Still Life With Crows

Ten

Corrie Swanson sat on the little folding bunk in the lone holding cell of the Medicine Creek jail, staring at the graffiti that covered the peeling walls. There was quite a lot of it, and despite the variety of inks and handwritings, it was remarkably consistent in subject matter. She could hear the television set blaring in the sheriff’s office up front. It was one of those sick soap operas for housewives with empty lives, complete with quavering organ music and hysterical female sobbing. And she could hear the sheriff moving noisily around the office in his clown shoes, restlessly, like a ferret in a cage, rustling paper and making phone calls. How could such a short man have such big feet? And smoking, too—the place stank. Four more hours and her mom would be sober enough to come down and get her. So here she was, being “taught a lesson”—her mother’s words—listening to the comings and goings of the world’s most ratlike human being. Some lesson. Well, it wasn’t any worse than sitting at home, listening to her mother’s nagging or drunken snoring. And the folding bunk was at least as comfortable as the broken-down mattress in her own bedroom.

She heard a door slam in the outer office, footsteps, muffled greetings. Corrie recognized one of the voices. It was Brad Hazen, the sheriff’s son and her classmate, with his jock friends. They said something about going into the back to check out the TV.

Quickly, she lay down on the bunk and turned her face to the wall.

She heard them moving around the inner office. One of them started changing the television channels, finger held to the button as it clicked through one raspy channel after another: game shows, soaps, cartoons, all divided by loud blasts of white noise.

Search unsuccessful, the shuffling of footsteps and grunted comments began again. Corrie heard them pass the open doorway to the back room, where her cell was located. There was a sudden pause and then Brad spoke in a low undertone. “Hey guys, check out who’s here. Well, well, well.”

She heard them shuffling through the doorway, snickering and whispering. There were at least two of them, maybe three. No doubt Chad was one of them, and probably Biff, too. Brad, Chad, and Biff. The fucking Hardy Boys.

Someone made a low farting sound with his lips. There was suppressed laughter.

“What’s that smell?” It was Brad again. “Somebody step in it?”

More low laughter. “What’d you do this time?”

Corrie spoke without turning around. “Your Deputy Dawg John Q. Ratface left his car running, keys in the ignition, windows down, for half an hour in front of the Wagon Wheel while he refueled on eclairs. How could I resist?”

“My what?”

“Your Ripley’s Believe It or Not amazing chain-smoking eclair-to-shit converting dad.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” The voice was rising.

“Yourfather, dork.”

Muffled laughter from his two friends.

“What a twat,” Brad said. “At least I’vegot a father. Which is more than I can say for you. And you don’t exactly have much of a mother, either.” He cackled and someone—Chad, probably—made another disgusting sound with his mouth.

“The town slut. She was in this cell just last month, wasn’t she, on a drunk and disorderly. Like mother, like daughter. Guess the apple never falls far from the tree. Or in your case, the shit never falls far from the asshole.”

There was another burst of smothered laughter. Corrie lay still, facing the wall.

Brad resumed his whisper. “Hey, did you read the paper today? Says the murderer might be local. Maybe a devil worshiper. You fit the bill, with that fucked-up purple hair and black eye makeup. Is that what you do at night? Go out and do mumbo-jumbo?”

“That’s right, Brad,” said Corrie, still not turning around. “At the dark of each moon, I bathe in the blood of a newborn lamb and recite the Curse of the Nine Gates, and then I summon Lucifer to wither your dick. If you have one.”

This brought forth another muffled snicker from Brad’s friends, but Brad didn’t join in.

“Bitch,”Brad muttered. He advanced a step and lowered his voice still further. “Look at you. You think you’re so cool, all dressed in black. Well, you’renot cool. You’re a loser. And I’ll bet for once you’re not lying. I’ll bet youdo go out at night for a little animal killing. Or better yet, animal fucking.” He gave a low chuckle. “Because noman would ever want to screw you, you freak.”

“If I see anymen around here I’ll let you know,” Corrie replied.

She heard the door into the back room open and a sudden silence fell. The sheriff spoke, his voice low, calm, and full of menace.

“Brad? Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, hi, Dad. We were just talking to Corrie here, that’s all.”

“Is that so?”

“Right.”

“Don’t bullshit me. I know exactly what you were doing.”

There was a tense silence.

“You harass a prisoner of mine again and I’ll book you and lock you up myself. You hear me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Now get the hell out, you and your friends. You’re late for scrimmage.”

There was the sound of guilty shuffling as Brad and his friends left the cellblock. “You all right, Swanson?” the sheriff asked gruffly.

Corrie ignored the question. Soon the door closed and she lay there, alone once again, listening to the sounds of the television and the voices in the outer office. She tried to keep her breathing normal, tried to forget what Brad had said. One more year and she was out of this loser town, this butt-crack capital of Kansas. One more year. Then it was goodbye, Medicine Shit Creek. It occurred to her, for the millionth time, that if she hadn’t blown it in tenth grade she’d already be out of here. And now she had done it to herself again. Well, no use thinking about that.

The door to the outer office tinkled again. Someone new had come in. A conversation began in the outer office. Was it Tad, the deputy? Or her mother, sober for once? But no—the new arrival, whoever it was, spoke so softly that Corrie couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The sheriff’s voice, on the other hand, took on a hard edge, but Corrie couldn’t make out the words over the blaring of the television set.

Eventually, she heard footsteps enter the back room.

“Swanson?”

It was the sheriff. She heard him draw heavily on his cigarette and smelled the fresh smoke. There was a rattle of keys, a click as her cell was unlocked. The rusty iron door creaked as it opened.

“You’re out of here.”

She didn’t move. Hazen’s voice sounded particularly thick. Something had made him mad.

“Someone just made your bail.”

Still she didn’t move. And the other voice spoke. It was low and soft, with an unfamiliar accent.

“Miss Swanson? You are free to leave.”

“Who are you?” she asked without turning around. “Did Mom send you?”

“No. I am Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.”

God. It was that creepy-looking man in the undertaker’s getup she’d seen walking around town.

“I don’t need your help,” she said.

His voice still heavy with annoyance, Hazen said to Pendergast, “Maybe you should’ve saved your money and stayed out of local law enforcement business.”

But Corrie had grown curious despite herself. After a moment, she asked, “What’s the catch?”

“We’ll speak about it outside,” said Pendergast.

“So thereis a catch. I can just imagine what it is, you pervert.”

Sheriff Hazen issued a burst of laughter that degenerated into a smoker’s hack. “Pendergast, what’d I tell you?”

Corrie remained curled on the folding bed. She wondered why this Pendergast was offering to bail her out. It was clear that Hazen didn’t particularly like Pendergast. She remembered a phrase: the enemy of your enemy is your friend. She sat up and looked around. There he was, the undertaker, arms folded, looking at her pensively. The little bulldog Hazen stood next to him, arms squared, scalp glistening under the thinning crew cut, razor rash on his face.

“So I can just get up and walk out of here?” she asked.

“If that’s what you want,” Pendergast replied.

She got up, brushed past the FBI agent, past the sheriff, and headed toward the door.

“Don’t forget your car keys,” called Hazen.

She paused in the door, turned, held out her hand. The sheriff was standing there, dangling them in his hand. He made no move to give them to her. She took a step forward and snatched them.

“Your car’s out back in the lot,” he said. “You can settle up the seventy-five-dollar towing fee later.”

Corrie opened the door and went outside. After the air-conditioned jail, it felt like walking into hot soup. Blinking against the glare, she made her way around the corner and down the alley to the little parking lot behind the sheriff’s office. There was her Gremlin, and there, leaning against it, was the pervert in the black suit. As she approached, he stepped forward and opened the door for her. She got in without a word and slammed the door behind her. Slipping the key into the ignition, she cranked the engine, and after turning over a few times it coughed into life, laying down a huge cloud of oily smoke. The man in black stepped away. She waited a moment, then leaned out the window.

“Thanks,” she said grudgingly.

“It was my pleasure.”

She pressed the accelerator and the car stalled.Shit.

She restarted it, revved a few times. More smoke poured out. The FBI man was still there. What the hell did he want? She had to admit, he didn’t really look like a pervert. Curiosity finally got the better of her and she leaned out the window once again.

“All right, Mr. Special Agent. What’s the catch?”

“I’ll tell you while you give me a lift back to Winifred Kraus’s place. That’s where I’m staying.”

Corrie Swanson hesitated, then opened the door. “Get in.” She swept a heap of McDonald’s trash off the passenger seat onto the floor. “I hope you’re not going to do something stupid.”

The FBI agent smiled and slid in beside her as smoothly as a cat. “You can trust me, Miss Swanson. Can I trust you?”

She looked at him. “No.”

She popped the clutch and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving behind a pall of oilsmoke and a nice ten-inch pair of tire marks on the sheriff’s asphalt. As she careened out of the alley and slewed onto the street, she was gratified to see the stumpy little sheriff tumble angrily out the door and start to shout something just as her black contrail obliterated him from view.

Eleven

The commercial district of Medicine Creek, Kansas, consisted of three dun-colored blocks of brick and wooden shopfronts. It took Corrie three, perhaps four heartbeats to reach its edge. As she jammed on the accelerator, the rusted frame of the Gremlin began to shake. There was a pile of some three dozen tapes littering the space between the front seats: her favorite death metal, dark ambient, industrial, and grindcore music. She riffled through them with one hand, passing over Discharge, Shinjuku Thief, and Fleshcrawl before finally selecting Lustmord. The dislocated, eldritch sounds of “Heresy, Part I” began to fill the small car. Her mother refused to let her play her music out loud in the house, so she’d retrofitted a tape player to the old Gremlin.

Speaking of her dear, nurturing parent, it was going to be a bitch going home. By now, her mother would be half drunk, half hungover—the worst combination. She decided she’d drop this Pendergast guy off at the old Kraus place, then go park under the powerlines and kill a few hours with a book.

She glanced over at the FBI man. “So, what’s with the black suit? Somebody die?”

“Like you, I’m rather partial to the color.”

She snorted. “What’s this catch you were talking about?”

“I need a car and driver.”

Corrie had to laugh. “What, me and my stretch AMC Gremlin?”

“I came by bus and I’m finding it rather inconvenient to be on foot.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. The muffler is shot, the thing goes through a quart of oil a week, there’s no AC, and the interior is so full of fumes I’ve got to keep the windows open, even in winter.”

“I propose compensation of a hundred dollars a day for the car and driver, plus a standard rate of thirty-one cents per mile for fuel and depreciation.”

A hundred bucks was more money than Corrie had ever seen at one time. This couldn’t be happening, it had to be some kind of bullshit. “If you’re a hotshot FBI special agent, where’s your own car and driver?”

“Since I’m technically on vacation, I haven’t been issued a car.”

“Yeah, but why me?”

“Quite simple. I need someone who knows Medicine Creek, who has a car, and has nothing better to do. You fit the bill. You’re no longer a minor, correct?”

“Just turned eighteen. But I’ve got another year of high school. And then I’m out of this Kansas shithole.”

“I hope to have concluded my work here long before school begins next month. The important thing is, youdo know Medicine Creek—don’t you?”

She laughed. “If hating is knowing. Have you thought about what the sheriff’s going to think about this arrangement?”

“I expect he’ll be glad you found gainful employment.”

Corrie shook her head. “You don’t know much, do you?”

“That lack of knowledge is what I hope to rectify. Leave me to deal with the sheriff. Now, do we have a deal, Miss Swanson?”

“A hundred bucks a day? Of course we have a deal. And please, do I look like a ‘Miss Swanson’ to you? Call me Corrie.”

“I shall call you Miss Swanson and you shall call me Special Agent Pendergast.”

She rolled her eyes and swept purple hair out of her face. “Okay,Special Agent Pendergast.”

“Thank you, Miss Swanson.”

The man slid a wallet out of his suit coat and removed five hundred-dollar bills. She could hardly take her eyes off the money as he casually unwired her broken glove compartment, placed the bills inside, and wired it back up. “Keep a written record of your mileage. Any overtime beyond eight hours daily will be paid at twenty dollars an hour. The five hundred dollars is your first week’s pay in advance.”

He pulled something else out of his suit coat. “And here is your cell phone. Keep it turned on at all times, even when charging at night. Do not make or receive personal calls.”

“Who am I gonna call in Shit Creek?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you’d be so kind as to turn the car around and give me a tour of the town?”

“Here goes.” Corrie glanced in her rearview mirror to make sure the coast was clear. Then she swung the wheel around violently, braking and accelerating at the same time. The Gremlin slewed around in a one-eighty, tires squealing, and ended up pointed back in the direction of town. She turned to Pendergast and grinned. “I learnedthat playingGrand Theft Auto on the computers at school.”

“Very impressive. However, I must insist on one thing, Miss Swanson.”

“What’s that?” she said, accelerating back toward town.

“You must not break the law in my employ. All traffic rules must be strictly obeyed.”

“Okay,okay. ”

“The speed limit on this road is forty-five, I believe. And you have not buckled your seatbelt.”

Corrie glanced down and saw she was going fifty. She eased down to the correct speed, then slowed even further as they entered the outskirts of town. She tried to fish the seatbelt out from behind the seat, the car swerving back and forth as she drove with her knee.

“Perhaps it would be more convenient if you pulled off to the side of the road to do that?”

Corrie gave an irritated sigh and pulled off, retrieved the belt, and buckled herself in. She started up again with another screech of rubber.

Pendergast settled back. The passenger seat was broken, and he reclined into a semi-supine position, his head just barely at the level of the window. “The tour, Miss Swanson?” he murmured, eyes half closed.

“Tour? I thought you were kidding.”

“I am anxious to see the sights.”

“You must be on drugs. The only sights around here are fat people, ugly buildings, and corn.”

“Tell me about them.”

Corrie grinned. “Okay, sure. We’re now approaching the lovely hamlet of Medicine Creek, Kansas, population three hundred and twenty-five and dropping like a stone.”

“Why is that?”

“Are you kidding? Only a dipshit would stay in a town like this.”

There was a pause.

“Miss Swanson?”

“What?”

“I can see that an insufficient, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to language.”

It took Corrie a moment to parse what Pendergast had said. “ ‘Dipshit’ isn’t a four-letter word.”

“That depends on whether you hyphenate it or not.”

“Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Joyce all used four-letter words.”

“I see I am dealing with a quasi-literate. It is also true that Shakespeare wrote:

In such a night as this,

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees

And they did make no noise, in such a night

Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls,

And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,

Where Cressid lay.”

Corrie looked at the man reclining in the seat beside her, his eyes still half closed. He was seriously weird.

“Now, may we continue with the tour?”

Corrie glanced around. The cornfields were reappearing on both sides of the road. “Tour’s over. We’ve already passed through town.”

There was no immediate response from Pendergast, and for a moment Corrie worried that his offer would be rescinded and all that money in the glove compartment would vanish back into the black suit. “I could always show you the Mounds,” she added.

“The Mounds?”

“The Indian Mounds down by the creek. They’re the only thing of interest in the whole county. Somebody must’ve told you about them, the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ and all that bullshit.”

Pendergast seemed to think about this for a moment. “Perhaps later we will see the Mounds. For the present, please turn around and pass through town once again, as slowly as possible. I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.”

“I don’t think I’d better do that.”

“Why not?”

“The sheriff won’t like it. He doesn’t like cruising.”

Pendergast closed his eyes completely. “Didn’t I say I would concern myself with the sheriff?”

“Okay, you’re the boss.”

She pulled to the side of the road, made a nice three-point turn, and headed back through town at a crawl. “On your left,” she said, “is the Wagon Wheel Tavern, run by Swede Cahill. He’s a decent guy, not too smart. His daughter is in my class, a real Barbie. It’s mostly a drinking establishment, not much food to speak of except Slim Jims, peanuts, the Giant Pickle Barrel—and, oh, yeah, chocolate eclairs. Believe it or not, they’re famous for their chocolate eclairs.”

Pendergast lay motionless.

“See that lady, walking down the sidewalk with the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo? That’s Klick Rasmussen, wife of Melton Rasmussen, who owns our local dry goods store. She’s coming back from lunch at the Castle Club, and in that bag are the remains of a roast beef sandwich for her dog, Peach. She won’t eat at Maisie’s on account of Maisie being her husband’s girlfriend before they got married about three hundred years ago. If only she knew what Melton gets up to with the gym teacher’s wife.”

Pendergast said nothing.

