Blood Country (17 page)

She couldn’t let the man catch her, because he was mean and there was no telling what he would do with her. But also, her mom wouldn’t be able to handle it. Meg was all her mom had left in the world, so she had to stay okay.

Meg could see the woods if she tilted her head up so she was getting close. Right before the woods, there was a little opening that she would have to run through. She would have to stand up in a crouch and scoot along the ground. She reached the end of the ditch. The weeds still grew up to the woods, but they wouldn’t completely hide her.

Meg thought back to the movies. She kicked off her shoes and pulled off her white socks, then put her shoes back on. Her sweater was green, and that might camouflage her. She rubbed her face with dirt.

Even if he saw her, she still had a good chance to make it to the fort. If she got to the fort, she would be all right. She could go into her secret hiding place, and he would never find her. She knew because she had looked at it from the outside, and it was completely concealed.

Meg felt her heart scrambling around inside her chest like a chipmunk. Maybe she should roll. Very slowly roll her way to the woods. She inched out of the ditch and lay like a corpse on the ground. She heard nothing. Facing the sky, she could see a plane leaving a white trail behind it. She wondered if anyone up there could see her down below, stretched out on the ground. Hansel and Gretel had left bread crumbs. Meg took off one of the barrettes she was wearing and left it in plain sight on the ground. Maybe her mom would find it.

Slowly, Meg began to roll toward the woods. Her dad and she would roll down this one hill by their old house together, they would have races, their hands tight against their sides, their feet held together, and she would laugh all the way down the hill.

Daddy, she thought in her mind, if you are looking down from heaven, don’t let him get me. Daddy, save me. She rolled a little faster until she finally hit a tree. She was at the edge of the woods.

Meg slid up behind the tree and looked back over the field. She knew she shouldn’t do that, that it would be better just to run, but she couldn’t stop herself. She needed to see where he was. His red hair stood out like a woodpecker’s crest. As her eyes found him, his head turned toward hers and he stepped out into the sunlight. She turned and ran through the dark trees.

19

C
laire thought of picking up Meg from Ramah’s while she searched Landers’ house, but changed her mind. She didn’t need another body tromping around inside this small house before she turned it over to Fred and Darla. It wouldn’t look good if Meg played with something and broke it. Although that would never happen with her daughter, she thought with a chuckle.

Claire opened the door to Landers’ house and smelled the disuse of it: food rotting in the fridge, stagnant water, old air. She carefully stepped on the mat inside the doorway and wiped her feet, then she stood still and looked around, a scan of the room before she moved into it.

She laughed again, thinking about Meg. No, her daughter was almost too perfect. Meg’s room was always clean. Claire didn’t know how that girl could slip out of her bed and have it look like she had never slept in it. Meg lined up her plastic horses along the top of her dresser. She folded her clothes a certain way. Meg actually picked up after Claire. Once Claire had told her not to dress her bed, it made her feel too guilty to come home to find her daughter had cleaned her room.

Claire stepped onto the linoleum floor and decided she might as well start with the kitchen. Not the obvious place to store secrets, but you never knew where someone might stick a letter or a note.

Even though it was her job to be in this house and rifle through all the drawers and boxes, Claire felt like an intruder. Maybe she was just being obstinate, trying to keep Darla and Fred out of this house one more day. She hadn’t a clue what she was looking for. But it seemed to her there was a history that seamed through this murder, like a streak of gold that would lead to the answer.

She pulled out the first drawer next to the sink. Silverware in top drawer, lift up the silverware box. Nothing. Utensils in second drawer. Phone books in bottom drawer. She pulled those out and placed them on the table. They might be worth a look-through. She would come back to them.

After opening and closing all the cupboards in the kitchen, she moved on to the living room. Claire sat down on the floor and looked at the bookshelves.
The Tontine
by Thomas Costain,
Immortal Heart
by Irving Stone, the whole collection of Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. She pulled a couple of books off the shelves, held them by the front and back covers, and flipped the pages upside down. Nothing dropped out of the books.

