As she came down to Highway 35 she didn’t slow up enough to make the last turn and a whoop came out of his mouth as she headed across the steep road and managed to aim the car onto a deeply rutted field road.
Grass ticked at the underside of the car carriage and she stopped the vehicle before it went into the field.
“I think I was going a little too fast,” Meg said without looking over at him.
“I think so.”
Meg didn’t say anything for a second. She turned off the car and they sat in silence. “Maybe I shouldn’t be driving.”
“No, this is how you learn. You’ll be fine if you slow down a bit. The car’s okay. We’re fine. Could have done a lot worse.”
“I don’t do anything right anymore.” Meg blubbered. Tears poured down her face as she sank back into the seat. The crying turned into wailing, then long sobs tore out of her throat.
Rich let her cry. She needed to get it out of her. She had kept all this sadness bottled up inside of her and it wouldn’t let her alone. When she started to throttle down, he patted her shoulder. She turned toward him and he hugged her.
“Rich, what am I going to do?”
“About what?”
She pulled away and looked at him, her eyes red and swollen from crying, her face splotched. “About my life. It’s all ruined. I don’t know what to do.”
He knew it would do no good to tell her that she would get through this horrible time. No teenager should have to feel responsible for the death of their best friend.
“Do you really want my advice?” Rich asked.
She sniffled and nodded.
“You need to focus on one thing at a time. And right now I think you need to back up slowly and get us home. That’s enough for you to do right now.”
“But,” Meg wiped her face. “I think I should try to find out who gave Krista the meth.”
“That’s not your job.” Rich decided not to mention that it was her mother’s job. Meg seemed to be down on Claire these days.
“But I could ask around. Like Mr. Jorgenson said. Someone’s gotta know who she was with.”
“Is there anyone in your school who you think is doing meth?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There might be someone I could talk to …” She cut herself off and started the car.
Rich hung onto the seatbelt as Meg hit reverse hard and the car bumped out onto the road, then headed toward home.
***
Amy hadn’t known what to wear to Letty’s funeral.
She decided she wasn’t going to go in her uniform even if it meant she’d have to change out of it and back into it at work. She was going to this funeral as a civilian and felt it was
improper to wear her deputy sheriff uniform. Plus she knew it would make people ill at ease and have them assume she was there on official business.
So she chose a pair of black slacks, using a roll of duct tape to get the cat hairs off of them, and a dark jacket over a black turtleneck. Sitting in the squad car outside the brick church in Durand, she craned her neck to look into her rearview mirror. Lipstick would help. Digging through the bottom of her purse, she found a tube of “Ripe Plum.” Sounded good. She applied it, careful to get none on her teeth as she smiled at herself in the mirror.
When she walked into the church, she remembered how ugly this old building was. Dark paneling made it seem smaller than it was and cheap light fixtures threw a dim light. The one stained glass window over the altar was framed into a box with artificial light shining behind it. Amy thought the whole point of stained glass was to have the sun shine through the colored glass to remind people of the light of God.
The church was crowded; she recognized many people from high school. She slid into the only pew left, which was close to the front.
Amy didn’t recognize the family sitting next to her in the pew. As she glanced over at them, she wondered why she had worried about what she was wearing. The father was dressed in full camouflage gear. The really sad thing was it was probably his best outfit. His wife wore jeans and a sweatshirt that said Green Bay Packers. The two boys at least had their hair slicked back in an attempt at civility. Amy wondered if they were some of Letty’s new friends since she had dropped out of the regular world.
The organist was fumbling her way through some old hymn but no one paid her much attention as they talked amongst
themselves. Amy checked the time and saw that there was still a few minutes before the service would start.
The front-row pew reserved for the family was still empty. She felt so sorry for Arlene. She was such a good woman and had lost her husband only a few years ago. Now she had lost her only sister and in such a dreadful way.
Amy knew there would be no coffin. There had been little left of Letty’s body and the family had decided to cremate. A silver urn stood on a small table at the bottom of the stairs going up to the altar.
