“I thought of it, but we would have had to walk. I just couldn’t do it.”
“Don’t blame you. What’re you up to tonight?”
“Only one week left of vacation. Curt and I might go see a movie in Red Wing if anything good is playing.”
“Can you stay for a minute? I haven’t talked to you in an age. Let’s go sit in the porch.”
The porch was on the north side of the house, so slightly
cooler. With screens on three sides it caught any little breeze coming down the bluffs. Bridget and Rachel settled into the glider while Meg took a wicker chair.
Bridget continued. “A movie sounds nice and cool. So things are good with you and Curt?”
“Yeah, great.” Meg was happy to sit and talk. She had been wanting to ask Bridget about some things she just couldn’t bring up with her mom. “Bridget, how old were you when you had sex for the first time?”
Bridget shot her a look. “Where’s this coming from? That’s the kind of question you should be asking your mom.”
“I did. I’m taking a survey.”
“What’d she say?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“Why do you think I will?”
“Don’t turn into Mom on me. I’m just trying to figure this sex stuff out. I read books and it seems like everyone is having sex when they’re like twelve.”
“Well, I wasn’t twelve. I was older than you.”
“How much?”
“A couple years older. Relatively late even when I was a kid. But I don’t regret that.” Bridget blew on Rachel’s sweaty forehead, then asked, “You need some contraceptives?”
“No, it’s not that. Curt and I would be careful. It’s just that he’s the greatest guy. I mean, what if we don’t have sex and then we break up and then I miss the chance to ever go all the way with him?”
“Believe me, there will be other guys lined up for that opportunity.”
“You think I should wait?” Meg wished someone would be definite with her.
“What do you want to do?” Bridget asked her.
That was the problem—she didn’t know. “I’m not sure.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I will tell you this. Making out will never be as good as it is right now.”
* * *
Jeremy dropped Claire off at the end of her driveway. As she walked up the slight slope, she still buzzed from all she had learned from Dr. Singh.
Her arm was killing her and she knew there was nothing more she could do tonight on the Baldwin case. First thing she would do is take one of her pain pills and sit in front of the air-conditioner.
She had called the sheriff from the road and told him what she had learned and then had set up a forensics team to meet her at the Baldwin’s farm tomorrow morning. They would take the cabin apart and see what they could find there.
But tonight all she wanted to do was to stand in a cool shower, eat a decent meal, drink a cold beer and climb into bed, preferably with Rich by her side.
When Claire walked in the house, the only noise she heard was the air conditioner humming. Even though it was after six, there was no sign of Rich and no dinner on the table. Very unusual. She had never been much of a cook and, with her broken arm, didn’t think she could manage even the simplest meal.
Good excuse to take him out to dinner. Burgers at the Fort sounded good to her.
She hollered, “Anybody home?”
No answer. A note was stuck to the refrigerator with a pheasant magnet: “Went to a movie with Curt. Be back by midnight. Your darling daughter.”
The phone rang and Claire grabbed it with her good hand, hoping it would be Rich calling. “Hello.”
“Claire, I checked out the phone records,” Amy said.
“That was fast.”
“Computers really speed things up. Anyways, not only were there a few phone calls from the Swaggums to the Baldwins after the date of the tree service, but this is what’s weird: There was a phone call to the Baldwin’s from the Swaggum’s on the day that Anne died, late afternoon. After Dean was already dead.”
“So it had to have been Mrs. Swaggum who was calling.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Have you checked this out?”
“Not yet. But I will.”
“Okay. Let me know.” Claire told Amy what she had learned from Dr. Singh.
When Claire got off the phone with Amy, she was so jangled she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wished Rich were home.
The phone rang again as she was sitting next to it.
“Yeah,” she answered.
Rich said, “Claire, get over here …”
The line went dead. She held out the receiver and looked at it as if it could tell her something more.
It had been Rich, telling her she needed to get over someplace. He must be at the Baldwin’s. Maybe Chet was at the farm. And Rich was there.
Claire called the sheriff’s department and told them where she was going. She grabbed the keys to her car. It was time to find out if she could drive with one hand.
