Dark Coulee (18 page)

Jenny’s head jerked up. “Like what? What are you suggesting—that my dad was a pervert? Well, he wasn’t.”

“I’m just trying to understand what you’re going through.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t. It’s all my fault. And now Brad’s going to go to prison forever.”

“I tend to be an optimist. Things might turn out better than you think. When you go into the sheriff’s department tomorrow, tell them everything you know. That’s what will help him the most.”

Jenny slouched lower over the table. She wouldn’t look at Mrs. Gunderson. She covered her head with her hands.

“Things will get better,” Mrs. Gunderson assured her.

Jenny raised her head, and the look in her eyes was wild. She took her beer bottle and threw it in the garbage can. Then she screamed, “Stop saying that! They will never get better. There’s no way they can.”

After forty years of teaching children how to grow up, Mrs. Gunderson knew enough not to argue. She finished her beer while Jenny put her head down on the table and wailed. What would happen would come to pass, whether Jenny believed in it or not.

“You’re nothing but an old woman, what do you know?” Jenny said in a quiet and mean voice, lifting her tearstained face.

Mrs. Gunderson stood and put her beer bottle in the recycling bag under the sink. She retied her bathrobe around her and turned and spoke to Jenny. “I am an old woman. But I know many things. And one thing I know is when I’m not wanted anymore. I will stay another few days until we can get you and Nora settled with a foster family or someone else can come to stay here. It’s time for me to go back home.”

She turned and walked carefully back up the stairs, her heart heavy. She had hoped she would get through to Jenny.

C
LAIRE parked her car by the courthouse, sat for a moment, trying to remember all she had to do today, and then clambered out of the vehicle. As she reached back in to pull out her purse and a couple of files she had taken home, she was tapped on the back. When she turned around, Pit Snyder was standing next to her car.

“Hello, Mr. Snyder,” she said in a friendly tone—but her first thought was that he was going to yell at her for how he had been handled in the Spitzler case.

Instead he asked pleasantly, “Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?”

“Nothing I’d like better. You want to go to the Prairie Pie?” Claire had been planning on getting in touch with Pit Snyder sometime today.

A new espresso bar with wonderful baked goods had opened up a few months ago in Durand. Claire liked to give them her business when she could. She hoped they would make a go of it, although they might have a hard time selling their espresso coffee for a dollar and a half when people around the town still expected a bottomless cup for twenty-five cents.

“Sure. I haven’t tried that place.” As they walked along, he told her, “I’ve been waiting for you. I wanted to catch you before you went in to work. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere near the jail for a while.”

“I don’t blame you.”

When they got to the restaurant, Pit ordered regular coffee and Claire a café au lait. After they had been served, Snyder stared at her large, foamy cup of coffee. “That sure looks nice.”

“Would you like a taste?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He took the cup in both hands and took a sip. “Creamy. Tastes like the hot chocolate my mom used to make when she brewed it in the old coffeemaker. I didn’t like it when I was a kid, but that tastes pretty good to me now.” He seemed so much more relaxed than the last time she had seen him.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Snyder?”

“Pit, call me Pit. Everybody does.” He took a gulp of his own coffee, then leaned forward and said in a half-whisper, “I’m sick about Brad Spitzler.”

“Is that why you got him a lawyer?”

“Yes, it’s the least I can do.”

“Pit, what did you see that night?”

“That’s the problem. I didn’t see anything. When I came walking up, the two kids were standing over their father, and the knife was on the ground. Both their hands were bloody. I told them to go wash up and I grabbed the knife.”

“Why? Why did you cover up for them?”

“Jed Spitzler was an evil man. He made their lives hell. I knew how mean he could be to Rainey. If I’d stepped in sooner, maybe none of this would have happened.”

“So you didn’t see Brad stab his father?”

“No.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“I really can’t say.”

“Why do you think he would do it now?”

“Maybe Jed did something that Brad couldn’t tolerate. I don’t know. In some ways, I’m surprised he didn’t do it sooner. That’s all I can figure. What does Brad say?”

“Since he’s got a lawyer, he’s not saying much. But I think they’re going to try to plea-bargain with him so he’ll have to make some kind of confession.”

“Do you have any sense of what kind of time they’ll give him for this?”

“No court looks kindly at patricide. But with the extenuating circumstances—his mother’s death, his father’s continuing brutality—I think they’ll go easy. And, fortunately, he’s a juvenile. I have a feeling he’ll be sentenced to the juvenile center until he’s eighteen, then let go. He’ll serve less than six months.”

