Eleven Days

by Donald Harstad

  “Take a sip of coffee …”

  She did, obediently. She looked up at me again, and her eyes reminded me of a sad puppy. Ouch.

  “There, now just take it easy. You might want to unwind your scarf.”

  She did that, too.

  “You sure you’re okay now?”

  She spoke for the first time. “You’re a son of a bitch, do you know that?” Softly, but with feeling.

  “Sometimes, Helen. Sometimes.”

  She closed her eyes. “Phyllis and I were lovers. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  Wonderful. Just wonderful. I really hadn’t expected that.

  “No, Helen, I didn’t. Believe me. If I had known that, I never would have shown you the pictures.”

  She shuddered. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know who killed her, Helen.”

  14

  Friday, April 26

  13:46 hours

  Helen sort of gathered herself, and I sat down in the adjoining chair.

  “I don’t know who killed her.”

  “I think you think you do.”

  Silence.

  “Who do you think did it?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and opened her eyes again. Accusing.

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid that Fred might have had something to do with it. But I don’t know.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  She seemed drained. “Because,” she said, “he knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That Phyllis and I were … were lovers.”

  That surprised me a little, but it sure explained Fred’s animosity toward the group.

  “He, well, he found us. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  She sighed again and closed her eyes tightly.

  “He came to use the phone one morning. I thought he’d be in the field all day, but some machinery broke, and he needed a part. He came in, and Phyllis and I were in the bedroom.”

  “And he saw you?”

  “No. He didn’t see anything much at all. We heard him come in, and we came right out. But I suppose we looked like we were caught …” She opened her eyes. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “We weren’t naked, or anything like that.” Her eyes shut again. “But I thought he could tell that we’d been kissing and things. I thought he could tell, and later, Phyllis said she thought so, too.

  “So, that night, after supper, things were really tense with Fred. Really tense.” She opened her eyes and reached for the coffee cup, took a drink, and set it back down.

  “So I told him.”

  “You told him?”

  “I had to. He didn’t want to know, so I never finished what I wanted to say. I guess I should have said that I tried to tell him. He couldn’t handle it, and I should have known that, I suppose. But, don’t you see, I couldn’t handle it, either.”

  “So what did Fred do?”

  “He told me to shut up, and went in and took a shower, and went to bed. He told me that such things weren’t meant to be talked about. That he could never love me again. That I made him sick to his stomach. That it made him sick. That I was crazy.”

  “That wasn’t necessary.” Well, we’ve got a motive here, but I don’t think it’s going to fly, I thought. Normal man would go after Helen, not Phyllis. Couldn’t acknowledge Phyllis as the competition, for Christ’s sake. Ruin his image.

  “What wasn’t necessary?”

  “Fred saying you were crazy.”

  “Thank you.” I believe she meant that.

  “When did Fred and you have this discussion?”

  “Oh, just before Thanksgiving.”

  “Toward the end of November, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell Phyllis that you told Fred?”

  “Yes. That was a mistake.”

  “Why, did it scare Phyllis off?”

  She looked at me hard. “You didn’t know Phyllis, did you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “No, it didn’t scare her off.” She stared out the window. “On the contrary. I went to her the next day and told her all about what Fred had said. She thought it was funny, said he was a ‘typical’ farmer. Said he was just stupid.”

  “What did she think about you? Didn’t she know how hard it would be on you?”

  “I don’t think she cared. She thought it would drive me toward her, I think.”

  “Did it?”

  “Oh, maybe at first. She thought it was exciting, that Fred was mad. She’d sneak over to the house and try to make love to me, when she knew he was close. Once, she came over after ten, when she knew Fred would be in bed, and tried to make love to me in the living room.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “Guilty.” She looked at me defiantly. “It was the most intense orgasm I’ve ever had.”

  Whoa, Helen. “So your relationship with Phyllis didn’t end when Fred found out?” She shook her head. “I see.” Standard phrase when you need time to think.

  “It ended just before Christmas.” Helen looked back toward the window, and a tear started down her cheek. “I thought she loved me, you understand. I really thought she did. She said that she did, and I believed her. She said that I should believe her, because she never told anybody that, she said, and because she told me that I should believe her. But she said that I should join the group. Get in touch with myself through Satan.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I thought it would be spiritual. Really spiritual, and that it would help our love.” Helen turned back to me. The look of defiance had been replaced by hatred and revulsion. “She had me make love to Peggy and Todd that night!”

  It turned out that there had been a little meeting of the group, and that it had turned into something quite a bit more physical than Helen had suspected. And turned out to be nothing like what she needed from Phyllis.

  This wasn’t the time to ask “Todd who?” but I made a mental note to find out in a few minutes.

  “I felt so used, so betrayed. She held me while they had sex with me. Held my head, stroked my hair, said it was all right!”

  “And that’s the night you broke it off with Phyllis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell Fred about that?”

  “No.”

  “What did Phyllis say about you breaking it off?”

  “She was mean, said I wasn’t ready for life, and that I wasn’t able to free myself. She said she was disappointed in me, and that I wasn’t as intellectually free as I thought. As she’d hoped.”

