I SAT IN A CAFÉ IN DOWNTOWN MOUNT JOY WATCHING AGENT Wardlaw stuff glazed doughnuts into his face. “You kept me waiting a long time,” he said. “I was starving.”
I said nothing. I was too mad at myself, and at my overweening capacity to charge off in one direction or another and always find trouble. If it was a nice, serene life on the land I wanted so much, why hadn’t I married that boy from the ranch next door? Not that I’d ever stuck around long enough for him to ask. No, I’d been sent east to prep school, and then south to college; by then going somewhere else was a habit, and I’d run off into the oil patch and then to Denver, and the next time I stopped by to say hello, he was married and on kid number two or three with a nice girl he’d met in 4H. Now I had made an art form out of running away and living nowhere, jumping from one crazy cause to another that took me anywhere but where I’d told myself I wanted to go.
There was nothing like the adrenaline boost of thinking that some FBI agent had been listening in on my private phone calls to make me think more clearly. During the ten-minute drive into Mount Joy from the inn, I had redialed Ray’s phone number and roused him a second time from his much needed sleep. And asked him if he’d dialed up Wardlaw the moment we’d finished our conversation an hour earlier.
Ray had given a sleepy, “Yes … but what did you expect? I’m going to let someone I care about get into worse trouble?”
So no, Agent Wardlaw was not breaking some anti-wiretapping law. This case wasn’t so hot that he could get a warrant to listen into my line; he was just messing with me. But I had switched off the phone and put it
away just in case. I didn’t want to have to discuss plans in front of Agent Brucie if Faye phoned back while he was grilling me.
Now, as I sat watching Wardlaw chew, I could see that Tert had been right; the pigments in that painting were the key to the whole thing. Hector had told me that his father could paint as well as anyone, and from there it was a short hop to the likelihood that he had painted
like
other artists as well. Who better than he to forge the family Remington that had accidentally wound up with his poodle-loving sister? She had no eye for art. If he swapped a close copy for the original, she’d never notice. She’d still have something to stare at, and he could sell the original to some hopped-up megalomaniac who would covetously hide it from all other eyes. His crime would go unreported, and he wouldn’t even see it as a crime; he was simply generating cash flow out of family goods.
I stared at Wardlaw. This man knew all about crimes of deceit. He was one of those law enforcement individuals who was hard to distinguish from the crooks he was chasing. As he dumped a third packet of sugar into his second coffee, I fantasized an island somewhere where all the crooks and all the bad cops could just chase each other around and around and leave the rest of the world out of their mania.
His cell phone tweedled and he answered it, grunted twice, then signed off. A bolt of anger shot through me. This man—this annoying, execrable man—had been able to get Jack to phone me when all I could get out of him was e-mails. I was back to being mad at Jack, and that was a whole lot easier to feel than guilt over wanting to go on with my life without him.
Wardlaw was watching me. He took a big, noisy slurp of his coffee. “Penny for your thoughts,” he said. He picked up another doughnut and chewed, his jaws going like a cow working her cud. He fluttered his eyelashes at me. “Hm? You’re thinking mighty deep ones today.”
My distant boyfriend, my joke of a thesis project, the ranch—I wasn’t sure which bugged me the most. I stared at him defiantly and said, “What’s our deal with the land, anyway? We seem to get unnaturally stuck to it.”
Speaking through a mouthful of doughnut, Wardlaw said, “Sounds like one of those thinky deals Tom Latimer used to get into.”
I stiffened at the thought of this man even bowing to the ground in front of Tom, let alone working with him. I looked away.
He said, “Okay, I’ll bite: What’s the connection between land and Krehbeil?”
“Which one?” I asked unkindly. This guy was so focused in on the art dealings that he had failed to take a look at the bigger picture. Checking the family stresses was the first thing Tom would have done.
“There’s more than one?”
“He has a sister. Deirdre. She’s dug into that property like a tick, which is nuts, considering that there is no way she could afford to bring it back to its original glory. And it isn’t the joy of farming she’s after—there are crops in the fields, but judging by the unused look of the barn, I’d say she’s leased out the land. So what holds her to the place?”
“Deirdre,” he said. “What property?”
“The family farm. Right here in this county,” I said, “not far from the fanciest suburb of Lancaster. The developers keep pushing outward, looking for another big farm to subdivide. They’re moving right toward the Krehbeil homestead, did you know that?”
“Nope. Should I care?”
“Yes, you should, because it’s an asset your quarry might soon inherit.”
“But his sister’s sitting on it. He’ll never get her off.” He grabbed a paper napkin, wiped it across his mouth, crumpled it, and tossed it onto his plate.
“The funny thing is, I suffer from this mania myself: It’s a matter of self-definition. ‘I am of this land, and therefore I am.’”
Wardlaw rolled his eyes. “You sound more and more like Latimer every minute. Naw, you got it all wrong. Land doesn’t own you, you own it. It’s power. Whoever gets the land gets to kick everyone else off.”
“So you think Deirdre’s a control freak.”
“I never met the lady, but if she’s like
my
sister …” Wardlaw broke off and stared out the front window of the café. For a moment, his eyes were bright, but then he closed them and took another slurp of his coffee.
“You grow up on a farm, Wardlaw?”
“West Virginia.”
“What happened? Your sister get the place?”
Wardlaw put down his cup and leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “This Deirdre the oldest?”
“Yes.”
“They’re a contemptuous lot. I know, you’ll think that’s a big word for a guy like me, but I went to college. It was the only thing I could do, if I didn’t want to go work in the mine that bulldozed my parents’ farm away. I’m just glad they didn’t live to see it happen. My old man died in the mines that ate the neighbor’s farm, and then my ma went, too, from emphysema from all the dust. That left the eight of us kids. The only way for any of us to get a piece of it was to sell the farm to the mine owners. I took my chunk and ran for it. End of story.”
