Cold Black Earth Read online

  Billy gave her a sharp look. “Not just girls.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. Friend of mine did some work for him once and at the end of the day the old bastard propositioned him.”

  Rachel gaped at him. “That’s unbelievable.”

  “That’s what I said. But my friend swore it was true. Not that he came right out with it. It was, like, subtle. Like, ‘Why don’t you stay and have supper with me and we’ll watch some movies.’ Nothing you could take to court or anything. But the dude said the message was pretty clear.”

  “Yuck.” Rachel set her cup down. “Yuck. That’s awful. I have to say, I never heard anything like that. That’s disturbing.”

  “Well, you been gone a long time. Maybe he wasn’t that way when you were around. I don’t know. But that’s why nobody wanted to work for him. Word gets around.”

  Rachel sat with her eyes closed, hand to her face, feeling the horror again. When she opened them she saw Billy staring at her, looking worried. “I’m sorry, Aunt Rachel,” he said. “Whatever the hell he was, I don’t mean to make light of it.”

  They exchanged a long look, and Rachel could see the pain in her nephew’s eyes; he had his own horrors to remember. “How long does it take before you feel normal again?”

  That was not a good move, Rachel thought, watching Billy’s expression harden. She was groping for common ground, but she could see she had blundered. “What,” he said. “After you find somebody dead? I don’t know. I didn’t find my mother. I just went to the funeral. All I can tell you is, I ain’t felt normal since.”

  “I’m sorry, Billy.”

  He shrugged, tucking into the eggs. “Not your fault,” he said, and Rachel could tell she had lost him.

  12

  “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Roger. “Starting with why he chose Ed Thomas.” He was warming his hands on the mug of coffee Rachel had set in front of him, his fur-lined trooper’s hat on the table at his elbow. “It was before the snow and the ground was close to frozen, but the state forensic guys are pretty good. They found tracks from two vehicles, yours on the drive and one other which was all over the place. That’s got to be Ed’s pickup. If Ryle was there, he either walked in or he rode in with Ed.” Roger hesitated, looking at Rachel, then said, “The amount of blood around the kill site helped them. They found two sets of footprints and were able to identify Ed’s, so they’ve got something to go on.”

  Coolly, Rachel said, “I think I managed to avoid stepping in it. But I’d be happy to let them look at my shoes.”

  Roger’s eyes fled hers. “They haven’t asked. What we’re thinking is that maybe Ed picked him up hitchhiking.”

  “Would he do that?” said Matt. “I’d say he was more the type to run a hitchhiker off the side of the road.”

  “Who knows? The killer got there somehow. Maybe he flagged him down on a pretext, like his car broke down or something. But then why would Ed take him back to his place?”

  “For gas? I think Ed still had a tank in the yard. But I’m having trouble seeing Ed putting himself out for anyone like that.”

  Roger shrugged. “Well, there’s other reasons you might bring someone home.” He stared into his coffee with a look of distaste.

  Rachel and Matt traded a look. “Like what?” said Matt.

  Roger took a sip of coffee. Eyes on the tabletop, he said, “Just speculating here. But when we searched Ed’s house we found what I’d call a fairly large stash of pornography. Not all of it, uh, heterosexual.”

  “Oh, God, poor Ruth,” Rachel breathed.

  “She may not have known anything about it. He probably kept it hidden as long as she was around. Anyway, it’s all speculation, like I said. Just one reason why he might have brought a hitchhiker home. And then had him go off on him. It would fit the profile for Ryle. According to what I’ve seen, sexual abuse as a child was a big factor in his pathologies. But we really don’t know anything. For that matter, there was no sign anybody besides Ed had been in the house. The door was unlocked, but there was no disturbance inside. Beyond the general mess, anyway. Ed wasn’t much of a housekeeper.”

  Rachel wondered if she was the only person in Dearborn County who hadn’t seen through Ed. “Awful, awful,” she said quietly.

  “Funeral’s tomorrow,” said Matt. “Closed coffin. I guess we have to go.”

