Silence the Dead

SIX

Tuesday, June 22, 1982

Jonah Ridl eased the open old Volkswagen to a rattling stop and shut off the engine. The shoulder of the road, high above the river and the town beyond, would be good for the first pictures.

He held his hand out, palm down. Steady. Eddings might have been right; maybe it was finally time for crime.

He lit a cigarette and studied the scene below. ‘Bucolic,’ Eddings had said. ‘Bring me bucolic.’

That looked to be no problem. A pristine cement bridge, as bright a white as if Tom, Huck and the gang had painted it just that morning, crossed a sparkling Royal River. Bright green leafy trees, lush with full summer, lined the bank beyond, shading what was sure to be a picturesque burg, dozing in the mid-afternoon heat, beneath a sun as happily yellow as the un-rusted portions of his convertible. It all reeked of bucolic.

He grabbed the old Canon FT-QL, hefted himself up to half-standing and fired four fast shots over the windshield. He knew the cheesy caption Eddings would love: ‘American pastoral: June, 1982. The day death came to bucolic Grand Point, Illinois.’

The editor had called Ridl into his office three hours earlier. ‘Another cat, Your Lordship?’ Ridl asked. Earlier that morning, Eddings had sent him to photograph a white cat some fool had dyed red and blue in honor of the upcoming Fourth of July. Such had things deteriorated – for the cat, and for Ridl’s career at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Eddings held up Ridl’s sheet of double-spaced type. ‘“The dye job is so expert,”’ he read aloud, ‘“one can envision the cat on its hind legs, playing the flute, marching alongside patriots holding flags and muskets and beating drums.”’ He started laughing.

‘The picture’s even better,’ Ridl said, trying to summon a grin. The cat had been only the latest in his lunatic assignments.

Laughing even harder, his eyes wet, Eddings read on. ‘“Perhaps the cat’s owner” – oh, I so love this – “should be dyed in the spirit of celebration as well.”’ He wiped at a tear that was running down his cheek, crumpled the copy and threw it at the wastebasket in the corner, missing by a foot. ‘It’s time, Jonah. Absolutely, it’s time.’

Ridl reached for a cigarette.

‘This, just off the wire,’ Eddings said, shifting into the staccato, old-newsreel voice he sometimes fancied. ‘Murder on lovers’ lane.’

Ridl focused on steadying his hands enough to light his cigarette. Special Features didn’t do murders and, sure as hell, he didn’t do murders – not anymore. Special Features did the fillers that puffed up the paper: safe stuff like nonsense about dyed cats.

The editor leaned forward. ‘Just after midnight, under the fullest of moons,’ he whispered, almost in a moan, ‘a man was shot dead in the bucolic-’

‘That’s for Front Section, or Metro,’ Ridl said.

‘It gets even better. The man’s car was moved, and his girlfriend is missing.’

‘The girl he was trying to rape shot him with his own gun, pushed his body out, used his car to drive away and is hiding out? She’ll show up, dripping snot, warranting sympathy. Metro for sure, if Front Page takes a pass.’

‘This is perfect.’

‘It’s crime. We’re Special Features.’

‘More enticement.’ Eddings reached in his desk and took out a white envelope. ‘Being ever mindful of the pay cut you took to join us in the basement, I offer forty-five in expenses.’

Special Features never covered crime, and Eddings never offered expenses. ‘Where, exactly, did this horrific event occur?’

‘Grand Point, Illinois, population 4,032.’

‘That’s a hundred miles west.’

‘A little vacation. Talk to the local sheriff. Stay overnight.’ Eddings leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘Tomorrow, maybe interview every shopkeeper in town.’

‘To con them into thinking we’re going to become a presence that far west of Chicago, so they’ll run ads with us.’ It was subterfuge, but there was even more. Eddings was testing to see if Ridl was ready to return to Metro, and crime.

‘You’ve been down here what, six months?’ Eddings asked, but really saying that six months was long enough.

‘You’d run the piece with my byline?’ Ridl asked.

‘Who pays attention to bylines?’ Eddings said, evading the question but meaning yes, they were going to test run Ridl’s name to see if it still attracted wolves.

Ridl owed the Sun-Times for those six months of cover. He should have been fired, if only to silence the community activists and local pols that wanted his head. Instead, the deputy managing editor got Eddings to create a place for him to lay low in Special Features.

He crossed to Eddings’s desk and picked up the expense envelope, damning the way his hand shook.

Eddings noticed. ‘Piece of cake, Jonah. A drive in the country, for advertising.’

Meaning this time Ridl could get no one killed.

‘We’ll talk about the byline when you get back,’ Eddings went on. ‘If you’re not ready, we’ll run it under my name.’ Then, grinning, ‘Just don’t forget the bucolic. We want our new advertisers to know that one lousy murder won’t stop us from showing their surroundings as idyllic.’

He drove to his apartment, packed a small bag and headed west to a small town a hundred miles west of Chicago.

Ready enough, at least, to commit bucolic.

SEVEN

The Peering County Sheriff’s Department was in the basement of a hundred-year-old red brick and gray limestone courthouse, set smack in the middle of a square surrounded by equally ancient storefronts, some laid up in the same sturdy red brick, others in cautiously painted white clapboard. The bricks were faded; the paint was chalking. It was another hot day.

Despite the heat, the courthouse lawn was lush and green, obviously tended by people who understood fertilizer. A farm couple – him in a seed cap, her in a sundress, both of them tanned and creased – idled near the sheriff’s door.

He went down the outside stairs. All four of the beige metal desks beyond the counter were empty. A pretty, slender, dark-haired girl in an orange University of Illinois T-shirt and cut-off blue jeans sat in the waiting area.

She looked up at him angrily, and mumbled something.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘You’ll have to yell, damn it.’

‘Anybody?’ Ridl shouted toward the wood door behind the desks.

‘Louder,’ the girl said.

Ridl turned. ‘Who are you?’

‘The press. Who are you?’

He ignored her. ‘Which paper?’

‘The Daily Illini.’

He thought he ought to call Eddings to say he was chasing the same story as a girl reporting for a college newspaper and no one else, but instead he screamed across the empty office. ‘Hey! Anybody? Anybody at all?’

The door opened a few seconds later. A sheriff’s deputy, no older than the college girl, stuck out a narrow head on a scrawny neck. ‘What?’

‘Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times.’ He held up his old Metro press card, pretty sure no hick cop this far from Chicago would recognize the name after six months. ‘You got a release?’

‘A what?’

‘A press release.’

‘About what?’

Ridl felt an instant’s nostalgia for the straightforwardness of the morning’s dyed cat: he’d gone; he’d photographed; he’d scurried back. ‘Maybe about the lovers’ lane killing that just happened?’

The young cop stepped out from the darkness behind the rear door. Though he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and wore neither a badge nor a gun, it was his too-large uniform that really killed the act. It was stiff and new and so oversized that his body seemed to wobble independently within it as he attempted a swagger across the office.

‘Well, I guess I’m the press what-cha-ma-call-it,’ he said, when he got to the counter.

‘Like hell, Jimmy Bales,’ the girl muttered.

‘Did I not tell you to leave?’

‘I’m press, same as him.’ She gestured toward Ridl.

‘You got no credentials, girl. Scoot.’

She made no move to get up.

The deputy’s face flushed deep red. ‘Shall I arrange to have you escorted out?’

‘By whom? There’s nobody around except you.’

‘Laurel Jessup!’

She swore under her breath and got up. She was six inches taller than Ridl’s five-five, all tanned skin, bone and no curves. And stunningly beautiful. She slammed the door behind her.

‘Damn college girl, thinks she’s so smart,’ the young deputy said.

‘How old is she?’ Ridl asked, before he could think not to.

‘I dunno; two or three years older than me. Why?’

‘Never mind. Tell me about the killing.’

‘Not much to tell. A man was found murdered on Poor Farm Road. His name was Paulus Pribilski, ex-Marine and, more recent, telephone lineman. He was twenty two, from Rockford, Illinois. We’re investigating.’

‘And…?’ Ridl asked, when the deputy stopped.

‘That’s it.’

Ridl took out his narrow spiral notebook. ‘The girl with him that’s now missing? What’s her name?’

The kid took a step backward. ‘Have to check with Clamp on that.’

‘Who’s Clamp?’

‘Chief Deputy Wilbur Reems. Sheriff Milner assigned him to head up the investigation.’

‘Where is he?

‘Out investigating, of course.’

Ridl made a show of flipping to a fresh page. ‘Bales, is it? Give me the correct spelling so I can report how little you, as the press what-cha-ma-call-it, know about what’s going on.’ Hearing himself, he had the sudden thought that he sounded exactly like he used to: steady, confident, focused.

Jimmy Bales’s face reddened. He looked around the office, then spoke in a low voice. ‘Betty Jo Dean’s her name. She’s a good girl, built a little too mature for her own good, maybe, but a good girl.’

‘She’s the killer…?’

Bales dropped his voice even further, to a whisper. ‘Clamp told the sheriff that if the Polish was packing, and he got too fast with her, she coulda got hold of his gun to stop him. That would explain her hiding out, scared nobody will believe her.’

It was ordinary, just as he’d told Eddings. He’d do some interviews and shoot some photos that evening, chat up two-dozen shopkeepers the next morning and be gone from Grand Point by noon.

‘How well do you know her?’

Jimmy Bales inhaled deeply, as though trying to inflate himself to fit his too-large uniform. ‘Spoke to her myself, last night. I keep a close eye on things after dark, and was on patrol outside Dougie’s. I talked to both her and that Polish guy. As I’ll probably write in an official report, they were getting along amenably.’

‘No problem between them?’

Bales shook his head.

‘Dougie’s?’ Ridl asked.

‘The Constellation. It’s a bar right across the street from here. I also observed them later at the Hacienda, out on the highway. The Polish was trying to get his paycheck cashed. We heard they went to the Wren House after that. According to witnesses, the Polish won a large amount of money gambling in their basement.’

‘The money’s missing?’

‘I don’t know what’s missing.’

‘Other than Betty Jo.’

‘Yeah. She’s missing, all right.’

‘Where’s the Wren House?’

‘Follow Second Street down to the very south end of town, just before it becomes Route Four.’

‘Poor Farm Road is the local lovers’ lane?’

His face flushed. ‘A half-mile past the Wren House.’

‘Easy enough for someone to follow Pribilski?’

The deputy’s eyes brightened at the inference. ‘See, that’s what the sheriff told Clamp could have happened. Best you shouldn’t jump to conclusions about Betty Jo being a killer.’

‘Pribilski’s car wasn’t found near his body?’

‘No. It was found in the parking lot across from the Wren House. Clamp thinks there were two of them – one to drive Pribilski’s car, the other to drive their own. All the more reason to think it was gamblers, since Betty Jo wouldn’t have driven Pribilski’s car back to the Wren House then left it. She has no car of her own.’

‘Who found Pribilski?’

‘A fisherman from here in Grand Point. He was driving east down Poor Farm Road, fixing to drop a couple lines in the Royal like he does every morning. A hundred yards in he saw a shoe lying in the middle of the road. No big deal, one shoe, except that, getting closer, he saw a dark red stain next to it, looking exactly like dried blood. He got out and saw drag marks on the gravel that could have been made by feet being dragged off the road. It didn’t take more than a few steps to see a man lying face up alongside the cornfield, and he wasn’t breathing. Well, he got right back in his car and hightailed it here to report directly to Sheriff Milner because, as the sheriff likes to remind folks, everybody knows he’s always at work early. The sheriff called Ruskin, the coroner, told him to get out to Poor Farm Road, and headed out there himself with two deputies. They saw the shoe. They saw the blood. And at the edge of the corn, just past the ditch, they saw a man dead from gunshot.

‘Coroner Ruskin arrived within thirty minutes, him being an early riser too, and the sheriff radioed Bud Wiley at the funeral home. After a brief examination of the deceased – there was no doubt he was dead, being as he was already stiffening – Coroner Ruskin authorized Bud to remove the body to Wiley’s funeral home.’

Bales’s head jerked up as the outside door opened. A sixty-year old man walked in. He wore a tan and green uniform just like Jimmy Bales’s, except that his was tight across the belly and had a star on it that said sheriff. He was red-faced and sweating.

‘Sheriff Milner? I’m from the Chicago-’ Ridl said.

‘Not now,’ Milner wheezed, banging open the gate in the counter. Jimmy Bales spun around and followed him through the empty office.

‘Did you find Betty Jo Dean?’ Ridl shouted.

‘Beat it!’ Milner yelled, charging through the open door at the back wall. Jimmy Bales slammed it closed behind them.

