Lake of Tears (18 page)

“There he is,” Amy said, pointing out to Claire the young man dressed in a jean jacket with a skull cap pulled down right over his forehead. Terry Whitman didn’t strike her as an aggressive man, but that was to be seen.

They had been sitting in a squad car at the train station, waiting for the train from Chicago to pull in. The train was almost an hour late. Claire was well aware of this, because she had already called Rich once to tell him to hold dinner. Depending on how their conversation went with Terry Whitman, she warned him that she might not even get home before midnight.

Claire and Amy stepped out of the car and approached Terry Whitman from both sides.

“Hey, Terry, Deputy Amy Shroeder. We need to talk to you about some new evidence we’ve found about Tammy Lee.”

He stopped and looked at her. “You got some info on Tammy Lee? Well, it’s about time. I talked to her folks last night and they’re torn up about this.”

“Yes, I can imagine.” Claire took his arm to steer him toward the squad car.

He shook her off. “I can talk, but not now, man. I just got off my shift. I’m beat. I need some sleep.”

“So you don’t want to hear about Tammy Lee.” Claire stepped closer to him. He wasn’t much bigger than she was.

“Yeah, sure I do. But I need some shut-eye. Can’t I call you later?”

“Terry, we went through your car.”

He bent his head slightly, then came up for air. “So?”

“So we found something.” Claire thought she’d let him dangle a bit. See what he did with this information.

“Like I said, Tammy Lee was in my car all the time. So what if you found her fingerprints or whatever.” He tried to walk away from them.

“We need to talk now.” Claire grabbed his arm, and this time wasn’t so gentle about it. She wheeled him toward the squad car. Amy already had the back door open. He ducked his head and sank into the back, looking like he was both resigned and exhausted.

“What did you find?” he asked when she started driving.

“We’ll talk at the station,” Claire told him.

“I already talked to her.” He pointed at Amy. “She knows what happened. What about Andrew Stickler? He’s the guy. He wanted her back, but she was having none of it. She told me so herself.”

“Do you know what happened to her ring?” Claire asked, curious what he would say.

He sunk further down in the seat and stared out the window. “She said she lost it. She said it slipped off her finger. I couldn’t believe it. How can you lose a real diamond engagement ring? That was like a month’s salary for me.”

Claire didn’t say anything more. She drove back up to Durand, Amy sitting quietly next to her, Terry dozing in the back seat.

She turned to Amy. “I want you to go to the bar where Terry was the other night when he got home. Ask around. See what kind of mood he was in, find out if he talked to anyone about Tammy Lee.”

Amy nodded.

Claire didn’t like the guy. She knew that shouldn’t matter in how she went at the case, but she couldn’t help not liking him. He was arrogant and cocky, and under it all, she was sure, very insecure. A bad combination. Even his reaction to the lost ring showed his anger. She just hoped Tammy Lee hadn’t been the victim of an eruption that could have resulted.

Meg grabbed the keys of the pickup. She didn’t care what her mom wanted her to do, she was going to see Andrew. He had called and hadn’t sounded very good. He was stuck at his parents’ house. He had tried to tell her something about a friend’s grandma dying, then something about a vow, but then it sounded like he had started crying. That had scared her. Why was he crying about someone else’s relative?

He had tried to explain. She told him she would be right over.

It didn’t matter that a storm was moving across Lake Pepin, a roiling, seething monster of a storm that was already shooting off spears of tearing light that shattered the sky. This conversation could not happen over the phone. She needed to be there with him.

In normal weather, it would take her twenty minutes to get to his house. Tonight, if the rain let loose, it was hard to tell—maybe she would race the storm across the land and beat it. She set off in the pickup, keeping an eye on the weather to the west.

Within minutes, the wind caught up with her. She could feel herself wrestling with the steering wheel. The rain came down so hard she could only see the road for a moment after the wipers cleared the glass. She watched for the yellow line, drove slow but steady.

Then ahead of her something cracked, and a tree came lashing down only yards in the front of the truck. She stepped on the brakes and the truck came to a rest, held in the tree branches, but unhurt.

What was she doing? How important was Andrew to her? What was she risking by seeing him again?

Meg climbed out of the car, went around to the other side of the tree, and started to pull at the tree’s branches. The tree wasn’t that big, but it was heavy. She was barely able to move it a few feet, but it was enough so that the truck was no longer tangled with tree limbs.

Soaked to the skin, she climbed into the truck, backed up and skirted around the tree. She turned down a road leading away from the lake and the storm abated, sheltered in the bluffs. When her teeth started chattering, she thought to turn on the heat, blower on high.

By the time she got to the Stickler farmhouse, she had dried off a bit, but her clothes were still damp and her hair was hanging in strands down her neck. The rain had eased up but she knew she would get wet again, running to the back door of the house. As she jumped out of the truck and slammed the door, she saw Andrew walking across the yard with an umbrella in his hand, held up high. She ran to him and he grabbed her tight with his free hand. They kissed, a wet kiss mixed with rain.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

“No prob.”

“I’ve got two beers waiting for us in the barn. It will be a little more private there.” Still holding her around the waist, he walked her to the open barn door. A few feet in, a table was set up with two bales of hay pushed close for chairs. Two bottles of Leinenkugel beer were already open.

“So fancy,” she said.

“Nothing but the best. Plus, this way we can watch the storm.”

They sat down close to each other on one bale and tipped their beer bottles together. After they drank, Meg wiped his hair back from his face and asked, “So tell me what is going on?”

Andrew picked at the label of his beer bottle and said, “I don’t know where to start. It’s just so hard to explain what happened over there.”

