See Also Murder (17 page)

“There will be no better days for Hank, Mr. Henderson. What don't you understand about that?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Trumaine. My condolences concerning your loss. I'm sorry to have bothered you.” And with that, the young Curtis Henderson turned around, walked steadily to his green Chevrolet, got in, and drove away.

Filled with nothing but frustration, fear, and curiosity, I watched as the car disappeared down the road.

CHAPTER 18

Shep greeted me when I returned to the inside of the house. The dog knew better than to jump up on me, but he did anyway. Once he was on his hind legs, Shep stretched upward as gently as he could and put his paws on my chest with equal pressure. He stared up at me with his amber eyes, intense and unflinching. The forbidden act stopped me in my tracks, surprised me, and I started to admonish him, but I couldn't. I stepped backward until I was flush with the closed front door and let it—and Shep—hold me up. I hadn't realized that I was crying.

The dog didn't linger. The jump was like a quick hello, or an attempt to save me from falling over an unseen cliff. He dropped to the floor and sat before me, offering a nervous wag of the tail. If Shep could have spoken English, or Igbo for that matter, I'm sure he would have said, “Calm down. Stop. Take a breath. Don't do anything you'll regret. Sheep get eaten by wolves. Chickens scurry out into the road and get run over. Don't. I'm telling you just don't—stop.” But it wasn't Shep's voice. It was my own, bouncing around inside my head like a .22 bullet would; not forceful enough to break through bone, but with enough momentum to slice through the brain, doing all the damage it could before it stopped. I wasn't sure I could make everything I was thinking or feeling go away.

How could things ever be normal again?

“It's all right, Shep,” I whispered. I knew he was doing nothing more than holding me at bay, just doing what border collies were bred to do, even though I was rarely in need of herding, at least in my opinion. His timing was prescient, but that was nothing unusual. Shep thrived on the anticipation of what came next. He knew I was heading straight to Hank. He knew I needed to be stopped. So he broke the jumping rule. He saved me a second or two that I might regret for the rest of my life.

Herding was all right as long as he stopped there with his working dog behavior. Nipping wasn't allowed either, not on human ankles or any other part of the body, any more than jumping up was. I was sure that I would've had a completely different reaction if the dog had put his teeth to my skin.

I already felt like the sanctity of my home had been violated by some dark force, a killer that had possibly lured Ardith out to the first barn and left an indelible mark on the ground forever. Regardless of the weeds or flowers that grew there in the future, I would forever see a pool of blood and a sprig of mistletoe in an outstretched pale white hand.

Get ahold of yourself, Marjorie. Days'll be worse than this once winter sets in.
It was my mother's voice working in concert with Shep to calm me down. Some days that's all I had to listen to, ghosts and dogs, made-up voices inside my head.

I might have been better off if I'd taken a second job waitressing at the Ivanhoe so I could talk to real, live, human beings every once in a while, instead of taking up indexing. But it was a fit for me. I got paid to read books. I hadn't counted on the double dose of isolation sending me to the edge of sanity.

“Who was that you were talking with, Marjie?” Hank called out. His voice was raspy, the volume low, barely audible over the breeze cutting through the house. But I knew his words, could have anticipated his question just as easily as Shep had known the future of my path when I'd stalked back inside the house. Not only was I Hank's caretaker, but I was his eyes and legs, too—he was as much a creature of habit as the dog was; as much as I was.

I wiped the tears from my eyes and took the deep breath that the dog had encouraged me to. “The new county extension agent come to introduce himself,” I called out.

Silence. Long enough for me to straighten my dress and get myself together as much as I could.

I ran my hands over my windblown hair and patted it back in place. I was about to step to the right of Shep, but he knew that before I did and jumped from his sit to a stand, blocking my way again.

