Prairie Gothic (18 page)

Hornbaker spun his wheels, forward and backward, and never moved an inch. She watched him kick open his door and go plowing through the drifts in Veteran's Memorial Park, headed in the general direction of Bertha's. He hadn't even paused to take his coat. It was eerie.

Mrs. Kraus didn't believe in ghosts, though if any place in Benteen County was haunted, this should be it. Pretty much all the evil in the county passed through here. And there were those two accused murderers who'd committed suicide by hanging themselves back in their cells about a century ago. The noises the old building made in the wind suddenly sounded more ominous. She relocked the door.

A shadow seemed to flit by the windows. Just a low cloud, she reassured herself. A distant rafter—surely it was only a rafter—moaned. Boards creaked. It sounded like footsteps, like someone coming across the foyer from the entrance to the jail. She backed up against her desk and watched the door, expecting the knob to begin to turn. A disembodied voice whispered her name behind her.

After Mrs. Kraus came down from the ceiling—where she was sure you could find the marks her fingernails had made as she sought to suspend herself there in sheer, unmitigated terror—she realized it had only been the radio. She had trouble finding the breath with which to answer it.

***

“Mrs. Kraus?” the sheriff asked again.

“Yes sir.” It was hard to hear her over the wind and the efforts of the Caddy's defroster to keep the windshield clear.

“We found the cruiser. It's nearly buried in snow, but we dug down to one of the back doors and confirmed that no one came back to it. No people, no messages. Anything at your end?”

“Power's off. Supervisor Hornbaker…came in.” Her voice sounded breathless, like she'd just run a hard 10K. “Everybody's gone. Even Hornbaker. Sheriff, he…seemed to know… about the swastika.”

“How could he? And what makes you think so?”

“He was being a know-it-all.” She was getting her breath back, or maybe she'd just been having trouble with her radio. “Said something about there being no way to identify the baby. I had to open my big trap. I told him there was a mark, a symbol. He turned seven shades of pale and said ‘A swastika,' and then he ran out of here like the devil himself was nipping at his heels. Didn't even stop for his coat.”

Hornbakers kept popping up to cause him trouble, the sheriff thought. But how could the supervisor know what had been on the infant's forehead? Was there some sort of neo-Nazi gang operating in Benteen County? Could bumbling Zeke Hornbaker be a member of a white supremacist group trafficking in deceased infants? Not possible, the sheriff told himself.

“Where'd he go?”

“Last I saw, he was on foot and crossing the park toward Bertha's.”

The sheriff exchanged puzzled frowns with his companions in the Cadillac. No one offered any opinions.

“Mrs. Kraus. You got a clue what this is about?”

“Nary a one, Sheriff.”

“Anybody?” The sheriff offered Judy and Wynn the elder a chance to contribute to the conversation. They were too busy shivering, recovering from the chilling effort of checking the cruiser.

“OK. We're on our way to Mad Dog's. We'll call from there.”

“Or sooner if you like. It's frustrating, sitting here in the cold and dark, all alone, not knowing what's going on.”

The sheriff understood. It was every bit as frustrating from where he sat.

***

“You know what a breech birth is?” Doc asked.

Mad Dog knew, but not exactly. “Sort of.”

“The baby doesn't turn the way it's supposed to for a normal delivery. It tries to come feet or butt first. Things get all twisted up. It's no big deal anymore, if you're in a maternity ward or a good clinic. There are techniques to turn the baby, or you can just do a C-section. Problem is, nobody saw this girl during her pregnancy but me, and then just to confirm it. Nobody with any real training was there when she went into labor. They let it go on too long. By the time Becky Hornbaker got Mary here, she was exhausted from hours of contractions. I was going to do a Caesarian, but Becky wouldn't hear of it. We tried some other techniques. They worked, much to my surprise. I got the baby turned and coming the right way, only it was a slow delivery because Mary didn't have it in her to push very hard. When we finally got the baby's head out, the umbilical cord was twisted around its neck. Blood wasn't flowing through the cord the way it's supposed to.”

Mad Dog nodded, sympathetically. “So that's why it was born dead.”