Ridl touched the back of his neck. It was prickling, like back in Metro when he tumbled onto something significant. This time it was telling him that cops almost always talked to the press, even when they had nothing new to report, because they wanted to come across smart. They never wanted to look rattled, or like they didn’t know what was going on.

Not so, the sheriff of Peering County. He’d been too upset to care what a reporter thought.

Ridl rubbed hard at the back of his neck until the tingling stopped, and went out the door.

EIGHT

Laurel Jessup, college girl, was waiting at the top of the stairs. ‘Jonah Ridl,’ she said.

He gave her no nod of acknowledgement, no forced smile. They’d probably studied his case in one of her journalism classes last semester. He’d been national news.

He jammed his hands in his pockets in case they got nervous. ‘The Daily Illini?’

‘It’s a real paper. Fifty thousand students are down at the U of I. How’s this killing so special that it summons someone so famous?’

‘Not famous.’

She failed at suppressing a grin. ‘Infamous, then?’

‘The story looked interesting.’ He’d never admit he was sent to snag advertisers.

‘You’ve got a good nose. From what I hear, Betty Jo Dean is not the type to be cowering somewhere, scared to come home.’

‘You don’t know her?’ Laurel Jessup looked to be almost the same age as the missing girl.

Her eyes flashed, but for only an instant. ‘I’m twenty-one, a senior. Besides, I live miles away, in DeKalb. I came here hoping to see reporters in action. So far, it’s just been a TV woman from Rockford and…’ She stepped back a foot and pretended to inspect him. ‘I figured you’d be older.’

At five-five and two hundred pounds, she probably figured he’d be taller and thinner, too. ‘What else have you heard?’

‘I’ve got a source.’

‘Then what’s your source telling you?’ he asked, not believing her.

‘Chief Deputy Reems is scattering his deputies too far and wide.’

‘A small town cop, panicked, lost his focus?’

‘I don’t know. How old are you anyway?’

Her directness was enchanting. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said, ‘but some days I’m a hundred.’

She checked her watch. ‘I’ve got an interview.’

‘Your source?’

‘I might get you in, but it would have to be later…’ She left the proposal unstated.

‘If we share the byline?’

She gave him a huge smile and walked away, all long strides and energy.

The farm couple he’d seen earlier had moved to the shade of a tree. They stood together, not speaking. They were waiting for something.

The man had taken off his seed cap and was twisting it in his hands. ‘You a reporter?’ he asked when Ridl walked up.

‘Chicago Sun-Times.’

‘We just saw Sheriff Milner go in. Is there news?’

‘Your sheriff doesn’t like to say much.’

‘Usually you can’t shut him up,’ the woman said.

‘We only came to the courthouse for a copy of a quit claim,’ the man said quickly.

It was strange, the denial, and unnecessarily defensive. ‘Terrible thing,’ Ridl said to the woman, hoping for more words from her.

She looked down.

‘Do you know Betty Jo Dean?’ he asked her.

‘She’s dead,’ the woman said to the ground. ‘If she didn’t come home, she’s dead.’

‘Martha, you don’t know any such thing.’

Martha raised her head, looked her husband in the eye and shook her index finger at the sheriff’s door. ‘I do. And they damned well know it.’

‘Hush now,’ the man said to his wife. He turned to Ridl, his face anxious to explain. ‘Martha’s a friend of Betty Jo’s mama.’ He grabbed his wife’s elbow and steered her away.

Ridl looked across the street, searching for the bar Jimmy Bales had mentioned. The Constellation was narrow, jammed between an insurance agency and a one-man law office. Though the sun still beat bright on the town its sign was lit, alive with little stars winking on and off. Jimmy Bales had said it was one of the places Betty Jo Dean and Pauly Pribilski had gone to drink, before Pribilski’s own life winked off for good. The Constellation could wait. He wanted to take pictures of Poor Farm Road while there was still good light.

He drove slowly through several blocks of century-old, pale-painted wood houses before speeding up past a McDonalds, a Shell station and sparser blocks of fragments of prairies. He didn’t come to a stop sign until he got to the southern outskirts of town, where Second Street intersected with Big Pine Road and became Route 4.

A windowless, long brown barn-like structure loomed dark on the northeast corner. A white, backlit sign on wheels advertised a Friday night fish fry special for $2.99, and Harvey Wallbangers for a dollar. He’d tried the drink once on a date several years before. It was the yellowish green of anti-freeze and tasted sickly sweet. He hadn’t liked it, or his date. Her name was Nancy, and she was obviously embarrassed at being fixed up with a man substantially shorter and wider than she was. She covered that by accusing him of being egocentric when, making conversation, he’d said news-papers were all that protected the world from chaos. He’d never had another Wallbanger, nor had he ever called her again.

Attached to the wheeled sign was a pole, on top of which the clever restaurateur had mounted an oversized red plywood birdhouse, which had become splattered with white drips. The restaurant was the Wren House. It was the last place Paulus Pribilski had been seen alive. Except by his killer.

He raised his camera. Nothing was more bucolic than a birdhouse, even strafed white by bombardier birds. He took a picture, and another of the restaurant hulking dark behind it.

Jimmy Bales had said Poor Farm Road was only a half-mile ahead. He drove up a concrete overpass that spanned a pair of railroad tracks and stopped at the top. Down below, a police car blocked the entrance to a gravel road that ran off to the left from Route 4. A hundred yards in, people milled about in clusters, talking. A news van was parked alongside the road. A woman in yellow and a cameraman in black jeans and a black T-shirt stood at the edge of a large patch of flattened corn. Behind them, ragged rows of searchers moved slowly through the field toward the west, flattening more corn.

He snapped three photos, drove down and parked across from the Peering County sheriff’s car blocking Poor Farm Road. Two deputies leaned against the hood. He wondered if they were embarrassed to be guarding a crime scene that people were trampling.

An image of such a loosely managed crime scene might matter. He pointed his camera dead at the two officers, making sure to center the news crew and one of the trampling search teams in the background between them. Both cops frowned as he snapped their picture.

‘How’s the hunt for Betty Jo Dean?’ he asked, walking up.

‘Progressing,’ the taller of the two said.

‘I’m with them.’ Ridl pointed at the news van.

Neither cop had more words. Ridl walked around them.

The news van belonged to the NBC affiliate in Rockford. The woman in yellow, studying notes on a clipboard, was in her mid-twenties, and dressed television perfect in a soft skirt and blouse that matched her sunny blonde hair – and, Ridl supposed, the faded, sunny yellow paint on his car, except where it was rusted. Certainly there was no rust eating at her, and might never be – at least, not the kind that had been corroding his insides for the past six months.

Her cameraman was even younger, about twenty-one. His black T-shirt, ripped under one arm, advertised an Allman Brothers concert from a dozen years earlier. He stood behind a camera on a tripod, where clothing didn’t matter, waiting for the reporter to memorize her lines. They were recording a segment for later broadcast.

She raised her microphone and nodded at the cameraman. ‘After leaving the Constellation,’ she said, ‘the couple went to Al’s Rustic Hacienda, a local bar, where they were seen having a drink and attempting to cash Pauly Pribilski’s check. Local sheriff’s deputies received reports that the pair got into an altercation with a man and a woman in the parking lot before heading to the Wren House, where Pribilski might have won money gambling. Presumably, the couple then drove here, to Poor Farm Road.’

She lowered the microphone, consulted the clipboard and gave the cameraman a new nod. ‘A fisherman found Pribilski, a former Marine, at six-thirty this morning, lying here.’ She pointed to a spot five feet to her left. ‘According to Coroner Ruskin, one shot entered his left side and penetrated his heart, causing instant death. Another struck him in the abdomen. His 1970 Buick was found in the parking lot across from the Wren House, a half-mile north of here. The sheriff’s department confirmed that they were familiar with the car, a distinctive GSX model, from times when Pribilski, a lineman for the DeKalb-Peering Telephone Company, stayed after work to enjoy a beer before returning to his home in Rockford. It’s routine, sheriff’s sources said, to notice strangers in their small community.’

As she stopped to check her notes, Ridl again mulled the aberrant thought: sunny yellows were everywhere in Grand Point. The news reporter’s hair and clothes, the dead man’s car, even the backdrop of the cornfields, though those yellows were only inferred, shrouded as they were in green husks. Still, nothing would make Eddings’s eyes glisten more than to work all those yellows into his piece.

The reporter continued, ‘Pribilski’s wallet is missing. Police believe it contained a fair amount of cash from gambling winnings, along with the paycheck he wanted to get cashed. Found on the ground, near where sheriff’s personnel believe Pribilski’s car was parked, was a fresh cigarette butt with lipstick on it. It was a Tareyton, the brand Betty Jo Dean, the young Grand Point woman seen in Pribilski’s company last night, is known to smoke. She is missing. Sheriff’s department personnel declined our request to speak on camera, citing their need to devote all their manpower to locating Miss Dean.’

She said sign-off words and lowered her microphone. Ridl stepped forward.

‘The sheriff’s department declined to speak, instead devoting all their manpower to locating the young woman?’ He cocked his head toward the two deputies idling at the entrance to Poor Farm Road.

She grinned. ‘Those two?’

‘They’re not bothering to protect the crime scene.’ He gestured toward a team of searchers.

‘Supposedly, the scene’s been processed. Maybe those two cops are waiting to see who comes back to linger-?’

‘The proverbial killer returning to the scene of his crime? Nah, those two are just killing time.’

‘You are?’

‘Chicago Sun-Times,’ he said, skipping his name, ‘but I told the cops I was with you.’

‘Then you’ll be watched. The sheriff is real sensitive about the town’s reputation. Those deputies tried to stop us from coming in.’

‘How did you change their minds?’

She nodded toward her cameraman, loading their gear into the back of the van. ‘He started setting up right in the middle of Route Four. They didn’t want to be taped obstructing our access. They relented.’ She opened the van door and got in. ‘Good luck getting along with the people here,’ she said through the open window. They drove away.

He stood for a minute, watching fifteen, maybe twenty search teams plod through the fields, as far west as he could see. They didn’t believe Betty Jo Dean was a murderer. They believed Betty Jo Dean was dead.

He walked back to the county cruiser. ‘You think Betty Jo Dean is on the run?’

‘Have to ask Clamp,’ the tall cop said.

‘Where is he?’

‘Checking a lead.’

‘If she’s not running, why wasn’t she killed too, and left right here with Pribilski? She was a witness to Pribilski’s murder – why would a killer risk taking her away in Pribilski’s car, only to leave the car such a short distance away? Why risk driving her someplace else?’

Neither cop bothered to respond. It enraged him further. ‘Are you thinking Betty Jo can’t be a suspect because Pribilski was an ex-Marine, and no seventeen-year-old girl could get him down?’

The shorter cop shrugged. ‘Don’t take strength to fire a gun,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you tell those searchers they’re wasting their time, like you’re wasting yours, guarding this road? She’s not in that field. She must be running.’

‘You little shit,’ the tall cop sneered, taking a step toward Ridl.

His partner stepped between them. ‘Have a good evening, sir,’ he said, and then, strangely, both cops laughed.

It only took the short walk across the street to understand why. A pink ticket was stuck under his windshield wiper. It was for illegal parking. The ‘Amount of Fine’ section had been filled in with a ballpoint pen. It was fifteen dollars, more than any such violation would cost in Chicago. He looked at the cops, both of whom were staring right back at him.

He lifted his camera and fired off six fast pictures, each one identical. It was all he could think to do to make them frown.

NINE

Only ten cars were parked across from the Wren House. Few of the locals had thought to gather there to seek comfort in bargain-priced Wallbangers.

Then again, it might have been the stink of the murder, committed so close by, that was keeping them away.

There was little light inside, just a few dim wall fixtures. But there was art. Calendar pictures of colorful birds were thumbtacked, unframed, to dark pine plank walls sparkling with grease. A small stage with a lone stool was set up in a far corner for anyone bent on bursting into song, or perhaps just to warble for a moment, like a cardinal or a blue jay. It was a place for crackers. And birds.

Only one of the booths surrounding the empty tables in the dining room was occupied. Jimmy Bales said gambling went on down in the basement. That’s where the owners of the few cars parked outside must be, and where Pauly Pribilski had gone to win the last bucks of his life.

A hostess came up with a menu. ‘One for dinner?’

‘The killing’s kept everyone away?’

‘Booth or a table?’

‘I’ll have a drink first.’ He walked past a wall of spindles that resembled prison bars. Three men sat at the bar. Each wore threadbare denim overalls. All looked too broke to gamble on anything other than their small glasses of tap beer. He sat in the center, between two guys who paid him no attention.