  “And since then?”

  “I’ve just sat at home. Oh, Carl, I feel so cheap and stupid. I really do. When I think of what I did, what I felt, what a fool I made of myself.” She wasn’t crying, but it looked like she was about to. “And what’s the worst of it all, a couple of weeks later I tried to get back together with her. I did, I really did. And she said that she wasn’t ‘comfortable’ with me anymore.”

  “Cheap shot.”

  “Yes, it was.” She didn’t cry. Good for you, Helen.

  “Let me get you another cup of coffee …”

  15

  Friday, April 26

  14:22 hours

  Helen was pretty washed-out. I took her cup of coffee in and thought that it was about time for Hal to come up.

  “You mentioned some ‘Todd’ a few minutes ago? I want to know who he is.”

  “Well, it’s Todd Glutzman. From Decorah.”

  “I don’t think I know him … Let me call the officer who was here yesterday. I want him to be here, if it’s all right with you.”

  She was really wiped out. “I don’t care.”

  I excused myself and called the office.

  It turned out that Hal was on his way to Cedar Rapids, but Hester was back. Even better.

  I told her Helen was really spilling over. She got there about five minutes later. I got her s
ome coffee, and we all sat in the living room. Helen was a bit surprised a woman officer was here, but seemed pleased, and a little more relaxed. I filled Hester in briefly, emphasizing Helen’s attending a group meeting at Phyllis’s place, and naming Todd Glutzman. I would tell Hester about the other business later, but not in front of Helen. If Helen wanted to fill her in before then, it was her choice.

  “Who all was at the group meeting,” asked Hester, “when you were there?”

  Helen sat straight, tilting her head back and looking at the ceiling.

  “There was Todd Glutzman, and Rachel, and Kenny and Liz Mills, and Frank McGuire. And Phyllis. And me.”

  She looked up from her notepad. “Any others?”

  “No.”

  “Is one of these the one they call Darkness?”

  “No. He wasn’t there. At least, not when I left.”

  “What did you do at this meeting?”

  “Not a lot of anything. Everybody had a robe on. Phyllis had one for me, it was white.”

  “Were they all white?” I asked.

  “No, Phyllis was in red, and so was Todd. Ken and Liz were in green. Rachel was in yellow, and I think that Frank was in black. Maybe dark blue.”

  “What happened?”

  Helen said that when she got there, Phyllis kept her in the master bedroom for a while, and everybody else was in the basement. Phyllis left her, after she put on the robe, and came back a little later. They went to the basement together.

  “It was dim down there. But there were lots of candles. Everybody was just sort of sitting around in their robes. She presented me to each one in turn. That’s the way she did it. She would lead me to each one, and say, ‘so-and-so, I present you Helen.’ Just like that.”

  “She said their names, that’s how you know who they were?”

  “No, she didn’t use their regular names. They all have a secret name, you know. She used those.” She hesitated and then looked at us with a rueful smile. “I didn’t have one.”

  “Do you remember any of those names?” asked Hester.

  “Oh, let me see … I know that Phyllis was called Shade. And Rachel was Handmaiden.”

  “The others?”

  “Well, I remember thinking that Frank’s was really appropriate. They called him Benefactor.”

  Yeah, it was. Appropriate.

  “Liz Mills was called Dusk. I thought that fit her pretty well, with her dark hair.”

  She thought for a minute. “I thought that Todd’s was Nathan, but he kept correcting me. He said it was pronounced ‘Nathayane’ or something. It reminded me of ‘propane.’ ”

  “Yeah …”

  “I really don’t remember what Ken was called.”

  “All right. Then what happened, after you got to the basement and were introduced?”

  “Presented.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, presented. Then what happened?”

  She said that they were all drinking red wine, that the conversations she was involved in revolved about freeing the spirit from its shackles, nurturing the soul with pleasant thoughts and feelings, of experiencing intense emotions.

  “Was Satan ever mentioned?”

  “A couple of times, not all that often. Mostly when Todd was telling me that Satan was misunderstood, that he had been given a bum rap by the Catholic Church, and how amusing that was, because they were using Satan to keep themselves in business. But mostly we sat around and talked about our souls, and our feelings, and how much the world puts us down.”

  Hester finished up her note. “Helen, were there any drugs being taken that night?”

  That seemed to take her aback. “No, at least none that I saw.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, after an hour or so, we’d been drinking the wine like I said. Phyllis and Todd and I were on a couch together. Phyllis had her arms around both of us, she was in the middle. She was very intense … and she asked me if I would like to join them in the group.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said that I thought I might. But that I didn’t know. Not for sure.” She looked at me. “I was afraid of what Fred would do if he found out. It all looked a little silly at first, but they were so supportive, you know? I thought it would be good to be a member of a group that looked like they cared about me. The real me, not just my cooking and cleaning.”

  “I understand that, Helen,” I said. “I do.”

