the body but continued to stand between it and Claire. He seemed protective of Landers, as if she were there to do him harm. “He went to my church.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Since I moved here, which was about ten years ago. We served on a couple of committees together. Drank many cups of coffee at the church. He was a good man.”

  “Yes, I thought so too. I was his next-door neighbor.”

  Dr. Lord walked toward a cabinet and took out a small saw. “What’re you doing here?”

  Claire didn’t know what he meant by the question. “Here, in Durand?”

  “No, here in this room. I’ve never worked with an audience before. Don’t you trust me?”

  This might explain why he was acting odd around her, not talking to her, trying to avoid looking at her. Claire smiled and stepped forward. She needed to put him at ease and explain. “It has nothing to do with that. I need to get the information, and I need to make sense of what has happened to Mr. Anderson. When I worked for the police in Minneapolis, we often attended autopsies.”

  “You city folk.” Dr. Lord chuckled. “I don’t think you could get Sheriff Talbert to attend an autopsy if you paid him. I didn’t know you had worked in Minneapolis. Were you homicide?”

  “I worked some homicide cases, yes.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “No, I just don’t talk a
bout it much. I don’t think it’s generally known around the county. It’s hard enough being a woman cop without also being perceived as a know-it-all from the big city.”

  “Yes, I suppose. I came over here from Rochester. Worked at the Mayo Clinic. I play that down. After too many years of being a specialist, I decided to go back to being a general practitioner. Got tired of seeing people die. I wanted to heal a few people, mend some bones, burn off some warts.”

  “Me too. I got tired of seeing people die.” Claire looked at Landers. His skin had turned to wax.

  “You know what the procedure is, then?” Dr. Lord asked.

  “Yes, but if you could talk a bit while you do it, I would appreciate it.”

  “Ask questions too.”

  “I do have one question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How close can you come to time of death?”

  “It’s not like in the movies. If we’re lucky, within three to six hours. His temperature was eighty when he was brought in. It’s been relatively mild out. Body loses heat at about a degree an hour. He came in at about noon. Right there, I’d guess time of death between five and nine last night.”

  Claire nodded. “The more I’ve thought about it, that’s what I figured too. You see, he was out in his garden. At first I thought he was digging around, but now I think he might have been just puttering, looking at what was coming up. I saw him and talked to him and then went into my house to watch a movie. We started watching it about seven. I think he died right at dusk, just as the sun set, right after we left.”

  Dr. Lord took a scalpel and made a sweeping cut from Landers’ left shoulder down to the middle of his stomach. Then he did the same from the other shoulder. Where the two cuts met, he proceeded down to his pubic bone. The skin pulled back on its own. Claire leaned back against the desk, the world of the body opening up in front of her.

  TWO HOURS LATER, the autopsy was over. Claire felt how Landers looked—cold and drained. Wearing a big wool cardigan, Dr. Lord simply looked tired. He covered up Landers Anderson gently, as if he were tucking him in for bed, and they left him in a chilly, dark room. The spring air outside smelled as sweet and clean as an orchard in full bloom. Claire took in deep gulps of it.

  “The stink of death comes off of everyone, no matter how good they were during their life,” Dr. Lord commented. “You care for a cup of coffee?”

  “Sounds great.”

  He took her to a small café and they got a booth by the window. He ordered coffee and said the pie was good. Claire followed his lead and ordered coffee and lemon meringue pie.

  Over the coffee and pie, Dr. Lord told Claire, “Someone hit him on the head with the shovel. It’s what we call a coup injury. Fairly readable.”

  “I was picking that up from what you were saying, but explain it to me.” During the autopsy, Dr. Lord had mumbled away to himself, and Claire had leaned against the oak desk and listened. She had also listened to the music that floated through the room. It gave the whole proceedings a rather ritualistic effect. Dr. Lord moved so thoughtfully and meticulously through the body that it became a sort of dance, peeling away the layers of the body and then putting them back together. All that was left on Landers were two incisions—one on the back of the head and the Y-shaped cut across the body—when it was over. Dr. Lord had made some notes.

  “You see, the brain’s like gelatin, soft but firm, and it’s held in a rigid mold, which allows it to keep its shape.” He stuck his fork into the pie in front of him and jiggled it. “Kind of like this piece of pie. When the brain is bruised, we can tell by the bruise whether it was caused by a fall or a hit on the head.”