Letty’s high school picture in a dark frame stared out at the crowd. With her large eyes and dark hair, she had been a pretty woman and full of life until she started to do drugs.
A bouquet of dyed blue carnations was next to the urn with what looked like a blue velvet hat tucked into the bouquet.
Amy swallowed a laugh. Why had they stuck an old hat in the bouquet? Whose idea was that? The style of the hat showed that it was probably from Letty’s teens, maybe something she had worn for Easter. Some small personal memento of a life gone terribly wrong. How do you make sense of what had happened to Letty?
As the organist turned up the volume and pumped hard into “Onward Christian Soldiers,” three people came walking up the aisle: Arlene, Letty’s son Davy, and Jared.
Arlene led the way in a dark navy suit and looked fairly composed. Davy was dancing at her side, too young to understand what was going on. He had on a dark suit coat that looked too big for him. Probably a hand-me-down of Jared’s. He was carrying a book with him. Amy guessed it was to keep him quiet during the service.
On the other side of the small boy, also holding his hand, was Jared. He walked very unsteadily.
Amy remembered Jared when he had been a little older than Davy.
She had babysat him when she was in high school, and he was about six or seven. He had been such a sweet kid, so interested in everything. She would often practice her Spanish when she was babysitting and he loved to sit and listen to her talk Spanish. He thought it was magic that she could speak another language. He would ask her word after word, “how do you say horse? how do you say potato?”
But now Amy just stared at Jared. He must be about the age she had been when she babysat him, in his late teens. She hadn’t seen him in years. But she recognized the look he had.
Since she had taken the meth workshop at the end of her law enforcement program, Amy saw this look everywhere she went: on people putting in two dollars worth of gas in their junkie cars, getting prescriptions at pharmacies, trying to take the edge off by drinking beer late at night in the bars.
She called them zombies, the walking dead. Emaciated, way past skinny. Sunken faces the result of teeth rotting away. No flicker in their eyes.
To her they looked like what she imagined zombies would be—fueled solely by a burning desire to feed the small fire that burned at the core of them—the need to have more meth. They wanted nothing else out of life. They cared for no one, not even themselves.
So when Jared came walking down the aisle of the church at his aunt’s funeral, Amy knew what he was—a meth freak.
“H
ow was your funeral?” Amy asked as she sat down at her desk kitty-corner from Claire’s.
Claire shook her head, remembering the sadness wafting through the church like incense gone bad. A young person’s funeral was always depressing. In this small county, where everyone knew everyone, knew them since they were born, such a death punched a real hole in the community.
“Bleak. I left right after. I couldn’t take anymore. I felt guilty that I wasn’t at work doing something about Krista’s death. Mr. Jorgenson got up and told everyone that his daughter had been murdered. He said that whoever gave her the meth had killed her. I have to agree with him.” She twisted her legs around each other and looked at Amy. “How was yours?”
“One of the stranger ones I’ve been too.” Amy paused, then emphasized, “I mean, I grew up here. I know these folks. Do people no longer know what’s good manners? This guy was there wearing camouflage. I don’t think people have to wear only black to a funeral, but at least to dress up a little in darker clothes. No jeans either. Is that asking too much?”
“I hear ya.”
Amy sat down in a rolling chair across the desk from Claire. “But the other thing I figured out at the funeral is, after seeing young Jared, I just got this very strong hint that he’s doing meth.”
“Really? Jared? He goes to school with Meg. I think he’s a grade or two ahead of her. What makes you think that?”
“You know, you just can tell. Skinny, bad complexion. He hasn’t been on it long enough to lose his teeth, but that will happen if he continues.”
“Did you talk to him? About Krista?”
“I decided to wait. A funeral just didn’t seem like the place. I can do that today. After the meeting with the sheriff. He said ten after,” Amy tilted her head toward the clock.
They both stood up and walked into Sheriff Talbert’s office. He had a pair of reading glasses on that made him look older than Claire usually thought of him. He kept reading but when Bill Trudeau came in he took the glasses off and motioned them all to sit. Claire and Amy took the chairs and Bill leaned against the wall.
