“There’s more than one?” I pressed. I felt bad, but I couldn’t help myself, even though each word looked to drain Hilo of more energy than he had to start with.
“From what I understand, there were six pieces in the original collection, but they were separated by estate settlements or sold off during years of drought, when the need was great for money, for saving the farm. I’m sure you understand that. Strand has collected them for years. He is distraught that his were stolen, and distraught and deeply upset with the appearance of the new one that was found at the murder scene.”
“I went to see him after I left Raymond’s, but there was no one home.”
“I haven’t had any contact with him since I brought it to you,” Hilo said. “Other things . . .”
I lowered my head. “Is this amulet one of the original pieces?”
“I don’t know, Marjorie. Strand was checking into it for me, too. He was the obvious place to start my investigation. The new sheriff will need to talk to him, and to you, once it all becomes official. I hope you understand.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
Hilo stepped back and stared down toward the trees, to the hidden river. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For involving you in all of this. I should have never bothered you with it in the first place. Maybe if I hadn’t, Ardith would still . . .” Hilo stopped, then looked up at the house. “I’m tired, Marjorie. I just want to get some rest. It looks like I’m going to have to sleep in the truck.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
Hilo forced a smile. “I’ve been sleeping behind the steering wheel of that truck for years, Marjorie. I guess I should’ve been paying closer attention to things, that’s all.”
“This isn’t random, is it?”
“No, no, I don’t think so. I kind of wish it was. It would make it easier to think that there’s nobody from around here that would do such a thing, that a stranger is wandering through town and will move on down the road. But I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a monster we’ve never met. We’ve looked this one in the eye at one time or another. I’m sure of it.”
I agreed silently but said nothing. I started to turn away, walk back up to the house, leave Hilo to his grief, what was left of his life, but I stopped. I had one more question that I needed to ask him. “What about Roy?”
That flash of anger I had seen earlier returned with the impact of my question. Only it didn’t disappear. It started on Hilo’s haggard face and twisted into a mask that was nearly unrecognizable. His chest lurched forward, and if I had been standing close enough it would have knocked me to the ground.
“Roy doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Hilo growled.
I stepped back and put a broomstick’s distance between us. “I’m sorry, Hilo, but I had to ask. Herbert Frakes said . . .”
“I can imagine what Herb said about Roy.” Hilo stepped forward with the rage of a father restraining himself against an intransigent child, and pointed his index finger at me. “You leave Roy out of this, you hear me, Marjorie Trumaine. You just leave him alone, goddamn it.”
It was a rare cuss word directed my way. Hilo looked like he was about to froth at the mouth. There was nothing more I could think to say. I was shocked by Hilo’s reaction. I hadn’t expected it.
I clamped my mouth shut, turned, and hurried up the hill toward the Studebaker. I wanted to be as far away from Hilo Jenkins as I could get.
“I’m serious, Marjorie. Leave him be,” Hilo yelled from behind me, into the wind, into the coming darkness. “Leave Roy be.”
CHAPTER 27
A pair of beady eyes reflected back at me in the darkness as I sped down Hilo’s drive. The sudden yellow glow barely caught my attention; an animal alongside the road was not an uncommon nighttime sight. There always seemed to be something lurking about at the intersection of light and dark in the summer. The windshield was peppered with splashes of bug parts.
My hands were gripped so tight on the steering wheel that I could hardly feel them. I was numb with an emotion that I couldn’t quite define or recall ever experiencing so deeply. It bordered on rage: an unsettled anger, fear, and confusion. I wanted to scream, to pound the dash, lash out, but all I could do instead was swerve and barely miss hitting a shiny-coated female coyote as she bounded across the road inches from the front bumper of the truck.
“Trickster,” I whispered aloud, as I watched the wild canine disappear over the berm with a hurried, single leap. “Go away,” I said louder, not quite a yell. “Just go away,” I added, full-throated, so loud inside the cab of the truck I couldn’t hear anything else.