‘Is the fish good here?’ he asked the man to his left.

‘Never tried it.’

‘How about the Wallbangers?’

‘Shit,’ the man said.

The bartender came over and asked to see his ID.

‘Twenty-nine?’ he asked, studying the driver’s license photo taken when Ridl was nineteen.

Ridl had heard it before. Being short didn’t help. Being fat didn’t, either.

‘And old for my age,’ Ridl said.

‘You a reporter?’

‘Chicago Sun-Times.’

The bartender handed the license back and Ridl ordered a tap beer. ‘What are you hearing about the killing?’

‘Clamp’s in Freeport, checking out two guys that were hanging around the Hacienda.’

‘Two guys, or a man and a woman?’ Ridl asked, remembering what the television reporter had said for broadcast. She’d mentioned a mixed couple, not two men.

‘I heard two guys.’ The bartender set the beer on the counter. ‘Seventy-five cents,’ he said.

It was cheaper than a Wallbanger, and less green. He laid a dollar next to the beer. ‘Those two guys were hassling Pribilski and Betty Jo?’

‘Mister Reporter, all kinds of rumors will be checked out before this is over.’

‘You know Betty Jo Dean?’

‘Nope.’

‘She was in here last night, with Pribilski.’

‘No way I know her. Or him, if that’s your next question.’

‘You think the killer is local?’

‘Jesus, mister.’ The bartender grabbed a towel, went down to the end of the bar and began polishing a beer glass that already looked clean.

One of the men sitting alongside Ridl looked over with red eyes. ‘Fifteen years ago, we had outshiders,’ he said, slurring the word. ‘Whores, military off the train for a hoot, punk kids from every dink town around. People who run this town got fed up and hired Clamp Reems as chief deputy. Clamp grew up at the sulky track north of town, a bad ass himself. He got rid of it all. This killing’s a surprise.’

‘Local, then?’

‘Could be.’

The bartender came up. ‘Last call, Vince. Finish your beer.’

‘Sun’s still out.’

The bartender leaned across the bar. ‘Last call, Vince.’

The man saw through his fog and gave Ridl a lopsided grin. ‘Local?’ he asked loudly. ‘No way in hell. Foreigner, for damned sure.’

Ridl left his beer untouched, went out and crossed to the parking lot. No one else at that bar was going to say another word to him.

A new pink rectangle was stuck beneath his windshield wiper. This time, the ticket was a twenty-five dollar fine for a missing rear license plate.

He walked to the back of his battered Beetle. They hadn’t even bothered to be cagey; the license plate screws lay in plain sight beneath the back bumper. Only the plate was missing.

The sheriff’s deputies had followed him from Poor Farm Road. They wanted him gone.

The back of his neck was tingling. He headed toward town.

No signs outside Al’s Rustic Hacienda advertised anything, let alone Wallbangers. Nor was there any hint the place served fish. That, especially, was a good thing. The Hacienda was a hovel of splotchy brown stucco and peeling, red-painted roof shingles, a dump that looked as though anything marine it might offer would have been snagged whiskered, crudded and diseased from the bottom of the Royal River roiling not twenty feet away.

Yet unlike the Wren House, the Hacienda’s parking lot was crammed full of cars. At least twenty teenagers clutching long-necked beers surrounded a young man in a bowling shirt who was leaning against the hood of a battered black Jeep. He was pointing toward the door of the Hacienda.

‘As soon as they come out, Betty Jo and the Polish guy, this black-haired broad steps in front of Betty Jo. The broad is shit-faced, angry, dripping sweat. The man with her, a skinny squirrel, is hanging back. He wants no trouble.

‘The broad starts giving Betty Jo crap about coming on to the squirrel. Betty Jo’s no slouch; no drunk broad is going to push her around. She stays cool, gives the broad a smile and says something pitying to the squirrel.’

‘What?’

‘Couldn’t hear.’

‘Who were they?’ a red-haired girl, barely sixteen, asked.

‘The broad and the squirrel? Not from here. Rockford, maybe.’

‘Where was the Polish guy during all this?’ a kid with sideburns descending into serious acne asked.

‘He was in a hurry, hustling ahead to unlock his car, but when he realized Betty Jo wasn’t keeping up he turned and started coming back. Betty Jo waved him away; she was doing fine without him. And she was. She left the woman in her dust. But it was crazy here, that night. There was this other pair, a couple of dorks leaning against an old beater Mercury, hassling a guy about his Pontiac – red, ragtop, real shiny wheels, saying their old Merc could steamroller the ragtop like it was tin. The dorks were just as shit-faced as the broad with the squirrel. I couldn’t see who they were, on account of the shadows, but one of them… his voice was sort of familiar. Next thing, I hear the Polish guy’s GSX pulling out of the lot. Nice exhaust, custom pipes, nothing factory installed.’

‘Someone else pulled out after them?’ the young red-headed girl asked.

‘Maybe.’ Bowling Shirt said more softly, his swagger slipping, ‘I didn’t pay it any mind.’

‘Jesus, you could have seen the killers take off after them,’ Sideburns said.

Bowling Shirt snorted, but it was forced. ‘It was just someone leaving.’

‘You hope it was only that,’ Sideburns said.

‘Bet your ass,’ Bowling Shirt said.

Ridl went inside. It was packed, full of smoke, clanking glass and people shouting to be heard above the din.

Surprisingly, it was also full of cops. Eight uniformed sheriff’s deputies sat at one end of the bar, including the two who ticketed him at Poor Farm Road and, later, at the Wren House.

Heads turned to look at him. The noise level fell away. A stranger, an interloper, had invaded their filthy little place.

It took no imagination to believe the cops who’d ticketed him earlier would wander outside to write something new, perhaps for his missing back plate, bad parking, or any of a thousand other imagined infractions. Mostly, though, he’d be ticketed for not being smart enough to get out of town. And this time, they might call for a tow truck and impound his car. Such were the way things played out for reporters in Grand Point.

He went back outside.

TEN

The sallow-faced young man behind the bar looked up with a huge, hungry smile. The Constellation was empty.

‘Dougie?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Chicago Sun-Times.’ Ridl sat at the bar and ordered a Coke.

‘It’s Doug, actually,’ the young man said, serving up the Coke.

‘What?’

‘I hate everybody calling me Dougie. They should have quit that after high school.’

‘And how long ago was that?’ It had to be four years, tops.

‘Eleven years.’

Ridl took a sip of his Coke. ‘The man that got killed was in here last night with Betty Jo Dean?’

‘I identified the body this morning,’ Dougie said, giving his importance a long nod.

Ridl set his Coke down and took out his notebook. ‘You knew Pribilski well?’

‘He stopped in here first most evenings, when he was working in Grand Point.’

‘“First?”’

‘He liked gambling down at the Wren House. Too much, he said once. Most nights he stopped in here first, to relax a little before heading down there. “Getting loose,” he called it.’

‘Because your sheriff’s department keeps an eye on strangers, they knew to call you to identify the body?’

‘Actually, it was me who called them. Once I heard he’d been shot, I called the sheriff’s department to say he and Betty Jo had been in here last evening. They said to go find the sheriff or Clamp at Wiley’s Funeral Parlor. Saw more than I wanted, that’s for sure.’

‘Like what?’

The big smile he’d greeted Ridl with bloomed again. ‘Want a sandwich? I made up a bunch for when you reporters came.’

‘Business good?’

The smile wavered. ‘Nobody came except some girl from the University of Illinois pretending to be a reporter, but she didn’t have any money. Got ham and cheese, plain cheese or plain ham.’

‘How much?’

‘Eight bucks,’ Dougie said, watching Ridl’s eyes.

Ridl would have laughed if he wasn’t desperate for information. Eight dollars was double what a sandwich would cost, even on Chicago’s overpriced Michigan Avenue where Ridl never hung out.

‘Includes the Coke,’ Dougie added, sweetening the deal.

‘Ham and cheese.’ The shakedown was minor. He laid one of Eddings’s tens on the counter and the plastic-wrapped sandwich materialized almost instantly.

‘Yes, sir, I seen plenty,’ Dougie said, making no move to find two bucks for change.

‘Keep the change,’ Ridl said, as though that were a choice, too.

The sandwich was stiff inside the wrap. Opening it revealed rye bread that was abrasive, like a scouring pad. Dougie was a conniver; he’d gotten a deal on old bread to maximize his expected windfall.

‘They had him barely covered by a sheet, all bloody in the middle,’ Dougie went on, the tariff having been paid, ‘but not so’s I couldn’t see everything right off, soon as I walked in. Luther quickly covered him up all the way, except for the face, so’s I could do the identifying. They said it was a necessary formality, if I wanted.’

‘“Luther?”’

‘Luther, Bud’s nephew, was the only one in the room. Bud – Mr Wiley, it’s his funeral home – was in the other room. I heard him talking with some others.’

‘No trouble recognizing Pribilski?’

‘Go ahead – eat,’ Dougie said, looking at the sandwich Ridl had kept poised outside his mouth, hoping for humidity.

He took a bite. It was like sand-papering his tongue.

‘Think the rest of the sandwiches will last another day?’ Dougie asked.

Ridl took a sip of Coke to soften the lump in his mouth. ‘I’m positive they’ll taste the same for quite some time,’ he said. Then: ‘Pribilski?’

‘His face was still damp. Sheriff had told them to clean him up quick so’s his Rockford kin wouldn’t see.’

Ridl managed to swallow. ‘The sheriff directed them to wash the body?’

‘Maybe not Sheriff Milner himself, but somebody from the department. Why not?’

Destruction of evidence was why not, like allowing people to tramp all over the cornfield, but he didn’t need to share that with this idiot. ‘Did you know Betty Jo Dean?’

‘She’s a sweetheart.’

‘Is she a killer?’

‘Hell, no. She’s beautiful.’

‘She’s a suspect, right? She was in Pribilski’s company. He turns up dead, his car gets moved, possibly with her driving, and now she’s disappeared.’

‘You ever see a picture of her?’

‘Not yet.’

Dougie pulled out a small photo from his wallet.

‘I was showing this to that college girl reporter before a deputy came in and said she was illegally parked. This is Betty Jo in high school, freshman year.’

It was not an official school photo. Betty Jo Dean sat on a blanket in a park, wearing a modest bikini. She was young, pretty and overripe for a high-school freshman.

‘She gave a picture just to you?’

‘I don’t guess that,’ Dougie said. ‘Lots of guys liked her.’

‘She prefer older guys, guys from out of town, like Pribilski?’

‘Pribilski was only twenty-two.’

‘You’re older than that. Did she like you?’

The man who forever was, and would forever be, a Dougie actually blushed. ‘Likely enough, I suppose, but I never made moves on her.’

‘They came in together last night, her and Pribilski?’

Dougie looked down at Ridl’s almost-intact sandwich. ‘Another? Cheese this time?’

‘I’m on a diet.’

Dougie nodded – too accepting.

‘They came in together?’ Ridl asked again.

‘He got here fifteen, twenty minutes before her shift was over at the phone company. She works part time, in the evenings.’

‘How did she act? Normal?’

‘A little nervous. Kept turning around to look at the door.’

‘New date jitters?’

Dougie shrugged. ‘All’s I know, she kept looking at the door.’

‘Like she was afraid of seeing someone?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And him?’

‘Pauly? No way was he nervous. He used to be a Marine and then climbed poles for a living. Huge shoulders, big biceps. I don’t expect he was afraid of anybody.’

‘I’m confused about something you said earlier,’ Ridl said. ‘Luther said you could identify the body if you wanted?’

Dougie’s face reddened. ‘Actually, it was more like Luther saying I could have a look if I wanted.’

‘He was the only one in the room, other than you? He was doing you a favor, giving you a peek?’

Dougie’s face darkened even more. ‘That don’t have to get out, does it? Look, they didn’t need me to identify anything. They already knew who Pribilski was.’

‘Because your sheriff’s department was already keeping an eye on him, right?’

‘Clamp keeps the town safe that way,’ Dougie said.

‘Or did, before the killing.’

Dougie Peterson had stopped listening. His eyes had gone vague. ‘Poor bastard, all them shots,’ he said, half under his breath. ‘Think what you will, it was good they tried to clean him up before his folks got there.’

‘Yeah, you said…’ Ridl paused. ‘What do you mean, all those shots? One to the heart, one to the abdomen?’

‘Pribilski’s pants were off, and I saw, before Luther pulled the sheet all the way up… No way in hell Betty Jo could have done that,’ Dougie said, his eyes once again focused on Ridl.

‘Did what?’

