Cold Black Earth Page 13

  A few seconds went by. Rachel expected jocularity, dismissal. Instead Matt said, “Sit tight, I’ll be right home.”

  “I don’t want to spoil your evening. I can stay here for a while.”

  “Nah, I was about ready to leave anyway. You want me to pick you up?”

  “I can make it a half mile down the road by myself, I think. I just want you to be there when I get home. I want you to check all the closets and make sure nobody’s hiding under the beds. I’m just having an attack of old-fashioned crybaby-scared-of-the-dark.”

  “Well, I can understand that. Give me ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll call you when I’m home, OK?”

  “OK. Thanks.” Rachel clicked off and sat with a hand over her face, eyes closed. Karen pulled out a chair, sat and gently grasped her other hand.

  Rachel looked up when Clyde came into the kitchen carrying a revolver and a box of shells. He sat down and said, “You’ve handled firearms before, right?” He was looking at her with concern, having second thoughts maybe about entrusting his Smith & Wesson Model 10 to a mere slip of a girl.

  Rachel shrugged. “I’ve shot the .22 a lot. Handguns, once or twice. I could use the safety lecture.”

  Clyde gave it to her, showing her how to break out the cylinder and load the shells, then emptying it again and explaining how the double action worked. “You can shoot it when it’s not cocked, but it takes a hard pull. Once you cock it, though, it’ll go off if you look at it funny. So be careful.”

  Rachel nodded. “Thank you, Clyde. I’m fervently hoping I never have to use it.”

  “That makes two of us. Just remember, shooting it’s the easy part. The real trick is anticipating, getting the thing out and pointed at the right person, heading off trouble if you can, so you never have to pull the trigger.”

  Rachel loaded the cylinder, swung it home and pushed the box of shells back across the table. “I think if I need more than six shots I’ll be in trouble so big, a gun won’t help me.”

  The look on Clyde’s ancient seamed face was dead serious. “If you need more than one, you better hope the cavalry’s coming.”

  When Rachel pulled up at the back door, Matt’s truck was parked there and lights were blazing in the house. Feeling foolish, she paused on the step with her key in her hand and her purse dangling heavier than usual on her arm. Leave the gun in the car, she thought, and then remembered her dread of the creaking empty house. Keep it with you, she decided. Under your pillow, cradled at your breast.

  A noise penetrated her awareness and she turned to look out over the vast black countryside with its thin scattering of lights. A high distant keening was just perceptible far off in the night; it puzzled her but after a moment she decided it was a car horn, blaring away stupidly. Stuck, no doubt; nobody would stand there leaning on the horn for minutes on end. The driver was probably frantically trying to cut it off. But it was disquieting; quickly she went inside.

  Matt was on the computer in the den, bringing up data on the commodities markets. Without looking away from the screen he said, “So, did he try and kiss you?”

  Rachel laughed. “No, he was a perfect gentleman, start to finish. Of course, I drew a line in the sand as soon as we sat down.”

  “Probably scared him to death.”

  Rachel set her purse on the floor, flopped onto the bed and leaned back against the wall. “I think Roger’s probably pretty hard to scare.”

  “If you’re a meth head or a drunk, maybe. I think women terrify him.”

  “Could be. I think he’s very lonely.”

  “Well, losing a wife can do that to you.”

  Rachel watched him for a moment and then got up and went and put her arms around him, bending over him. “I’m sorry, Matt.”

  He shoved away from the computer. “Well, there’s no crying in baseball. I’m OK. I get Billy straightened out, I’ll be happy.”

  Rachel sank back onto the bed. “Roger says Billy’s basically a good kid. He says he’s too smart for the people he’s hanging out with. I think that means he’ll come to his senses.”

  The look Matt gave her was weary and completely free of illusions. “He can start anytime, far as I’m concerned. Now, you’re sitting right where I hope to be laying in about a minute and a half. I’m calling it a night.”

