Still Life With Crows p-4

by Douglas Preston

  Suddenly Maisie appeared from nowhere, her bulk covered by a white apron. “Klick, leave Smitty alone,” she said. “We’re lucky to have him. Most counties our size don’t even have a newspaper, let alone a daily.”

  Klick took a step backward. Ludwig felt doubly grateful to Maisie, because of the awkwardness he knew existed between the two women. Maisie was perhaps the only person in the room who could have called Klick Rasmussen off so quickly. Klick shot one dark glance at Ludwig, then turned toward the approaching Gladys Cahill, and the two drifted off toward the turkey tables, talking in low voices.

  Ludwig turned to Maisie. “Thanks a lot. You saved me.”

  “I always take care of you, Smit.” She winked and went back toward the carving station.

  As Ludwig turned to follow, he noticed that a hush was falling over the room. All eyes had swiveled in the direction of the door. Instinctively, Ludwig followed suit. There, framed against the golden sky, was a figure in black.

  Pendergast.

  There was something distinctly creepy in the way the FBI agent paused in the doorway, the bright sunlight silhouetting his severe form, like some gunslinger entering a saloon. Then he strode coolly forward, eyes roving the crowd before locking on Ludwig himself. Pendergast changed course immediately, gliding through the crowd toward him.

  “I’m relieved to see you, Mr. Ludwig,” he said. “I know no one here but you and the sheriff, and I can’t very well expect the busy sheriff to take time for introductions. Come, lead the way, if you please.”

  “Lead the way?” Ludwig echoed.

  “I need introductions, Mr. Ludwig. Where I come from, it’s a social error to introduce oneself rather than have a proper introduction from a third party. And as publisher, editor, and chief reporter for theCry County Courier, you know everyone in town.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “Excellent. Shall we begin with Mrs. Melton Rasmussen? I understand she is one of the leading ladies.”

  Ludwig paused in mid-breath. Klick Rasmussen, of all people, who he’d just gotten free of. A profound sinking feeling settled on Ludwig as he looked around the room. There was Klick at one of the turkey tables, holding forth with Gladys Cahill and the rest of the usual gang.

  “Over there,” he said, leading the way with a heavy tread.

  As they approached, the gaggle of ladies fell silent. Ludwig saw Klick glance at Pendergast, her features pinching with displeasure.

  “I’d like to introduce—” began Ludwig.

  “I knowvery well who this man is. I have only one thing to say—”

  She stopped abruptly as Pendergast bowed, took her hand, and lifted it to within an inch of his lips, in the French manner. “A great pleasure, Mrs. Rasmussen. My name is Pendergast.”

  “My,” said Klick. Her hand went limp within his.

  “I understand, Mrs. Rasmussen, that you are responsible for the decorations.”

  Ludwig wondered where Pendergast had learned this little tidbit. The man’s southern accent seemed to have deepened to the consistency of molasses as he gazed at Klick intently with his strange eyes. To Ludwig’s private amusement, Klick Rasmussen blushed. “Yes, I am,” she said.

  “They are enchanting.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pendergast.”

  Pendergast bowed again, still holding her hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, and now I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  Klick blushed again, even more deeply. As she did so, Melton Rasmussen, having seen the exchange from afar, abruptly arrived. “Well, well,” he said heartily, sticking his hand out and interposing himself between his plump, blushing wife and Pendergast, “welcome to Medicine Creek. I’m Mel. Melton Rasmussen. I realize the circumstances could be a little happier, but I think you’ll find the Kansas hospitality of Medicine Creek to be just as warm as it always was.”

  “I have already found it so, Mr. Rasmussen,” said Pendergast, shaking his hand.

  “Where’re you from, Pendergast? Can’t quite place the accent.”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Ah, the great city of New Orleans. Is it true they eat alligator? I hear it tastes like chicken.”

  “In my view the taste is more like iguana or snake than chicken.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll stick to turkey,” said Rasmussen with a laugh. “You come by my store sometime and have a look-see. You’re welcome anytime.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “So,” said Rasmussen, moving a little closer, “what’s the news? Any more leads?”

