Tallgrass (9 page)

“OH,” MOM SAID, GLANCING
at Granny, and then at me as she sat down hard in her chair. Granny was sewing placidly, not paying attention to the sheriff. His words had made no impression on her. But they had on me. I stared at him, barely breathing, and I prayed Mom wouldn’t find some chore for me to do upstairs. I needed to stay. Susan was my friend. I had to know what had happened to her. Mom made a halfhearted waving motion at me to tell me to be still, but I hadn’t been about to say anything. I wasn’t absolutely sure what the word
ravished
meant, but I had a pretty good idea. I pulled my elbows into my sides and stared at the table.

Susan was a warm, sweet girl, like a bunny. How could anybody hurt her? I wondered. Just a few days before, I’d gone to her house, and we’d worked a thousand-piece puzzle she’d gotten for Christmas. The picture on it was of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, and Susan said it made her want to visit a cliff dwelling. She asked if Cliff Palace had an elevator, and we laughed. It was nice that Susan wasn’t self-conscious about her crutches. She had invited me back the next day, but I didn’t like puzzles much. Then Buddy came home, and I forgot about Susan. Maybe she stayed up late last night working on the puzzle, I thought, and somebody saw her through the window. If I’d finished the puzzle with her, she’d have been in bed, safe. I’m sorry, Susan, I said to myself. Although I was in the safest place I knew, the kitchen of our farm, with Buddy and Dad to protect me, I was scared. I’d never been so scared in our house before.

“That poor thing,” Mom added. “I’ll bake a cake.” Like all farm women, Mom’s reaction to bad news was to take food to the bereaved. It helped them, and it gave her a chore that made her feel useful. I wished I had something to do.

“She was an awful nice little girl. What happened to her, Hen?” Dad asked. Dad looked almost ready to cry—at least I thought he did. I’d never seen him cry. He glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it, too: What if that had happened to me?

“I guess I’ll set down.” Sheriff Watrous unbuttoned his coat but didn’t take it off. He dropped into a chair while Dad got up and poured himself coffee, then put the pot on the table. The sheriff waited until Dad took his seat before he spoke. “It looks like the little girl woke up in the night and went outside to use the backhouse. She got the polio a few years back, you know, and was crippled up and couldn’t manage the stairs, so her folks had her to sleep in a room near the kitchen door. This morning, when Elmo Reddick got up, he found the door wide open and the snow blown in. The storm was over by then. At first, he thought his girl was outside, but then he saw the snow was piled up on the floor, and there wasn’t no footprints in it. So he figured she’d gone outside in the evening and hadn’t latched the door good when she came back in. You know how the wind was blowing last night, hard enough to take a door right off the hinges.” He shook his head for emphasis. “Course, it wasn’t like that storm two years ago, or was it three?”

Mom cleared her throat, prodding the sheriff to forget about the storm and get on with what had happened to Susan. She poured herself more coffee, although she just held the cup and didn’t drink. “Go on, Sheriff Watrous,” she said. I stared at him without blinking, hoping he’d get the hint to move along.

“When Elmo looked in the bedroom, the girl wasn’t there. So the two of them, Elmo and Opal, went outside looking for her. They were afraid she’d gone out and got lost in the storm. You know how these prairie blizzards can be awful bad.”

We all nodded. Plains storms were deadly. With the snow swirling around, you could lose your sense of direction and freeze ten feet from your back door. Men put up ropes between their houses and the barns in the winter so they wouldn’t get lost. “And they found her?” Mom asked, agitated that Sheriff Watrous was back on the weather.

“Opal found her back of the barn, covered with hay. She thought Susan’d crawled in there to keep warm. She was about to wake up the little girl, but then she saw the blood. Even then, Opal said, she didn’t believe her girl was dead, because she looked so peaceful.” The sheriff leaned back on two legs of his chair, thought better of it, and eased the chair back down. “Then Elmo went to pick her up, and they saw little Susan’s throat had been cut, like it’d been sliced with a sickle, and her legs was . . .” The sheriff looked at Mom and said, “Well, she was disarranged. And she didn’t have on her nightdress. She was froze to the hay with her blood. Naked she was.” He pronounced the word
necked.

