See Also Deception (5 page)

The hawk, a big red-tailed, flew right for the chickens that had, of course, wandered away from the garage, thanks to Shep's absence. The dog sank low to the ground, eyes to the sky, then launched after the raptor, even though it was twenty-five feet in the air. Shep's fierce bark filled the silence, caught on the wind, and provoked a flap of the wings and an annoyed glance from the hungry hawk as it climbed higher into the sky.

The rise in altitude didn't deter Shep. He chased after it until they were both out of sight. The bark echoed and the hawk's shadow lingered, giving me pause, concerned for the chickens. Predators were always out and about. It was easy to forget sometimes.

CHAPTER 7

It had never been easy to leave Hank since the accident, but it had become even harder after the murders of Lida and Erik Knudsen. In the dark months that followed their deaths, I had floundered like a fish pulled from a slough and left on the bank to die. I stayed closer to home more than I ever had in my life. Plain and simple, I was afraid to leave Hank. I wanted to spend every possible minute I could with him; I was certain that I feared his death far more than he did.

“Doc Huddleston's phone number is on the wall,” I said to Betty Walsh. She smelled like twenty-five-cent perfume, lavender with a hint of rubbing alcohol. It smelled foreign for the time of year, and my nose crinkled with discomfort.

Betty nodded and looked over her shoulder. Jaeger lingered in the kitchen, sipping on a cup of leftover coffee that I'd warmed up in a soup pan on the stove. “He won't be far if something comes up, Mrs. Trumaine. Don't worry; I've handled worse than this.” She realized immediately how callous her words sounded and apologized the best she could. “That's not what I meant. I'm sorry, it's just that he . . .”

I interrupted her. “It's all right, Betty. I'd worry about leaving here if I were talking to Doc Huddleston himself. I thought I heard a rattle in his chest this morning, but it's gone now. I'm just extra worried, flustered by everything.”

Jaeger padded up behind us. “There's nothin' for ya to be worried about, Mrs. Trumaine. We'll call the doc if something comes up. Hank looks fine to me.”

“He does to me, too, now.” I wrung my hands, more unsure about leaving by the second.

Shep barked outside. He was still worrying over the chickens, trying to keep them safe from the hawk. One of them must have wandered too far away for his liking.

“Nothing's gonna happen, Mrs. Trumaine.”

Betty stood staring at Hank, listening to us, but she immediately detached herself from the conversation. It was like she had just shown up for a paid job, and I appreciated that, at the very least. I would be happy to give her some money on my return.

“Those bad days are over,” Jaeger said. “Not a thing is gonna go wrong while we're here. I promise you that. We can look after Hank well enough. Now, you go on into town and do what it is you need to.” Jaeger had always been a good manager. He knew how to get people to do what needed to be done without coming off like a dictator.

I sighed, relaxed, and nodded my head. I looked over at Hank lying on the bed. His eyes were fixed in their normal spot on the ceiling—only his face showed aggravation, or maybe frustration, it was hard to tell these days. He either wanted to go with me or was angry about the fuss that was being made over him.

I didn't have to think too hard which it was. Hank had never liked being the center of attention or the cause of folks adjusting their lives to line up with his. It was easy to be shy where we lived.

I squared myself. Jaeger was right; nothing was going to happen. I cast my attention to Betty. “There's a list of instructions on the nightstand.”

She nodded and forced a smile. “I understand.”

“I won't be long, two hours at the most,” I said, as I made my way over to kiss Hank goodbye. Such a show of affection would embarrass him even more if he could see.

“It's such a shame about Miss Eltmore,” Betty said. Calla was Miss Eltmore to most all of Dickinson. She had always been the spinster librarian who had never married. Miss. Always Miss, never missus.

“It is,” I said, then leaned down and pecked Hank quickly on the forehead.

He winced and exhaled slightly at the same time. “I'll be fine. Go on, now. Get your questions answered. It'll do you good to get away from me and your work.”

“Try to be kind to this young girl,” I ordered him.

Hank squished his forehead together and pursed his lips at the same time, like he was going to say something rash but decided not to. He just nodded slightly.

I pulled back from him and headed toward the door. As I passed by Betty, she said, “I just can't imagine a person doing such a thing.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. Ice water shot through my veins. “What do you mean by that?” It was not a gentle question. It was a demand.

Betty drew back. “I didn't mean anything, Mrs. Trumaine; I was just sayin' that I didn't understand is all.”

“Understand what, Betty?”

I had stopped so I was shoulder to shoulder with Jaeger. “She thought you knew,” he said. “Betty hears a lot of things at the drugstore. You surely had to know that.”

“Heard what?” My heart raced, and I suddenly found it very difficult to breathe. All I could smell was Betty's cheap perfume and the antiseptic tang of Hank's skin. I thought I was going to be sick.

“Miss Eltmore killed herself,” Jaeger said. “Put a gun to her head right there at her desk and pulled the trigger. A sad act to be sure.”

“Was that in the
Press
?” I whispered, trembling.

Jaeger shook his head. “Probably a good thing it wasn't if you ask me. I'm sorry,” he said, easing his hand to my shoulder. “I know she was your friend.”

I couldn't contain myself any longer. Tears burst out of my eyes and my chest heaved. The truth of Calla's death was too much to bear. The cause of it wasn't something I had considered other than by natural means. There had been no need to. Calla Eltmore had always seemed like the least likely person in the world to commit suicide.

Jaeger spun me around and wrapped his arms around me. I didn't resist the gesture, the comfort of his caring embrace. I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to.