“And that dried-up old bag coming out of the Coast to Coast with a rolling pin is Mrs. Bender Lang, whose father died when their house was burned down by an arsonist thirty years ago. They never found out who did it, or why.” Corrie shook her head. “Some think old Gregory Flatt did it. He was the town drunk and kind of nuts, and one day he just sort of wandered off into the corn and disappeared. Never found his body. He used to talk about UFOs all the time. Personally, I think he finally got his wish and was abducted. The night he disappeared there were some strange lights in the north.” She laughed derisively. “Medicine Creek is an all-American town, and everybody’s got a skeleton in his closet. Orher closet.”

This, at least, roused Pendergast, who half opened his eyes to look at her.

“Oh, yes. Even that dippy old lady whose house you’re staying in, Winifred Kraus. She may act pious, but it’s all a crock. Her father was a rum-runner and moonshiner. Bible-thumper, too, on top of that. But that isn’t all. I heard that when old Winifred was a teenager, she was known as the town vamp.”

Pendergast blinked.

Corrie snickered, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on in Medicine Creek. Like Vera Estrem, who’s doing the wild thing with the Deeper butcher. If her husband ever finds out, there’s going to be blood. Dale Estrem’s the head of the Farmer’s Co-op and he’s the meanest man in Medicine Creek. His grandfather was a German immigrant and during World War II he went back to fight for the Nazis. You can imagine what the town thought of that. The grandfather never returned. Screwed the whole family, basically.”

“Indeed.”

“We’ve got our share of nutcases, too. Like that tinker who comes through here once a year and camps out in the corn somewhere. Or Brushy Jim, who did one tour too many in Vietnam. They say he fragged his lieutenant. Everybody’s just waiting for him to ‘go postal’ one of these days.”

Pendergast had lain back in the seat again. He looked asleep.

“Anyway. There’s the Rexall Drug. That empty building is where the Music Shop used to be. There’s Calvary Lutheran Church. It’s Missouri Synod. The pastor is John Wilbur. A fossilized specimen if ever there was one.”

There was no response from Pendergast.

“We are now passing Ernie’s Exxon. Don’t get your car fixed there. That’s Ernie himself at the pump. His son’s the biggest pothead in Cry County and old Ernie doesn’t have a clue. And that old wooden building is Rasmussen’s, the dry goods store I told you about. Their motto is, ‘If you can’t find it here, you don’t need it there.’ I’ve always wondered where ‘there’ was. There’s the sheriff’s office on the left, but I hardly need to pointthat place out. And there’s Maisie’s on the right. Her meatloaf is just edible. Her desserts would give a hyena the runs. Uh-oh, I knew it. Here he comes.”

Corrie watched in the rearview mirror as the sheriff’s cruiser pulled out of the alleyway, lights flashing.

“Hey,” she said to the motionless Pendergast. “Wake up. I’m getting pulled over.”

But Pendergast seemed sound asleep.

The sheriff came right up behind her and gave his siren a crank. “Please pull off to the side of the road,” his voice rasped through the loudspeaker atop the car. “Remain inside your vehicle.”

It was the same thing that had happened to her at least ten times before, only this time Corrie had Pendergast in the car. She realized the sheriff probably hadn’t seen him, he was sunk so low in the seat. His eyes remained closed even through the siren and the noise. Maybe, she thought, he was dead. He certainly looked dead.

The door of the cruiser flung open and the sheriff came sauntering up, billy club flapping at his side. He placed his meaty palms on the open passenger window and leaned in. When he saw Pendergast, he jerked back abruptly. “Jesus!” he said.

Pendergast opened one eye. “Problem, Sheriff?”

Corrie enjoyed the look that came over the sheriff’s face. His entire face flamed red, from the fuzz-covered folds of skin piled up against his collar to the tops of his hair-clogged ears. She hoped Brad would age just like his father.

“Well, Agent Pendergast,” Hazen said, “it’s just that we don’t allow cruising back and forth through town. This is the third time she’s been through.”

The sheriff paused, obviously awaiting some kind of explanation, but after a long silence it became clear he wasn’t going to get any.

At length, Hazen pushed himself away from the car. “You may go on your way,” he said.

“Since you’ve taken an interest in our movements,” said Pendergast in his lazy drawl, “I should inform you that we’ll be driving through town again, and perhaps even a fifth time, while Miss Swanson shows me the sights. After all, Iam on vacation.”

As Corrie looked at the darkening expression on Sheriff Hazen’s face, she wondered if this so-called Special Agent Pendergast really knew what he was doing. It was no joke making an enemy like Hazen in a town like Medicine Creek. She’d been stupid enough to do it herself.

“Thank you for your concern, Sheriff.” Pendergast turned to her. “Shall we go, Miss Swanson?”

She hesitated a moment, looking at Sheriff Hazen. Then she shrugged.What the hell, she thought, as she accelerated from the curb with a little screech and a fresh cloud of black smoke.

Twelve

The sun was settling into a bloody patch of cloud along the horizon as Special Agent Pendergast exited Maisie’s Diner, accompanied by a slender man in a Federal Express uniform.

“They told me I’d find you in there,” the man said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

“Quite all right,” Pendergast replied. “I wasn’t especially hungry.”

“If you’ll sign for it now, I’ll leave everything by the back door.”

Pendergast signed the proffered form. “Miss Kraus will show you where to put it all. Would you mind if I take a look?”

“Help yourself. Takes up half the truck.”

The shiny FedEx truck was parked outside the diner, looking out of place on the dusty, monochromatic street. Pendergast peered into its interior. Along one wall were perhaps a dozen large boxes. Some had labels readingPERISHABLE—CONTENTS PACKED IN ICE .

“They’re all from New York,” the driver said. “Starting a restaurant or something?”

“It’s my deliverance from Maisie.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Everything seems to be in order, thank you.”

Pendergast stepped back and watched the truck glide off into the soupy evening. Then he began strolling east, away from the dying glow of the horizon. Within five minutes, he had left the town of Medicine Creek behind. The road stretched ahead like a dark faultline in the corn.

He quickened his pace. His errand was a vague one, an intuition more than a certainty. Intuition, Pendergast knew, was the end result of the most sophisticated kind of reasoning.

Twilight and crows rose from the fields, and the smell of cornstalks and earth drifted on the air. Headlights appeared, grew larger, and then a huge semi-trailer came shuddering past, leaving dust and diesel in its wake.

Two miles out of town, Pendergast stopped. A dirt track ran away from the road here, angling off to the left between walls of corn. Pendergast followed it, moving with long silent strides. The track began to rise more sharply, heading for a dark cluster of trees on the horizon, surrounding three dark low outlines framed against the dusky sky: the Mounds. Leaving the corn behind, the track turned into a trail. Ahead were the trees, giant cottonwoods with massive trunks, bark as rough as fractured stone. Broken limbs lay scattered on the ground, clawlike branches upturned.

As he entered the shadowy confines of the grove, Pendergast paused to look back. The land fell away in a long, gentle declivity toward the town. The distant streetlights formed a glowing cross in the sea of dark corn. The Gro-Bain plant lay south of town, a low cluster of lights all by itself. The creek lay between them, a meandering line of cottonwoods that snaked through the landscape of corn. As flat as the land looked at first sight, it had its gentle undulations, its rises and its bottomlands. The point on which he stood was the highest for many miles.

The summer darkness had fallen heavily on the land. If anything, the air had grown muggier. A few bright planets glowed in the dying sky.

Pendergast turned and walked deeper into the darkness of the grove, becoming virtually invisible in his black suit. He followed a trail that wandered uncertainly through rabbitbrush and oak scrub. After another quarter mile, Pendergast stopped again.

The Mounds were just ahead.

There were three of them, low and broad, arranged in a triangle, rising twenty feet above the surrounding land. The flanks of two of the mounds had worn away, exposing limestone ledges and heavy boulders underneath. The cottonwood trees were thicker here and the shadows were very deep.

Pendergast listened to the sounds of the August night. A chorus of insects trilled furiously. Blinking fireflies drifted among the silent trunks, their streaked lights mingling with the distant heat lightning that flickered to the north. A crescent moon hung just above the horizon, both horns pointed upward.

Pendergast remained motionless. The night sky was now blossoming with stars. He began to hear other sounds: the rustlings and scratchings of small animals, the flutterings of birds. A pair of close-set eyes glowed briefly in the dark. Down by the creek a coyote howled, and at the very edge of hearing, from the direction of the town, a dog barked a reply. The sliver of moon cast just enough light to see by. Night crickets began to chirrup, first one, then others, the sounds rising from the tall grass.

At last, Pendergast moved forward, toward the three dark mounds. He walked slowly and silently, his foot crackling a single leaf. The crickets fell silent. Pendergast waited until, one by one, they resumed their calls. Then he moved on until he reached the base of the first mound. Here he knelt silently, brushed aside the dead leaves, and dug his hand into the soil. He removed a fistful, rolled it between his hands, and inhaled.

Different soils had distinctive smells. This, he confirmed, was the same soil as that found on the tools in the back of Swegg’s car. The sheriff had been right: she had been digging for relics in the Mounds. He pinched some earth into a small glass test tube, stoppered it, and slid it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

Pendergast rose again. The moon had disappeared below the horizon. The fireflies had stopped blinking; the heat lightning grew less frequent, then ceased altogether. A profound darkness slowly enveloped the Mounds.

Pendergast moved past the first mound, then the second, until he stood at their center, three dark swellings growing gradually indistinguishable. Now the darkness was complete.

Still, Pendergast waited. A half hour passed. An hour.

And then, suddenly, the crickets fell silent.

Pendergast waited for them to start their chorus again. His muscles gathered, tensing. He could feel a presence in the dark to his right: a presence of great stealth. It was moving very silently—too silently even for his highly sensitive ears. But the crickets could feel vibrations in the ground that humans could not. The crickets knew.

He waited, tensed, until the presence was no more than five feet away. It had stopped. It, too, was waiting.

One by one the crickets resumed their chirruping. But Pendergast wasn’t fooled. The presence was still there. Waiting.

And now, the presence moved again. Ever so slowly, it was coming closer. One step, two steps, until it was close enough to touch.

In a single movement, Pendergast dropped to one side while pulling his flashlight and gun and aiming both toward the figure. The beam of the light illuminated a wild-looking man crouching in the dirt, a double-barreled shotgun pointing to the spot where Pendergast had been standing a moment before. The gun went off with a great roar and the man staggered back, shrieking unintelligibly, and in that instant Pendergast was on top of him. Another moment and the shotgun was on the ground and the man was doubled over, held in a hammerlock, Pendergast’s gun pressed against his temple. He struggled a moment, then went limp.

Pendergast loosened his grip and the man fell to the ground. He lay there, an extraordinary figure dressed in buckskin rags, a string of bloody squirrels slung around his shoulder. A giant handmade knife was tucked into his belt. His feet were bare, the soles broad and dirty. Two very small eyes were pushed like raisins into a face so wrinkled it seemed to belong to a man beyond time itself. And yet his physique, his glossy and extraordinarily long black hair and beard, told of a robust individual no more than fifty years of age.

“It is inadvisable to fire a gun in haste,” said Pendergast, standing over the man. “You could have hurt someone.”

“Who the hell are you?” the man shrilled from the ground.

“The very question I was going to ask you.”

The man swallowed, recovering slightly, and sat up. “Get your goddamned light out of my face.”

Pendergast lowered the light.

“Now who the deuce do you think you are, scaring decent people half to death?”

“We have yet to establish decency,” said Pendergast. “Pray rise and identify yourself.”

“Mister, you can pray all you like and it don’t mean shit.” He rose to his feet anyway, brushing the leaves and twigs out of his beard and hair. Then he hawked up an enormous gob of phlegm and shot it into the darkness. He wiped his beard and mouth with a filthy hand, front and back, and spat again.

Pendergast removed his shield and passed it before the man’s face.

The man’s eyes widened, then narrowed again. He laughed. “FBI? Never would’ve guessed it.”

“Special Agent Pendergast.” He closed the leather case with a snap and it disappeared into his jacket.

“I don’t talk to FBI.”

“Before you make any more rash declarations which will cause you to lose face later, you should know you have a choice. You can have an informal chat with me here . . .” He paused.

“Or?”

Pendergast smiled suddenly, his thin lips stretching to expose a row of perfect white teeth. But the effect, in the glow of the flashlight, was anything but friendly.

The man removed a twisted chaw from his pocket, screwed a piece off, and packed it into his cheek. “Shit,” he said, and spat.

“May I ask your name?” Pendergast asked.

The silence stretched on for a minute, then two.

“Hell,” the man said at last. “I guess having a name’s no crime, is it? Gasparilla. Lonny Gasparilla. Can I have my gun back now?”

“We shall see.” Pendergast bobbed the beam of his light toward the bloody squirrels. “Is that what you were doing up here? Hunting?”

“I ain’t hanging around the Mounds for the view.”

“Do you have a residence nearby, Mr. Gasparilla?”

The man barked a laugh. “That’s a funny one.” Again, when there was no reply from Pendergast, he jerked his head to one side. “I’m camped over yonder.”

Pendergast picked up the shotgun, broke it open, ejected the spent shells, and handed it empty to Gasparilla. “Show me, if you please.”

Five minutes of walking brought them to the edge of the trees and into the sea of corn. Gasparilla ducked into a row and they followed it down a dusty, beaten path. A few more minutes brought them to a cottonwood grove that lined the banks of Medicine Creek. The air here smelled of moisture, and there was the faint sound of water purling over a bed of sand. Ahead was the reddish glow of a campfire, built against a clay bank. A big iron pot sat atop the fire, bubbling, smelling of onions, potatoes, and peppers.

Gasparilla picked some pieces of wood off a pile and banked them beside the coals. Flames rose, illuminating the little campsite. There was a greasy-looking tent, a log for a seat, an abandoned wooden door set on more logs to make a table.

Gasparilla plucked the bundle of squirrels off his shoulder and dropped them on the makeshift table. Then he took out his knife and went to work, slicing one open, pulling out the guts and tossing them aside. And then, with one sharp tug, he tore off the skin. A series of swift chops took off the head, paws, and tail; a few more hacks quartered the animal, and it went into the simmering pot. The process for each squirrel took less than twenty seconds.

“What are you doing here?” Pendergast asked.

“On tour,” said the man.

“Tour?”

“Tool sharpening. Make two rounds of my territory in the warm months. Go south to Brownsville for the winter. You got it, I sharpen it, from chainsaws to combine rotors.”

“How do you get around?”

“Pickup.”

“Where’s it parked?”

Gasparilla gave a final savage chop, tossed the last squirrel into the pot. Then he jerked his head toward the road. “Over there, if you want to check it out.”

“I plan to.”

“They know me in town. I ain’t never been on the wrong side of the law, you can ask the sheriff. I work for a living, same as you. Only I don’t go sneaking around in the dark, shining lights in people’s faces and scaring them half to death.” He threw some parched lima beans into the pot.

“If, as you say, they know you in town, why do you camp out here?”

“I like a little elbow room.”

“And the bare feet?”

“Huh?”

Pendergast shone his light at the man’s filthy toes.

“Shoes are expensive.” He rummaged in a pocket, pulled out the chaw of tobacco, screwed off another piece, and shoved it in his cheek. “What’s an FBI man doing out here?” he asked, poking his cheek with a finger, adjusting the chaw to his satisfaction.

“I imagine you could guess the answer to that question, Mr. Gasparilla.”

The man gave him a sidelong glance but did not reply.

“She was digging up in the Mounds, wasn’t she?” Pendergast asked at last.

Gasparilla spat. “Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did she find anything?”

He shrugged. “It ain’t the first time there’s been digging in the Mounds. I don’t pay much attention to it. When I’m here I only go up there to hunt. I don’t mess around with the dead.”

“Are there burials in the Mounds?”

“So they say. There was also a massacre up there once. That’s all I know and all I want to know. The place gives me the creeps. I wouldn’t go up there except that’s where all the squirrels are.”

“I’ve heard talk of some legend associated with the place. The ‘curse of the Forty-Fives,’ I believe.”

Gasparilla said nothing, and for a long time the camp was quiet. He stirred the pot with a stick, occasionally darting glances at Pendergast.

“The murder occurred three nights ago, during the new moon. Did you see or hear anything?”

Gasparilla spat again. “Nothing.”

“What were your movements that evening, Mr. Gasparilla?”

Gasparilla kept stirring. “If you’re hinting that I killed that woman, then I just about figure this conversation’s over, mister.”

“I’d say it’s just begun.”