“Got timing like Hamish Martin,” Hank answered. He was right, of course. Hamish Martin was the local property and casualty insurance agent and drove the yellow convertible I had seen in town in front of his office. Hamish always showed up after a catastrophe of some kind or other, trying to sell you more insurance coverage than you would ever need. Hank always said he was a land shark and could smell blood, or a tornado, from a thousand miles away. I thought he was a buffoon and never allowed myself to be in a room alone with him.

I stopped and stared down at Shep. I couldn't be mad at the dog, even though I wanted to be. “He was young, just out of college,” I answered back. The force of my mood pushed my voice toward the bedroom. I did my best to hide the emotions I was battling. “I don't think he was from around here. Never seen him before.”

The clock over my desk ticked loudly and echoed throughout the house. The day had already gotten away from me. I had so much to do; I didn't know where to start.

I pushed past Shep, even though he had scrambled to block me. “Stay!” I yelled at him.

The dog's ears retracted instantly and he dropped to the floor, finally submitting to my tone and glare.

“What's the matter?” Hank said.

“Shep's underfoot, that's all.”

I was at the bedroom door in the blink of an eye. Hank was just where I left him, unmoved like always, his cloudy eyes staring upward at the ceiling. He had lost weight since the accident, and his profile had withered just like the rest of him. Some days, I hardly recognized him. All I had was a voice and the memory of a strapping man busting out the door every morning to take on the land and the weather. He might as well have been a ghost himself.

“Dog like that doesn't need to be in the house, Marjie. Just leads to problems. I told you that.”

“Somebody needs to keep an eye on you.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“Says you.” A flinch at the crest of his cheek; a remote smile from one of the few muscles that would still respond, consciously or unconsciously, to Hank's command or feeling.

I stood in the doorway, stared at Hank, and let the silence settle back inside the house. I knew we weren't alone. Duke Parsons sat guarding the drive. Gawkers still drove up and down the road, looking, I supposed, for some sign, some clue, that the worst of this storm was over. At least, I hoped that's what they were looking for. I know I was.

“He wanted to talk to you,” I said, my voice straight and direct as a new fence row.

“What about?”

“Wouldn't say but wouldn't budge either when I pushed him and told him I could deal with whatever it was he wanted to talk about.”

“You know how it is out here, Marjie.” Hank's words had some weight to them. Just enough of a push to realize what he was saying was true.

“You men have a secret language?”

“Something like that.”

“This farm's different.”

“Maybe he thinks you got enough to shoulder. He talked to Lloyd?”

“Said he did.”

Hank's eyelids fluttered easily. It was his casual nod. “Then he knows all of our old troubles along with the new. Don't suppose he has much experience at talking with someone who found a dead body on their land. Boy was most likely nervous, Marjie. I wouldn't take it personal if I was you.”

I stared at Hank, then to the open window. The curtains pushed in and out like the house was breathing. I had made the curtains not long after we had gotten married.

“You're not keeping anything from me, are you, Hank?” I tried to keep the words even, with any doubt, anger, or fear, hidden.

Hank turned his head to me fifteen degrees. It was nearly his limit of movement, and took all of the energy and focus he could muster. “Why would I do that?”

I shrugged my shoulders and didn't answer. I knew Hank could not see my reaction, not physically, anyway, but he knew me well enough to know what had just happened. Hank and Shep had a lot in common when it came to reading people, exercising anticipation.

“Burlene Standish said she heard something, Hank. I'm confused is all. Confused and concerned.”

“Heard what?”

“She didn't say.”

“I told you what happened. I didn't hear anything.”

“You're sure?”

“As sure as it's summer and there aren't enough hours in the day to get ready for winter. I heard Ardith put the phone down and walk out the door. That's it. Nothing else. You're going to trust that busybody over me? She could have heard anything—on anybody's line, not just ours. What's the matter with you, Marjie?”

It was my turn to nod. Hank was right. Burlene could have heard anything. There might have been somebody else with an open receiver. It happened all of the time. “I'm tired, Hank. Just tired and numb. It's a lot to take in.”

“New York didn't help much.”

“You heard that, too?”