A
fter parking a block away from the Baldwin’s farm, Claire slid out of the car and started up the road, hoping that the dog wouldn’t bellow out a greeting as she approached. She would just have to chance it. She wanted to sneak up on the house, because she didn’t want to spook Chet. Rich had probably cut off their call because he didn’t want Chet to know what he had done. Why else would the phone call have been cut off like that?
Rich’s pickup was parked right by the barn. To calm herself down, Claire ran through a list of other reasons why their phone call might have been cut off: line problems, battery died, dropped phone. As she got closer to the house, she moved even more cautiously, watching her feet. At the bottom of the steps, she could hear voices in the house—Rich and Chet.
“… because of me,” Chet was saying. “To put it bluntly, I couldn’t get it up anymore.”
Rich said, “But for god’s sake, Chet, Anne didn’t kill herself because you couldn’t have sex anymore.”
“You don’t know,” Chet answered, “It’s more complicated than that. No one will believe what really happened. I know that.”
Claire stepped up the stairs and was able to see into the kitchen. The two men sat on opposite sides of the small kitchen table.
“You can’t know that. Let me call Claire again. We’ll get her over here and you can tell her yourself.”
Chet slammed back the chair he was sitting on. He stood up and waved something in his hand.
Claire could see that he had a gun.
“I don’t want to talk to Claire. She won’t believe a word I’m saying. Besides, I just don’t care anymore.” Chet’s voice was loud and crazy with grief.
Claire stood very still. She had her gun holstered. She was hoping she would have no trouble managing it with one hand.
Rich wasn’t reacting to Chet’s outburst. He said calmly, “What do you want to do? I’ll help you. Do you want to run away? Leave your home and your animals? Leave Anne unburied?”
“My Anne. She’s all I want, all I’ve ever wanted. To be with her.” Chet looked at the gun in his hand.
“Chet, sit down. Tell me what happened. Start there.”
Chet pulled the chair back to the table and sat down.
“What happened the night Anne died?” Rich asked him. “You said you went for a walk.”
Claire moved into the shadow of the door. She could still see the men and listen to what was being said, but she was sure she couldn’t be seen. She slipped her gun out of its holster. Chet still had the gun in his hand, but it was resting on the table.
“Yeah, we had been fighting. Anne was really upset. She had been depressed for a few weeks, maybe longer. Hard to tell. Things were bad. I can’t tell you how bad.”
“Why? What was going on?”
Chet lifted up the gun and slammed the butt on the table. “I couldn’t get it up anymore! I couldn’t satisfy my wife. I didn’t know what to do. So I left for about a half an hour.”
“When you got home, was she dead?”
Chet shook his head, his voice breaking as he spoke again. “No, she wasn’t. But she had the gun I gave her. She was standing in the living room, holding the loaded gun in her hand. Anne said she was going to kill herself. I didn’t know what to do. She said some woman had called and asked about her husband, threatening her. She said she couldn’t do it anymore. I tried to talk to her. I begged her to give me the gun. She let the gun hang loose in her hand and I was sure she was listening.”
Sobs wrenched out of Chet like they were going to carry him away. He gulped and continued. “Then, she held up the gun. She stared at it. It was pointing right at her chest. I tried to grab it from her and she raised it up in the air. It went off. A blast. Then it all ended. The gun went off right in her face. My lovely wife. What I did to her.”
“Chet, it wasn’t your fault,” Rich said.
Chet stood again. “You have no idea. No idea what this is all about. Because of me Anne started messing around with another guy. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t become impotent.”
Claire opened the screen door and stepped into the kitchen.
“Put the gun down, Chet,” she said as clearly and as calmly as she could.
Chet swung the gun around, not aiming it anywhere. “I just want to be with Anne.”
Everything went into a slow motion for Rich with two guns in the same room: Chet crazy and Claire on edge. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt. He brought his hands up and set them on the table. “Claire, you need to back off.”
Claire kept her eyes on Chet.
Rich was afraid of what she might do. He knew he couldn’t stand it if she killed Chet. For once, she had to listen to him. “Claire, we can talk this out. It’s going to be okay. Chet, put the gun down.”
Chet’s gun started to swing around. Rich knew what Claire was trained to do. “Stop,” Rich yelled.
At the sound of his voice, Claire halted and looked at him, waiting for him to say something else. For once she was listening to him.