Pit bent his head. “He’s such a good kid. I hope this won’t ruin him. What about Jenny and Nora?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with that. Mrs. Gunderson is still staying with them—but who knows how long she’ll last?”

Jenny slid her feet forward and then followed them. It was easy, this thing called walking that she did to move around the world. She followed the deputy sheriff out of the patrol car and into the police station. She had worn her new red tennis shoes. They were the last thing Dad ever bought for her. That made them special. And they made the walking even easier.

Everyone was staring at her, but she didn’t care. They couldn’t touch her. She was sliding along on her feet, walking carefully so that no one could tell how high she was.

She had doubled her dosage, being careful not to take too much. She didn’t need another fainting episode with the deputy. But she was concerned because she was reaching the bottom of her pill bottle. After carefully counting them three times, she saw that she had only seven pills left. She wasn’t sure if her connection in school had any more, and she didn’t know if she could fake another toothache.

“Jenny.” The woman deputy was talking to her. She needed to tune in again. The deputy’s name was Watkins, Claire Watkins. That’s right. And another deputy was sitting next to her, a cute deputy named Billy. He looked a little like Ricky Martin, who she actually thought was pretty dopey.

“Yes.” Jenny made her lips slope upward in a smile.

“We’re going to be taping this. Is that all right?”

“I guess.”

“I’ll be asking you the questions.” Claire turned on the tape. “Billy will be here, and he might ask you some questions too. Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

Claire said the date and time and who was present in the room. Jenny looked up at the window. It was so high you couldn’t see out of it. All it did was let some light in. The room they were sitting in reminded her of a jail cell. Maybe Brad was close by. She wanted to see him before she left. She had to remember that.

“Jenny, some of these questions are going to be difficult, but I want you to answer them the best you can. We are trying to understand what led up to your brother Brad stabbing your father. Let’s start with your mother’s death.”

“It was like Brad said.” Jenny didn’t want to have to talk about her mother’s death. Everything had started then. Everything had ended then. It had been the worst day of her life.

“Can you elaborate?”

“Mom was putting the sorghum in the press, and Dad pushed her. You know the rest.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Beats me. You never knew with Dad, how he’d take something, what would make him mad. Mom had been saying she was going to leave him. I don’t think she meant to, maybe she was just bugging him, but I think that made him mad. He liked to have power over everyone in the family.”

“I think your mother was trying to leave, Jenny. She had called Pit Snyder and had asked him to help her.”

Jenny felt her heart break open. What if they could have gotten away from Dad? What if Mom had just piled them in the car that morning and gone away? She would still be alive. Dad would still be alive. Brad wouldn’t be in jail. Oh, what could have been. Jenny felt as if what had not come to pass was freezing her up. She didn’t know what to say.

“Jenny?”

She spit out: “Well, it didn’t happen.”

Claire looked at her with sadness in her eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Billy jumped in with some questions. “What happened after your mother died? Did your father change in his behavior toward you?”

“Well, like we told you, he threatened to kill us. But then it was like that never happened. Right around the funeral, he was pretty nice to us. There were other people around and all. The grieving family. That routine. But when it was just us and him again, he got meaner. We never pleased him. He yelled at us.” Jenny looked at Billy to see if he’d understand. “Mom wasn’t around anymore to take it for us, so he took all his anger out on us.”

Billy nodded as if he knew what she was talking about and kept up the questions. “Did he ever hit you or hurt you in any way?”

Jenny felt the hurts welling up in her, all the things that he had done over the years pushing to get out and be told. But she kept them in. “Not me. But he and Brad got into a fight, and he broke Brad’s arm.”

Claire made a note on a pad of paper in front of her. Then she asked, “He did? When was this?”

“About a year ago.”

“Did Brad go to the doctor?”

“Oh, yeah. Dad took him in. Brad wasn’t much use to Dad with a broken arm.”

“Good. There’ll be a record of that.” Claire leaned toward Jenny and put a hand out to her, but didn’t touch her. “Jenny, is there anything else you want to tell us that happened with your father?”

“Not much more. He’d yell at us, threaten us, but that was about it. Sometimes he could be all right. He was always pretty nice to Nora. But she saw what went on. It was hard on her too.”

Claire asked the next question, because it was something she had been wondering about. “Did your father ever do anything sexually inappropriate with you?”

Jenny felt words push into her head, into her mouth, but she managed to avoid them. She shook her head and kept her answer short. “He was a creep, not a pervert.”

“Now, Jenny, can you tell us what happened the night your father was killed?”

