Watkins - 01 - Blood Country

by Mary Logue

  “Of course. Right after work?”

  “You got it.” He hung up.

  She put down the phone and stared at her hand. Her feeling of last night—how safe she was from whoever killed her husband—seemed as far away as the stars. Claire remembered how agonizingly frustrated she had been right after her husband had been killed. The police couldn’t seem to get a lead on anyone. No one had seen anything, she had thought. Now she knew that Meg had, and she couldn’t stand the thought of Meg in any kind of danger. Out of an urgency to find out who had killed her husband, she had told Bruce. She wondered if it had been the right thing to do.

  She rapped on the rippled glass front of the sheriffs office and walked in when she heard his summoning voice. “Yes, sir,” she said to tease him.

  Sheriff Talbert gave her the once-over, not in a sexual way, more an assessment of an employee. Then he scratched his head. “Claire, I got a call on you.”

  “What does that mean, sir?” Claire felt her skin flush. “A kind of complaint.” He said the word slowly. Jenkins rose in her mind’s eye, scurvy little fellow stuck to a fence. Claire said simply, “He had it coming.”

  “What coming?” The sheriff looked over at her and watched her again.

  Claire felt as if she had stepped a toe into something sticky. She decided to back up. “Who was the complaint from, sir?” “Mrs. Langston.” “The property rights woman?” “None other.”

  “What was she complaining about?”

  “She said you’d come visiting her and her organization.”

  “I did attend a meeting.”

  “What you do on your off time is not usually my business.” “Well, I was actually following a lead in the Landers case. His brother is very involved in the landowner rights movement. I wanted to see what they were all about.”

  “Oh.” Talbert leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. A smile played on his lips. “Did you find anything out?”

  She told him about the figure burned in effigy and the glove. “I just got the glove back from the forensic lab in Eau Claire. The two gloves are a match, which means there’s a high probability that the burned glove was Mr. Anderson’s.”

  “Are you planning on talking to Mrs. Langston?” “Yes.”

  “Good idea. Maybe you could go apologize in person to her and find out what’s going on.”

  “What do I apologize to her about?”

  “You know what I mean. Smooth things over.”

  “I’m only doing my job.”

  “I know that.” When Claire turned to go, he called her back.

  “And, Claire, give her a chance. She’s not such a bad old hellion. I actually think you might get a kick out of her.”

  “WELL, YOU’RE HERE EARLY,” Mr. Blounder said, surprise and snideness mixing in his voice like two incompatible medications. He looked exhausted, but that was how he often looked. When they had first started working together a year ago, Bridget had asked him several times if he was all right, with real alarm in her voice. After his grunted assent that he was fine, she quit asking. Now that she knew him better, she realized he never did anything but come to work and go home. He never went outside. His skin was so pale as to seem almost transparent, and occasionally she had the urge to reach over and pet him, just to feel how soft his skin was.

  Bridget merely stretched a smile at his comment. She did not need to get into it with him today. Turning and bending down as if she had dropped something, she grabbed a box off the shelf in front of the cash register. Why did they put those goddamn tests there? Right next to the condoms. If you don’t wear one, you’ll need the other. A kind of perverse morality being practiced right in the store.

  Bridget slipped the pregnancy test into her purse, intending to pay for it later. Then she stood up and went to the bathroom. She locked the door and dropped her coat to the floor. Maybe she simply had cancer, some huge growth that had stopped her periods. Time to find out.

  Bridget squatted down on the stool and peed on the plastic stick. She closed her eyes and held her breath. The instructions said to wait two minutes. Would it be like Christmas? If you wanted something too much, you wouldn’t get it? In her mind she saddled up her horse and rode him hard. The dreams she had welled up in her. She had always wanted to own a small stable of horses. She could see herself giving lessons, riding at the state fair, winning ribbons for jumping. She was saving money from her job to set all that up. Her dreams could be all over, depending on the color of the plastic wand she held in her hand. Wish, wish, no color. Or to see a drop of blood in the water below her.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw the stick had turned blue, which meant she was with child. Bridget let it fall into the toilet and then flushed it down. She stood up, adjusted her clothing, and walked to the mirror. Thirty-five—that wasn’t too old to be a mom by today’s standards. When she was fifty-three, the child would be eighteen. She would still be able to ride. Many people rode into their sixties. Why, she had heard of a woman who had been in the Olympics when she was sixty-four. She would simply put it off for a while; her whole life would go on hold while she changed diapers and wiped snotty noses and told a child to go to bed; she meant it. She could do it all.

  For a moment, she considered an abortion. She had had one when she was twenty-three. No regrets. She would have one again, but she knew Chuck would not hear of it. He wanted a child. And he had that odd masculine notion that a child from his seed would be more worthy than all the rest.