Be methodical, she had been taught, when exercising a search warrant. Don’t skip anything, because you won’t get a second chance. She started on the top shelf and went down through the books. People stuck things in books. That was a fact. She remembered her grandmother kept a zillion newspaper clippings about her dad in the Bible. Report cards from school, the works.

An old photograph album was on the bottom shelf. Claire paged through it. The first few photos must have been from the late forties, after Landers got out of the service. He had a full head of dark hair and was a very handsome man. A wedding picture showed him in a nice suit and his wife in a dark fitted dress with a corsage pinned to her front. She wore a small velvet hat with a net that floated in front of her face, and had small heart-shaped lips. She was much smaller than Landers and looked frail beside his robustness.

Then there were pictures of the department store he owned in Wabasha and pictures of the house she was sitting in, but the trees were smaller, and it was painted a different color; the porch hadn’t been added on yet.

Then she came to pictures of Fred and Darla. The date was printed on the side of the picture—1955. Darla had a wonderful full figure, and her hair was done up in a French twist. She looked smashing. Fred looked happy and goofy as ever. And Landers’ wife was sitting on the edge of the picnic table with her hands folded and her hair in tight curls on her head. Right next to her sat a young boy with dark hair and glasses.

The last picture in the album made Claire sad—it was of Landers and his wife, just before she died. Eva sat on the couch with her arms folded over her body about a yard away from Landers. He had his arm along the back of the couch and was leaning toward her, but she was staring right at the camera. Her hair had gone completely white, and her face was set hard against him.

Claire went into the bedroom and decided it was time to toss it, so to speak. She lifted up the mattress and found an old comb. She went through the pockets of his suits in his closet and found money and gum, old Kleenex. Just what she might expect. She was running her hand under his underclothes in his dresser when she hit a piece of paper, tucked in a back corner. She pulled it out and found herself staring at the wide face of a handsome forty-year-old woman with light brown hair that she wore in waves around her face. She had quite a bit of makeup on, bright red lips. She reminded Claire of a movie star from the forties. But the photo didn’t look that old; it looked quite recent. The colors were bright, not faded at all. At the bottom the photograph was signed, “To Landers, with love.” No name.

Maybe this woman was why Landers’ wife had hated him the last five years of his life. Maybe he had had an affair with this good-looking gal. Claire wondered if she could find out who the woman was. She didn’t want to go around shoving the picture under people’s noses. She certainly didn’t want to besmirch Landers’ name unnecessarily. This woman certainly had nothing to do with his death—or did she? Claire would be discreet.

Almost done with her search, she looked through the drawers of his small desk, tucked into a corner. Checkbooks—she’d take them with her. Taxes—she’d glance through those too. You found out an awful lot about someone by reading their taxes.

Then she saw a small wastebasket shoved way under the desk, a few crumpled papers in it. She sorted through them—old coupons from the newspaper, check stubs—then found a document that had been torn into small pieces. She gathered the pieces up and put them into an empty envelope she found in the drawer. One scrap of paper caught her attention, and she smoothed it out on top of the desk. The word
quit
was printed on it. Worth piecing this back together to see what it had been.

She remembered a story a questioned-document examiner had told her about a woman found hanging from a tree out in the middle of a field. At first, they found nothing when examining the crime scene, but then someone noticed a small scrap of blue paper. Police gathered up all the torn pieces of blue paper, spread out over an acre of land. When the examiner pieced the letter back together, he found it was a Dear John letter. The woman’s old lover had killed her and then torn up the letter she had sent him, tossing it to the wind.

Claire had ducked under the desk to see if she had gotten all the pieces when someone tapped at the front door. She jerked up, bumping her head on the underside of the desk. “Damnation,” she said under her breath. Backing out carefully, she stood up and went to the door.

Ramah waited outside the door, her face sagging with worry.

Claire pulled the door open and asked, “Where’s Meg?”

Ramah took a step backward and almost fell off the top step. “Oh, dear. I was afraid that’s what you were going to say.”

Claire grabbed the old woman by the arms. ‘What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

Claire shook her. “You haven’t seen her. Why didn’t you call me?”