  “Justice never sleeps, Mr. Rasmussen.”

  “Well, I’ve got a theory of my own. Would you like to hear it?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “It’s that fellow camped down by the creek. Gasparilla. He’s worth looking into. He’s a strange one, always has been.”

  “Now, Mel,” scolded Klick. “You know he’s been coming around for years and he’s never been in any kind of trouble.”

  “You never know when somebody’s gonna go queer on you. Why does he camp way out there on the creek? Isn’t the town good enough for him?”

  The question hung in the air, unanswered. Klick was staring past her husband, her mouth forming a small, perfect O. Ludwig heard a hushed murmur ripple through the assembly. There was a brief clapping of hands. He turned to see Art Ridder and the sheriff escorting a man he didn’t recognize through the crowd. The man was small and thin, with a closely trimmed beard, and he wore a light blue seersucker suit. In his wake came Mrs. Bender Lang and a few of the town’s other leading ladies.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors of Medicine Creek!” Art Ridder boomed to the assembly. “It is my great privilege to introduce this year’s guest of honor, Dr. Stanton Chauncy of Kansas State University!”

  This was followed by thunderous applause and a few piercing whistles. The man named Chauncy stood, nodded once at the crowd, then turned his back on them and began to converse with Ridder. Slowly, the applause faltered into silence.

  “Mr. Ludwig,” Pendergast said. “There’s a group of gentlemen in the far corner—?”

  Ludwig looked in the indicated direction. Four or five men in bib overalls were drinking lemonade and talking amongst themselves in low voices. Rather than joining in the applause, they were looking in the direction of Chauncy with narrowed eyes.

  “Oh, that’s Dale Estrem and the rest of the Farmer’s Co-operative,” Ludwig replied. “The last of the die-hard holdouts. They’re the only ones who haven’t sold out to the big farming conglomerates. Still own their own farms around Medicine Creek.”

  “And why don’t they share in the town’s good feeling?”

  “The Farmer’s Co-op holds no truck with genetically modified corn. They fear it’ll cross-pollinate and ruin their own crops.”

  Ridder was now introducing the man from Kansas State to select knots of people.

  “There are several other introductions I’d like you to make, if you would,” Pendergast said. “The minister, for example.”

  “Of course.” Ludwig scanned the crowd for Pastor Wilbur, finally spotting him standing alone, in line for turkey. “This way.”

  “Tell me about him first, if you please.”

  Ludwig hesitated, not wishing to speak ill of anybody. “Pastor Wilbur’s been here for forty years, at least. He means well. It’s just that . . .” He faltered.

  “Yes?” said Pendergast. Ludwig found the man’s gray eyes focused on him in a most unsettling way.

  “I guess you’d have to say he’s a little set in his ways. He’s not really in touch with what’s happening, ornot happening, in Medicine Creek these days.” He struggled a moment. “There are some who feel a younger, more vibrant ministry would help revive the town, keep the youngsters from leaving. Fill the spiritual void that’s opened up here.”

  “I see.”

  The minister raised his head as they approached. As usual, a pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of
his nose, whether or not he was reading anything. Ludwig figured he did it to look scholarly. “Pastor Wilbur?” Ludwig said. “I’d like to introduce Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.”

  Wilbur took the proffered hand.

  “I envy you, Pastor,” Pendergast said. “Ministering to the souls of a community such as Medicine Creek.”

  Wilbur gazed benevolently at Pendergast. “It is at times a fearsome responsibility, being entrusted with so many hundreds, Mr. Pendergast. But I flatter myself that I’ve shepherded them well.”

  “It seems a good life here,” Pendergast went on. “For a man of God such as yourself, I mean.”

  “God has seen fit to both bless me and bring me trials. We all share equally in the curse of Adam, but perhaps a man of the cloth shares more than most.” Wilbur’s face had assumed a saintly, almost martyred demeanor.

  Ludwig recognized that look: Wilbur was about to spout one of his prized little scraps of poetry.

