Blood Country (13 page)

“I thought you were gone all night again.”

“Did you look in the bedroom?” “No.”

She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. She looked down at her husband as he leaned forward on the couch. She believed him. It made sense, and she felt so stupid. She hadn’t heard him come home, hadn’t looked in the bedroom, and had assumed he was still gone. All that gut-wrenching for nought. Silly, pregnant woman. She hadn’t told him about her premonition. She would soon.

“I’m an idiot.”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. He patted the couch next to him.

She told him, “Claire should be home soon.”

“Whatever.” He smiled and opened his arms.

She slid into his embrace. Lovely husband. They kissed, and he gently nibbled her lower lip. “Let’s sleep together tonight.”

“Great idea,” Bridget whispered in his ear.

“Hi, Uncle Chuck,” Meg yelled from the top of the stairs. “My story isn’t done yet.”

“Did you know there used to be cougars here?” Bridget asked Chuck, pulling out of his embrace far enough so she could see his fece.

“What are you reading her?” They both stood up and walked up the stairs.

“Little House in the Big Woods.”

“I’d like to see a cougar.”

S
TANDING IN HER
driveway, Claire looked up at the firmament. She picked out the planets, which shone red-tinged light, steady and focused. Other stars hinted at blue and flickered as if a celestial wind blew them. What Claire loved best was the Milky Way, but it didn’t look like milk to her, rather salt strewn over someone’s shoulder.

Her life was good down here. Claire dropped her eyes down to Meg’s bedroom window. She had eight more years before Meg would leave home to go to college. They would be happy years, Claire promised herself. Maybe some nice man would join them. Not to take Steve’s place—that could never be—but a man who would be kind to Meg would be so good for her.

Claire had assumed the pickup truck in the driveway was one of her brother-in-law’s, so she was not surprised to see him on the living room couch when she walked in the back door. She was surprised to see him in a tight clinch with Bridget.

“Worked things out, have we?”

Bridget sat up, flushed and pretty. “We have indeed. He was there sleeping in bed. He came in while I was sleeping, so he was always there.” Bridget looked closer at Claire, then asked, “What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“What?”

“Looks like someone punched you.”

Claire walked into the bathroom and surveyed her face. Crying always made her look like a raccoon. She turned on the hot water and washed her face. “Never wear mascara to a funeral.”

When she emerged from the bathroom, the two of them had their coats on.

“Thanks, Big Sis,” Bridget said. “Was the funeral hard?” she asked as an afterthought.

“Yes and no. It is easier when the person has lived a long life,” Claire told them as they walked out the door. “Thanks for watching Meg.”

Bridget turned around in the yard and yelled back, “I think she was watching me.”

C
LAIRE STOOD IN
the doorway to her daughter’s room. Meg was sleeping so soundly that she didn’t go in and touch her cheek like she wanted to do.

She wanted to gather her sleeping child in her arms and croon to her all the promises that a mother could make: “It’s going to be all right No one will ever hurt you. I will watch over you and care for you until you’re bigger than me. Until the world is your stomping ground. Until you are your own person.”

Lately, Claire had had moments of hopefulness. She prayed nothing would happen to take them away.

15

C
laire leaned over her desk, reading the paper and chewing a tuna fish sandwich. She made it a point to read the local paper. The headline of the Durand paper was about the opening of fishing season. She usually liked to read what the police had been up to—how many people they had stopped for speeding, if there had been any serious crimes committed.

There had been a fuss in the paper a few weeks ago when one of the deputies escorted a man home after he had fallen asleep at the McDonald’s drive-through. The man had ordered and then nodded off. The server wasn’t able to wake him, so she called the police. The deputy came, made him move over, and drove him home. He had been called on the carpet because he hadn’t given the guy a Breathalyzer test Claire thought it was sad that even in a small town, helping somebody home was seen as the wrong thing to do.

There was nothing so exciting in the paper today.

Sheriff Talbert poked his head into her office. “Any good news there?”

Claire lowered the paper. “Great deal on radial tires.”

“You got a minute?”

“Sure.”

“When you’re done eating, come on in my office.”

As soon as he left, Claire sat up and tried to figure out what she had done wrong. He never wanted to see her in his office. It sounded so official.

The tuna fish sandwich hit the wastebasket with a thud. She folded the paper and swatted a fly with it. Her phone rang, and she picked up immediately.

