Page 21 of The River We Remember

“I’ll get on them first thing. And you’ll call me with the results of the autopsy? I want to get this story right.”

“I will. Thanks for your help, Sam.”

Brody offered his hand and Wicklow shook it. The sheriff and his deputy watched as the newspaperman maneuvered himself into his station wagon, made a laborious U-turn, and drove away.

Graff lit his cigarette and let out a slow snake of smoke. “I’m thinking I ought to check all the farms nearby, see if anyone saw or heard anything.”

“All right. I’m heading back into Jewel, meet the Quinns for the ID.”

“What about his truck? Can’t just leave it here.”

“When I meet with the family, I’ll talk to them about getting it back to the farm.”

“Want to dust it for prints?”

“What would be the point? It’s pretty clear what happened. He killed himself, Connie. Or it was a tragic accident. Besides, I’ve seen Quinn and J.P. and every one of his hired men driving that truck at one time or another. It’s covered with prints, I’m sure, so what would they tell us? Seems to me our time would be better spent in other pursuits.”

Graff walked to his pickup, but he didn’t get in immediately. Connie Graff was always a man to see the broad perspective, and he stood looking at the wildflowers and the tall green grasses, then he squinted toward the sun and studied the distant cultivated fields beyond the eastern curve of the river, and finally his eyes climbed to the top of Fordham Ridge. “Remember your history of Black Earth County, Brody? The Stephen H. Long expedition?”

Brody said, “Early eighteen hundreds. Legend has it that Long named the ridge after one of his superiors, a man he disliked intensely. From what I understand, he hoped this Fordham would see it as an honor, but Long actually meant it as an insult because he thought everything along the Alabaster was nothing but wasteland.”

“That’s right. Stephen H. Long stood up there and declared that this whole area was unfit for cultivation. Said this was all part of what he called the Great American Desert.”

“What’s your point?”

“Just thinking how a man can be looking at a thing and not see at all its true nature.”

Brody said, “Is the fault in the man, Connie?”

Graff dropped what was left of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under the heel of his boot. He gave Brody an indecipherable look and said, “Depends on the man, I suppose. I’ll see you in town.” He got into his truck and left Inkpaduta Bend, following the narrow trail broken through the prairie grass.

CHAPTER TEN

CONNIE GRAFF WAS sixty years old and had always expected to be dead by then. Or at the very least, glued to a rocking chair on the porch of an old folks’ home waiting to be fitted for a coffin. Growing up, he hadn’t seen many men make it to the age of white hair and a face full of wrinkles. Guys like Gunther Haas, that leathery old veteran of one of the last Indian campaigns, were a rarity in Black Earth County, where the men were mostly farmers and working the land killed them early. Which was one of the reasons Graff had chosen to wear a badge as a way to make a living. A lawman’s life could be cut short by a bullet, sure, but Graff had seen far more death from inattention or drunkenness around combines and balers, or the errant kick of a draft horse or mule, or the suicides that came with the uncertainty and worry of trusting in the Lord to deliver just the right combination of weather. Or a man simply worked himself to death. His father and his grandfather had been farmers, and Graff had seen the land suck all the life right out of them. He wanted no part of that.

He drove away from Inkpaduta Bend, drove the threads of back roads and gravel lanes that knitted the farms and hamlets of Black Earth County together in a loose fabric of commerce and community. It was a lovely summer day, the sky a blue blade that seemed to cut off the rest of the world along a green horizon. Occasionally the approaching rattle of his pickup flushed a pheasant from the tall grass and weeds at the roadside. The flight and cackle of the birds made him think of Myrna and those days when he’d ride with her on horseback down these country roads and the pheasants would fly up at their coming and take to the safety of the tall corn. She’d been born a city girl, but she knew how to sit a horse proud. God, he missed her.

He spent a good part of the morning catching farmers in their barns or in their fields, questioning them briefly. They were, to a man, ignorant of anything that might help crack the mystery of Jimmy Quinn’s death. This was exactly what Graff had expected and mostly his questioning was done for the sake of thoroughness, just good cop work. Because Connie Graff had an idea about Inkpaduta Bend and about Quinn, and before long he was driving up a very narrow lane to a farmhouse that stood in the shadow of an enormous Dutch elm just a stone’s throw from the Alabaster.

The farmhouse was small and built of lumber hand-hewn around the turn of the century. There was a modest barn, old but recently refurbished; a newer construction of corrugated metal that was probably a garage or machine shed; a chicken coop full of strutting, bobbing hens; and a pen where pigs lay sleeping in the morning sun. Graff drove his pickup into the farmyard, killed the engine, and got out. On most farms, a dog would have come bounding out, barking a greeting or warning, but here there was only the quiet of the countryside and the occasional grunt from one of the pigs and the cluck of hens. The man who owned the place drove a red Ford pickup, but the pickup was nowhere to be seen. Graff walked to the farmhouse door and knocked. When no one answered, he knocked again, with the same result. He stepped out of the shade, nudged the brim of his Stetson up a bit higher on his forehead, and scanned what he could see of the property.

The place was tiny compared to the vast majority of the farms around it, eighty acres at most. Behind the house, a small orchard had been planted in neat rows, the trees still too young to bear fruit. Graff drifted around to the back of the barn. In the field there, amid green shoots rising up from the black earth, a figure with a hoe stood bent, working the area between two rows. Whoever it was wore a broad-brimmed straw hat that cast a dark shadow, so that Graff couldn’t see the face clearly. The figure was tiny, an adolescent, most observers might think, but Graff knew differently. He walked into the field, and as he approached, an old Saint Bernard lying near the figure stood up and barked a warning.

The woman had been singing quietly to herself as she worked. When the dog barked, the song died on her lips, the hoe paused in its chopping, and the woman looked up out of the shadow of her straw hat. She was young, pretty, Asian. Japanese, Graff knew. Hell, everyone in Black Earth County knew. Word had gone out within days of Noah Bluestone’s return to Minnesota that he’d married a Jap. Although the war had been over for more than a dozen years, many folks in Black Earth County still considered her one of the enemy. Graff had seldom seen her, and then only briefly on those few occasions when she accompanied her husband into town. Usually, she sat alone in the truck while Bluestone conducted his business. Did she speak English? He had no idea.

And so, when she eyed him from the shadow of her hat, he didn’t know if she would be able to understand his question.

“Mrs. Bluestone, I’m Deputy Graff. I’m looking for your husband.”

Her dark brown eyes studied him briefly, then she lowered her gaze again to the earth she’d broken with her hoe and said, “He’s not here.” She spoke quietly but clearly, with only a little accent that harked back to her origins.

“Do you know when he’ll be back? I’d like to talk to him.”

She shook her head.

“Do you know where he is?”

“At the Quinn farm.”