Dark Coulee (8 page)

“I think there’s some flexibility there, Lester,” Stuart said. “We might not even get much snow this winter. If we do, I think we can dip into the campground funds to help out. After all, we’ve been talking about raising the camping fees.”

“But we need a motion.”

Rich was pleased to see it carry. Lou wore a grin the rest of the meeting. They adjourned just after nine o’clock. Stuart walked out the door with Rich and asked him if he wanted to go get a beer at the Fort.

“Not tonight.”

“You seeing Claire tonight?”

“Don’t think so. She’s working a case.”

“Spitzler?”

“Yeah, you read about that in the paper?”

“Hell, who needs to read about anything when the postmaster knows everything before it happens.”

“Did you know Spitzler at all?”

“Couldn’t even tell you what he looked like. I don’t think he frequented my establishment.” Stuart ran the bakery in town.

“Probably not. His farm is about ten miles away from here. He’d go into Durand for baked goods.”

“So it’s keeping Claire busy.”

“I guess.”

As Rich walked away, he wondered if there’d be a message from her on his machine. They had only been seeing each other a couple times a week, but after Saturday night he found himself wanting to talk to her more often. He wondered how sleeping together would change their relationship. Usually it was the woman who wanted to move in and get close and comfortable. But he thought with Claire it might well be different.

He walked the half mile back to his farm along Highway 35. There wasn’t much traffic at night, and the late-summer air was still warm, but the first smells of autumn were in the air. A slight tang of leaves falling. A bit of a snap in the air. The softness of summer was leaving.

When he was down the driveway from his house, he noticed that there was a dark pile of something sitting on his front steps. He couldn’t make it out. He tried to make it a pile of leaves, which didn’t make any sense. Maybe a bird had flown into the window of his back door and landed in a pile of feathers on the stoop. But as he walked closer, he saw a hint of color. Red. Something red.

He came to the bottom of the steps and saw what had been placed in front of his door.

A bouquet of roses. Red roses. In a glass vase.

There was only one person who would have done that.

No woman had ever given him flowers.

He lifted the roses up into his arms and smelled their dusty sweetness. His heart lifted up in his chest from happiness. He was in love with a generous woman.

Then he saw the note: “Rich, can’t see you for a while. Real busy with case. Claire.”

If only I hadn’t become a police officer.

If only I had never met Bruce.

If only I had gotten the mail, my husband wouldn’t have walked out to get it, the truck wouldn’t have hit him, he’d still be alive.

I know this all sounds utterly absurd.

But what scares me the most is when I say, It should have been me who got hit by the truck. It should have been me that took a bullet in the chest.

It makes this whole thing we’re doing, this life we’re living, seem a game. I feel like if I had moved two steps in a different direction at a certain time, everything would have turned out differently. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, of course I do.

Do you feel that?

It’s close to despair. I do feel it sometimes.

I don’t know if I told you, but I’m seeing someone. We’ve been friends for a while, and now we’re getting closer.

And I realize I don’t know if I can do it.

The other night I thought, for a second, that maybe if I gave Rich up, if I promised not to see him anymore, then I could get my husband back.

Isn’t that ridiculous?

The feeling isn’t.

Can’t you tell me what to do?

I talk to you, I tell you all this, but what I want from you, what I need, is some task to do that will change how I feel.

If you would tell me to climb a mountain, or go work for the homeless, or give away all my money.

It sounds like you think you should do some kind of penance. What is it that you need forgiveness for?

You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.

I didn’t die. I’m still alive.

I can love someone else. I can be happy again.

That isn’t available to either Bruce or my husband. I took it away from them.

It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.

No, it’s not fair. Fairness is just something we humans dreamed up. It has little to do with the reality of the world.

I know I need to accept what has happened, but sometimes I feel like I’m fighting so hard that my stomach knots up, waiting for a punch.

What do you want, Claire?

I want to go on with my own, good life.

