Poison Heart (13 page)

Jim had to do something or the animal would die. If he could put out the fire on the beam before the roof came down, he could get the elk out.

Jim knew there was a hose by the water trough. He ran and pulled it to the door. The smoke was starting to pour out of the barn, and he worried that the elk would be overcome by smoke.

He turned the faucet on high and aimed the stream of water at the blaze. It fell short. He covered part of the nozzle with his hand and forced the pressure up. He aimed the water higher and it started hitting the beam.

The elk was going crazy, charging and pawing at the back of the barn. Jim thought Harvey would hurt himself trying to tear a hole in the barn. Jim kept dousing the beam. The roar of the fire was getting louder. He was afraid more of the roof would cave in.

The fire on the beam subsided. Jim dropped the hose. He covered the bottom half of his face with his arm and ran into the barn. He got to the other side of the beam, and the elk came running up to him. He ducked behind the animal, and Harvey jumped away from him and bolted out of the barn.

Jim followed, but he tripped on the beam and went sprawling. As he fell, he tried to roll, but his boot was stuck. His leg twisted under him. He screamed in pain. Flat on the straw, he knew he had to get out of the barn. It wasn’t going to hold together much longer. He started to crawl.

The fire sounded like a tornado. The suck of the flames pulled the air out of his lungs and into the towering blaze above. The heat pushed him down. The pain from his leg made movement almost impossible. He was afraid he wouldn’t get out. He couldn’t breathe. He was almost to the door when he heard the barn coming down behind him.

CHAPTER 15

Rain fell in the very early morning. Claire heard it tapping at the window before she crawled out of bed, thinking it would make everything a little harder to do today. But they needed the rain. It had been a dry late summer, and some good rains before the ground froze would help all the plants survive the winter.

Funny how she thought of those things now. When she’d been living in the city, it had never occurred to her to worry about the plants.

The drive to work was long, with waves of rain slapping the car as she made her way up to Durand and the Pepin County sheriff’s department. Checking the level of the sloughs along the road, she figured a couple inches of rain had fallen. She planned on having an office day, catching up on her paperwork.

As soon as she entered the department, however, the sheriff called her into his office and told her she would be working on something else that day.

“I just got off the phone with Reiner. He’s fuming.”

“What now?” she asked. She sat down. She could tell the conversation would not be quick.

He said sarcastically, “Your lines of communication are down? Usually I assume you know all that’s gone on in the county before you walk in the door.”

She ignored his tone. “What happened?”

“Reiner’s barn burned down last night.”

This announcement took Claire by surprise. She’d been uneasy about what Patty Jo Tilde might do next, but she hadn’t thought it would be so dramatic or so quick. “You’re kidding. Anyone hurt?”

“His caretaker just about got asphyxiated. Ended up in the hospital with a concussion, a broken leg, and messed-up lungs. I want you to go talk to him. Then run out to take a look at that barn. What’s left of it.”

“Do they know what happened?”

“Arson suspected.”

“Is Reiner there?”

“He will be.” The sheriff looked down and shuffled some papers around. “He says he’s calling in help.”

Claire didn’t mind help. Especially with an arson. But she knew it made the sheriff uneasy. “Fine by me.”

“A Dr. Wegman.”

“Barney? Great.”

“You know this guy?”

“He’s the arson expert. Has his own business. I worked with him quite a bit in the Cities. He’s a character. He travels around the country in a Citroën.”

“A what?”

“French car. Low-slung body, big headlights. Looks like a bug. One cool feature is that you can lower the car onto its wheels, making it virtually impossible to steal. The thing is forever breaking down, but he keeps it running.”

“Never heard of such a car.”

“Don’t think I’ve seen one in Pepin County since I moved here.”

“You foreigners bring in the darnedest things.”

Claire sat still for a moment, thinking. “That Tilde woman. The widow.”

The sheriff nodded. “Two fires in one week is too much of a coincidence for me.”