CHAPTER 8

As a mere child I wrote down everything that I saw, what I needed to remember, what I wanted to accomplish in a day and in my life. My childhood writing desk had been constantly littered with all sizes of paper, with lists of ducks and songbirds—the species, the Latin name, the date that I first saw them, and the date I last saw them. The same with mammals and wildflowers. My father could barely restrain his immense pride at my interest in the outside world. He'd encouraged it by filling my bookshelves with beginner field guides, little books bought at the Ben Franklin for a quarter—they still sat on my shelf—and in long walks on the prairie, sharing his stories and knowledge with me. He wouldn't have been surprised a bit by my vocation as an indexer. I could imagine him holding the
Common Plants
book with such pride you would have thought it was a grandson.

There was no question that once I had learned to read and write making lists came as easily to me as breathing. That skill had been perfectly honed long before I knew what an index was. But being organized came later, slowly. Recognizing order, knowing instinctively where one thing fit into the world and another thing didn't, took experience, time, and loads of failed efforts. More than once I'd been admonished by my mother in the kitchen for putting a pan or skillet in the wrong place. Nothing had thrilled Momma more than when I learned the alphabet, at her prodding, so I could retrieve and replace a spice from the cabinet without making a mess of her world. She was the organized one. Everything had its place. Even me.

And so it was that I found myself lost without a way to organize myself into understanding the concept of suicide. The vision of Calla Eltmore raising a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger was as foreign to me as the inside of a television or a radio. I had no working knowledge of such things. My tenuous relationship with the Lutheran church didn't help matters much. If I had been left to my childhood religious teachings, then I could only consider that Calla Eltmore had committed the gravest of sins and would be damned to hell for all of eternity. It was a thought that I couldn't hold on to, Calla being damned, suffering and burning for an act that none of us knew the reason for.

I couldn't imagine a reason to commit suicide. Calla loved books, her job. I'd always just assumed that she was happy with her life. She never complained, but she didn't readily share details, either. Calla had never truly confided her deepest, darkest thoughts and secrets to me. I suppose I had never expected her to, but there were times when I thought she looked lonely, and I wondered if she'd ever known true love.

My speculation that Calla and Herbert Frakes, the longtime janitor at the library, were having a secret relationship was more for my own comfort than Calla's. I'd always hoped that she had someone to hold in the deep darkness of night, when life was tough and fear was at the door, that she knew love like Elizabeth Barrett, Calla's favorite poet, had known for Robert Browning.
How do I love thee, let me count the ways
 . . . But I'd been wrong about Calla. Life was miserable enough for her to end it suddenly and without so much as a goodbye.

I pulled away from the house with an ugly, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. It felt like I had been punched by some invisible force, and the pain of the blow lingered with the threat of staying on permanently. I had no choice but to go into town, not only to get my question answered but to find out as much as I could about Calla's fate. I wasn't going to rely on the
Press
or Betty Walsh for any kind of update or the full story. A story that, truth be told, I wasn't sure I wanted to know. The ending of it, Calla's suicide, was awful. I could only imagine the beginning and the middle.

The Studebaker had always ridden like a hay wagon with a temperamental engine, but the weather was drier than normal lately, and the rutted gravel road that led away from the house bounced and jarred me physically, almost enough to match what I felt inside my mind and in my heart.

I was surrounded by dun brown fields that went on for as far as the eye could see. There were slight rolls in the land, offering a wide vista, but mostly it was flat, unobscured, with the exception of faraway buttes. What trees that did poke up alongside the road had lost their leaves to the pushing wind a month prior. Most of them looked like skeleton hands reaching up to the broad blue sky for help. Spring was a long way off.

The road was lonely except for the sight of an occasional jackrabbit or a hawk gliding in the distance. I had the radio off only because I didn't want to blare the volume. The rumble and roar underneath the truck sounded like a constant explosion. A dust plume spewed from the tail-end of the Studebaker, and it would have taken little imagination to pretend that I was inside a rocket ship, leaving the world once and for all.

I reached over to my purse, pulled it next to me, then opened it—all the while keeping one eye on the road. I grabbed hold of my pack of cigarettes—Salems, the package green and white—then let them go as quickly as I'd grabbed them.

Calla and I had shared a cigarette nearly every time I'd stopped in the library to visit with her or pick up some errant piece of information that I'd needed. That would never happen again. I could hardly bear the thought of it, and I nearly started crying again. I steeled myself, though, mainly from the embarrassment that I'd felt by breaking down in front of Jaeger and Betty.

I picked up the pack of cigarettes again, eased one into my mouth, put the pack back where it belonged, and pushed in the dashboard lighter. I could taste the mint on the edge of my lip and found no calming effect to it at all. I hoped that would come in the form of a puff or two.

Hank had never smoked, though he was fond of a chaw of Redman tobacco on occasion—mostly when there were men about, working on the engine of one machine or another. He would never chew or spit in front of me, or any other woman for that matter. Nor did Hank like it that I smoked. I wasn't regular about it, but it steadied my nerves when I needed it to. I'd hid my smoking from him before Lida and Erik had been murdered, but not so much anymore—though I would go outside when I felt the need to light one up.

The lighter clicked and ejected outward. I grabbed it and put the red hot coil to the end of the Salem and sucked in as deep as I could. Something needed to calm me down before I got into town. Smoking was the only thing I could think of.

“To Calla,” I said aloud as I exhaled, obscuring my vision for a second, filling it with a gray cloud that lingered, then blew back and stung my eyes. It was a good thing I wasn't in downtown Dickinson or I might've wrecked the truck and really found myself up a tree.