And then there was nothing ahead of me. Nothing but the sharp white light of my headlights cutting into the infinite blackness of night. There was no city glow to pierce the dome of darkness. All there was was me, alone in my truck, so mad I could spit nails.
I straightened the front of the truck from the slight swerve and pressed down on the accelerator. I wanted to be in the comfort of my home as soon as possible.
I just want to be home where I belong, with my Hank.
It was hard to envy Hank in his current condition, blind and bedridden, the world lost to him, but some days I thought he had it far better than anyone else I knew. I would never tell him that I thought that. I’m not sure he’d understand—or ever agree with me. He just wanted to be whole again, or dead. One or the other. There was no in-between for Hank Trumaine.
I wasn’t prepared for another coyote to jump in front of the Studebaker, but one did—in the blink of an eye—an unexpected life fleeing from something or running after something, showing itself in the light. Vulnerable, suddenly afraid, fear in its eyes. I felt a deep kinship with the beast.
Coyotes rarely ran in packs, or even in pairs, especially in midsummer. A spring sighting like this wouldn’t have been so surprising to see: a couple intent on mating, on stalking the night together in search of an easy meal, an easy kill. Maybe they were siblings, hanging on to their youth for as long as they could. I couldn’t blame them for that.
Instinct demanded that I swerve again, and I obeyed. This time, the tires slipped out of control on the gravel, and the pickup’s bed swung sideways as I slammed on the brakes and overcorrected more aggressively than I should have.
This coyote was a big male, as big as Shep or bigger, and he was close enough to hit.
As leery as I was of coyotes, killing a living creature of any kind didn’t settle well with me. Especially right now. I fought gravity without the aid of the power steering that came in the newer, fancier, trucks. This task demanded the muscle of a man accustomed to chopping logs and baling hay, not a woman who rolled out delicate potato dough to make lefse or typed indexes on an old Underwood typewriter.
I struggled and slid for another twenty or thirty feet, cringing, waiting for the inevitable thud underneath the truck, but none came. When I finally came to a stop there was no sign of the coyote. It was almost like the animal had never been there at all, had been a figment of my imagination, or had responded to my request to disappear.
If only I had that kind of power, that kind of magic. Hank would be able to see and walk again. I would turn back time. I would save Erik, Lida, and Ardith from a horrible, unthinkable death—from being murdered in cold blood. It was a silly thought, and I vanquished the idea of supernatural power as quickly as it came. In all of my years on this earth I had never seen an iota of proof that such a thing existed. Goodness was a human invention. So was evil.
I saw nothing in front of me except the dust settling from my slide—earthly glitter, a million tiny stars burning out, going back to sleep, road dust and powdery white limestone falling back to the ground where it belonged. There was nothing behind me but the same darkness I had driven into. My heart beat faster than it should have, and my wrists and shoulders stung from the tension and effort it had taken not to wreck the truck.
The .22 had fallen over to the
door, out of reach since the basket of lefse and sausage had been left behind at Hilo’s. I reached over for the little Remington, brought the butt back up next to me, then barricaded it to my thigh with my purse.
I squared myself, glad the Studebaker was still running and that I hadn’t killed anything in my blind rage and lack of attention to the road. I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible and relieve Peter from his watch over Hank—and be as far away from Hilo Jenkins’ house as I could. Tomorrow was going to be a long day for us all. The showing for the Knudsens was in the afternoon and would last well into the evening. Betty Walsh, the girl at the Rexall counter, had said the whole town would turn out, and I fully expected her to be right about that.
I released my foot slowly from the brake, eased the truck forward toward home, and glanced casually into the rearview mirror, hoping to catch sight of the coyote, safe, alive, bouncing off after some kind of trouble or another.
I expected to see nothing, darkness, but I was surprised by a distant pair of headlights growing brighter by the second.