  Rachel picked up her purse, heavy with the weight of the gun. She started to tell Matt about the gun but hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She leaned over and kissed him on the top of his head. “Good night.”

  “Night. You OK, for sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come knock on the door if you need company.”

  Suddenly she was overcome with love for him; all that pain he must have inside him and here he was, offering to comfort her. Rachel opened her mouth to tell him how much she loved him but all that came out was “Thanks. I will.”

  Rachel awoke in the depths of the night. For a moment she was bewildered; darkness was universal, and she could have been anywhere on the face of the earth. A great fear roiled, black and lethal, just below the level of her awareness.

  Then she was fully awake in her bed, the old woolen blanket rough against her cheek. A door had opened and closed, downstairs. The back door, she thought. Someone has just come into the house.

  Over the thumping of her heart she told herself it was Billy coming in, and she was a fool to lie here trembling like this. A short time passed; there was a distant murmur of voices. Rachel checked her watch: Three o’clock had come and gone. The voices sounded again, low and terse. She lay in bed trying to identify them: One was Matt’s, but whose was the other?

  She got up and put on a bathrobe and slippers. She stood at the head of the stairs in the dark, listening, until she was sure. Matt and another man were talking quietly somewhere below. She could not make out the words. There were footsteps and then the sound of running water.

  Rachel tightened the belt on her robe and descended the stairs. The hall light was off, but light shone in the kitchen at the end of the hall and spilled from the bathroom halfway along it. Someone was running water at the bathroom sink. Rachel stepped softly down the hall and halted at the door of the bathroom.

  Dan Olson stood bent over the sink in a T-shirt, washing something from his hands and forearms, the muscles of his arms rippling. Pink water swirled in the white porcelain sink. On the floor at Dan’s feet lay a sweatshirt, mottled red.

  Rachel sucked in a sharp breath. Dan’s head snapped toward her, his face grim and haggard. “Jesus, Rachel!” He leapt back from the sink, wet hands held away from his body. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  They gaped at one another. Breathless, Rachel said, “What are you doing here?”

  Dan opened his mouth and nothing came out. Matt appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. Dan said, “I gotta wash my hands.”

  “For God’s sake, what happened?”

  After a long second Dan said, “Somebody else got killed.”

  Rachel put a hand on the doorjamb to steady herself. Matt said quietly, “There’s been another murder. We got the call.”

  “Who?” said Rachel, her voice nearly failing her.

  Dan answered. “Carl Holmes,” he said, bending to the sink again. “My uncle.”

  Rachel had made herself a cup of tea. Dan and Matt had sucked down a beer apiece and started on a second. “Bob Dayton found him,” said Matt. “About three miles from here, on the Bremen road. He heard the horn going off and got in his truck to go see what it was. He was so freaked out he took off down the road, got all the way to Bremen before he pulled over and dialed 911. County emergency calls get routed to the local first responders, which is us. Dan got there about a minute after I did, and then Tom Carlson and Andy Wilson showed up, and then finally a sheriff’s car. We hung around till the detectives showed up.”

  “Wish to God I was never there,” said Dan, staring at the tabletop.

  This is knowledge I don’t want, thought
Rachel, but I have to share the load. “He was in his car?”

  “In his pickup,” Matt said. “When I shone the light on him”—Matt squeezed his eyes shut, grimacing, rubbed his face with both hands—“I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was seeing at first.” He opened his eyes and looked at Rachel. “His throat was cut.”

  “He was halfway out, like he’d gotten the door open and tried to run,” said Dan. “But he never made it. He just kind of twisted and got, like, wedged with his elbow against the horn. The cops yelled at me for moving him, but I couldn’t stand there and listen to that noise. That’s when I got the blood on me. There was a fuck of a lot of it.”

  Rachel rose from the table. She walked to the sink and stood with her arms crossed, looking at her reflection in the window. “Sorry,” said Dan behind her.

  Matt said, “The guy must have flagged him down, hitched a ride or something. The truck was in the ditch just shy of the stop sign at 600 East. The guy must have waited for him to slow down, then cut him and got out and run.”