Dougie looked away. ‘Shots down below.’

‘What are you telling me, Dougie?’

‘I’m telling you there’s no way Betty Jo could have done that.’

‘Shoot him?’

‘Shoot him like that. Bastard was shot in the nuts, four, five times. Someone blew his balls off.’

ELEVEN

He ran down the sheriff’s stairs and banged open the door, holding up his Sun-Times I.D.

‘Nothing’s new,’ one of the two duty deputies said. Both had their feet up on their desks.

‘How many times was Pauly Pribilski shot?’ He was wheezing, out of breath, sweating from running across the street.

‘You’re getting nothing tonight.’

‘Multiple gunshots to the groin? You know damned well that’s passion.’

Both deputies switched out their smirks for glares. ‘Beat it,’ the second one said.

‘If it wasn’t Betty Jo Dean who killed him, then it was someone emotionally involved with her, or with Pribilski. No one else would shoot him like that. Who’s jealous? Who’s enraged?’

‘We’re investigating.’

‘Looks like it’s going real slow, here and at the Hacienda.’

‘It’s nighttime.’

‘There’s a seventeen-year-old girl somewhere out in that night, running, hiding or dead. Why aren’t you looking for her?’

One of them got up and started moving toward the counter. ‘I can find a reason to arrest you, round boy.’

‘Thanks so much,’ Ridl said, and left.

His hands shook a little as he stood on the lawn and lit a cigarette. The night was more vivid than any he’d known in months. Though the air was heavy, it smelled purer, and despite the humid haze the stars seemed to shine a million watts brighter. He took a deep drag on the cigarette. There was no doubt: the night felt right because things felt so wrong in Grand Point.

A figure stepped out from the shadows along the building. ‘What do you know?’ Laurel Jessup, student journalist asked, trying to sound casual.

‘You’re watching the sheriff’s door to see who goes in?’

‘You’ve been it, so far.’

‘It’s too late to be walking around this town by yourself,’ he said, surely sounding like the girl’s mother. ‘How did that interview go, after I saw you?’

‘I told you: I’ve got a great source. Shared byline?’

‘That depends on what you’ve got.’

The sheriff’s door opened down below and two sets of footsteps began climbing the stairs. Ridl tugged the girl around the corner of the building and stubbed out his cigarette. Neither of them spoke.

Unseen cigarette lighters clicked faintly in the night. The two deputies had come out for a smoke.

‘Where’s your car?’ he whispered.

She pointed to a dented red Dodge Dart parked directly under a street lamp, in easy view of the cops. Two window decals were centered in its rear window. The first was a blue-and-orange graphic masterpiece of the University of Illinois mascot Indian holding a beer stein; the other a row of three identical gold Greek letters, triangles.

‘Sorority girl?’ he whispered.

‘Tri-Delt.’

She was so different than him, a kid who’d commuted to a second-rate Chicago city college from his ma’s two flat.

‘Walk your way around and come up to your car from across the street so they don’t think you’ve been hanging around the courthouse,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I’m a reporter.’

‘So am I.’

He gave her a sigh. ‘They don’t like reporters here. I’ll tell you more tomorrow if you leave now.’

‘Damn,’ she said. But she left, of a fashion. She marched straight out from the shadows, crossing the lawn directly in front of the two cops. One whistled softly at her.

She threw a lot of flounce into her walk as she passed beneath the street light next to the phone booths, and took too long to get into her car. The only thing she hadn’t done was thumb her nose at the two cops.

He waited a full five minutes, then crossed Second Street far enough down so the two cops couldn’t see him. He drove back up on a parallel street, clear of the courthouse.

The ticket seller at the movie theater in the next block was lit brightly in her booth, a glassed-in exhibit of a gray-haired woman alone. She raised her head abruptly at the clattering sound of his car driving by. He almost waved. Grand Point, that night, was deserted.

He passed into a residential block, looking for the sign he’d spotted earlier. It was three blocks farther on. Hand-painted on thin plywood and faded by a dozen seasons, it was stuck on a stick in the lawn of a two story, clapboard Victorian. ‘ROOMS,’ it read, faint in the light from the street lamp at the corner. He parked and walked up to a porch lit low by a single small bare bulb. An elderly woman answered the bell.

‘How much are the rooms?’ Ridl asked.

‘How many nights?’ she said through a clicking pair of dentures.

‘Just tonight.’

‘Ten bucks. You a reporter?’

‘Sun-Times.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s a scholarly journal, read mostly by Hollywood types.’

She nodded like that made sense, and said, ‘I’m expecting a bunch of reporters once they find Betty Jo Dean.’

‘You think she’s a victim, or the killer?’

She dodged the question, a persistent businesswoman. ‘There ain’t but one motel in Grand Point, and it’s got bugs. You want the room?’

‘Air-conditioning?’

‘Rooms rent fine without it. You want the room?’

He shifted his feet only slightly, reaching for his wallet, but it was enough to enlarge his shadow disproportionately against the pale clapboards of the house. He looked up at the sky. The moon was full. It would have been just as bright the night before.

He found a ten and handed it to her. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, and hurried to his car. He had a need – no, an obsession – to see the murder scene in the full light of the moon, as it must have been.

‘You best be quick!’ she shouted. ‘I won’t leave the door unlocked, and I go to bed right after Johnny Carson.’

He sped south, past the houses, McDonalds, the Shell station, fragments of prairies and the almost empty parking lot that signaled the Wren House was still taking a beating on unserved Wallbangers. He slowed at the top of the overpass. The milky light of the moon chalked Poor Farm Road into a flat white alley between two endless black fields. He drove down and turned left.

A car was parked where Pauly Pribilski’s body was found. Courageous neckers, or perhaps thrill-seekers, come to park under the same full moon that had lit the bullets fired into Pauly Pribilski.

He cut his headlights and coasted to a stop a short distance back. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that some of the beaten-down stalks of corn had begun wrenching slowly back up, contorting to clutch at life again, but the field would never be the same. Too much was dead.

A woman moved in the trampled corn. She wore a long dress or coat, despite the heat of the night. Beneath a soft, shapeless hat, her face was indistinct, and shifting. She might have been wearing a veil.

She moved slowly in a tight little circle. Her head was tilted downward and she seemed oblivious to Ridl, parked not fifty yards away. Several times she stopped and stretched out her arms in front of her, as though seeking something from the ground.

He watched her for fifteen minutes, then his curiosity could wait no more. He started his engine, turned on his headlamps and eased forward. The woman looked up. She was indeed wearing a long black dress and a long veil. She walked to her car, in no apparent haste, got in and drove away.

Sometimes nuts came out to play after a killing. This one had come costumed, right down to a long black veil. He drove back to the rooming house and took his small duffel bag to the front door.

As the landlady led him upstairs, she reminded him that it was a good thing he’d snapped up a room, as they were going fast. He asked how many others she’d rented. None yet, she said, but it was bound to happen.

The room he’d snapped up belonged to her son, now apparently grown and gone. He’d decorated it with hanging model airplanes. Ridl stripped to his shorts and lay on an itchy wool blanket that felt even hotter than the air trapped in the closed-up room. Opening the window by the bed set some sort of monstrous bug, unseen, banging on the window screen – trying to get in instead of out, he hoped. He turned out the light and the bug gave up.

As he lay in the heat in the dark, he let himself wonder if he were mountain-building. It was still most likely that the girl had been attacked by her date. She’d fought back and ended up killing him. Unhinged, she’d gone into hiding. Even at the end of the day, it reeked of ordinary.

Except that too many bullets had rained into Pauly Pribilski’s groin. That wasn’t ordinary, and the growing belief that he’d tumbled onto a good story began to calm him.

So, too, did the softer image of a tall and slender girl, tan and beautiful, who was not too many years younger than him.

Soon, he found sleep.

TWELVE

The sound of a small airplane, flying low, woke him at seven-thirty the next morning. He swung too quickly out of bed and got hit by another airplane, this one much smaller and dangling from the ceiling. Keeping his head low to avoid the rest of the mismatched squadron, he slipped on a fresh golf shirt and his khakis, went into the hall and found the bathroom. It was a place of Ivory soap and furry pink bath mats. He showered quickly and was downstairs before eight. By then, he’d heard the airplane – the real one – four more times.

‘Coffee’s on the counter, Mr Ridl,’ the landlady said. No doubt braced for the onslaught of reporters needing rooms, she’d donned a pink blouse that matched her bath mats.

Another woman sat with her at the chrome-trimmed, white Formica table. Ridl took a cup from the counter, filled it with coffee from the percolator – no new-fangled Mr Coffee, not for this landlady – and joined them.

‘Mr Ridl, this here is Blanche.’

Blanche nodded.

‘Mr Ridl is an important reporter for a Hollywood newspaper,’ the landlady said.

Blanche looked at Ridl with narrow-eyed interest. ‘You know movie stars?’

‘Too many to count,’ he said.

‘That your yellow convertible on the street?’ Blanche asked. ‘Doesn’t look like a Hollywood car.’

‘It’s a rental.’

‘It’s got an awful lot of rust on it,’ Blanche said.

‘Keeps me from appearing too Hollywood.’

‘It’s got a ticket on it. I looked: no parking is the offense,’ Blanche said.

Ridl caught the profanity before it got loose from his tongue, and said instead, ‘How much?’

‘Forty-five, because it says it’s a third offense,’ Blanche said. ‘More than usual.’

‘What’s usual?’

She made a noise of disgust in the back of her throat. ‘Zero. Delbert Milner is an elected man. Foolishness like parking tickets will get him thrown out as sheriff.’

‘I heard an airplane,’ Ridl said.

‘Searching for Betty Jo Dean,’ Blanche said. ‘Besides the airplane, and me and others going door-to-door, there are teams crisscrossing fields all the way west to Big Pine State Park.’

Ridl gulped the last of his coffee and got up.

‘Want me to hold your room?’ the landlady asked. ‘’Course, you’ll have to pay in advance.’

‘I hope I’ll be leaving after I do some interviews in town,’ his mouth said, but his head already doubted this. The fresh ticket on his windshield went beyond a sheriff hassling a reporter. He’d been tracked, found on a side street. They wanted him gone, fast.

He got in his car and headed south, toward Poor Farm Road.

The intersection of Route 4 and Big Pine Road was clogged in every direction by cars and trucks. He had to drive a quarter mile west before he could park.

He shot pictures of the long, ragged lines of people moving west through the fields of tall grass. Though it was still early, the temperature was already in the upper eighties. He didn’t want to think about what shape the girl was sure to be in if she’d been lying in such high heat for over a day.

He moved into the field to join the closest line of searchers. ‘You a professional photographer?’ the woman closest to him asked.

‘Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times.’

‘She’s not going to be found here,’ the woman said, waving vaguely at the prairie grass surrounding them. ‘All this was searched yesterday.’

‘How about the state park?’

‘Big Pine? That’s four miles ahead. Park rangers are doing that because some of the paths are dangerous. It’ll be hard, slow work. Years of leaves, mounded up. You could hide a body good…’ Her voice trailed away.

‘You’re thinking she’ll never be found?’

‘Not there, not in the Royal, either.’ She pushed at the grass in front of her. ‘That river is just a few hundred yards east of where Mr Pribilski was found, and it’s deep and runs fast. Wouldn’t you rather weight a body to disappear instead of leaving it in these weeds to be found?’

‘Assuming she wasn’t the killer, why abduct Betty Jo Dean?’

She gave him a weary look. ‘The killers might have had additional need of her.’

‘Rape?’

‘I heard she excited plenty of men.’

They came to an access road.

‘Then we have this,’ the woman said, stopping to wipe her forehead. ‘Care to guess the name of this particular road?’

‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’

‘It’s called the Devil’s Backbone because of the way it’s twisted. Up there is the Materials Corporation. Sand and gravel pits, some of which have been flooded for years. They’ve got divers checking them out, but I imagine there are a hundred little crags and nooks in every one. If Betty Jo’s in there, she’s likely never coming out.’

They crossed the access road and passed under a gnarled, stunted tree, the only tree within several hundred yards. ‘If you don’t think she’ll be found, why are you doing this?’ he asked.

The woman looked straight ahead, at the miles of open prairie that stretched ahead of them.

‘You can’t not do it,’ she said simply. ‘A girl’s gone missing. You have to keep searching until you know what happened to her.’

He joined a dozen different search teams that morning. They’d come from Grand Point and from Rockford, Dixon, Rochelle and tinier towns he’d never heard of. Occasionally they talked; mostly they just pushed ahead through the grasses, swarms of insects and the heat, their faces set in grim determination. By noon, the temperature was ninety-four degrees.

