Spilled Blood

1

Christopher Hawk drove west on Highway 7 into the emptiness of rural Minnesota, leaving civilization behind him with each mile away from the city. Staring at the horizon between his windshield wipers, he could have sworn the world was flat, and he hoped there was a sign ahead to warn him before he sped off the edge of the earth. Long, empty miles loomed between towns. There were no buildings, other than the occasional desolate farm. He drove beside endless fields ruled by King Corn, but it was too early for planting season, and the land resembled a rutted moonscape. He didn’t feel welcome.

The weather made it worse. March was going out like a lamb, freakishly warm and wet. It had started raining almost as soon as he cleared the western edge of I-494, and the dreary spattering had continued nonstop for nearly two hours and a hundred miles. He passed swollen drainage ditches where the water looked ready to spill across the lanes of the highway. The bumpy gray clouds were like a thick hood thrown over his head.

An amateur billboard mounted in the midst of farmland caught his eye. The message had been painted in bold black letters on a plain white background. It said:

I AM COMING SOON. ARE YOU READY?

The message was signed, ‘Jesus.’

Chris didn’t think he belonged in a place where God felt the need to advertise. Even so, when he asked himself if he was ready, the answer was easy. No. He wasn’t ready at all. He was nervous about this journey, because he was on his way back into the lives of two strangers.

The first was his ex-wife. The second was his daughter.

That morning, Hannah had called at six o’clock, waking him up. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, but he could see her face as clearly as if she’d been sleeping beside him. There were still days when he reached for her in bed, hoping to take her hand, hoping to fold her against his body. He still had dreams where the three of them lived together as a family. Chris. Hannah. Olivia.

She didn’t give him a chance to dream.

‘Our daughter has been arrested for murder,’ she announced.

Just like that. No small talk. Hannah never wasted time. She had a way of cutting to the chase, whether it was in college when he wanted to sleep with her (she said yes), or three years ago when she wanted a divorce (he said no, but that didn’t change her mind).

Olivia.

Chris didn’t ask for details about the crime she had supposedly committed. He didn’t want to know the victim’s name, or what happened, or hear Hannah reassure him that she was really innocent. For him, that wasn’t even a question. His daughter didn’t do it. Not Olivia. The girl who texted and tweeted him every day – Send me a pic of a Dunn Bros latte, Dad. I miss it. – was not a murderer.

‘I’ll be there this afternoon,’ he replied.

The silence on the phone told him that his answer surprised her. Finally, Hannah said, ‘She needs a lawyer, Chris.’

‘I’m a lawyer.’

‘You know what I mean. A criminal lawyer.’

‘All lawyers are criminals.’

It was an old joke between them, but Hannah didn’t laugh. ‘Chris, this is serious. I’m scared.’

‘I know you are, but this is obviously a misunderstanding. I’ll straighten it out with the police.’

Her hesitation felt like a punch to the gut. ‘I’m not so sure that’s all it is,’ she said. She was silent again, and then she added, ‘It’s ugly. Olivia’s in trouble.’

Hannah sketched out the facts for him, and he realized that she was right. It was ugly. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a pretty teenage girl had been shot to death, and Olivia had been at the scene, drunk, desperate, pointing a gun at the girl’s head. It hadn’t taken long – it was Tuesday now – for the police to conclude that his daughter was guilty.

‘What did Olivia tell you?’ he asked. ‘What happened between them?’

‘She won’t talk to me. She said I should call you.’

‘Okay, tell her I’ll be there soon.’

Hannah didn’t protest further. ‘Fine. You’re right, she needs you. Just remember that you don’t know this girl, Chris. Not anymore.’

‘We talk all the time.’

‘That’s not the same thing. Believe me. You see the girl she wants you to see.’

As his ex-wife hung up, he’d wondered if that were true.

A lifetime had passed – three years – since Hannah left him to go back to the small farm town called St. Croix where she’d been raised. He saw his daughter every few months, but to him she would always be a girl, not a woman. He didn’t know anything about the mix-up of emotions a teenager faced. She hadn’t said a word to him about what was in her head. She talked about meaningless things. Easy things. He should have realized there was much more to her than a girl who missed her father.

It didn’t change what he had to do. Olivia needed him, and he had to go.

Now, hours later, he was deep in the western farmlands of Minnesota, with the rain coming down, with Jesus on a billboard asking if he was ready. It could have been Antarctica; it could have been Mars. Every mile here looked like the next. This part of the world was terra incognita to him. He was a creature of the noise, asphalt, and people of downtown Minneapolis. He owned a two-bedroom condominium near Loring Park, which he used mostly to sleep. He didn’t cook, so he ate fish and chips and drank Guinness at The Local and ordered take-out pho from Quang. He spent his days and nights negotiating contracts for industrial parks and strip malls. Steel and concrete – those were things that were real, things he could touch and measure.

