She was all elbows, knees, and hair suddenly. Her braces were bared for all to see. She climbed into the passenger seat, hugging the cat, and sat there, waiting.
“Hon,” said her brother, “what’s kitty going to poop in?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t hear. Her brother gently pried the keys from her hand and went to unlock the Pêche Tôt. I spent the minute he was gone coldly zipping open Ingrid’s reel case. I had to know if I understood grief. Or if that face, that stagger, that wild impulse to escape—and my own—were the simple marks of a criminal.
I laid the case open. Six reels, the best money could buy. But on every reel, connecting line to leader, braided loops. No nail knots. Ingrid couldn’t tie them either.
As I set the case back into its place, I noticed something surprising, snapped neatly through the stays of a backpack. It was the little wreath of knotted grass Shelly had tried to give Jake at the funeral home.
Ingrid Jacobs was still as a stone in the front seat, staring straight down the vacant main street of Black Earth. As her brother retrieved the litter box from the defunct Pêche Tôt, I reached through the window, slowly, so as not to startle her, and I touched the widow on the shoulder.
Chapter 38
Which left me with the riddle of Dickie Pee. I drove Junior’s pickup back up the coulee, thinking about how a man in a wheelchair could manage the murder of Jake Jacobs—and such thoughts, of course, took me straight back to idea of teamwork. So, Dickie Pee, Bostock, and Bud? It was odd and unlikely mix of egos. And the nail knot didn’t really make sense. If someone had carried the dead man’s rod out to the road and told Dickie, “I can’t tie on a sally. He doesn’t even have a leader,” then Dickie wouldn’t have said, “Okay, walk back across the field, kick that sign off, and bring me the nail.” Hell no. He had knot tying tools, I was sure, in his van. Whoever tied the nail knot was on the stream, in the heat of the moment. And there was no way to get a wheelchair out there.
I was headed up the coulee past the campground at a pretty good clip when I saw the gate was open. A tow truck was backed up to the snout of the Cruise Master. By the time I bumped down the drive, a guy in a greasy green uniform was air-drilling the last of four new tires onto up my baby.
“I told you I’d fix ‘em for ya,” slurred Shelly Milkerson, stepping around the rear bumper. She looked freshly ripped, a beer-and-a joint-for-breakfast kind of glow on her. She wore cutoffs and a halter top, and the guy from Hellenbrand Tire couldn’t keep his eyes on the job. There was something different about her, too, but I couldn’t place it.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“You did. Thanks.”
“He’s got a tire changer and air and everything right on his truck, see?”
“I see.”
“That’s how they do tractors and stuff. Just come right out into the field.”
“I see. How much do I owe you?”
She frowned a little. Through the fingers of her left hand she had twisted the top of a plastic bagel bag, and she swung this around as if she were in deep thought, trying to calculate. But if I had harbored any doubts about the kind of business woman Shelly was, I was quickly relieved of my uncertainty. She knew exactly how much cash I had in my safe box.
“How about eight hundred?” Shelly said.
That was the number. Exactly. I mumbled something, suddenly wondering how many fishermen on Black Earth Creek had needed their tires fixed.
“And you said I could drive it sometime. Remember?”
I mumbled something again. The tire guy threw his tools in the back of the tow truck and took a long last look at Shelly. “Ronnie’s gonna bill me,” she told him. He snorted and rolled his eyes. He ripped up a long patch of campground turf as he drove out.
“You got the keys?” Shelly asked me. “Can I drive?”
I looked away from her at my ruptured door, peeled open like sardine can. Junior leaped to mind. Where, how, was Junior? And Dad? Out on Lake Bud, the buoys for the Jet Sky Jam bobbed peacefully. Such was the disgraceful appearance of the old mill pond that a few dozen neon orange bobbers actually decorated the thing, made it look like a place where something more exciting than pollution could happen. And was happening—but what?
I looked back at Shelly. I was bad at knowing what had changed on a woman. But something had.
“You got bungee cords?” she asked me. “That will hold your door shut.” I hesitated. “Look,” she said. “I can drive. I’ve been driving since I was ten. I used to drive my dad home from the Dew Drop. When he was too drunk. Which was every night.”