At twelve-thirty, a woman left the road to push into the weeds. She was waving her arms frantically, trying to shout, but her voice was too weak to be heard.

The searchers broke their lines to move toward the woman. When she got close, she cupped her hands to her mouth. ‘Sheriff’s making an announcement in fifteen minutes.’

‘What about?’ someone yelled.

‘I heard big news, nothing more,’ the woman shouted, and pushed forward to reach those who had not heard.

THIRTEEN

A hundred cars heading up simultaneously from Big Pine Road made for a maddeningly slow crawl to the courthouse. By the time Ridl parked and ran back to the square, the courthouse lawn was packed.

Sheriff Milner appeared in an arch on the second floor two minutes later. Unlike yesterday, when he’d blown into the sheriff’s department, beet red and sweating, today Delbert Milner was ashen-faced, his skin the pale gray of a corpse.

He pasted on a smile, held up his arms like a politician declaring victory, and shouted, ‘Neighbors, I have news! I believe Betty Jo Dean is alive!’

It set off a cacophony of shouted questions. Milner waited until the last of them died down, then continued, ‘I’ve received a tip. A truck driver, heading north on Route Four at about the same time Mr Pribilski was killed, caught a car in his headlights just past Poor Farm Road, headed south. Its driver was steering with his left hand and using his right to beat a young woman in the passenger’s seat.’

Fifty hands shot into the air. Milner shook his head. ‘There’s no time for questions. You need to help. I think Betty Jo Dean is being held captive somewhere south of Poor Farm Road. Get down there and help search that whole area.’

‘Those cabins along the river?’ a man in a business suit shouted.

‘Ideal spots!’ And with that, gray-faced Sheriff Milner went back into the courthouse.

He must have expected pandemonium, and he got it. He’d set loose a mob, running for their vehicles. Within only a minute or two, Route 4 was a parking lot again, this time pointed back south.

It took Ridl thirty minutes to get down to the overpass, and another fifteen to turn where most of the cars were turning, onto Poor Farm Road. All continued past the spot where Pauly Pribilski was found and followed the curve south along the river. Parked vehicles already lined both sides, narrowing the road to a bare single-car width. He found a parking spot between a white Ford Econoline van with a red Diver Down decal on its rear window and a black-and-white sheriff’s cruiser, then headed through woods of maples and oaks to the bramble that grew alongside the water.

A dive team worked from a small blue, square-fronted boat anchored off the opposite bank. A man in a black wet suit sat at its stern, resting his hand lightly on a slim slack rope dangling over the side. It was a signal line, tied to a partner below.

Down river, fifty of Milner’s energized citizens were darting about like crazed insects through a long row of run-down shacks that lined the riverbank. Ridl walked up to a man who’d hung back at the edge of the clearing to talk to newcomers. ‘We got no warrants,’ he said. ‘We can’t ask to see inside. Just look anywhere you can.’

Ridl nodded and walked ahead.

There were twenty-one cabins spread unsociably apart in that deep shade along the Royal. All had started out as small shacks, little more than lean-tos, constructed haphazardly of whatever scrap wood had been around for the taking. Some had been expanded into large shacks as more material – wood crating, old fence lumber and the like – became available. Most had outhouses, except for three that had been modernized, of a fashion, with straight pipes aimed from indoor toilets right into the river. All were unadorned, except for one whose mildewed plank siding had been decorated with several fish heads, which in turn had long since been picked clean by the ancestors of the hundreds of flies that now buzzed around Ridl’s head.

It was dark, dank and perfectly isolated for holding a girl who’d witnessed a murder. The cool of its shade might have been equally perfect for holding a corpse for some brief time as well.

He worked alongside the other searchers, peering under cinderblock pilings down into the pits below the fetid outhouses, and beneath upside-down boats and canoes set on low wood bucks. They scrutinized the moss-slicked ground for signs of recent digging, and knocked on the doors of every cabin. Few people answered, of course, and that made it dumb work, for if anyone in those cabins knew anything about the girl’s disappearance, they would have already come forward. Unless they were a killer or a kidnapper, in which case they would have simply lied.

More people came as the afternoon wore on. Some helped search while some stayed by the river, watching the divers who might dislodge the girl at any moment.

He spotted Laurel Jessup staring at the water, and walked up. ‘What are you seeing, Daily Illini? Frogs, or a Pulitzer for investigative reporting?’

She gave him an odd smile. ‘Don’t look around, but I’m seeing a cop who’s been watching me all afternoon.’

‘Young cop? Maybe it’s lust.’

She put her arm through Ridl’s. ‘Then this’ll give him something to stew over.’ Embarassingly, she had to bend down to kiss Ridl on the cheek.

‘I should sputter,’ Ridl said, only half kidding.

‘Wait ’til I’m gone,’ she said, laughing, and walked away.

He did look around after she’d gone several yards, but by then the cop had disappeared.

The divers came out of the water at seven, and carried their gear and square-fronted blue boat through the woods to the road. The searchers followed them. By then, everything had been searched as well as it could be without warrants.

Ridl stayed behind as the woods went silent, looking at the river rippling white in its hurry to get down to Biloxi or Baton Rouge or wherever it was headed. He would not have wanted to be a diver in that fast current, though he supposed the water might be moving slower below the surface, calm enough to hold a weighted body in place.

‘That your Volkswagen, parked on the road? Yellow thing, black top?’

A round-bellied sheriff’s deputy who was maybe thirty-five had come up on him, silent as a panther. The man’s substantial jowls surrounded a jaw clenching a corncob pipe. A torn cigar stood ludicrously in the bowl of the pipe. He could have been mistaken for a hick, a cracker cop, except for his eyes. There was nothing comical about the way they didn’t blink, or the way he’d appeared so soundlessly.

The name on his shirt tag read Reems. He was the chief deputy who ran the law in Grand Point.

‘You’re Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times.’

He met the man’s unblinking eyes. ‘Why try to shoo me out of town?’

‘You’re asking questions that are meant to make us look like fools.’

‘You’re being dishonest.’

Reems pulled out a chrome Zippo lighter and lit the dead cigar. ‘How so?’

‘Pribilski got shot once in the heart, then multiple times in the crotch. That’s rage, not robbery.’

The chief deputy rocked back on his heels. ‘New leads are popping up all the time, just like this here,’ he said, nodding toward the row of cabins. ‘We just learned of a gray-haired gent who parks his car on Poor Farm Road, usually around midnight. According to one person, he was there Monday night into Tuesday.’

Ridl took out his notebook. ‘Was he alone, this man?’

‘Yes. Maybe he just likes to watch the moon, or maybe he likes to watch others. Or maybe he’s a wienie-wagger, bringing his privates out to delight in the night. We’ll find him.’

‘Not a local?’

‘Don’t even know that, yet.’

‘What else?’

‘There was a Pontiac on Poor Farm parked just ahead of Pribilski’s car.’

‘I thought it was a couple of guys in a heap, hassling a guy who owned a Pontiac at the Hacienda.’

Reems smiled, releasing a puff of smoke. ‘There you have it: we heard it both ways and more. We’re checking everything out.’

‘Along with every man or boy that ever went out with Betty Jo Dean?’

‘And every girl that went out with that Polish, and every boyfriend of every one of those girls. Problem with jealousy is that it’s everywhere. It’s a long list of leads we’ve got.’ He started walking toward the road.

‘You think you’ll ever find her?’ Ridl called after him.

Reems turned around. ‘Betty Jo’s reputed to have more than a touch of the Devil in her. I’ll settle for her being someplace safe, laughing her ass off, though at what I can’t yet imagine.’

Watching the chief deputy move silently away, he knew it would be a mistake to dismiss the man as a buffoon. The extra fifty pounds he was packing and the cigar jammed ridiculously into his pipe were camouflage. Clamp Reems was no bumpkin.

Likely as not, he was Betty Jo Dean’s best hope.

FOURTEEN

The landlady banged on his door rapidly. ‘Mr Ridl, Mr Ridl!’ she yelled.

For a moment, he fought the racket. He’d been soul deep in a sweet dream about a too-tall girl and the flavor of a kiss.

‘Hey, Mr Reporter!’

He sat up too fast, striking his head on the underbelly of a cargo plane, which then set the whole plastic squadron jangling like giant Chinese door beads.

‘They found her!’ she yelled above the clatter. ‘They found Betty Jo Dean!’

He stepped into his khakis. ‘Alive? She’s alive?’ he shouted, grabbing yesterday’s shirt and socks.

‘She’s-’ Her words disappeared in the beat of her orthopedic shoes thumping down the stairs.

He stepped into his unlaced Pumas, grabbed his notepad and banged down after her. The wall clock at the base of the stairs said it was eight-fifteen.

Blanche, the bearer of all news, was again seated at the kitchen table. A quick glance at the look on both their faces told him what they didn’t want to say.

He’d stayed another night; of course he had. And now he was going to hear what he’d begun to hope he never would. He busied himself too long pouring a cup of coffee before joining them at the table.

‘Dennis Poe found her at around five-thirty this morning,’ Blanche said. ‘He was running empty up the Devil’s Backbone to pick up a load at the materials plant.’

He remembered the road. He’d helped search there yesterday. ‘That’s a half-mile west of the Wren House, right?’

Blanche nodded. ‘The Devil’s Backbone is narrow, and it’s custom for the empty truck to make way for someone coming out full. Dennis pulled over to let a full truck pass. He smelled or saw something in the weeds, and hightailed it ahead to the plant to call the sheriff. Delbert Milner got there in five minutes flat.’

‘Smelled?’ Something oily worked up the back of his throat. ‘Surely you’re not saying she’d been out in the heat for some-?’

Blanche raised her hand, stopping him. ‘Maybe it’s just that Dennis Poe saw her from the cab of his truck.’

He ran for the door.

Two sheriff’s cruisers blocked traffic from turning onto Big Pine Road. He left his car by the Wren House and walked the short half-mile to the dozen cop cars clustered at the base of the Devil’s Backbone.

Fifty onlookers had gathered around a deputy. Ridl snapped a couple of photos, not necessarily looking through the lens for a tall girl, and started up the access road.

‘No press,’ the deputy said.

He stepped back and took pictures of the men standing loosely together thirty yards up the Devil’s Backbone. He recognized the exact spot because it was next to a twisted, half-dead tree – the only tree within a hundred yards. He’d searched under that tree, with others, the day before.

He turned to the deputy. ‘Her body was found under that tree?’ he asked, disbelieving.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure: under that tree?’

The cop nodded.

‘She still there?’ he asked.

The deputy glanced uneasily up the Devil’s Backbone. No one was looking back. ‘I heard she was in bad shape,’ he said. ‘Clamp took one look and had Mr Wiley take her to his funeral home.’

‘How bad?’

‘Shot once in the back of the head, clothes thrown down on top of her like rags, then out for two days in this heat? Bad enough, I’d say.’

‘Two days? You’re sure – under that tree, for two days?’

‘That tree is mostly dead and doesn’t throw off much shade, if that’s what you’re wondering. Like I said, once Clamp saw the decomp, he had Mr Wiley quick take her out of there.’

‘You said she was nude?’

‘Partially.’

‘The sheriff will hold a press conference?’

‘Maybe not Delbert.’

‘Milner isn’t there?’ He looked up the few yards again.

‘He got taken sick suddenly and left. Look, Mister, anything else you need, ask Clamp.’

Ridl raised his camera and took another photo of the men up the road, standing beneath the tree where so many people had searched just the day before.

Word spread fast. Television news vans from Rockford, East Moline and Dubuque were parked close when he got back to the courthouse, and he supposed it was print reporters who were jamming the phone booths out front. He drove across the river to the pay phone he remembered in the Hacienda’s parking lot. He lit a cigarette after he’d fed in the dimes.

Eddings started yelling as soon as he picked up, culminating in, ‘And thanks again for not showing up for work this morning.’

‘This is bigger than you thought,’ he said when the editor paused to gulp air. ‘A man gets killed at one in the morning on Tuesday, then his date shows up dead on Thursday in a field that was thoroughly searched on Wednesday.’

‘You’re missing the point of why you’re there.’

‘They’re having a press conference.’

‘Have you excited any potential advertisers?’

‘Only sheriff’s deputies.’ He told Eddings about the tickets he’d collected.

‘Trying to run you out?’

‘That’ll end. There’s press everywhere, now.’

‘When’s the damned press conference?’

‘I might stick around afterward. Something’s real wrong here, Eddings.’

‘Yeah. Two dead and three tickets.’

‘More than that.’

‘Because you think the girl was dumped later?’