  “Of course we have to go,” said Rachel. “Whatever else he was, Ed was our father’s friend. And his wife was my friend.”

  “We may be the only ones there.”

  “That would surprise me,” said Roger. “That would surprise me a whole lot.”

  The last church service Rachel had attended had been her wedding in Jezzine, Lebanon, in a five-hundred-year-old church, smoky with incense and echoing with strange chants. There wasn’t going to be any of that at Trinity Lutheran Church in Ontario, but as far as Rachel was concerned the simple white frame construction with its squat steeple and vista of open fields beyond was all a church should be; she was through with exoticism.

  There were four TV station vans parked within a block of the church. One was from Peoria, two were from the Quad Cities and one had come all the way from Chicago. “He did it,” said Matt, easing to a stop down the block from the church and throwing the pickup in park. “Otis Ryle put us on the map.”

  “I have a feeling it’s a map we don’t want to be on.” Rachel made no move to get out of the truck. “Will they know who I am?”

  “Not until somebody points you out to them. Which should take about a minute.”

  “Terrific.”

  Matt gave her a long look. “We can turn around and go home if you want.”

  She thought about it. “No. I’d feel like I chickened out. I’m here for Ruth.” She reached for the door handle.

  A sparse crowd of perhaps two dozen people milled in front of the steps. Matt had put on a suit, but he was a rarity. Nobody dresses up for church anymore, Rachel thought. The best-dressed people in the crowd were the TV reporters, two men and a woman, identified by the mikes in their hands and an air of fretting about their hair. There was apparently no filming going on at the moment, the cameras sitting idle on their tripods and the crews—the most slovenly of all those present—peering at their equipment or blowing cigarette smoke up into the wind.

  They went slowly up the sidewalk, a few heads turning as they approached. “Do you still come every Sunday?” Rachel asked, prey to a sudden devastating sweep of longing for a certainty she had lost years before.

  “I don’t make it in every week,” Matt said. “And I stopped trying to make Billy go when he was about fourteen. But I get to feeling guilty if I miss too much.”

  Rachel had given up feeling guilty as her faith waxed and waned; she figured the ongoing torment of doubt was between her and God and required no public adjudication. “I stopped going years ago,” she said.

  “Well, you’ll be the belle of the ball. Old Martha Erickson was asking about you just the other day. She seemed to be under the impression you had become a Muslim.”

  Rachel had to stop and turn her back on the throng, her frazzled nerves giving way.

  “You OK?” said Matt, full of concern.

  Rachel stood hunched with her face in her hands, giggling uncontrollably. “A Muslim,” she managed to gasp.

  Matt put an arm around her shoulders. “I told her you only had to wear the veil on Fridays.”

  Rachel had to ride out another spasm of suppressed laughter before she recalled what was lying in the coffin inside, killing the mirth instantly. She took a few deep breaths. “I’m OK,” she said. Matt handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes.

  A benefit of the attack was that she had given a perfect imitation of grieving distress in full sight of the crowd, and they shied away from her as she approached the church steps.

  Except, of course, for the TV people. The Peoria crew had gotten the jump on the others, and a well-groomed youngster in a camel-
hair coat came trotting down the sidewalk, microphone in hand and look of professional gravity on his face. “Ms. Lindstrom?” he said, accosting her.

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say.”

  She might as well have spoken in Arabic. “I’m told you were the one who found the body.”

  “Fuck off,” said Matt, and they brushed past him. Rachel saw that a camera was trained on her and lowered her eyes. The two other reporters made tentative approaches as she and Matt navigated the crowd, but Matt fended them off. They stopped to shake a few hands. Nobody had anything to say beyond the greetings; the atmosphere was strained, like a party where something embarrassing had just happened. They went up the steps and into the church.