  Bridget thought of a child as a person, not a belonging. So many of the women she watched who had children acted as if they owned them. It would be easier for her to give in to the prospect of having a child if she could see them that way. As it was, she really wasn’t sure she wanted another demanding person in her life. She remembered all too clearly her own childhood, her father being at work all day long, her mother taking loving care of her and Claire and yet wishing they would go on vacation for a few weeks without her. Her mother would lie on the couch in the living room after everyone was in bed just to listen to the quiet. That’s what she had told Bridget when she came up the stairs to get a drink of water. Bridget would nod and listen to the quiet, too, and wonder what her mother heard in it. Now, at thirty-five, she understood.

  Bridget put her hand over her stomach. It did seem larger to her—harder was the better way to put it She was with child. One in the oven. Whatever. She had tied her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck. She’d have to wear it back most of the time so the baby couldn’t grab at it and yank her head back. Maybe she should just cut it off. Fat and shorn, that’s how she’d look in a few months.

  Bridget took a small sip of water and walked out of the bathroom.

  Mr. Blounder curled his lips back and said, “Are you feeling okay?”

  Bridget stopped in front of him and asked, “Did your mother love you?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “I guess so.”

  “Did you love your mother?”

  For the first time since she had known him, a thin worm of a smile crawled out on his lips. “Yes, I loved my mother dearly.”

  She stared at him. Maybe it was possible. “Yes, I’m feeling fine.”

  THE ROAD CURVED up through a wooded hillside to the crest Claire bumped the police car up the dirt road carefully, feeling the car slide slightly in the runoff caused by the snowmelt Hidden under the just budding trees were piles of old snow. They would be gone in another week or so, if more snow didn’t come. Snow in April wasn’t that unusual. Messy and soggy, it reminded Claire of ephemeral East Coast snow, the kind that melted in midflight.

  Driving over the top of the hill, Claire stopped the car on the descent, struck by the view. People paid big bucks for this. Lake Pepin spread out below her like a fine, light gray tablecloth. There was no breeze, and it was so calm it seemed possible to walk on the water. Claire compared this view to the one she saw of the lake from her house. All she could make out was a twinkling of silver throug
h tree branches in the dead of winter. By the time the trees leafed out, the lake had disappeared. Here, the blufflands encircled the lake, their contours moving in and away from the water like ripple candy. Way across the lake, she could see another farm. The silhouette of the barn and silos stood out against the light blue sky.

  Before the blufflands ordinance, anyone could build right on the edge of the bluff. But in the last century, the farmers had resisted doing that. They sheltered their farmhouses in the small valleys just over the ridge of the bluffs so the houses wouldn’t be hit by the winds. However, new developers and owners perched their houses as far out as they could over the water. From the interior of some of these houses Claire sometimes got vertigo, as it appeared that nothing held the house up from the waves below. Charming names were given to these places, like “Eagle’s Nest.” But since the blufflands ordinance forbade such placement of houses, the far ridge of the bluffs would stay much the way Claire saw it now—the odd barn or two on the opposite side of the lake, but other than that, it could almost give the impression of how the landscape had been a thousand years ago.

  Claire let the car ease down the other side of the hill. The road wound into a grove of trees, and she parked next to a station wagon. She reached over and got the charred piece of glove that the forensic lab had sent back to her. As she walked toward the house, a big German shepherd bounded out at her. She stood still and waited for him to come to her; she wasn’t afraid of him, just cautious. She held out her hand, and he gave it a sniff, then wagged his tail.

  “Good dog,” she said and started forward, but he jumped at her. Claire stood still again. He didn’t seem to want her to move.

  The front door of the house swung open, and a high voice keened out, “Off, Sheriff.”

  The dog backed up and wagged his tail furiously. Claire walked toward the front of the house, and the dog let her pass.

  Mrs. Langston leaned in the front doorway. “I’ve got him trained,” she stated.

  “I see that.”

  “I’m up here by myself now, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “My husband passed away nearly five years ago. I got Sheriff two weeks later. Couldn’t stand to be alone.”

  “I know how you feel. My husband died about a year ago.” When the words came out of her mouth, Claire couldn’t believe it. She had never volunteered that information before. Maybe it was about time she did.

  “I’m so sorry. A young woman like you. That’s horrible.” Mrs. Langston motioned her through the door. “You’re in luck. I just put some water on for tea and I baked some brownies this morning.”

  Claire followed her into a sunny kitchen. A round oak table sat right under a bay of windows that overlooked the lake. A collection of salt and pepper shakers danced around the window ledges: shakers in the shapes of windmills, gas stations, Scottie dogs, and different kinds of fruit.

  “What a wonderful collection,” Claire exclaimed.

  “Oh, the kids are always finding me a new set. They’re not as discriminating as I might be. I really like the animals. This is one of my favorite sets.” She held up two skunks, their tails raised up high, with little holes in them for the condiments to come out.