“Don’t get snippy with me. I never killed nobody in my life.”

“Then you should have no objection to detailing your movements that day.”

“That was my second day here at Medicine Creek. I hunted up at the Mounds late that afternoon. She was there, digging. I came back here at sunset, spent the night in camp.”

“Did she see you?”

“Didyou see me?”

“Where was she digging, exactly?”

“All over. I gave her a wide berth. I know trouble when I see it.” Gasparilla gave the stewpot a brisk stir, brought out an enameled tin bowl and a battered spoon, ladled some stew into it. He scooped up a spoonful, blew on it, took a bite, dug the spoon in again. Then he stopped.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting a bowl.”

“I would not object.”

Wordlessly, he brought out a second bowl, held it up before Pendergast.

“Thank you.” Pendergast helped himself to the pot, took a taste of the stew. “Burgoo, I believe?”

Gasparilla nodded and stuffed a goodly amount in his mouth, juice dribbling down into his tangled black beard. He chewed loudly, spat out a few bones, swallowed. He wiped his mouth with his hand, then wiped his hand on his beard.

They finished their stew in silence. Gasparilla stacked the bowls, leaned back, took out the plug of tobacco. “And now, mister, if you got what you’re looking for, I hope you’ll be about your business. I like a quiet evening.”

Pendergast rose. “Mr. Gasparilla, I will leave you in peace. But first, if there’s anything you’d care to add, I would advise you to tell it to me now, rather than waiting for me to discover it myself.”

Gasparilla spat a brown rope of saliva in the direction of the creek. “I don’t particularly care to get involved.”

“You’re already involved. Either you are the murderer, Mr. Gasparilla, or your continued presence here puts you in grave danger. One or the other.”

Gasparilla grunted, bit off another plug, spat again. Then he asked, “Do you believe in the devil?”

Pendergast regarded the man, his pale eyes glinting in the firelight. “Why do you ask, Mr. Gasparilla?”

“Because I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, the devil’s a lot of preacher bullshit. But thereis evil on this earth, Mr. FBI Agent. You asked about the curse of the Forty-Fives. Well, you might as well get on home right now, because you ain’t never going to get to the bottom ofthat. The evil I’m talking about, most of the time it’s got an explanation. But some of the time”—Gasparilla spat more tobacco juice, then leaned forward as if to impart a secret—“some of the time, itjust don’t. ”

Thirteen

Smit Ludwig pulled his AMC Pacer into the parking lot of Calvary Lutheran, which was wall to wall with hot cars glittering in the August sun. A big placard, already curling in the intense heat, was affixed to the front of the neat, redbrick church. It announced, 33RD ANNUAL BAKED TURKEY SUPPER SOCIABLE. Another, even bigger placard beside it burbled,MEDICINE CREEK WELCOMES PROFESSOR STANTON CHAUNCY !!! There was a touch of desperation, Ludwig thought, to the three exclamation marks. He parked his car at the far end of the lot, got out, dabbed the back of his neck with a handkerchief, and walked up to the entrance.

Then he paused, hand on the door. Over the years, the town had gotten used to his nice human interest stories; to his uncontroversial coverage of church and school, 4-H and Boy Scouts and Future Farmers of America. They had gotten used to theCourier glossing over and even ignoring the petty crimes of their children—the occasional joyrides, the drunken parties. They had taken for granted his downplaying of the inspection problems at Gro-Bain, the rising injury rate at the plant, the union troubles. They had forgotten that theCourier was a newspaper, not the town PR organ. Yesterday, all that had changed. TheCourier had become a real paper, reporting real news.

Smit Ludwig wondered just what the reaction would be.

With his free hand, he nervously fingered his bow tie. He’d covered the Baked Turkey Sociable for every one of its thirty-three years, but never had he approached it with such trepidation. It was times like this that he most missed his wife, Sarah. It would have been easier with her on his arm.

Buck up, Smitty,he told himself, pushing open the doors.

The Fellowship Hall of the church was jammed. Practically the entire town was there. Some were already seated, eating, while others had formed long lines to load up on mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans. Some were even eating the turkey, although Smitty noticed, as usual, that the Gro-Bain plant workers were nowhere to be seen in the turkey lines. It was one of those things that nobody ever mentioned: how little turkey was actually consumed at the Turkey Sociable.

A huge plastic banner on one wall thanked Gro-Bain and its general manager, Art Ridder, for their generosity in providing the turkeys. Another banner on the opposite wall thanked Buswell Agricon for their ongoing donations for the upkeep of the church. And yet another banner, the biggest of all, trumpeted the arrival of Stanton Chauncy, the year’s guest of honor. Ludwig looked around. Familiar faces all. One of the joys of living in small-town America.

From across the room, Art Ridder caught his eye. Ridder was wearing a maroon-and-white polyester suit, and the usual smile was plastered on his unnaturally smooth face. His body was as solid as a chunk of suet, and he moved through the crowd slowly, without deviating from his path. People moved for Art Ridder, thought Ludwig, not the other way around. Maybe it was the faint smell of slaughtered turkey that seemed to hang around him, despite heavy doses of Old Spice; or maybe it was that he was the town’s richest man. Ridder had sold the turkey plant to Gro-Bain Agricultural Products and had stayed on as its manager, though they’d written him a nice fat check. He said he “liked the work.” Ludwig thought it was more probable Ridder liked the Town Father status that being plant boss conveyed.

Ridder was still approaching, eye on the reporter, the smile stamped on his face. Of all people, he was probably the least likely to appreciate yesterday’s article on the murder. Ludwig braced himself.

Out of nowhere, salvation—Mrs. Bender Lang darted up, whispered something in Ridder’s ear. Abruptly, the two veered off.This fellow Chauncy must be about to arrive, Ludwig thought. Nothing else would have made Ridder move that fast.

In all thirty-three years of the Sociable’s history, this was the first year that the guest of honor had not been selected from among the town’s own. That in itself demonstrated the importance that Medicine Creek placed in impressing Dr. Stanton Chauncy of Kansas State University. It was Chauncy who’d decide, by next Monday, whether or not Medicine Creek would become the test site for several acres of genetically modified corn, or . . .

A high, shrill voice intruded on his thoughts. “Smit Ludwig, how dare you!” He turned to find Klick Rasmussen at his elbow, her beehive hairdo bobbing at about the level of his shoulder. “Howcould it be one of us?”

He turned to face her. “Now, Klick, I didn’t say I believed—”

“If you didn’t believe it,” cried Klick Rasmussen, “then why did youprint it?”

“Because it’s my duty to report all the theories—”

“What happened to all thenice articles you used to print? TheCourier used to be such alovely paper.”

“Not all news is nice, Klick—”

But Klick wouldn’t let him finish. “If you want to write trash, why don’t you write about that FBI agent wandering about town, asking questions, poking his nose where it doesn’t belong, filling your head with darn-fool ideas? Let’s see howhe likes it. And on top of that, raising the whole business of the Ghost Warriors, the curse of the Forty-Fives—”

“There wasn’t anything in the paper about that.”

“Not exactly in so manywords, but with that business about the old Indian arrows, whatelse are people going to think? That’s all we need, a resurrection of that old story.”

“Please, let’s be reasonable—” Ludwig took a step back. In the distance, he could see Swede Cahill’s wife, Gladys, approaching them, preparing to wade in. This was worse than he’d imagined.

Suddenly Maisie appeared from nowhere, her bulk covered by a white apron. “Klick, leave Smitty alone,” she said. “We’re lucky to have him. Most counties our size don’t even have a newspaper, let alone a daily.”

Klick took a step backward. Ludwig felt doubly grateful to Maisie, because of the awkwardness he knew existed between the two women. Maisie was perhaps the only person in the room who could have called Klick Rasmussen off so quickly. Klick shot one dark glance at Ludwig, then turned toward the approaching Gladys Cahill, and the two drifted off toward the turkey tables, talking in low voices.

Ludwig turned to Maisie. “Thanks a lot. You saved me.”

“I always take care of you, Smit.” She winked and went back toward the carving station.

As Ludwig turned to follow, he noticed that a hush was falling over the room. All eyes had swiveled in the direction of the door. Instinctively, Ludwig followed suit. There, framed against the golden sky, was a figure in black.

Pendergast.

There was something distinctly creepy in the way the FBI agent paused in the doorway, the bright sunlight silhouetting his severe form, like some gunslinger entering a saloon. Then he strode coolly forward, eyes roving the crowd before locking on Ludwig himself. Pendergast changed course immediately, gliding through the crowd toward him.

“I’m relieved to see you, Mr. Ludwig,” he said. “I know no one here but you and the sheriff, and I can’t very well expect the busy sheriff to take time for introductions. Come, lead the way, if you please.”

“Lead the way?” Ludwig echoed.

“I need introductions, Mr. Ludwig. Where I come from, it’s a social error to introduce oneself rather than have a proper introduction from a third party. And as publisher, editor, and chief reporter for theCry County Courier, you know everyone in town.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Excellent. Shall we begin with Mrs. Melton Rasmussen? I understand she is one of the leading ladies.”

Ludwig paused in mid-breath. Klick Rasmussen, of all people, who he’d just gotten free of. A profound sinking feeling settled on Ludwig as he looked around the room. There was Klick at one of the turkey tables, holding forth with Gladys Cahill and the rest of the usual gang.

“Over there,” he said, leading the way with a heavy tread.

As they approached, the gaggle of ladies fell silent. Ludwig saw Klick glance at Pendergast, her features pinching with displeasure.

“I’d like to introduce—” began Ludwig.

“I knowvery well who this man is. I have only one thing to say—”

She stopped abruptly as Pendergast bowed, took her hand, and lifted it to within an inch of his lips, in the French manner. “A great pleasure, Mrs. Rasmussen. My name is Pendergast.”

“My,” said Klick. Her hand went limp within his.

“I understand, Mrs. Rasmussen, that you are responsible for the decorations.”

Ludwig wondered where Pendergast had learned this little tidbit. The man’s southern accent seemed to have deepened to the consistency of molasses as he gazed at Klick intently with his strange eyes. To Ludwig’s private amusement, Klick Rasmussen blushed. “Yes, I am,” she said.

“They are enchanting.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pendergast.”

Pendergast bowed again, still holding her hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, and now I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”

Klick blushed again, even more deeply. As she did so, Melton Rasmussen, having seen the exchange from afar, abruptly arrived. “Well, well,” he said heartily, sticking his hand out and interposing himself between his plump, blushing wife and Pendergast, “welcome to Medicine Creek. I’m Mel. Melton Rasmussen. I realize the circumstances could be a little happier, but I think you’ll find the Kansas hospitality of Medicine Creek to be just as warm as it always was.”

“I have already found it so, Mr. Rasmussen,” said Pendergast, shaking his hand.

“Where’re you from, Pendergast? Can’t quite place the accent.”

“New Orleans.”

“Ah, the great city of New Orleans. Is it true they eat alligator? I hear it tastes like chicken.”

“In my view the taste is more like iguana or snake than chicken.”

“Right. Well, I’ll stick to turkey,” said Rasmussen with a laugh. “You come by my store sometime and have a look-see. You’re welcome anytime.”

“You’re very kind.”

“So,” said Rasmussen, moving a little closer, “what’s the news? Any more leads?”

“Justice never sleeps, Mr. Rasmussen.”

“Well, I’ve got a theory of my own. Would you like to hear it?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“It’s that fellow camped down by the creek. Gasparilla. He’s worth looking into. He’s a strange one, always has been.”

“Now, Mel,” scolded Klick. “You know he’s been coming around for years and he’s never been in any kind of trouble.”

“You never know when somebody’s gonna go queer on you. Why does he camp way out there on the creek? Isn’t the town good enough for him?”

The question hung in the air, unanswered. Klick was staring past her husband, her mouth forming a small, perfect O. Ludwig heard a hushed murmur ripple through the assembly. There was a brief clapping of hands. He turned to see Art Ridder and the sheriff escorting a man he didn’t recognize through the crowd. The man was small and thin, with a closely trimmed beard, and he wore a light blue seersucker suit. In his wake came Mrs. Bender Lang and a few of the town’s other leading ladies.

“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors of Medicine Creek!” Art Ridder boomed to the assembly. “It is my great privilege to introduce this year’s guest of honor, Dr. Stanton Chauncy of Kansas State University!”

This was followed by thunderous applause and a few piercing whistles. The man named Chauncy stood, nodded once at the crowd, then turned his back on them and began to converse with Ridder. Slowly, the applause faltered into silence.

“Mr. Ludwig,” Pendergast said. “There’s a group of gentlemen in the far corner—?”

Ludwig looked in the indicated direction. Four or five men in bib overalls were drinking lemonade and talking amongst themselves in low voices. Rather than joining in the applause, they were looking in the direction of Chauncy with narrowed eyes.

“Oh, that’s Dale Estrem and the rest of the Farmer’s Co-operative,” Ludwig replied. “The last of the die-hard holdouts. They’re the only ones who haven’t sold out to the big farming conglomerates. Still own their own farms around Medicine Creek.”

“And why don’t they share in the town’s good feeling?”

“The Farmer’s Co-op holds no truck with genetically modified corn. They fear it’ll cross-pollinate and ruin their own crops.”

Ridder was now introducing the man from Kansas State to select knots of people.

“There are several other introductions I’d like you to make, if you would,” Pendergast said. “The minister, for example.”

“Of course.” Ludwig scanned the crowd for Pastor Wilbur, finally spotting him standing alone, in line for turkey. “This way.”

“Tell me about him first, if you please.”

Ludwig hesitated, not wishing to speak ill of anybody. “Pastor Wilbur’s been here for forty years, at least. He means well. It’s just that . . .” He faltered.

“Yes?” said Pendergast. Ludwig found the man’s gray eyes focused on him in a most unsettling way.

“I guess you’d have to say he’s a little set in his ways. He’s not really in touch with what’s happening, ornot happening, in Medicine Creek these days.” He struggled a moment. “There are some who feel a younger, more vibrant ministry would help revive the town, keep the youngsters from leaving. Fill the spiritual void that’s opened up here.”

“I see.”

The minister raised his head as they approached. As usual, a pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of his nose, whether or not he was reading anything. Ludwig figured he did it to look scholarly. “Pastor Wilbur?” Ludwig said. “I’d like to introduce Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.”

Wilbur took the proffered hand.

“I envy you, Pastor,” Pendergast said. “Ministering to the souls of a community such as Medicine Creek.”

Wilbur gazed benevolently at Pendergast. “It is at times a fearsome responsibility, being entrusted with so many hundreds, Mr. Pendergast. But I flatter myself that I’ve shepherded them well.”

“It seems a good life here,” Pendergast went on. “For a man of God such as yourself, I mean.”

“God has seen fit to both bless me and bring me trials. We all share equally in the curse of Adam, but perhaps a man of the cloth shares more than most.” Wilbur’s face had assumed a saintly, almost martyred demeanor.

Ludwig recognized that look: Wilbur was about to spout one of his prized little scraps of poetry.

“Alas,”Wilbur began,“what boots it with uncessant care, to tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade?” He looked through his reading glasses at Pendergast with evident satisfaction. “Milton. Naturally.”

“Naturally.Lycidas. ”

Wilbur was slightly taken aback. “Ah, I believe that’s correct, yes.”

“Another line from that elegy comes to mind:The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. ”

There was a brief silence. Ludwig looked back and forth between the two men, uncertain what, if anything, had just passed between them.

Wilbur blinked. “I—”

“I look forward to greeting you again in church on Sunday,” Pendergast interjected smoothly, grasping Wilbur’s hand once more.

“Ah, yes, yes, so do I,” Wilbur said, the note of surprise still detectable in his voice.

“Excuse me!” The booming voice of Art Ridder, amplified, again cut through the babble of overlapping conversations. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would all be so kind, our guest of honor would like to say a few words. Dr. Stanton Chauncy!”

All around the Fellowship Hall, people put down their forks and turned their attention to the little man in the seersucker suit.

“Thank you,” the man said. He stood erect, hands folded in front of him like he was at a wake. “My name is Stanton Chauncy. Dr. Stanton Chauncy. I represent the Agricultural Extension of Kansas State University. But of course you know that.” His voice was high, and his manner of speaking was so crisp and precise that his words were almost overarticulated.

“The genetic enhancement of corn is a complicated subject, and not one that I can readily elucidate in a venue such as this,” he began. “It requires knowledge of certain disciplines such as organic chemistry and plant biology that one could not expect a lay audience to possess.” He sniffed. “However, I will attempt to impart the most rudimentary of overviews to you this afternoon.”

