Cold Black Earth (32 page)

The house was silent. Matt was gone on some errand and Billy was asleep. Rachel hauled herself to her feet. She walked down the hall into the kitchen. She needed something to occupy herself and there was an item of business she had been postponing. She reached into her purse lying on the kitchen table and pulled out the revolver. It lay heavy in her hand, a kilogram or so of brutal functionality in machined steel, sleek and lethal.

All you have to do is drive a half mile down the road and return it to Clyde, Rachel thought.

She shoved the gun back into her purse, put on her coat, grabbed the purse off the table and went out and got into the Chevy. She sat letting it warm up, the purse on the seat beside her. That would do it, she thought. It did it for Margie. Margie is through worrying about people’s expectations. Margie put in her time and it’s her turn to rest.

Somewhere far away, she thought. Drive until you are in a different county, so whoever finds you will be nobody you know. Find a place with a nice view. She put the car in gear, wheeled around on the gravel and headed out the drive. She hesitated for an instant and then turned left toward the Larsons’.

A place with a nice view and then an end. Matt won’t have to find you; he’ll be sad but he’ll survive. The farm will survive. He’ll plant in the spring and the seasons will change; Billy will go away and have a life somewhere and Matt will grow old in the house, standing at the sink looking out across the fields thinking of everything he has lost.

Rachel hit the brakes and jerked the wheel to the left just in time to slew into Clyde Larson’s driveway. She pulled up at the door and sat for a moment, her heart pounding. When she was calm she turned off the ignition, picked up her purse and got out of the car.

In the kitchen she pulled the revolver out of the purse and handed it to Clyde, grip first. “I’m glad I didn’t have to use it,” she said.

“Me, too,” said Clyde, taking it back.

Karen put a hand on her arm. “Are you all right, honey?”

Rachel nodded, eyes closed. “I’m all right. I’m OK now.”

Clyde broke out the cylinder and froze for a second, then looked up at Rachel. “Where are the bullets?” he said. He showed her the empty cylinder.

Rachel blinked at the gun and then at him, bewildered. “I don’t know.”

Billy was sitting at the kitchen table when she got home, a mug of coffee and a plate of eggs and toast in front of him. Unshaven, he wore a ragged sweatshirt, his lank unwashed hair hooked behind his ears. He looked like a bad boy after a bad night. Rachel set her newly lightened purse on the table. “I took Clyde’s gun back to him.”

Billy nodded, his mouth full of toast. “That’s good,” he said. He swallowed and gulped coffee. “I’ll get the bullets back to him one of these days.”

Rachel sank onto a chair, weak-kneed. “Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” said Billy. “Feeling better?”

“Getting there,” she said. “Give me time.”

Billy said, “I figured with you, brain chemistry wouldn’t be a problem. But you sure as hell had a run of bad luck with men.”

She closed her eyes briefly, exhaling. “Bad luck or bad judgment, maybe.”

Billy considered that while he drank more coffee. “You can’t be thinking like that. That’s what my mom did, blame herself for everything. There’s nothing wrong with your judgment. Sometimes people let you down, that’s all. And it sucks, big time. But there’s a lot of other people out there. You put it behind you and go find somebody else.”

Rachel reached across the table for his free hand. She clasped it and squeezed and was gratified when he squeezed back. She said, “Next time I need somebody to sit with me for a good cry in the attic, I’ll know who to call.”

He smiled. “Hope it helped.”

“It helped,” said Rachel. “Big time.”

“They have damn good prostheses these days,” Roger said. “The doctors say I should be able to do pretty much anything I could before.” His mouth twisted in the crooked grin. “Of course, I might have to give up on learning to play the violin at this point.”

For now the prosthesis was still in the future and Roger’s arm ended six inches below his shoulder, clad in a white cotton stump sock. He was sweating lightly from the exercises Rachel had watched him doing through the glass at the physical therapy outpatient clinic on Gunderson Street in Warrensburg.

“I had breakfast with Billy this morning,” Roger said. “That’s one smart kid.”

“He is that.”

“Best damn confidential informant we ever had, I’ll tell you that. That boy has guts. What he went through over the last few months I wouldn’t wish on anybody.”