“Of course I did.” Hank paused, straightened his head back, so his blank eyes stared upward to the ceiling. “You don't have to do that work, Marjie. It'll all pan out without you burnin' the candle at both ends. Take a day or two. Do the things you need to. Make them wait for once, make them see your life has value to it, too.”

“I wish I could, Hank. I wish I could.”

CHAPTER 19

I stared at the pile of page proofs on my desk and came to the slow realization that I had more time than I thought I did. What had seemed like a burden, more work, more pressure from Richard Rothstein, was actually a small gift if I chose to see it that way.

In all of the comings and goings of the last two days, in all of the sadness, confusion, and terror, it hadn't dawned on me that my indexing work had ground to a complete stop. The pagination had changed, and it would be a day before the Air Mail box would arrive from New York with a set of new page proofs inside. It would be fruitless to move on, to mine the pages on my desk for keywords and concepts and commit them to an index card in wait of compilation. I
could
go ahead and do that, type up the entries anyway, but then I would have to go back and insert the correct page numbers one index card at a time. It seemed like planting the same field twice to me.

I had the break that I desperately needed, but I knew it would come with a cost. The delay would eat into the deadline that was forbidden to move, and I would have to burn the midnight oil to make up the time lost once the pages showed up on my doorstep.

I sighed at the thought. Honestly, I was in no frame of mind to direct readers to the cause and religion of casual decapitation. Under normal circumstances, I would have been thrilled for the opportunity to learn something so exotic, something I never would have encountered if it wasn't for the job I had taken on. When it came to that, to the learning, the immersion in another culture, the joy of being inside a text, the mind of a distant, brilliant man, there was nothing better. It wasn't about money, or a combine payment, or Hank's condition. It was about surviving and growing, seeing the world a little differently in a bleak landscape.

There was no way to know what the next few days held in store, but there were certainties that I knew I would have to deal with. The chores of the farm would still be a demand, as would be the continual complexities of caring for Hank. Those duties hadn't stopped, and they wouldn't for the foreseeable future. And then there were visitations and funerals to attend, food to carry to Hilo's house like I had to the Knudsens'—all without the help of Lida or Ardith. Somehow, I had to figure out how to get everything done I needed to, which was normal, but this was the most extreme time I could ever remember. I constantly craved a cigarette.

I sank into my chair as the weight of my life returned to my thoughts. Indexing a headhunter book seemed easy and irrelevant in comparison to my reality, especially when I considered the potential loss of Peter and Jaeger's labor and the fact that I still had the Norse amulet in my possession.

It was my opinion that that ugly thing had started all of this madness. I would always rue the day that I looked up and saw Hilo turn into our drive with that insidious relic in his pocket, ready to hand it off to me because I was “the smartest person” he knew. That felt like a curse more than ever now.

I sighed again, louder than the last time, drawing Shep's attention to me. He was lying between me and the door of my office, had done so on his own, and I was grateful for that even though I didn't know whether the dog was holding me at bay or protecting me. I hoped it was a little of both.

The office window was open. I was tempted to lock up the whole house, seal it like a jail cell so it was impossible to get into, or out of, for that matter. But I needed the fresh air, the promise of a normal, lazy summer day.

The sky was cloudless and the temperature was comfortable, lacking any humidity at all. Even the insects seemed to be in a dull mood, buzzing softly, allowing the breeze to propel them from one flower to the next in the garden that grew perennially underneath the window. I loved the sweet, innocent fragrance of lilies of the valley.

I had allowed myself to be momentarily lulled into a moment of laziness, but the truth was that I was still afraid of what could come through the window next. The .22 was within an arm's reach, and so was the realization that someone determined to get inside the house would find a way to do so no matter how tight the house was locked up or protected by one of Stark County's finest deputies. I needed a bit of normalcy even though I knew it was just a blue sky fantasy. An unknown darkness had settled on this tiny slice of North Dakota, and I didn't figure it was going anywhere any time soon.