Jim Bartlett’s head was tilted back on a crisp white pillow and his hand rested on his forehead. His leg, looking like a white sausage, lay on the hospital bed. Gauze frosted his cheek. He was puffing air through his cheeks the way people do when they’re doped up on painkillers. Claire hated to wake him. He looked like he had had a rough time.

She sat in the chair in his room and closed her eyes for a moment, tired of this rainy day and what lay ahead of her. When she opened them, he was staring at her.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, surprised.

“Checking on you,” she said.

He had raised his head to talk to her and now lowered it back to the pillow, wincing as he did. He closed his eyes, then popped them open as he said, “I hope you don’t think I was responsible for that fire.”

“Not particularly.” Claire waited a moment, then asked, “Should I?”

“Can’t a guy say anything to a cop without incriminating himself?”

Claire ignored his whine and asked, “Who do you think set the fire? And why are you so sure it was set?”

“I know that barn inside and out.” He took a long breath and shook himself, as if he were still seeing something frightening. Then he continued, “It was built a year ago. The wiring is perfect. There’s nothing left lying around that could catch on fire. I don’t smoke when I’m around the barn. At least I try not to. It happened in the middle of the night. I didn’t hear anything, but I can sleep pretty heavy.”

“All right.”

“Reiner is going to be really pissed about this, probably blame me. I want to keep my job.”

“I don’t blame you. Anyone come by the barn in the last few days?”

“Your daughter.”

“I think we can safely count her out.”

“She’s a smart kid.”

“Thanks.”

“She brought some boy with her to see the elk.”

“She did?” Claire was annoyed at herself for letting those words pop out of her mouth. How would she look as a cop when she didn’t even know what her daughter was up to?

“Maybe he came back to the barn after she left,” Jim suggested. “Boys like to play with fire.”

“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll ask her about him. Find out who he was. Anything else you can think of?”

“I don’t know if you can tell this, but whoever started it did it on the side toward the road. When I came out of the house, the fire was only on the outside. The elk was in the barn.”

“He was in the barn?”

“He got out. I got him out.”

“Thank God.”

“Almost got killed doing it.”

“I’ll find out who set this fire. You can tell them how you feel.”

“That’d be good.” His hand rose to his forehead again. His eyes closed. “Morphine and I don’t get along. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Claire stood. This was her cue to leave. “I’ll get the nurse,” she said.

Standing in the shelter of the overhang outside her school, Meg watched her classmates climb into school buses for the ride home. She felt a sense of relief. About once a week either her mom or Rich picked her up after school, and she loved it. Her bus ride home took nearly an hour. She was the last kid on the route, and while she had learned to entertain herself, by the end it was just pure boring.

Ted walked by and then turned back and gave her a weird stare. “What’re you doing?”

Ever since the elk, he had been mean to her. She didn’t quite understand it, but she figured he was mad because she had seen him be a chicken. For girls it wasn’t such a big deal. Obviously it was for Ted.

“Waiting for my mom.”

“I heard your elk might have got cooked last night.”

Meg felt a sinking in her stomach. “What?”

“Didn’t you know? That barn burned down last night. The one the elk was in.”

“No way.”

“I’m telling you, it did. My dad told me this morning. He went up and looked at the place. He said it was totally gone. To the ground.”

“But Harvey?” Meg could feel herself on the edge of tears.

“Far as I know, he’s okay. But maybe he went down with the barn.” Ted shrugged. “They had a whole herd of elk. One wouldn’t matter much.”

Meg bristled. “You don’t know anything. Just because you were scared of him. He’s worth about a million dollars. They told me. There will never be another elk like him. The best elk in the world.”

Ted laughed. “You sound like that elk is your best friend.”

“Maybe he is.” Meg saw the squad car pull up with her mother driving. “I’ll find out right now.”

She ran through the rain to where her mother had parked, and slipped into the car. “Mom, what happened to Harvey?”

“I should have known you would hear. He’s fine. Completely fine. The caretaker got him out of the barn in time.”