  Here in the vestry were more people they knew: The Larsons were there along with a few other neighbors, mostly elderly. Ed Thomas had shed friends over the years, but they were turning out now, whether from loyalty or morbid curiosity Rachel could only wonder. A man Rachel had never seen before, stooped and gray in an ancient polyester suit, was introduced to her as Ed’s brother Dick from Warrensburg. He looked dazed, blinking wetly at everyone and occasionally mumbling something nobody bothered to ask him to repeat. After an uncomfortable round of platitudes, Rachel followed Matt into the sanctuary, where the closed coffin sat on a bier at the front.

  Her mind wandered during the service. The pastor was in his thirties, plump and high-voiced. There was no eulogy and his message was brief, a hasty rehashing of the scripture, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Nobody appeared much comforted. The church was barely half full and most of the congregation had seen the backside of sixty. Rachel tried to focus, to find solace in the ritual, but found it hard.

  Afterward the church emptied fast. Standing on the steps in the chill, Rachel saw that all three television crews were occupied, interviewing people they had snagged from the congregation. She and Matt made their good-byes and started down the steps. Ed Thomas’s brother was in a knot of people at the foot of the steps talking to a man in a trench coat; Rachel knew she’d seen him recently but couldn’t place him. “Who’s that talking to Ed’s brother?” she said when they had cleared the crowd.

  “Mark McDonald,” said Matt. “We saw him at the basketball game.”

  “Right. What’s he doing here?”

  Matt cast a look over his shoulder. “From the look of things, I’d say he’s trying to get his hands on Ed’s land. And if I had to bet I’d say he’s going to get it. Ed’s brother doesn’t look like the type of man to drive a hard bargain.”

  “Where does a convicted felon get the money to buy farmland?”

  “It’s not his money. He works for DAE.”

  “What’s DAE?”

  “That’s the big ag company that’s trying to buy up all the land around here. Dearborn Agricultural Enterprises. The word is they’re gonna grow corn for ethanol. They’ve been throwing money around the county, driving up land prices. I heard they made Ed an offer and he told them to go to hell. You’d think if anybody would sell, he would. Cash in and go live in Florida. But he was a stubborn old bastard. Go figure.”

  On the drive home Rachel sat thinking of Ruth Thomas, married but childless, watching her husband grow bitter and vicious as the years went by, devoting herself to other people’s children. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

  “I know,” said Matt, glancing over. “He was a jerk, but Dad liked him. It’s like losing a little bit of Dad that was left.”

  “It’s Ruth I’m crying for,” said Rachel.

  “Ah,” said Matt. He sighed.

  And myself, Rachel thought. I’m crying for me, too.

  13

  The world outside was bleak: pale sky and mottled earth, wind rattling the windows and trailing dustings of snow across the frozen ground that stretched away into a colorless nothing at the horizon. Matt had gone to town again, on errands unknown. Billy had gone rocketing down the drive in the Dodge and wheeled east, sliding on the gravel. Rachel cleaned up the lunch dishes, puttered aimlessly, turned the television on and then off again, and finally gave up. She put on her jacket, went upstairs, walked to the end of the hall and opened the door, and mounted the narrow stairs that led to the attic.

  It was cold up here and darker than she remembered; as she reached the top of the stairs, stooping so as not to hit her head on the rafters, she saw that the light from the round window at the far end was blocked by stacks of boxes. The attic had filled up since she had last been up here, no doubt the result of her dead sister-in-law’s makeover of the house. Here was her father’s trunk, there her mother’s garment bags, thrown carelessly in a corner. She picked her way through the maze toward the window, light growing as she neared it.

  There was still open space by the window, and if anything the place was more private than ever, shielded from the stairs. Rachel settled on the floor with her back against a wall of boxes, turned up the collar of her jacket and hugged her knees, and looked out the round window across the fields. She could make out the water tower in Rome, two miles distant. Beyond that was the limitless earth.

  Rachel had dreamed of Fadi early that morning, a beautiful dark-eyed golden Fadi, laughing at her and holding out his hand, on a terrace in an impossible, precipitous city hanging far above a turquoise sea. Rachel had awakened in the cold gray dawn and lain in her bed finally certain that the man she had loved and the world he had given her were gone forever.