  “Alas,”Wilbur began,“what boots it with uncessant care, to tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade?” He looked through his reading glasses at Pendergast with evident satisfaction. “Milton. Naturally.”

  “Naturally.Lycidas. ”

  Wilbur was slightly taken aback. “Ah, I believe that’s correct, yes.”

  “Another line from that elegy comes to mind:The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. ”

  There was a brief silence. Ludwig looked back and forth between the two men, uncertain what, if anything, had just passed between them.

  Wilbur blinked. “I—”

  “I look forward to greeting you again in church on Sunday,” Pendergast interjected smoothly, grasping Wilbur’s hand once more.

  “Ah, yes, yes, so do I,” Wilbur said, the note of surprise still detectable in his voice.

  “Excuse me!” The booming voice of Art Ridder, amplified, again cut through the babble of overlapping conversations. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would all be so kind, our guest of honor would like to say a few words. Dr. Stanton Chauncy!”

  All around the Fellowship Hall, people put down their forks and turned their attention to the little man in the seersucker suit.

  “Thank you,” the man said. He stood erect, hands folded in front of him like he was at a wake. “My name is Stanton Chauncy. Dr. Stanton Chauncy. I represent the Agricultural Extension of Kansas State University. But of course you know that.” His voice was high, and his manner of speaking was so crisp and precise that his words were almost overarticulated.

  “The genetic enhancement of corn is a complicated subject, and not one that I can readily elucidate in a venue such as this,” he began. “It requires knowledge of certain disciplines such as organic chemistry and plant biology that one could not expect a lay audience to possess.” He sniffed. “However, I will attempt to impart the most rudimentary of overviews to you this afternoon.”

  As if of one mind, those who had gathered in the Fellowship Hall appeared to slump. There was a collective exhalation of breath. If they had hoped to hear praise heaped on their town or their Sociable, or even—dared one hope?—word of Chauncy’s impending decision, they were sadly disappointed. Instead, the man launched into an explanation of corn varietals so detailed that the eyes of even the most enthusiastic corn farmer glazed over. It almost seemed to Ludwig as if Chauncy wastrying to be as boring as possible. Whispered conversations resumed; forkfuls of mashed potato and turkey gravy were slipped into furtive mouths; small streams of people began moving back and forth along the far walls of the hall. Dale Estrem and the Farmer’s Co-op crowd stood at the back, arms folded, faces set hard.

  Smit Ludwig tuned out the droning voice as he looked around the hall. Despite everything, he appreciated the small-town atmosphere of the Sociable: its homespun provinciality, and the fact that it brought the community together, even forcing people who didn’t like each other to acknowledge the other and be civil. It was one of the many reasons why he never wanted to leave—even after his wife had passed away. A person could not get lost in Medicine Creek. People were taken care of, nobody was forgotten, and everyone had a place. It wasn’t like that in L.A., where old people died unloved and alone every day. His daughter had been calling a lot lately, urging him to relocate nearer her. But he wasn’t going to do that. Not even after he closed the paper and retired. For better or worse, he was going to end his days in Medicine Creek and be buried in the cemetery out on the Deeper Road, beside his wife.

  He glanced at his watch. What had generated these thoughts of mortality? He had a deadline to make, even if it was self-imposed, and the time had come for him to go home and write up the story.

  He made his stealthy way to the open doors of the hall. Beyond, late afternoon light illuminated the broad green lawn of the church. The heat was unbroken as it lay over the grass, the parking lot, and the cornfields like a suffocating blanket. But despite the heat—and, in fact, despite everything—a part of Smit Ludwig felt relieved. He could have fared a lot worse at the hands of his fellow townsfolk; he had Maisie, and perhaps Pendergast, to thank for that. And on a less selfish note, he’d be able to write an upbeat piece about the Sociable without dissembling. It had started with a certain grimness, he felt: a stoic sense that the show must go on, despite everything. But the gloom and oppression had seemed to lift. The town had become itself again, and not even Chauncy’s stultifying lecture, which still droned on behind him, could change that. The thirty-third annual Gro-Bain Turkey Sociable was a success.