As if of one mind, those who had gathered in the Fellowship Hall appeared to slump. There was a collective exhalation of breath. If they had hoped to hear praise heaped on their town or their Sociable, or even—dared one hope?—word of Chauncy’s impending decision, they were sadly disappointed. Instead, the man launched into an explanation of corn varietals so detailed that the eyes of even the most enthusiastic corn farmer glazed over. It almost seemed to Ludwig as if Chauncy wastrying to be as boring as possible. Whispered conversations resumed; forkfuls of mashed potato and turkey gravy were slipped into furtive mouths; small streams of people began moving back and forth along the far walls of the hall. Dale Estrem and the Farmer’s Co-op crowd stood at the back, arms folded, faces set hard.

Smit Ludwig tuned out the droning voice as he looked around the hall. Despite everything, he appreciated the small-town atmosphere of the Sociable: its homespun provinciality, and the fact that it brought the community together, even forcing people who didn’t like each other to acknowledge the other and be civil. It was one of the many reasons why he never wanted to leave—even after his wife had passed away. A person could not get lost in Medicine Creek. People were taken care of, nobody was forgotten, and everyone had a place. It wasn’t like that in L.A., where old people died unloved and alone every day. His daughter had been calling a lot lately, urging him to relocate nearer her. But he wasn’t going to do that. Not even after he closed the paper and retired. For better or worse, he was going to end his days in Medicine Creek and be buried in the cemetery out on the Deeper Road, beside his wife.

He glanced at his watch. What had generated these thoughts of mortality? He had a deadline to make, even if it was self-imposed, and the time had come for him to go home and write up the story.

He made his stealthy way to the open doors of the hall. Beyond, late afternoon light illuminated the broad green lawn of the church. The heat was unbroken as it lay over the grass, the parking lot, and the cornfields like a suffocating blanket. But despite the heat—and, in fact, despite everything—a part of Smit Ludwig felt relieved. He could have fared a lot worse at the hands of his fellow townsfolk; he had Maisie, and perhaps Pendergast, to thank for that. And on a less selfish note, he’d be able to write an upbeat piece about the Sociable without dissembling. It had started with a certain grimness, he felt: a stoic sense that the show must go on, despite everything. But the gloom and oppression had seemed to lift. The town had become itself again, and not even Chauncy’s stultifying lecture, which still droned on behind him, could change that. The thirty-third annual Gro-Bain Turkey Sociable was a success.

Ludwig fetched a deep, slow breath as he looked out from the steps of the church. And then, suddenly, he froze.

One by one, the people around him began to do the same, staring out from the wooden doorway. There was a gasp, a low murmur. Like an electric current, the murmur began to jump from person to person, running back into the crowds within the hall itself, growing in volume until Chauncy’s exegesis of variegated corn kernels came under threat.

“What is it?” Chauncy said, stopping in mid-sentence. “What’s going on?”

Nobody answered. All eyes were fixed on the horizon beyond the open doors of the hall, where, against the yellow sky, a lazy column of vultures wheeled in ever tightening circles above the endless corn.

Fourteen

When Corrie Swanson pulled up to the church, people were standing on the front lawn, huddled together in groups, murmuring anxiously. Now and then somebody would break away from one of the groups and stare out in the direction of the cornfields. There must have been fifty people out there, but she didn’t see Pendergast among them. And that made no sense, because he’d asked her to come right away. He’d been most insistent on it, in fact.

It was almost a relief to find him missing. Pendergast was going to get her into even worse trouble than she already was in this town—she could feel it in her bones. She was already the town’s A-number-one pariah. Once again, she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into. The money was still burning a hole in her glove compartment. He’d get her in trouble, and then he’d be gone, and she’d still be stuck in Medicine Creek dealing with the consequences. If she were smart, she’d give him back the money and wash her hands of the whole thing.

She jumped involuntarily as a black figure seemed to materialize out of nowhere beside the car. Pendergast opened the passenger door and slid in as sleekly as a cat. The way he moved gave her the creeps sometimes.

She reached for the dashboard, turned down the blaring sound of “Starfuckers” by Nine Inch Nails. “So, where to, Special Agent?” she said as casually as she could.

Pendergast nodded toward the cornfields. “Do you see those birds?”

She shaded her eyes against the glow of the sunset. “What, those turkey vultures? What about them?”

“That’s where we’re going.”

She revved the engine; the car shuddered and coughed black smoke. “There’s no roads out that way, and this is a Gremlin, not a Hummer, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Don’t worry, Miss Swanson, I will not get you mired in a cornfield. Head west on the Cry Road, please.”

“Whatever.” She stamped on the accelerator and the Gremlin pulled away from the curb, shuddering with the effort.

“So how was the Turkey Sociable?” she asked. “That’s like the big event of the year in Shit Creek.”

“It was most instructive—from an anthropological point of view.”

“Anthropological? Yeah, right, Special Agent Pendergast among the savages. Did they introduce that guy from KSU, the one who wants to grow radioactive corn around here?”

“Genetically modified corn. They did.”

“And what was he like? Did he have three heads?”

“If he did, two must have been successfully removed in infancy.”

Corrie looked at him. He looked back from the broken seat with his usual placid, mild, unsmiling expression. She could never tell whether or not he was cracking a joke. He had to be the weirdest adult she’d ever met, and with all the characters wandering around Medicine Creek, that was saying something.

“Miss Swanson? Your speed.”

“Sorry.” She braked. “I thought you FBI guys drove as fast as you wanted.”

“I’m on vacation.”

“The sheriff goes everywhere at a hundred miles an hour even when he’s off duty. And you always know when there’s fresh eclairs at the Wagon Wheel. Then he goes a hundred and twenty.”

They hummed along the smooth asphalt for a while in silence.

“Miss Swanson, take a look up the road, if you please. Do you see where the sheriff’s car is parked? Pull in behind it.”

Corrie squinted into the gathering dusk. Ahead, she could see the cruiser pulled over onto the wrong shoulder, lights flashing. Overhead, and maybe a quarter mile into the corn, she could see the column of turkey vultures more clearly.

It suddenly clicked. “Jesus,” she said. “Not another one?”

“That remains to be seen.”

Corrie pulled up behind the cruiser and put on her flashers. Pendergast got out. “I may be a while.”

“I’m not coming with you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“No problem, I brought a book.”

She watched Pendergast push his way into the corn and disappear, feeling vaguely annoyed. Then she turned her attention to the back seat. She always had five or six books flung about willy-nilly back there—science fiction, horror, splatterpunk, occasionally a teen romance that she never, ever let anybody catch her reading. She glanced over the pile. Maybe, while she waited, she’d start that new techno-thriller,Beyond the Ice Limit. She picked it up, then paused again. Somehow, the idea of sitting in the car, reading, all alone, didn’t seem quite as appealing as it usually did. She couldn’t help but glance again at the column of vultures. They had soared higher now. Even against the gathering dusk, she could see they were agitated. Perhaps the sheriff had scared them off. She felt a twinge of curiosity: there might be something out there in the corn a whole lot more interesting than anything she’d find in one of her escapist novels.

She tossed the book in the back seat with a snort of impatience. Pendergast wasn’t going to keep her away like that. She had as much a right as anyone to see what was going on.

She flung open the car door and headed off into the corn. She could see where the sheriff had tramped through the dirt. There was another, narrower pair of tracks that ran back and forth over the sheriff’s clown shoes: probably his well-meaning but brain-dead deputy, Tad. And near them, Pendergast’s light step.

It was very hot and claustrophobic in the corn. The husks rose high over Corrie’s head, and as she passed by they rattled, showering her with dust and pollen. There was still some light in the sky, but in the corn it seemed that night had already fallen. Corrie felt her breath coming faster as she walked. She began to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. She never went into the corn. All her life she had hated the cornfields. They started in the spring as so much endless dirt, the giant machines tearing up the earth, leaving behind plumes of dust that coated the town and filled her bed with grit. And then the corn came up and the only thing anyone talked about for four months was the weather. Slowly the roads got closed in by claustrophobic walls of corn until you felt like you were driving in a tunnel of green. Now the corn was yellowing and pretty soon the giant machines would be back, leaving the land as naked and ugly as a shaved poodle.

It was awful: the dust filled her nose and stung her eyes and the moldy, papery smell made her sick. All this corn, probably growing not to feed people or even animals, but cars. Car corn. Sick, sick, sick.

And then, quite suddenly, she broke through into a small trampled clearing. There were the sheriff and Tad, holding flashlights and bending over something. Pendergast stood to one side, and as she entered the clearing he turned toward her, his pale eyes almost luminous in the gathering twilight.

Corrie’s heart gave an ugly lurch. There was something dead in the middle. But when she forced herself to look she realized it was only a dead dog. It was brown and so bloated with the gases of rot that its hair stood on end, making it look horribly strange, like a four-legged blowfish. An awful, sweetish smell hung in the still air and there was a steady roar of flies.

The sheriff turned. “Well, Pendergast,” he said in a genial voice, “looks like we got all riled up for nothing.” Then his eyes flickered over Pendergast’s shoulder, and landed on her. He stared at her for a few uncomfortable seconds before looking back at Pendergast. The agent said nothing.

Pendergast had slipped a small light out of his own pocket and was playing its bright beam over the bloated corpse. Corrie felt sick: she recognized the dog. It was a chocolate Lab mutt belonging to Swede Cahill’s son, a nice freckled kid of twelve.

“Okay, Tad,” said the sheriff, slapping his hand on the gangly deputy’s shoulder, “we’ve seen all there is to see. Let’s call it a day.”

Pendergast had now moved in and was kneeling, examining the dog more closely. The flies, disturbed, were swarming above the corpse in a wild cloud.

The sheriff walked past Corrie without acknowledging her, then turned at the edge of the clearing. “Pendergast? You coming?”

“I haven’t completed my examination.”

“You finding anything interesting?”

There was a silence, and then Pendergast said, “This is another killing.”

“Another killing? It’s a dead dog in a cornfield and we’re two miles from the site of the Swegg homicide.”

Corrie watched in vague horror as the FBI agent picked up the dog’s head, moved it back and forth gently, laid it down, shone his light in the mouth, the ears, down the flank. The angry drone of flies grew louder.

“Well?” asked the sheriff, his voice harder.

“This dog’s neck has been violently broken,” said Pendergast.

“Hit by a car. Dragged himself out here to die. Happens all the time.”

“A car wouldn’t have done that to the tail.”

“What tail?”

“Exactly my point.”

Both the sheriff and Tad directed their lights to the dog’s rump. Where the tail had been there was nothing but a ragged pink stump with a white bone at the center.

The sheriff said nothing.

“And over there”—Pendergast shone his light into the corn—“I imagine you will find the footprints of the killer. Bare footprints, size eleven, heading back down toward the creek. Same as the footprints found at the site of the first homicide.”

There was another silence. And then the sheriff spoke. “Well, Pendergast, all I can say is, it’s kind of a relief. Here you thought we were dealing with a serial killer. Now we know he’s just some sicko. Murdering a dog and cutting off the tail. Jesus Christ.”

“But you will note the difference here. There was no ceremony to this killing, no feeling that the corpse has been arrangeden tableau. ”

“So?”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern. But of course, that simply means we’re dealing with anew pattern—in fact, a new type altogether.”

“A new type of what?”

“Of serial killer.”

Hazen rolled his eyes theatrically. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re still dealing with a single murder. A dog doesn’t count.” He turned to Tad. “Call the M.E. and let’s scoop this dog up to Garden City for an autopsy. Get the SOC boys out here to work over the site and especially take a look at any prints they find. And get the Staties to post a guard. I want this site sealed. No unauthorized personnel. Got it?”

“Yes, Sheriff.”

“Good. And now, Pendergast, I’m hoping you will escort allunauthorized personnel from the site immediately.” Corrie jumped as he abruptly shined his light on her.

“Sheriff, you’re not referring to my assistant, are you?”

There was a thunderous silence. Corrie glanced at him, wondering what his game was now. Assistant? Her old suspicions began to return; next thing she knew, he’d be trying to assist himself into her pants.

After a moment the sheriff spoke. “Assistant? Are you referring to that delinquent standing next to you who’s facing a charge of larceny in the second degree, which, by the way, happens to be a felony in the state of Kansas?”

“I am.”

The sheriff nodded. And when he spoke again, his voice was unnaturally mild. “I’m a patient man, Mr. Pendergast. I will say this to you, and this only: thereis a limit.”

In the ensuing silence, Pendergast said, “Miss Swanson, would you kindly hold the flashlight while I examine the posterior of this dog?”

Holding her nose against the rising stench, Corrie took the flashlight and aimed it at the desired spot, aware of Sheriff Hazen standing behind her, staring so hard at the back of her neck that she could feel the hairs curling.

Pendergast turned, rose, and laid a hand on the sheriff’s shoulder. The man looked down at the hand, seemed about to brush it off. “Sheriff Hazen,” said Pendergast, his voice suddenly deferential, “it may seem that I have come here expressly to annoy you. But I assure you there are good reasons behind everything I do. I do hope you will continue to exercise the patience you’ve so admirably demonstrated already, and bear with me and my unorthodox methods—and my unorthodox assistant—a little longer.”

The sheriff seemed to digest this for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice sounded ever so slightly mollified. “I can’t say I honestly like the way you’re handling the case. You FBI boys always seem to forget that once we catch the perp we’ve got toconvict him. You know how it is these days: screw up the evidencein any way and the perp walks.” He glanced at Corrie. “She better have scene-of-crime authorization.”

“She will.”

“And keep in mind what kind of impression she’s going to make in front of a jury with that purple hair and the spiked dog collar. Not to mention a felony on her record.”

“We will cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The sheriff stared hard at him. “All right then. I’ll leave you to Fido here. Remember what I said. Come on, Tad, let’s go make those calls.”

Then he turned away, lit a cigarette, and disappeared into the wall of corn, followed by Tad. As the sound of crashing diminished, a silence descended on the site.

Corrie took several steps back from the stench of decay. “Agent Pendergast?”

“Miss Swanson?”

“What’s this ‘assistant’ crap?”

“I assumed you were willing to take the job by the fact that you disobeyed my orders and came here, thereby displaying an interest in the forensic aspects of crime.”

Was he kidding again? “I just don’t like being left behind. Look, I don’t know jack about detective work. I can’t type, I can’t handle the phones, and I’m sure as hell not going to take dictation or do whatever it is that assistants do.”

“That is not what I require. This may surprise you, but I’ve actually given this matter some thought and I’ve concluded that you’ll make an excellent assistant. I need someone who knows the town, knows the people, knows their secrets, but who is also an outsider, beholden to no one. Someone who will tell me the unvarnished truth as she sees it. Are you not exactly that person?”

Corrie considered it. Outsider, beholden to no one . . . Depressingly, she seemed to fit the bill.

“The promotion comes with a raise to a hundred and fifty dollars a day. I have all the paperwork in the car, including a limited scene-of-crime authorization. It means obeying my orders to the letter. No more jumping out of the car on a whim. We will discuss your new responsibilities in more detail later.”

“Who’s paying me? The FBI?”

“I shall be paying you out of my own pocket.”

“Come on, you know I’m not worth it. You’re throwing your money away.”

Pendergast turned and looked at her, and once again she was struck by the intensity that lay behind those gray eyes. “I already know one thing: we are dealing with an extremely dangerous killer and I do not have time to waste. I must have your help. If one life is saved, what is that worth?”

“Yeah, but how can I possibly help? I mean, the sheriff’s right. I’m just a dumb delinquent.”

“Miss Swanson, don’t be fatuous. Have we got a deal?”

“All right. Butassistant is where it begins and ends. Like I said before, don’t get any ideas.”

He looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re a man. You know what I’m talking about.”

Pendergast waved his hand. “Miss Swanson, the inference you are making is quite unthinkable. We come from two different worlds. There is a vast difference between us in terms of age, temperament, upbringing, background, and relative positions of power—not to mention your pierced tongue. In my opinion such a relationship, while it might afford both of us considerable diversion, would be most unwise.”

Corrie felt vaguely irritated by his explanation. “What’s wrong with my pierced tongue?”

“Perhaps nothing. Females of the Wimbu tribe of the Andaman Islands pierce their labia and dangle strings of cowry shells from them. The shells jingle under their skirts when they walk. The men find it most attractive.”

“That’s totally foul!”

