Strange Country (2 page)

Boyd checked up and down the street. Wind burned across his cheekbones, cold and dry. Cemetery Road was on the north edge of West Prairie City. The cemetery for which the road was named occupied two lots directly across the street with an open field gone to grass and the county road beyond it. To the east of the cemetery sat a two-story-and-attic Queen Anne; to the west, a three-bedroom, no-frills ranch house built nearly a hundred years later. Three houses down, there was a light on in a second-floor bedroom, a garage light on in the house across, but otherwise the entire neighborhood was dark and quiet.

He skirted the house once: straggly shrubs underneath the porch windows in front, a single car garage down a narrow drive, a long row of overgrown privet along the garage, a big old maple tree in the center of the backyard with a few clusters of dried leaves rattling in the wind. There was a small back porch, enclosed like the front one, and in the east side yard, a row of paving stones, like someone had once intended a garden, but had run out of steam. No sign of a prowler, but the ground was frozen hard and there was no snow to leave tracks.

His knock on the rattly porch door sounded like a trio of gunshots, too loud for three o’clock in the morning. He waited. There was no movement behind the curtained windows where he presumed the living room was, no sound of footsteps approaching the door. He knocked again.

Finally the inside door opened and he saw, framed against the hall light, who it was who’d called—Prue Stalking Horse, who worked as a bartender down at Cleary’s and who always seemed to know things, whether she was willing to talk about those things or not. Boyd dropped a step down and waited for her to open the porch door and let him in.

She was tall, though not as tall as he was, with long white-blond hair, high cheekbones, and light blue eyes. There was a certain agelessness about her, but he’d never been able to figure out if that was because she really did look young or because she so rarely smiled or showed any sort of intense emotion.

He’d dreamed about her once.

Not—yeah, not in
that
way.

Boyd’s dreams were, or at least had always been, about events that were going to happen. He’d dreamed about Prue maybe four months ago, just after Hallie came back to Taylor County, after Martin and Pete died, after the end of Uku-Weber, but before the rest of it. It had been a short dream, barren landscape, gray skies—not cloudy skies, but a flat gray, like old primer or warships. There’d been three people in the dream, all of them so far away, they’d seemed to him like nothing more than dark silhouettes, and yet he’d known just from their dark profiles who two of them were—Prue Stalking Horse and Hallie Michaels. The third figure wasn’t someone he knew, or at least not someone he recognized within the context of the dream. He’d known it was that person, the unrecognizable one, who was important, who could have answered his questions, if he’d known which questions to ask. Of all of them, that third person was the one, in the dream, who knew exactly what was coming.

Tonight, Prue’s hair was smoothed back flat and tight, caught up in a neat knot at the nape of her neck. She wore an oversized denim shirt with old paint stains and black leggings to her ankles. Her feet were bare despite the late hour and the freezing temperatures.

Boyd held the door as he entered, then let it close slowly behind him. Prue still hadn’t turned on a porch light, so they stood in a sort of gray twilight illuminated only by the streetlights out along the road and the light inside in the hallway. The enclosed porch was a clutter of mismatched furniture, old rag rugs, and cardboard boxes stacked three high. “You reported a prowler,” Boyd said, his inflection settling the sentence somewhere between a statement and a question.

She turned away without answering him and walked back into the house. Boyd took a last look at the porch and the yard just beyond the windows and followed her inside. He wondered if this was one of those calls that came in the middle of the night sometimes, when sunrise seemed infinitely far and loneliness crowded in. People called because they couldn’t admit the real problem, that there was no sound in the house except their own breath moving in and out of their lungs. They called with whispered voices—something outside, they’d say, please come. Prue Stalking Horse had never struck Boyd as that sort of person. But then, people weren’t always who you thought they were.

The living room was dark, shades pulled tight over double windows north and east. Like the porch, it was full of mismatched furniture, mostly overstuffed chairs upholstered in faded chintz and small side tables with delicately turned legs, everything looking like it was bought at church sales and auctions after people died. The room smelled like lemon polish and carpet shampoo, though dust danced along a stray shaft of gray light from the floor lamp by the north windows.