  The sobs she had been suppressing for weeks came as great heaves. Rachel sobbed until she ached, looking out across the fields through her tears, in despair as vast as the world outside.

  She cried to exhaustion and fell silent, head against the wall, cheeks glistening with tears, mucus running down onto her upper lip. The air was cold enough that she could see her breath, and she watched it rise through the light from the round window. A step creaked on the attic stairs.

  She held her breath. She had not imagined it. Someone was coming slowly up the stairs. Her mind began to work rapidly: Had she locked the door after Billy left? Would she have heard someone breaking in? Had she been heard?

  Why else would someone be creeping up those steps?

  Her heart was thumping madly. Keep silent and he won’t know you’re here, Rachel thought, knowing that was infantile even as she heard the steps come softly across the attic floor. Fight then, she told herself, seeing Ed Thomas’s sundered arm in the jaws of a beast and knowing she would never win a fight with the man who had done that.

  Then you are going to die, she thought. The adrenaline made her stir at last, sucking in breath as she discovered she very much wanted to live. She had gotten one leg under her, preparing to rise, when Billy stepped out from behind the boxes.

  They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. “Hello, Billy,” she said.

  “You OK?” He was a bad boy, gaunt and menacing in his black leather jacket with his hair framing his long face, but the look in his eyes was alarmed.

  Rachel closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Not really. But I’m not going to kill myself. I promise.” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of the jacket, and then stalled, awkwardly, face covered with snot and nothing to wipe it with.

  “Here.” He produced a blue paisley bandanna from inside his jacket. “It’s clean.”

  Rachel took it and blew her nose, wiped her face clean. “I’ll wash it for you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He was staring down at her with an absorbed look.

  Her heart rate was beginning to subside. “I’m sorry. That was a callous thing to say. If you want to sit down I’ll try and tell you why I’m falling apart up here.”

  Somewhat to her surprise, Billy shoved a box out of the way with his foot and lowered himself to the floor. There was just enough room for them to sit facing each other with their knees drawn up and touching side by side, feet tucked against the other’s hip. Billy reached inside his jacket again, and this ti
me he brought out a stainless steel half pint flask. He twisted off the cap and offered it to her. “Here you go. Good for what ails you.”

  Bad boys have their uses, Rachel thought, putting it to her lips. It was bourbon and it burned a little, but it was good. “Thank you,” she said, handing it back. “I was about to ask you a really stupid question.”

  Billy took a sip and replaced the cap. “What’s that?”

  “I was about to ask if you’d ever been betrayed by someone you loved.”

  He laughed at that, a short ironic grunt. “Yeah, you could say that.” He frowned out the window, the westering light showing up the fine lines of his face. “Brain chemistry,” he said.

  “Brain chemistry?”

  “Yeah. That’s the only way to look at it. It was just brain chemistry. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t really trying to punish us. It just seemed like it.”

  “I think that’s probably about right,” Rachel ventured.

  “But it was Dad’s fault, too. Shit, we were happy in the other house. I was, anyway. I couldn’t see any reason to move. But he was like, no, we have to keep the house in the family. The Lindstrom farm, the century farm, all that shit. So we moved over here. And the house I grew up in is just standing there empty.”

  “Well, the farm’s really important to him.”

  “Yeah.” Billy’s tone of voice told her what he thought of the farm.

  Rachel hesitated and then said, “When you’re handed something like that, built up over the generations, you don’t take it lightly. And that’s all I’m going to say in his defense.”

  “Nah, I know.” He looked away out the window again. “But I didn’t ask to be born into this family. None of this was my idea. But somehow I’m supposed to say, oh sure, I’ll be happy to take over, spend the rest of my life staring down bean rows, never get more’n twenty miles away from where I was born.” The look on his face had gone sullen. “Fuck that.”

  Rachel waited a while and said, “So what do you want to do?”