So, come winter, Millie had decided to out-sneak the sneak. Hell, if he was going to keep secrets from them, his own family, then she’d find out what he was up to her own way.
12.
Sterno leaned against a column in front of the Old Price Hotel. His hands were busy at waist level with tobacco and a paper. His eyes meanwhile were cast across the street and down a few buildings. He was watching the well-dressed townspeople emerging from the German Lutheran Church into the white sunlight. He was tired and gazing. The women busied themselves against the wind—their hats, their dresses. The men gathered in a circle and stuffed big pinches of snuff into their mouths. When he lit his cigarette his mind came back to life.
Abner Greentree saw him, watched him for a few seconds. Finally gave him a big friendly wave. Sterno dipped the brim of his fedora in response. He stayed there like that for two cigarettes, waiting for all the churchgoers to be on their ways before he resumed his work.
Truth be known, he didn't know where to go next. The trip out to the Neuwald boys’ house had been a good one. He had left there with a few loose little patches to carry around with him, and a few little holes as well. The problem was that the patches didn’t fit the holes, and the holes needed patches he didn’t have, so he would have to just carry them around until he found them a fit.
Mayor Greentree and his straw-haired, heavy-bottomed wife were the last to leave for home. A young Negro pulled a large white sedan around for the couple. He leapt out to open doors for them. As they passed by Sterno, the driver must have felt some instinct to slow the car. It rolled nearly to a stop in front of him. Slow enough for Sterno to get a good look at the face the Negro made when Mayor Greentree said to him, "What're you slowin' down for, Jove? Come on, boy, I’m hungry." Then, through the open window, with a much different manner of speaking: "Morning there, Mr. Sterno! Careful those cigarettes in this wind, now!"
The car sped up the road, leaving Sterno in the relative silence offered by the wind sucking between the buildings.
Looks like a ghost town, he thought. Welcome back to small town Sundays.
Then a quick flash of light in one of the windows across the street caught his eye. He looked carefully. He rubbed his eyes. The glare remained in his eye for a few seconds. It was not his imagination.
He stepped out from the shade of the hotel. He stamped out his cigarettes between two of the bricks on Main Street. He stopped in the middle of the street, waited. It didn't come again. In the lull between gusts, Sterno heard some music coming from a phonograph. The sound came from behind him, not from where he had seen the flash. He turned to see white curtains billowing out from the second floor of the Old Price Hotel. It had not been a flash but the reflection of a flash that he had seen, coming from Dr. Rosenzweig's office.
*
Dr. Rosenzweig looked flustered upon opening the door, but was then pleased to see that it was Sterno and his extended masseter who had knocked.
"Mr. Sterno."
"Everyone else is at church," Sterno said. "Pretty sleepy out there. Wonder if I might take a look at those Donnan pictures again."
The doctor held the door open for him. He might have been smiling at Sterno as he walked by, or he might have been lifting his face to keep his glasses from falling; it was hard to tell. A sight made Sterno stop as he entered. On a white-sheeted top of a table against one wall was a dead animal. A coyote. It lay on its side with its skin pulled back from ankle to ear to expose the pink and white muscle underneath. Dr. Rosenzweig had hung one of his cameras from the ceiling so that it pointed down at the animal. When Sterno knocked, the doctor had been in the process of changing the flash powder.
"Ja, ja, I have them close by," the doctor said. Sterno smelled wine and pipe tobacco on him as he stepped to the desk. "I figured, with you still in town, I should keep them where I can find them. Your investigation is proceeding well, Mr. Sterno?” His “Sterno” sounded like “Schterno.”
“It’s proceeding,” Sterno answered.
“Very well, very well. Please, make yourself comfortable. You will not mind if I continue to work?"
Sterno sat down at the desk. He opened the folder to the grim image of Tommy Donnan alive and well, smiling after a race. Sterno put it aside. He went through the other pictures, with more care this time. A loud click-and-flash caused him to flinch, the doctor at work. Coughing, Rosenzweig fanned the flash smoke toward the window.
