Cold Black Earth (18 page)

“What, for God’s sake?”

“That’s about when he went out to California. Otis Ryle. The father.”

“I don’t know if it means anything.”

“I don’t either. I just thought you should know. I mean, this just keeps coming up. All of a sudden the Ryle family is everywhere.”

“But this Mrs. Swanson didn’t remember the name of the guy that went to California, right?” Roger said.

“No, but I went and asked my Aunt Helga about it, and she remembered it. She says she heard the gossip at the time. Gus Holmes and Otis Ryle Sr. had some kind of feud, and some said it was because Otis had been a little too familiar with Nancy Holmes while Gus was away at the war. She’d forgotten about it until I asked, but she was pretty definite.”

A few seconds went by in silence. “The implication being that Otis Jr. knocked off Carl because . . .” Roger let the sentence trail away.

“I don’t know what the implication is, Roger. I don’t mean to be one of these nutcases who pesters the police with every brainstorm. I was just struck by the connection, that’s all. It’s just fucking
spooky
, if you’ll pardon my language. There was a connection between Ed Thomas and the Ryles, and now it turns out there was a connection between the Holmeses and the Ryles. I don’t know if it means anything, either. Maybe it just means that in a farm community everyone’s connected. I just thought whoever’s looking into this should know.”

“You’re right. You did the right thing. I don’t mean to shoot you down. I’ll pass it on, for sure.”

“It’s probably meaningless, I know.”

“But maybe not.”

“Yeah, maybe not. And if not . . .”

“I know where you’re going.”

“Where am I going?”

“If Otis Ryle is going around killing people because of old family grudges, then we better be busting our asses to find out about any more old Ryle family grudges.”

“Because they’ll tell us who he’s going to kill next.”

“Bingo,” said Roger.

18    

“I’m not going,” said Rachel. “I didn’t even know the man. Besides, if you think Ed’s funeral had media coverage, wait till you see this one. And they’ll be all over you.”

Matt sighed. “I know. But I have to go. Dan’s my best friend.”

“Give him my best. I just can’t face it, Matt.”

Matt stood nodding slowly, necktie dangling from his fingers. This was the second time in a week Rachel had seen Matt stuffed into his suit, and she was starting to take a distinct dislike to the garment. “Come out to the house afterwards, anyway,” Matt said. “Jim’s having people in after the funeral. Just friends.”

“Jim Holmes that we went to school with? He’s related to Carl?”

“Nephew. You didn’t know that?”

“I had no idea.” Holmes was a common name in the county, an Anglicization of the Swedish Holm, and they were scattered everywhere. Everyone’s connected, Rachel thought. “OK, I can do that. Yeah, that would be good.”

Matt put on his tie and jumped in the truck and was gone. Rachel locked the door behind him, cleaned up the kitchen and then puttered around the house, tidying. She stood at the south windows in the living room looking out at the far scattered farms. How many times had she seen these fields go through their cycles, from snow cover to green peeking up through black earth to midsummer sumptuousness to harvest and back to quiescence? A finite number, less than twenty if you got down to it, and yet she had an impression of an endless idyllic childhood behind her, rooted in this familiar earth. The memory had comforted her in far places. And now it was barren and sinister, a wasteland of ice.

She heard Billy stirring upstairs. He must have come in sometime late in the night, when she and Matt were asleep. His hours had gotten more and more eccentric, and he and Matt seldom crossed paths. Rachel wandered toward the kitchen. She had taken to fixing breakfast for Billy when he appeared, enjoying a half hour of easy companionship before he disappeared on mysterious errands. Since their shared tipple in the attic they had settled into an odd complicity.

She heard the shower running and took her time with the breakfast; when Billy appeared she had an omelet and fresh coffee and hot buttered toast waiting for him. Billy came in with wet shining hair and two or three days’ stubble on his chin. He halted, looking at the breakfast laid out on the table, and said, “Damn, Aunt Rachel. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know. I don’t mind. Gives me something to do.”

Billy sat down. “Well, I appreciate it. Whoa, what’s in here?”

“Onions, peppers, Swiss cheese. You want jam or honey for the toast?”

“Uh, jam’s fine.”

