Strange Country (19 page)

Maybe ten minutes after the fire trucks had arrived, Haxon Blake, the volunteer fire chief came over to talk to Boyd. “It doesn’t look like much of a fire,” he said.

What it looked like was an explosion, Boyd thought. He and Hallie had retreated to stand next to his patrol car while the firefighters worked, and he’d pulled a couple of towels from the trunk so they could wipe mud and dirt off their faces. Now, they walked over with Hack to inspect the damage. A hole maybe six feet by six feet had been punched in the outer wall of Boyd’s house, right where his office was. The window and some shattered siding were ten feet away, twisted up against the hedgerow, insulation scattered like confetti along with slushy water from the fire hose, the framing from the window, and glass.

“This is your house, right?” Hack asked Boyd. “Dispatch said it was your house.”

Boyd couldn’t stop looking at the mess. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s mine.”

“Looks like something blew a hole in the side here,” Hack said somewhat unnecessarily.

My house, Boyd thought. He had just repaired it. Just gotten the windows back in and the siding replaced, had just spent last weekend outside in the cold, sanding and refitting the south porch railing.

“—limited the damage to that one room.”

“What?” he said.

Hack cocked his head sideways. “I said it’s pretty well contained, never really much danger from it. Except to your house, of course. I think we can limit most of the damage to that one room and, well, some smoke. And some water probably.” He added.

“What happened?” Boyd said. Hallie had left the two of them and was approaching the hole itself, waved back by one of the firefighters so she had to skirt to the other side, the smoke still too thick to see much, though it looked like they were pulling the hose back out, pulling away loose siding, and testing the rest of the side wall.

“Well, something blew up.” Hack said it like he felt Boyd was being a little slow on the uptake. “Probably from the inside out.” He waved a hand. “Well, you can see.”

“Can I—?” Go in? Look around? He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to ask, what he wanted to do.

“Give us half an hour,” Hack said, “and you can get in the house, but stay out of that room. At least until tomorrow. I want to get someone in in the morning to test the joists. Make sure it’s safe.”

Boyd wanted to point out that there were people in the room right now, Kate Wannamaker climbing over the ragged gap to jump the short distance down to the lawn.

Someone—something—blew a hole in my wall.

It echoed through his brain, that single phrase, as if he couldn’t quite get past it. Explosions; his house; and West Prairie City, South Dakota, didn’t fit together. Or didn’t seem like they ought to fit together, because lots of things were happening in West Prairie City that didn’t fit these days.

“Davies!”

Boyd turned to see Teedt approaching. Behind him, Kate Wannamaker said, “Hey, Chief, you better come look at this.”

“Ole wants to talk to you,” Teedt said as he stepped over the fire hose. He looked Boyd up and down as if noticing for the first time that he was soaking wet with mud splattered up his pants leg to his knees and all down the front of his slicker. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

“My house exploded,” Boyd said dryly.

“All over you?”

“It’s a long story,” Boyd said. One he was reasonably certain Teedt didn’t want to hear.

“It’s always a long story,” Teedt complained. He looked at the hole in Boyd’s house one more time and shook his head. “Come on. Ole’s waiting.”

As they crossed the lawn, Boyd could smell burnt wood and plastic, could practically taste it in the back of his throat, harsh and corrosive. He looked around for Hallie, but she had disappeared somewhere in the chaos, not just firefighters now, but Boyd’s neighbors too, cars lining the street where people had stopped just to see what was going on. A white pickup followed closely by a small black SUV wound carefully down the street, the pickup pausing in front of the house before a honk from the SUV behind it got it moving again.

Ole stood by Boyd’s back door. “This is surely a hell of a mess,” he remarked.

“Yes, sir, it is,” Boyd agreed. Teedt’s radio crackled, and with a quick wave of his hand in Boyd’s and Ole’s direction, he strode away toward the street, one hand on his radio mike.

“I want to show you something,” Ole said. He pushed open Boyd’s back door.

“That was locked,” Boyd said.

“Yeah, well, it’s not a very good lock,” Ole said. As they walked up the three steps into the kitchen, he asked over his shoulder, “You need a couple of days off?”

“I thought we were shorthanded,” Boyd said.

