Strange Country (7 page)

He wondered if he was supposed to talk first, because neither Cross nor Gerson said anything. Any other day he wouldn’t have wondered. Things would have simply proceeded as they were meant to proceed. Any other day he wouldn’t be sitting in his own dining room with two special agents from the state Division of Criminal Investigation talking about a murder he’d witnessed, but not prevented.

“You have my report,” he said, not quite a question. How long had they been in town? He checked his watch. 8:05. He wondered if they’d been to the crime scene yet.

Gerson looked at Cross, who was fiddling with his pen. It looked expensive, Cross’s pen, though Boyd didn’t know all that much about pens. He was particular about a great many things, how they appeared and whether they had places and were in them, but all he asked of a pen was that it have the right color ink and that it work. Cross’s pen was silver, looked heavy, and had some sort of engraving in a spiral along the shaft. Crooks was twisting it apart and tightening it, twisting and tightening as if it were this task and no other that he had come to Boyd’s house on a dry, cold day to do.

Finally, Gerson said, “Yes, we’ve read your statement. It’s clear and concise, which I appreciate. You went to Ms. Stalking Horse’s house on a prowler complaint, is that correct?”

Boyd wanted to say, It’s in my report, everything’s in my report. Instead, he said, “I received the call approximately three twenty-five
A.M
. I was at the southwest end of the county, so it took me approximately twenty minutes to reach the house.”

“Is that unusual?” Cross had put his pen back together, but he didn’t look at Boyd when he spoke.

Boyd frowned. “That it took twenty minutes or that I was in the southwest end of the county?”

Cross looked up then. “Your position when the call came in,” he said, like Boyd should have known from the way he asked the question. It was clear to Boyd that Agent Cross wasn’t from South Dakota. His accent was flatter, like St. Paul maybe or Chicago, though he could have been from anywhere, wasn’t necessarily from a city. He wore a dark suit with a dark gray tie, a wool topcoat, and dress shoes. Gerson was dressed more practically in wool slacks, hiking boots, a fine-gauge turtleneck sweater, and a parka with a fur-lined hood.

“We have only one deputy on duty at night,” Boyd said calmly, “except Saturday nights in good weather and a few days when we call people in. We cover the entire county. At any given time, I’m going to be somewhere.”

“Your primary population points are West Prairie City and Prairie City, though, correct?”

“And Templeton,” Boyd said.

“Which has its own police force?”

“That’s correct,” Boyd replied.

“Are you certain it was a high-powered rifle that killed her?” Cross asked. He hadn’t taken any notes, like he already knew the answers, which he would, if he’d read Boyd’s report.

“It must have been,” Boyd said. Did they think he’d shot her himself? Or that someone had walked up behind him and shot her? Or that he had been sleeping in his car and woke at the sound of a gunshot? “And we have the bullet.”

“Mm-hmm,” Cross said, the sound strangely emphatic.

Gerson frowned and made a note in a small notebook.

“Everything’s in my report,” Boyd said.

Agent Gerson laid down her pen and looked at him. “You’ve had some unusual activity in Taylor County this winter,” she said.

“Unusual?” Boyd asked. You have no idea, he thought.

“Mysterious explosions. For example,” she added after a slight pause. There was something intent about her gaze. She seemed relaxed, her hands folded neatly over her notebook, her face calm. And yet, it felt as if she was waiting for him to say something or do something that she didn’t entirely expect him to do or say, but hoped he would.

“This isn’t—,” Cross began, a brittle edge to his voice.

Gerson held up her right hand. “We agreed,” she said. She looked at Boyd again. “Deputy Davies?”

“Are you asking if this could be related to what happened out at Uku-Weber?”

“Is it related?”

“I have no idea,” he said honestly. He didn’t see how it could be.

The landline in the kitchen rang. “Excuse me,” Boyd said.

“Jesus, is your phone off?” Ole didn’t bother to identify himself. But then, he almost never had to. He’d been the sheriff for nearly twelve years, and he’d told Boyd once that if people didn’t know him by now, they weren’t likely to.

“My cell phone?”

“Hell, yes, your cell phone. I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes.”