I didn’t react for half a second; people came and went all the time. Maybe it was somebody on their way home from Hilo’s. And then the next thought exploded into the front of my mind and stayed there: Maybe it’s somebody coming for you, Marjorie.
My throat went dry. I had never felt so alone in my life. I begged the coyotes to come back, but they weren’t Shep, they wouldn’t protect me—they would wait until I was dead and consider me a feast that they’d had the good fortune to have stumbled upon.
I shoved my sensible-heeled Montgomery Ward’s shoe down on the accelerator as hard as I could, wishing the whole time I had boots on, boots with anvils strapped to them so I could make the Studebaker go faster than it ever had.
The tires spun, and the bed fishtailed again, this time with intent, with as much control as I could muscle into the steering wheel.
I glanced up to the rearview mirror again, and the headlights had gained a lot more ground. They were half as far away as they’d been when I’d first spotted them. Go, go, go . . . I smacked the steering wheel with the palm of my hand and maintained as much force on the accelerator as I could. It was a good thing that the floorboard wasn’t rusted, or my foot would have gone right through it.
The rear tires finally caught and rocketed me down the gravel road. I headed straight for home. My safe place. Where Hank and Peter were waiting for me. Hopefully, a county deputy was at the gate, too. Duke Parsons to the rescue. He had come for me before, when the start of the combine had grabbed our attention.
I didn’t know for sure that it was somebody after me. I had thought the same thing coming home from Raymond’s, panicked then, and it had turned out to be a false assumption. A green Chevy in a hurry to go somewhere that had blown by me like I was standing still. A lot had happened since then, and I wasn’t taking any chances. People drove fast on these roads all the time. Speed limits were more a courtesy than a law. I’d never met a person in my life who’d got a speeding ticket this far out of Dickinson.
The front of the truck was slightly out of alignment, and it shimmied with the constant threat of breaking apart as I sped toward home. I struggled again to hold onto the wheel, and my shoulders ached with foreign pain from the effort. Once more, the lack of maintenance came back to haunt me.
It only took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings. My turn off was three roads up, just past a dead oak that had been struck by lightning years ago. The tree’s decay had taken years, encouraged more by the weather than insects. Termites were not a big threat in North Dakota like they were in Africa.
I looked behind me again, and the headlights approached at greater speed, catching up with me even though I had pushed the pickup truck up over seventy miles an hour, its limit.
Hot white light suddenly filled the cab of the truck. Four bright headlights aimed at the back of my head. I could hardly look in the rearview mirror because it was like looking into the sun.
I was hunched forward, urging the truck to go faster. My body was as tense as a matchstick. One wrong moved and I would snap in half. I was sure of it.
I expected the car to go around me, but it didn’t. It stayed on my rear bumper and flooded the interior with light, making it nearly impossible to see what was ahead of me.
I was two turns away from my road, but I was starting to rethink my course. Did I want to lead them to my house?
And then it rammed me.
Thunder behind lightning. The push was a hard hit, not direct, but on the right corner of the bumper. Along with the shimmy of the front end, the collision at the rear end catapulted the Studebaker into a vulnerable moment of instability. The steering wheel jumped out of my hand, and the truck whirled into a spin.
One of the advantages of living in North Dakota is the experience of driving in difficult situations on a regular basis. I have spun a truck on ice on more than one occasion. It’s never fun, there’s always panic— but this panic was heightened. I had just been rammed with intention. I had to think that the person who had killed three people that I loved in the last few days was trying to do the same thing to me.
I tried to relax, not overreact, not slam on the brakes. I turned the steering wheel in the same direction as the spin. Luckily there was nothing but open fields on both sides of the road. Then I lifted my foot off the accelerator and downshifted the truck into low gear, all the while trying to keep an eye on the attacking vehicle behind me.
I careened off the road and into the field, leaving the gravel and anything to gain traction on behind me. The truck jumped up and down, and the intensity of the bright headlights grew dimmer, more distant. A quick glance told me that the car had slowed and remained on the road.