Rachel fetched it from the refrigerator. “You growing a beard?” The whiskers coming in accented his fine cleft chin rather nicely, Rachel found.

“Nah, just too lazy to shave. Where’s Dad?”

“Gone to the funeral.”

“Ah, yeah.” Billy ate in silence while Rachel poured herself a cup of coffee. “It’s fucked up, ain’t it?” Billy said. “This guy running around killing people.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

He shot her a sharp glance. “I’m sorry. Don’t mean to rake it all up. You feeling OK?”

She shrugged. “Every day it gets a little better.”

“Yeah. When Mom died, I remember it was just misery for a long time and then after a while I would wake up in the morning and think, It doesn’t hurt so much today.”

Rachel stared at him over her coffee cup, thinking that compared to what Billy and Matt had gone through she really couldn’t complain. “So. Who was that girl that came looking for you the other night?”

His face went blank and Rachel knew she had blown it again, stepped over the line. He chewed, eyes on his plate, and said, “Nobody special. There’s this bunch down in East Warrensburg I hang out with sometimes. I don’t know what they were doing up this way.”

“I don’t mean to pry into your private life. Just curious. When you don’t have a lot going on in your life, you get interested in other people’s.” She smiled, trying to make light of it.

Somewhat to her surprise he smiled back. “Lot of fish in the sea, Aunt Rachel. Just because it didn’t work out with one guy doesn’t mean it’s all over.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Not that it’s a very big sea around here.”

“Well, I doubt I’ll be settling here.” She watched him eat for a few seconds. “What about you? You ever think about leaving?”

“All the time.” The glance he gave her was grave, intense. “Gotta get some money together first.”

She waited for elaboration but it didn’t come. “Got an idea about where you’d go?”

Billy shrugged, scraping at his plate. “I used to think about New Orleans. Friend of mine went down there for Mardi Gras one year, said it was amazing. But now there ain’t much of it left, after the hurricane. California, maybe? And Seattle’s supposed to be cool. I don’t know. Anyplace there’s jobs, I guess. It’s a big country.”

“It sure is.” Rachel was suddenly thrilled with the possibilities. She remembered being nineteen and not believing in limits. “I could help you maybe. If money’s the only thing stopping you, I could float you a loan. I’ve got plenty saved up after the life I’ve been living.”

That got his attention, she could see; she watched him start to take the notion seriously, maybe for the first time. But she could see it scared him a little, too. “Cool,” he said finally. “I might have to think about that.”

That put an end to it for the moment. Billy finished his breakfast and disappeared while Rachel cleaned up. When he came down again he had on his hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket. “Gotta roll,” he said. He paused at the top of the steps, momentarily awkward, lips parted. “You’d really lend me money?” he said.

Drying her hands, Rachel took a few steps toward him. She had been fighting off second thoughts ever since her generous impulse had carried her away, and she knew it was time to set the terms. “Sure,” she said. “But I’d want to talk about plans first. You really ought to finish school. You could go somewhere else to do that, of course. I think I’d want a commitment to go back to school, even if it wasn’t right away. But if you had a plan and needed more support than your father could give you, of course I’d be happy to help.”

Billy nodded, frowning faintly. Then his expression eased and he said, “For an aunt you’re fuckin’ awesome, you know that?”

Rachel had to laugh. “That’s the first time anybody’s said that to me.”

“Hey, believe it.” Billy grinned at her and then he was gone, out the back door.

Rachel stood still, listening as the Dodge started up and then tore away down the drive. She was stunned at what she had felt when Billy smiled at her, dark-eyed and unshaven and moving with his feral grace: Out of the blue she had felt a pang of physical desire, sharp and explicit, the first stirring of lust she had felt for many weeks. Brutally she suppressed a vision of her nephew’s bare torso, strands of wet hair lacing his broad sinewy shoulders.

You need to get a grip, girl, she told herself. On top of everything else, not least the utter delusion involved in reading anything into that smile, that’s
incest
. Rachel walked across the kitchen to the sink and stared out across the fields, then hid her face in her hands. You’re pathetic, she thought. You are forty-three and have been reduced to fantasizing about young men half your age. Young men
related
to you.