Pendergast smiled. “So you are not the cultural relativist I had assumed.”

“You’re a seriously weird person, you know that?”

“The alternative, Miss Swanson, does not appeal to me at all.” He took the light from her and shone it back on the dog. “And now, as my assistant, you can begin by telling me whose dog this is.”

Her eyes flickered unwillingly back to the bloated corpse. “It’s Jiff. He belonged to Andy, Swede Cahill’s son.”

“Did Jiff wear a collar?”

“Yes.”

“Did he normally run free?”

“Most of the dogs in town run free, despite the leash laws.”

Pendergast nodded. “I knew my confidence in you was not misplaced.”

Corrie looked at him, feeling amused. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

“Thank you. We seem to have something in common.” He took the light from her and shined it back on the dog.

A silence descended on the rude clearing while Corrie wondered if she’d been insulted or complimented. But as she followed the beam with her eyes, she felt a sudden stab of pity: pity that transcended the awful stench, the drone of flies. Andy Cahill was going to be heartbroken. Somebody had to tell him, and it looked like that somebody would have to be her. She certainly couldn’t leave it to the sheriff or his assistant, who could be counted on to say the wrong thing. Nor did she think Pendergast, for all his courtesy, was the right person to break the news to the kid. She looked up and, to her surprise, found Pendergast looking at her.

“Yes,” he said, “I think it would be an act of kindness for you to break the news to Andy Cahill.”

“How did—?”

“At the same time, Miss Swanson, you might find out, in an offhand way, when Andy last saw Jiff, and where the dog might have been heading.”

“You want me to play detective, in other words.”

Pendergast nodded. “You are, after all, my new assistant.”

Fifteen

Margery Tealander sat behind the old wooden desk of her spartan office, industriously clipping coupons while keeping one eye onThe Price Is Right. The picture on the old black-and-white was so poor that she’d cranked the volume up so as not to miss any of the action. Not that there was all that much action today; rarely had she seen such a sorry group of contestants. Bidding high, bidding low, bidding every which way except within a mile of the real price of anything. She paused in her clipping to peer at the screen and listen. Everybody else had bid on the latest item except for the final contestant, a skinny Asian girl who couldn’t be more than twenty.

“I’ll bid one thousand four hundred and one dollars, Bob,” the girl said with a shy smile and a duck of her head.

“Man alive.” Marge clucked disapprovingly and returned to her clipping. Fourteen hundred dollars for an over-under Maytag? What planet could these people be living on? Couldn’t be more than nine hundred fifty, tops. And the audience wasn’t any help either, yelling encouragingly at every wrong guess. Now, ifshe was on the show, the audience would see someserious cleaning up. She always seemed to guess the right price, always seemed to pick the right door. And she wouldn’t settle for any of those cheesy prizes, either, the redwood utility sheds or the knickknack cabinets or the year’s supply of floor wax. She’d hold out for the fifteen-foot Chris-Craft; she had a cousin up near Lake Scott with a dock and mooring. The pity of it was that she’d finally talked Rocky into taking her out to Studio City, and then a week later he was diagnosed with emphysema. And now, she couldn’t very well go alone, God rest his soul, it would be much too much for . . . Nowthis was interesting: twenty percent off Woolite with a grocery purchase of $30 or more. That hardlyever went on sale, and with triple coupons on weekends that meant she could buy it for almost half price. She’d have to stock up. You just couldn’t beat the Shopper’s Palace in Ulysses for prices. The Red Owl in Garden City was closer, of course, but if you were serious about saving a little money you just couldn’t beat the Palace. And on Super Saturdays she’d get ten cents off a gallon on regular gas—that more than made up for the extra mileage right there. Of course, she felt a little bad about not patronizing Ernie, but these were lean times and a body just had to be practical . . . Now, if that didn’t beat all. Nine hundred twenty-five for the Maytag. Sure would have looked nice right next to her slop sink. Maybe she’d talk to Alice Franks about looking into a bus excursion that could—

All of a sudden she realized that a strange man was standing before her desk.

“Good gracious!” Marge quickly turned down the sound on the television. “Young man, you startled me.” It was that man in the black suit she’d seen out and about recently.

“My apologies,” the man replied in a voice redolent of mint juleps, pralines, and cypress trees. He gave a formal little bow, then stood before her, hands at his sides. He had slender, tapered fingers with nails that—she noticed with some surprise—were subtly but very professionally manicured.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Just don’t be sneaking up on a body like that. Now, what can I do you for?”

The man nodded toward the coupons. “I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

Marge barked out a laugh. “Hah! A bad time! That’s a good one.” She pushed the coupons to one side. “Mr. Stranger, you have myun divided attention.”

“I must apologize again,” the man said. “I’ve neglected to introduce myself. The name’s Pendergast.”

Marge suddenly remembered the article in the paper. “Of course. You’re that fellow from down south who’s looking into the murder. I could tell you weren’t from around here, of course. Not talking like that, you aren’t.”

She looked at him with fresh curiosity. He was rather tall, with hair so blond it was almost white, and he returned her look with pale eyes full of mild inquisitiveness. Although he was slender, he gave no sense of being frail; quite the opposite, really, although his suit was so unrelievedly black it was hard to tell. He was really very attractive, in a Southern Comfort kind of way.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Pendergast,” she said. “I’d offer you a seat, but this swivel chair of mine’s the only one. The people who come here aren’t usually inclined to stay very long.” She barked another laugh.

“And why is that, Mrs. Tealander?” The question was phrased so politely that Marge didn’t notice he already knew her name.

“Why do you think? Unless you happen to be partial to paying taxes and filling out forms, of course.”

“Yes, of course. I do see.” The man named Pendergast took a step forward. “Mrs. Tealander, it’s my understanding that—”

“Five hundred dollars,” Marge interrupted.

The man paused. “Pardon me?”

“Nothing.” Marge pulled her eyes from the now-silent TV.

“It’s my understanding that you are the keeper of public records for Medicine Creek.”

Marge nodded. “That’s right.”

“And that you function as town administrator.”

“A part-time job. Very part-time, these days.”

“That you run the public works department.”

“Oh, that just means keeping tabs on Henry Fleming, who drives the snow plow and changes the bulbs in the streetlamps.”

“And that you levy real estate taxes.”

“Yes, andthat’s the reason I don’t get invited to Klick Rasmussen’s canasta parties.”

Pendergast paused again for a moment. “So one could say that, in essence, you run Medicine Creek.”

Marge grinned widely. “Young man, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Of course, Sheriff Hazen and Art Ridder might not share your view.”

“We’ll leave them to their own opinion, then.”

“Man alive, Iknew it!” Marge’s eyes had strayed back to the television, and with an effort she returned them to her guest.

Pendergast slipped a leather wallet from his jacket pocket. “Mrs. Tealander,” he said, opening it to display the gold shield inside, “you’re aware that I’m an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

“That’s what they said over at the Hair Apparent.”

“I would like to get a better, shall we say,bureaucratic perspective on the people of Medicine Creek. What they do, where they live, what their economic status might be. That manner of thing.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place. I know everything legal there is to know about every blessed soul in town.”

Pendergast waved one hand. “Technically, of course, such an inquiry requires a warrant.”

“Where do you think you are, young man? Great Bend? Wichita, maybe? I’m not going to stand on ceremony with an officer of the law. Besides, we’ve got no secrets here. At least, none that would interest you.”

“Then you see no difficulty in, ah, making me better acquainted with the inhabitants.”

“Mr. Pendergast, I’ve got nothing on my calendar until August twenty-second, when I have to type up the property tax bills for the fourth quarter.”

Pendergast glided a little closer to the desk. “Let’s hope it doesn’t take quite that long.”

Another bark of laughter. “Take that long! Hoo-eee!Man alive, that’s a good one.”

Marge turned her swivel chair to the back wall of the office, where an old-fashioned safe stood. It was massive and decorated around the edges with faded gold leaf. Aside from the desk and a small bookshelf, it was the only article of furniture in the room. She twirled its large central dial back and forth, entering the combination, then grasped the handle and pulled the iron door open. Inside was a smaller box, closed with a padlock. She unlocked the padlock with a key that she drew from around her neck. Reaching inside, she removed an even smaller, wooden box. Then she turned around in her swivel chair again and placed it on the desk between herself and Pendergast.

“There you go,” she said, patting the little box with satisfaction. “Where do you want to start?”

Pendergast looked at the box. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, where do you want to start?”

“Do you mean to tell me that—” For a very brief moment, the man’s face seemed to go completely blank before once again assuming its look of casual curiosity.

“What, did you think it took a computer to run a town the size of Medicine Creek? I’ve got everything I need right in this little box. And what isn’t there is up here.” She tapped her temple. “Look, I’ll show you.” She opened the box, drew out an index card by random. It contained perhaps a dozen lines of neat handwriting, followed by a row of numbers, a couple of squiggles and symbols, and a few stickers of various colors: red, yellow, green. “You see?” she said, waving it under Pendergast’s nose. “This is the card of Dale Estrem, the cranky young farmer. His father was a cranky old farmer. And his grandfather—well, we won’t mentionhim. Dale and the rest of those troublemakers in the Farmer’s Co-operative, always standing in the way of progress. See, it shows here that he’s two quarters behind in his taxes, that his oldest kid had to repeat ninth grade, that his septic tank’s not in compliance with the code, and that he’s applied for farm relief seven years out of the last seven.” She clucked disapprovingly.

Pendergast looked from her, to the card, and back to her again. “I see,” he said.

“I’ve got ninety-three cards here, one for each family in Medicine Creek and in the unincorporated areas around it. I could talk for an hour on each, maybe two hours if necessary.” Marge felt herself growing excited. It wasn’t every day that somebody official took an interest in her records. And with Rocky passed on, God knows, she had precious few people to chat with. “I promise, you’ll know all there is to know about Medicine Creek when I’m done with you.”

This was greeted by a profound silence.

“Of course,” Pendergast said after a few moments, as if re-collecting himself.

“So I ask again, Mr. Pendergast. Where do you want to start?”

Pendergast thought a moment. “I suppose we should start with the A’s.”

“There are no last names starting with ‘A’ in Medicine Creek, Mr. Pendergast. We’ll start with David Barness, out on the Cry Road. So sorry I can’t get you a chair. Maybe when we start in again tomorrow I’ll bring one along for you from my kitchen.” And she returned the card she was holding to its spot, licked her finger eagerly, plucked the first card from the box, and began to talk. At her elbow the television flickered on, the game show now completely forgotten.

Sixteen

Deputy Sheriff Tad Franklin guided his cruiser into the gravel parking lot between the big old Victorian house and the gift shop. He crunched to a halt, pushed open the car door, and unfolded himself into the hot August sun. He paused to stretch, scratch at his black crew cut, and to peer, a little warily, at the house. The white picket fence that surrounded it was falling apart, paint peeling, slats hanging every which way. Beyond lay the overgrown yard. The giant old gabled house looked like it hadn’t been painted in fifty years. Kansas dust storms had sandblasted it right down to weatherbeaten wood and were now stripping the wood down to tarpaper. The “Kraus’s Kaverns” sign, off-kilter, with its great strips of peeling red and white paint, looked like something out of a grade-B horror flick. The whole place depressed him. He had to get out of Medicine Creek. But to do that, he needed to put in his time, get some more experience under his belt. And he dreaded the idea of telling Sheriff Hazen. The sheriff, Tad knew, was grooming him, in his rough paternal way, to take his place. Tad didn’t like to think about what the sheriff would say when he told him he was taking a job in Wichita or Topeka. Anywhere but Medicine Creek.

He forced himself through the gate, along the weed-choked sidewalk, and up the steps onto the crooked wraparound porch. His leather boots made a hollow sound as he walked up to the door. The air was still, and in the corn he could hear the cicadas droning. He paused, then rapped on the door.

It opened so quickly that he jumped. Special Agent Pendergast.

“Deputy Sheriff Franklin. Please come in.”

Tad took off his hat and came into the parlor, feeling uncomfortable. The sheriff had wanted him to quietly check up on what Pendergast was up to, what else he had learned about the dog killing. But now that he was here, he felt embarrassed. He couldn’t imagine any way to broach the subject without making the reason for his visit painfully obvious.

“You’re just in time for lunch,” said the agent, closing the door behind him. The shades were drawn and it was a little cooler here, out of the sun, but without air conditioning it was still uncomfortably hot. Not far from the front door sat two oversized suitcases—wardrobe trunks, really—overnight express labels still affixed to the expensive-looking leather exteriors. It seemed that Pendergast was settling in for a longer stay.

“Lunch?” Tad repeated.

“A light salad with antipasti. Prosciutto di San Daniele, pecorino cheese with truffled honey, baccelli, tomatoes, and rucola. Something light for a hot day.”

“Er, sure. Great.” If they were going to eat Italian, why not stick with pizza? He advanced another step, not knowing what to say. It was one o’clock. Who ate lunch at one o’clock? He had eaten at the normal time of eleven-thirty.

“Miss Kraus is feeling poorly. She’s taken to bed. I’ve been filling in.”

“I see.” Tad followed Pendergast into the kitchen. In one corner a stack of Federal Express and DHL boxes had been neatly piled halfway to the ceiling. The counter was littered with at least a dozen food packages sporting foreign-sounding names: Balducci’s, Zabar’s. Tad wondered if maybe Pendergast wasn’t Italian or French. He sure didn’t eat like an American.

Pendergast had busied himself in the kitchen, his movements deft and economical, quickly arranging odd-looking food onto three plates—salami and cheese and what had to be some kind of lettuce. Tad watched, shifting his hat from one hand to the other.

“I’ll just bring this plate back to Miss Kraus,” said Pendergast.

“Right. Okay.”

Pendergast disappeared into the back recesses of the house. Tad could hear Winifred’s soft voice, Pendergast’s murmured responses. A moment later, the agent returned.

“Is she okay?” Tad asked.

“Fine,” Pendergast said in a low voice. “It’s more psychological than physical. These delayed reactions are common in such cases. You can imagine the kind of shock she had, learning about the murder.”

“We were all shocked.”

“Of course you were. I recently wrapped up a rather unpleasant case myself in New York, where killings are regrettably more common. I am used to it, Mr. Franklin, or as used to it as a creature can ever be. For all of you, I have no doubt this was—and is—a most unwelcome new experience. Please sit down.”

Tad sat down, put his hat on the table, decided that wasn’t a good place, laid it on a chair, then snatched it up again, afraid he might forget it.

“I’ll take that,” said Pendergast, placing it on a hat rack nearby.

Tad shifted in his chair, feeling more awkward by the minute. A plate was put in front of him.“Buon appetito,” Pendergast said, gesturing for Tad to dig in.

Tad picked up a fork and stabbed into a piece of cheese. He cut some off and tasted it gingerly.

“You’ll want to drizzle a little of thismiele al tartufo bianco on there,” Pendergast said, offering him a tiny jar of odd-smelling honey.

“I’ll stick to it plain, thanks.”

“Nonsense.” Pendergast took a pearl spoon and dribbled some honey over the rest of Tad’s cheese.

Tad took another bite, and discovered it wasn’t bad.

They ate in silence. Tad found the food much to his liking, especially some small slices of salami. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Cinghiale.Wild boar.”

“Oh.”

Now Pendergast was pouring olive oil all over everything, as well as some liquid as black as tar. He poured some on Tad’s own plate as well. “And now, Deputy, I imagine you are here for a briefing.”

Somehow, having it stated so baldly made everything much less awkward. “Well, yes. Right.”

Pendergast dabbed his mouth and sat back. “The dog was named Jiff and he belonged to Andy Cahill. I understand that Andy is quite an explorer and that he used to roam all over the place with his dog. My assistant will be providing me soon with the results of an interview.”

Tad fumbled for his notebook, brought it out, and started taking notes.

“It appears the dog was killed that previous night. You may recall it was overcast for a few hours after midnight, and that appears to be when the killing occurred. I have the results of the autopsy right here, which I just received. The C 2, 3, and 4 vertebrae were actuallycrushed. There was no indication that any kind of machine or instrument was used, which is problematic, since if only one’s hands were employed, such crushing would require considerable force. The tail appears to have been hacked off with a crude implement and removed from the scene, along with the collar and tags.”

Tad took notes furiously. This was good stuff. The sheriff would be pleased. Then again, he’d probably gotten the same report. He continued taking notes, just to be sure.