Meg burst into tears. She tried to hold them back, but it did no good. They pushed too hard. “I can’t stand it. Why Harvey? Why would anyone want to hurt Harvey? You said he would be safe. You promised. But he’s not.”

Her mom reached over to hug Meg, but Meg shrugged her off. She was mad at the whole world.

“Meg, settle down. He’s fine. I’m going to find out who did this.” Her mom paused, then asked, “Meg, who did you take to see Harvey?”

How had she found out about that? Not that she had done anything wrong; she just didn’t want to talk about Ted with her mother. “Oh, just this kid from school. He lives right by the farm, so I told him about Harvey and he wanted to come.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ted.”

“He’s a nice kid?”

“Of course, Mom. What d’you think? I hang out with losers?”

Meg slouched in the corner of the squad car and didn’t bother to put her seat belt on. They were only going six blocks. Over to see Beatrice. She had seen her once since her stroke, and the change in the older woman had shaken her. What Meg had always liked about Beatrice was that she said what she thought. But she seemed to have gotten buried under a pile of vagueness. She wasn’t quick anymore. She was slow and tired. Meg felt sorry for her but wasn’t anxious to spend much time with her.

Her mom kept talking, telling her what she knew about the fire. Meg didn’t really listen to her. She let the words roll over her like a wave. She felt like everything good was going away: Beatrice’s spark, her friendship with Ted. And now Harvey was being threatened again.

“How was school?” her mother asked.

Meg heard this question every day. She usually tried her best to give Rich or her mom some kind of answer to it, but there really wasn’t much difference day to day. This time Meg decided she’d try a new tack—tell the truth. “Kinda crappy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Boring. Everybody is so slow. I finished the whole book we’re working on, and we have to keep going back.”

“You’ll learn it even better that way.”

Meg gave her mom a disgusted look. “You don’t need to do that. Always looking at the bright side of things. Sometimes things are just crap.”

Her mother pulled the car over to the side of the road. They weren’t even to the nursing home yet. She turned and looked at Meg. “I’m sorry you had a bad day. Mine’s been kind of crappy too. Days like that do happen. I hate to think of them happening to you, and so maybe I try to pretend they don’t.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad.”

“Maybe it will get better. Let’s go see Beatrice. See if we can cheer her up.”

When they got to the home, they found Beatrice sitting in a chair near the window, working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up at them as if they were strangers. Then, when she recognized them, a half smile snuck onto her face.

“How are you?” she asked, looking at Meg.

Meg decided to stick to the truth. “Crappy.”

Beatrice looked up at Claire to see what she had to say.

“Crappy,” her mom said. “How about you?”

“Really crappy,” Beatrice croaked. Meg thought a glimpse of the old Beatrice seemed to come through at that moment.

They pulled up chairs and helped Beatrice work the crossword puzzle. She still was smarter than almost anyone Meg knew when it came to words. They didn’t stay too long. Her mother said she had more work to do before the day was over. When they were leaving, Meg asked Beatrice if she liked jigsaw puzzles.

“I don’t know. Haven’t done one in years.”

“How about I bring one over next week?”

“We could try.”

Meg knew which one she would bring. Rich had given her one for her birthday that was all historical American figures, such as George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. When you put it all together, it made a picture of the American flag. As they were turning to go out of Beatrice’s room, the woman whose barn had burned down walked by. Meg wondered what she was doing here. She marched by as if she were on a mission, her fake blond hair as stiff as a helmet.

“Mom, did you see her?”

“Yeah,” her mother said, and when they reached the desk, they stopped and her mom asked the nurse about the woman. “Patty Jo Tilde? Why is she here?”

“Oh, she’s been coming in ever since Walter’s wife was here. Even though Walter died, she still comes to play bingo with everyone.”

Her mom nodded, and they walked out the door. When they got into the car, Meg told her mom what had happened after she had gone to see Harvey. “I forgot to mention it, but I saw that woman driving around in her car. She asked me where the elk farm was.”

