Strange Country (11 page)

“Will you know it when you see it?” Hallie didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm.

“Yes,” Beth said. “Yes. I mean, I
see
them all. And some of the surrounding area. I’ll know. I think. It can’t be more than a hundred square mile area. It’s not in Rapid City. And it’s not across the river.” She frowned over the maps.

Hallie left her and went back to the kitchen. If Beth couldn’t actually find the door, then she, Hallie, didn’t have much to worry about.

Brett had already started another pot of coffee when Hallie returned. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask Hallie whose car was out in the yard or where they were. Questions like that were nosy, and in a place where everyone knew everyone’s business just as a matter of course, it was bad form to ask directly.

“So, does your dad like Arizona?” Hallie asked. Like a neutral topic would make everything else easier to talk about.

“I think he has a girlfriend down there,” Brett said.

Brett’s mother had been from Minneapolis, had met her father at college. She’d married him and come to South Dakota, stayed ten years on the ranch, then left and moved back to the city. Brett had visited her at Christmas and spring breaks when she was in school. Hallie had no idea how often Brett saw her now. For several years, her father had had an on-again, off-again relationship with Molly Eckles, who cleaned houses and baked pies to order over in Old Prairie City. Back when Hallie and Brett were in high school, Molly had lived out at the ranch half the year and in town the rest. She and Brett’s father had never married, and sometimes Hallie hadn’t even been sure they’d liked each other. Two years ago, Molly had packed up and moved to North Carolina.

“Is he coming back?” Hallie asked.

“I don’t even ask,” Brett said. There was a pause. Hallie stretched her legs in front of her and crossed them, one over the other at the ankle. “Prue Stalking Horse,” Brett said abruptly. “Jesus.”

“I know,” Hallie said. What else was there to say?

Brett took a cautious sip of coffee and said, “I’m on call a couple of nights a week right now. I usually stay at the fire station in West PC, though, honestly, unless the call is actually from someone in West PC, it’s going to take upwards of a half hour or more to get there anyway. But I guess that’s not the point,” she added, like she was arguing with herself. “It was…” She tapped her index finger against the side of the mug. “They don’t call us out if someone’s already dead, you know. Sometimes they die before we get there. And a lot of times you can’t tell from the call. I’ve seen car accidents where the car rolled over three or four times before it stopped. I’ve seen someone who had their arm ripped off by a power takeoff.

“So it’s not like I’m a voyeur or anything. And it’s not like this is the first time someone I know has died. But this—” She swallowed. “This was different.”

Hallie nodded. It was the way Prue had been killed, with a bullet from a high-powered rifle. In Afghanistan, Hallie’s squad and two others had been pinned down nearly the whole of one day by snipers on rooftops. Andy Rodriguez, whose squad was teamed with hers on almost every task they’d been assigned for two months, and a second soldier, who arrived less than three days earlier and whom she hadn’t known at all, were been shot and killed that day. Hallie didn’t know if that was what Brett meant. She might have only meant that it was violent. But it was more than that, Hallie knew, that kind of death. It was sudden, it was nearly silent, and it was completely faceless. It could happen again, any second. It could happen to you. And there was nothing you could do.

“I was sitting there in the fire station, and it’s only about a five-minute walk.” Brett drained her coffee, then sat with the mug in her hands. “I guess I thought maybe there was something I could do. Like someone might need something, though God knows what. So, I walked over.

“No one paid any attention to me. There were lights everywhere, of course, and one or two neighbors in their yards, not even talking to each other, just standing there looking at the house and the deputies going back and forth across the road. It looked like they’d already gotten all their pictures and taken all their measurements. They kept Boyd standing outside—or, at least, he kept standing outside—and Ole kept walking up to him every few minutes and poking him in the chest. Mostly he just stood there, though.”

She paused.

Hallie wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, whether Brett just wanted to lay it out for its own sake, which was fair enough, or whether she was building up to something, some point that had brought her to the ranch on this particular afternoon to tell this particular story.