  “How?”

  “If someone falls down backward and hits his head, there is a bruise on the back of the head and a fracture under it in the skull, but the bruise on the brain is on the opposite side. We call that contrecoup. However, if someone is hit, then he has a bruise on the scalp, a break underneath, and a bruise on the brain under that. All the injuries line up. This is what I saw when I examined his brain.”

  “So someone killed him by hitting him with the shovel?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First he was hit by the shovel, but this did not kill him. Then he died from a heart attack. The blow from the shovel was not the cause of death.”

  Claire thought about this for a moment. She took a sip of coffee before she spoke. “If someone dies during an assault, even if the death is not a direct result of the assault, it can be considered first-degree murder. Landers was murdered.”

  Dr. Lord shook his head in a weary, what-is-this-world-coming-to sort of way.

  Claire asked the question she always asked anyone who knew the murder victim. “You have any idea who would want to kill him?”

  Dr. Lord leaned his head back and squeezed his eyes tight shut. Then he slowly lowered his head and looked at her. “Not anymore. She’s been dead about five years.”

  5

  Rich’s shoulders ached. He had been lugging feed for the pheasants for an hour. After checking a stump over for bird shit, he sat down on it and watched them go at their food. Little chicks. That’s what baby pheasants were called. He thought they looked gorgeous. Small puffs of feathers, huge heads. Funny critters, but not stupid. Not like turkeys. Now, there’s a stupid bird. His dad had raised them.

  He got up and strolled toward the house. In town today everyone had been talking about the fact that Landers Anderson had died. Some were saying it was under peculiar circumstances, although Rich wondered why they thought that. Landers was an old man. An unhealthy old man. Dying from heart disease. Slowly, over the last ten years, the disease had circumscribed his life. You never saw Landers walk down to get his mail anymore. He drove his car the three blocks.

  Rich stopped at the pump and washed his hands. His mom had taught him well—“Don’t go bringing that bird dirt into the house with you.” He walked into his house the back way and shed his shoes at the door. On the other side, a pair of slippers waited for his feet. He had made them himself from a kit he bought through a magazine. He liked to work with his hands. He had his mom’s old Singer sewing machine set up in his spare bedroom. He could patch a pair of jeans as well as any woman he knew, better than most.

  Just as he was about to stick his head into the fridge and see what looked good for dinner, he heard the pheasants raising a din out in the yard. Something must be spooking them. Or maybe someone. He had found a new baseball bat in the woods behind his coop. Now, maybe it was just a kid cutting through the woods, but his place wasn’t on the way to anywhere.

  He had thought of calling that new cop, the woman, Claire Watkins. Asking her what she thought he should do about the person who was leaving the footprints. He liked the idea of a woman deputy. He had heard some men at the bar complain about her, or rather any woman taking on a man’s job, as they put it. Rich had started laughing at them. They asked him why he was laughing. He explained his mom was the person who had taken care of law and order in his house, why he thought women were highly qualified for that kind of work. When he thought of Claire, he could almost feel her hair in his hands. That long, thick, black hair. She would be a handful.

  The pheasants were still screeching. Why would someone come sneaking around his property? Steal a couple pheasant? Hell, they wouldn’t be ready to eat for months yet. Months and months. Not till September.

  He walked out in the backyard but didn’t see anything right away. Then he heard a sound, an almost familiar sound. Like a golf club hitting a golfball. A thwacking sound. Or maybe a stick hitting a small skull. He yelled and went running toward the sound.

  He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A mangled, bloody bundle of fuzzy feathers smashed near the side of the barn. So little left of it, he couldn’t tell what had happened. He heard someone thrashing through his woods but didn’t bother to give chase. He scooped up the broken body of the bird and wrapped it in a newspaper. He’d dispos
e of it later. This was the third body of a chick he had found. The other two hadn’t been so mangled; they had just looked like someone had held them too tight and smothered them.

  WHEN BRIDGET SAW Meg’s eyes as she got off the school bus, she was glad she had raised a fuss at work and was there to meet her niece. Meg had a way of sucking in her whole face when she was upset until her eyes stood out in it, like one of those awful pictures of waifs standing in the rain with huge eyes, holding puppy dogs with huge eyes.