“I followed the bare footprints leading to and from the scene. The same corn row was used in both cases, leading away from, and then back to, Medicine Creek. Once in the creek, it was no longer possible to follow the tracks. So I spent the morning with Mrs. Tealander, the town administrator, acquainting myself with the local residents. I fear that this task will take much longer than I’d originally—”

A tremulous voice came from the rear of the house. “Mr. Pendergast?”

Pendergast held his finger to his lips. “Miss Kraus is out of bed,” he murmured. “It wouldn’t do for her to hear us talking this way.” He turned, and said in a louder tone, “Yes, Miss Kraus?”

Tad saw the figure of the old woman appear in the doorway, muffled despite the heat in a nightgown and robes. Tad quickly rose.

“Why, hello, Tad,” said the old lady. “I’ve been poorly, you know, and Mr. Pendergast has been kind enough to take care of me. Don’t stand on my account. Please, take your seat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Tad.

She sat down heavily in a chair at the table, her face careworn. “I have to tell you, I’m getting awfully tired of that bed. I don’t know how invalids do it. Mr. Pendergast, would you mind pouring me a cup of that green tea of yours? I find it settles my nerves.”

“Delighted.” Pendergast rose and moved toward the stove.

“It’s just terrible, isn’t it, Tad?” she said.

The deputy sheriff didn’t quite know how to respond.

“This killing. Who could have done it? Doesanyone know?”

“We’ve got some leads we’re following up,” Tad replied. It was the line the sheriff always used.

Miss Kraus drew the robe more tightly around her throat. “I feel dreadful, just dreadful, knowing someone like that’s on the loose. And maybe even one of our own, if the papers are to be believed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Pendergast served tea all around and the table fell silent. Through the gauze curtains Tad could see the great fields of corn stretching out toward the horizon, a monochromatic rusty yellow. It made the eyes tired just looking at it. For the first time, the idea occurred to him that working on this case—if it had a successful resolution—could be just the ticket out he’d been waiting for. All of a sudden, checking up on Pendergast didn’t seem like a chore. It seemed, instead, like something he should do regularly. But Miss Kraus was speaking again, and he politely turned to listen.

“I fear for our little town,” Winifred Kraus was saying. “With this murderer out there, I fear for it truly.”

Seventeen

Corrie Swanson brought the Gremlin to a shuddering halt, sending up a swirl of dust that spiraled slowly into the air. God, it was hot. She looked over at the passenger seat. Pendergast returned the glance, eyebrows slightly raised.

“This is the place,” she said. “You still haven’t told me why we’re here.”

“We’re going to pay a visit to one James Draper.”

“Why?”

“I understand he makes certain claims regarding the Medicine Creek Massacre. I think it’s time I learned more about them.”

“Brushy Jim makes a lot of claims.”

“You doubt him?”

Corrie laughed. “He can’t say hello without lying.”

“I have found that liars in the end communicate more truth than do truth tellers.”

“How’s that?”

“Because truth is the safest lie.”

Corrie eased the car forward, shaking her head. No question about it: weird, weird, weird.

Brushy Jim’s place was an eighth-section of land out on the Deeper Road, fenced in with barbed wire. The plankboard, two-room house stood well back from the highway, a lone cottonwood in front offering a semblance of privacy. The house was surrounded by a sea of junked cars, old trailers, rusted boilers, abandoned refrigerators, washing machines, old telephone poles, compressors, a couple of boat hulls, something that appeared to be a steam locomotive, and other things too sunken into decrepitude to be recognizable.

As Corrie rolled into the dirt driveway she gave the car just a bit too much gas, and the Gremlin shuddered, backfired thunderously, and died. For a moment all was still. Then the door of the house banged open and a man appeared in the shade of the porch. As they got out of the car, he advanced into the light. Like most people in Medicine Creek, Corrie went out of her way to avoid meeting Brushy Jim, yet he looked just the same as she remembered: a mass of pale red hair and beard that sprouted from his entire face, leaving nothing visible but two beady black eyes, a pair of lips, and a patch of forehead. He was dressed in thick denim jeans, big chocolate-colored roper boots, a blue shirt with fake pearl snaps, and a battered felt cowboy hat. A bolo tie with a chunk of turquoise big enough to split the skull of a mule hung around his thick neck, the knotted leather partially obscured by the heavy beard. He was well over fifty, but with all the hair managed to look a decade younger. He gripped the post and peered at them suspiciously.

Pendergast strode toward the porch, suit coat flapping.

“Just hold it right there,” Brushy Jim called out, “and state your business. Now.”

Corrie swallowed. If something bad was going to happen, it was going to happen now.

Pendergast halted. “I understand you are Mr. James Draper, great-grandson of Isaiah Draper?”

At this, Brushy Jim straightened slightly. The look of mistrust did not go away. “And?”

“My name is Pendergast. I’m interested in learning more about the Medicine Creek Massacre of August 14, 1865, of which your great-grandfather was the lone survivor.”

The mention of the massacre wrought a dramatic change in Brushy Jim’s countenance. The suspicious glare in his eye softened somewhat. “And the young lady, if that’s what she is? Who’s she?”

“Miss Corrie Swanson,” Pendergast replied.

At this, Jim stood even straighter. “Little Corrie?” he said in surprise. “What happened to your pretty blonde hair?”

Ate too much eggplant,Corrie almost said. But Brushy Jim was unpredictable, and he had a hair-trigger temper, so she decided that a shrug was the safest response.

“You look terrible, Corrie, all dressed in black.” He stood there a moment, looking at the two of them. Then he nodded his head. “Well, you might as well come in.”

They followed Brushy Jim into the stuffy confines of his house. There were few windows and it was dark, a house crammed full of shadowy objects. It smelled of old food and taxidermy gone bad.

“Sit down and have a Coke.” The refrigerator threw out a rectangle of welcome light as Brushy Jim opened it. Corrie perched on a folding chair, while Pendergast—after a quick scan of the premises—took a seat on the only portion of a cowhide sofa not stacked with dusty copies ofArizona Highways. Corrie had never been inside before, and she looked around uneasily. The walls were covered with old rifles, buckskins, boards with arrowheads glued on, Civil War memorabilia, plaques displaying different types of barbed wire. A row of moldering old books ran along one shelf, bookended by huge pieces of unpolished petrified wood. An entire stuffed horse, an Appaloosa, worn and moth-eaten, stood guard in one corner. The floor was littered with dirty laundry, broken saddle trees, pieces of leather, and other bric-a-brac. It was remarkable: the entire place was like a dusty museum devoted to relics of the Old West. Corrie had expected to see mementos of Vietnam: weapons, insignia, photographs. But there was absolutely nothing, not a trace, of the war that reputedly had changed Brushy Jim forever.

Brushy Jim handed Corrie and Pendergast cans of Coke. “Now, Mr. Pendergast, just what do you want to know about the massacre?”

Corrie watched Pendergast set the Coke can aside. “Everything.”

“Well, it started during the Civil War.” Brushy Jim threw his massive body into a big armchair, took a noisy sip. “You know all about Bloody Kansas, I’m sure, Mr. Pendergast, being a historian.”

“I’m not a historian, Mr. Draper. I’m a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

There was a dead silence. Then Brushy Jim cleared his throat.

“All right, then, Mr. Pendergast. So you’re FBI. May I ask what brings you to Medicine Creek?”

“The recent homicide.”

Brushy Jim’s look of suspicion had returned, full force. “And what,exactly, does that have to do with me?”

“The victim was a relic hunter named Sheila Swegg. She’d been digging in the Mounds.”

Brushy Jim spat on the floor, twisted it into the dust with his boot. “Goddamned relic hunters. They should leave the stuff in the ground.” Then he looked quickly back at Pendergast. “You still haven’t said what the murder has to do with me.”

“I understand the history of the Mounds, and the Medicine Creek Massacre, are intertwined. Along with something I’ve heard referred to locally as the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives.’ And as you may know, a large number of Southern Cheyenne arrows were found arranged with the body.”

A long time passed while Brushy Jim seemed to consider this. “What kind of arrows?” he finally asked.

“They were of cane, feathered with bald eagle primaries and tipped with a type II Plains Cimarron style point of Alibates chert and Bighorn red jasper. A matched set, by the way, in almost perfect condition. They date to around the time of the massacre.”

Brushy Jim issued a long low whistle, and then fell into silence, his brow furrowed with thought.

“Mr. Draper?” Pendergast prompted at last.

For another moment, Brushy Jim was still. Then, with a slow shake of his head, he began his story.

“Before the Civil War, southwestern Kansas was completely unsettled, just Cheyenne and Arapaho, Pawnee and Sioux. The only white folks were those passing through on the Santa Fe Trail. But settlement was rolling this way from the frontier, which at that time was eastern Kansas. Folks had their eye on the good range in the valleys of the Cimarron River, the Arkansas, Crooked Creek, and Medicine Creek. When the Civil War broke out all the soldiers went off, leaving the territory defenseless. The settlers had been brutalizing the Indians and now it was payback time. There was a whole string of Indian attacks along the frontier. Then when the Civil War ended, a lot of soldiers came back, armed and bitter. They’d seen war, Mr. Pendergast. And I meanwar. That kind of violence can do something to a man. It can damage the mind.”

The man paused, cleared his throat.

“So they came back here and began forming vigilante groups to push the Indians west so they could take the land. ‘Clearing the country,’ they called it. There was a group formed over in Dodge, called the Forty-Fives. ’Course, it wasn’t Dodge then, just the Hickson Brothers ranch. Forty-five men, it was, some of the worst dregs of humanity, murderers and crooks pushed out of settled towns farther east. My great-grandfather Isaiah Draper was just a boy of sixteen, barely in long pants, and he got sucked into it. I guess his thinking was he’d missed the war, so he’d better hurry up and prove his manhood damn quick while he still could.”

Brushy Jim took another noisy sip.

“Anyway, in June of ’65 the Forty-Fives went on a rampage, heading down the criks south of the Canadian and Cimarron and into the Oklahoma panhandle. These were Civil War veterans who knew all about fighting a mounted enemy. They were hardened men, tough, survivors of the very worst sort. They’d been through the fires of hell, Mr. Pendergast. But they were also cowards. If you want to survive a war, nothing helps like being a chicken-livered, yellow-bellied poltroon. They waited until the warriors had gone off on the hunt and then attacked Indian settlements at night, killing mostly women and children. They showed no mercy, Mr. Pendergast. They had a saying: nits make lice. They even killed the babies. Bayoneted them to save ammunition.”

Another sip. His low gravelly voice in the dark cool room was hypnotic. It almost seemed to Corrie that he was describing something he himself had seen. Maybe he had, in a way . . . She averted her eyes.

“My great-grandfather was sickened by what he saw. Raping and killing women and cutting up babies wasn’t his idea of becoming a man. He wanted to leave the group, but with the Indians all riled up it would’ve been certain death to peel off and try to get home alone. So he had to go along. One night they got drunk and beat the hell out of him ’cause he wouldn’t join in the fun. Busted a few ribs. That’s what saved his life in the end—those broken ribs.

“Toward the middle of August they’d rampaged through a half dozen Cheyenne camps and driven the rest of them north and west out of Kansas. Or so they thought, anyways. They were returning to the Hickson ranch when they came through here. Medicine Creek. It was the night of August fourteenth they camped up at the Mounds—you been to the Mounds, Mr. Pendergast?”

Pendergast nodded.

“Then you’ll know it’s the highest point of land. There weren’t any trees back then, just a bare rise with three scrub-covered mounds on top. You could see for miles around. They posted pickets, like always. Four sentries at the compass points, posted a quarter mile from camp. Sun was setting and the wind had kicked up. A front was coming in and the dust was a-blowing.

“My great-grandfather had those broken ribs and they’d laid him down in a little holler right there behind the Mounds, maybe a hundred yards away. With the broken ribs he couldn’t sit up, see, and the dust at ground level was just about driving him crazy. So they put him in this little brush shelter out of the wind. I guess they felt sorry for what they’d done to him.

“Just as the sun was setting and the men were getting ready to eat dinner, it happened.”

He tilted his head back, took a long swig.

“There was a sound of beating hooves right on top of them. Thirty warriors on white horses, painted with red ochre, came out of the dust. The Indians were all duded up with painted faces and feathers and rattles—and they came howling, arrows flying. Right out of nowhere. Surprised the hell out of the Forty-Fives. Made a couple of passes and killed them all, every last man. The sentries saw nothing. They hadn’t seen any sign of riders approaching, hadn’t heard a sound. The sentries, Mr. Pendergast, were among thelast to be killed. Now that’s just the opposite of what usually happens, if you know your western military history.

“It weren’t no cakewalk for the Cheyennes, though. The Forty-Fives were tough men and fought back hard and killed at least a third of the attackers and a bunch of their horses. My great-grandfather saw the whole thing from where he was lying. After . . . after killing their last man, the Indiansrode back into the huge clouds of dust. Disappeared, Mr. Pendergast. And when the dust cleared there were no Indians. No horses. Just forty-four white men, dead and scalped. Even the Indians’ dead warriors and horses had vanished.

“A patrol of the Fourth Cavalry picked up my great-grandfather two days later near the Santa Fe Trail. He took ’em back to the site of the massacre. They found the blood and piles of rotting guts from the Indian horses, but no bodies or fresh graves. There were hoofprints all around the hilltop but nowhere else. No tracks went beyond where the sentries had been killed. There were some Arapaho scouts with the Fourth, and they were so terrified at the lack of tracks coming and going that they began wailing that these were ghost warriors and refused to follow the trail. There was a big uproar and several more Cheyenne villages were burned by the cavalry for good measure, but most folks were glad the Forty-Fives were gone. They were a bad bunch.

“That was the end of the Cheyenne in western Kansas. Dodge City was settled in 1871 and the Santa Fe Railroad came through in 1872, and pretty soon Dodge became the cowboy capital of the West, the end of the Texas Trail, shootouts, Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, and all that. Medicine Creek was settled in 1877 by the cattleman H. H. Keyser, cattle brand bar H high on the left shoulder, horse brand flying H on the right. The blizzard of ’86 wiped out eleven thousand head and the next day Keyser leaned his head against the barrels of his shotgun and pulled both triggers. They said it was the curse. Then sodbusters and nesters came and the days of the cattle barons were over. First it was wheat and sorghum, then the dust bowl, and after that they replanted in feed corn and now gasohol corn. But in all that time no one ever solved the mystery of the Ghost Warriors and the Medicine Creek Massacre.”

He took one final sip and dramatically clunked down his can.

Corrie looked at Pendergast. It was a good story, and Brushy Jim told it well. Pendergast was so still he might have been asleep. His eyes were half closed, his fingers tented, his body sunken into the sofa.

“And your great-grandfather, Mr. Draper?” he murmured.

“He settled down in Deeper, married and buried three wives. He wrote up the whole thing in a private journal, with a lot more detail than what I just gave you, but the journal got sold off with a lot of his other valuables in the Great Depression and now sits in some library vault back east. Never could figure out where. I heard the story from my dad.”

“And how did he manage to see everything, in the middle of a dust storm?”

“Well, all I know is what my dad said. When you get a dust storm in these parts, sometimes it blows on and off, like.”

“And the Cheyenne, Mr. Draper, weren’t they already known to the U.S. Cavalry as the ‘Red Specters’ because of the way they could sneak up on even the most vigilant sentry and cut his throat before he even realized it?”

“For an FBI agent, you seem to know quite a lot, Mr. Pendergast. But you got to remember this happened at sunset, not at night, and those Forty-Fives had just fought as Confederates and lost a war. You know what it’s like to lose a war? You can damn well be sure they were keeping their eyes open.”

“How was it that the Indians didn’t discover your great-grandfather?”

“Like I said, the men felt bad about whomping him and had erected a little windbreak for him. He pulled that brush over himself to hide.”

“I see. And from that vantage point, lying in a hollow, covered with brush, at least a hundred yards downhill from the camp, in a dust storm, he was able to see all that you just described in such vivid detail. The Ghost Warriors appearing and disappearing as if by magic.”

Brushy Jim’s eyes flashed dangerously and he half rose from his seat. “I ain’t selling you anything, Mr. Pendergast. My great-granddaddy ain’t on trial here. I’m just telling you the story as it came down to me.”

“Then you have a theory, Mr. Draper? A personal opinion, perhaps? Or do you really think it wasghosts? ”

There was a silence.

“I don’t like the tone you’re taking with me, Mr. Pendergast,” Brushy Jim said, now on his feet. “And FBI or not, if you’re insinuating something, I want to hear it flat out.Right now. ”

Pendergast did not immediately reply. Corrie swallowed with difficulty, her gaze moving toward the door.