Ole grimaced, like he had just bitten down on something unpleasant. “The wedding thing, it’s apparently not happening.” He held up his hands, like waving something aside. “Don’t ask him about it. He’ll say he doesn’t want to talk about it, then he’ll tell you his sister’s entire life story, how many times she’s been married, what the kid’s father said to Teedt’s sister and to Teedt. I mean, just … don’t ask. But the thing of it is, I’m not shorthanded and you’re going to need to take care of this, whatever this is.”

A set of muddy tracks crossed the kitchen floor. Ole, Boyd guessed, checking things out while Boyd was still absorbing what had happened.

“I want to keep working,” Boyd said. “I have some new information.” New data, because he didn’t know yet what it meant, whether it pointed to any suspects or was just something else that didn’t make any sense.

“Take a look at this,” Ole said.

The door to the office was open. It was a sloppy mess. Desk tipped sideways, water running down the wall, the rug on the floor flung up against the far wall and torn right through the middle, fraying threads dangling like a fractured curtain. Both shelves above the desk had been tipped, one of them falling to the floor, a single end tilting up like the spar from a shipwreck. He looked for the safe, which had been against the wall to his right, the one opposite the outside wall. It was no longer there, just a hole through to the dining room, pretty much exactly the size of the safe. Bits of plaster, shredded paper from the wallboard, a jagged bit of old lath made a trail from the hole across the dining room floor. Ole grabbed his arm and pointed at something underneath the table—the safe, metal curling outward as though it were nothing but tinfoil, and yet it still sat upright and square, as if it had always been there.

“What do you make of that?” Ole asked.

Before Boyd could answer, footsteps pounded up the back steps and Hack joined them, clapping Ole on the shoulder. He said to Boyd, “Things’re looking pretty good. I’m going to leave the little truck here with Kate and Stu. It wasn’t much of a fire, like I said, just smoke and debris from the explosion.” He thought for a minute. “Or whatever. You want some help sealing things up?”

Boyd ran a hand along the back of his neck. “Thanks. I’ve got a roof tarp out in the garage. If we secure that, it should keep the weather out.”

“That door any good?” Hack asked, nodding at the entrance to the office.

“Pretty good.”

“It’s the cold. You don’t want to let the temperature in the house get too low. Freeze your pipes. And it plays hell on your drywall and plaster.”

“It’s a good door,” Boyd repeated. “I can insulate it.”

Hack repeated his recommendation that no one should walk on the office floor until a builder looked at it. “It’d be best if you could get a structural engineer,” he said, “but it’s easier to find a good construction guy. That’ll probably do ya anyway.”

“No,” Boyd said. “I’ll need to go in there. I’ve—”

Hack was shaking his head before Boyd could finish. “Nothing’s going to change in there before morning,” he said. “Trust me.”

Which might have been true if the only danger were from wet flooring and damaged joists.

“It can’t be that dangerous.”

“It’ll be less dangerous in the morning, after someone’s checked the flooring.”

Which was right, Boyd was sure, but not helpful. The stones—stones he’d put in his safe not that many minutes before Hallie arrived—were now pretty clearly no longer there. Also pretty clearly, at least to Boyd’s thinking, the stones were the cause of the explosion. Where it had occurred, how it had occurred, and the results all pretty clear indications. He needed to find them—all of them—and make sure they were put away safe before anything else happened.

To Hack, he said, “It’s my house, I’m going in.”

Hack looked like he wanted to argue, but Ole turned him back toward the kitchen, saying, as they moved away, “You’ve seen a lot of fires. This make you think of anything? Anything … suspicious?”

Boyd squatted down to look at the destroyed safe. He’d set all four stones together on top of the title search for his house and an inventory of his valuables. Three of them were just gone. The fourth was tangled in the ripped-open steel of the door. Boyd pried it out carefully, cutting his right index finger in the process, and put it in the left slant pocket of his rain slicker. He found two more of the stones in the office, one stuck underneath the shattered leg of his desk, probably what had shattered it, and one hard up against the baseboard on the outer wall. He shoved both of them into the right slant pocket of his rain slicker, where they vibrated against each other until he moved one of them up to his shirt pocket. The floor was spongy, and he realized that Hack had been right, he probably shouldn’t have come in.

Hallie appeared in the doorway. “Jesus,” she said as she took in the damage. She looked at him, her eyes that particular hard focus she got when things didn’t make sense. “Do you know what happened?”