Claire wanted to walk back in and spin Patty Jo around, demanding what she was up to. But she didn’t want to make a scene at Beatrice’s new place of residence. When she had the evidence she needed, she would take on Patty Jo.

CHAPTER 16

What Claire saw first as she drove up to Reiner’s place was the Citroën parked in the shade with the trunk wide open. The car was a 1970 model painted a silver blue that enhanced its buglike qualities. The license plate read
BURNOUT
.

The rubble from the burned-down barn was black and still smoldering. Claire saw Barney Wegman standing knee-deep in the charred remains. He was wearing his usual uniform: blue jeans, knee-high rubber boots, a turtleneck shirt, and a fisherman’s vest covered with pockets. He would have equipment stuffed in every pocket.

When Claire drove up he turned and saluted her. She was glad to see him, a solid, organized man in the midst of chaos.

“Hey, Doc. It’s been a long time,” Claire said as she approached the edge of the scorched earth. Luckily they had had that rain in the early morning. Even more luckily, it had stopped about an hour ago.

He strode up to her and then, surprising her, swooped her into a hug. “Claire, living in the country suits you. Course, the last time I saw you was a bad time for you.”

Claire was a little flustered from the hug. She remembered the last time he had seen her. He had come to her husband’s funeral, an act of kindness from a man who didn’t give them out easily.

“That was a rough period. But I’ve worked through it and I like my life down here.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in uniform.”

“Comes with working for the sheriff. I don’t mind it. Don’t have to decide what to wear in the morning.” She looked back at his car. “You got here quick. That old crate didn’t break down on you?”

“Hey, I found a new mechanic. Does this guy know his stuff! He swears he’s going to keep that car running another twenty years.”

Claire looked around. She had wondered if Reiner would be at the scene. “How’d Reiner get you out here so quick?”

Wegman looked back at Reiner’s house. “He caught me at a good time. Plus, I know he’s good for it.”

Claire laughed. “You got that right.”

“He drove down late last night and left this morning. He was plenty mad when he talked to me.”

Claire looked around at the remains of the barn. “Find anything yet?”

“Give me a few minutes. What do you know? Have you talked to the caretaker about how it started? He was the first witness, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, I’ve been to the hospital. According to him, it started on the side toward the road. He suspects arson.”

“What about him?”

“I don’t think so. That’s my take. He’s got a lot to lose. He likes his job, and the house comes with it. He made it pretty clear to me that he’d like us to find out who did it. If it was him, I’d expect him to be pushing the idea that it was an accident of some sort.”

Claire offered to help, but Dr. Wegman told her to stay out of the mess, insisting that she shouldn’t get her uniform dirty. “I’d rather not deal with any more feet in here than I have to.”

Claire leaned on the squad car and watched Dr. Wegman work. He used a small brush to gently clean off pieces of metal sticking out of the ashes. He poked around in the burned shards and sifted through the charred wood. Occasionally he’d stick something in a small bag and bring it over by her for safekeeping.

At first she wasn’t sure what he was using to dig through the rubble. Then she saw it was a plastic spatula. “You look like a cook.”

He stood up and grinned. “With my fearless spatula? This thing is my favorite tool. With its soft edge, it doesn’t abrade anything.”

Bringing over one final bag, Doc stood next to her and surveyed the pile of samples. “That’ll get me going. See what I find in this first round of samples.” He looked up at the sky. “Doesn’t look like it will rain tonight. Have you heard the forecast?”

“Not supposed to.”

He turned to her and looked her over with much the same eye he had used to survey the scene. “What do you know?”

“About what?”

“Life in general. This fire in particular.”

“In general life is quite good, but I’d like to know what’s going on here. I think we might have an arsonist at work. This is the second fire we’ve had in this area in the past couple of days.”

He raised his eyebrows and waited for her to go on.

“The first one was at a barn about three miles from here.” Claire told him what happened at the Tilde farm. Then she told him about Patty Jo Tilde and how she had acted after the fire.

“So you think this little old lady did it?”

