Page 41 of The River We Remember

“What is it?” Graff said.

Brody crouched in the grass. “Come on over and see for yourself.”

Graff joined him. “What the hell?”

“More blood,” Brody said.

It was not nearly so much as the big stain on the riverbank, but it was blood, spilled across a small area, staining the grass stalks and the ground out of which they grew. Brody looked from there to the larger spill, then stood and slowly walked a line between the two, carefully studying the ground.

“Nothing between them,” he reported to Graff. “It’s like two different incidents, two different woundings.”

“The person who was out here with Jimmy?”

“Get the evidence bags,” Brody said.

They collected samples of the bloodstained grass and dirt of the smaller spilling, then gathered the same from the large blood spill on the riverbank.

“Going to send these to the BCA for analysis?” Graff asked when they’d finished. He was talking about the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

“That might take forever. I’ll give Doc Porter a call, see if he’d be willing to look at them.”

It was nearing sunset. The two lawmen stood beside the Alabaster River, under a sky empty of clouds. The air was still, in the way it often became in southern Minnesota when the day prepared to yield to darkness. Brody breathed in the scent of the tall grass and wildflowers, and below that, the heavy smell of the river and the mud, and under it all, the fecund aroma of the deep, black earth from which the county drew its name.

“What now?” Graff said.

“Back to the office,” Brody replied. “I’ll give Doc a call. Then I’ve got a turkey sandwich in my refrigerator and some cold beer, so unless something comes up that needs my attention, I’m going to settle down for the night. Welcome to join me. For the beer, anyway.”

Graff shook his head. “I got me a couple of horses to feed. And I’ve got my own beer, thank you. And I’ve also got a lot of thinking to do.” He took one last, long look around the scene. “I know you’ve been fighting against this as a homicide, Brody. And I think I know why. There’s a reason they call us peace officers, son. But there’ll be no peace in this county for a while. Everybody’s going to be talking about Jimmy Quinn’s death, and everybody’s going to have a theory. There’s going to be fingers pointing in a lot of unfortunate directions. And you’re going to be in the middle of it and making no one happy. Would have been a whole lot easier if you could just write it off as a terrible accident, or even suicide. And I’ll tell you one more thing, a little bit of a confession.”

Brody waited, then had to ask, “What’s that?”

“I’m glad it’s you and not me wearing that sheriff’s badge. And good luck sleeping nights. Because any hope of a peaceful life for you in Black Earth County was blown to smithereens with that shotgun blast.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CONNIE GRAFF’S PLACE was a few miles north of Jewel, an acreage looking west toward the narrow dip in the farmland where the Alabaster had long ago cut its course. His property included a house and lawn; a combination garage and workshop; a horse barn and corral; and some pastureland with a small, clear stream running through. He kept two horses in that pasture—Bogie, named for the movie star, and Honeydew, who’d been his wife’s mount.

He’d fed the horses and brushed them and stood now in the open doorway of the little barn. He’d rolled himself a cigarette and had punched open a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He smoked and sipped the beer and watched the light dying. It was that time of day when he and Myrna might have sat in the glider together, holding hands. Myrna had always been one for holding hands. When he thought about her, which was often, it wasn’t the big things he missed, but the small, intimate moments. Like those in the glider.

When he finally crossed the yard to the house, there was nothing to light his way but a dim afterglow in the west. Inside, he turned on a lamp, and the living room seemed to leap at him in the way of a stranger whose appearance was sudden and unexpected. It was the same room he’d shared with Myrna for more than thirty years, and yet it wasn’t. There was no place Myrna had been that was the same. From the moment his wife died, Connie felt as if he’d entered an unfamiliar land.

He was no stranger to death. He’d seen it on the battlefield, young. He’d seen it in the warehouses and dirty streets and shabby neighborhoods of Kansas City as a uniformed cop. He’d seen it in Black Earth County as both deputy and sheriff, seen it amid a tangle of twisted metal and shattered glass on highways, in the bloodied cogs and blades of farm machinery, in the sweat-stained, rumpled bedding that was the end of a long, drawn-out battle with some terrible illness. He and death were well acquainted, he’d thought. Until Myrna.

