Bad Moon Rising

2

A month earlier a gang of bikers had invaded the compound and smashed up the farmhouses and made several of the male hippies strip. For a few people in Black River Falls-anywhere you live there are a few people-it was a tough call. Who was more despicable? Drunken bikers or hippies?

The commune had a history. Shortly after the war two brothers decided to get a GI loan for a large farm they would work together. They built two modest clapboard houses about forty yards apart and proceeded to marry and raise their respective families. They were decorated warriors and popular young men who’d been raised on a farm in a smaller town twenty miles west of Black River Falls. Everything went according to Norman Rockwell for the next nine years, but then, true to many of the stories in the Bible, one brother began to covet the other brother’s wife. Well, in fact, he did quite a bit more than covet, and when the cuckold caught his brother and wife making love in the shallow wooded area behind the outbuildings, he became so distraught he ran back to his home, killed their only child (a girl of seven) and then killed himself.

The survivors left the farm, the bank foreclosed, and despite the efforts of a couple of other farmers to buy it and lease it out to starter farmers who couldn’t afford the purchase price, the land refused to cooperate. There was a scientific explanation for this, as a state agronomist repeated to anybody who listened, but locals preferred the notion that the land was “cursed” because of what had happened on it.

The hippies came two years ago. Twenty or so of them stayed in the main house, the white one; another fifteen or so stayed in the smaller, yellow house. Some of them worked in town; some of them raised a good share of the food they ate; and a handful, from my observation, were so stoned most of the time that they couldn’t do much more than tell you what they’d seen in their last acid vision.

Peace and love, brother. Age of Aquarius. Brotherhood of Man. Every once in a while, stoned on nothing stronger than beer, I’d get caught up in one of the many rock songs that espoused those precepts. But then I’d remember Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both of whom had died earlier this year, and I’d remind myself of how naive it all was. There was no peace and love in the slaughter of Vietnam or in the streets of bloody Detroit or Los Angeles.

In some respects I felt sorry for the hippies. I understood in a theoretical way what they were rebelling against. Our country was war-happy and our culture was pure Madison Avenue. What I didn’t understand were the ways they’d gone about expressing their distrust of society. I’d look at their babies and wonder what kind of lives the little ones would have. The same for the sanctimony of their language. Without seeming to realize it they were just as doctrinaire as the straight people they put down.

Then there were the drugs, which was how I’d gotten involved with the hippies. Since no other lawyer in town wanted to deal with them, and since the public defender’s office had only two attorneys, who worked eighteen-hour days as it was, I decided to help as many as I could. Clifford Sykes, our police chief, was jailing everybody who even looked as if he could spell marijuana (something I doubt Cliffie himself could do).

Marijuana I had no problem with. But I couldn’t see the social or spiritual benefits of dropping acid. I’d heard too many stories from the emergency room about young people who never quite recovered from their trips. In March two high schoolers had contrived a suicide plan and had, while acid fractured their minds, locked hands and jumped off Indian Point. They were skewered on the jagged rocks below.

These days chickens, cats, and an arthritic old dog had declared the weedy yard in front of the larger, two-story white farmhouse their private domain. A rusted plow and an old-fashioned refrigerator with the cooling coils on top sat on the edge of the yard, remnants from the farm before it had been deserted by the owners long ago. The enormous garden was in back. They were dutiful about keeping it plentiful. No matter how much pot, acid, and cheap wine filled the night they were up early to work their land. They’d planted corn, carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, and cabbage. Using a battered wood-fired stove, they also baked bread. That was another surprise. One of them gave me a slice with strawberry jam on it one day, and damned if it didn’t taste good.

I snapped off the ignition key and slid out of the new Ford convertible I’d bought after my old Ford ragtop got too expensive to keep fixing up. Or maybe I got it to signal my father, who’d died three years ago, that in my thirties I was finally becoming the man he’d wanted me to be.

Now, as I stood under the glowing span of moon and stars, a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash amp; Young began streaming from the main house. A breeze fresh as a first kiss made me close my eyes for a moment and ride along with it to long-ago summers when my red Ford ragtop and the lovely Pamela Forrest had been my primary concerns.

When I turned to look at the house I saw Richard Donovan coming down the steps. His father was a colonel in the army, and Richard had inherited his military bearing. Richard even had a uniform of sorts-blue work shirt, brown or black corduroy trousers. They were always clean. The girls usually wound up doing the laundry for the boys-feminism, the new “ism,” had yet to make its mark on this commune-but Richard did his own. I’d seen him hanging his own shirt and a pair of trousers on the clothesline one day. He told me he didn’t trust anybody else to keep his stuff the way he wanted it.