D
OWN a long hallway, Claire was leading Leonard Lundgren toward the cells. The corridor in the jail was dimly lit. One of the bulbs must be out, she thought. She wasn’t talking to Leonard. He was walking in front of her. She stayed close behind him. When they got to the door of the cell, he stepped to the side to let her unlock it. She kept an eye on him. He had been quiet, but she wasn’t sure she trusted him.

As the door swung open, she touched his shoulder with her hand to usher him into the cell. Then it happened. A dance. He spun away from her, got behind her somehow so fast she couldn’t believe it was possible.

And he had a gun.

Why hadn’t Billy frisked him.

What the hell was he doing with a gun?

The gun grew larger in his hand. He shoved it into her belly. She stepped back. He was pushing her toward the cell. She didn’t want to go into the cell. She was afraid she would never leave it. He would lock her in and leave her.

She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She was choking. The scream had gotten stuck in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Black air rose up from the floor and filled the room. She couldn’t see anything.

Suddenly, she broke through into night—the quiet night of her bedroom. Her heart galloping in her chest like a runaway horse. Her body covered with sweat. Her hands tingling with the hyperventilation. She clasped her hands over her chest to slow herself down, to reassure herself.

It was only a dream. There was no gun. No cell. Lundgren was safely locked up. She would see him in the morning.

Breathe slowly. The was the first thing to do. Stop breathing so fast and breathe in deeply. She focused on the air moving in and out of her body, pulled it in deep, held it in for a count or two, let it out slowly. Her therapist had taught her this method of breathing; it was supposed to be calming. Especially good for panic.

Claire hoped she hadn’t screamed. She listened intently for any noise coming from Meg’s room, but heard nothing.

She knew there would be no getting back to sleep for a while. She might as well get up and have something hot to drink. Her therapist had said to get up and shake the dream off. She couldn’t stop them coming, but she could remain calmer after they had gone. Not give them so much power over herself.

Glancing over at the alarm clock, she saw the time was three in the morning. Hours before it was time to get up. She wished the dreams would come about six and she could just segue into the day, but she really did need another two or three hours of sleep to be able to cope with all the work she had ahead of her. Jed Spitzler’s funeral was today, and she felt she should attend.

Claire got out of bed and went to her window. Gentle darkness. The moon overhead had a slice taken out of its side but was still giving off plenty of light. On the bluff behind her house, she could make out the white lines of the birch, thin fingers of trees reaching for the sky.

She wrapped her terry-cloth bathrobe around her, cinched it at the waist, and quietly walked past Meg’s doorway. Peeking in, she saw her daughter’s sweet profile tipped up, nose pointed at the ceiling, seeming to strain into the air of the night. Meg had been sleeping better of late. Her worries had died down—and she knew none of her mother’s. Claire was so glad of that.

The world had become a safer place for Meg, and with help, Claire hoped that it would become a less fearful place for herself.

The pastor had asked Brad to say something about his father at the service. Brad should have turned him down, but somehow he hadn’t been able to. Brad knew he suffered from trying to please other people. Oldest child syndrome, according to this psych book they had read in school.

So now he stood in the back of the church, watching the few people who had come to the service file in and take a pew, and he held a crumpled piece of paper in his hand on which he had written a few sentences. Searching around for something profound to say, he had pulled a few lines from the Bible, figuring that would be a safe bet. The best he could come up with on such short notice.

Jenny and Nora sat up front in the pew reserved for family. Some of the people in the church he didn’t know, and he figured they were members of the congregation who had come to help with the luncheon afterward. He recognized some friends from school. Their parents probably told them they could skip school if they went to the service, and they decided that was a good deal.

Mary Beth Klinger was sitting a few rows from the back. Brad had always liked her. She was funny and serious at the same time. The few times he had tried to make a joke in her presence, she had understood it. She was a grade behind him in school, but their school was so small that everyone knew everyone.

As he looked at her, she turned and smiled at him. Maybe he should ask her out. What a thing to think about at a funeral. It sure was nice of her to come to his dad’s funeral. She had met his father only once, but as Brad recalled, his father had been decent to her.