“Come now, Mr. Draper,” Pendergast said at last. “You’re no fool. I’d like to hear yourreal opinion.”

There was an electric moment in which nobody moved. Then Brushy Jim softened.

“Mr. Pendergast, it appears you’ve smoked me out. No, I don’t think those Indians were ghosts. If you go out to the Mounds—it’s hard to see now with all the trees—but there’s a long gentle fold of land that comes up from the crik. A group of thirty Cheyenne could come up that fold, hidden from the sentries if they walked their horses. The setting sun would have put them in the shadow of the Mounds. They could’ve waited below for the dust to come up, mounted real quick, and rode in. That would explain the sudden hoofbeats. And they could’ve left the same way, packing out their dead and erasing their tracks. I never heard of an Arapaho who could track a Cheyenne, anyway.”

He laughed, but it was a mirthless laugh.

“What about the dead Cheyenne horses? How did they vanish, in your opinion?”

“You’re a hard man to please, Mr. Pendergast. I thought about that, too. When I was young I saw an eighty-year-old Lakota chief butcher a buffalo in less than ten minutes. A buffalo’s a damn sight bigger than a horse. Indians ate horsemeat. They could’ve butchered the horses and packed the meat and bones out with their dead or hauled them out by travois. They left the guts behind, you see, to lighten the loads. And maybe there weren’t more than two or three dead Cheyenne horses, anyway. Maybe Great-Granddaddy Isaiah exaggerated just a little when he said a dozen of their horses had been killed.”

“Perhaps,” Pendergast said. He rose and walked over to the makeshift bookshelf. “And I thank you for a most informative story. But what does the story of the massacre have to do with the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ that you mentioned, which nobody seems willing to talk about?”

Brushy Jim stirred. “Well, now, Mr. Pendergast, I don’t think ‘willing’ is the right word there. It’s just not a pretty story, that’s all.”

“I’m all ears, Mr. Draper.”

Brushy Jim licked his lips. Then he leaned forward. “All right, then. You know how I said that the sentries were among the last to be killed?”

Pendergast nodded. He had picked up a battered copy ofButler & Company’s New American First Reader and was leafing through it.

“The very last to be killed was a fellow named Harry Beaumont. He was the leader of the Forty-Fives and a real hard case, too. The Indians were furious at what had been done to their women and children, and they punished Beaumont for it. They didn’t just scalp him. Theyrounded him.”

“I’m not familiar with that term.”

“Well, let’s just say that they did something to Harry Beaumont that would make sure none of his family recognized him in the afterlife. And after they were done they cut off his boots and skinned off the soles of his feet, so his spirit couldn’t follow them. Then they buried the boots on either side of the Mounds, as a backup, like, to trap his evil spirit there forever.”

Pendergast returned the book, pulled out another, even more battered, titledCommerce of the Prairies. He flipped through the pages. “I see. And the curse?”

“Different people will tell you different things. Some say Beaumont’s ghost still haunts the Mounds, looking for his missing boots. Some say still worse things that I’d just as soon not repeat in front of a lady, if it’s all the same to you. But the one thing I can tell you for sure is that, right before he died, Beaumont cursed the very ground around him—cursed it for all eternity. My great-granddaddy was still hidden in the hollow, and he heard him with his own ears. He was the only living witness.”

“I see.” Pendergast had pulled out another volume, very narrow and tall. “Thank you, Mr. Draper, for a most interesting history lesson.”

Brushy Jim rose. “Not a problem.”

But Pendergast seemed not to hear. He was staring closely at the narrow book. It had a cheap cloth cover, Corrie noticed, and its ruled pages seemed filled with crude drawings.

“Oh, that old thing,” Brushy Jim said. “My dad bought that off some soldier’s widow, years and years ago. Swindled. I’m ashamed he was taken in by such a fake. Always meant to throw it out with the trash.”

“This is no fake.” Pendergast turned a page, then another, with something close to reverence. “To all appearances, this is a genuine Indian ledger book. Fully intact, as well.”

“Ledger book?” Corrie repeated. “What’s that?”

“The Cheyenne would take an old Army ledger book and draw pictures on the pages—of battles, courtship, the hunt. The pictures would chronicle the life of a warrior, a kind of biography. The Indians thought decorated ledger books had supernatural powers, and if you strapped one to your body they would render you invincible. The Natural History Museum in New York has a ledger book done by a Cheyenne Indian named Little Finger Nail. It wasn’t as magical as Little Finger Nail would have liked: it still bears the mark of the soldier’s carbine ball that passed through both the ledger bookand him as well.”

Brushy Jim was staring, wide-eyed. “You mean . . .” he began in an incredulous tone. “You mean to say that, all this time . . . The thing’s real?”

Pendergast nodded. “Not only that, but unless I’m much mistaken, it’s a work of singular importance. This scene, here, seems emblematic of the Little Bighorn. And this, at the end of the book, appears to be a depiction of the Ghost Dance religion.” He closed the volume with care and handed it to Brushy Jim. “This is the work of a Sioux chief. And here perhaps is his glyph, which might be interpreted as Buffalo Hump. It would take additional scholarship to be sure.”

Brushy Jim held the book at arm’s length, trembling, as if afraid to drop it.

“You realize that it’s worth several hundred thousand dollars,” Pendergast said. “Perhaps more, should you want to sell it. It is in need of conservation, though. The groundwood pulp in ledger book paper is highly acidic.”

Slowly, Brushy Jim brought the book closer, turned the pages. “I want to keep this here book, Mr. Pendergast. The money’s no good to me. But how do I get it, um, conserved?”

“I know a gentleman who can work wonders with books as damaged and frail as this one. I’d be happy to have it taken care of, gratis, of course.”

Brushy Jim looked at the book for a minute. Then, without a word, he extended it to Pendergast.

They said their goodbyes. As Corrie drove back to town, Pendergast fell into silence, eyes closed, deep in thought, the carefully wrapped ledger book held very gently in one hand.

Eighteen

Willie Stott moved across the slick concrete floor, sweeping the hot mixture of bleach and water back and forth, propelling stray gizzards, heads, crests, guts, and all the other poultry effluvia—collectively known as “gibs” by the line workers—toward the huge stainless steel sink in the floor below the Evisceration Area. With the expertise of years, Stott flicked his hose hand left and right, sending additional strings of offal skidding away under the force of the cleanser, rolling them all up neatly together as they were forced toward the center. Stott worked the jet like an artist works a brush, teasing everything into a long bloody rope before giving it one final signature blast that propelled it down the drain with a wet swallow. He gave the floor a once-over, snaking the jet here and there to catch a few stray strings and wattles, the odd beak, causing the stragglers to jump and dance under the play of the hose.

Stott had given up eating turkey within days of starting work at Gro-Bain, and after a few months had given up meat altogether. Most everybody else he knew who worked there was the same. At Thanksgiving, Gro-Bain gave free turkeys to all its employees, but Stott had yet to meet anyone who actually ate it.

Work complete, he switched off and racked the nozzle. It was ten-fifteen and the last of the second shift had left hours before. In years past there would have been a third shift, from eight until four in the morning, but those days were gone.

He felt the comforting pressure in his back pocket from the pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad. As a reward for finishing, he slipped out the flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull. The whiskey, warmed to body temperature, traced a nice warm tingling line right down to his belly and then, a few moments later, back up to his head.

Life wasn’t so bad.

He took a final pull and emptied the bottle, shoved it back into his pocket, and picked up the big squeegee that hung on the tiled wall. Back and forth, back and forth—in another five minutes the floor, workers’ platform, and conveyor belt overhead were all so clean and dry you could eat off them. And the stench of turkey shit, fear, blood, and sour guts had been replaced by the clean, astringent smell of bleach. Another job well done. Stott felt a small stab of pride.

He reached for the bottle, then remembered it was empty. He glanced at his watch. The Wagon Wheel would be open for another thirty minutes. If Jimmy, the night guard, arrived on schedule, he would make it with plenty of time to spare.

It was a wonderfully warming thought.

As he was racking up the last of the cleaning equipment, he heard Jimmy coming into the plant. The man was actually five minutes early—or, more likely, his own damn watch was running slow. He walked over to the docks to wait. In a minute he heard Jimmy approaching, jangling like an ice cream truck with his keys and all his other crap.

“Yo, Jimmy-boy,” Stott said.

“Willie. Hey.”

“All yours.”

“Whatever.”

Stott walked into the deserted employee parking lot, where his dusty car sat beneath a light at the far end, all alone. Since he arrived at the height of the second shift, his car was always the farthest away. The night was hot and silent. He walked through the pools of light toward his car. Beyond the lot, cornfields stretched into darkness. The nearest stalks—the ones he could make out—stood very still and straight. They seemed to be listening. The sky was overcast and it was impossible to tell where the corn stopped and night began. It was one huge black sinkhole. He quickened his pace. It wasn’t natural, to be surrounded by so much goddamn corn. It made people strange.

He unlocked the car and got in, slamming the door behind him. The violent motion sent the thin blanket of dust and corn pollen that had settled on the roof skittering down the windows. He locked the door, getting more dust on his hands. The shit was everywhere. Christ, he could already taste Swede’s whiskey, burning the back of his throat clean.

He started his car, an old AMC Hornet. The engine turned over, coughed, died.

He swore, looked out the windows. To his right, darkness. To his left, the empty parking lot with its regular intervals of light.

He waited, turned the key again. This time the engine caught. He gave the accelerator a few revs and then put the thing into drive. With its habitual clank of protesting metal, the car moved forward.

Wagon Wheel, here we come.A warm feeling invaded him as he thought of another pint, another pull, just something to see him back to Elmwood Acres, the sad little mini-development where he lived on the far end of town. Or maybe he’d make it two pints. It felt like that kind of a night.

The lights of the Gro-Bain plant flashed past, and then Stott was humming along in the darkness, two walls of corn blurring past on either side, his headlights illuminating a small section of the dusty road. Up ahead it curved, angling lazily toward Medicine Creek. The lights of town lay to the left, a glow in the sky above the corn.

As he rounded the curve the engine clanked again, more ominously than before. And then, with a wheeze and cough, it went dead.

“Shit,” Willie Stott muttered.

The old Hornet glided to a stop along the road. Stott put it in park and turned the key, but there was nothing. The car was dead.

“Shit!” he cried again, slamming the wheel. “Shit, shit,shit! ”

His voice died away in the confines of the car. Silence and darkness surrounded him. Whatever had happened in his car just now sounded pretty fucking final, and he didn’t even have a flashlight to look under the hood.

He pulled out his flask, opened it, tipped it up, drained the last fiery drop. He licked his lips, turning the bottle over in his hands, staring at it. He didn’t have any more at home.

He flung it out the window into the corn and checked his watch. Twenty minutes until the Wagon Wheel closed. It was about a mile. He could still make it on foot if he walked fast.

Then, hand on the door handle, he paused, thinking about the recent murder, about the unpleasant details the newspaper had hinted at.

Yeah, right. Five billion acres of corn and some nutcase is lying in wait, right between here and the Wagon Wheel.

Muggy night air flowed in as he opened the door. Christ, twenty minutes to eleven and it was still hot as bejesus. He could smell the corn, the moisture. Crickets chirped in the darkness. Heat lightning flickered on the distant horizon.

He turned back toward the car, wondering if he should put on the emergency blinkers. Then he decided against it. That would just add a dead battery to his problems. Besides, nobody would come along the road until the pre-shift, at seven.

If he was going to get to the Wagon Wheel in time, he’d better get moving.

He walked fast, lanky legs eating up the road. His job at the plant paid seven-fifty an hour. How the hell was he supposed to fix his car on seven-fifty an hour? Ernie would give him a break, but parts cost a fortune. A new starter might be three fifty, four hundred. Two weeks of work. He could hitch a ride to work with Rip. Like last time, he’d have to borrow Jimmy’s car to get home, and then come back at seven to pick him up. Problem was, Jimmy expected him to pay for all the gas during the arrangement, and gas cost a fucking fortune these days.

It wasn’t fair. He was a good worker. He should be paid more. Nine bucks an hour, eight-fifty, at least.

He walked even faster. The warm glow of yellow light in the Wagon Wheel, the long wooden bar, the plaintive jukebox, the bottles and glasses glistening on their shelves before the mirror—the images filled his heart and propelled his legs.

Suddenly he stopped. He thought he’d heard a rustling in the corn to his right.

He waited a moment, listening, but all was silent. The air was dead still. The heat lightning flickered, then flickered again.

He resumed walking, this time moving to the center of the road. All was silent. Some animal, coon probably. Or maybe his imagination.

Again his thoughts turned to the Wagon Wheel. He could see the big friendly form of Swede with his red cheeks and handlebar mustache moving behind the counter: good old Swede, who always had a friendly word for everyone. He imagined Swede setting the little shot glass down in front of him, the generously poured whiskey slopping over the side; he imagined raising it to his lips; he imagined the golden fire making its way down his gullet. Instead of a pint, he’d pay a little more and drink at the bar. Swede would give him a ride home, he was good to his customers. Or maybe he could just rack out in the back room, go on over to Ernie’s first thing in the morning. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept one off in the Wagon Wheel. Beat going home to the ball and chain, anyway. He could call her from the bar, make some excuse—

There was that sound in the corn again.

He hesitated only for a moment, then continued walking, his work shoes soft on the warm asphalt. And then he heard the sound again, closer now, close enough to be recognized.

It was the rustle of someone brushing through the dry corn.

He peered to his right, trying to see. But he could only see the tops of the corn against the faint sky. The rest was a wall of darkness.

Then, as he stared, he saw a single cornstalk tremble against the sky.

What was it? Deer? Coyote?

“Hah!” he cried, shooing his hands in the direction of the sound.

His blood froze at the reply. It was a grunt, human yet not human.

Muh,came the sound.

“Who the hell is that?”

No sound now.

“Fuck you,” said Stott, quickening his pace and veering to the far side of the road. “I don’t know who the hell you are, butfuck you. ”

There was a rustling sound, of someone moving through the corn, faster now, keeping pace with him.

Muh.

Stott began to jog along the far side of the road.

The rustling in the corn kept pace. The voice, the strange gasping voice, rose in volume and insistence.Muh! Muh!

Now Stott broke into a run. There was a corresponding crashing in the corn to his right. He could see, against the faintest sky, the tops of the corn alongside the road thrashing and snapping. More crashing, and then he saw what he thought was a dark shape coming out of the corn, very fast, first moving parallel to him, then angling closer.

In a second, some atavistic instinct drove Willie Stott to jump the ditch on the left side of the road and crash headlong into the corn. As the tall ears swallowed him up, he glanced back for only a second. As he did so he saw a large, dark shape scuttling across the road behind him at a terrible speed.

Stott crashed through the next row, and the next, forcing himself as deeply as possible into the dark, suffocating corn, gasping out loud. But always he heard the crash of dry ears being trampled behind him.

He took a ninety-degree angle and ran down a row. Behind, the crashing stopped.

Stott ran. He had long legs and in high school he’d been on the track team. That had been years ago, but he still knew how to run. And so he ran, thinking of nothing else except planting one foot before the other, outrunning whatever it was behind him.

Despite the encircling corn, he was not yet fully disoriented. Medicine Creek lay ahead of him, just over a mile away. He could still make it. . .

Behind him now, he could hear the loud slapping of feet against earth. And with each step, a rhythmic grunt.

Muh. Muh. Muh.

The long row of corn made a slow curve along the topography of the land, and he flew along it, running with a speed born of sheer terror.

Muh. Muh. Muh.

Christ, it was getting closer. He swerved, desperately crashing through another row, still running.

He heard an echoing crash behind him as the pursuer broke through the row, following him, closing in.

Muh. Muh. Muh. Muh.

“Leave me the fuck alone!” he screamed.

Muh. Muh. Muh. Muh.

It was getting closer, so close he almost imagined he could feel puffs of hot breath on his neck, keeping time with the thudding feet. A sudden wet warmth flooded his thighs as his bladder let go. He swerved, crashed through yet another row, swerved, veered back. The thing kept right behind him, closer, ever closer.

Muh! Muh! Muh! Muh!

Muh. Muh. Muh. Muh.

It was still gaining, and gaining fast.

Stott felt something grab his hair, something horribly strong. He tried to jerk his head away, the sudden pain awful, but the grip held fast. His lungs were on fire. He could feel his legs slackening with terror.

