“That sounds wonderful. I’m sorry if I sounded a little peevish this morning.”
“Now, there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Peevish?”
“Uh-huh.”
“One of my mother’s favorites. You could throw your bunk bed through your second-floor window, and Mother would explain to the maid that you were ‘peevish’ that day. She was one of those soft, wilted flowers who never figured out a way to cope with the world, God rest her soul.”
“When did she die?”
“When I was twelve.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, my father took up the slack. I couldn’t have asked for a better father until I turned sixteen.”
“What happened, then?”
“I lost my virginity. One night in a cornfield, as a matter of fact. Some seniors were having the first spring kegger. My father hated my friends. He said they were beneath me and, looking back, I have to say he was probably right. Anyway, that night, I had two firsts — my first boy and my first drunk. I was a mess when I got home, and so naturally my father was curious and angry, and I told him. I shouldn’t have — it really wasn’t any of his business — but I was still pretty drunk so the words just came out. If my mother had been alive, she’d have taken me in her arms and held me and cried right along with me. But my father slapped me. He was almost insane. And it was all pride. He didn’t ask me how I felt or if I’d been hurt in any way. He just wanted to know who the boy was and what his father did for a living. He just couldn’t believe that his prim little daughter would have given herself to a member of the lower classes.” A wan laugh. “I never did get around to telling him that this boy had served a year in Eldora — you know, the reformatory. God, he would have gone berserk if he’d known that.”
“So after that you and your father didn’t get along?”
“Oh, we tried, both of us, we really did, gave it our best effort. But basically my father and I have never liked each other — there’s always been some tension there, if I believed in Freud I’d say we probably wanted to get into each others’ knickers — and so he’d give me very strict hours and I’d break them, and he’d buy me new cars and I’d smash them up, and he’d pack me off to boarding school, and I’d run away. I’m sure you’ve heard of girls like me before.”
I thought of the quiet, anxious, pretty woman who sat on my couch last night. I would not have deduced from her looks, her manner or her language this wild background she was portraying.
“Then there were all the usual problems with drugs and alcohol,” she said. “I have to admit I really put him through hell. No doubt about that.”
“Why is he so against you hiring an investigator for your daughter’s murder?”
“He thinks I’m the same unhappy, foolish girl who used to come in after curfew all the time and then throw fits when he confronted me. He’s very sorry that Maryanne died, but he thinks I’m just wasting my money and my time by not letting the police handle it. ‘Pathetic’ was the word he used just the other day.”
“I’m going to do my best, as I said.”
“I appreciate that. And I apologize again for being so—”
“—peevish.”
She laughed again. It was a nice, sweet sound. “I’ll give you a phone service where you can leave messages for me. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. And I’d appreciate hearing from you every few days.”
“You will. I promise.”
“Well, we’d better check out now. I have to go down the hall to Vic’s room and pound on his door till he wakes up. He could sleep through a bombing raid.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
Crayfish, shrimp tails, chicken entrails, hog melts, worms, night crawlers, live and dead chubs, coagulated blood, sour clams and frog pieces were all in my bait bucket when I went fishing that afternoon.
Figured this would be my last chance for a time, so I took advantage of it, doing a little bit of what they call drift fishing, wading out to the middle of the stream and staying there a couple of hours.
I saw yellow birds and red ones and blue ones, I heard dogs and owls and splashing fish, I smelled the rich dark spring mud of the riverbank and the piney scent of the woods and the aroma of hot sunlight on the denim of my shirt. I was on a gentle leg of the river that was almost a cul-de-sac. A doe stood in a clearing and watched me for ten full minutes and a water snake at least two feet long slithered up from a muddy hole, looked around, and vanished back into the hole again immediately, apparently not liking my company. A cow with cowy brown eyes and swinging cowy tits appeared in the same spot the doe had and took up the watch, trying to figure out just what it was this two-legged creature was doing out there in the middle of the gentle blue river.
Easy to imagine the time when the Mesquakie Indians had laid claim to all this rich land. See the gray of their campfire smoke against the soft blue sky, hear the pounding messages of their drums echo off the limestone cliffs to the north. As a boy I’d combed these hills for buried arrowheads, almost obsessive in my search. In all those summer days I’d found only one. I still had it in my bureau at home. Kathy had always referred to it as “the start of my Indian museum.”
I got home just at dusk, just when the invisible birds in the trees were making enough noise to awaken every Mesquakie laid to rest in the burial ground three miles to the west.
I got inside and turned the light on and said, “Damn.”
We’ve seen it in the movies so many times that we should be used to it: how a house looks after thieves have gone through it, trashing everything in their search for hidden treasure, your living quarters a jumble of scattered papers, neckties, overturned chairs, emptied desk drawers and magazines that had been riffled through and then tossed on the floor like so many dead splayed birds.
I had a good notion of what my visitor had been looking for and it wasn’t treasure. Not of the monetary kind, anyway.
He’d wanted something germane to the investigation of Maryanne Conners’s murder.
I worked my way through the house room by room. By nine I had everything pretty much fixed up, shoving a stack of paperbacks under the end of the couch where he’d broken the leg, putting all the classical CDs that had been Kathy’s back in their proper slots, wondering in a bemused moment what he thought of all my underwear and socks that had been worn down to little more than holes with elastic banding at the top.
I felt raped, and for all the coolheadedness I’d just bragged about to Nora, I wanted to get my hands on the bastard.
Six hours later, deep into the night, the cats snoring at my feet, the phone rang.
I picked up.
“Leave it alone, Mr. Payne. Just leave it alone.”
Perfectly androgynous voice. Perfectly.
“You understand, Mr. Payne?”
And then he-she hung up.
I lay back down in my bed of shadows.
Knowing that I was now lying on my back, Tasha took the opportunity to walk up my body and lie on my chest, which she had found a most inviting bed.
I hadn’t had to ask what the caller wanted me to leave alone.
8
Cellmate the first year is a fifty-one-year-old farmer named Renzler. Frank Renzler.
Frank, who has told him this story so many, many times, was a farmer with a wife and two kids. Bank foreclosed on him after two bad droughts in a row, so Frank couldn’t help it: one day he just picked up his hunting rifle and drove into town and blew away the banker. Took maybe one-eighth of his head off with two shots.
He cries, Frank does. No, check that. Not merely cries. Sobs. Lies on his bottom bunk and just goes nuts.