Cold Black Earth (13 page)

13    

The world outside was bleak: pale sky and mottled earth, wind rattling the windows and trailing dustings of snow across the frozen ground that stretched away into a colorless nothing at the horizon. Matt had gone to town again, on errands unknown. Billy had gone rocketing down the drive in the Dodge and wheeled east, sliding on the gravel. Rachel cleaned up the lunch dishes, puttered aimlessly, turned the television on and then off again, and finally gave up. She put on her jacket, went upstairs, walked to the end of the hall and opened the door, and mounted the narrow stairs that led to the attic.

It was cold up here and darker than she remembered; as she reached the top of the stairs, stooping so as not to hit her head on the rafters, she saw that the light from the round window at the far end was blocked by stacks of boxes. The attic had filled up since she had last been up here, no doubt the result of her dead sister-in-law’s makeover of the house. Here was her father’s trunk, there her mother’s garment bags, thrown carelessly in a corner. She picked her way through the maze toward the window, light growing as she neared it.

There was still open space by the window, and if anything the place was more private than ever, shielded from the stairs. Rachel settled on the floor with her back against a wall of boxes, turned up the collar of her jacket and hugged her knees, and looked out the round window across the fields. She could make out the water tower in Rome, two miles distant. Beyond that was the limitless earth.

Rachel had dreamed of Fadi early that morning, a beautiful dark-eyed golden Fadi, laughing at her and holding out his hand, on a terrace in an impossible, precipitous city hanging far above a turquoise sea. Rachel had awakened in the cold gray dawn and lain in her bed finally certain that the man she had loved and the world he had given her were gone forever.

The sobs she had been suppressing for weeks came as great heaves. Rachel sobbed until she ached, looking out across the fields through her tears, in despair as vast as the world outside.

She cried to exhaustion and fell silent, head against the wall, cheeks glistening with tears, mucus running down onto her upper lip. The air was cold enough that she could see her breath, and she watched it rise through the light from the round window. A step creaked on the attic stairs.

She held her breath. She had not imagined it. Someone was coming slowly up the stairs. Her mind began to work rapidly: Had she locked the door after Billy left? Would she have heard someone breaking in? Had she been heard?

Why else would someone be creeping up those steps?

Her heart was thumping madly. Keep silent and he won’t know you’re here, Rachel thought, knowing that was infantile even as she heard the steps come softly across the attic floor. Fight then, she told herself, seeing Ed Thomas’s sundered arm in the jaws of a beast and knowing she would never win a fight with the man who had done that.

Then you are going to die, she thought. The adrenaline made her stir at last, sucking in breath as she discovered she very much wanted to live. She had gotten one leg under her, preparing to rise, when Billy stepped out from behind the boxes.

They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. “Hello, Billy,” she said.

“You OK?” He was a bad boy, gaunt and menacing in his black leather jacket with his hair framing his long face, but the look in his eyes was alarmed.

Rachel closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Not really. But I’m not going to kill myself. I promise.” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of the jacket, and then stalled, awkwardly, face covered with snot and nothing to wipe it with.

“Here.” He produced a blue paisley bandanna from inside his jacket. “It’s clean.”

Rachel took it and blew her nose, wiped her face clean. “I’ll wash it for you.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He was staring down at her with an absorbed look.

Her heart rate was beginning to subside. “I’m sorry. That was a callous thing to say. If you want to sit down I’ll try and tell you why I’m falling apart up here.”

Somewhat to her surprise, Billy shoved a box out of the way with his foot and lowered himself to the floor. There was just enough room for them to sit facing each other with their knees drawn up and touching side by side, feet tucked against the other’s hip. Billy reached inside his jacket again, and this time he brought out a stainless steel half pint flask. He twisted off the cap and offered it to her. “Here you go. Good for what ails you.”

Bad boys have their uses, Rachel thought, putting it to her lips. It was bourbon and it burned a little, but it was good. “Thank you,” she said, handing it back. “I was about to ask you a really stupid question.”

Billy took a sip and replaced the cap. “What’s that?”

“I was about to ask if you’d ever been betrayed by someone you loved.”

He laughed at that, a short ironic grunt. “Yeah, you could say that.” He frowned out the window, the westering light showing up the fine lines of his face. “Brain chemistry,” he said.

“Brain chemistry?”

“Yeah. That’s the only way to look at it. It was just brain chemistry. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t really trying to punish us. It just seemed like it.”

“I think that’s probably about right,” Rachel ventured.

“But it was Dad’s fault, too. Shit, we were happy in the other house. I was, anyway. I couldn’t see any reason to move. But he was like, no, we have to keep the house in the family. The Lindstrom farm, the century farm, all that shit. So we moved over here. And the house I grew up in is just standing there empty.”

“Well, the farm’s really important to him.”

“Yeah.” Billy’s tone of voice told her what he thought of the farm.

Rachel hesitated and then said, “When you’re handed something like that, built up over the generations, you don’t take it lightly. And that’s all I’m going to say in his defense.”

“Nah, I know.” He looked away out the window again. “But I didn’t ask to be born into this family. None of this was my idea. But somehow I’m supposed to say, oh sure, I’ll be happy to take over, spend the rest of my life staring down bean rows, never get more’n twenty miles away from where I was born.” The look on his face had gone sullen. “Fuck that.”