He boiled a hot dog and ate it with some potato chips and another beer while he sat in an easy chair in the living room and listened to Wagner on the RCA phonograph. That was Myrna’s influence. The city girl, whose father had been a wealthy doctor. By the time the record was finished, tears streamed down his cheeks and he had no further appetite.

He scraped the plate and washed it and turned out the lights. He went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth and washed where the tears had dried to salt on his face and stripped out of his clothing down to his boxers and undershirt and stood in the doorway of the bedroom that had been his and Myrna’s. He no longer slept there. Instead, he used what had always been the guest room. He couldn’t bring himself to sleep in the bed where he’d shared so much with Myrna. Where he’d seen the end of her life, a death for which he felt responsible.

Murderer, he thought to himself, then turned away and went to the bed in the guest room, where he was alone now, always, and where, he knew, if sleep came, it would come after a long struggle.

IN THE JAILHOUSE, above the office and the cells, was the apartment Brody called home. He had a small living room, a kitchen larger than he needed, a bedroom that was more than adequate for his simple needs, and a bathroom with a toilet, a pedestal sink, and a claw-footed tub. He’d lived there since he’d taken the job as Connie Graff’s deputy. It was as much a home as Brody felt he needed. He hadn’t really decorated. There was little from his past that he cared to be reminded of, so no framed photographs on the walls, nothing from his days growing up on the farm or his time in a military uniform. No sweetheart. No children. He’d hung up a print of a painting he kind of liked by a guy named Hopper. It showed a diner in some big city at night and there were only a few people inside and they all looked like they had nowhere to go and no one who cared where they were or if they were lost.

He did have a photo of Hector, which he’d taken when they were out hunting. The dog was sitting alert in prairie grass, one tall dead tree at his back, the Black Hills of South Dakota in the distance. A brace of grouse that Brody had shot lay on the ground beside him. Although Hector was in the middle of nowhere, he appeared more content than anyone in the painting by Hopper. Whenever Brody looked at the photo, he remembered that outing and how good it was to be out there alone with his dog, and he almost always felt comforted.

After he returned from Inkpaduta Bend, Brody put some Purina in a bowl for Hector. For himself, he pulled from the refrigerator the turkey sandwich Angie had made for him earlier that day but he hadn’t eaten. He grabbed a can of Hamm’s beer and punched holes in the top with a church key. He sat in the easy chair and tried to watch Gunsmoke, but his heart wasn’t in it. He turned off the television, switched on the radio, picked up WOW out of Omaha, and listened to the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” His chair faced the south window. The sky beyond was already dark. He could see the lights of Jewel—the marquee on the Rialto Theater, the streetlamps along the three blocks of businesses, the lit windows of houses beyond that. It was Saturday night, and folks were up a little later than usual, and so there were headlights moving along the streets, and every once in a while, Brody caught a snatch of conversation from the sidewalk below his window.

He used to be gone from Jewel on Saturday nights, and Asa Fielding or Connie Graff would be on duty. Long ago Brody had created a girlfriend for himself. He’d let on that she was a teacher in Worthington, a safe forty miles away. Her name was Lilah. That’s all he would say. Except he made sure folks in Jewel knew that on Saturday nights he and Lilah had dinner together and took in a show or went dancing. Everyone in Jewel understood that Brody didn’t talk marriage, but the reason or reasons were a little fuzzy. It didn’t matter. It kept people from asking the wrong kinds of questions and kept his relationship with Garnet Dern, who was the only soul who knew the truth of the lie, safe. But he’d got tired of that particular story, of keeping up the pretense, and he hadn’t been gone on a Saturday night for weeks. He knew folks were talking. He’d let out that he and Lilah had parted ways, though he never said exactly why. One lie to kill another. Where all this was leading, he still didn’t know.

When he finished his sandwich and beer, he turned off the radio and took his guitar from where it sat in the corner near the kitchen table and began to pick out the chords of the Everly Brothers tune. After that he strummed a little Hank Williams, and finally, in honor of Elvis Presley, who’d been drafted into the army a few months earlier, he ended with “Love Me Tender.”