  When Claire sat down, she took off her hat and faced the older woman. She took a deep breath and began, “Mrs. Langston, part of the reason I stopped by today was to apologize for how my visit to your meeting the other night might have appeared.”

  “Please call me Edith. You’re making me feel older than my sixty-five years. Actually I didn’t mind you being there so much, although having the police attend a meeting can be a little off-putting. It’s that Rich Haggard. He’s been against us from the beginning.” She put a cup of tea in front of Claire and set a brownie on the edge of her saucer.

  Claire lifted the cup, a simple white one with a scroll of roses on it, and admired it. She brought her attention back to Edith’s statement. “How so?”

  “You know, I’ve known that kid since he was born. His uncle was a strange old man, and I’ve often wondered if brain trouble doesn’t run in that family.”

  “Brain trouble?”

  “Oh, you know that mixed bag of depression, schizophrenia, whatever. All the people in Rich’s family just seem to think too much.”

  “That’s not always a bad thing.” Claire sniffed the tea—the faint smell of jasmine—and took a sip.

  “No, but I’ve not often been on the right side of any one of them, and they’re horrible enemies.”

  Claire almost spit out the tea in her mouth as she laughed. ‘Well, that’s certainly something to hold against them.”

  “They’ve always been the outcasts down here. Never fit in, never mingled much. Didn’t help any that the Haggards were something like Scotch-English and Catholic to boot.”

  “What are you?”

  “Well, I’m Swedish. My husband was French and German. Mostly German. Lutheran, so that was okay.” Edith sat down across from Claire and tapped her on the hand. “I helped form the Landowners of America group because of the strong connection I feel to this place. We in the group love this land. We don’t need the government to step in and tell us how to treat it My grandparents came here from Sweden. They traveled up the Mississippi by riverboat. Landed on the shore of Lake Pepin and claimed this land right here for their farm. We’ve been here since the beginning.”

  Claire supressed the urge to mention the Chippewa who had camped probably right where this house sat. “I would like to ask you some questions about your organization and this proposed development.”

  “Ask away.”

  “How far along are plans for this development?”

  “You’ve seen the map. We’ve contacted a terrific developer in Minnesota who’s done a contingency plan for us. He thinks we’ve got a very viable project here, and he’s contacting some investors to come and meet with us.”

  “The development would involve a huge parcel of your own land. How do you feel about that?”

  “When my husband died, he didn’t leave me any money. Everything we had, we put into the farm to keep it going. He always said to me, ‘Edith, the land is our nest egg.’ I want to retire too. I’m tired of worrying about getting the crops in. If this development goes through, it will bring in enough money to set me up for the rest of my long life. Who knows, I might live to be ninety-nine like my grandmother, Olga Swenson.”

  “How are Darla and Fred Anderson involved with the development?”

  Edith stood up and bustled around the kitchen. “You can’t keep Fred out of anything. He thinks he knows it all.”

  “Have they put any money in?”

  “Not money.”

  “What about Landers? Had he been approached to sell his land?”

  “Of course. If you looked at that map the other night, you couldn’t help notice that the whole development borders on his land. To incorporate that ten-acre chunk into our plans would be wonderful. But Landers wasn’t interested.”

  “Who contacted him?”

  When Edith didn’t answer, Claire prompted her. “Was it Ted Brown who called Landers?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Edith appeared distracted.

  “Who is he?”

  “Just one of our major investors. He’s been coming down to this area for a long time, picking up small parcels of land and holding on to them. He’s ready to make his fortune.”

  “I hope not at anyone’s expense,” Claire said. “Was that frustrating to you when Landers didn’t want to sell?”

  “I didn’t see it that way. I’m doing this because I think it will be good for the community. I thought that if Landers could have that explained to him, it might change his mind. If not, I thought maybe Darla could persuade him.”

  Claire sat puzzled. Of all the people she might pick to persuade Landers of something, Darla would be the last. “Darla?”

  “Yes, they go way back.”

  “But they don’t like each other.”
>
  “Well, they did. They were going out before Landers left and joined the marines. In fact, Darla and Landers were engaged to be married. Then the war broke out and he left, and she married Fred.”

  Not knowing what to say to that, Claire reached into her pocket and pulled out the bag containing the burned glove. “The other night at the meeting, you burned an effigy of a DNR man. People put things into the fire. This was one of the items burned. Our forensic lab has matched it to a glove of Landers Anderson’s.”

  Edith Langston stood up and patted her hair. Instead of looking closer at the glove, she pulled back and walked to the window. “I know nothing about that glove. If you’re looking for a connection between Landers’ land and his death, I think you should look at the man you were sitting next to the other night. Rich Haggard wants that land as badly as anyone.”