“But your sister made the decision.”
“She was the oldest. I wasn’t yet eighteen. She kept extra because she said she’d earned it nursing Ma.”
“She kicked your ass into college so you wouldn’t die in the mines.”
“She didn’t give a shit where I went. She kicked my ass clear out of West Virginia. Damned state never was big enough for the both of us.”
I finally took a sip of the cup of coffee Wardlaw had purchased for me. “Do you ever go back?”
He stared into his oversweetened brew, looking for something in its hidden depths. “There’s nothing back there to visit. You get it? They bulldozed it away.”
I almost envied Wardlaw the finality of his situation. I couldn’t go home anymore either, but “home” was still there, it just … belonged to someone else now. Suddenly, I saw the Krehbeil debacle from a slightly different angle, and looked on Deirdre not only as the bullying older sister, but also as a human being who was afraid of losing her roots.
Is that why Deirdre holds on to that land so hard? But the others left long ago. Why do they keep hanging on? Is it a matter of identity, or is there something in that family worth sticking to? Even Cricket came back. Why? And where is she now? Hector said she was in the family gulag. Did he mean the property down in the serpentine barrens?
Cricket. She was the one tiny bit of the puzzle that eluded me. There was something important about her, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I focused on Agent Wardlaw. “Bruce … May I call you Bruce?”
“It’s my name.”
“Yeah, well, Bruce, I need to make a phone call, all right?”
“Who?”
“It’s really not your business, but if you must know, I’m going to call a woman friend.”
“You mean Faye, wife of the late, great Tom Latimer, who now hangs out with art thieves?”
“Come on, Wardlaw, she’s just staying there. She doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“Then she’ll be glad to let me in when I knock on the door.”
“Oh, go to hell, Wardlaw.”
“And I thought you were gonna call me Bruce.”
“Do you think you could be just one degree less nasty?”
“Not after yesterday.”
I couldn’t control the smile that burst across my lips. “Hey, where’s your sense of humor? Those mutts didn’t break the skin, did they?”
He spread his sticky fingers across his chest. “It was your attitude that most offended me.”
My smile widened. He was actually trying to be funny. I said, “Well, here’s a thing you can ponder: Maybe you won’t even have to get Tert on tax evasion, or whatever it is you’re hoping to prove.”
“Tell me more,” said Wardlaw, starting his third doughnut.
“His mom is sick with what looks like heavy-metal poisoning. I think he might have fed it to her.”
“That’s disgusting, Hansen! Matricide?”
“Ooo, another big word for you, Brucie.”
“So why would he want to bump off the old dame?”
I gave him my reasoning.
Wardlaw said, “So if Tert can get Mom dead and the property into probate before the development rights get sold into this Ag thing, then he can make a mint selling his quarter to a developer. That’s good,” he mused, his thick lips spreading into a sugar-crusted grin. “That’s real good. But we don’t got probable cause until the old lady croaks.”
“All right, so you can’t do anything there. So please excuse me while I go and do something about it myself.”
“What you got in mind?”
“I was thinking about a little trip into Philadelphia.”
Wardlaw smiled like a frog that has just caught a bug.
But first I gave Jenny a call. As I switched on the cell phone, it bleeped,
indicating that I had an incoming message, but I went ahead and dialed Jenny first. “Can you get on your jungle telegraph and see if there’s anything new about Cricket Krehbeil?” I asked her. “I mean really dig. It’s important.”
“Sure. I can ask, anyway. Like I said, she’s kind of a gypsy.”
“Hector said she was in the ‘family gulag.’ I’m thinking that might be the barrens property.”
“I’ll check. If she’s there, someone in the old gang’s got to be hearing from her.”
As I ended the connection, I switched over to the message menu in search of what had bleeped me. After I punched in my pass code, I heard, “Em, this is Faye.” There were background sounds as well: road noise. The baby fussing. Tert saying, “Why are you calling her?” Faye’s voice continuing. “Listen, I’m … we’re … on our way to Tert’s mother’s place. We’re, uh, going to have lunch or something. We’re supposed to be there at eleven. Tert promised we’d be back in Philadelphia by three or four. Just … ah, wanted you to know where we’ll be.” She sounded anxious, uncertain. Then a click. End of message.
I dialed back immediately, but got one of those messages that told me that the party I was calling was out of their service area or blah-blah-blah.
“Shit,” I said.
“What? So, which car shall we take to Philly?” Wardlaw was asking, as he dumped some change out of his pockets to leave the waitress a tip. “I sure ain’t lettin’ you take off by yourself. You might give me the slip, or lead me into another pack of dogs.”
“We don’t either of us have to drive,” I said. “They’re coming to us.”
WE DECIDED TO take both cars to Elm. Jenny rang back as Wardlaw followed me there, staying so close to my back bumper I started to think that he’d hitched his car to mine. She said, “I have more information than I could have hoped for, but it’s rather sad.”
“Cricket?”
“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t drugs; it was some sort of psychological trauma that made her so … such a disappearing act. I could go into detail, but let’s just say she didn’t want to play her part in the family drama. So she’d
wander off for months and years at a time and they wouldn’t hear from her. Then finally she came back; she said to stay.”
“So she’s still here? Where?”
“In fact, I don’t know. I was talking with my friend Janice, who heard from Cricket eight or nine months ago. She said that Cricket was really trying to sort things out with them this time, but it was uphill work. Proud families don’t like it when one of their number can’t follow the script.”