I looked at the table, embarrassed for Susan. What if I’d been murdered and Mom and Dad had found me naked, and the sheriff had come and looked at me? My insides got all balled up as I thought of Susan outside in the storm without any clothes, her arms and legs and back icy with the cold, how she couldn’t have gotten away from the man because she couldn’t run with her crippled legs. My own hands grew cold as I wondered who had taken her out there and what he’d done to her. I started to cry. Buddy put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. Without looking at me, Dad reached over and put his hand on top of mine.

The sheriff watched me a minute, maybe hoping I’d get up from the table. When I didn’t, he continued. “Elmo stayed with her, and Opal came for me in that big old truck of theirs—don’t know how she made it over the roads, but she did—and me and the coroner was the ones had to tell them for sure that their little girl’d been“—he looked at Granny, who was still sewing—“been taken liberties with, you might say.”

“Been raped,” Dad said, looking over the sheriff’s head.

“Yes, sir.” Beads of sweat stood out on the sheriff’s face, although it was not hot in the room. “It brings a lump to a fellow’s throat.”

“Any idea who did it, sir?” Bud asked. Everyone looked at the sheriff then, including Granny.

The sheriff shook his head. He picked up his cup, which was empty, and reached for the pot, but it was empty, too. Mom got up to make fresh coffee, turning on the water in the sink to fill the teakettle and rattling things around more than was necessary. “I wish I had cookies left, Sheriff Watrous, but Bud’s eaten every last one of them. You know how these boys are. They don’t feed them so good in the army,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. I can’t say as I’d care for food just now.”

“Oh, those were real good cookies. We gathered the black walnuts ourselves last fall. October, I believe it was. Granny and I.”

Dad said, “Hush, Mary,” and she was quiet.

“You ask who done it, and I tell you I’ve got no idea a’tall,” the sheriff told Bud.

“They have a hired man,” Dad said.

“It wasn’t him, ’cause he was in town all night. One of the girls upstairs over Jay Dee’s Tavern vouched for that. We asked her right after we took the body to town. No, sir, somebody else was in that yard, and the poor little girl must have bumped into him when she went out to do her duty.”

“How come she went outside instead of using the chamber pot?” I asked.

Sheriff Watrous jerked up his head, then looked at me so fiercely that I stared at the oilcloth again and began tracing a flower with my fingertip. “That’s a good question, young lady. You know, I wasn’t thinking right. A man, now he’d get up, but a little girl like that would use the thunder mug under the bed, especially in a storm. Her father said he believed she’d gone to the backhouse, and I never stopped to ponder it.” His head went up and down few times. “You know what that means, don’t you, Mr. Stroud?”

“It means somebody came in the house after her,” Bud said before Dad could answer.

“That’s about right,” the sheriff said. It was a horrible thought, a person coming right into the Reddicks’ house to get Susan. What if someone had come into our house after me?

“I bet somebody’d been watching her, and he knew where she slept,” Bud said.

“And knew Reddicks don’t lock their doors,” Dad added.

“Well, that’s not much of a deduction. There’s only some that lock their doors, even now, with the camp open. Besides, it wouldn’t matter if they did. You can get into most any house around Ellis with a skeleton key.” The sheriff took out his pack of ready-mades and asked Mom if she minded if he smoked. Dad got out the makings and offered them to Bud, who shook his head. Then Dad rolled his own cigarette, struck a kitchen match, and lighted the sheriff’s cigarette and his own.

“Who’d be watching her?” Bud asked.

“That’s the question, ain’t it?” the sheriff said. “That’s why I stopped to talk to you folks.” He turned to me. “You ever see anybody watching little Susan, somebody who oughtn’t to be?”

I thought that over, wishing I had an answer, hoping I could come up with something more important than an observation about a chamber pot. I hadn’t seen any tramps around, and none of the boys at school paid much attention to Susan. I shook my head.

“Didn’t think so,” the sheriff said. “Mr. Stroud, anybody coming from town last night would have gone right past your place on the Tallgrass Road.”

“Unless they took to the section roads,” Dad told him.

“Not last night. Those roads was too drifted over.”

“We didn’t see anybody,” Dad said, looking around the table. We all shook our heads. “Hearing’s something else. There are folks driving up and down that road all hours of the night, even last night. I wouldn’t have known who it was.”

Then Bud asked about Beaner, and I could tell by the way Dad nodded that he was wondering about Beaner, too.