“Hello?”

“Claire, it’s Bruce. Can’t talk right now. I got a sniff of someone knowing something about your husband’s death.”

“What?”

“I’d like to come down tonight and tell you about it. It would be better.”

“Of course. Right after work?”

“You got it.” He hung up.

She put down the phone and stared at her hand. Her feeling of last night—how safe she was from whoever killed her husband—seemed as far away as the stars. Claire remembered how agonizingly frustrated she had been right after her husband had been killed. The police couldn’t seem to get a lead on anyone. No one had seen anything, she had thought. Now she knew that Meg had, and she couldn’t stand the thought of Meg in any kind of danger. Out of an urgency to find out who had killed her husband, she had told Bruce. She wondered if it had been the right thing to do.

She rapped on the rippled glass front of the sheriffs office and walked in when she heard his summoning voice. “Yes, sir,” she said to tease him.

Sheriff Talbert gave her the once-over, not in a sexual way, more an assessment of an employee. Then he scratched his head. “Claire, I got a call on you.”

“What does that mean, sir?” Claire felt her skin flush. “A kind of complaint.” He said the word slowly. Jenkins rose in her mind’s eye, scurvy little fellow stuck to a fence. Claire said simply, “He had it coming.”

“What coming?” The sheriff looked over at her and watched her again.

Claire felt as if she had stepped a toe into something sticky. She decided to back up. “Who was the complaint from, sir?” “Mrs. Langston.” “The property rights woman?” “None other.”

“What was she complaining about?”

“She said you’d come visiting her and her organization.”

“I did attend a meeting.”

“What you do on your off time is not usually my business.” “Well, I was actually following a lead in the Landers case. His brother is very involved in the landowner rights movement. I wanted to see what they were all about.”

“Oh.” Talbert leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. A smile played on his lips. “Did you find anything out?”

She told him about the figure burned in effigy and the glove. “I just got the glove back from the forensic lab in Eau Claire. The two gloves are a match, which means there’s a high probability that the burned glove was Mr. Anderson’s.”

“Are you planning on talking to Mrs. Langston?” “Yes.”

“Good idea. Maybe you could go apologize in person to her and find out what’s going on.”

“What do I apologize to her about?”

“You know what I mean. Smooth things over.”

“I’m only doing my job.”

“I know that.” When Claire turned to go, he called her back.

“And, Claire, give her a chance. She’s not such a bad old hellion. I actually think you might get a kick out of her.”

“W
ELL, YOU’RE HERE EARLY,”
Mr. Blounder said, surprise and snideness mixing in his voice like two incompatible medications. He looked exhausted, but that was how he often looked. When they had first started working together a year ago, Bridget had asked him several times if he was all right, with real alarm in her voice. After his grunted assent that he was fine, she quit asking. Now that she knew him better, she realized he never did anything but come to work and go home. He never went outside. His skin was so pale as to seem almost transparent, and occasionally she had the urge to reach over and pet him, just to feel how soft his skin was.

Bridget merely stretched a smile at his comment. She did not need to get into it with him today. Turning and bending down as if she had dropped something, she grabbed a box off the shelf in front of the cash register. Why did they put those goddamn tests there? Right next to the condoms. If you don’t wear one, you’ll need the other. A kind of perverse morality being practiced right in the store.

Bridget slipped the pregnancy test into her purse, intending to pay for it later. Then she stood up and went to the bathroom. She locked the door and dropped her coat to the floor. Maybe she simply had cancer, some huge growth that had stopped her periods. Time to find out.

Bridget squatted down on the stool and peed on the plastic stick. She closed her eyes and held her breath. The instructions said to wait two minutes. Would it be like Christmas? If you wanted something too much, you wouldn’t get it? In her mind she saddled up her horse and rode him hard. The dreams she had welled up in her. She had always wanted to own a small stable of horses. She could see herself giving lessons, riding at the state fair, winning ribbons for jumping. She was saving money from her job to set all that up. Her dreams could be all over, depending on the color of the plastic wand she held in her hand. Wish, wish, no color. Or to see a drop of blood in the water below her.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the stick had turned blue, which meant she was with child. Bridget let it fall into the toilet and then flushed it down. She stood up, adjusted her clothing, and walked to the mirror. Thirty-five—that wasn’t too old to be a mom by today’s standards. When she was fifty-three, the child would be eighteen. She would still be able to ride. Many people rode into their sixties. Why, she had heard of a woman who had been in the Olympics when she was sixty-four. She would simply put it off for a while; her whole life would go on hold while she changed diapers and wiped snotty noses and told a child to go to bed; she meant it. She could do it all.

