Cold Black Earth (3 page)

Matt brought home groceries and news. “They had one get loose out at the prison yesterday. There’s sheriffs’ cars all over the roads.”

Rachel pulled frozen dinners out of the bags, looking for food. “Anybody dangerous?”

“They’re not saying who on the radio. I know they got some tough characters locked up over there.”

“I thought it was just a medium-security facility.” The prison had been built in the eighties, the town catching a break as the plants closed, getting in on a growth industry.

“What, you think that means everybody in there’s harmless? Plus, they got the psychiatric unit over there, with all the crazies.”

Her eyes met Matt’s. “You don’t think that’s who we saw on the road last night, do you?”

“Well, I did call the sheriff’s office to report it. But I’d be surprised. We’re eighteen miles from the prison, and I don’t think he covered that on foot. And if he caught a ride, stole a car or whatever, then he’s in Chicago or St. Louis by now. He’s not going to hang around here. I think that was just somebody fooling around. One of the Collinses stumbling home from the tavern ’cause he lost his car keys. It’s been known to happen.”

“All right,” Rachel said. “I won’t worry about it.”

“They’ll grab him in a day or two. They never get too far. A few years ago two of them made a break for it and got as far as the rail yards. They found them in a box car, hungry and ready to give up. Billy around?”

“Some friend came by and they went off together.”

Matt shot her a look, a handful of TV dinners poised to go into the freezer. “Dammit, he was gonna help me fix that auger. I bet he ran off just to get out of it.”

“Maybe he forgot.”

“He didn’t forget. It’s a constant fight, trying to get him to pull his weight around here.” He jammed the dinners deep into the freezer and slammed the door.

“Seems to me I remember you and Dad tussling over work a few times.”

“Not like with this kid. I keep telling him, you’re tired of farm life, that’s fine. Get your ass back down to Macomb and finish college, go join the Marines, whatever you want to do. But as long as you’re living off me, you’ll do your share of the work around here. And I have to fight him about it, every day.”

“Maybe he’ll be back in time.” Here I am playing peacemaker, Rachel thought, just like my mother.

“Don’t hold your breath. I’m going to have to hire somebody again next year. I was hoping Billy would commit to the farm, at least for a couple of years till he figures out what to do with his life, but it’s not happening.” Matt drank a glass of water at the sink, looking out the window. “He took it real bad, Margie killing herself like that. That’s the worst thing about it. That’s what I can’t forgive her for. Killing yourself is about the cruelest thing you can do to your loved ones, especially your kids. I don’t know if that’s what she intended or if she was just too sick to think. But it hurt those kids, that’s for damn sure. Billy especially.”

The silence went on for a while. Rachel came back from thoughts of cruelties done to her and said, “Can I have the car to go into town? I’ve got some visits to make.”

“Far as I’m concerned.”

“I thought I’d start with Susan. And I’ll cook tonight. I’ll get what I need on the way back.”

Matt turned from the window and smiled. “That’d be good. I got a whole side of beef down in the freezer, already cut up. I can bring up some steaks.”

“I think I’ll save them for tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to cook you something exotic.”

“Exotic? Like what?”

“Something other than meat and potatoes.”

“What’s wrong with meat and potatoes? You forgotten you’re Swedish?”

“Nothing wrong with meat and potatoes. Or TV dinners, once in a while. But even the Swedes throw caution to the winds sometimes and have vegetables.”

Matt shrugged. “Suit yourself. I got a freezer full of meat, and I don’t know who’s gonna eat it all.”

3    

The country high school Rachel had gone to served four little farm towns in the northern part of the county, each with the type of unlikely name that betrayed where the pioneers had come from or what they admired: Ontario, Bremen, Regina and Rome. Each town had maintained its own high school until the fifties, when the districts were merged, producing a consolidated high school with a population close to three hundred, just big enough to field a football team.

Susan Stevenson, née Holmgren, had been Rachel’s best friend at North County High. Distance and diverging paths had never quite extinguished the friendship, though it had been reduced to a flicker at times. The advent of e-mail had resuscitated it, and through the teeth-grinding times in Iraq, Susan’s messages from a blessedly humdrum world had helped keep Rachel’s sanity more or less intact.

Susan had married a CPA and moved to Warrensburg, where she had raised three children, run the PTA and the First Lutheran Missions Committee, and in general done what generations of prairie women had done before her—namely, make civilization possible.