In the city, he was an insider. Not here. Out here, he was an alien.

Ahead of him, through the sheets of rain, Chris saw a highway sign for the Spirit Dam. The town of Barron, where Olivia was being held in the county jail, was on the river side of the dam, three miles to the south. He drove his decade-old silver Lexus onto the roadway, but he stopped in the middle of the bridge. For some reason, he found himself hesitating. He got out of the car and shut the door behind him. Rain lashed across his face, and he squinted. He didn’t care about getting wet.

Chris looked down at the wild water squeezing into whirlpools through a dozen sluice gates. Downstream, the Spirit River settled into a mucky brown calm as it wound toward Barron, feeding a web of narrow streams, including one that flowed behind Hannah’s house in the tiny town of St. Croix a few miles to the southeast. On the north side of the dam, the water sprawled like a vast octopus into miles of man-made lake. The river pushed toward the valley, and the dam pushed back and said, Stop. That was exactly what he had to do. That was his mission. Olivia was in the path of a flood, and he had to stop it.

Still, Chris lingered on the bridge, staring at the water.

He was a tall man, almost exactly six feet. At forty-one, his hair was still thick and brown, without any gray to remind him of his age. He wore contacts over his dark eyes; years of poring over realestate contracts had killed his eyesight. Since the divorce, he’d had no excuse for avoiding the gym. He’d dropped twenty pounds and added several inches of muscle to his chest. He looked good; the various women who chased him told him that. It wasn’t just his lawyer’s wallet that attracted them. Even so, he hadn’t agreed to a date in seven months, hadn’t had sex in over a year. He told himself that it was his busy schedule, but the truth was more complicated.

The truth was Hannah. He’d never stopped loving her. Her voice on the phone was enough to awaken the old feelings. She was what was holding him back.

Ready or not, Chris drove across the dam and turned south toward Barron. The river followed the highway, winking in and out behind trees that grew on the shore. Houses appeared. A school bus pulled in front of him. The city sign advertised the population: 5,383. Out here, that was a metropolis, a hub for the whole county. As he neared the town, he felt as if he had crossed back into the 1950s, as if decades of progress had hopscotched over this section of land. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this place would not be as intimidating as it seemed.

Life in the city was fast and complex; life in the country was slower and simpler.

A mile later, he realized that he was wrong.

On the outskirts of Barron, he passed an agribusiness facility built on the western bank of the river. It was one-story, white, clean, and almost windowless. The plant looked more like a prison than an industrial site, because it was protected by a nine-foot fence wound with coils of barbed wire to keep intruders from reaching the interior grounds. The single narrow gate in the fence, just wide enough for trucks to pass, was guarded by two uniformed security officers who were both armed with handguns. As he drove by the plant slowly, he noticed their eyes following him with suspicion.

He noticed something else, too. Outside the fence, he saw a dramatic marble sign ten feet in height, featuring the company name in brass letters. Mondamin Research. Its logo was a golden ear of corn inside a multi-colored helix strand of DNA. Two workers in yellow slickers labored in the rain to sandblast graffiti that had been spray-painted in streaky letters across the white stone. Despite their efforts, he could still see what had been written.

The graffiti said: You’re killing us.

Chris found the Riverside Motel a quarter-mile beyond the Mondamin headquarters. From the parking lot, he had a perfect vantage on the plant’s barbed-wire fence glistening in the rain. Ahead of him, he saw the main street of Barron. Between the two landmarks was the chocolate-brown ribbon of the river.

The motel was a U-shaped, single-story building with two dozen rooms. The white paint had begun to peel away in chips, and the gutters sagged from the shingled black roof. The doors were cherry-red. After parking and retrieving his bag, he ducked through the rain and opened the screen door of the motel office. The interior was humid, and a fan swiveled on the desk, which was unusual for March. On the left wall he saw an ice machine and two vending machines selling snacks and pop. He approached the check-in counter.

‘I’m Chris Hawk,’ he told the man seated behind the counter. ‘I called this morning about a room.’

The motel owner nodded pleasantly. ‘Welcome to Barron, Mr. Hawk.’

Chris guessed that the man was in his early fifties. He had an olive Italian cast to his skin. His hair was black-and-gray, buzzed into a wiry crew cut. He had a jet-black mustache, a mole on his upper cheek, and a silver chain nestled in the matted fringe of his chest hair. He slid out a reservation form, which he handed to Chris with a pen.

‘I’m looking for the county courthouse,’ Chris mentioned as he filled in his personal details.

‘Yes, of course. Well, you can’t miss it. It’s downtown, beautiful old building, red stone.’

Chris stopped writing and looked up. ‘Why “of course”?’

‘Oh, everyone knows who you are, Mr. Hawk, and why you’re here.’

‘Already?’