Brett got up and grabbed the coffeepot and refilled both her mug and Hallie’s, didn’t ask if Hallie wanted more coffee, just did it. She returned the pot to the counter, but didn’t sit back down. Instead, she leaned against the wall next to the living room doorway and said, “The coroner arrived and went in the house and I realized that I didn’t want to be there when they brought Prue out. Not because it would have been awful; there wouldn’t have been anything to see. But it would have been real, like I could pretend it was a dream, standing there at four in the morning in ten-degree weather because someone here, someone in West PC, for God’s sake, because they’d been shot in the head in the middle of the night. It had to be a dream—how could something like that be real?

“I walked back the long way, not really thinking about much except Prue and what happened and wondering why, was it someone who hated her that much or just a random thing? And I didn’t really think anything of it at first.”

“What?” Hallie had been thinking about Prue too as they talked, thinking about that moment—had Prue even had time to know, to recognize what was happening to her? Probably not, because death would have been instantaneous, not even one minute to the next, just there then not. Blinked out.

“Past the actual cemetery, there’s mostly empty fields to the north, streetlights just on the one side, and I was walking on the field side because I hadn’t crossed back over yet.…” She paused, took a long sip of coffee. “And I was maybe halfway down the second block when Tel Sigurdson went by in that white pickup he has—or it could have been someone else’s white pickup, because you know there’s a ton of them around here. In any case, after it went past me, it stopped up the street and just sat there with its lights out for, like, two or three minutes. Not close enough for the deputies to notice it, I don’t think, but whoever was inside could have definitely seen Prue’s house and everything. That was when I started thinking maybe it wasn’t Tel Sigurdson’s truck at all. Maybe a little older?” She said the last like a question, more to indicate she wasn’t sure herself than that Hallie might have an answer.

She downed a giant swig of coffee, then grimaced at the bitterness. “When they turned around and came back down the street, they still didn’t have their lights on, like they really didn’t want anyone to notice them. I kind of stepped farther off the street into the field and the moon was down by then, so I don’t think they saw me, at least not on their way back.” She hesitated, leaned forward in her chair so that she was looking at Hallie with a sort of painful intensity that wasn’t normal for Brett, who was usually laid-back and unflappable. “Do you think that was it? The killer?”

Hallie could tell that she was shaken by the idea, that a killer was there, that they’d come back, that she—Brett—might have seen them.

“It could have been,” Hallie said cautiously. “But it could have been someone curious, someone who didn’t want to talk to the deputies for whatever reason. You couldn’t see who was driving?”

“No.” Brett leaned back in her chair again as if saying it out loud—was I on the same street as a killer?—had helped in some way to make her feel safer again. “That was weird too, don’t you think? I mean, Tel would have stopped. At least when he went by me the first time. So, maybe it wasn’t Tel, because he didn’t offer me a ride or anything either, and I know he saw me when he drove in.”

“Did you talk to the sheriff?”

“Do you think I should? I mean, what am I really saying? That it might be Tel’s truck? It might not be.”

“It might have been the killer,” Hallie said. “You need to tell someone. Boyd’s coming to supper. Do you want to come? You could talk to him about it first.”

Brett nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” She gave a quick half laugh. “At least this time it doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”

“My kind of thing?”

Brett waved a hand. “You know. Ghosts and devils and things.”

Brett knew about Martin Weber and his blood magic, about the ghosts Hallie saw. She knew what had happened with Travis Hollowell and Boyd’s wife, Lily. She chose not to believe it, to reconstruct reality so there wasn’t any room for ghosts or blood magic, or anything else that wasn’t concrete and knowable and everyday.

“Someday you’re going to see something you won’t be able to explain,” Hallie said. “And then what are you going to do?”

“Get you to take care of it for me,” Brett said promptly. She got up, set her coffee mug in the sink, and crossed the room to retrieve her coat from its hook by the door.

“Supper’ll be around seven,” Hallie said.

“Can I bring Sally?”

Hallie wasn’t sure who Sally was, but, “Bring anyone you want. Bring salad or something.”

Brett settled her hat on her head, zipped up her coat, and left with just a quick wave of her hand to say good-bye.

She hadn’t been gone five minutes when Beth came back into the kitchen in a rush, grabbed her messenger bag, and was out the kitchen door before Hallie could even say anything.

Jesus.

“Hey!” Hallie shouted out the back door, the wind cutting through her shirtsleeves like a knife. Beth stopped and turned, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket and her shoulders hunched, like that would keep her warmer. “Where are you going?”