“Somebody, help me!” he screamed, diving to one side, jerking and thrashing his head so violently he could feel his scalp begin to separate from his skull. The thing was now almost on top of him. And then he felt a sudden, viselike grip on the back of his neck, a brutal twist and snap, and suddenly it seemed as if he had left the ground and was flying, flying, up into the dark sky, while a triumphant voice screamed:

Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

Nineteen

Smit Ludwig locked the door to theCry County Courier and dropped the keys into his pocket. As he angled across the street he glanced up at the early morning sky. Big sterile thunderheads were piling up on the northern horizon, just as they had done every day for the past two weeks. They would spread across the sky by nightfall and be gone by morning. One of these days the heat would break and there would be one hell of a storm. But it looked as if the heat would grip the town for a while more, at least.

Ludwig had a pretty good idea what Art Ridder and the sheriff wanted to talk to him about. Well, tough: he’d already written the story about the dog, and it was going to run that very afternoon. He strode down the sidewalk, feeling the heat soaking through the soles of his shoes, feeling the pressure of the sun on his head. Magg’s Candlepin Castle was only a five minute walk, but two minutes into it Ludwig realized his mistake in not driving. He would arrive sweaty and disheveled: a tactical error. At least, he told himself, Magg’s was air-conditioned to tundra-like temperatures.

He pushed through the double doors into a blast of icy air, and was greeted by silence: at this time of the morning the alleys were dark, the pins like tall white teeth in the gloom, the racking machines mute. At the far end of the alley he could see the lights of the Castle Club, where every morning Art Ridder held court with his paper and his breakfast. Ludwig adjusted his collar, straightened his shoulders, and started forward.

The Castle Club was not so much a club as a glassed-in eating area with red fake-leather banquettes, Formica tables made to look like wood, and beveled mirrors shot through with faux gold marbling. Ludwig pushed through the door and approached the corner table, where Ridder and Sheriff Hazen were seated, talking in low tones. Ridder caught sight of Ludwig, rose with a big smile, held out his hand, and guided the reporter into a chair.

“Smitty! Real good of you to come.”

“Sure, Art.”

The sheriff had not risen, and now he simply nodded through a wash of cigarette smoke. “Smit.”

“Sheriff.”

There was a short silence. Ridder looked around, his polyester collar stretching this way and that. “Em! Coffee! And bring Mr. Ludwig some bacon and eggs.”

“I don’t eat much of a breakfast.”

“Nonsense. Today’s an important day.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Dr. Stanton Chauncy, the professor from KSU, will be joining us in fifteen minutes. I’m going to show him the town.”

There was a short pause. Art Ridder was wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt and light gray doubleknit trousers, his white blazer thrown over the back of the chair. He was rounded, but not especially soft. All those years wrestling turkeys had put muscles on his arms that, it seemed, would never wither. He glowed with ruddy good health.

“We don’t have much time, Smitty, so I’ll be direct. You know me: Mr. Direct.” Ridder gave a little chuckle.

“Sure, Art.” Ludwig leaned back to allow the waitress to slide a greasy plate of bacon and eggs in front of him. He wondered what a real reporter would do at this point. Walk out? Politely decline?

“Okay, Smitty, here’s the deal. You know this guy, Chauncy, is looking for a place to put in an experimental cornfield for Kansas State. It’s either us or Deeper. Deeper’s got a motel, Deeper’s got two gas stations, Deeper’s twenty miles closer to the interstate. Okay? So you might ask, where’s the contest? Why us? You following me?”

Ludwig nodded.You following me? was Art Ridder’s signature phrase.

Ridder raised the coffee mug, flexed his hairy arm, took a sip.

“We’ve got something Deeper doesn’t. Now listen to me good, because this isn’t the official KSU line. We’ve gotisolation. ” He paused dramatically. “Why is isolation important? ’Cause this cornfield’s going to be used for testinggenetically—altered—corn. ” He hummed theTwilight Zone theme, then grinned. “You following me?”

“Not really.”

“We all know that genetically modified corn is harmless. But there are a bunch of ignorant city folks, liberals, enviros—you know who I’m talking about—who think there’s somethingdangerous about genetically altered corn.” He hummedTwilight Zone again. “Thereal reason Medicine Creek is in the running is because we’re isolated. No hotel. Long drive. No big mall. Closest radio and television station one hundred miles away. In short,this is the world’s lousiest place to organize a protest. Of course, Dale Estrem and the Farmer’s Co-op aren’t too pleased about it, either, but they’re just a few and I can handle them. You following me?”

Ludwig nodded.

“But now we’ve got a small problem. We’ve got a sonofabitch wacko running around. He’s killed a person, killed adog, and God knows what the hell else he’s up to, maybe he’s fucking sheep, too. Right when Stanton Chauncy, project director for the Agricultural Extension Program of Kansas State University, is in town to see if Medicine Creek is the right place to site these fields. And we want to show him itis a good place. A calm, law-and-order town. No drugs, no hippies, no protests. Sure, he’s heard about the murder, but he figures it’s just some random, one-time thing. He’s not concerned, and I want him to stay that way. So I need your help with two things.”

Ludwig waited.

“First, take a break from these goddamn articles about the killing. Okay, it happened. Now take a breather. And whatever you do, forchrissakes don’t do a story on the dead dog.”

Ludwig swallowed. There was a silence. Ridder was staring at him with a pair of red eyes, dark circles under them. He was really taking this seriously.

“That story qualifies as news,” Ludwig said, but his voice cracked when he said it.

Ridder smiled, laid a big hand on Ludwig’s shoulder. He lowered his voice. “I’masking you, Smitty, as afavor, to just take a few days off from the story. Just while the KSU guy is here. I’m not telling you to kill it, or anything like that.” He gave Ludwig’s shoulder a little squeeze. “Look, you and I both know the Gro-Bain plant isn’t exactly a sure thing. When they cut the night shift back in ’96, twenty families left town. Those were good jobs, Smitty. People got hurt, had to uproot themselves and leave homes their granddaddies built. I don’t want to live in a dying town.You don’t want to live in a dying town. This could make a real difference for our future. One or two fields is just a start, but genetic crop engineering is the coming wave, it’s where the big money’s going to be, and Medicine Creek could be part of it. There’s a lot riding on this, Smitty. A lot more than you might think. All I’m asking,all I’m asking, is a two-, three-day break. The guy’s announcing his decision on Monday. Just save it up and publish it when the guy leaves. Tuesday morning. You following me?”

“I see your point.”

“I care about this town. So do you, Smitty, I know you do. This isn’t for me. I’m just trying to do my civic duty.”

Ludwig swallowed. He noticed that his eggs were congealing on the plate and his bacon had already stiffened.

Sheriff Hazen spoke at last. “Smitty, I know we’ve had our differences. But there’s another reason not to publish anything on the dog. The forensic psychology guys in Dodge think the killer might be feeding off the publicity. His goal is to terrorize the town. People are already dredging up the old rumors about the massacre and the curse of the Forty-Fives, and those damn arrows just seemed calculated to revive the whole thing. It seems the killer might be acting out some weird fantasy about the curse. They say articles in the paper just encourage him. We don’t want to do anything that might trigger another killing. This guy’s no joke, Smitty.”

There was a long silence.

Ludwig finally sighed. “Maybe I can put the dog story off a couple of days,” he said in a low voice.

Ridder smiled. “That’s great. Great.” He squeezed Smitty’s shoulder again.

“You mentioned two things,” Ludwig said a little weakly.

“That’s right, I did. Okay. I was thinking—again, this is just a suggestion, Smitty—that you could fill the gap with a story on Dr. Stanton Chauncy. Everybody loves a little attention, and this guy’s no exception. The project—maybe it’s better not to go into that too much. But a story onhim, who he is, where he comes from, all his big degrees, all the great things he’s done up at KSU—you following me, Smitty?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Ludwig murmured. And, in fact, it really wasn’t a bad idea. If the guy proved to be interesting it would make a good story, and it was just the kind of thing people wanted to read. The future of the town was always the number one topic of conversation in Medicine Creek.

“Great. He’s going to be here in five minutes. I’ll introduce you, then leave you two alone.”

“Fine.” Ludwig swallowed again.

Ridder finally released his grip on Ludwig’s shoulder. He felt a cold patch where the warm, moist hand had been. “You’re a good guy, Smitty.”

“Right.”

Just then the sheriff’s radio crackled to life. Hazen pulled it off his belt and pressed the receive button. Ludwig could hear Tad’s tinny voice giving the sheriff the morning’s incident report. “Some joker let the air out of the tires of the football coach’s car,” came Tad’s voice.

“Next,” said Hazen.

“Another dead dog. This one reported by the side of the road.”

“Christ. Next.”

“Willie Stott’s wife says he didn’t come home last night.”

The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Check with Swede at the Wagon Wheel. He’s probably sleeping it off in the back room again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll check out the dog myself.”

“It’s two and a half miles out the Deeper Road, on the west side.”

“Check.”

Hazen shoved the radio back into his belt, ground out his cigarette in an ashtray, swept his hat off the empty seat next to him, fitted it to his head, and stood. “See you, Art. Smitty, thanks. Gotta run.”

The sheriff left, and then, as if on cue, Dr. Stanton Chauncy materialized at the far end of the bowling alley, glancing around.

Ridder called, waved at him through the glass. Chauncy nodded and walked past the alleys and into the Castle Club. He had the same stiff walk Ludwig had noticed at the Sociable. The man peered at the plastic decor and Ludwig thought he could see a flicker of something in his eyes: amusement? contempt?

Ridder rose and so did Ludwig.

“Don’t get up on my account,” Chauncy said. He shook their hands and they all sat down.

“Dr. Chauncy,” Ridder began, “I want to introduce to you Smit Ludwig from theCry County Courier, our local paper. He’s the publisher, editor, and reporter. It’s a one-man band.” He laughed.

Ludwig found a pair of rather cool blue eyes turned on him. “That must be very interesting for you, Mr. Ludwig.”

“Call him Smitty. We don’t go on ceremony in Medicine Creek. We’re a friendly town.”

“Thank you, Art.” Chauncy turned to Ludwig. “Smitty, I hope you’ll call me Stan.”

Ridder spoke before Ludwig could answer. “Stan, listen. Smitty wants to do a story on you and I have to run, so I’ll leave you here. Order what you like; bill’s on me.”

In a moment Ridder was gone, and Chauncy had turned his two dry eyes back on Ludwig. For a moment, Ludwig wondered what he was waiting for. Then he remembered he was supposed to do an interview. He pulled out his steno book, fished out a pen.

“If you don’t mind, I prefer to work with questions presented to me ahead of time,” said Chauncy.

“I wish we were that organized,” said Ludwig, mustering a smile.

Chauncy did not smile. “Tell me what kind of story you had in mind.”

“It would be a profile, basically. You know, the man behind the project and all that.”

There was a silence. “We’re dealing with a sensitive subject. It has to be handledjust so. ”

“It would be a favorable, uncontroversial article, focusing on you, not on the details of the experimental field.”

Chauncy thought a moment. “I’ll have to see the piece before it runs.”

“We don’t usually do that.”

“You’ll just have to make an exception in my case. University policy.”

Ludwig sighed. “Very well.”

“Proceed,” said Chauncy. He sat back in the chair.

“Would you like a coffee, some breakfast?”

“I ate hours ago, back in Deeper.”

“All right, then. Let’s see.” Ludwig opened the steno book to a blank page, smoothed it, readied his pen, and tried to think of a few pithy questions.

Chauncy looked at his watch. “I’m really a very busy man, so if you could keep this to fifteen minutes, I’d appreciate it. Next time, you should bring questions instead of making them up on the spot. It’s a simple courtesy when interviewing someone whose time is valuable.”

Ludwig exhaled. “So, tell me about yourself, where you went to school, how you got interested in agriculture, that sort of thing.”

“I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. I went to high school there, and attended the University of California at Davis, where I majored in biochemistry. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, in 1985.” He paused. “Would you like me to spell ‘summa cum laude’?”

“I think I can manage it.”

“Then I attended graduate school at Stanford University, graduating in four years—that would be 1989—with a doctorate in molecular biology. My dissertation was awarded the Hensley Medal. That’s H-E-N-S-L-E-Y. I shortly thereafter joined the biology department of Kansas State University on a tenure-track position. I was awarded the chair of Leon Throckmorton Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology in 1995 and, in addition, became director of the Agricultural Extension Program in 1998.”

He paused for Ludwig to catch up.

Ludwig had done enough boring stories to know what one smelled like, and this reeked to high heaven. TheHensley Medal, Jesus Christ. Was this guy a prick or what?

“Right, thanks. Stan, when did, ah, genetic engineering really capture your interest? When did you know what you wanted to become?”

“We don’t refer to it as genetic engineering. We refer to it as geneticenhancement. ”

“Genetic enhancement, then.”

A pious look briefly settled on Chauncy’s features. “When I was twelve or thirteen, I saw a picture inLife magazine of a crowd of starving Biafran children all crowding around a UN truck, trying to get a bit of rice. I thought,I want to do something to feed those starving children. ”

What a crock. But Ludwig dutifully wrote it all down.

“And your father? Mother? What did they do? Does science run in the family?”

There was a brief silence. “I would prefer to keep the focus on myself.”

Father probably drove a truck and beat his wife,thought Ludwig. “Fine. Tell me, have you published any papers or books?”

“Yes. A great many. I will have a copy of my curriculum vitae faxed to your office if you will give me the number.”

“No fax machine. Sorry.”

“I see. Frankly, I find it a waste of time to answer questions like this when it would be far simpler for you to get the information yourself from the KSU public relations department. They have a file on me a foot thick. And it would be much better if youread some of my papers before interviewing me. It just saves everyone so much time.” He checked his watch again.

Ludwig shifted to another tack. “Why Medicine Creek?”

“May I remind you, we haven’t necessarily chosen Medicine Creek.”

“I know, but why is it in the running?”

“We were looking for an average place with typical growing conditions. Medicine Creek and Deeper came out of a comprehensive, two-hundred-thousand-dollar computerized study of almost a hundred towns in western Kansas. Thousands of criteria were used. We are now in phase three of the study, determining the final choice for the project. We have already struck agreements with the appropriate agribusinesses for possible access to their land. All we need now is to make a decision between the two towns. And that is why I am here: to make that final decision and announce it on Monday.”

Ludwig wrote it all down, all the while realizing that when you really parsed what the man had said, he in fact had said nothing.

“But what do you think of thetown? ” he asked.

There was a brief silence, and Ludwig could see that this was one question Chauncy did not have a ready answer for.

“Well, I . . . Unfortunately there’s no hotel here, and the only place where I could stay had already been booked by a man, a difficult man it would seem, who took the entire floor and categorically refused to relinquish a room.” His lips pursed, bristling the short hairs around his mouth. “So I’ve had to stay in Deeper and make an inconvenient drive of twenty-five miles every morning and evening. There isn’t anything here, really, except abowling alley and a diner . . . No library, no cultural events, no museum or concert hall. Medicine Creek really hasn’t got anything particular to recommend it, frankly.” He smiled quickly.

Ludwig found himself bristling. “We’ve got good, solid, small-town, old-fashioned American values here. That’s worth something.”

Chauncy shuddered faintly. “I have no doubt of that. Mr. Ludwig, when I make the final decision between Deeper and Medicine Creek, you will no doubt be among the first to know. And now, if you don’t mind, I have important business to tend to.” He rose.

Ludwig rose with him and grasped the extended hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sun-reddened, stubble-headed form of Dale Estrem and two other farmers looking at them through the glass front of the bowling alley. They had seen Chauncy inside and were obviously waiting for him to come out. Ludwig suppressed a smile.

“You can fax or e-mail the piece to the KSU public relations department,” said Chauncy. “The number is on my card. They will vet it and return it to you by the end of the week.” He snapped his card on the table and stood up.

By the end of the week.Ludwig watched the little prick walk stiffly past the bowling lanes, his head up, his back very straight, his small legs moving as briskly as machinery. Chauncy pushed open the door to the street and now Dale Estrem was striding toward him, his big farmer’s arms swinging. The sound of his raised voice was enough to penetrate even the inner sanctum of the Castle Club. It looked like Chauncy was in for a verbal mauling.

Ludwig smiled. Dale Estrem: now there was someone who was always willing to speak his mind. Screw Chauncy, screw Ridder, and screw the sheriff. Ludwig had a paper to publish.

The dog would stay.

Twenty