But Chet wasn’t. His gun kept rising.
Rich tried to step in between the two of them as Chet pulled his gun in toward his body.
A shot sounded.
The wash of blood that swept Claire’s shirt made Rich groan with horror. A deep wish that he could do anything to change what had just happened swept over him as he lunged toward Claire to catch her.
* * *
“I’m okay,” she assured Rich. She wiped at the blood, wondering where it came from. “This isn’t me. It’s Chet.”
Chet was on the floor, mouth open, eyes closed. Blood pumped from his chest, right under his collar bone. Claire heard a small sound come out of his mouth, like a mewl a hurt kitten might make. She dropped down on her knees next to Chet and checked his wound.
She looked up at Rich. “Get me a towel.”
When he handed her a kitchen towel, she clamped it to Chet’s chest and put her full one-handed weight on it. “Call the EMTs.”
She could feel Chet breathing under her hand. “Come on, Chet. This is no way to go.”
Chet opened his eyes. “I gotta tell you. I gotta tell you what happened. It doesn’t matter anymore so you should know.”
Claire knew that he probably wasn’t going to die, the wound—while not quite superficial—was in a place that would do a lot of damage to his shoulder, but was not near any vital organs or arteries. But it was time for Chet to talk. “Yes, tell us.”
“I hate to say it but—Anne killed him,” he said. “I just want you to know I didn’t do it.”
“Killed who?” Claire asked, wondering what he was telling her.
“That Dean. I found them together. He and I started to fight. She shot him. Because she was afraid he was going to hurt me. She did it for me.”
“Why’d you throw him in the river?”
“God only knows. Anne was worried what people would think of me, that they wouldn’t let me be on the board any more. I was only thinking about her—how it would all come out that
she had slept with this guy—when it was actually my doing, my fault. All my fault.”
Claire looked up at Rich. He shook his head. How could two people think so crazy? Trying to protect each other, they blew their life apart.
“So you dumped him in the river?”
“Yeah, we weighed him down with a cement block. We thought he’d never be found. We thought no one knew that he had even come to our farm. Then the wife called last week and Anne fell apart.”
Claire heard the ambulance’s siren wailing up the bluffs. Chet didn’t seem to hear the sound. His speech was slowing down, but he kept talking. “I loved her. It was all my fault. Didn’t want anything to happen to her.”
O
n the Friday before Labor Day, two weeks after Chet Baldwin shot himself, Claire walked upstairs in the government center to the courtroom for his bail hearing. She sat behind him in the courtroom and could only see his face when he turned to talk to his lawyer.
Chet looked drawn, but she saw him give a crooked smile to his lawyer. He was still wearing a sling and bandages on his arm. He was also wearing ankle shackles, but he seemed more in the world again.
He was being charged with aiding and abetting the murder of Dean Swaggum. Mrs. Swaggum was also in the courtroom. She looked just as Amy had described her, like a lady from the fifties: white-blond hair, bright red lips, teary eyes.
After Amy had acquired the phone records of the Baldwins and the Swaggums, it had turned out that Mrs. Swaggum had called Anne on the day Anne had killed herself. Mrs. Swaggum had been looking for her husband and had gone down the list of people he had recently worked for. Her call must have petrified Anne.
Claire felt a hand on her arm and turned to see Rich settling into the seat next to her. He gave her a nod and she put her hand on top of his.
The District Attorney presented the charges and his recommendations to Judge Barker. “August first, Chet Baldwin came home to find his wife struggling in their cabin with Dean Swaggum. It appeared to Baldwin that his wife was fighting the man off, trying to get away from him and he wouldn’t let her go. Baldwin pulled Swaggum away and they fought. Swaggum, being larger and younger than Baldwin, had the advantage. Mrs. Baldwin shot Swaggum, intending only to stop him, but the bullet caught him in the side and hit his liver. He died immediately.
“This version of the story has been corroborated by Anne Baldwin’s sister, Colette Anderson. She claims that her sister had told her what had happened. That it was all her fault. Not quite two weeks later, Anne Baldwin used the same gun and killed herself. Forensics verifies that the same gun was used in both deaths. The bullet that killed Dean Swaggum was found in the cabin.”