The motel owner shrugged. He was short and squat, with bulging forearms. His T-shirt, which fit snugly, advertised Dreamland Barbeque. ‘This is a small town. If you fart in your bedroom, your neighbors start gossiping about what you had for dinner.’

Chris laughed. ‘That’s good to know.’

The man extended his hand. His handshake was a vise. ‘My name is Marco Piva.’

‘Since you know why I’m here, Marco, can you tell me what people are saying about what happened on Friday night?’

The motel owner snuffled loudly. He wiped his bulbous nose above his mustache. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear that.’

‘They think my daughter murdered Ashlynn Steele.’

‘Oh, yes, everyone says she did. No one thinks it was an accident or a game. I’m very sorry. I have to tell you, I knew something like this would happen. Violence begets violence, and someone dies. It’s a shame two young girls were involved.’

Chris handed the registration form back to Marco and turned as the screen door banged behind him. A teenage boy, the kind of fresh-faced Scandinavian Lutheran that Chris expected to find in this part of the state, stood in the doorway. He had wavy blond hair that was plastered on his head from the rain and the sturdy physique of a football player. His eyes were sky-blue. He wore a form-fitting white T-shirt that emphasized his muscles, crisp jeans, and cowboy boots. Chris figured he was seventeen or eighteen years old.

‘Johan,’ Marco called. ‘This is Mr. Hawk.’

The boy didn’t look surprised. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Johan lives in St. Croix,’ Marco added.

‘Oh, really?’ Chris said. ‘So you know my daughter.’

‘She lives across the street.’

Chris found it odd that his teenage daughter lived so close to a boy who looked like a Norwegian god, and she had never mentioned him. Not once. He thought about Hannah’s warning: You see the girl she wants you to see.

‘Marco says a lot of people think Olivia is guilty, Johan. What do you think?’

The boy looked pained. ‘I guess nobody really knows what happened,’ he replied, but his face said something else. We all know what happened.

‘I’m here to help her,’ Chris told him. ‘Maybe you can help me.’

‘How?’

‘By telling me about the bad blood between the kids in Barron and St. Croix.’

Johan frowned. ‘I try to stay out of it. It’s like a poison.’

‘That’s smart.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I told Olivia, but she didn’t listen.’

‘No?’

‘No, she’s stubborn. She couldn’t let go.’

Marco interrupted them, as if he didn’t want the feud carried inside his walls. ‘Is Mr. Hawk’s room ready, Johan?’

The boy nodded.

‘Put his suitcase inside, all right?’

Johan grabbed the suitcase, swinging it as if it were practically weightless. He nodded at Chris as he left the office, and his sculpted face was pure Minnesotan: polite, handsome, but yielding no secrets.

‘Johan is a good boy,’ Marco said when he was gone. ‘He cares for your daughter.’

‘He looked at me like I was from another planet,’ Chris said.

‘Ah, but you are, Mr. Hawk. You’re an outsider.’

‘Is that a crime around here?’

‘Oh, no,’ Marco chuckled. ‘It’s worse. Most people here would happily choose a local criminal over an honest outsider.’

Chris smiled at the man’s jowly Italian face. ‘You look like an outsider yourself.’

‘Yes, you’re right about that. I bought this place in December. What a shock, all that snow and cold! I hate winter, but I needed to get out of San Jose. My wife passed away last year, and all I had was my city pension and a house full of memories. I asked a realtor to scout motels for me, and this place looked like a nice business in a beautiful area. I figured, that’s for me.’

‘Have the locals accepted you?’ Chris asked.

‘No, I could be here twenty years, and I’d still be a newcomer. The people are perfectly nice, but that’s as far as it goes. I don’t mind. I didn’t come here to make friends, just to get a little peace. It will be worse for you, Mr. Hawk.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because a man who tries to stop a dog fight usually gets bitten for his trouble.’

‘I’m just here for Olivia,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t care what’s going on between Barron and St. Croix.’

‘It doesn’t matter whether you pick sides. You will not be trusted. People will not tell you things you need to know. They will want to see you gone. Be careful, okay?’

‘I appreciate the advice,’ Chris said.

Marco shrugged. ‘No charge for that. It’s free from one outsider to another.’ He added, ‘If you want to know more, talk to Johan’s father. Glenn Magnus is the minister at the church in St. Croix. They were among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Mondamin Research.’

Chris felt a heaviness in his heart. He knew what that meant. Death.

‘Who did they lose?’ he asked.

‘Johan’s sister,’ Marco said, shaking his head. ‘Her name was Kimberly. Johan has shown me pictures. A lovely girl. Grief leads to some dark places, Mr. Hawk. When you get a cancer cluster in a place like St. Croix, especially among young people, it can’t help but cut out the heart of the town. It makes people crazy. It makes people want revenge.’