  Ludwig fetched a deep, slow breath as he looked out from the steps of the church. And then, suddenly, he froze.

  One by one, the people around him began to do the same, staring out from the wooden doorway. There was a gasp, a low murmur. Like an electric current, the murmur began to jump from person to person, running back into the crowds within the hall itself, growing in volume until Chauncy’s exegesis of variegated corn kernels came under threat.

  “What is it?” Chauncy said, stopping in mid-sentence. “What’s going on?”

  Nobody answered. All eyes were fixed on the horizon beyond the open doors of the hall, where, against the yellow sky, a lazy column of vultures wheeled in ever tightening circles above the endless corn.

  Fourteen

  When Corrie Swanson pulled up to the church, people were standing on the front lawn, huddled together in groups, murmuring anxiously. Now and then somebody would break away from one of the groups and stare out in the direction of the cornfields. There must have been fifty people out there, but she didn’t see Pendergast among them. And that made no sense, because he’d asked her to come right away. He’d been most insistent on it, in fact.

  It was almost a relief to find him missing. Pendergast was going to get her into even worse trouble than she already was in this town—she could feel it in her bones. She was already the town’s A-number-one pariah. Once again, she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into. The money was still burning a hole in her glove compartment. He’d get her in trouble, and then he’d be gone, and she’d still be stuck in Medicine Creek dealing with the consequences. If she were smart, she’d give him back the money and wash her hands of the whole thing.

  She jumped involuntarily as a black figure seemed to materialize out of nowhere beside the car. Pendergast opened the passenger door and slid in as sleekly as a cat. The way he moved gave her the creeps sometimes.

  She reached for the dashboard, turned down the blaring sound of “Starfuckers” by Nine Inch Nails. “So, where to, Special Agent?” she said as casually as she could.

  Pendergast nodded toward the cornfields. “Do you see those birds?”

  She shaded her eyes against the glow of the sunset. “What, those turkey vultures? What about them?”

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  She revved the engine; the car shuddered and coughed black smoke. “There’s no roads out that way, and this is a Gremlin, not a Hummer, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Don’t worry, Miss S
wanson, I will not get you mired in a cornfield. Head west on the Cry Road, please.”

  “Whatever.” She stamped on the accelerator and the Gremlin pulled away from the curb, shuddering with the effort.

  “So how was the Turkey Sociable?” she asked. “That’s like the big event of the year in Shit Creek.”

  “It was most instructive—from an anthropological point of view.”

  “Anthropological? Yeah, right, Special Agent Pendergast among the savages. Did they introduce that guy from KSU, the one who wants to grow radioactive corn around here?”

  “Genetically modified corn. They did.”

  “And what was he like? Did he have three heads?”

  “If he did, two must have been successfully removed in infancy.”

  Corrie looked at him. He looked back from the broken seat with his usual placid, mild, unsmiling expression. She could never tell whether or not he was cracking a joke. He had to be the weirdest adult she’d ever met, and with all the characters wandering around Medicine Creek, that was saying something.

  “Miss Swanson? Your speed.”

  “Sorry.” She braked. “I thought you FBI guys drove as fast as you wanted.”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  “The sheriff goes everywhere at a hundred miles an hour even when he’s off duty. And you always know when there’s fresh eclairs at the Wagon Wheel. Then he goes a hundred and twenty.”

  They hummed along the smooth asphalt for a while in silence.

  “Miss Swanson, take a look up the road, if you please. Do you see where the sheriff’s car is parked? Pull in behind it.”

  Corrie squinted into the gathering dusk. Ahead, she could see the cruiser pulled over onto the wrong shoulder, lights flashing. Overhead, and maybe a quarter mile into the corn, she could see the column of turkey vultures more clearly.

  It suddenly clicked. “Jesus,” she said. “Not another one?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Corrie pulled up behind the cruiser and put on her flashers. Pendergast got out. “I may be a while.”

  “I’m not coming with you?”