The field had been recently cut, and the stubs of wheat stalks were still reasonably stiff. It sounded like I was running over spikes instead of plants intended to provide bread to the world.
I got control of the truck and finally came to a quick stop about twenty-five yards from the road. This time, the Studebaker coughed and died. I immediately tried to start it. I knew I had to get out of there as fast as I could, but the engine ground over and over again, refusing to turn over. Sweat dripped from my forehead, carving canyons in my makeup. My fingers were numb—along with the rest of my body. I had never been so afraid in my life.
I was a sitting duck.
My own headlights cut across a barren field. There was no place to run. I looked over my shoulder, out the back window, and saw the car just sitting there, still running, lights on, patient as a red-tail hawk sitting on top of a telephone pole waiting on a hapless mouse to make a move—a wrong move, any move.
Think, Marjorie, think. And then I looked over at the rifle. “Aim for the head,” Hank had said. I had a better idea. I’d aim for the eyes. Just above the headlight. One of them, just to let them know I was armed, that I could hit a target. I wasn’t just going to sit there and wait to die. I had to get back to Hank.
I grabbed the rifle, took a breath, and made my way out of the truck, hunkering down alongside the bed to keep myself covered. There I was in a dress and heels, with a rifle, and about to shoot at a car in the darkness of night. Annie Oakley I wasn’t, but at that moment, I sure could have used some of her confidence.
My eyes had adjusted to the starry light from the sky. I could see the silhouette of the vehicle, and there was no mistake that it was a car, but I was too far away to see the color, the make. I didn’t have that kind of knowledge. The only way I could tell a Ford from a Chevrolet was by what was written on the front of the car. Hank knew every make and model from the time of the horseless carriages to the present. I wished he was with me. He could tell me what I was looking at in pitch dark.
I could hear the constant rotation of the engine as it idled. The droning metallic presence was foreign to the land, unexpected and uninvited.
There was no time to hesitate, to wait. For all I knew, the driver had gotten out the car and was heading my
way, a sharp knife in his hand to slit my throat with. I raised the rifle, steadied it on the truck, sighted my target, and pulled the trigger.
The shot echoed in the cool night air like the sudden yip of a hundred coyotes. Then metal crashed into metal, a cold crack, not near as loud, but enough to get the attention of the driver of the car. I’d hit just behind the headlight, but didn’t shatter it.
“You’re messing with the wrong woman,” I said, under my breath.
My strategy worked. The car revved its engine, lurched forward, spun its tires, and tore away like it was running a one-car drag race.
I was tempted to take another shot at the red taillights as they disappeared over the first rise, but I restrained myself. I didn’t want to miss and accidently kill someone, the hunted suddenly becoming the hunter. Enough blood had been spilled in the last few days to last a lifetime.
CHAPTER 28
A red flare sizzled at the head of our drive. It glowed on the ground like a star fallen from the sky, struggling to stay alive. My shoulders drooped as I lifted my foot off the accelerator, and started to brake. Home again. Thank god.
Duke Parsons stood up out of the brown and tan Ford as I turned in and came to a stop.
“Marjorie,” he said with a nod. My window was down, had been since I tore out of the field and hightailed it home, constantly checking behind me for a pair of headlights and listening for a roaring car offering chase. Every fiber of my being was on alert.
I hadn’t seen a soul the rest of the way to the house.
“Someone,” I gasped. “Someone came after me.” I was on the edge of tears, had fought off the bottomless fear I’d felt the best I could, but it was impossible to hold back any longer. I was overwhelmed, more afraid than I had ever been in my life. Any fool could see that I was agitated, about to come unhinged.
Duke stared at me, his always-puffy eyes a little glassy, like he had just stirred from a nap. He still reminded me of a blood-engorged tick with the ability to talk. “You all right, there, Marjorie?” He peered inside, and I could smell mustard and sweet pickles on his breath. He had been eating, not sleeping.
See Also Murder Page 18