The sheriff said, “Krista Jorgenson’s once-thought-to-be-accidental death might well turn into a murder investigation. I want to be ready if that happens. Claire will be looking into it. I want the two of you, Amy and Bill, to help her out however you can. At the moment, we’re going to keep it in-house, but if we need more help, I’ll call in the crime bureau.”
The three deputy sheriffs nodded.
“What’ve you got, Claire?”
“The meth angle is what we need to figure out. There’s a good chance that Krista died because someone gave her some meth.” Claire cleared her throat. She tried not to think of the bright Krista she had known. “But we still don’t know what
happened—if she fell, if she jumped or even if she was pushed. We might never know.”
“Was she a known user?”
“Quite the contrary. Her parents swore up and down, when I told them there had been meth in her blood, that she had never done it before. Most parents don’t know what’s going on with their kids. But, as you know, my daughter Meg was her best friend. And she claims that Krista had never done any drugs. Not coke, not grass, nothing. She says Krista would have a beer or two, but didn’t even like wine or hard liquor. They talked about drugs—but Krista said she had never touched anything. No reason for her to lie to Meg.” Claire pulled her hair back.
“I assume Meg’s reliable. She wouldn’t be trying to protect her dead friend, would she?”
“My daugher’s not perfect, but she doesn’t lie.” Amy piped in. “She’s a good kid. I’d trust her with my cat.”
The sheriff pushed himself back from his desk and blew out air. “Well, I heard about what Roger Jorgenson said at his daughter’s funeral. A number of people have called me about it, telling me they’ve been missing anhydrous ammonia, asking me to find the meth pushers around here and stop them. Wish it were that easy. In a way it doesn’t matter how she fell to her death: if it was an accident or if she jumped on purpose, because whoever gave her the meth basically killed her just as sure as if he had pushed her off that cliff, which he might have done.”
“Statute 609.195 states you give someone a controlled substance and they die, you’re guilty of murder in the third degree,” Amy reeled off.
Bill looked over at her and smirked. “Can always tell the rookies cause they still know the numbers to all the laws.”
“So let’s start looking harder at the meth dealers in this county, the ones we know about, find out what other ones are out there. Hopefully the phone calls will keep coming in with more info. Give us some good leads,” the sheriff said and then dismissed them.
The three of them left the office and stood in the hallway talking. “We just sent two guys up from Monona. I’ll ask around,” Bill said.
“I was thinking maybe we should talk to Margie.” Amy suggested to Claire, ignoring Bill. “She’s in the jail. Do you know who she is?” “I don’t think so.”
“She’s a skinny blond. Looks like she’s about ten, but I think she’s over twenty. Maybe old enough to drink. Not a juvie, that’s for sure. She knows more about the world than you and I put together.”
“I know who you mean,” Bill said. “Kinda cute if you like the beat-up look.”
Once again Amy ignored Bill, which made Claire wonder if there was something going on between those two.
“When they brought her in here she slept for five days straight. I helped turn her from side to side so she wouldn’t get bed sores.”
“How long has she been here?” Claire asked. “Two weeks. She’s still buggy and shaking. Picks at her scalp. Can’t seem to stop. But she’s finally on the docket.” “What’s she in for—possession?” Claire asked. “No, she broke into a one of those big houses on the top of the bluff. Unlucky for her the owners had an alarm.”
Bill started laughing. “I took that call. When Jed and I got there we found her in the closet off the master bedroom, trying on clothes. Not too smart.”
“Well, you guys weren’t too smart to strip search her. You know a woman is supposed to be present.”
“No way we strip searched her. We just told her to take off the woman’s clothes. We had to stay and watch her so she didn’t try anything.”
Claire said, “I don’t want to hear about this. Let’s get to work. Bill, you track down those guys and find out anything you can on the dealers in the area. Amy and I will go talk to Margie and let’s meet later to compare notes.”
After Bill walked away, Claire turned and asked Amy, “What’s up with you and Bill?”
“I don’t like how he’s always throwing in my face how new I am to all this. Plus, I don’t think he always plays by the rules.”