Boyd rubbed his eyes. He didn’t precisely remember where his cell phone was. He might have left it in the car. “Has something happened?” he asked.

There was a pause; Boyd could hear Ole draw in a breath and let it out. “Tell the Division of Criminal Investigations that I need them over here at the Stalking Horse place pronto.” He pronounced each syllable in “Division of Criminal Investigations” as it were an individual word. “You better come too,” he added. Then, “Jesus.”

Boyd went back into the dining room and told Gerson and Cross what Ole had said.

“No details?” Cross asked, like Boyd were responsible for the cryptic nature of the message.

“No,” Boyd said.

Cross frowned. “All right,” he said, as if Boyd had issued a challenge or told a tall tale that was about to be disproved. While the two agents donned their coats and gloves, Boyd collected the two coffee cups—his and Cross’s—took them to the kitchen, emptied the undrunk coffee into the sink, and stacked the cups in the small dishwasher. He returned for Gerson’s water glass. He put the water glass in the dishwasher, took his own coat, a pair of leather gloves, and a baseball cap from the closet by the back door. “I’ll take my own car,” he said.

Cross looked like he was going to argue, but Gerson said, “Fine, we’ll meet you there.”

He let them out the front, locked the door behind them, and left by the back door, locking that as well.

It took less than five minutes to drive from Boyd’s house on the west side of town to Prue’s on the north. Gray sunlight filtered through thin clouds, and the wind buffeted his SUV as he parked on the street. There was no sidewalk, just a shallow slope of yard to tarmac. The driveway was on the west side of the house, two narrow strips of concrete with brown grass down the center. Cross parked in the driveway behind two Taylor County sheriff’s cars, the tires of his nondescript gray sedan missing the concrete strips by nearly six inches.

Despite the frozen ground, there were clear signs that heavy foot traffic had tramped across the yard, grass matted down hard, the frozen earth underneath showing through. Yellow tape crossed the porch entrance, the door open and fastened with an orange-striped bungee cord so it didn’t bang against the side of the house in the wind. The yard itself, seen in daylight, was neat but utilitarian, old evergreen shrubs underneath the porch windows, one lone tree on the far side near the house, a narrow sidewalk from the street to the porch door. Maybe there would be tulips and daffodils in the spring, but otherwise there was nothing to soften the stark white edges of the enclosed front porch or the bland old siding. If he’d ever thought much about it, which he hadn’t, Boyd wouldn’t have expected this house for Prue Stalking Horse. He’d have expected modern—glass and steel and blond wood furniture. He’d also have expected her to live in St. Paul, to run a New Age herb shop or a yoga center or a retreat for busy executives who wanted to pretend a weekend of meditation and moderate exercise would give them compassion or calm their overstressed hearts.

But she hadn’t. She’d lived here, in West Prairie City. And now she’d died here.

7

After she left Boyd’s house, Hallie stopped at the grocery store on the edge of West Prairie City, then headed over to Templeton to the ag supply. Pabby’s old Ford tractor, which Hallie thought she’d fixed last week when she replaced the battery, had failed to start again three days ago when she went out to move some of the big round bales closer to the barn. This time the fan belt had snapped in two. Maybe it was old, maybe it was the cold, most probably a combination of the two. The tractor was a 1974 model, and she’d had to order the part in, but Forest Buehl, who’d worked at the ag supply in Templeton since he was fifteen, could find any part for any tractor.

There was no snow on the ground. Everything looked flat and gray brown and empty, even in West Prairie City, even with cars and trucks slant-parked all along Main, it looked empty. As if the apocalypse had come several weeks ago, and Hallie and the few other people still around had just completely failed to notice.

She looked for shadows along the road, torn between annoyance that Death hadn’t talked to her in weeks and something that felt an awful lot like relief. She wanted it over with, wanted her chance to say it flat out—no. No, she wasn’t going to be, didn’t want to be, would never be Death. Wanted to stop looking for him in every shadow on every road.

Maybe he hadn’t been back because he’d changed his mind.

That thought pissed her off almost as much as his absence, because he’d brought her back. He’d asked the question. And they’d saved him, she and Boyd, saved the under—saved the world, to be clear. The least he could do was show up.