“Honey, you haven’t changed a bit.” Susan stepped back from their embrace and held Rachel at arm’s length.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“All right, you haven’t gained an ounce. How’s that?” Susan had gained quite a few; she wore them reasonably well, but the willowy young blonde whose looks Rachel had secretly envied was history.

“That’s stress, not virtue,” Rachel said. “Eighteen-hour days and the occasional explosion don’t do much for the digestion.”

“Was it awful?”

Susan led her into the kitchen, where a pot of tea was steeping on the table. Through a window Rachel could see trees, a patio with wrought-iron furniture, a garage. Susan lived in the nice end of town, in a house she had described to Rachel as “
Addams Family
meets
Home Improvement
.” To Rachel it looked like heaven, a big creaky comfortable Victorian with the pleasantly untidy look of a place where the raising of children had worn down standards of organization.

“Some of it was awful. Some of it was just tedious. All of it was pointless after a while.”

“And you just up and quit?”

“Not exactly. My last job over there was to go around throwing unbelievable amounts of money away on projects that made no sense. People were desperate for power and water and we were setting up beekeeping projects. I sent a very skeptical report back to the embassy and got called in for a dressing-down. I lost my temper and either resigned or was fired, depending on who you talk to.”

They settled at the table and Susan poured the tea. “I thought of you every time we read about bombs going off.”

“There were some bad times. But we were protected. We had an army unit with us everywhere we went. The ones who suffered were the poor Iraqis.” Rachel shuddered. “Don’t get me started. I’m still trying to process it all.”

“There’s a book in there somewhere.”

“Maybe. Everybody I knew over there talked about writing a book. Now all I want to do is rest. And figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”

Susan sipped tea, watching her over the rim of the cup. “And the husband?”

“Now the ex. The naysayers were right. Though I probably could have saved the marriage if I’d ditched the career.”

“And what would you be doing if you had ditched the career?”

“Living in Beirut, the idle wife of a rich Christian businessman. I’d have two or three spoiled children, probably bilingual in Arabic and French. I’d vacation in Paris. I’d have made it back here for my parents’ funerals.”

In the silence Susan reached across the table to put her hand on Rachel’s. “Nobody blamed you.”

“
I
blamed me. But I’m over that.” She heaved a sigh. “I guess I can’t really complain. It’s been interesting.”

“I guess so. Paris, Beirut? I think you get the prize for longest distance traveled from the farm.”

“And it’s all because of Mrs. Avery’s French class. Who’d have thought?”

“Oh, God. You were such a star. I never got much past
keska say ka sah
.”

“She forced me to learn it. Said I had a talent. God knows I didn’t want to learn French. I was going to be a nurse, remember?”

“I do. And I was going to be a psychiatrist, as I recall.”

“If I’d known I’d wind up in a bunker in Baghdad I’d have stuck with the Future Homemakers of America. Didn’t you win the Crisco Award for best recipe one year?”

It felt good to laugh; it had been a while. Rachel laughed until the tears came, and then suddenly her eyes were squeezed shut and her shoulders were shaking and Susan had come around the table to put her arms around her. “Oh, Rachel. Honey, it’s all right now. You’re home.”

Susan found her a Kleenex and Rachel dried her eyes. “Sorry about that. Don’t know where that came from.”

“Well my God, I may not be a psychiatrist, but I know enough to recognize stress when I see it. You’ve been through the wringer.”

“I suppose so. And I guess I always thought I would have a marriage to go back to when it was over. But I didn’t.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was a bit of a fairy tale all along. We had three good years in Beirut. But he had a roving eye, even then. The night I left for Baghdad I remember thinking, he’s going to cheat on me. Can we survive that? And it turned out the answer was no.”

They looked at each other over the teapot for a time, and finally Rachel smiled. “As for being home, I think the jury’s still out on that.”

Rachel stopped at the supermarket at the north end of town and managed to assemble the ingredients for a passable lamb couscous, including, somewhat to her surprise, the couscous. Having spent so much of her life outside the United States, she was sometimes startled to find that things progressed when she wasn’t there. The most exotic item she could recall seeing in the supermarket as a girl was garlic.

She put the groceries on the back seat of the Chevy, shoving a welter of wadded-up napkins, greasy wrappers and empty cups onto the floor to clear a space. Billy had failed to inherit his father’s mania for cleanliness, apparently, or was actively suppressing it. Rachel made a note to spend a morning soon making the car habitable.