“Don’t come in,” Boyd said. “Meet me outside.” He pointed through the gap. Hallie nodded and disappeared. Boyd pulled his gloves back on so he wouldn’t cut his hands any worse than he already had and climbed through the hole in the outside wall using the same path he’d seen Kate Wannamaker take twenty minutes earlier.

When Hallie joined him, he motioned her over toward the hedgerow that separated his yard from his neighbor’s.

“It’s the stones,” Boyd said.

Hallie looked skeptical. “Boyd, you’ve had those stones for days.”

He shook his head. “I’ve had three of them. I found a fourth today. That’s the difference.” Hallie opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand. Wait. She had questions. Hallie always had questions, but he was figuring this out as he talked, and he needed to finish before she asked them. “I put all of them in the safe all together. Then I came outside to wait for you. I was here. That’s part of the point. No one came into the house. I don’t smell explosives or gunpowder or see any residue in the room. It’s true I might not smell it or see it and we could ask Rapid City or the feds for a dog. But I don’t think it was explosives.”

“You think it was the stones.” Her skepticism was clear. He didn’t blame her. He would have trouble believing it himself, and Hallie liked to see things with her own eyes. He pulled one of the stones from his shirt pocket and put it in his gloved hand. “Look, I hold it in my hand, it doesn’t do anything, right?”

“Right.”

He pulled a second one from the left pocket of his rain slicker and put it with the first one. They vibrated against each other with a barely audible clatter. He separated them a little, and the vibration lessened but didn’t stop. He pulled the third one out, placed it between the other two, and they knocked together so hard, his hand shook and he almost dropped them. He grabbed one of them out of his hand and stuffed it back into his shirt pocket.

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “All right. So … what are you thinking? The fourth was critical mass?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where is it now?” she asked, because Hallie always went right to the heart.

“I would guess”—Boyd pointed into the hedges—“in there. It won’t be dangerous. For most people. I hope,” he couldn’t help adding.

“Jesus,” Hallie said. Which sentiment Boyd definitely agreed with. “I mean, you’re right. Probably not dangerous. If they don’t have any affinity for magic,” Hallie said. “Or if there’s not something else we don’t know about them.”

Boyd nodded grimly in agreement. He took two of the stones, wrapped them in a clean white handkerchief from his pocket, and handed them to Hallie. “It’s probably not a good idea to carry all four of them around,” he told her.

Hallie slid the stones into the back pocket of her jeans, looked at the jagged six-foot hole in Boyd’s house, and said, “Yeah, that would be a very bad idea.”

“Hey!”

Boyd shoved the third stone back into his shirt pocket as Deputy Teedt approached them. “Mrs. Otis over there?” he asked it like it was a question, which it never was with Teedt. “Says she’d like to talk to you when you have a chance.”

“Would you tell her I’ll come over when I’m finished here?” Boyd asked Teedt.

Teedt’s lips twisted in something that wasn’t quite a frown. “Sure,” he said. “What else have I got to do?”

“I can take care of this,” Hallie said, waving at the big gaping hole in Boyd’s house. “If you want to look for … the other thing.”

19

It wasn’t much past four in the afternoon, the sun was still at least two hours from setting, but the sky was so gray and the sun low enough on the horizon that long shadows made the ground under the hedges nearly impenetrable. There was a trail of broken branches that told him this was the spot, though he couldn’t tell how far the stone might have traveled. He needed a flashlight before he could do anything.

Margaret Otis was waving frantically to him from the sidewalk. Nate, her eight-year-old son, was beside her wearing rubber boots, an orange rain slicker, and blue and yellow basketball shorts that went down past his knees. Boyd frowned, but went over there. He was aware of the stone in his pocket, of the other stone still missing, like lead weights to drag him down. But he could take a minute.

“Deputy Davies!”

Nate hopped up and down, like he was on springs. He’d turned eight three weeks earlier, Boyd knew, because in the summer, Nate came through the gap in the hedge to Boyd’s house to watch him work on the Farmall in his garage and hand him tools. He’d crouch for an hour at a time, peering under the tractor, asking questions, and telling Boyd things about the Otis family that Boyd was pretty sure his mother and father would rather he, or anyone else, didn’t know.