In the windows on either side of the front door, faces watched us silently. Whatever had happened out here, everybody knew about it and they were waiting to see how I was going to react when Richard finally told me what was going on.

He was handsome in a severe, gaunt way. There was something of the Old West in the face, pioneer stock I suppose, and now anxiety filled the blue eyes and bulged the hinges of his jaw.

“We have an audience, Richard.”

“They’re scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I’m going to show you. They’re like little children. If I wasn’t here this place wouldn’t exist.”

Nobody would ever accuse Donovan of being modest. Or having a sense of humor. He was the absolute lord and master of this place as well as the final arbiter. The first few times he paid me to represent him-he didn’t seem to have a job so I wondered where the cash came from-he lectured me on how the country was going to be once the government “abdicated” and people like him took over. I didn’t like him much, and I suspected the feeling was mutual.

His gaze roamed to the tumbledown, once-red barn downslope from us. In my high school summers I’d detasseled corn, the hottest and hardest work I’d ever done, eight a.m. to seven p.m., in temperatures frequently rising to one hundred. By noon you’d eaten your weight in bugs. At the end of the day, waiting for the bus to take us day laborers back to town, I’d always throw myself on any amount of hay I could find in the cooling barn and go instantly to sleep. This barn, however, looked as though it might collapse on me while I slept.

He nodded in the direction of the lopsided structure and started walking. The ground here was hard and lightly sand-covered. The voices from the watchers grew louder as the music stopped. Some of them were on the porch now. They knew a lot more about what was going on than I did.

The barn was within several yards of the woods and the woods were less than a city block deep. Behind them ran a two-lane gravel county road. High school kids wanting to raise some hell had gotten on the commune property by coming up this way. They waited till late at night when the hippies were asleep and a good share of them stoned as well. They smashed a few windows and spray-painted some swastikas on the houses. Donovan was the only one who confronted them. He jumped on the leader of the kids and broke his nose and arm. Cliffie Sykes had been persuaded to charge only the kids. But the parents of the boy who Donovan had hurt had now sued him in civil court. I’d handle the trial when it came up.

There was no door on the barn. Shadows deeper than night awaited us inside. Donovan stalked right in. I lost him for a few seconds. That’s how dark it was. Then suddenly there was light in the form of a dusty kerosene lantern put to life with a stick match he blew out a second too late. He’d burned his fingers and cursed about it.

It was a conventional barn layout with stalls for animals and space for storing equipment. The haymow above us was accessible only by a ladder. The stalls were packed with boxes. This was a storage area. Since a good share of these kids-like some of the other hippies across the land-came from prosperous families, I wondered if they’d brought along some of the goodies from the old days.

The smells ranged from old manure to wood soaked by decades of rain. A few brittle bridles hung from posts; horses had probably been commonplace. As had a leaky ceiling; ruts from tractor tires still gouged the dirt floor in places. Tin signs from the thirties had been nailed to the walls, pop and cigarettes and chewing tobacco and gasoline. This was a time trap; if you stayed here long enough you could probably hear ghost music from that era.

“Nobody here knows anything about this. I want to make that clear.”

“I take it somebody’s dead.”

“Yes.” His face was taut with sudden anger. “They’ll probably be out here with pitchforks and torches when they find out.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself. Calm down.”

“Yeah, calm down. All the bullshit we have to put up with just trying to live our lives. You live in a shithole of a town.”

He was already getting tiresome. “Show me where the body is.” He looked as if he was going to start preaching at me again. “Now.”

Donovan walked to a stall that held fewer boxes than the others. “Here.” Then: “Superdog kept barking so loud I had to see what was wrong. He brought me over here. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean, who cared about these boxes? But then I took them down. I should trust our dog more.”

The boxes were quickly stacked outside the stall. A filthy brown blanket had been thrown over a human body. A small, slender foot with a very white sock protruded from the bottom of the blanket.

I started forward but he stopped me. “I know who she is. She came out here a lot. The whole commune is in real trouble now. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the cops didn’t kill her and plant her here to make us look bad.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Well, right now crazy sounds pretty sane to me.”

“Who is she?”

“The minute I say her name you’ll know how much trouble we’re in.”

