Rob comes in. “Hey, College Girl,” he says, and I grin.
Flo notices us smiling at each other. “Maybe I should take the posse table for a while.”
I shake my head, unwilling to give Rob up.
“Did you get that early admissions application in, College Girl? Did you...” Rob stops talking when John Junior sinks into the booth, still hungover. He should be just plain John — his dad’s been dead for a decade — but we call him Junior because he’s still the high school jock who copied Rob’s homework.
“Pity he and Nancy never had children,” Flo tells me. “Sometimes a man like that grows up at the same time as the kids.”
Ever the real estate agent, Brad Halsted goes around to each table and hands out flyers with photos of the house his agency is selling, like we all haven’t been inside the Thornton place a thousand times. He nods politely at Flo before sitting with Rob and John Junior.
We all watch the sheriff hold the door open for Deputy Dina. The holster at her waist accentuates the sway of her hips. Both of them look tired. The sheriff listens as she speaks. She’s much younger than him. If he desires her, he hides it well. When I finish taking their order, Dina tells me the night before was spent trolling the highway and pulling out-of-staters from ditches. They are always looking out for us. If we go down the wrong road, they will bring us back. I feel safe when they are here.
The farmers come in next. My uncle pulls off his old work gloves. His callused hands cup the beige mug. County trucks sidle up to the café and work crews bring in gusts of cold with them.
“Close the damn door!” Meg Walker yells from a booth close to the entrance.
One of them is the fiancé who jilted her at the altar twenty years ago, so no one takes offense. Another flirts with me. I don’t flirt back. He dated my best friend — she’s at Carroll College now — and I know what’s hidden behind those smiles.
“Leave her alone,” Jim Ballestreri warns him.
“No way,” Meg Walker tells her daughter as I set the bill between them on the table. “You’re not quitting, I worked too hard to get you on the squad!”
Meg comes up to the register to pay. She digs around in her Dooney & Bourke, and I wonder if she really has a revolver in there. Finally, she finds her checkbook and writes out the exact amount, $8.53. Anyone else would have made it for ten. She has the money to buy a $150 purse but can never seem to find a few quarters for a tip. I imagine her riding in the car with the stranger, things not going her way. I wonder if they were lovers. When she leaves, I tell Flo, “It’s easy to believe a bad tipper might be a murderer. No respect for rules or social contracts.”
“Hon,” Flo says, “it’s more complicated than that.”
But this is the lens through which I see people.
Snow is still falling, downy as dandelion fluff. It sticks to windshields, the parking lot, the wet sidewalk.
“Report came in yesterday,” the deputy says, just loud enough for everyone to hear. An informal press conference. No one makes a sound. “The Smith & Wesson .357 revolver on the seat of the car wasn’t the murder weapon.”
“It was a Colt .45 automatic,” the sheriff adds. He looks over at the posse. “A few folks around here have one.” He ambles over to the men.
“I thought it was suicide,” John Junior says.
“Oh, you thought,” the sheriff scoffs. “We almost missed finding the .45’s ejected shell casing way back under the front seat. The killing bullet blasted out the roof to who knows where, but the state crime lab in Helena says they can match the casing to the gun that shot it.”
“We’ll need to see your gun,” the deputy tells John Junior.
“That’s going a little far. You reading his rights?” Brad Halsted says. I’m surprised it is the real estate agent who speaks up for his friend, not the lawyer. My eyes skitter to Flo’s, and it dawns on us that Rob knows something about the murder.
“You want to get involved in this?” the deputy asks Brad Halsted.
The sheriff has more cards than anyone in town and he knows how to stack the deck. Brad’s son got a DUI his junior year of high school, and we’re all pretty sure he forgot to mention it on his college applications. He has two more years to go at Cornell. One phone call might change that. Shaking his head, Brad folds.
So does John Junior. “Spent half an hour looking for that casing,” he tells the sheriff. “It’s always some little thing.”
They escort him into the blizzard and the backseat of the squad car.
Someone exhales. I move to Mindy, still on the stool. She hugs me tight and I can feel her tremble. No one moves. No one speaks. For the first time, my uncle is silent. He sits in the booth, handkerchief in both hands, eggs over easy half-eaten on his plate.
There is no satisfaction. It’s not like TV with a standoff between the criminal and the law. It’s not an Agatha Christie novel with a soliloquy explaining why. Without a motive, it feels like a random game of Clue: the banker did it, in the field, with the automatic.
Over the next few days, facts flurry together. John Junior thought his wife was having an affair. He followed Nancy around town and saw her talking to Sullivan in his car, heads tilted together, behind the bowling alley. He didn’t know that she’d been gathering information about the Bar None feedlot, where she’d snuck in and taken photos of forty dead horses rotting in pens filled with soggy manure. We learn that it was Rob who picked up John Junior from Sig’s farm after the murder and drove him back to town. Not an accessory, but an accomplice nonetheless.
He still comes in early — Hey, College Girl, have you signed up for your classes yet? — trying to be friendly like before. We don’t talk to him. Flo pours his coffee now.
We’re glad Mindy’s back to tending her steer. Good thing too. It’s almost fair time. Theodore’s up to 1,200 pounds. She spends more time blow-drying his hair than I do mine. We still don’t understand how the killer could be someone we know, someone who contributed to my college fund every morning. “I smiled at a murderer while serving him breakfast,” Flo murmurs to herself. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen her fazed. After the trial, John Junior ends up in the state pen. We feel sorry for his mother. Folks shake their heads and say this never would have happened if John Senior were still alive.
You can see the wind today. It whips car antennas in the parking lot, it turns the pasture across the highway into an ocean of light-green waves. Tumbleweeds blow by the gas pumps, through town, on their way to the rest of the world. Won’t be long and I’ll follow.
Dark Monument
by Sidner Larson
Havre
Back when I was alive, we knew better than to chase yesterday, but here you are, blood of mine, a full-grown man with no more sense than those wandering orphan ponies we called catch colts.
I flew into Denver and then changed planes for Helena. It would take a couple more hours to get to Havre from Helena than from Great Falls, but I didn’t mind because it would allow me to drive through the healing space of Wolf Creek Canyon and give me time to think. I upgraded to the biggest rental car available in case I needed to sleep in it, tossed my duffel bag in the backseat, and hit the road around six p.m.
Havre, Montana. Shit. After nearly thirty years gone and now sixty-some years old, I was on my way back to Havre. Havre of the underground tunnels where hookers and Chinese railroad workers once roamed. Havre where the Indians were treated so badly in the old days that the Catholic Church had to send Black Robes to intervene with the other whites. Havre where my great-grandfather was the government scout and packer who found Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce for General Miles at the time of their desperate flight to Canada.