Brad had been working on remembering the good times with his father, stockpiling them up against all the other memories. His favorite time was once when he was seven or eight, they had gone together to cut down a Christmas tree. Dad had let him take the first few swings at the trunk and then had praised him for the job he had done, cutting a deep notch into the tree. They had dragged the tree back over the snow-covered land to the truck and hoisted it up into the back. On the ride home, his father had whistled a Christmas carol. Snow had sifted down out of the sky. Brad had looked out the window and felt warm inside.

More people were filling the church. Brad was glad. He would have felt embarrassed if no one had come to mourn his father’s passing. He knew many of these people were coming to offer their support to him and his sisters. Pit Snyder, the mayor of Little Rock, was there. He was sitting in the very back row. Mrs. Gunderson had come, and she had marched right up front and sat behind Jenny and Nora. She was patting Jenny on the shoulder right now.

Then that woman deputy was here, in uniform, sitting with another deputy, the one who had asked him questions. What the hell were they doing here? It seemed like an insult to have the police at his dad’s funeral, but maybe that was part of their job.

Then Brad saw Lola walk down the aisle. She aimed herself at the front row and pushed Jenny and Nora over. Dressed all in black, she had pulled her hair back so it didn’t look so messy. Actually, black suited her. It made her look more elegant than she usually did. But her face was a mess. Mascara-streaked cheeks. One more production by Lola. Maybe now they’d be through with her.

She had come out to the farm yesterday and asked Brad if he needed help going through his dad’s stuff. He had told her no. He wasn’t ready to even go into his father’s room. But she had seemed to need something, a memento. So finally he told her she could go in and take something to remember his father by. He had stood in the doorway and watched her. He didn’t trust her much. She had gone through the closet and, after digging around, finally pulled out an old flannel shirt and clutched it to her chest.

After hugging Nora and crying for a while in the middle of the kitchen, she had finally left. He hoped she never came back.

The church was more than half full. The organ started playing, and the pastor came foward and started the service with a hymn, “Asleep in Jesus.”

Brad walked to the front and slid in next to Mrs. Gunderson. Lola was taking up enough room in the front row. Mrs. Gunderson reached over and squeezed his hand, then let go. He had never had her as a teacher, but she had always been nice to him. She seemed to know how to give a person room to breathe.

Brad couldn’t focus on what the pastor was saying. It had always been like that for him when he went to church. As soon as the pastor started talking, his thoughts flew out the window. It was something about the singsong sound of the pastor’s voice. They never talked like regular people; they always had an odd cadence.

After the next hymn, the pastor motioned Brad to come forward.

Brad stood up in the pew and walked toward the pulpit. He unfolded the paper he had kept in his hand and smoothed it out. He looked at the words he had written and read them out loud in a clear, strong voice. He didn’t have much to say, but he could let everybody hear it.

“My father raised us kids the best he could. We always had food on the table and clothes on our back. He loved farming and he wasn’t bad at it. Once he won a blue ribbon at the county fair for his feed corn. As the Bible says, ‘Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord, your God, has commanded you, that you might have a long life and prosperity in the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you.'” For a moment, standing there, Brad remembered the next commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He took a deep breath and looked out at the faces of all the people in the church, watching him as if he were about to announce something really important. “That is all I have to say.”

After the funeral, the pastor invited everyone to join them for a light luncheon in the basement. Billy and Claire had agreed that it was worth sticking around to see if anyone had anything to tell them, so they had walked down the linoleum-covered stairs into the basement with the crowd.

Claire looked over the food spread out on two long folding tables. Every form of hot dish known to mankind, and it all looked good to her: tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese, bean dishes, spaghetti, green beans with potato chips crumbled over the top, meatballs and scalloped potatoes. She had only had coffee for breakfast.

Billy nudged her. “I could go for some grub. How about you?”

Claire turned to him and nodded. “Someone’s got to eat it. The church ladies have outdone themselves.”