“Humor me. Who the hell is she?”

“It’s Vanessa Mainwaring.”

“What the hell was Paul Mainwaring’s daughter doing out here?”

The laugh was cruel. “A little high-class for pigs like us?”

“Don’t give me any more of your overthrow bullshit right now, Donovan, or I might tell you to go to hell and I’ll walk away. Don’t forget, there isn’t another lawyer in town who’ll work with you.”

I pushed him out of the way and grabbed a rusty rake. Awkward as it was, I managed to ease it under the blanket until I could gently lift it and set it aside. Because I knew her father, I’d seen her a number of times. Now, as she lay on her side, her profile was statue-perfect.

I hunched down. The wounds I could see were concentrated around her heart. There were six of them. Somebody had been very angry with her and had let a knife convey the rage. In books, beautiful dead women always retain some remnant of their beauty. Not so in real life. Heartbreaker that she’d been, now the skin was gray, and the tongue lolling out of the right side of her mouth looked lurid and sickly. Vivid blue eyes stared into eternity; even the dark hair was dusty and flecked with straw.

I looked up at Donovan. “How many people were in this stall to look at her?”

“Just about everybody. Why?”

“You’re not stupid, Donovan. You’ve never heard of a crime scene? The cops’ll look for all kinds of evidence. People tramping around in here’ll just make it tougher for them.”

“Cliffie’s a moron. He won’t look for any evidence at all.”

I pushed against my thighs to stand up and face him. “Cliffie’s daddy hired a so-called police commander to do all the serious work. The old man got tired of everybody bitching about his son. The police commander’s name is Mike Potter and he was a detective in Kansas City for six years before he had a heart attack and decided to look for a nice little nook to spend the rest of his career. He’s good. And the first person he’ll want to talk to is you. And one of the first questions he’s going to ask is how many people tramped around in the barn after you found her body.”

“You mean I was supposed to stop them?”

He wanted to argue. His question had been an accusation. “Who put the blanket on her?”

“I did.”

“What time did your dog start barking?”

“Maybe an hour and a half ago. And listen-I’m not some zombie, man. I’m sorry she’s dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I also kinda run this place, you know. I’ve got to worry about everybody else, too.”

“Who did she know out here?”

“Everybody. She tried hard to fit in but most of the people didn’t like her.”

“Why not?”

He took the time to slide a package of Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket. He was stalling.

“Why didn’t they like her?”

“Because of Neil, Neil Cameron.”

I’d had to represent Cameron a few times. He had a temper. When townspeople hassled him, he hassled back. “What about Neil?”

“She kind of jacked him around.”

“He went out with her?”

This time he got a full one-act play out of lighting his cigarette with a stick match. “Some people said he was obsessed with her. When she broke up with him he just kind of…”

“Kind of what?”

He shrugged lean shoulders. “You know what it’s like when you’re dumped. You get crazy for a while.”

“Was he still crazy these days?”

He was good at evasion. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

“Where do I find Cameron now?”

“I’m not sure. His sister would know.”

“Sarah Powers?”

“Oh, that’s right. You handled a couple of cases for her, too.”

Neil and Sarah had different last names because their parents were killed before the kids were even ten, and different sets of aunts and uncles raised them.

“Sarah doesn’t like you very much.”

“Then we’re even. I don’t like Sarah very much, either.”

She was one of the troublemakers out here. She’d been ticketed for parking the van in a No Parking zone and then had screamed at the cop while he was making out her summons. Then she got in another screaming match with a check-out woman at one of the supermarkets, accusing the woman of overcharging her because she was a hippie. Two weeks ago she was in a record store telling all the customers that they should steal anything they wanted, that the filthy capitalists were ripping off the country and getting away with it. The owner of the store called me and said if I didn’t remove her in five minutes-she had threatened to punch him if he touched her-he’d call the police. Fortunately, I’d been in my office and got there in time. The owner was a twenty-eight-year-old who fancied himself to be very counterculture. I wondered how he was feeling about things now that he’d heard Sarah’s everything-for-free rap.

“Let me see the soles of your sandals.”

“Why?”

“I want to check footprints. I need to eliminate yours and mine.”

He wore tire-tread sandals, easy to identify. I checked my own, then began dragging the lantern low over the immediate area. There were numerous fresh imprints. “You said ‘just about everybody’ was in here looking. How many people would that be?”

“Well, not everybody’s here tonight. I suppose fifteen or twenty.”