“I would not call her that, especially not to her face. She’s got the tenacity of a rat terrier. When she gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go. I think she’s pissed at Reiner because he backed out of a deal with her.”

“Could I take a look at the other barn?”

“This gets kinda tricky. Patty Jo and I don’t get along, but I’ll ask her. I suppose I could try to get a court order, but I don’t know on what grounds. The insurance company has determined the fire was an accident.”

Claire wanted to go home. Her workday was done. It was past five o’clock. Rich would be making dinner, Meg doing her homework. She had already gone home once today, to drop Meg off on her way to the Reiner estate. But she decided to tackle Patty Jo now. Dr. Wegman had said he’d be back to take another look at the Reiner barn tomorrow. If she could get permission to take him over to look at the remnants of Patty Jo’s barn, it would be a more efficient use of his time.

Much as she didn’t want to, she turned her squad car up the bluff instead of heading straight home. The road wound up through the trees and came out on top surrounded by a cow pasture. Off across the field, she could see the cows were heading home. They knew what time it was.

When Claire drove up to Patty Jo’s house, she saw her car was sitting out front. So she assumed Patty Jo was at home.

Claire knocked on the door and waited. Nothing.

She stepped back from the house and surveyed its front. No sign of any movement. No curtain pulled back. No lights on. No sound at all coming from the house. Where was Patty Jo? Claire didn’t see her as the kind of woman that went for a stroll in the late afternoon.

She might be hanging up clothes in the backyard. Claire decided to look. She walked around the house and thought she had come up empty until she turned and noticed Patty Jo sitting on the back steps, smoking.

Patty Jo hadn’t seen her yet, didn’t seem to know Claire was there. She was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and looked younger than she usually did when she was dressed up. She was smoking the way Claire remembered people smoking before the habit had gotten such a bad name. Patty Jo would inhale, sit for a moment or two, then slowly let the smoke out in a lovely white stream that the wind blew away.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Claire remarked.

Patty Jo didn’t jump. She didn’t even turn her head to look at Claire. Maybe she had known she was there after all.

She said, “I don’t anymore. I gave it up. Walter didn’t like it. Now, I come outside once a month to smoke one cigarette. It was the only way I could quit.” She stubbed out her cigarette, rubbing it against the cement of the back steps. Then she turned and looked at Claire. “What’re you doing back here?”

No niceties from this woman. Claire decided to get right to the point. “I don’t know if you heard, but there was another barn burned down last night. The Reiners’. The fire investigator who’s looking at the scene would like to come over and examine your barn. It might be the work of the same person.”

Patty Jo looked as though she had taken a big bite of a lemon. “I don’t think so. This fire was an accident.”

Claire noticed what Patty Jo hadn’t said: no questions about how the Reiners’ barn had burned down, no guesses as to who might have done it, no possibility that this might be a way to get to the bottom of who had destroyed her barn. What was so frustrating was that Patty Jo was doing everything to look guilty, but Claire still couldn’t get anything on her.

“This would be an enormous service to the county if you would allow us to do this. If a firebug is running around, we’d like to catch him.”

“What do I owe the county? A big nothing. All the county is doing is trying to take my farm from me.”

“That’s not true.”

Patty Jo stood up as if she was going to walk back inside the house, then apparently changed her mind. “You’re behind this. I don’t know what your interest is in all this or what Margaret has told you, but I don’t want to see you on my property again. I will call the sheriff myself and ask him to keep you away from me. Get a restraining order if I need it.”

Claire could feel her anger building. Her fingers got twitchy and her ears got warm. “It’s my job as a deputy sheriff to try to prevent crimes from happening in this county and to try to solve them when they do. That includes your barn burning down.”

“It wasn’t a crime, it was an accident. Why don’t you focus on what’s happening to me? What about Margaret persecuting me? Trying to take away the farm. Have you done anything to prevent that?” Patty Jo spit the words at her. “And I saw you at the Lakeside senior home today. Are you following me? I want you to leave me alone.”