‘Or freshly killed after being held for forty-eight hours.’

‘What if I threaten to fire you?’

‘You won’t find anyone as good with dyed cats.’

‘On my desk tomorrow, Jonah,’ Eddings said, and hung up.

He opened the phone booth door, lit another cigarette and savored a play on words: Jonah Ridl had risen from two dead.

FIFTEEN

Late that afternoon, a hand reached from the throng of people going up the stairs and grabbed his forearm. It was Laurel. She’d gotten dressed up for the press conference, sort of. She still wore cut-offs, but she’d traded her university T-shirt for a white blouse, and was wearing lipstick that wasn’t at all necessary.

‘How sure do you have to be?’ she asked, tugging him from the crowd when they got to the top.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How much should you know before you ask a question?’

‘At a press briefing?’ Ridl said. ‘They’re questions, for Pete’s sake. You’re not expected to know the answers.’ Then: ‘What do you suspect?’

‘It’s OK to fire away, no matter what?’ she pressed, ignoring his question.

‘You can ask anything.’ He’d leaned closer, he told himself, only because he was tired of getting jostled by the crush of people pushing into the courtroom.

‘And the shared byline? It’s still on?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she said. And then she was gone.

They packed into a small courtroom, full of news people and townspeople – several of whom, standing stiffly together, were dressed so identically in short-sleeved white shirts and dark ties that he wondered if they were the town council – and plenty of cops, though Milner was not there. It was a stately room with massive ceiling beams, white-plastered walls and oak wainscoting made black by a hundred years of waxing.

It was a proper room for dispensing justice and, as Chief Deputy Reems must have hoped, formal enough to discourage shouting. He had not presumed to sit up on the judge’s dais. He stood below the raised bench, separated by a thick wood railing from the television crews and print reporters and, behind them, as many locals as could squeeze in. Reems wore his tan and green uniform, but he’d ditched the corncob pipe and genial air of country folksiness he’d laid on Ridl by the river.

‘Good morning,’ he began. ‘I am Chief Deputy Wilbur Reems. Let me explain what’s happened here before I answer questions.’

Ridl looked around. He didn’t see Laurel.

‘This morning,’ Reems went on, ‘we recovered the body of Betty Jo Dean, age seventeen, of this town. She’d been shot once in the back of the head. She was found lying on her stomach, fully dressed except for her slacks, which were neatly folded and placed upon her. Now, let me put this unfortunate development into the context of what we believe.’

He raised a pointer to the top of an L-shaped map he’d chalked on a wheeled blackboard. ‘At approximately one o’clock on Tuesday morning, Paulus Pribilski, age twenty-two, of Rockford, was killed on Poor Farm Road. He was shot five times with a.38 revolver as he stood next to his car, a Buick GSX, while a second assailant held Betty Jo Dean helpless in that car. After Pribilski’s killer had dragged him to the edge of the cornfield, he drove his own vehicle to the Wren House parking lot. The second assailant followed in Pribilski’s car, with Betty Jo in it.’ He moved the tip of the pointer straight down, to the left corner of the L’s base.

‘Abandoning Pribilski’s Buick in the Wren House parking lot, the two assailants drove Betty Jo to the Devil’s Backbone Road,’ he said, moving the pointer to the right, along the base of the L, ‘where she was shot once in the back of the head and left in the tall weeds by the side of the road.’

Hands shot up. ‘Not yet,’ Reems said. ‘I want you to be clear why we’re sure two individuals perpetrated this crime. First of all, when a gunman approached Mr Pribilski’s Buick, jerked open the door and pulled him out to shoot him, Betty Jo’s reaction would have been to run. A second person had to be there to restrain her from taking off into the cornfields.

‘Second, two people had to be involved because one was needed to drive Pribilski’s Buick to the Wren House while the other drove their own car.

‘Third, our most promising leads involve eyewitness accounts of several pairs of individuals behaving in hostile fashions. Coming out of the Rustic Hacienda, Mr Pribilski and Miss Dean got into an altercation with a woman and a man. The woman was quite angry with Betty Jo about something. Also in that parking lot were two young men loafing next to an older car. This pair was looking for trouble, threatening another couple, owners of a red Pontiac convertible, but they might well have turned their attentions to Pribilski and Betty Jo.

‘There’s also a report of a third duo, one of which may have once had local ties, hanging around the Hacienda’s parking lot that night, though there’s confusion about that.

‘Finally, we have reports that Pribilski might have won a substantial amount of money from gambling with several men after leaving the Hacienda. Two or more of those men might have taken offense at Pribilski leaving before they had a chance to win their money back. There’s also an unsubstantiated report that Pribilski owed large debts to gamblers down at the Wren House, debts he neglected to pay.

‘Add to all this, we’ve learned Pribilski was very active on the social scene up in Rockford. Betty Jo Dean, of course, was known to have a number of male admirers not just here, but in surrounding communities. Jealousy might well have been the motive for these killings.’

He set the pointer on the tray beneath the blackboard. ‘We have a tremendous number of leads. We’re casting a wide net, using every resource available, but this is going to take some time. Now I will take your questions.’

‘A local woman said she heard from Betty Jo the day after Pribilski was killed,’ a man with a print reporter’s narrow notebook said.

Reems patted his pocket, like he missed his pipe. ‘Your source is Miss Abigail Beech?’

The reporter said nothing.

‘Never mind.’ Reems looked around the room. ‘For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Miss Beech is our local psychic, or whatever. She’s been prowling the ground along Poor Farm Road hoping for signals, I guess.’

Reems was referring to the woman in the long dress and veil that Ridl had seen in the moonlight.

‘It’s cruel, her saying such nonsense,’ Reems said. ‘Next question.’

‘What about the older man seen driving southbound, struggling with a girl in a car?’

‘That tip was a hoax. For those of you who haven’t heard, Sheriff Milner got an anonymous phone call about some trucker seeing such an incident. A hundred searchers combed the cabins and the river bank south of Poor Farm Road, but nothing came of it.’

‘Was she raped?’ an older woman in a blue dress asked.

Reems’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘She most certainly was not,’ he shot back. ‘Doc Farmont conducted a thorough examination this morning. Betty Jo’s body was unfortunately decomposed, having been out in the heat for over two days, but he is certain she was not sexually molested.’

‘Were she and Pribilski having consensual sex at the time they were attacked?’ the same woman asked.

Reems stepped forward to the edge of the rail. ‘Where the hell are you from?’

‘Des Moines Sentinal Register.’

‘Let me tell you something, Miss Sentinal Register. What Betty Jo Dean was doing out on Poor Farm Road is none of our damned business, beyond it being a date. Her family lives in this town. We’re respectful of our neighbors here. And of their memories.’ Reems pointed to someone else. ‘Next question.’

‘She was shot once, in the back of the neck?’

‘And fell forward, yes.’

‘Does the bullet match the ones recovered from Pribilski?’

‘It’s the same.38 caliber. I’ll be taking that bullet with the five we recovered from Mr Pribilski to the Illinois State Police lab, but I expect they’re from the same gun.’

‘Wasn’t that excessive, removing all five from Pribilski?’

‘I insisted every one be extracted, in case there were two shooters.’

‘.38 is a common caliber, correct?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. We’re not going to bother checking ammunition suppliers, since there are a million of them around.’

When Ridl raised his hand, Reems called on him with a nod of recognition. ‘The man from the Sun-Times.’

‘Any thoughts on why Betty Jo Dean was taken from Poor Farm Road? If the objective was to get rid of an eyewitness, why not shoot her and leave her with Pribilski? Why risk driving her someplace else to kill her?’

Reems grimaced. ‘I hate to speculate, but the intent must have been rape. It’s small comfort, but they must have changed their minds after they took her.’

‘That doesn’t explain risking moving the Buick. All three could have simply piled into the perpetrators’ car.’

‘My own theory is they moved the Buick to delay the discovery of Pribilski’s body. They didn’t know they’d left a shoe on the road and a puddle of blood.’

Ridl followed up with: ‘You’re certain Betty Jo was lying along the Devil’s Backbone Road since very early Tuesday morning?’

‘It isn’t me that’s certain. It’s the coroner.’

‘He didn’t do the autopsy. You just said Doctor Farmont from right here in Grand Point did the examination.’

‘OK, it’s Doc Farmont’s who’s certain she’s been lying there the whole time. What’s your point?’

‘Hundreds of people searched that area by the Devil’s Backbone Road, beginning Tuesday. I helped search there myself, on Wednesday, and distinctly remember walking past that gnarled tree. How was she missed?’

‘If you were down there, you saw those tall weeds.’

‘Yet this morning she’s seen by a man in a truck, farther away than we were?’

‘The driver was sitting high up in his cab. He had a better view than you. And if you must know, he also mentioned smelling something bad, like a dog or something had died at that spot.’ He held up his hand in admonishment. ‘I’d appreciate you not dwelling on that. It’s a fact, and you’re entitled to report it, but decomposition’s one of those details that’s a horror to the family.’

Reems pointed to a reporter on the other side of the room.

‘Milner was first on the scene?’ Ridl shouted. ‘It made him sick?’

Reems looked back, his face darkening. ‘People get sick, damn it. Our sheriff’s got a touch of the flu. He stayed, securing the crime scene, until I got there with Mr Wiley from the funeral home.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now, let’s give other people a chance.’ He pointed to a hand raised against the opposite wall. ‘Yes, miss?’

‘Who was the man that slapped Betty Jo outside the Hacienda, last Friday night?’ It was Laurel Jessup’s voice, high and nervous.

‘Who the hell told you that?’ Reems shot back, furious.

‘Was it that man’s fetus that your Doctor Farmont aborted from her?’

‘This damned briefing is over,’ Reems yelled, striding angrily through the side door.

SIXTEEN

‘Jonah Ridl, I‘ll be damned,’ the voice called out behind him.

Ridl, jittery from Laurel Jessup’s grenades back in the courtroom, spun around. ‘Spetter,’ he said. He hadn’t seen him inside.

The Chicago Tribune’s investigative reporter, dressed also in khakis and a golf shirt, was Ridl’s counterpart at the Trib, or rather, Ridl had been Spetter’s, until Ridl parachuted into the basement anonymity of the Sun Times’s Special Features.

‘We talk about you, Jonah,’ Spetter said.

‘Bad stuff?’ Ridl said, producing what he hoped was a real smile. He shot a glance over Spetter’s shoulder, looking for Laurel.

‘Bad circumstances, Jonah. It could have been any one of us.’

It wasn’t, though. It had been only Ridl, and something he should have let go.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ Spetter said.

‘I’d better pass.’ He wanted to find Laurel.

‘I’ll buy.’

‘It isn’t that; I can afford a drink.’

‘Just a Coke, then? Your byline just disappeared, man. I’ll come back a hero if I say I ran into you.’

Ridl hesitated. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to admit he’d spent the past six months hiding in Special Features, either. Spetter, though, had been about the only one who’d checked up on him those first days after Ridl himself had become news.

Ridl pointed to the Constellation across the street. ‘It’s quiet there.’ It had a window that faced Laurel’s Dodge Dart, parked at the curb.

The place was empty. Dougie Peterson showed happy teeth when they walked in. Recognizing Ridl, perhaps. More likely, smiling at the prospect of peddling a couple of the sandwiches still curling in plastic wrap on the bar.

Spetter got a Scotch, Ridl a Dr Pepper.

‘Sandwiches?’ Dougie asked. ‘Made fresh.’

‘Expense account,’ said Spetter, a man new to Grand Point, buying two.

Ridl led them to a table with a view out the front window.

Spetter took a bite of his sandwich, then set it down fast to reach for his drink, obviously needing the moisture.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Spetter said, when he could. ‘This story here, though… waste of a day.’

Laurel was crossing the street, walking slowly as though dazed. Ridl got up and went out the door.

‘Laurel,’ he said.

Her eyes glistened and her lips were trembling. ‘I screwed up, didn’t I? Shut things down cold?’

‘I was the one who said you should ask anything, but Jesus, Laurel… How solid was that business about a man hitting her and an abortion?’

‘Like a rock, I think.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘My scoop, Jonah.’

‘One of those white-shirt businessmen in the courtroom?’ Ridl asked.

She shrugged.

‘I told you I’ll share the byline if you give me what you have. We’ll split the writing.’

Her face worked at smiling.

‘You could go back to campus this fall waving a clip from the Sun-Times,’ he added. ‘That’s big time for a journalism major. Just make sure the information’s solid.’

‘I’m on my way to do that now.’ She gave him her home phone number. ‘Call me tomorrow, after noon,’ she said, getting in her car.