  “Run where? Where’s there to run to?”

  Matt said, “The closest house is the Nylands’, a couple of hundred yards north. The sheriff’s guys checked there right away, as soon as they got some backup. Everybody was OK there, no sign of trouble. They’re checking all the farms around there. Nobody knows where he went.”

  “How could he just disappear?”

  Nobody had an answer for that. “I gotta go tell Aunt Peg,” said Dan, his voice ragged. “I told the sheriff’s guys I’d do it. What the fuck was I thinking? I can’t do it. It’ll kill her. This’ll put her over the edge. Ah, shit.” He took a pull on his beer. “I gotta go tell her.”

  Silence reigned. Dan made no move to get up. Rachel swayed a little, her eyes closed. How strong can I be? God, if this is a test, give me the strength to pass it. She opened her eyes and said, “Three miles from here?”

  Matt looked up. “That’s right.”

  “So he could be right outside by now. He could be watching the house.”

  “He could be, I guess. If he’s invisible. There are a lot of cops on the roads right now.”

  Dan said, “He could be going across fields. Nobody’d see him from the roads.”

  “Then he’s leaving tracks. And the cops’ll find them. Soon as daylight comes. They were looking when we left.”

  “He had to have a vehicle,” said Dan. “He’s still got Ed’s truck, I bet. Maybe he staged a breakdown, flagged Carl down, pulled the knife and cut him, then took off in the truck. Who the fuck knows?”

  Matt sighed. “If he’s driving Ed’s truck around, I’m not so worried about him hanging around outside the house. It means he’s got a hiding place somewhere.”

  They all thought about that for a few seconds. Rachel said, “Clyde gave me his gun. I’ve got it upstairs by my bed.”

  A look of weariness, or maybe resignation, passed briefly over Matt’s face. “Keep it there. I think we’re OK as long as we keep the doors locked. I don’t know that this guy’s going around breaking into houses.”

  “Not yet,” said Dan. “Shit, I gotta go tell Aunt Peg.” He shoved away from the table and stood up.

  Matt watched him as he stood up. “You OK to drive? You look like hell.”

  “I feel like hell. But I’ll make it.”

  In pressure-cooker situations in Iraq Rachel had found that sometimes the worst part was seeing what stress was doing to other people. Dan looked dazed, unfocused. Rachel saw his hand trembling a little where it rested on the back of the chair. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. You know it.” He turned to her and spread his arms, and they embraced.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Dan released her and made for the door. “Hang in there, pal,” said Matt, and he hugged Dan as well, throwing in a couple of thumps on the back. “You want me to come with you?”

  “No, I got it. My job. I shoulda done it first thing. What the fuck time is it? Christ, she’s probably woke up and gotten worried. She’s probably trying to call him on his cell phone. I gotta roll.”

  When Dan had gone, Matt and Rachel sat at the table staring at nothing. “This is bad,” said Matt after a while. “This is really, really bad.”

  Rachel was thinking about a beach in a sheltered cove on the island of Cyprus, where she and Fadi had lain in the sun and been happy. I want to be anywhere but here, she thought.

  Tires crackled on frozen gravel outside. Matt and Rachel traded an electrified look. “Billy,” she said.

  “Maybe. Go get that gun.”

  “Come on, Matt. It’s Billy.”

  They listened as the car pulled up, the engine shut off, a door slammed. When the key went into the lock in the back door, Matt exhaled. “Shit,” he said. “I’m freaked out now, too.”

  Billy came into the kitchen with his keys dangling from his fingers, wide-eyed. He stopped still when he saw them at the table. “You heard?” he said.

  Matt nodded. “We heard. Where you been?”

  “Trying to convince a couple of sheriff’s deputies I didn’t have anything to do with it. They’re all over the place out there. What the fuck’s going on around here?”

  “You tell me, son,” said Matt, shaking his head. “You tell me.”

