TWENTY-FIVE
Mac had two hours before April and Maggie would arrive to resuscitate the Bird’s Nest for another evening. April would yell hell if she caught him tilting his lance at anything except what Rogenet needed to prove Mac’s full-time residency in Linder County. Maggie wouldn’t; the dining-room hostess would simply roll her eyes.
He started online. The Rockford Register-Star had put the old story in its Web archives. Pribilski had been a local boy, and the accounts were respectful. He’d honored himself with the U.S. Marines, and was well liked by his fellow workers at the DeKalb-Peering Telephone Company. A photo in uniform showed him to be nice-looking, with a broad Slavic face and blond hair.
The Rockford paper had ginned up their depiction of Betty Jo Dean. They’d used the swimsuit photo The Democrat had run, and reported that the killings had occurred under a full moon, in words that subtly inferred Betty Jo had been a temptress who’d lured the innocent, unsuspecting young man to his death on lovers’ lane. The paper had reported the seemingly endless list of leads Chief Deputy Reems was pursuing, noting that all were coming up dry.
Mac leaned back in his chair. He always felt uneasy around Reems the few times he’d talked to him. The man projected a false heartiness, an artificial bumpkin’s smile that never got to his eyes. Clamp’s eyes were coyote’s eyes, always searching, always registering, always hunting. Still, it must have taken such eyes to chase out the unsavory elements that had dirtied Grand Point for so many years.
It must have been particularly galling to those eyes to have never found the murderers of Pauly Pribilski and Betty Jo Dean.
He switched off the computer, went out and drove to the courthouse. The sheriff’s department was in the basement.
‘Clamp around?’ he asked the desk sergeant.
The middle-aged man smiled. ‘Clamp’s never around. He likes to keep moving.’
‘I need to talk to him about an old case.’
‘Which case?’
‘Betty Jo Dean.’
The desk sergeant’s smile went away. ‘Clamp still takes that one personally.’
‘Nothing’s ever been learned?’
‘Why are you digging in that?’
‘A constituent asked about it.’
‘I’ll tell Clamp you dropped by,’ the sergeant said, finding something to look at on his desk.
Mac went up the stairs, crossed Second Street and walked two blocks south. Like all the buildings close to the courthouse, the brown brick library was old. The plaque outside said it had been built with funds donated by Andrew Carnegie in 1908. The poster inside said their collections had outgrown the facility and they needed new benefactors.
‘May I help you?’ the woman behind the desk asked. Her curt tone suggested she was interested in no such thing.
She wore no nametag; everyone knew everyone in Grand Point. Except Mac. He didn’t know the woman’s name, but he recognized the curtness. After the indictment, it was everywhere.
‘You’ve got the Democrat on microfilm?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
‘How about the Rockford Register-Star?’
She got up with a sigh, led him down to the basement with a sigh and unlocked an old oak door. With another sigh. A solitary microfilm reader sat on a chipped, gray metal table. She switched it on to warm it up and walked to a beige metal cabinet. Opening the twin doors, she asked, ‘What do you need to see?’
‘June, 1982.’
For an instant, she seemed to freeze in front of the rows of small boxes. The she said, ‘Here we go,’ and handed him a box.
He looked at its label. ‘This says 1981.’ He handed it back to her.
Her hand shook, taking it from him. ‘My mistake.’ She put it back, and made a show of looking again.
Even standing well behind her, Mac could see the obvious gap in the row of film boxes. The first and second half-years of the Rockford paper for 1982 were missing, just as Pam the waitress had said.
The librarian made a nervous little laugh. ‘I surely don’t understand this.’
‘No matter, I’ll come back,’ he said.
She was obviously lying. She’d known those films were missing. Likely enough, she knew they were never coming back, either.
He walked north to the True Value hardware store and climbed the adjacent stairs to the office of the Peering County Democrat. He’d gone there once to be interviewed during the mayoral campaign. Horace Wiggins hadn’t bothered to conceal that his interest was a sham, a formality. Like Jen Jessup, the Democrat’s publisher had made no secret of his support for the then mayor, Pete Moore.
Only the assistant, a dour woman in her sixties, was in the office. It was rumored that she was the publisher’s mistress. That had to be well back in the day, for it was hard to imagine the pinched-face woman writhing beneath anyone, even one as equally pinch-faced as Horace Wiggins.
‘Horace be back soon?’ he asked her.
‘Lunch,’ she said, adding pointedly, ‘with Pete Moore.’
‘Lunch with an ex-mayor certainly sounds like fun,’ Mac said, with a grin.
The assistant made a frown, deepening her already descending crevasses.
‘You’ve been here since Horace took over the Democrat from his father, right?’
‘1979.’
‘The library says they don’t have microfilms of your old issues.’
‘We’ve got them going back to 1937.’
‘On microfilm, or disc, or file?’
‘Actual issues. Horace keeps them in his garage.’ She took a long, weary breath to show annoyance. ‘How can I help you, Mr Bassett?’
‘I thought Horace might like to hear my side of the indictment story.’ Wiggins had run the Linder County state’s attorney’s indictment verbatim, but hadn’t bothered to call for Mac’s response.
‘Bit late, aren’t you?’
‘Truth is always timely.’
‘I’ll be sure to pass that along.’
He walked down the stairs before the poor woman’s face cracked into pieces.
It was only when he got to the Bird’s Nest that he realized he’d blown off his constituent hour at the Willow Tree. Maybe it was time. No one was going to show up anymore.
The two women in his life were readying the restaurant for the dinner hour, except they no longer called it that. Now they called it the prayer hour, that time of day they prayed for people to show up.
April, the ex-Mrs Bassett, was in the kitchen. Tall and statuesque, she towered over their head cook, furious at his most recent infraction, whatever that might have been. She didn’t bother to nod at Mac as he passed through.
There was no nonsense to April. Except for agreeing to marry Mac – something she rectified with divorce as soon as she came to her senses, she liked to say – she was a high-speed practical woman, long on concentration, short on tolerance. Seeing her now, berating their cook, Mac was reminded of the first time two priests from the local parish stopped in for a drink. They’d been fishing in the Royal River and were dressed in shabby clothes. ‘April,’ Mac had called out when she’d breezed into the bar, focused on a clipboard, ‘I’d like to introduce you to two Fathers from town.’ April had looked up, made a quick study of their clothes and their unshaven faces. ‘If they’re priests, then I’m the frickin’ Virgin Mary,’ she’d said without breaking stride on her way into the kitchen.
The priests had had the good humor to laugh. Mac had had the relief to laugh, too.
April’s domain was the kitchen. She was comfortable in heat and chaos, amid things that had sharp edges or banged loudly.
Maggie Day moved more softly. Shorter than April, and thinner, she favored straw cowboy hats, tinted rimless glasses and loose, black clothing. He and April had known Maggie for years. She’d been the hostess at a popular Linder County restaurant and had helped out, from time to time, at their dinner playhouse. They’d considered themselves lucky when she’d agreed to come out to Grand Point to run their dining room.