‘Wasn’t that the girl who stopped the show?’ Spetter asked when Ridl came back. He’d watched through the window.

‘Journalism major, University of Illinois.’

‘God save us from the determination of the young. Think she was right about the man slapping the Dean girl, and the abortion?’

‘No idea,’ he lied.

‘I tried telling my editor that we get better murders in Chicago every single day,’ Spetter said. ‘No dice; he saw intrigue in the girl not being found for two days. But it’s a wilderness out there, lots of big weeds.’ He checked his watch. ‘I gotta go.’

‘Why don’t you take your sandwich?’ Ridl asked, offering up a smirk. ‘It’ll last for weeks.’ His own lay untouched, but then, he’d been to the Constellation before.

Spetter laughed, and left.

Ridl stayed at the table, ate the dry ham, the brittle Swiss and only those fragments of gritty rye bread that wouldn’t come off the cheese. Then he shifted in his chair to call across the empty bar. ‘Who knocked up Betty Jo Dean, Dougie?’

Dougie’s face froze, but he wasn’t looking at Ridl. A sheriff’s deputy stood in the doorway, a dark shape backlit by the sun lowering behind him.

Ridl got up. ‘Guess I’ll shove off,’ he said, moving around the cop and out the door.

He drove south, turned right at the Wren House and parked where he’d parked when he’d helped search the fields. Several people milled about the gnarled tree. He took pictures as he walked up. He’d study them when he got back to Chicago, but there was no way they’d convince him Betty Jo Dean had been laying there when that field was searched.

He stopped, shocked. The weeds surrounding the gnarled tree had been mowed.

‘Why was this cut?’ he asked a man standing nearby.

‘Clamp ordered it, to search for evidence.’

‘They find anything?’

‘All I saw was the guy doing the cutting.’

And destroying evidence.

The Materials Corporation was five hundred yards up the road, a scattering of several small house trailers used as offices. Six huge haulers were parked in a row at the end of the gravel lot. Though it was well past quitting time, three men stood smoking nearby.

‘Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times,’ he said, walking up. ‘Mind if I ask how many trucks come out of here every day?’

‘You mean just ours, or customers, too?’ one of the men said.

‘Total trucks.’

‘I’d guess, what,’ he looked at the others, ‘two dozen every day?’

‘At least,’ another man said. ‘June is high season for us.’

‘So maybe fifty trucks came in and out of here since early Tuesday morning?’

‘You’re wanting to know why not one of them drivers saw her in the weeds until this morning?’ the first man asked.

Ridl grinned. ‘They had to concentrate on their driving, and not the side of the road?’

The man spit on the ground. ‘Drivers aren’t blind.’

‘I’ll bet no one here is stupid, either,’ Ridl said.

None of the three asked what he meant, and that spoke plenty about what they didn’t believe coming from their sheriff’s department.

He walked back down the road, deciding against taking any more pictures. No matter how many he took, none would convince him that fifty drivers had missed seeing a body lying so close to the road.

SEVENTEEN

It was dusk, mercifully too late to lie to shopkeepers. He’d make one last stop and head back to Chicago.

He crossed the river and swung into the parking lot of Al’s Rustic Hacienda. Like last time, there was a crowd of underage drinkers lounging around the cars in the parking lot. Also like last time, inside there was a raucous mix of clinking glasses and liquored laughter. The place smelled of thick smoke and booze. Ridl worked his way through to the bar and ordered a ginger ale.

A smudged blonde in her early thirties was sitting on the stool next to him. ‘You’re new,’ she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. Most certainly she’d been perched at the bar for some time.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She cocked her head. ‘Reporter, or boy scout?’

‘Reporter.’

‘I thought… you’d all been run off by now.’ She shook her head. ‘Stupid.’

‘Some of us are more tenacious than others.’

‘No point,’ she said. ‘Ish done.’

A brunette of the same vintage, though less smudged, nudged herself between Ridl and the blonde. ‘For God’s sake, Evie.’

Evie tilted forward until her elbows steadied on the bar. ‘Ish true, goddammit. Nothing more to be learn.’

‘There seems to be leads pointing to the patrons of this establishment, or at least your parking lot,’ Ridl ventured to the brunette.

Her face tightened. ‘Plus gamblers down at the Wren House, a peeper parked just off Poor Farm Road and God knows how many jilted lovers. You can’t lay it all here.’

‘You think any of the leads will pan out?’ Ridl asked.

‘Never, bet your ash,’ Evie said, peering around the brunette. ‘Damn whore, that Betty Jo Dean.’

The brunette put her arm around Evie and walked her away.

‘Ginger ale or gin buck?’ Clamp Reems filled the space vacated by the two women.

It was no real surprise. ‘Gin buck?’

Reems pointed to Ridl’s glass. ‘A buck looks like plain ginger ale, but it’s got gin in it. It was Betty Jo Dean’s favorite drink.’ He paused, obviously enjoying the confusion on Ridl’s face. ‘We’re not hillbillies, Mr Ridl. We’re being thorough.’

‘You thought to find out what she drank?’

‘No, I said that to show off. She dated the bartender here for a time.’

‘She wasn’t in that field yesterday, Deputy Reems. I was there. I searched around that tree myself.’

‘Too many people say she was easy to miss, covered with last year’s leaves.’ Reems pointed to a small group of men sitting at tables in the back, barely visible through the smoke. ‘Go ask them directly.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Doc Farmont and his assistant, Randy White. Bud Wiley, our mortician, is at the next table with his nephew, Luther, and Horace Wiggins, our crime scene photographer. Any of them will tell you Betty Jo was covered with debris, and had spent quite some time exposed to the elements.’

‘There’ll be a more formal autopsy by your coroner, or the Illinois State Police?’

‘No need. Cause of death is obviously gunshot wound to the back of the head. Because of the decomposition, the Dean family wants her buried tomorrow.’ He pulled out his pipe and fished in his pants pocket. Coming out with a freshly torn cigar, he jammed it in the pipe and lit it with his Zippo. He grinned, comfortably Colonel Cornpone again. ‘Don’t worry about them parking tickets. Being as you’re leaving tonight, I’ll get the fines waived.’ He walked away.

‘Best be careful, mister,’ the bartender said after Reems had disappeared in front of his own smoke. ‘You never want him paying too much attention to you, and that goes double when you’re talking to his wife.’

‘His wife?’

‘That blonde you were talking to. She’s Evie Reems.’

‘She’s rattled.’

‘We’re all rattled.’

‘You went out with Betty Jo?’

The bartender looked wistful for an instant, then his face went blank. ‘We got along, for a time.’

‘When was this?’

‘I forget.’

‘All the boys liked Betty Jo Dean?’ Dougie Peterson over at the Constellation had said it. Evie Reems had said more than that, calling Betty Jo a whore.

‘Mister, we all liked her, about as much as we hated liking her. She was beautiful, too young and too old simultaneously. Be careful, is all.’

There was no point in hanging around to finish a ginger ale that would now taste like something left by a murdered girl. He’d call Laurel from Chicago the next day and write up what he had. He went out to his car.

As he pulled up to the highway another engine started up loud behind him. He waited, uneasy, but no headlights came on. It was paranoia; he’d spent too long in Grand Point. He turned east and eased the rattling Volkswagen up to a sedate forty miles an hour.

His headlamps lit a black-on-white sign five minutes later: ‘Leaving Peering County, One Mile.’ He chanced a last glance in the rearview. Something shiny glinted on the road, well behind him. Certainly there were no headlamps; it was unlikely to have been an automobile.

He watched the mirror more than the road, but nothing showed in the darkness. To be sure anyway, he killed his lights when he crested the hill at the county line, downshifting to a stop on the shoulder so as to not flash his brake lights. He shut off the engine, jumped out and ran back up the hill.

He saw and heard nothing for a few seconds, and then the rumble of a big engine grew louder in the night. There was no glow of lights, front or rear. The car was running dark. Good people did not run dark on a highway in the night.

He moved to the shoulder of the road and dropped onto his stomach. It was a damned dumb thing he’d done. There was no time to run back to the Volkswagen and accelerate away to safety.

The engine was almost deafening now. Only a big V-8 sounded that full and throaty. People hadn’t bought expensive, thirsty engines much since the energy crisis sent gasoline prices to the moon a decade earlier.

Except cops. Cops still liked the big engines.

The engine rumbled as loud as thunder; the car was climbing the rise. He pressed himself down as hard as he could. In a second, the driver would crest the hill. Even running without lights, its driver would see Ridl’s car in the moonlight, parked below.

The night went red from the taillights. The engine quieted, a little. The car had stopped.

He lifted his head just enough to see. The car was barely ten yards in front of him, idling, a beast hungry in the darkness. He pushed his cheek down hard into the dirt and tried not to breathe. A moment passed, and then another.

The transmission snicked softly as the driver shifted into another gear, and then the tires squealed softly, turning on the asphalt. He lifted his head. The car was backing into a turn. Headlamps came on, sweeping across the field on the other side of the highway, and the car roared back toward Grand Point.

He stood in time to see the vague shapes of bubble lights on the roof. Reems, or another of Milner’s men, wanted to make sure he was gone.

He went back to his car.

EIGHTEEN

The Peering County Democrat’s offices were above the True Value Hardware, across the highway from the courthouse.

‘Good morning,’ he said to the sour-faced woman at the gray metal desk. ‘I’m Jonah Ridl, of the Chicago Sun-Times.’ Eying the other gray desk in the small room, fortunately vacant, he added the lie: ‘My office called?’

‘Never heard of you,’ the woman snapped.

She was barely in her thirties, but already her face had hardened with the squinting eyes and deep frown lines of a woman angry at being lied to for decades. There was also the possibility she’d sensed that he’d slept in his car on a farm road a safe mile past the outskirts of Peering County, and shaved by a stream.

He pulled out his wallet, brimming with bits of paper. ‘I’m to meet with ah, ah…’ He made a show of fumbling through the scraps of old notes.

‘Horace Wiggins, our publisher,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘He’s the only other one who works here.’

Ridl smiled with what he hoped looked like gratitude. ‘Yes. Mr Wiggins, of course. It’s about the murders.’

‘Can’t help you now. Horace is out, photographing the funeral.’

‘Betty Jo Dean is being buried so soon?’ he asked, faking surprise at what Reems had told him the night before. ‘I figured the police would want her body for at least another day.’

‘Doc said it was best.’

‘Yes, of course. That would be Doctor Romulus Farmont? I’m here to speak to him as well.’

‘I could swear I’ve seen you before. In town, earlier than today.’

‘I must have an evil twin,’ he said.

‘At the Hacienda, last night,’ she said, with the certainty of a woman who’s never been wrong. About anything. Ever.

‘That’s a lovely brooch,’ he said, trying to ingratiate himself with her by feigning interest in the enormous cut-glass abomination that hung on her bird-like chest like a fallen window sash.

A slight smile twitched at the frown lines guarding her mouth. ‘Anyway, Horace is not here,’ she said, less harshly.

He took the chance. ‘I was supposed to see the crime scene photographs.’

‘Says who?’

‘Said my office. They arranged it with Mr Wiggins.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. Besides, there’s only the one.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Horace brought in only the one picture.’

‘You saw it, then?’

‘Wasn’t supposed to, but I did. Horrible.’ She fingered the weight of the glass brooch.

‘Badly decomposed, I heard.’

‘I couldn’t see that, for the leaves, but then I only looked for an instant.’

‘Leaves?’

‘There were leaves all over her head, completely covering it up. I suppose that’s just as well – spares the family from seeing.’

‘I’m only here for the day. I don’t suppose you…’ He let the plea dangle like the glass on the plain of her chest.

She glanced at the door nervously and stood up. ‘You must promise to tell no one I showed you, because you should really wait for Horace.’

‘Not a word,’ Ridl said.

She walked to the other desk, took an eight-by-ten black-and-white picture from an envelope, and brought it back to Ridl.

‘Mr Wiggins doesn’t shoot in color?’ No one shot crime scene photos in black and white anymore.

‘Not this time.’

At first, all he saw were leaves, just as she’d said. But then he made out an upper torso, lying chest down on the ground, and the top half of a pair of white panties, partially covered by the folded dark slacks Reems had mentioned at his press briefing. The girl’s patterned blouse had been tugged up, exposing her skin up to the back strap of her white bra. The upper portion of her right arm and her elbow were also visible; the rest of the arm and all of her head were hidden under the cover of leaves.

The photo looked arranged, as though the profusion of leaves had been meant to obscure any meaningful details.

‘You’re sure this is the only photo?’ Ridl asked.

‘Horace said any more would only distress the family unnecessarily.’