“I heard a sound,” she said.

“In the house or outside?” he asked.

“Out … outside.” She stumbled over the word and it was the first sign Boyd had seen that she was even a little nervous. She didn’t wring her hands or tug at her clothes. She didn’t stare uncomfortably at his face as if looking for a sign that he believed her or understood, that he could stop whatever it was that had frightened her. She swallowed and continued, her voice smoothing out as she spoke. “We close at midnight on weeknights,” she said. “I usually get home around twelve forty or so, after I let the cleaning crew in and cash out. It’s not far. A mile, maybe?” Like it was a question. Like he would know the answer. “Sometimes in summer, I walk,” she said.

“But you drove tonight.”

Boyd could be patient. It annoyed Hallie, when he was patient. Hallie acted. Even when they didn’t know anything, even when there were important questions still to be answered, she preferred to do something. But patience worked. In this job, sometimes patience was all he had.

2

After a moment that was mostly silent, Boyd unzipped his jacket halfway, unbuttoned the flap on his shirt pocket, and pulled out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen. He clicked the top of the pen and flipped the notebook open to an empty page. He did it all slowly and deliberately, wanted to give her time to see him do it, to take a breath, to get what she wanted to tell him straight in her head.

She blinked when he clicked his pen, looked at the notebook in his left hand, at the pen in his right, then looked at him. “Yes,” she said. Another brief pause. “Well, yes.” She made a gesture toward the hall. “Let’s go back to the kitchen, Deputy…” She paused again.

“Davies.”

“Davies,” she repeated. The word sounded rich, the way she said it, as if it described azure skies, mountain meadows, the faint sweet scent of clover in late spring, and the lazy hum of bumblebees. Boyd looked at her more closely. “I’ll make coffee,” she said. As if this were a social call, as if whatever the danger was, whoever the prowler was, it was over.

Or she wanted to believe it was.

The kitchen was a sharp contrast to the living room, bright and warm, the walls pale yellow, the trim bright white, accessorized in sage green and brick red with stainless-steel appliances, granite countertops, and a stone tile floor. Boyd removed his jacket, hung it on a chair, and sat.

One of the lights over the stove buzzed. The room smelled of nutmeg and freshly turned soil. The door to the cellar was wide open, though Prue had to walk awkwardly around it when she went to the counter. The back door was closed and locked, chained. There were locked dead bolts below and above the doorknob. Both looked brand-new. Not a usual thing—triple locks—for West Prairie City, South Dakota.

Prue’s next words seemed to echo Boyd’s thoughts. “I don’t lock my doors. Usually. No one does around here. But lately, there’s been … well, it’s seemed like a good idea. When I got home tonight, the light was on by the garage. I didn’t think a lot of it. It comes on when there’s a storm, when the wind is strong, or a raccoon wanders through.” She put the filter in the coffeemaker, added water from the tap, and turned it on. She took two white cups with a chased silver design and matching saucers from the cupboard. When she set the cups and saucers on the table, her right hand shook and one of the cups jumped sideways. Boyd caught it before it fell and set it back on the saucer. “Thank you,” Prue said. For a moment, there was just the sound of the coffeemaker and the sharp odor of brewing coffee.

Prue sat down across from Boyd. She took hold of one of the cups by the handle and moved it back and forth as if to watch the silver catch the light. Boyd’s radio crackled. When the coffee finished brewing, Prue retrieved the pot. She poured coffee into each of the cups and slid one toward Boyd. She didn’t ask if he wanted cream or sugar, and he didn’t know if it didn’t occur to her or if she already knew he didn’t.

Boyd put his arm on the table and looked at her, though she wasn’t looking at him. “The prowler,” he said.

“I came in the back door,” she said, as if she’d simply been waiting for him to ask before she continued. “It was closed, but I realized when I grasped the doorknob that it wasn’t latched. That was the first thing. The light over the sink was on, as I’d left it. Nothing seemed to be disturbed. Then I heard it. A noise from upstairs.” She looked at him then, which she hadn’t done since she’d sat down, had told him the story while looking down at the coffee in her cup, like secrets had been written there. Or she was writing them as she spoke. “That’s when I called you.”