“He’s glad it’s over. He’s thinking about going back to Macomb to finish up.”

“He might want to get a little farther away from Dearborn County than that. There’s a few lowlife types still on the loose around here that aren’t big Billy Lindstrom fans. We busted a whole network of meth cooks thanks to him, but they got friends. Tell him to stay away for a while.”

“I’ll do that.” They fell silent for a minute and then Rachel said, “I’m sorry, Roger.”

His eyes widened. “Sorry? What do you have to be sorry for?”

“For everything. For what happened to you, for getting involved with Dan. For calling him that night because I was too chicken to go meet Billy by myself.”

Roger waved it all away with his remaining hand. “Everything happens for a reason, Rachel. We might never have nailed him if he hadn’t showed up like that. Anyway, you saved my life. Most people would have lit out of there as fast as they could. I’ve seen trained law enforcement officers run from gunfire. But you came back and saved my life. From here on out, every morning I get to wake up is because of you.”

Rachel had to look away. After a minute she said, “Did you have any idea before that? Did you suspect anything?”

“I’d had a notion or two. As soon as I saw that deer down in the creek bed had been frozen, I started thinking about freezers, and hunters. Trouble was, there’s a hell of a lot of both of them around here. So then I started looking at who lived near the creek. And that narrowed it down some. And when Carl got killed and people started talking about how hard it was on Peggy, I thought about her land, maybe because I’d been cheated out of land myself, and how Dan was going to lose it. And that was kind of uncomfortable, because I always liked Dan. I was rooting for it to be somebody else.”

Rachel nodded, eyes downcast. “I can’t even process it. I hate him and I’m grieving for him at the same time.”

“Aw, Rachel.” He reached for her hand and held it, gently. “You gotta remember, the good parts with Dan are just as real as the bad parts. It’s OK to grieve for them.”

“Thanks. That’s a nice try.” Rachel released his hand. “I’m leaving in a couple of days.”

Roger’s eyes held hers, his expression carefully neutral. “Going back overseas?”

“No, just to Washington, DC. I’m interviewing for a research position at a think tank.”

“Wow. That’s impressive. That sounds really interesting.”

“It’ll pay the rent, if it comes through. But I’m going to try to make it back here more often, for holidays at least. I never realized how much of my heart is here.”

Roger nodded solemnly. “Well, when you’re out there in Washington solving the world’s problems, just remember. There’s a one-armed man in Illinois who always . . .” Roger’s mouth hung open for a moment and he frowned a little. “Who never forgot a prom date he had once in high school.” Rachel waited for the crooked grin, but it never came.

“Try not to let eight years go by before you come see us again,” said Matt.

“I promise,” said Rachel.

The California Zephyr was sounding its horn somewhere around the curve, slowing for the station. Matt looked off into the distance and said, “Though I can understand if you don’t want to get within a thousand miles of the place.”

Rachel looked up at him gravely. “I’m glad I was here for it, given that you had to go through it. I ducked out on enough things.”

“That’s awful broad-minded of you.”

Rachel frowned into a bitter wind, trying to put the words together. “I had this fairy-tale home I wanted to come back to, but that was just escapism. It’s better to know it’s a real place with real people. It’s better to know there’s no Utopia and no escaping.”

Matt shivered, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Says you. I’ll be in Montego Bay next week, and if that ain’t escaping I don’t know what is.”

Rachel gave it a token laugh, and wiped her eyes, and then it was time for the embrace as the train pulled into sight. She clung to her brother as long as she could, and then, too soon, there was only the frozen land passing by outside the window, waiting for spring.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been completed without the generous help of Linda Bell, Dale Bjorling, Lowell Bjorling, Andrew Bowman, Nick Carlson, Howard Magnuson and David Salter. Any implausibilities or errors are strictly the fault of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2015 Kevin Valentine

Sam Reaves was raised in small towns in Indiana and Illinois but gravitated to Chicago upon graduating from college and has been there ever since, when on US soil. He has lived and traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East and has worked as a teacher and a translator. He has published fiction and nonfiction as Sam Reaves; under the pen name Dominic Martell he has written a European-based suspense trilogy. He is married and has two adult children.