“To check a couple things out,” she said. “If I have to do this myself, I’ll do it.” She shoved her chin forward, like a challenge.

Hallie sighed. “Tell me what you find.”

Beth straightened, took a step back toward Hallie. “You’ll help me?”

“No, I won’t help you. I mean…” For once she didn’t know what she meant. She let the door swing closed behind her. “I mean, tell me and we can talk about it.” Which didn’t mean she’d do it, because she wouldn’t do it. Let Beth go into the under? Let
Beth
become Death, some nineteen-year-old who didn’t even know what she was thinking? No. But maybe it was a way for her, Hallie, to talk to Death. Maybe it was a way to figure this thing out, for both of them.

“Just … talk to me. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Then she was gone.

11

Boyd woke from the middle of a dream into the gray light of his own bedroom with the curtains half-drawn so that the dull light of early dusk softened the edges of the room and gave everything a timeless muted quality. He sat up, blinking against the abrupt transition. In his dream, the world had been split in two—darkness and light. And he’d been the one, the person who was going to have to choose—one or the other. It seemed like a simple choice, seemed like something anyone could choose. Light, of course, light. But in the dream, he’d been sure there was a trick, been sure it was particularly important that he understand, that he make the correct choice.

It had been impossible to see what lay in the light, and that seemed dangerous, everything sharp-edged and illuminated, no secrets in the light, but so bright that it all seemed to be one thing, one color, blended together forever. Darkness promised shadows, shades of gray, reflections in moonlight, and privacy.

He wouldn’t choose, shouldn’t have to choose, but the world would end, they told him. Who told him? He didn’t know.

Choose, they said.

Then he woke.

He felt as if his heart were pounding in his chest, though he checked his pulse with a finger on his wrist and it wasn’t, felt like he’d been running a marathon, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. It was just past four. He had another hour or so before he had to leave for Hallie’s. He needed more sleep, but he knew it would be impossible. He reached for the notebook he kept beside the bed, wrote down his dream—dated and numbered. He flipped back through the last three weeks of notes, but he couldn’t see that this particular dream related to anything that had preceded it. Maybe it did; maybe he couldn’t see the connections yet.

He got up, took a quick shower, shaved, and pulled on a clean pair of jeans. Still barefoot, he cleaned the sink and the bathtub, took the towels he’d used and put them in the laundry, laid out clean towels, carried the laundry basket to the basement, and ran a quick load of wash. Back upstairs, he added laundry detergent to the grocery list he kept on a small marker board on the refrigerator. He got the mail, sorted it, filed three bills to be paid later, checked his email, responded to a question from Ole from the day before about whether he could pick up an extra shift on Saturday, and one from his mother about whether he’d be home for Christmas. He shut down the computer, went back into the bedroom, put on a shirt, tucked it into his jeans, took socks and a pair of boots back into the office, and sat back down.

It wasn’t until after all that, that he pulled the evidence bag with the stone he’d taken from Prue’s house off the shelf where he’d put it earlier, and placed it on the desk. He still wasn’t comfortable having it in his possession. It was evidence in a murder investigation. And yet, he understood Gerson’s reasoning, even if he didn’t understand Gerson herself—what she knew and what she wanted. To investigate the stones, regular police procedures wouldn’t help. He and Gerson had dusted the stones for fingerprints before the forensic team had been allowed downstairs. Boyd had insisted and Gerson hadn’t argued. There was nothing; he hadn’t expected anything, but it was procedure and important. It was the way you got to the end.

From the center drawer of his desk, he pulled out a new notebook and a ballpoint pen. First, he noted down his observations from Prue’s house. The cellar with the buried bones and the three stones. The stones had been separated from each other, as if the distance were important? He’d measured the space between them and made a sketch of the way they’d been placed. The three stones had been exactly twelve inches apart—twelve, twelve, twelve. They were buried, but both he and Gerson felt that they couldn’t make any conclusions from that until they knew how long they’d been there. There had been the weird flash of light, light that only he and Gerson had seen. Light and thunder, like something had been asked and answered. Gerson had seen only the light. She hadn’t heard the thunder. And that meant something too. It all meant something. The task was to figure out what.