“First name I thought of.” The sheriff said he’d gone over to the Jack place right after talking to the girl at Jay Dee’s and had had to wade from the road through three-foot drifts. “They were pure driven snow. Nobody came in or out of that farm since the storm started, and Beaner was inside the house. Besides, mean as Beaner is, I don’t know as he’d do something like this. He’s a bully, but he’s not a killer.”

Bud asked about Pete and Danny, but the sheriff said they were snowed in, too. “Besides, the only time they get into trouble is when Beaner puts them up to it,” he added.

“I can’t see any local boy doing this,” Mom said. “Maybe there’s a workman left in town, somebody who came in to build the camp.”

“The camp,” the sheriff said slowly.

Dad said, “Hen, I don’t reckon—”

“I don’t like to think it, either, Mr. Stroud, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense, ain’t it? Somebody’s been looking out at that little girl, waiting for a chance at her, and the Reddicks live as close to the camp as you do.”

Mom said, “Oh!” and looked at me, and I knew she was thinking that if it were somebody at the camp and he’d looked east instead of west, he would have come to our farm. I hadn’t considered the Japanese when Sheriff Watrous asked me if anyone had been watching Susan, and I tried to recall if I’d seen any Japanese near her farm. But the Reddick place was in the opposite direction from town, and the Japanese didn’t go that way. And because Susan was on crutches, she wouldn’t have walked down the road past Tallgrass. Besides, the Japanese looked away when we passed them on the road. But what if it was a Japanese boy, and he’s hiding in a gully, watching our house right now? I thought. Perhaps he knew Buddy was here, and that was why he went to Susan’s place instead of ours. He might be marking time until Buddy leaves. Or is the person who killed Susan a white man, someone I know? He couldn’t be. Nobody in Ellis would do such a thing. I wondered what I would do if the bad man come after me. I wasn’t crippled, so I could run, but maybe I’d be so afraid that I’d just curl up and die, too.

“I was hoping you could tell me something so’s I wouldn’t have to go out to the Tallgrass and question those folks. That’d sure stir up trouble.” Sheriff Watrous sighed and got up, touching his hat to Mom. He said he had to return to town to take care of things at the jail, since his deputy had taken off for Denver for the holidays. The sheriff was planning on going back to the Reddicks’ in a couple of hours, and he wanted Mom and Dad to ride out with him. After that, he’d stop at the camp and ask around. “Mr. Stroud, you have a level head about those folks. I’d like it if you was to come along.”

“I reckoned you’d say that,” Dad told him.

Dad turned to Bud, who raised his hands before Dad could speak and said, “I was planning on staying right close to home today.”

“I’d be glad for it,” Dad said.

BY THE TIME THE
sheriff came back from town, Mom had baked a layer cake—which I iced with caramel frosting—fried up a chicken, and gone to the cellar for a jar of green beans that we’d bottled last summer. With the side roads so bad, Mom said, women might not be able to get to the Reddick farm for another day, and she didn’t want Mrs. Reddick to have to worry about cooking. “Maybe if there’s food, they’ll eat a little. It’ll keep up their strength.”

“I expect Mrs. Reddick’d appreciate the aid and comfort a woman’d bring her,” the sheriff said.

“You sure you feel up to it, Mother?” Dad asked, and the two of them exchanged a glance.

“Of course, I do.” She explained to Sheriff Watrous, “I’ve been a little tired lately is all.”

Dad studied her a moment then turned to the sheriff. “Reddicks are awful fond of Rennie,” he said, and I jerked up my head, because I hadn’t asked to go with them. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. It would be creepy. But I figured maybe I owed it to Susan. Ever since the sheriff had told us about her, I’d felt guilty that I hadn’t gone back to her house to finish the puzzle. I turned to Mom and waited for her answer.

Dad and Mom exchanged glances, then Mom nodded, and the sheriff said, “Bring her along.”

“We’ll be back after a bit,” Dad told Bud.

Dad drove Mom and me in Red Boy, behind the sheriff’s car, and when we turned into the Reddick farm, Mom sighed and said, “There’s no cars and not many tracks here. I was right, Loyal. Nobody’s come yet to grieve with them.”

“The Reddicks don’t have a phone. Maybe nobody knows what happened,” I said.

“And that fool sheriff never thought to call the neighbors. What’s come over the man? These folks could starve to death, with nobody to bring them a meal. If you ask me, Sheriff Watrous ought to find another line of work. He’s got no more common sense than a rooster.”