Ramah’s eyes flew wide open, and she sputtered, “I did. You were gone. She didn’t come to my house after school.”

“Was she on the school bus?”

“I don’t know.” The old woman bent over, and now Claire found herself trying to hold her up as she began to cry. “I don’t know.”

“Did you check my house?”

“Yes, I walked over there, and there was no sign of her.”

Claire couldn’t take the time to comfort Ramah. Her daughter was missing. That was the only thing that mattered. “Did you call anyone?”

“Yes, I called Stuart. He said he’d go to the park.”

“Yes, the park, maybe she went there to play.” Claire didn’t believe it for a moment, but she heard the words coming out of her mouth. “You go home and wait for her. Maybe she’ll show up there. I’ll run down to the park and see if Stuart’s found anything.”

Claire didn’t wait to walk with Ramah but ran out of the yard and down the street Her heart beat a horrible thunder in her chest Not Meg, she prayed, not my baby.

She ran down the hill and saw a pile of books lying on the side of the road. She rushed over to them, and as she read the name, Meg, hand-printed in such perfect letters on the cover of the blue folder, she reached down and gathered them up.

Claire stood in the middle of the road with her daughter’s schoolbooks in her arms, not knowing what to do. Then she knew—she would do everything possible to get her daughter back. She walked over to the side of the road and set the books down in the weeds, where they wouldn’t get run over. She and Meg could come and get them later, when all this was over.

T
HE WIND CAME
in off the lake, a brisk wind that whipped up the waves and blew the warmth from the air. Gulls were wheeling in the soft blue sky. Rich looked at the color and thought of how thin Wisconsin air was; not much of the golden color of the sun was held in the atmosphere. The sky was a true blue, the clouds were a solid white, and the gull he watched formed a slight apostrophe as it turned and plunged downward.

Rich looked around and saw no little girl. He and Stuart had split up to cover the park, but they were the only ones walking along the beach, stepping over cast-up driftwood and old tires. Stuart had walked down to the other end of the point, then circled around back and joined Rich.

“This was where I always ran away to. Did you know the steamboat used to land here? That was quite a scene,” Rich told Stuart as they stood along the shore of the lake. “Wonder what got into her, taking off. She doesn’t seem like that kind of kid. Did you run away when you were a kid?”

“Yeah, a few times. Once I even made it to the airport by myself. I spent the afternoon watching planes take off and then called my mom with my last dime. Man, was she mad at me.”

“God, Stuart, you don’t even run away like a normal kid. You actually went to the airport.”

Stuart kicked a piece of driftwood. ‘Well, I wanted to go to France, didn’t I? What little fruitcake doesn’t want to go to France?”

“I don’t think she’s down here. You can’t walk any farther along the beach.” They stood on the end of the sand beach. A gull screeched overhead.

Stuart cupped his hands and yelled, “Meg!”

Rich looked up the road toward town and saw Claire running toward them. He recognized her because she was still in uniform, and her hair was streaming behind her head like a black flag. She ran like someone was chasing her, but she was alone. When she stopped right in front of them, he could see her face was white, as if all color had leached out of it.

She gasped out, “Any sign of her?”

The two men shook their heads.

Claire took a deep breath and said, ‘We have to find her.”

Stuart grabbed her and held her. “Claire, what’s going on here?”

“See, this is bad,” she blurted out.

“Meg’s going to be fine. She probably went for a walk,” Rich said to calm Claire down.

“No,” Claire screamed. “She didn’t go for a walk. Meg doesn’t do that. She knows better.”

Rich was stunned by the ferocity of her disclaimer.

“Her books, I found her books lying alongside the road. I think somebody’s taken her.”

“No, no one would do that.” Stuart tried to reassure her.

At this, Claire forced herself to stand. “Oh, yes, they would.”

“But why?”

“To get at me, to hurt me. They’re killing my family.”

B
RUCE LISTENED TO
Claire and almost didn’t trust his voice. She had finally called him and was asking for his help. They would be working together again. Her voice held the shrillness of fear. He needed to make sure she was not going to do anything rash. “Where are you right now?”