And so Jenny went over it again. She had already told much of it before. How they had all gone together in the car, how Nora had stayed home, how it was Lola’s idea, how they went their separate ways at the dance, then how she and Brad ran into their father.

“Jenny, before you told us that your father was already stabbed when you saw him again, but after what Brad has told us, that wasn’t true, was it?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“Well, he was by the johns, and Brad had just found me, and then we ran into Dad. Brad was trying to persuade me to go home. He thought I was too out of it. Dad didn’t want to leave yet. They got into a fight. Dad called Brad some names. He started yelling at Brad.”

“Was this unusual?”

“Not at all. Dad was always telling Brad he was a piece of shit. I can say that, can’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Brad tried so hard to be good and not get Dad riled, but I think that’s what bugged Dad the most. That Brad was kind of perfect.”

“What happened next?”

“I think Dad took a swing at Brad. Brad just ducked. But then Brad punched him in the face.”

“Hard?”

“Pretty hard, I think, because then Dad started to hold his head.” Jenny remembered how black it had been all around them. Like they were standing in a pool of oil.

“Jenny, can you tell us what happened after that?”

“You know, that’s when it gets pretty fuzzy. I don’t think I even knew Brad had stabbed him. The next thing I remember is Dad lying on the ground, and my hands were covered with blood. I was trying to stop it from bleeding. Brad pulled me away. We went and washed our hands.”

“Did Brad say anything?”

“Not really.”

“Did you and Brad talk about what had happened to your father after that?”

“No. I don’t think we wanted to. After we left the hospital and we were driving home in the car, we didn’t even talk about him.” Jenny smiled, thinking about that night. “I don’t know about Brad, but I was so happy I could have died.”

This time of night was hard. Ten-thirty. Meg was sleeping. The dishes were done, the kitchen straightened. Claire had checked that the doors were locked, the windows shut and latched. Left the new night-light burning in the hallway. It was time for her to go to bed and try to sleep.

Claire stood next to the window in her bedroom and looked out over the town. She had started hating going to sleep, which was an odd feeling, since it had always been a refuge for her. But the dreams. She never knew when the dreams would come. The one of the woman with no hands haunted her during the day as no other dream had.

Even now, with Brad Spitzler ready to plea-bargain his case, she felt unsettled by the Spitzler ordeal. What had triggered Brad Spitzler’s stabbing? What had Jed finally done that Brad could no longer tolerate? Claire wondered if it had something to do with Brad being in his last year of high school and not wanting to leave the two girls alone with Jed. What had gone on there? Claire had asked about sexual abuse, and Jenny had said there had been none, but still it niggled at Claire, the possibility of it.

Jenny hadn’t been much help. But Claire had been glad to hear about the broken arm and had called before she left work and requested that the medical record be sent over to her tomorrow. She would pass it on to Brad’s attorney.

Claire was actually pleased they had gotten as much out of Jenny as they had. When she had gone to pick the girl up, she had seen that Jenny was pretty wasted again.

After they had finished the interview, Jenny had asked to see Brad. Claire had called down to the jail and asked the guard to bring him up. But the guard had called back a few minutes later and said that Brad didn’t want to see her.

Jenny had taken it pretty hard. She looked like the air had been knocked out of her. Then she recovered, and Claire drove her home. She didn’t say much of anything for the whole drive. Poor kid.

The phone rang. Claire let it ring twice, hoping it wasn’t work, and then grabbed it on the third ring. “Hello,” she said, sitting down on her bed.

“Did I wake you?” Rich’s deep voice came over the line.

Just the voice she wanted to hear. She put her head on her pillow and stretched out on the bed. “No. I was just contemplating my pillow. It’s a new meditative mantra my therapist has me doing.”

“I know I’m not supposed to be calling, but I wanted to see how you were doing. If you still existed and all.”

Claire chuckled. He had such a good memory. “Rich, there are no rules for this. I’m sorry if I made it sound that way. You can’t really do anything wrong, because I don’t know what I’m doing myself. I’m glad you called. After all, I was the one who stopped over the other night.”

“Yes. I remember that.”

“I do exist.”

“Good.”

“I interviewed Jenny Spitzler today. We brought her into the station and grilled her for an hour or so. Just needed corroboration for Brad’s story.”

“How did that go?”

“It’s such a sad story, Rich. Those poor kids with that awful man. Still, after I was done talking to her, I couldn’t help feeling that I hadn’t gotten it all. I don’t blame her for not wanting to talk about it, but we need it as background for this case. However, I don’t understand why Brad killed his father. Why that night? What made it different from any other night? I feel like Jed must have done something to trigger it.”