Meg guessed he meant Afghanistan. She stayed quiet.

“Life was this weird combination of really boring and bone-sizzling scary. We spent most of our time waiting for something to happen and then when it did we just hoped we’d come through it alive. I got to be pretty good friends with these two guys—I told you about them—Doug and Brian. One night we were goofing around and Doug said, let’s take a vow. We were drinking and knew something was up. It had grown kinda quiet around us and that meant some action would happen in the next day or two. So he says, yeah, let’s vow that we all three make it out of this, or none of us do. That we go down together or we leave together. I can’t explain why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Like we were linked, and that way we’d be stronger. So we vowed we’d be in it together, praying we’d all come out alive.”

Meg took a swig of her beer and nodded. “A vow.”

“We swore it on our hearts. I know it sounds weird, but it seemed like the thing to do. The next day the three of us, along with some other guys, are sent off into the hills to find a hidden treasure—they claim they’ve got the mother of all ammos tucked away in a cave.

“We’re the scouts. We’re not supposed to engage. Just try to light the way for the other guys. We walk for what seems like hours, carefully checking all around us as we go. We almost get to the cave when I hear something. It’s like a chatter, like an animal that’s mad, we’re in its territory. I think it’s nothing, but Doug blows. He shoots at it—whatever it is—like he can’t help it.

“Now we’re in trouble. If anyone is out there, they know where we are. The other guys behind us drop back. We’re stranded close to the cave. Before I hear them, before I see them, I feel them. They’re surrounding us. We’re up on a high ridge, one side a sheer drop-off and the other side dense brush.”

He stopped, and his hand covered his eyes for a moment.

“Are you sure you want to tell me this?” Meg asked.

“Please,” he said, and then continued, “I need to explain what happened to someone. It’s hard to capture how bad it was. Then it happened. Like at some secret signal, the world exploded. I was hugging the earth. Doug was firing back, like a crazy man, he was standing and shooting as if they couldn’t see him, like he was invisible.

“Then it got worse. Doug got hit. I saw him go down. I was crawling over to where he was when I saw Brian start to go over the cliff. I grabbed his hand and he pulled me to the edge. He was dangling and I was holding on. They were shooting at us. Then he fell, and his body got ripped up by shots on the way down. He bounced on the rocks like a rag doll.”

Andrew was shaking. Meg stood above him and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him into her. She wanted to know how he had made it. She wanted to know what this had to do with the grandmother. But she just held him until he calmed. He took one of her hands and turned it over and kissed the palm.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“That you had to go through that.”

“Well, I made it. Somehow I made it through. I dug into a bush, dragged Doug in with me, and the other men came pouring in and took over. I didn’t come out. I stayed in there, hidden, until all the shooting was over. Doug was bad. A bullet had clipped his head. He was bleeding like a stuck pig. We got him out of there, and they choppered him out that night. I was sent home two weeks later. My last tour of duty was over. I don’t know if I could have gone back.”

“What about Doug?”

“I haven’t seen him since. He’s called me a few times, but he sounds pretty strange. Talks about the vow. How we left Brian behind. He wants to see me. Called last night. When I tried to get back to him this morning, I figured out he was calling from his grandma’s. She doesn’t live too far from here, down Fountain City way. I called there and some neighbor answered and said Doug was gone.”

“Oh,” Meg said, knowing there was more.

“And that his grandmother was dead. Someone shot her.”

When Terry took his cap off, Claire could see that he was a little older than she had thought. His hair was starting to thin at the front of his head. He rubbed at his eyes and then stared around the room. “Nice office,” he said.

“It’s just temporary.”

“So you’re not really the sheriff?”

“For now,” Claire said, then wondered why she did that. He didn’t need to know this information, and she was the one that should be asking the questions. “Let me just get this time frame straight. When was the last time you saw Tammy Lee?”

“Thursday night, like I already told that other woman deputy.
I got off work, had a drink at the bar, then we hung out for a while.”

“Anything happen?”

“Not really. I’m not much good after a shift. Tammy Lee wanted to party, but I wasn’t up for it.”

“Is this when she told you about the ring?”

“Naw, she told me that while I was working. Wish she would have waited. Got me all riled up. Maybe it’s stupid, but it just don’t seem right that she would lose the ring before we even got married. Like it’s a bad omen.” He stopped talking, his eyes dropping down to the hat in his hands. “I guess maybe it was.”

“Were you mad at her?”

“Sure, I was mad. Who wouldn’t be.”

“You ever get violent with her.”

“Not much. Maybe once, I punched her. But when she’d have too much to drink she could get nasty. She’d slap me and call me names. But usually she wasn’t like that.” He leaned down and his voice was muffled. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Did you think she really lost the ring?”

He looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Did it ever occur to you that she might have taken it off on purpose, maybe she didn’t want to wear it anymore?”

“Sometimes she would tease me, say it was over, but the next day everything would be all right again. Until that Andrew came back. He’s the one you should be talking to, not me. She said he wanted her back. Thinks he’s so big just cause he went over and fought in the war. And he has a temper. You know he slugged me out in the parking lot.”

“Yes, I know that. I also know that you hit him, too.”

“A guy’s got to defend himself.”

Claire reached into the drawer of the desk and pulled out a plastic bag. She handed it over to Terry. “Is this the ring?”

“Hard to see through this plastic,” he complained.

Claire reached into her pocket and handed him a pair of plastic gloves. “Put these on and you can take it out.”

Reluctantly, he snapped the gloves on and then opened the bag. Holding the ring in his hands, he said, “I’m pretty sure it is. Where did you find it?”