“You seem a little intoxicated yourself,” I told her.
“You should talk,” she huffed defiantly back. But she looked away from me, out at the orange buoys on the lake. Then she turned to me, brightly. “You let me drive,” she said, “And I’ll show you something.”
We were half-mile up the coulee when we passed her dad, working out on the stream. She said nothing. Then, another mile up, she stopped near the point where Jacobs was killed.
“You see that rock out there, in the pasture?”
I saw it: a jagged chunk of limestone, surrounded by thistles, about a hundred yards beyond the barbed wire. The stream was another hundred yards beyond. The corner where I had found Jacobs’ body was a bit north. Junior’s black-and-white Holsteins were conspicuously missing from the pasture. No one had been around to milk them and let them out of the barn.
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”
Shelly had a necklace on. That was the difference in her. She had a cheap chain around her neck, the silver, beaded kind that dangles from a light fixture, and she was fingering some ornament that hung between her breasts at the center of it. “Take a closer look,” Shelly urged me.
“It’s just a rock. I’ve walked past it before.”
“Come on,” she urged me. “Take a look. You’ll be surprised.”
I crawled beneath the barbed wire, wetting myself in the dew-soaked grass. I was a few yards toward the stone when I got my surprise. Shelly was pulling away in the Cruise Master. Her gaze was aimed forward, up the coulee, both hands on the wheel, and the Cruise Master had been floored. My baby was straining to get some speed. I knew by the knock in the engine. And I knew suddenly what was on the chain around Shelly’s neck, gripped in her left hand as she drove.
It was the big, tarnished, faux-pearl earring I had found in the belly of the trout. The earring I was guessing belonged to her mother.
I watched my Cruise Master disappear up the coulee. Where Shelly thought she was going, I couldn’t imagine. But suddenly I knew where the nail knot had come from.
Chapter 39
Outside the pop-up camper, I lifted up the two support ropes that had snapped in the thunderstorm. Since they were ropes, not fishing line, Shelly had repaired them using a stick—a larger and handier version of a nail—to shape the knots. And sure enough, those two ropes were rejoined with nail knots.
Sleek, tight, shapely—perfect nail knots.
Shelly Milkerson? The thought wouldn’t settle with me. Sure, she had the ability to get close to Jacobs, perhaps to surprise him, and she had the ability to tie the nail knot. I could believe she had busted the fisherman’s sign and used the nail. She was that resourceful and more. But why would she be interested in drowning Jake Jacobs? And how would she do it?
The sun was high now. From the outside, the pop-up camper smelled musty and hot. I circled it once, more as a nervous diversion than anything. I found Shelly’s potty spot around back. I had noticed a few days before that at one end, under the camper, she had kept a plastic bucket with a few things inside—a scrub brush, a screw driver, a pump bottle of liquid soap, a steak knife, a pair of pliers. Now that was gone.
I returned to the front of the camper and twisted the door knob. The door stuck. I tugged and the camper shook. But another tug overcame the chalky aluminum friction and the door came open. The heat hit me first, carrying upon it the pine scent of a car a
ir freshener that spun from the ceiling. In the dim light below I made out Shelly’s bed. But the Scooby Doo sleeping bag was gone. So was the little suitcase. So was the shrine to the mother that had abandoned her.
I scrambled to process a new sequence of events. Didn’t Shelly understand she would be pursued? Didn’t she understand it was clear now that she had killed Jake Jacobs and robbed the Cruise Master to set up Melvin O’Malley a second time—after her first attempt fell through? Didn’t she comprehend that a drunk girl in a halter top driving a thirty-foot RV with Massachusetts plates was going to get exactly nowhere?
I couldn’t imagine she was that drunk, or that stupid. I knew she wasn’t. Nor could I explain how the second yellow sally on Jacobs’ line had been tied with a granny knot, when Shelly clearly knew better. And how, after all, had Shelly’s mother’s earring ended up in the belly of a brown trout?