Ridl stopped himself from telling the lame-headed woman that crime scene photos were not given as keepsakes to the victim’s family. ‘I can’t see any decomposition,’ he said.

‘Doc Farmont wouldn’t be wrong about such a thing, nor would Bud Wiley. If they say it was there, it’s there.’

‘There’s no bloating at her back or on the part of the arm that’s visible. Bodies bloat up after death, especially in heat like we’ve been having.’

‘That’s a question for the doc.’

‘And supposedly, the excessive decomposition is why they hurried to bury her today?’

‘No supposedly about it,’ she said, bristling. ‘You best talk to Doc and Bud if you want to learn more.’

He thanked the woman, gave another smile to the brooch on her chest and went down the stairs.

Too much was wrong. The cops were making too little of too many bullets fired into Pribilski’s crotch. Too much evidence had been destroyed, through trampling and mowing and washing. The cops were too insistent that Betty Jo Dean had lain a long time along the Devil’s Backbone, when too many searchers would attest to that not being true. Betty Jo Dean was being hustled too quickly into the ground. And the one photo taken of Betty Jo Dean’s corpse smacked too much of being staged to obscure anything meaningful at the discovery site.

Perhaps most of all, though, Sheriff Delbert Milner might have gotten too sick after seeing the most sought-after corpse in his county.

He looked across to the row of phone booths in front of the courthouse. A telephone directory dangled below the stainless steel shelf in the closest one.

He walked across the highway.

NINETEEN

The directory had listed Delbert Milner as living on the western outskirts of Grand Point. It was a tidy beige brick ranch house brightened by green shutters, set on an expansive, freshly mowed corner lot. Carefully trimmed yews and a long row of purple and white flowers ran along the front.

Ordinarily, it would have looked like a happy house, but today a red-and-white Cadillac ambulance was backed crooked in the driveway, and a Peering County sheriff’s car had been left at a haphazard angle out on the street. Both had their lights flashing.

A young sheriff’s deputy stood stiffly outside the front door. He was holding his wide-brimmed hat in front of him, as though he were in church. Or at a funeral.

The top was up on Ridl’s convertible, but it wouldn’t buy him invisibility. The deputies knew his car. He parked three houses back, behind a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and had just slumped low behind the steering wheel when a second sheriff’s car raced up and slammed to a stop in the middle of the street, next to the first cruiser. A haggard-looking, middle-aged woman in a white nurse’s uniform got out of the back and ran through the front door the deputy had hurriedly jerked open. An instant later, it must have been her who screamed.

The deputy who’d driven the nurse looked out his window at Ridl’s car. Ridl recognized him. It was the tall cop he’d seen on Poor Farm Road on his first day in town – one of the pair who’d ticketed him for illegal parking and then for missing a rear license plate. The cop was speaking into his radio handset.

Two ambulance personnel came out, wheeling a collapsible gurney. They did not hurry. The body on the gurney was zipped to the scalp in a black vinyl bag.

The nurse came out fast behind them. Her face was wet with tears and red with rage. ‘Murphy’s in DeKalb, not Wiley’s, you hear?’ she shouted to the ambulance crew. ‘Murphy’s Funeral Home in DeKalb!’

‘You sure, Mrs Milner?’ one of the men shouted back, opening the ambulance’s back door. ‘The sheriff played cards with Mr Wiley.’

Mrs Milner was not a large woman, but she raised her fist and came toward him. ‘You need me to drive the damned ambulance?’ she screamed.

‘No, ma’am.’

As the two men collapsed the wheels and slid the gurney into the back of the ambulance, Mrs Milner doubled over and fell to her knees. The young deputy left the front door and ran across the lawn.

‘We’ll go to DeKalb,’ the ambulance driver shouted. ‘Clamp says whatever you want.’

He climbed in and they drove off, lights flashing but in no hurry. The young deputy got Mrs Milner to stand, and together they walked into the house.

The tall cop got out of the second cruiser and began walking toward the Volkswagen. His face looked angry. Ridl gave him a faint wave and drove away.

Most probably, Milner had been dropped by a heart attack. He was overweight, and had been sweating too hard the first time Ridl had seen him down in the sheriff’s office. He’d looked no better the next time. He’d been ashen-faced addressing the townspeople from the arch in the courthouse, reporting a trucker’s tip and encouraging them to search the land and the cabins south of Poor Farm Road. That Milner had gotten sick at the sight of Betty Jo Dean at the Devil’s Backbone fit too. Clearly, the man had not been well.

Mrs Milner was a nurse, a medical professional. She’d have known, more intimately than anyone else, how sick he was. Even so, her shock and her screams were understandable. Her husband was dead.

Only one thing nagged: she’d insisted hysterically that her husband be taken out of town, away from Wiley’s, to another funeral home in DeKalb.

He caught up with the ambulance three miles east, and hung back the thirty minutes it took to get to DeKalb. Murphy’s Funeral Parlor was on the main drag. He parked in front of a Rexall pharmacy, two doors down, where he could see when the ambulance left, and called Eddings from a booth out in front.

‘The prodigal deigns to call,’ Eddings, ever the wordster, said. ‘You do recall you and your story were supposed to be in my office today at noon?’

‘Too much is wrong here. The sheriff just got carted away, dead.’

‘Murdered?’

‘Probably a heart attack.’

‘Now who’s talking ordinary, Jonah?’

‘I have to hang around.’

‘For what? Spetter at the Trib gave it barely a hundred words this morning.’

‘I’ll have at least two thousand for openers. I can call later, to dictate?’

Eddings sighed and gave him the name of the night man to call.

‘One more thing,’ Ridl said. ‘I’ve got someone working with me. Laurel Jessup.’ He spelled it out. ‘I told her we’d share the byline.’

He smiled, imagining her strutting on campus with a well-worn clip from the Sun-Times. And for the first time he felt the weight of the last six months start to lift. It was slight, to be sure; he’d never be completely free of a kid shot dead in a Chicago alley, but Laurel was a start, a way back. Maybe even an amends.

‘Never heard of her,’ Eddings said.

‘Journalism major at Illinois. She’s got a source – lines into a motive that no one else knows about. I’m calling her this afternoon.’

The ambulance, emptied of Delbert Milner, appeared at the end of the street and turned toward Grand Point. He told Eddings he’d call the night man and walked to Murphy’s front door.

A man and a woman were seated in an office to the right, their backs to the door, facing someone across a desk. The man’s shoulders were hunched. The woman’s were shaking. She was sobbing.

A white-haired man in a black suit came out of a viewing parlor and crossed the foyer to close the office door. ‘Always especially terrible when a young person dies,’ he said. ‘May I help you?’

‘I said I’d follow along behind the ambulance but I got stuck behind a truck.’ It was only the first of the lies he’d planned.

‘You’re here about Sheriff Milner? Not to worry. He’s safe in our hands.’

Ridl chewed at his lip. ‘Terrible, terrible thing.’

The white-haired man put on an appropriately consoling face. ‘We’ll oversee every possible detail, though it will have to be a closed casket viewing…’

Closed casket. Words too searing for a death by heart attack.

‘Closed casket,’ Ridl repeated.

He hadn’t kept the question out of the words. The funeral director’s eyes narrowed from consoling to cautious. ‘Forgive me; I thought perhaps you were a son. You are family, sir?’

‘I wasn’t at the house.’ It was all he could think to say.

‘Wiley’s is a fine establishment, to be sure.’

He almost wanted to laugh. The funeral director wasn’t being protective of Milner’s family; he was worried about being accused of poaching a stiff from another mortician’s turf.

‘You’re wondering why we’re not using Wiley’s?’

The man in the black suit smiled, obviously relieved that Ridl understood the delicacy of the situation.

Because Grand Point’s own funeral director was up to his own formaldehyde in covering up big things, along with the town’s doctor, newspaper publisher and maybe half its sheriff’s department, Ridl wanted to say, and the newly widowed Mrs Milner didn’t want any of their dirty hands touching what was left of her husband, who perhaps hadn’t wanted to conspire anymore.

‘I’m fully prepared to put in a reassuring word,’ Ridl said instead, ‘so long as I’m comfortable with your decision-making.’

The mortician beamed.

‘To best communicate the need to restrict the viewing,’ Ridl went on, ‘and for my information only…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Exactly how bad is the…?’ He let the question dangle – a guess, but one he had to make.

The funeral director leaned forward. ‘You do understand, reconstruction in the case of gunshot is tenuous at best?’

‘How close was the shot?’

‘There is no doubt.’

‘That close?’

‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said, trying to soothe. ‘I merely meant… well, you understand, depression’s a disease.’

The office door opened and the bereaved couple came out, accompanied by a younger version of the white-haired funeral director.

‘She’s safe in our hands,’ the younger mortician said to the couple, echoing the same line his father had used with Ridl. The woman sobbed. The man’s face was tight, but dry. He carried a purse. The victim must have been a woman.

The older director touched Ridl’s elbow and nudged him ever so gently away. ‘There are papers…?’

‘The family will be contacting you shortly,’ he said, and left. Sheriff Milner had died of gunshot. Whether it had been a suicide or murder wasn’t something he was likely to learn on his own, anytime soon.

Someone with better sources might know. And it was time anyway. He stepped into the phone booth outside the Rexall, fed in a dime and called Laurel Jessup.

TWENTY

The phone rang nine times before a child answered. It was her younger sister, perhaps.

‘Laurel Jessup, please.’

The girl started crying. A soft thud came then, as though she’d dropped the receiver.

An older woman must have picked it up. ‘Yes?’ she asked softly.

‘Jonah Ridl, calling for Laurel Jessup.’

‘For God’s sake…’ The line went dead.

Faces he’d just seen blended into a blurred kaleidoscope in his mind: a father with shoulders hunched in grief, a mother sobbing, and a young solicitous mortician murmuring practiced words that wouldn’t do anything at all.

Suddenly there was no air. He pushed at the folding metal door and stumbled out of the phone booth. He made it back to Murphy’s by concentrating on the symmetry of the lines between the squares of the sidewalk. He did not dare to think.

The white-haired man was still in the foyer, straightening a flower arrangement on a small table.

‘Sir?’ he asked, startled by what he must have seen on Ridl’s face.

‘The other person that was brought in…’

‘Miss Jessup.’

And there it was.

‘I knew her,’ he managed.

The white-haired man nodded because, after all, it was what he’d trained himself to do.

‘Tell me,’ Ridl said.

‘Sir?’

‘Tell me how she died, goddamn it, and don’t give me any shit about her being in safe hands.’

‘I’m afraid…’

Ridl advanced. He wanted to hit. Hard. ‘Murder? Was she shot, like Milner?’

The funeral man stepped back, his pale eyes horrified. It was so very good that he was afraid.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘My goodness, no. It was a car accident.’

His mind scrambled back to his own dark drive the night before, when he’d been tailed by a deputy.

‘Where?’ he demanded.

‘West of here.’ The old man named a different highway.

‘But still Peering County? Yes?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘What was odd about the crash?’

‘Nothing.’ The funeral man stepped back hurriedly.

‘There had to be something odd about the crash, damn it.’

‘Not really. The deputy who brought her purse said she must have fallen asleep. It was late. She ran off the road and hit a tree.’

It made horrible sense. ‘Was anything taken from Laurel’s purse?’ Like a notebook that contained the name of a source…

‘Please, sir, you must calm yourself. The purse spilled open from the impact. Its contents were scattered all over the inside of the car. A deputy brought it here. We gave it to the family. I’m sure everything was returned safely.’

That old weight came again, as crushing as when he’d gone to the morgue to see the pale skin and fuzzy beginnings of a mustache on a kid too young to be in a gang.

He bought two tablets of lined yellow paper at the Rexall and sat in his car. He wrote deliberately and slowly, pausing time and again to make sure it was all of what he knew, and all of what he suspected. There would be no redoing the story, not ever.

It took all of the afternoon and into the dusk. When he was done there were only a few sheets left on the second tablet. He threw them away. He never wanted to write on lined paper again.

He went back into the Rexall. He bought an envelope big enough for all the lined sheets of paper, and enough stamps from a rectangular machine on a stand to mail it twice to the moon.

He put her name on it and tried to push the sheets into the envelope. They would not fit, not all at once. Some had curled up from his rereading. Many were damp.

A young girl, not much younger than Laurel, came out from behind the counter and asked if he was all right. His voice sounded normal as he said, ‘Yes,’ but he knew then that he would never be all right again.

She took the papers from him and slid them in smaller batches into the envelope. She did not speak of their dampness.

There was a mailbox at the next corner. He let the envelope slide from his hands.