"Does the music bother you?" he asked as he fanned.
"I didn't notice," Sterno said coughing.
"It is Mendelssohn. He is a German too. Not the same kind of German we have around here, I fear. He was a Lutheran, like they are, although he was born into a Jewish family. ‘Sterno.’ I know this name. ‘Sternau,’ am I right? You have Jewish blood in you, as well, Mr. Sterno, am I right?”
Sterno didn’t answer; he was still waving the white smoke from his face.
The doctor leaned in to him, speaking low. “Well, Mr. Sterno, if you would like to keep it in you, not answering this question is the correct way to answer this question.” Then, loud again, the winey, gusty doctor, scientist, photographer and music connoisseur: “Ja, this recording is only two years old, recorded in London, England, and already it is on a phonograph in Price, Kansas, the United States of America. These modern times, Mr. Sterno, are sometimes frightening. I have American Ragtime, if you like."
Sterno wiped his eyes, turned his face back to the pictures. He suddenly smelled something in this folder he had missed a couple days ago. He looked over every inch of the pictures of Tommy, his clothing, the buggy, his remains. Nothing was jumping out at him. But something about these photos was stirring up that old gritty feeling in his gut. Disappointed, he put down the last of the pictures taken of the body.
Another flash from behind him blinded him, then left him blinking at a photograph of a road. Running down the middle of this road was a black string of beads. Blood. Sterno looked at the next photo, this one was of a piece of clothing, also bloodied, on the side of the road. The next photo was of a rock perhaps the size of a melon. It had been slightly dislodged from the road and was marked with fine splatters of blood.
Sterno stared out the window. He nodded, then shook his head at the one word hanging like an electric bulb: blood.
"It was likely a stone much like this one that killed him," Rosenzweig said from over his shoulder. "This one marked the first sign of blood on the road leading to the farm."
"Can you take me to where these were taken?"
The doctor clinched his goatee at the question, lines of thought forming across his forehead. "Of course," he said finally.
"Now?"
Dr. Rosenzweig took off his glasses. He rubbed the smoke from his eyes as he made his way over to the window. He replaced them, held one of his blowing curtains aside as he looked down at the street. "Very well," he said. "But let us be careful. These kind of Germans are the staunch Protestant kind of Germans, und they frown on any sort of activity being carried out on Sundays, unless it pertains to God or food."
*
They took a road from town Sterno was beginning to know well. This time, however, Dr. Rosenzweig gave him the nickel tour along the way.
"...Let us see. That is the old township hall und annex," he said, pointing to a mass of charred wood heaped on the dry grass like a shipwreck. "It burnt down, when was it? maybe five or six years ago." He showed him farms, houses, more farms. At one point he poked a finger down a tree lined road at a large white house with black shutters. "That is the manse of our once future governor out there," he said. "Abner has added quite a bit to it in recent years. Of course, all this land belongs to the mayor too. Or most of it does, anyhow."
"Quite a piece of land."
"There was some oil interest in Hope County not too long ago. Last year, in fact. The mayor thought it a good idea if he bought up as many farms as he could. He wanted bargaining leverage against the oil company, when they finally decided to invest—that was h
is plan. He believed one landowner would get them much more money. He also believed he was going to fund his campaign on that oil.
“We agreed with him, mostly, I believe; it would have been good for us. Suddenly, boop! those oil men left as fast as they had arrived. Unfortunate, I liked them; they stayed at the hotel, of course. I am not sure what happened. They checked out and drove away and then we heard they had disappeared. A fire at the refinery in Oklahoma. Some newspaper men were here to ask around, but of course no one knew anything. So, we never see those oil men again und the mayor is no farmer, so now all this good farmland is being wasted. Here we are, stop anywhere after this turn in the road."