“You should’ve sold tickets.”

“Hey man, you’d be interested, too, a dead girl in your barn. It’s natural to be curious.”

“Let’s go find Sarah.”

He put his fingers against my chest as if he didn’t want me to move. He shook his head as if I’d said something he didn’t agree with. “Look, I might as well tell you.”

I shoved him away. “Tell me what?”

“About Neil.” He sighed. “And Vanessa. They-she came out here the other night and he started screaming at her. We were all afraid he’d hurt her or something. Finally Sarah broke it up. She didn’t want to see Neil hurt Vanessa. She and Van were good friends.”

“So you think Neil killed her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did.” I wondered why it had come so easily from him. He’d been protective of everybody in the commune and then he set Neil Cameron up with a motive and a possible foreshadowing of the murder.

“I feel like hell telling you about Neil.”

I almost smiled. He was a terrible actor. “Yeah, I can tell.”

His eyes narrowed in the dusty gold of lantern light. He was probably trying to figure out if there was any sarcasm in my response.

I walked to the rear of the barn. The doors hung askew and there was a wide gap separating them. An average-sized person could walk between them with no problem. I went out and stood in the back. At this point the woods were close. A person who’d climbed up the hill from the road below wouldn’t have had any trouble sneaking into the barn without being seen.

I went back inside.

“Let’s go find Sarah.”

I was glad to leave the barn, to enjoy the healing effects of the stars and the breezes of the night. I could see that at least six or seven people stood on the porch watching us. The music was off. Pot odor got stronger the closer we got to them. One of them was Sarah Powers, hands on hips, glaring at me. Before we even got there she snapped, “What’s he doing here, Richard?”

“He’s going to help us.”

“You’re such a child, Richard. He’s here to get us in trouble and for no other reason.” She had a tomboy rage that made her as formidable as a boy, forty pounds overweight, an unattractive round face and dark eyes that seemed to have only two expressions: contempt and rage. She tried to hide her own misery by taking it out on others.

“I want him off our land,” she said as we walked up to her.

“’Fraid you can’t do that, Sarah. I’m an investigator for Judge Whitney. That gives me the right to arrest people, and if you try obstructing justice, I’ll arrest you.”

“Thanks for inviting him here, Richard. You did exactly the wrong thing as usual.”

“I need to talk to your brother.”

“He isn’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He could be in serious trouble, Sarah. Believe it or not, I’m trying to help him.”

“I’m the only one who can help him. If he did what I tell him, he’d never get in trouble.”

“The police’ll be looking for him as soon as they hear about this.”

“A lot of people had reason to kill her. Don’t try to shit me, McCain.”

“A lot of people may have had reason to kill her, but not a lot of people had the opportunity to kill her in your barn. That’s the first thing the police’ll jump on.”

“C’mon, Sarah, help him.”

“All you care about is this stupid commune, Richard. You don’t care about Neil.”

“He’s my friend, Sarah. You’re forgetting that.”

“If he’s your friend, what’s McCain doing here?”

As she spoke, and for the third time, I saw her eyes glance at the small rusted Airstream west of the house. If he hadn’t run away, that might be the place he’d choose to gather himself and plan what he was going to do next.

“Donovan, I want you to come with me. I want to check out the trailer.”

“No!” There was pain rather than anger in her voice. She was protecting her brother.

“C’mon, Donovan.”

She grabbed my arm. “You can’t do this, McCain. He didn’t kill her.”

“Then he needs to tell the police that.” I removed her hand from my arm. I nodded to Donovan and we started walking to the trailer. The group on the porch was still watching us. By now sweat was streaming down my chest and back. Despite our words I felt sorry for Sarah. She was right. Cliffie and the local paper would convict Cameron without a trial. The people who hated the commune would use the murder as a pretext for getting rid of it entirely.

The trailer had been left here by the farmer and his wife who’d tried leasing it the second time. They couldn’t afford to fix up either of the houses to live in so they’d bought this old tin trailer. They’d left it behind with their dreams.

As we walked I said, “When we get done here, I want you to go to your house and call the police. Tell the woman on duty there what happened and tell her we need the chief to come out here with an ambulance. I’m going to guard the barn so nobody else gets in there.”

I could hear her coming behind me. The ground was covered with rocks and pieces of wood, probably blown here in one of the many tornadoes the area had endured over the years. She was running. I shifted to the left, in case she’d already launched herself at me. But all she wanted, breathless, was to talk.