And there was another problem, too. Shelly hadn’t taken everything with her. She had left behind a brand new tool box under her sleeping platform—and inside that tool box were wire cutters and wire strippers, gloves, and cable. Beneath the box was a file folder, recognizable as belonging to Jacobs by the neat left-handed lettering on the tab. The tab said Dam—Structural Analysis. Beneath the folder, covered with muddy fingerprints, lay three pages printed off the internet. The pages were from The Anarchist’s Cookbook. They were instructions for laying dynamite.
The murder of Jake Jacobs wasn’t the end of it, I realized. Shelly Milkerson and her partner, Dickie Pee, were taking things a step beyond.
Chapter 40
While I can understand now how wrong my instincts were at that moment—almost fatally wrong—I remain rather proud of them. Maybe I’ve picked up a little wisdom along the trout road after all, because my hunch now is that we all die with a searing flash of awareness that we have been utterly wrong on any number of big assumptions. But if you are going to die (and you are—you can quote the Dog on that), I guess you would be lucky, at that moment, to find yourself having erred on the side of faith and hope. At least that’s the way my friend Junior O’Malley would see things.
Shelly Milkerson was a kid. That’s what I was telling myself as I looked around the Lake Bud campground that hot August morning. True, she was a kid who had cleaned me out, who had left me with nothing to my name but a frayed aluminum lawn chair, a set of wheel chocks, and my waders slung over a burr oak limb. But she was a kid who needed sympathy and guidance. Her life had taken an awful twist, and she had adapted in self-destructive and violent ways.
She was a kid with a father, I was telling myself. A father who ought to know what she was doing. Who ought to crawl out of his own pain and do something to help her. That was my thinking. That was my fatherly instinct. Another sign of the Dog, unconscious, turning back to the pack.
I slipped into my waders and hiked back up the road. Across from Junior’s, I rolled under the barbed wire.
When I found Manfred “White” Milkerson, he was nipping from his flask in mid-stream and whistling to a bird—an eastern kingbird, I thought. He wore his hard-plastic yellow backpack, and his shocking probe dangled downstream.
“Hey, White. How’s it going?”
He turned unsteadily. I could see he was trying to recognize me. He was smashed.
“The trout bum,” I reminded him. “The guy who found the body.”
He nodded, preened back his sloppy moustache, gave me a little smile.
“Drink?”
“Sure.”
He tossed me the flask. “Thought you’d moved on.” “Not quite.”
“Saw your rig heading up the road.” “Wasn’t me.”
He busied himself with a cigarette. A bird warbled nearby. I said, “That a kingbird?” “Nope.” “Waxwing?” “Nope.”
“You got me then. I’m an easterner.”
“Dickcissel.” White Milkerson squinted at me. “Little seedeater. Big voice. Hard as hell to see.” He took his flask back. He stuck it under his moustache. When the burn had cleared, he said, “You’re not fishing.”
“Nope. I came out to talk to you.”
He moaned, “Aww crap,” and propped the cigarette in his lips. When he had it lit, he said, “So my daughter cut your tires, right? That’s what the last guy who camped there said. And I suppose that was her driving off with your rig. What am I supposed to do about it?”
“She needs help.”
“Hell, we all need help.”
“So let’s help each other.”
“I can’t pay for everything she does. She stole something of yours, you gotta call the cops.”
“She’s in a lot more trouble than that.”
Milkerson turned away like he didn’t want to hear any more. He sloshed to the bank. “I got work to do,” he grunted as he slung his shocker motor into the grass and pulled the starter cord. The little engine kicked and spat, then settled into a steady snarl on his back. He waded up the stream away from me, sweeping his probe through the current.
I went with him. “She’s mixed up in the death of Jake Jacobs,” I hollered into his ear. “She and this Dickie Pee character. I think she may have helped him kill Jacobs. She’s been tampering with evidence to cover it up. And now she’s playing around with explosives.”
Milkerson wallowed forward without replying. Stunned fish began to ghost up around him. He had left his long-handled net on the bank. I followed him with it, scooping up eight-inch brown trout until the net was full. But he didn’t seem to have any plan for them. Suddenly I wondered what work he was doing, and I intended to ask him.
But when I caught up with him, White Milkerson was weeping. Fat tears squeezed from his creased eyes and were quickly subsumed in his great, sloppy moustache. He pushed forward, sweeping the electric probe, seeing nothing.