“No. The baby was alive. There was a pulse.”

“But you said…”

“I told you, Mad Dog. I lied. I delivered that baby in a hurry then. All I needed to do was clear its windpipe, get it breathing on its own. Only this was a baby Simon Hornbaker persuaded me should never have been born. Rape and incest. And the child's mother is retarded. This baby had all kinds of chances for birth defects and brain damage. I looked at this infant and saw what I wanted to see. Head shape was wrong. Color wasn't good. It had been without proper oxygen flow for a while. Too long, maybe. I played God. Oh, it was stillborn, but only because I didn't prevent that.”

“No!” Mad Dog couldn't imagine Doc doing that. It was like finding out Santa brought cancer instead of toys.

“What I did was worse than an abortion,” Doc confessed. Mad Dog wasn't qualified to hear one, though he was a priest of sorts, and probably the only one in Benteen County to whom Doc would tell all this. “I pulled a Kevorkian. Some might call it a mercy killing, a kindness, considering all that child had going against him, but I'm not sure I can go hide there. Mad Dog, I murdered that child.”

***

Wynn Some, Lose Some didn't exactly leap from the roof. He hadn't been all that keen on leaving the sleeping porch. It had a wall that stood about three feet above its floor. If you hunkered down it kept you out of the worst of the storm's fury. Only the girls shamed him into leaving. They weren't going to let Becky and the Hornbakers cage them out here where they'd slowly freeze to death. They punched a hole in the screen on the west side, then hopped across and tested the roof above the wrap-around exterior porch. It held, and one of them came back to argue that they could crawl under a window or two and pick a place to get down where they wouldn't be easy to see from inside. She made him feel like a wimp for not leading the escape effort. Besides, he didn't want to stay behind alone.

The gap the Heathers hopped with ease looked like an immense chasm from the edge of the porch.

“Don't look down,” One hollered, so he did. It was hard to believe he was only on the second story. The ground at the edge of the house looked far enough below to kill the man unlucky enough to plunge to its depths. It took him several tries to work up his nerve. He got one hand on the side of the house to help pull, used the other to push off from one of the uprights that supported the porch roof, then kicked off with every ounce of his strength.

It was more than enough. He landed two feet beyond the edge he'd been concerned with. He also landed closer to the downhill edge, where the roof drained into a series of gutters that fed the shrubbery below. And, he landed on his heels. Normally, they would have bit into the shingles and he would have stopped abruptly, maybe even stumbled back into the edge of the house behind him. Today did not qualify for normally. It was a snow-slick slope and he hit it with force and velocity. His feet went out from under him, his arms windmilled past a pair of girls frantically trying to grab him, and he did a backward somersault while proceeding inexorably toward the brink. He got back onto his hands and knees in time to see it coming and pushed off hard enough to delay the inevitable. If ever a man positioned himself with the maximum potential to fly as he launched into the abyss, it was Wynn. The deputy wasn't wearing a cape and tights with a scarlet S emblazoned on his chest. Ultimately, he flew about as well as the laws of physics predicted.

He glanced off a branch on the way down. That helped him straighten out and get his feet under him for a landing that was a lot softer than it should have been because the snow was beginning to drift over the shrub where he hit. Judges at some extreme sporting event would have given him high scores, especially if they, like the Hornbakers, were unable to hear over the storm as his terrified scream trailed him to the ground.

The Heathers dropped on either side of him.

“You OK?” One asked.

“'Cause we'd better run!” Two explained.

Wynn was fine, and scared enough to turn in a dash time that would have impressed an NFL scout. He left the girls behind, but not the blizzard.

***

Except for where it was drifting behind the evergreens, the pasture hadn't accumulated much snow. The winter-stunted grass wouldn't hold more. The wind took the rest and went searching for a snow bank to invest in that might keep it safely deposited until spring.