Claire held herself back. No good would come of telling Patty Jo off. “I was visiting a friend. I’m sorry if you think I have something against you. I thought you might like to know what happened to your barn.”

Patty Jo stood on the steps, looking down at Claire, and said quietly, “I don’t care about the barn. I just want to be left alone. So please get off my property right now.”

The house felt cold, so Margaret went and fetched the afghan that her mother had crocheted. She had persuaded her mother to use only green tones, so it hadn’t ended up a hodgepodge of color. She found the afghan soothing and the fact that her mother had made it comforting. She wrapped herself in it and sat on the couch.

It was past midnight. She had slept for two hours, then woken up. This was an all-too-familiar pattern for her. In the last two years, she had gone from easily sleeping ten hours straight a night to being lucky if she could catnap for two to three hours at a time. Between having to pee and just feeling anxious, she couldn’t stay asleep for long.

Margaret tried not to let it bother her. If she got up and read for an hour or so, she could often fall back asleep for another few hours.

She picked up the book she had left next to the couch, but it looked no more interesting to her now than it had last night. What she wouldn’t give for a good book. They seemed harder and harder to find. Maybe she was just getting to be more difficult to please. Mark thought so. She opened the pages, then snapped it shut. She was tired of reading about women whose lives were falling apart. Women in jeopardy—these were women in apoplexy. Who wanted to read about her own life? Didn’t people read to escape?

She stood up and didn’t know what to do with herself. Her mind churned at this time of night. Maybe she should try to write a book about a woman who is afraid of nothing and conquers all.

Margaret looked around her house. She had a good life. Couldn’t she get that through her head? She had a husband who loved her. Sure, he tracked in mud and didn’t put the dishes away, but he brought her wildflowers when they were in bloom and did more than his fair share of the milking, claiming he liked it.

Maybe once she got through this transition phase of her life she would hit a good patch and try some new things. Get excited about life again.

If only they would get the farm. It would make all the difference in the world. She tried not to think about it, but it was hard not to fantasize.

After she’d heard about the will, she and Mark had decided to try to get the farm away from Patty Jo. They thought they might have a chance of proving that Patty Jo had unduly influenced Walter in the grief that had followed his first wife’s death. They had filed for another injunction in probate court.

She had talked to the lawyer today, and he’d come right out and said not to count on it. He’d said their case was very difficult and there wasn’t much to argue against in her father’s new will.

“But the timing . . .”

“The woman was his wife,” the lawyer reminded her.

“But they had only been married a few months.”

“I’m aware of that. I don’t know that it can matter in this case. The will was signed and witnessed.”

“She never loved him,” Margaret blurted out, and then regretted it. Why did she always have to make everything so personal?

Margaret walked to the front window. The moon was a small gleaming boat in the dark sky. The leaves hung still on the maple tree. She decided to walk out and check on the goats. Maybe counting goats instead of sheep would make her sleepy.

She folded the afghan and placed it on the couch, then grabbed her barn jacket, which hung by the back door, and slipped her feet into her rubber boots. Pulling the jacket over her flannel nightgown, she was sure she would be warm enough. The nights hadn’t started to cool off much yet. The thermometer outside the kitchen window said it was still fifty degrees out. Not bad.

She opened the door and smelled the air. The sweet smell of decay. The leaves were starting to fall. One good wind and most of them would drop. Sometimes it happened in a weekend. It would be nice to get a few days of color before they fell.

She walked around the side of the house and stared at the barn. At first she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

A candle was burning in the window of the goat barn. She stood still and wondered if Mark had taken one of the automatic candles she put in the windows for Christmas and set it up in there. As a night-light for the goats? Not likely. But what other explanation was there?

She started walking quickly toward the barn. The candle was very short. What might happen if it burned all the way down? There was a lot of hay in the barn.

The candle exploded in front of her eyes, and the whole window of the barn filled with light. Margaret wasn’t sure what had caught on fire, but she knew she had to stop it before it got out of control.

She yelled for Mark as loudly as she could but didn’t stop moving toward the barn. She had to get the animals out.