“White,” I said, turning the net over, watching the paralyzed trout drift away, “what are you doing? What’s going on? Look, I’m trying to help your daughter.”
His shoulders caved. His tears streamed. Trout sailed numbly into him, spun away. He looked helpless and pathetic. “God bless you,” he said. “Somebody has to. I’m a horrible father. I’ve made horrible, horrible mistakes. She’s on her own now. I can’t help her.”
I turned off his shocker.
“So what’s going on, White? What are you really doing out here?”
I helped him to the bank.
“You’re out here every day, probing this creek. Are you really doing studies?”
He stared at the water. He took a big breath and snorted it out. “The studies are faked,” he said. “Hell—it takes more than one guy to do a decent stream survey. You gotta have a damn sled, a tub, a couple guys to haul and chart.”
“The stream is not dying?”
“Hell no. It’s worse than dying. It’s living dead.” He laughed roughly and looked at me like we both knew it. Like there was so much pain in what he had just said that he had to spread it around. But I wasn’t sure what he meant. He kept his sad eyes on me. “Studies don’t matter for shit, partner. Twenty years from now, thirty years from now, whatever, the guys in the suits will have their way. What we’re sitting on right here is gonna be a parking lot, or somebody’s goddamn backyard. We just don’t know it yet.”
“It can’t be that bad, White.”
Abruptly, his sorrow shut down. He looked at me cagily. “No. It’s going to make some people happy, that’s for sure. It’s going to be great habitat for junk fish, too.”
He kept his eyes on me.
He said, “Ice fishing’s going to be good down on Lake Bud in a couple more years.”
He still looked at me.
“And I’ve seen towns like Black Earth take a stream like this one here and get it channeled real nice so it never floods anymore. Then they put railings around it so kids can’t fall in anymore.” He dipped his cigarette butt in the stream and dropped it in his shirt pocket. “Shit, I used to fall in this crick all the time.”
“What are you doing out h
ere, White?”
He lit a fresh one. “It’s too late for cute shit like ponytails,” he said, exhaling. “You know? Every man for himself at this point. That’s what I figure. But then I’m a certified bad person. Not like Jake. He was good. He was really good. It’s just that this world … Hell, I don’t know ….”
“You don’t want that dam out, do you?”
“No, I do not.”
“You disagreed with Jacobs.”
“No. I agreed with him. The dam is a problem. Jake was a good man.”
I paused to think a minute. We seemed to be going somewhere. The studies were faked, Milkerson had said, which made their results even more telling.
“You said in your study this was going to be smallmouth bass water in another few years. Not junk fish water. You knew Bud Bjorgstad would jump on that and use it to fight for the dam. He’d use it to fight Jacobs.”
He shrugged.
“What is it, White? You’re looking for the first smallmouth out here?”
Milkerson laughed smoke. “Fuck smallmouth.” “Bud’s feeding fish out on the lake,” I said. “Those aren’t smallmouth?”
He looked at me. He looked up and down the stream. Above us was one of Junior’s cattle fences, stretching across the stream. Above that was a deep hole. A fisherman’s ladder straddled the fence on the far bank, making it easy for a man in waders to get over Junior’s barbed wire. White Milkerson looked back at me. Now he had a sad little grin. He looked more than a little like Shelly.
“Okay,” he said. “Look. There’s a little business going on in here. A little bit of put-and-take. I tell you what it’s about, partner, and you can get into it for free, as long as you just take your trophy and drive away, don’t blab it around.”
“Drive away in what?”
I waited. The dickcissel chirped from a nearby dogwood, but White Milkerson didn’t seem to hear it.
“See,” he said, “President Bud and I go way back. Old turkey hunting buddies. Him and me and Mel O’Malley. Then Mel had all them strokes and Bud got rich on the Cox Hollow development and then he got in with this safari crowd. You know, big game hunters. Guys that go to down to a fenced farm in Arkansas or Texas and shoot some kind of African goat with fancy horns, put it up on the wall. Shit—pay five, ten grand for it.”
The Nail Knot Page 20