After a moment Rachel took her hands from her face and heaved a great sigh, knowing she was perfectly capable of keeping a lid on her libido and acting with decorum around her nephew; all he was was the trigger. She turned away from the window and forced her mind to practical matters, meals to plan.

Two minutes later she had to shove the cookbooks away and close her eyes again. It had shaken her. Having dodged the question throughout her long period of celibacy, Rachel now knew with certainty she was not going to be able to forgo physical love forever. Men neglected and betrayed you, but the animal inside you needed the animal inside them.

If only, Rachel thought, you could be content with the animal part. Sometimes it was a burden to be human.

Rachel drove east, noticing farms and their outbuildings as they passed. He’s close, she thought. He’s here somewhere, waiting for nightfall. She had grown up on this land and knew many of the people who lived in these houses, but now she was aware of how many farms could fill a few square miles, how many strangers there had always been on the fringes of her community. That small white house with a single red-painted shed in a grove of trees, half a mile to the south: Who lived there? Rachel had no idea.

Jim Holmes lived a mile or so north of Ontario, on a farm that looked middling prosperous, with a couple of grain bins and a barn that could use a coat of paint but had a recently replaced sliding track door. Rachel sat in the car for a moment after joining a dozen or so cars parked on the grass along the drive, reluctant to go in. The feeling of appalled dread had taken hold of her again, and she did not expect it to be relieved by mingling with people who had cared for Carl Holmes and would be dazed and wounded by his slaughter. She got out of the car.

In the kitchen were women she knew, tending to food: Karen Larson was there, along with other women of her generation, and Jim’s sister Sherry. The greetings were subdued. “I’m so sorry,” Rachel murmured, stepping back from a hug with Sherry.

“It’s a shock,” said Sherry, looking baffled and hurt. “I mean, God, why? It’s just so . . .
evil
.” Words failed her. Rachel allowed herself to be steered into the living room, where the main gathering was.

Rachel had been to a few funeral gatherings in her time, and she sensed instantly that this one was different. There was none of the closure, the unstated relief that prevailed when an elderly person passed on. The mood here was sullen. Men stood in knots, muttering; women held the couches, regarding the men warily. Matt nodded at her from across the room, standing with their cousin Steve. Some faces there were familiar from the basketball game: Tommy Swanson, Bobby Jacobs, a couple of others. Rachel’s entrance had been noted, but nobody was in the mood for cheerful reunions. She made her way to where Jim Holmes stood, rubicund and heavy but recognizably the boy she had known twenty-five years before. She made her condolences, and Jim said, “You came home at a bad time. Too bad you had to land in the middle of this.”

“Oh, Jim. It’s so awful. I’m sorry. You must have been close to him.”

Jim shrugged. “I guess. He never had no kids, so he kind of spoiled his nieces and nephews. He was the rowdy uncle who always did fun stuff like give us rides on his motorcycle. He was a character.”

That brought a rumble of agreement from the company. “Here’s to him,” a man said, and bottles were raised.

Tommy Swanson said, “You were the one found Ed Thomas, weren’t you?”

Rachel nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“And your brother found Carl?”

“Somebody else found Carl. Matt just got the call.”

“Still. The police must be all over you.”

“That’d be about par for the course for the cops around here,” said Jim. “Waste their time messing with Rachel and Matt instead of tracking down this maniac.”

“They brought in all these experts from Peoria and Springfield and God knows where, and they still can’t find their own asses to wipe ’em.”

“They come and search your outbuildings yet?” said another man. “They did mine.”

Tommy nodded. “They had the dogs out the other day, down by the creek. Going through the woods.”

“If they haven’t found him it’s because he ain’t around,” said the first man. “I think he’s got himself a room in Peoria or someplace, comes up here at night to go hunting.”

That set off a general debate. Rachel extricated herself and started across the room toward Matt, but before she got there she found herself looking down at a frail elderly woman in a wheelchair and, sitting next to her at the end of a sofa, Dan Olson. “Hey, Rachel,” he said.

“Danny.” She halted and stared at him, caught speechless. He was in a sport jacket but without a tie, cowboy boots showing beneath the cuffs of new blue jeans; he looked freshly groomed and almost civilized but wore a gaunt, brooding look. “Hi,” she said, and was embarrassed by her inanity.