  17

  When Rachel awoke groggy and unrested after a couple of hours of fitful sleep, it was past ten and the sheets of snow on the fields outside were gleaming in the sun. She came downstairs to find Matt in the kitchen talking to two strangers, obvious cops despite the plain clothes. One was heavy-set and gray, the other thin, fair and intense with a short military haircut. Introductions were made but Rachel forgot their names immediately, retaining only the fact that they were from the Illinois State Police. Matt sat at the head of the table bleary-eyed and bedraggled, and Rachel wasn’t sure he’d been to bed at all.

  “I was about to come and get you,” Matt said. “The, um, officers had a few questions. About Ed.”

  “Oh.” Rachel made for the coffeemaker. “OK. I made a statement already. I thought the guys I talked to were from the State Police.”

  “They were,” said the older man. “And we’ve got their report. We just wanted to go over a couple of things.”

  Rachel poured herself a cup of coffee and brought it to the table. “Like what a coincidence it is that both murders were discovered by people from the same family?” There was an awkward silence, glances darting around the table.

  With a hint of a shrug the younger detective said, “Well, technically speaking your brother didn’t discover it. He was the first on the scene after the call. But we don’t have any reason to believe it was anything but coincidence. If you’ve got any ideas about it being otherwise, we’d like to hear them.”

  Rachel shook her head. “No. Though I’m starting to wonder why our family seems to have a black cloud hanging over it.”

  It was Matt who answered the looks of keen interest from the detectives. “We’ve had some deaths in the family over the past few years,” he said.

  “Sorry to hear that,” said the older detective, managing to look sympathetic. He waited a second or two and said, “Actually, what I wanted to ask you was whether you had remembered anything more. The report says you were unable to remember what exactly you saw at the scene.” He was working hard to keep his expression neutral, but Rachel could see the skepticism there.

  She drew a deep breath. “I’m told it’s called traumatic amnesia. I can remember everything up until I went around the corner of the barn. I turned the corner and saw something terrible, and then the next thing I remember I was in my car, driving away. It’s hard to explain. I know I saw it, but I just have a blank there where there ought to be a visual memory.”

  The detective nodded. “You use the term traumatic amnesia. Is that a professional diagnosis? Did you get counseling, see a doctor about this?”

  She shook her head. “No. That’s not a professional diagnosis. It’s amateur sp
eculation.”

  The detectives traded a look, and Rachel knew what was coming. “I think you should see somebody,” the younger detective said. “Consult a doctor.”

  Rachel clasped her hands under the table to stop them trembling. “So I can remember what I saw? I’m not sure I want to.”

  “In case you saw something that might be of importance,” said the older man.

  “I saw exactly what she saw,” said Matt. “I was there in a few minutes. And then within half an hour the place was overrun with cops. There’s no need to make her go through something traumatic again.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Lindstrom, you can’t guarantee she saw exactly what you did. Not if there was a gap of a few minutes.”

  “I can tell you what I saw,” said Rachel. “I saw Ed Thomas’s body cut up in pieces. I know that intellectually. I just don’t have the visual memory, that’s all.”

  Again the detectives consulted each other silently. This time the older one said, “All right, we’ll leave that for the time being. I was wondering if I could go over a couple of other points with you.” He took her through her story, from hearing the chainsaw in the night to seeing the coyote. “You’re fairly certain about the time, when you heard the chainsaw going?”

  “I think it was close to midnight. That’s about all I can tell you. I looked at the clock in my room when I went to bed a few minutes later, and it was around twelve fifteen.”

  The cop nodded. “That correlates pretty well with what other people have told us.”

  “You mean I wasn’t the only one who heard it?”

  “Oh, no. Lots of people heard it, and they all pretty much agree on the time. That’s pretty helpful, actually, in pinning down the time of the attack.”

  Rachel felt a knot of tension ease deep inside her. She was not alone; this was not just her nightmare. “I wish I’d known what I was hearing,” she said.

  “By that time it was too late to do anything,” the older cop said.

  “Except maybe increase the chances of catching the guy.”