The highroad had become a farm road with two rows of car ruts running like tracks in the dirt. The Model T bounced around the sharp curve, stopped in the grass by the road. Sterno knew this turn as the same one that nearly ran him off the road his first time out here. The men had just stepped out of the car when a gust took Dr. Rosenzweig's bowler from him, sent it tumbling down the road. This gave Sterno a few seconds to look around him. To the east, about two hundred feet from the road was a wood’s edge running north-south as did the road before the turn, reaching in each direction for at least a mile. Opposite this view, in the western distance, over a shallow and gradual rise in the land, Sterno could just make out the twin elms—one dead, one leafed—that marked Donnan's farm.
The doctor returned, hat in hand; he was looking around the road for something. "Let us see, I do not see that big rock anywhere," he said over the wind. "I can tell you however, it was right about where you are standing. I was coming back from taking photos of the body, riding with Abner. I just happened to see the bloodied rock. He did not want to stop, but I made him—I am quite glad I did."
"The rock was covered in blood, then."
"I would not say ‘covered.’ It was not covered completely. It was early enough in the day that it was still brownish-red, but the rock was spotted, or splattered, more than covered, I would say.”
Red blood, Sterno thought.
“There was a pattern of splattered blood spraying from here—" Dr. Rosensweig said, stooping, "to here," indicating about three feet of space fanning outward in the direction the horse would be going.
"These pictures," Sterno said, "lead this way, towards Braun Donnan's farm."
"Ja. Yes."
"What about this way?" Sterno asked. He pointed down the road from where they had come, toward town. “How much blood was there on the road from that way?”
The doctor's shoes seemed to take him that same way of their own volition. Sterno could see on his face he was following not just Sterno's pointing finger, but his train of thought, as well. "None," he said.
Sterno slid the picture of the piece of ripped sleeve onto the top of the pile he held in his hand. "Where was this one taken?"
The doctor seemed to be doing math in his head. His face stayed focused on something invisible at his feet.
"Doctor?"
"Excuse me."
"This one."
"Oh, ja, yes. Here," the doctor said. He led Sterno to exactly where the road made its turn. "Here," he said again. He made an X in the dirt with his foot.
Sterno stepped on the X on his way into the grass. Buffalo grass, wild barley and a few patches of wild sunflowers, all wilted from the drought, covered the small, fallow field. The field ran from the road to the wood on one side, and a row of trees that marked a brook on the other. Underfoot, he just made out two narrow, worn paths, impossible to see from the road. The path, if realized, would make the upside-down-L-shaped turn in the road into a T-shaped turn, and this new arm of the road would lead east, right into the woods.
He turned to the doctor. "Whose woods are those?"
Dr. Rosenzweig searched the wood's edge, thought about it, shrugged. "I stay in town, mostly.”
Sterno rubbed his jaw. He had more questions for the doctor, but he wasn’t about to ask them yet: one, the one that brought him out here, why is there dry red blood all over the road and all over Tommy Donnan if he were killed in the middle of a rain storm? and two, a new one since coming out here, why is there no blood leading from town, from where the horse had come? And now a third, and it involved those woods.
"There is a detailed map of the county," the doctor offered. "It was made just a few years ago."
"You said the annex burned down with the township hall."
"It did. It did. But almost all of the records were moved beforehand. Herbert Price moved them himself. Not too many people of the town know about that, actually. This is because not too many people of the town care, I assume."
"So where are the records now?" Sterno asked.
The doctor smiled. "In the cellar," he said. "Those are Mrs. Helmcamp’s records. Hers and Herbert’s, that is. Herbert Price."
13.
That great growing season of 1921 that had Pa dancing with Jumpy on his hind legs coughed out a few icy snowstorms in November and December, then dried up. A freeze set in so bad it hurt to breathe. The wind bent trees. Teams slipped and buckled on the hard-frozen roads and in the hard-frozen air Pa’s pick-up wouldn’t start, not once the whole winter. The rain and snow the soil needed never returned and the hard freeze never left. Families throughout the county were forced to hunker into their homes and hope their stovewood, coffee, sugar, flour, liquor and wits didn’t run out.