“He’s in there, McCain. In the trailer, I mean.”

“All right.”

“But he’s got a gun and I don’t want him to do anything crazy. The mood he’s in-he might try to kill himself.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “Look, Sarah, I’m not trying to be a hard-ass here. I just want Neil to talk to the police. We both know they’re going to say he did it. If I was a cop I’d be inclined to say that, too. They had an argument. Neil couldn’t deal with losing her. She was found in the barn. But the only alternative right now is that he runs away and if he does that he’s in real trouble. He might be someplace where a trigger-happy cop spots him and kills him. Fugitive on the run. Happens all the time, Sarah.”

Grief replaced anger. I took my hand away. I saw the youngster in her. Hers hadn’t been a happy life, not looking the way she did. School kids could hurt you worse than bullets, with wounds that never healed.

“You don’t give a damn about him.”

“I’d like to see him clear himself if he can.”

“You already think he’s guilty and he isn’t.” Tears gleamed in her eyes.

“Good. That’s what I want to hear him tell me. Now let’s you and I go talk to him.”

She glanced back at the people on the porch as if for reassurance. A shadowy male shouted, “Don’t trust him, Sarah.”

“He’s wrong, Sarah. Right now Neil needs me more than ever. I’m the only legal friend he’s got.”

Donovan spoke quietly. “He’s right, Sarah. You need to listen to him.”

Grief became anger. “You want him to be guilty, Richard.”

I had no idea what she was hinting at. “Let’s find him, Sarah. Right away, before things get any worse.”

“How could they get any worse?”

“By not calling the police as soon as possible. If there’s a long lag between the time I saw the body and calling them, it’ll look very bad for everybody. Now c’mon.”

“You better be telling me the truth about helping Neil.”

“I am.”

I turned toward the trailer. After half a minute she joined me and we set off. My shirt and trousers had sweated to me like a second skin. The alcohol kick from the party was long gone. The ground here was rough and rocky. I almost stumbled twice.

We were now ten yards away.

“I’ll go ahead and talk to him. He’s my brother.”

“All right.”

“You stay back here until I tell you to come in.”

She was in a hurry now. I saw a silhouette of him, backlit by the sudden lantern light inside, watching her rush to him. Then the door squeaked open and she disappeared into the dim doorway.

I smoked. I smoked three cigarettes in the next twenty minutes. I could hear their voices but not their words. Sometimes there was the sharp noise of anger, sometimes there were sobs. There were even lengthy silences. I thought of all the things they were probably saying to each other. From what I knew of him, Neil probably wasn’t about to turn himself in. But she would be pleading. I’d raised the prospect of him being killed by some overeager cop. I had the feeling that these were the words that had scared her into helping me.

A stray brown mutt came up and looked me over with big sweet eyes. Apparently she didn’t like what she saw. She trundled away. I looked back at the houses. They were all in the front yard now, waiting to see what would happen. “In a White Room” was being played, but at a much lower volume than the earlier records. The heat and plain exhaustion were making standing difficult. I’d had a long day and now I was facing an even longer night.

The trailer swayed. Heavy footsteps. The door swung open. Sarah appeared. She half shouted: “Neil says you can come to the door and talk to him but you can’t go inside.”

“He’s giving the orders now?”

“He’s scared. You can’t understand that?”

“He’ll have to come out eventually.”

“That’s your problem. Right now you just get to stand in the doorway, all right?”

I had my. 45. I’d talk to him in the doorway and then I’d go inside and get him. Apparently desperation had confused her. She assumed that I’d really put up with this and not make my move.

“All right, Sarah.”

She stepped away from the trailer. She had her hands on her hips as I walked toward her. When I got closer she said, “Don’t hassle him. He doesn’t need to be hassled.”

“Right.”

“And keep your sarcasm to yourself. He’s my brother.” I wondered how many times tonight she was going to remind me of that.

I approached the door and she stepped aside.

“Remember what you agreed to.”

“I remember.”

Smells coming from the open trailer door almost gagged me. Several decades of filth combined to become a weapon. I started to stick my head inside but she got me before I was able to finish the move.

At the time I had no idea what she hit me with. Nor did I have time to think about it. My skull felt as if it had been cleaved in half. A headache that seemed to instantly shut down my entire body left me unable to defend myself when she yanked me backward and struck me with even more force a second time. I have no idea what happened next.