Rachel waited a while and said, “So what do you want to do?”

A look of great weariness passed over Billy’s face. “Fuck, Aunt Rachel, I don’t know. Why do I have to do anything with my life? I ain’t hurting nobody. If all I ever do for the rest of my life is party, who gives a shit?”

They looked out the window together for a time, just watching the snow drift gently across the land. “I think this is where I’m supposed to give you the lecture,” Rachel said. “But having screwed up my own life to the point where I’m blubbering in the attic at age forty-three, I don’t think I have a lot of credibility. So I’m just going to ask you for another drink.” He handed her the flask and she drank. “Maybe adulthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“That’s the impression I’m getting.” He took the flask back. “So, who stabbed you in the back? Your husband?”

“Yeah. I started to get the picture when I would come home to Beirut on furlough and find other women’s cosmetics in the bathroom.”

“Damn. Welcome home.”

“Yeah. I guess I pretty much asked for it. I knew when I married him, or I should have known, that I wasn’t marrying into a culture that valued a woman’s career prospects. When I put my career first, that was pretty much it for the marriage. And then I went and flushed the career down the toilet, too. So now where am I?”

“Sitting in the attic getting drunk with your no-good nephew.”

Rachel had to smile at that. “There are worse fates,” she said, holding out her hand for the flask.

When Matt came in he stopped in his tracks by the back door to stare at them sitting at the kitchen table, cards and small change scattered over the tabletop. “What you playing?” he said, taking off his coat.

“Gin rummy.” Billy was dealing. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I just gambled away the farm.”

“Suits me.” Matt pulled out a chair. “Let somebody else worry about it for a while.”

“Aunt Rachel says she’ll let you stay, long as she gets that rent check in Paris every month.”

“Should just keep me in that nice little flat on the Île St. Louis,” Rachel said, deadpan.

Matt’s eyes narrowed. “You two been drinking?”

They burst out in giggles and Rachel knew she was cutting a poor figure for a grown-up woman, but she didn’t care. “Couple of God damn schoolkids,” said Matt. “Well, is there any left?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Billy. “We killed the bourbon. But I think there’s beer.”

Matt shook his head and went and got himself one. Rachel gave him a sheepish look. “What can I say? Never could hold my liquor.”

Matt opened the bottle and sat down. “Well, while you two been sitting here getting drunk, there’s a manhunt going on out there.”

That killed the mood fast; Rachel and Billy exchanged a look and then Billy tossed his cards down on the table. “They coming up with anything?” he said.

“I don’t know, but there’s cops all over. The word is, they found a place where he might have been hiding out, over toward Regina. There’s an abandoned house right by the strip mines down there where they found signs somebody’d been in there in the last couple of days. There was food and stuff in there, and a couple of blankets, and somebody’d built a fire in the fireplace.”

“That doesn’t mean it was him,” said Billy. “There’s a million abandoned houses around here. People get in there and do drugs and shit. Or just camp out. There’s homeless people out here in farm country, too, you know.”

“I know. I’m just telling you what the grapevine’s saying. Ron McKay’s brother farms down there, and he had state cops out beating the bushes behind his place.”

“The grapevine. You been hanging out with the geezers at the Snack Shack again?”

Matt gave Billy a cool look and Rachel tensed, but after a moment Matt smiled. “I’m one of the geezers now, boy. Watch what you say. Anyway, hanging out with the geezers is how you get the news around here.”

Billy let it go. “Seems like all they got to do is look for that truck. There can’t be too many of those old Fords still around.”

“Yeah, and if he’s still around that’s probably how they’ll spot him. I think they got tire prints from Ed’s place, and I bet the state cops are smart enough to compare ’em with anything they find.”

Billy frowned, fiddling with coins on the table. “What would he be doing hanging around here, anyway? If I was him, with a set of wheels, I’d be in fuckin’ Mexico by now.”

“Watch your language, will you? Who knows how a sick mind like that works? Maybe he’s got old grudges to settle, or thinks he does. You know Ed Thomas grew up near Regina and knew the Ryles, right?”

Rachel and Billy stared at him. “Listen to you,” said Rachel. “Pulling that out of your hat, like you knew it all along. Who told you that?”

“That’s what Ron says. He says not too many people remember the Ryles because they lost their land and moved away a long time ago, like forty years ago, but according to him, and he says he got it from his dad, the Ryles and the Thomases knew each other back in the day and didn’t get along too well.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. All Ron said was, they didn’t get along. Ed’s father and Bessie’s husband had some kind of a feud or something, way back in the fifties. That’s all he knew.”

“Ron told the police this, I’m assuming.”

“Oh, yeah. I think they’re all over it.”

Billy said, “So the guy comes back forty years later to whack old Ed? Dude’s got a long memory.”

“Hold on,” said Rachel. “Otis Ryle was just a little boy when the fifties ended. I’m having a hard time believing he would have even known anything, much less cared, about some feud his, what, grandfather had? Bessie was his grandmother, right? And it doesn’t sound like he was exactly invested in the Ryle family honor or anything. I can’t see it.”

Matt spread his hands. “Yeah, I don’t know. All I’m telling you is what Ron told me. That’s the scuttlebutt. Make of it what you will.”