In the ruins of a collapsed brick well in the east woods, the dogs of those woods slept in a heap like a single being made up many parts. They curled their tails over their faces and used little energy, as they had been taught, and left the den only when it was absolutely necessary to do so, for the scent of prey in the woods. Many of the pack died from the cold, the youngest and the oldest of them, but many lived on through the hard winter, as they always had and always would.
To Millie’s lovey-dovers, however, this terrible winter had meant nothing. They had kept each other nice and warm no matter the weather.
Darling, December '21
I am writing in my room in my quiet house. It has been a tumultuous day in our household. The wind actually made our house sway today, and somewhere there is a crack in the house, and the wind is leaking in and making Mother miserable. She had not enough to say about it, be sure. Pa spends his evening at the kitchen table, drinking, and Junior is worse than ever; he will barely look at me, he will not talk to me, even if it is his one word. He must know about us, Darling, or suspect us; why else would he act his way? I do not like sneaking around behind his back, my own brother, but I feel it will hurt him too much if he knows. It is a dilemma from which I see no escape—not yet, but I do plan to tell him soon.
I feel, my Darling Florella, that if you are truly ready to venture out of your house in the night, then the time is now. I will whisk you away to a place I know, an abandoned shack in the woods east of here. There, we will find the full meaning of our love, and manifest it into the world, not under the watchful eye of your father, not on mere, two-dimensional paper, and not in our dreams; but face to face, lips to lips, skin to skin. In the cold darkness of those barren woods, our love will find the sun and warmth it needs to blossom in full and bear fruit against the odds. In that humble dwelling, we will cease to be two, and become one being brought into this world in the spirit of true love. Please, Flora, please say yes, and let me spirit you away, so that even if it is in the stolen moments of the night, we can begin our life together. Please say yes, my dearest!
Love, Tommy
This bit about Junior had Millie standing still on her bare feet in the mow, staring down at the floor. Thinking. Leaping forward in her mind to that night of Valentine’s Day, to their fight in the woods, the look on Junior’s face the moment before he kicked Tommy in the ribs, an animal kind of look, with teeth showing. The grip he had had on her arm as he flung her over his shoulder to carry her home. It left a bruise like an arm band that she had had to hide from Mother.
She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It made
her stomach squeeze up for some reason, like she felt in the cellar at night sometimes. Was it fear? Could it be something so simple as fear? It couldn’t be, because fear of what, exactly, her own brother? A voice in her head told her not to think about it, and she was eager to listen to this voice, and get back to her story, to the chronological events.
My Sweet Love Dec. 28, 1921
Come for me, love. Oh please come for me. I cannot take another dark day in this dark house. At least you have a sister, a brother, a dog……I have nobody but these boring, mean old people. Grandmother, Mommy, Daddy, who seem to have nothing to do but to run my life for me. When am I going to marry Geshen? Why hasn’t that handsome Geshen been to the house? Little do they know, me Sweet Love, that in my heart I am already married, to you.
But now, now I am ready to be married with my body too. So come for me Tommy, if only for a stolen piece of the night, come for me and take me away from here.
Forever Your Love,
Flora
Millie still had trouble knowing if she were remembering this coming part of the story, or making it up based on what she had seen—witnessed is the word Tommy had used—what she had known, and the details of the country and the people as she knew them, all patched together as in a dream. Tommy would say it didn’t matter: “If you tell a story and you’re honest in your purpose, then your story becomes the truth and the real truth doesn’t matter anymore.” Which still didn’t make sense to her these months later, but by and by she stopped worrying about if she were making it up or not and just let it come.
What Millie witnessed that December and January was two lovers alone in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, where they didn’t belong.
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