They both walked over to the end of the line. Within minutes they were up to the table, had picked up plates and loaded them up. Billy found them a place to sit at another long table, and after setting her plate down, Claire went and got them both cups of coffee.

After they’d been eating for a moment, Pit Snyder walked up to the table and asked if he could join them. He pulled out a folding chair and sat down in it carefully, as if he were afraid it might break under him. Claire was surprised by how little food he had on his plate: carrot and celery sticks, an unbuttered roll, and some green beans.

“Not enough hot dish on your plate,” she told him.

“Hey, I’m on a diet. I don’t like it, but my wife has threatened awful things if I don’t lose a few pounds. If I even look at anything with fat in it, I gain weight.”

He bit into a carrot stick while watching them eat their hot dishes. After gnawing it down to nothing, he said, “I heard you took Lundgren into custody.”

“Yes, we brought him in last night.”

“Isn’t that a little premature?”

Claire was surprised by his comment. “Actually not at all. Most murder cases that are solved are closed within the first few days. So we’re right on schedule if we’re going to get this one figured out.”

“You think he did it?”

“Wouldn’t have gone in with a search warrant if I didn’t think it was a possibility. Forensics will let us know in the next day or two.”

“What does he say?”

“Not much. Says he didn’t do it.” Claire looked over at Snyder, nibbling on a roll with no butter on it. “What do you think?”

Snyder threw the roll down on his plate and shoved it away. “I wouldn’t pick Leonard Lundgren for a stabber. He might sock someone and give them a concussion by accident, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who would knife someone to death. This has a premeditated feel to it, don’t you think?”

“You’ve been giving this a lot of thought, haven’t you?” Claire asked.

“It’s my town. I’ve been mayor here for over ten years. What I’d like more than anything else is to find out that someone who came into town from out of the county took a dislike to Jed and stabbed him. I’d like this thing to be pinned on someone I’ve never heard of.”

Billy shook his head. “Not likely, Pit. I didn’t see too many strange faces at the dance. Mainly the local yokels.”

“Yeah, you got that right.” Snyder sighed, then out of the blue said, “It’ll be four years this next week since the Spitzler kids’ mother died. She died on the thirty-first of the month.”

Rainey Spitzler. She kept coming up in this case. Claire wasn’t surprised to learn the deaths had happened so close to the same date, years apart. Somehow the two deaths seemed tied together. This woman’s death was certainly haunting her.

“How do you happen to remember that?” Claire asked, pushing her plate back. She hadn’t quite finished, but she no longer believed in the clean plate club, figuring it was partly responsible for all the overweight midwestern folks.

“I was on the ambulance crew.”

Claire thought back to what Dr. Lord had told her. “But I heard that they hadn’t called for an ambulance. I was told that Jed just piled her in his truck and drove her in to the hospital himself.”

“Yeah, the stupid bastard did. Sorry to speak poorly of the dead, but I don’t know what he was thinking. Sometimes I’ve wondered if he didn’t call the ambulance because he knew I was part of the team. Be just like him. But I went out to the farm later that day.”

“Why?”

Snyder didn’t answer at first. His eyes were turned inward, as if he were seeing the accident scene all over again. “Dr. Lord called me. He wanted me to go out and retrieve what was left of her hands from the sorghum press.”

Long tables in dark basements with deep bowls of food were not easy for Mrs. Gunderson to make out. She stood at the end of the table, held her plate in one hand, and decided there was only one way to get what she wanted, as hard as it was for her to do sometimes, and that was ask for it.

“Excuse me, Nora.” Mrs. Gunderson looked down at the young girl next to her elbow. “Have you eaten already?”

“Yes, ma’am, I have.”

“My, what nice manners you have.”

“Thank you. My mom taught me.”

“She was a real nice lady, your mom.”

“You knew her?”

“Oh, yes. I knew her well, and I was very fond of her.” Mrs. Gunderson touched Nora on the shoulder. “I have a favor to ask of you.”