  “This Satan stuff made me really nervous, you know? I get nervous even when his name is mentioned in a normal conversation. We were brought up not to think of him—well, not to acknowledge him. Isn’t that right, Carl?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Evil—don’t speak his name lightly, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, then, what happened?” asked Hester.

  “When Phyllis said that she thought that she and Todd and I should have a private discussion upstairs, I went with them. I think I’d had a little too much of the wine, because I was dizzy, sort of. And we got up to the bedroom, and Phyllis took off her robe.”

  She stopped. Cold.

  Hester looked at me quizzically. I shook my head.

  “How long were you in the bedroom?”

  “About fifteen or twenty minutes. I started to leave once, and she coaxed me back. The second time, I grabbed my clothes and ran into the bathroom. I was so embarrassed …”

  I’ll bet, I thought. From the spiritual discussion to “let us in your pants” in fifteen minutes.

  “Did Todd try to stop you physically?” I asked. “Or Phyllis?”

  “Phyllis did. She grabbed me by the arm and said that if I left she would be very disappointed in me.”

  “And you left?”

  “Yes. Todd just said, ‘Let the bitch go.’ ” Her lip was trembling. “Oh, God,” she said, “I was so mortified!”

  Helen looked at her watch. “My God! It’s after two-thirty!” She stood up and rewrapped her scarf. “I have to get groceries yet. And if I’m not home real soon, he’ll know where I’ve been!”

  We tried to set up another meeting, as she hurried out of the house. It was left at “Call me.” And she was gone.

  Hester and I sat there for a little while, talking about Helen and what she had told us. We agreed that, while we were getting pretty close to naming all the members of the coven, or whatever, and getting leads that would surely have to give us the identity of Darkness, we weren’t a whole lot closer to solving the murders. Unless Fred was our man.

  “Fred had a motive,” said Hester. “No doubt about it.”

  “That he did.”

  “Depending, of course, on how much Helen told him.”

  “Well,” I said, “before you got here she told me that he knew about her and Phyllis. Sort of caught the two of them in Helen’s bedroom one day. Apparently pissed him off and revolted him at the same time.”

  “We need Rachel. She’ll know.”

  We both agreed to hold off on interviewing Fred for forty-eight hours. He wasn’t going anywhere, and if he did, it would tend to confirm him as a suspect. And Fred wasn’t the sort of person who would be too hard to find. Anyway, that would give us time to find Rachel.

  “I think,” I said, “Fred’s strong enough to have done it all by himself.”

  “True.”

  “And he had a motive.”

  “True again.”

  “But I don’t think he did it. It just doesn’t seem to fit, quite.”

  “I know. But he sure is looking good.”

  Hester left, heading for Iowa City to meet up with Hal and to begin tracking down the group members that Helen identified. I called Lamar at the office, and he wasn’t in. Left a message for him that I would be going back to work the following night.

  It suddenly dawned on me that Fred might well have been the one who tried to crack my skull. I had been concentrating so much on the case that I had forgotten about mine.

  I thought about it. Tried to remember Fred’s reaction to me when Hal and
I were at the Bockman farm. It seemed to me that it was the reaction of somebody who had a secret, but that secret was probably concerning Helen. Then, again, if he was the suspect, whacking me on the head was the least of his offenses, and might not produce a guilty reaction at all.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t like Fred, even before he had become a suspect. I was rubbing the right side of my head and caught myself in the dining room mirror … sitting there, with my hand on my head, a little smile in the corner of my mouth. I broke into a grin. I reminded myself of the little statues of the Darwinian monkey contemplating the human skull.

  I picked up where I had left off with labeling the photos. I had to get that done. I felt pretty cheap, showing Helen the montage like that. Her distress level had been a lot higher than I had anticipated. How could I have known that they had been lovers? Rationalize, Carl. It had been cruel, anyway. True. But it had gotten her to talk. Thinking about that, I hoped that she wouldn’t be in too much trouble with Fred, which we would have also caused.

  I was feeling guilty, and that tends to screw up your head. I began to think about Fred being a strong suspect and began to fear for Helen’s safety. After all, if he had done the murders, he should be quite capable of killing her, too.

  Then, again, if I tried to contact her, or to check on her, I would just make him mad. Especially if she pulled off the “grocery” trip, and he was calm. Shit.

  I had a physics course once. Didn’t do all that well, but I remembered one section devoted to the second law of thermodynamics. As I recall, it stated that all things tended to go from an ordered state to a less ordered state. Disorder, or entropy, always increased. Always. In one way or another. If you tried to decrease the entropy of something, the energy you created by doing that was increasing the entropy in another area. Or something like that.

  Anyway, cop work was like that. Take the four murders. They had increased the community disorder by an order of magnitude. Our efforts to decrease that disorder by apprehending the suspect or suspects tended to increase the disorder in other areas. Helen and Fred, for example. The coven members, soon enough. The displaced officers, getting less sleep, getting hit on the head; making more cases as we went. The burial controversy with Pastor Rothberg. And on and on. Entropy increases. Inevitably. All we can do, in the long run, is to try to direct or channel it toward our goals.