The possibilities are as endless as our horizon.
At noon, the Starks, who own the Breeze Inn, sit in one of Flo’s booths. They answer our questions tersely. Mrs. Stark admits they talked to the stranger when he checked in. He kept to himself. Had been here two days. Hadn’t ordered any of those extra TV channels. The Starks didn’t know if he had any visitors. They didn’t find any binoculars among his belongings, no camcorder either, just an empty Minolta and a metal briefcase they hadn’t tried to open. There was a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on the nightstand.
No, they didn’t know when he was at the motel or when he was out in the field, so to speak. They had twelve rooms and prided themselves on the privacy reserved for their guests. No, they didn’t think he was having an affair. He was a middle-aged man, just like you see in the background of movies or at the mall.
The sheriff, who wears his holster strapped underneath that reassuring gut, is tight-lipped as he and Deputy Dina examine the dead man, his motel room, our faces. They find fingerprints on the gun, alibis in the bar. If they have a suspect, we don’t know about it. And a suspect would be reassuring. Someone to blame. Someone to target. Someone who would let us relax, knowing the killer and his accomplice are locked away.
With no suspect, everyone is suspect. People start asking what Jim was doing on Sig’s land. It was hunting season, but Billy insisted Jim hadn’t asked permission to be there. Maybe Jim murdered the investigator and couldn’t stand to wait till Billy got around to finding the body. And then there’s Meg Walker, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “So she carries a gun,” Flo says. “How would she ever find it in that purse of hers?”
“Laugh all you want,” John Junior says. “I’m telling you, she gets a look in her eye.”
“So does every woman who sees you,” my uncle says. “You ask me, Duke Miller has the most to lose. What if Uncle Sam makes Duke reimburse all the workers’ comp payments? There goes his bar. His house. His wife.”
“That bar’s his life.”
“Some life.”
A man is dead. There has to be a reason.
The sheriff and the deputy drive to the funeral in Helena, where there is already said to be talk of naming something after the inspector. The Sullivan Building. Or maybe Sullivan Street.
The widow comes up a week later. The sheriff’s wife offers to let her stay with them, but Mrs. Sullivan wants to stay where her husband did. She reserved his room for a week. She walks around town in a daze. We don’t know what to do. Meet her eye and nod? Give her privacy to grieve by glancing away and pretending we don’t know who she is?
The Ladies’ Auxiliary takes over homemade buns and salads. Mr. Stark puts his daughter’s old dorm refrigerator in the room so the food will keep. In the end, Mrs. Sullivan stays just two nights before quietly bundling her husband’s things into the trunk of her Chevy. Folks in town take care of her bill.
Late fall, it already feels like winter with flurries of snow swirling along the Hi-Line. Farmers feed their animals, then come in. Harvest long over, they have time. All morning, they sit in one of my booths. They talk taxes. Politics. Murder. I like the cadence of their voices, smooth as the cream they pour in their decaf.
“Remember the Johnson case?” one asks.
“It’s been what, twenty years now?” my uncle responds.
“No, thirty.”
It’s hard to understand how they let an entire decade slip from their grasp. The minutes of my life tick by so slowly.
The Johnsons were accountants, from Arizona originally. After a forty-year career here on the plains, he wanted to return there for good. The cold had seeped into his bones and maybe even a part of his brain. She wanted to stay in the home where she’d raised her kids and now spent time decorating with her son’s old wrestling trophies and her daughter’s photography. But Old Man Johnson wasn’t sentimental. To get her around to his way of thinking, he doused the house and burned it down. She retaliated the only way she knew how: she grabbed her daddy’s rifle and shot him. The judge, who we call “Catch-and-Release,” was understanding. She’d been provoked. Still, he said, she couldn’t stay in Montana. And that was her sentence.
“Duncan McKenzie,” my uncle says.
The men look deep into their cups.
I wasn’t alive when he raped, tortured, and strangled Lana Harding, a young teacher. Years of legal pirouettes keeping him on death row have not kept McKenzie slim. Most people want him to hang, but he’s so fat that a noose would rip his head clean off his body. Frankly, no one sees a problem with this.
That murder happened not far from a one-room schoolhouse in another Montana field. Years later, my uncle still tears up when he thinks of Lana and her parents.
But these cases are different. The Johnsons were from Arizona. McKenzie was born in Chicago. We could console ourselves that these killers were not from here. But whoever killed Sullivan is.
Snow continues to come down, flakes glint on the garden and whisper along the sidewalk, the first of the season that stick. When I come back from feeding the steers in the barn, Mindy is thrilled because KSEN announced that today is a snow day. For one day, no blaring bells, no soggy fare in the lunchroom. It is the middle of the week and her time is her own.
While she puts her pajamas back on, I get ready for work, tying my brown apron over my uniform, a sherbet-orange dress.
“Do you have to go?” asks Mindy, holding up the Parcheesi board.
“Waitresses don’t get snow days.” When had I sailed from salutatorian to waitress?
“Just a few more months,” she says, echoing the words I keep telling myself.
“I don’t want you driving those roads!” my aunt — probably attached to her curling iron — yells from the bathroom. “Why don’t you call in and tell ’em you can’t make it?”
I perk up at the pity, but my uncle says, “She can handle herself.”
Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad about going in to work. I tell Mindy to get dressed again because I know she won’t want to stay alone on the farm. “You can help me wrap silverware in napkins.”
Uncle Jarl started my truck and scraped its windows, so by the time Mindy and I step into the cold, the cab is warm. The drive to town is only fifteen miles. Up the dirt road onto the Hi-Line, which runs parallel to the tracks, which runs parallel to the Canadian border. The sky is white, the highway is white. The snowplow passed by earlier this morning, but the wind has already whipped the snow off the skinny shoulders and flung it back on the road. On days like this, the road feels narrower than ever, an ice rink rather than an artery that leads to the heart of town. I crawl along at forty, grateful my uncle has weighed me down with feedbags that stop the Ford from fishtailing.
We walk through the door of the Town Dump just as KSEN announces that the highway patrol decided to close the highway, 120 miles of whiteout. My first thought is, why couldn’t they have decided before Mindy and I got in the truck? My second thought, as I pass behind the counter and hang up my coat, is that if the snow keeps up all day, we might be stuck in town and have to spend the night at Flo’s. My third thought almost makes me drop the carafe as I pour myself a coffee. Among us is the killer. He can’t get far and neither can we.
At the counter, Mindy swivels on the stool. The daily ballet begins. Though the wind revs up to forty miles an hour, locals aren’t afraid to drive short distances. It feels like most everybody passes through for a cup of coffee or Flo’s hot chocolate, to marvel out the window at the snow or to complain about winter before it even starts.