For a moment, she considered an abortion. She had had one when she was twenty-three. No regrets. She would have one again, but she knew Chuck would not hear of it. He wanted a child. And he had that odd masculine notion that a child from his seed would be more worthy than all the rest.

Bridget thought of a child as a person, not a belonging. So many of the women she watched who had children acted as if they owned them. It would be easier for her to give in to the prospect of having a child if she could see them that way. As it was, she really wasn’t sure she wanted another demanding person in her life. She remembered all too clearly her own childhood, her father being at work all day long, her mother taking loving care of her and Claire and yet wishing they would go on vacation for a few weeks without her. Her mother would lie on the couch in the living room after everyone was in bed just to listen to the quiet. That’s what she had told Bridget when she came up the stairs to get a drink of water. Bridget would nod and listen to the quiet, too, and wonder what her mother heard in it. Now, at thirty-five, she understood.

Bridget put her hand over her stomach. It did seem larger to her—harder was the better way to put it She was with child. One in the oven. Whatever. She had tied her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck. She’d have to wear it back most of the time so the baby couldn’t grab at it and yank her head back. Maybe she should just cut it off. Fat and shorn, that’s how she’d look in a few months.

Bridget took a small sip of water and walked out of the bathroom.

Mr. Blounder curled his lips back and said, “Are you feeling okay?”

Bridget stopped in front of him and asked, “Did your mother love you?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “I guess so.”

“Did you love your mother?”

For the first time since she had known him, a thin worm of a smile crawled out on his lips. “Yes, I loved my mother dearly.”

She stared at him. Maybe it was possible. “Yes, I’m feeling fine.”

T
HE ROAD CURVED
up through a wooded hillside to the crest Claire bumped the police car up the dirt road carefully, feeling the car slide slightly in the runoff caused by the snowmelt Hidden under the just budding trees were piles of old snow. They would be gone in another week or so, if more snow didn’t come. Snow in April wasn’t that unusual. Messy and soggy, it reminded Claire of ephemeral East Coast snow, the kind that melted in midflight.

Driving over the top of the hill, Claire stopped the car on the descent, struck by the view. People paid big bucks for this. Lake Pepin spread out below her like a fine, light gray tablecloth. There was no breeze, and it was so calm it seemed possible to walk on the water. Claire compared this view to the one she saw of the lake from her house. All she could make out was a twinkling of silver through tree branches in the dead of winter. By the time the trees leafed out, the lake had disappeared. Here, the blufflands encircled the lake, their contours moving in and away from the water like ripple candy. Way across the lake, she could see another farm. The silhouette of the barn and silos stood out against the light blue sky.

Before the blufflands ordinance, anyone could build right on the edge of the bluff. But in the last century, the farmers had resisted doing that. They sheltered their farmhouses in the small valleys just over the ridge of the bluffs so the houses wouldn’t be hit by the winds. However, new developers and owners perched their houses as far out as they could over the water. From the interior of some of these houses Claire sometimes got vertigo, as it appeared that nothing held the house up from the waves below. Charming names were given to these places, like “Eagle’s Nest.” But since the blufflands ordinance forbade such placement of houses, the far ridge of the bluffs would stay much the way Claire saw it now—the odd barn or two on the opposite side of the lake, but other than that, it could almost give the impression of how the landscape had been a thousand years ago.

Claire let the car ease down the other side of the hill. The road wound into a grove of trees, and she parked next to a station wagon. She reached over and got the charred piece of glove that the forensic lab had sent back to her. As she walked toward the house, a big German shepherd bounded out at her. She stood still and waited for him to come to her; she wasn’t afraid of him, just cautious. She held out her hand, and he gave it a sniff, then wagged his tail.

“Good dog,” she said and started forward, but he jumped at her. Claire stood still again. He didn’t seem to want her to move.

The front door of the house swung open, and a high voice keened out, “Off, Sheriff.”

The dog backed up and wagged his tail furiously. Claire walked toward the front of the house, and the dog let her pass.

Mrs. Langston leaned in the front doorway. “I’ve got him trained,” she stated.