There were only three trucks in the parking lot when Hallie reached the ag supply. Tiny dry flakes of snow swirled in the air. On the ground, they clustered together, then swept across the parking lot in narrow white lines. A band of clouds sat low on the horizon, not moving closer or farther away, just sitting there, like foreboding.

The ag supply was so brightly lit in contrast to the gray day outside that Hallie had to stop just inside the doorway for a minute and blink. It was a big space—horse supplies and tack to the left, boots and denim to the right, the parts window clear in back. There were two women on the cash registers, one of them Jenny Vagts, who gave Hallie a half smile before she went back to ringing up three pairs of jeans, two rubber calf feeders, and a blue salt lick for a white-haired rancher in a sheepskin jacket and black hat.

By the time Hallie had walked the length of the store to the parts window, Forest Buehl had the fan belt sitting on the counter waiting for her.

“Thanks for getting it in so fast,” she said. Hallie couldn’t help studying Forest every time she saw him. He’d disappeared back in the fall, along with two dozen other people, dropped straight into the under when the walls had gone all thin. All of them, at least the ones Hallie’d talked to, claimed they didn’t remember a thing from the moment they fell through until they were back in the world. Hallie found that hard to believe, that they didn’t remember, figured even without conscious memory, the act itself had to have an effect. They’d gone to the land of the dead and come back. That ought to make a difference. So far, she couldn’t see that it had.

“You want to pay for that here?” Forest asked her.

“Sure,” Hallie said. “I don’t need anything else.”

Forest took the fan belt back from her and turned to the register. “You know we’ve still got slots open for Saturday-night bowling.” He took her debit card and ran it through the slot. “It’s pretty informal, not leagues or nothing. But, you know, if you’re looking for something to do…” He shrugged, like the shrug was actually the punctuation.

“You know I’m kind of dating someone, right?” she said. More than kind of, actually, but she always said it like that, like it might change at any moment, like she didn’t quite trust that it was a relationship, which she didn’t.

Rather than looking embarrassed, as she’d expected, he looked at her with a grin and handed her card back to her. “Everybody knows that,” he said. “You know how it is around here—everyone’s business is everyone’s business. But, I guess what I mean is, it’s the same people every Saturday, and I like ’em and all, but you can get tired of the same people and the same topics and things turning out pretty much the same way all the time. Someone comes back who’s around our age and done some different things, I like to ask. Most people don’t come, but most people are just looking to leave town again as soon as they can. Hey, it can’t hurt, right?”

“I’ll think about it,” Hallie said, and was surprised that she meant it.

He slid the fan belt into a paper bag with a stamped logo on it. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s all I’m saying.”

Back out in the truck, Maker was watching two delivery trucks jockey for position at the loading dock on the side of the ag supply, focused on them like their maneuvering was the most interesting thing it had seen in days. Hallie tossed the bag with the fan belt onto the floor of the truck, started the engine, and turned on the heater.

“Is Death ever coming?” she asked without looking over at Maker.

“Death always comes,” Maker said.

“To…” She was surprised it was hard to say, because usually nothing was that hard for her. Think of it and do it, all one thing, because anything else was too slow. “To
take
me.” She had to bite down to get the word out, and she changed it as soon as she had. “To ask me again.”

Maker turned to look at her and licked the tip of its nose. “Did you answer?” it asked.

“He didn’t give me time to answer,” she said.

“You can answer anytime,” Maker said.

Hallie put the truck in gear, but she didn’t pull out of her parking spot. “Really?” Because it didn’t seem right. Or likely.

“Anytime,” Maker repeated. “Anytime he can hear you,” it added. Then it jumped through the window, disappearing before it reached the ground.

Hallie thought about it all the way home. As usual with Maker the question was, what exactly did it mean? Anytime Death could hear her? Saying it out loud? That didn’t seem likely. In a dream? How would she convince her dream self to do it? Go into the under? She didn’t know how and even if she did, would she? If she could do any of those things, would he just accept her answer? Why had he asked her at all, come to that? Couldn’t he simply make her do it? Grab her and take her to the under and say—hey, it’s all on you now?

There were too many questions and not enough answers and she still wanted to know what she’d wanted to know for months—what were the real choices, what could she really choose?