Boyd didn’t say, Why didn’t you tell me you heard a noise upstairs when I walked in the door? Why did you tell me the prowler was outside when you already knew he wasn’t? Because she hadn’t and they couldn’t go back and do it over.

Instead, he crossed to the back door and checked that it really was locked even though there were three locks and it was obvious that it was. “Stay here,” he said.

Prue raised the coffee cup to her lips and took a sip as she watched him. He couldn’t get a gauge on her and that bothered him, alternately relaxed and nervous and he couldn’t understand what caused one reaction or the other. Hallie had told him once that everything Prue did was calculated. If so, she was good, each action or reaction seeming genuine in itself, just that it made no sense when it was all put together.

He moved lightly down the hall, unsnapping his holster and removing his pistol as he did so. There had been no sounds from upstairs since he arrived; if there had been an intruder inside the house, he or she was probably gone. But the gap between probability and certainty was wide. And dangerous. He thought again about Prue at the table watching him. She was playing a game, had probably been playing one since the moment she called the station. But he didn’t know what her game was, and if there was even the slimmest possibility that there really was a prowler, he had to check it out.

At the top of the stairs was a narrow landing with four doors that led to what Boyd guessed were three bedrooms and a bathroom. He paused. Nothing. He opened the first door to his left—the bathroom, long and narrow—checked behind the door and the shower curtain. Nothing. The next room was filled with boxes, a long table and two armoires on opposite walls. Moonlight filtered in through the uncurtained window, and the room felt cold. There was an acrid smell, like burnt motor oil, and a low hum that Boyd felt more in his chest than actually heard. He flipped the switch, but the single overhead light didn’t come on, so he worked his way along the wall, checking the corners before he moved on to the furniture. The first armoire was locked; the second was empty.

The third room, visible by a night-light in an outlet by the bed, looked like a guest room—bed, nightstand, narrow painted dresser, wooden rocking chair. Boyd checked behind the door, checked the closet. No other sounds than his own footsteps as he moved though the rooms. Still, he checked.

The last room was the largest, clearly Prue’s own bedroom, with a night-light in the outlet near the door, and a second one to the left of the nightstand by the bed. Boyd checked behind the door and in the closet. He could see all the corners and he’d already lowered his pistol when he noticed that the window on the far side of the bed had been raised approximately six inches.

He approached with his hand on his gun.

There was a three-foot drop to the porch roof. The window and the storm window were both open, but not far enough for anyone to squeeze through. Cold from outside barely penetrated the warmth of the room, stymied by insulated curtains and the general stillness of the night. He tried the window himself. It lowered, but it wouldn’t open any farther than the six inches it had already been raised.

After studying both the window and the porch roof below for several minutes, Boyd returned to the closet, turned on the light, and looked up. He saw a trapdoor with a pull rope attached. When he stood to the side and pulled, steps unfolded into the narrow closet space. He waited, didn’t hear anything, and went carefully up the stairs. He could have called another deputy out, gotten them out of bed, and waited while they drove across town or ten miles in from a trailer on CR54, but even then, one of them still would have had to be the first one up the ladder.

He went up fast, pistol ready, and found what he’d expected—boxes, some dust. No intruder, but he could see that dust had been disturbed on a couple of boxes and a shelf on the near wall where there appeared to be something missing, a clear spot left behind in the shape of a small rectangle.

He refolded the attic stairs, reholstered his pistol, brushed nonexistent dust off his pants leg, and went back downstairs.

Chelly checked in on the way down, which meant he’d been there half an hour. “Five minutes,” he told her.

He went back to the kitchen, where he found Prue still in the same spot at the table, looking at the cooling coffee in her cup, her cell phone laid on the table as if she’d just made a call or was waiting for one. She didn’t look up until he approached the table. “Nothing,” he said as he crossed behind her and retrieved his jacket. “The window was open in your bedroom,” he said. “I don’t think anyone could have come through or gone out that way.” He shrugged into his jacket and zipped it. “There’s no one up there now. Have you been in the attic lately?” he asked.