The sheriff had lived at or regularly visited Mad Dog's place all his life. He knew it in all its aspects, even smudged by a driving snowstorm. He'd noticed the drift that didn't belong in his brother's pasture. They were missing three people, and the drift's size was too close to human for him to ignore, even though the chairman had told him what was there. He left the chairman and Judy in the car, just short of Mad Dog's driveway, while he went to check. He'd expected an argument from Judy. He'd thought he might have to take her along, only the lump in the pasture was so obviously not alive that she'd stayed behind, uncharacteristically silent and obedient.

The snowdrift wasn't human. It had hooves, and, when he brushed at it, revealed a great rusty stain where blood had gushed, thickened, then frozen, from the bullet wound that had killed the last buffalo in Benteen County.

“It's Buffalo Bob,” the sheriff told the radio.

“Who would kill Mad Dog's hand-raised pet?” The walkie-talkie was hard to hear over the wind. He couldn't tell, though he thought the comment came from Mrs. Kraus. He'd used the radio to alert the office to this extra-vehicular activity.

“Mr. Chairman,” the sheriff continued. “Get your gun out and ready. Let Judy drive so your hands are free. We know this didn't happen recently. All the same, somebody with a high-powered rifle could be waiting up at the house. I'll circle around to the barn, come on the house from the back while you drive in from the front. I'll call you again when I'm in position.”

“Understood,” the chairman answered.

The sheriff let the wind shove him toward the barn. Mad Dog's house was hardly visible behind a screen of snow-capped lilacs and forsythia.

The drifts near the barn were deep enough to cause problems. The sheriff finally reached its back door by circling some and wading through others. He was breathing as hard as if he'd finished his usual four-mile run when he slid one side open and stepped into the relative stillness of the barn's dark interior.

It wasn't any warmer inside, except for wind chill. Temperatures far below freezing weren't ideal for olfactory impressions, but the sheriff recognized the coppery scent the moment he closed the door. Mad Dog had turned the stalls along the south wall into pens for his rescue wolves. Someone else had turned them into an abattoir. It was hard to take, even though he had known what to expect.

The sheriff knew several ranchers who feared those wolves enough to react this violently if their stock had been slaughtered by loose dogs or coyotes. He couldn't imagine even one of them taking Mad Dog's buffalo too. This had a taste of personal vengeance to it, or maybe madness.

The sheriff made his way to the other end of the barn. The yard behind Mad Dog's house was as empty of life, but less violently so. No bodies, living or dead. No vehicles. No indication anyone was home.

“I'm going in,” he told the radio. “You too, but come ready.”

Judy came like one of those stunt car drivers at the fair, sliding the Cadillac to a stop by the walk to Mad Dog's front door so the bulk of the vehicle was between the house and Chairman Wynn as he jumped out and leveled his pistol across the hood. It was a more impressive approach than the sheriff was accustomed to getting out of his deputies, but unnecessary.

The house was as empty as it looked, and it, too, was a victim of the sick violence that had visited Mad Dog's barn and pasture. Most of the windows were broken. The front door had been kicked to splinters. Furniture was overturned, appliances broken, bookcases toppled. Books had been hurled about as if they could feel the same emotions they might impart. It didn't make sense. Neither did the frozen red swastika someone had drawn on the kitchen floor. At least it wasn't blood, just the contents of a broken ketchup bottle.

***

“I had a bison calf,” Mad Dog said. “There was something wrong with it. Back legs weren't right. It couldn't stand and it bawled all the time. I knew better, but I tried to nurse it, keep it alive. Finally, I had to do what I should have done at the start.”

Doc Jones rolled his eyes. “You trying to equate putting down a calf with murdering a child? Jesus, Mad Dog! I'm not asking you for absolution. I know what I did and I'm past trying to hide or deny it. I'm ready to face up to it.”

Mad Dog leaned down and put his face right in Doc's. It shut him up. “Enough
mea culpas
, already. You aren't listening to me. What I figured out, finally, was that calf's spirit wasn't right. It wasn't really a buffalo. Maybe it got crossbred with some beef cattle. Anyway, what I mercy killed never had the chance to be a buffalo. That's what happened with you, too, isn't it? You did an autopsy on that baby. What did you find? Was it normal?”

“Normal is a broad term…” Doc tried to back away but Mad Dog pinned him against the wall.

“Was it a person who could have lived?”