The sky was a gray wash above her as she drove north through the darkening afternoon. Could I capture that with watercolors? she wondered. Her hobbies had fallen by the wayside over the years. The thought that she had time now to paint excited her but at the same time gave her butterflies. The rest of my life is wide open, she thought, amazed.

Having a cry had been good for her. She could feel the knots easing. You could only go for so long lying to yourself about how you felt before it caught up to you. Stress was only half of it; some time soon Rachel was going to have to break down and tell somebody how it had felt to be betrayed by the man she had sent all those passionate longing e-mails to, hunched over her laptop in a cramped trailer in the desert.

She switched on the radio.
“. . . Illinois State Police are saying the likelihood is that Ryle has left the county, though they warn residents to be on the lookout and to secure their homes and places of business, as he is considered extremely dangerous. Ryle escaped from the psychiatric unit at Mills Correctional Center in Warrensburg sometime yesterday and has been the object of an intensive manhunt for the past twenty-four hours. In 1998 Ryle was convicted of killing his wife and children in Bloomington and dismembering the bodies. At the correctional center, an inquiry continues into how the fifty-two-year-old Ryle managed to escape from the high-security psychiatric unit. . .”

Rachel stabbed at the button, killing the radio. After three years in Iraq, it hardly seemed fair that horror should pursue her here. She thought again of the man on the road and decided that if Matt and the state police both thought the madman had left the county, that was good enough for her.

When she pulled into the drive an unfamiliar pickup was parked on the gravel near the kitchen door. She came into the kitchen with her groceries to find Matt and another man at the table with beers in front of them. She plunked the grocery bags down on the table, groping for an identity for this ruggedly handsome face she couldn’t quite place. “Oh, my God.”

“Well, I’ll be. It’s little Rachel,” the man said, rising.

“Danny?”

“Boy, nobody’s called me that in a while.” He opened his arms for her, a big strapping man with the frame of an athlete, gone a little heavy around the middle but still imposing, graying at the temples and in the goatee and moustache that set off his square jaw. They hugged briefly, and he stepped back to look down at her from his six-foot-three perspective. “You haven’t changed.”

“Oh, please. I have a mirror.”

“I mean it. You look great.”

“Thanks. Twenty-five years ago I’d have killed to hear you say that.”

He grinned. “Ah, jeez, don’t hold that against me. I barely knew who you were.”

“I know. That’s what hurt.” Dan Olson had been in Matt’s class, two years ahead of Rachel, the three-sport star and the freshman girl’s dream and her first serious crush. “But that’s OK. I forgave you.” She took her bags to the counter and started emptying them. She found herself wishing she’d ducked into the bathroom first to check her face, then scowled at herself for caring. “And what are you rascals up to this afternoon?”

Matt said, “We’re just recovering from all the hard work we did at drill.”

“Drill?”

“For the Rome, Illinois, volunteer fire department. I didn’t tell you I’d joined?”

“No, I’m impressed. And what do you do at drill?”

“Well, usually we practice first-responder stuff. CPR and all that. Sometimes we even set shit on fire and try and put it out.”

Dan chuckled and said, “But today we just went around stringing up the town Christmas lights.”

Rachel smiled. “Well, it’s dirty work but somebody has to do it. How’s . . . let’s see. You married Sandy, didn’t you?”

“Far as I know, she’s fine. She’s up in Moline now with the slick bastard she ran off with.”

Rachel grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

Dan shrugged, smiling. “It’s all good. She wasn’t cut out for farm life. At least she stuck around long enough to get our kids raised.”

“And how are they?”

“The kids are great. I got a boy in the Navy out in Norfolk, a girl married and living in Seattle, and my younger boy finishes up at Macomb in the spring. They’re good kids. What about you? You home for good?”

“Boy, that’s a great question. For good? Probably not. But for a while, anyway.”

“You all done with government work, then?”

“Well, I burned all my bridges at the State Department. I’d like to think there’s something I could do with my experience. Maybe teach somewhere. But I don’t have to think about that for a while.” She turned from the counter. “Now, who’s going to be here for dinner?”

She served the couscous at the kitchen table, and she almost laughed at the looks on the men’s faces as they peered at it. Matt and Dan had added a few empty beer bottles to the ranks under the sink, and Rachel had permitted herself one. The cooking and the banter had relaxed her, and she had managed to slip away to the bathroom and check that she looked OK and wonder again why she cared.