Wide Open (20 page)

“Not today,” Pete said. And without another word, he punched her in the jaw, smooth and quick, like a striking snake. Hallie was as ready for it as she could be, but still, it snapped her head back and bounced the back of her skull painfully off the truck fender. Knocked her to the ground, too, though she didn’t realize it for a stark half second.

She was trying to scramble to her feet when Pete grabbed her hard by the elbow and hauled her up. “Martin wants to talk to you,” he said.

The sirens, which had been steady background while they were talking, were suddenly loud, were right
there
. Two sheriff’s cars pulled fast into the parking lot and stopped, headlights shining on Pete and Hallie.

“Not today, Pete,” Hallie said.

*   *   *

The guy with the shotgun had disappeared into the prairie grass when the cars arrived, so it was just her and Pete, looking like quarreling lovers. Pete tried to tell them that Hallie’d been trespassing, but Ole, the sheriff, was disgusted with the both of them.

“I do not need this kind of shit from you,” Ole told her when it was just Hallie and him in the little conference room off his office. “Stumbling over bodies? Getting in fights with Pete Bolluyt? Of all people. I always thought you had more sense than your daddy. But maybe I was wrong.”

Hallie didn’t say anything, figured talking would prolong things, and she was tired and wet and cold. She’d wanted Martin to show his hand, and he had. Unfortunately, she still wasn’t sure what that hand was. There was the blood, the lines on the floor and walls at Uku-Weber. But what did it all mean?

She wanted someone to talk to—wanted Boyd to talk to—so badly, it hurt. But that wasn’t happening. He made that pretty plain when he’d brought her back to her truck. And she sure wasn’t going to beg for it. So, she shoved the thought aside because it wasn’t helping.

Ole stopped talking and looked at her. She was trying not to shiver, trying not to look as wet and cold as she felt. Apparently she hadn’t been all that successful.

“Oh, get the hell out of here,” Ole said.

“Aren’t there—I don’t know—charges?”

“No, there aren’t goddamned charges! But if you’re not out of my sight in the next five minutes, there sure as hell will be. If I have to make up a law to charge you with.”

It wasn’t until Hallie was outside that she remembered that her pickup truck was still sitting in the Uku-Weber parking lot.

Shit
.

In the end she called Brett, who was in her car, driving back from Rapid City. She came, though it took her forty-five minutes to get there.

“Why are you all wet? Why is your truck in the Uku-Weber parking lot? And why are you at the sheriff’s office?”

“It rained. Because. And I got in a fight.”

Brett looked sideways at her. “Well, that last is obvious,” Brett said. Hallie figured there was probably a pretty good bruise from where Pete had hit her. It felt like it, anyway. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Now?”

Brett pulled into the long drive to Uku-Weber. Hallie rubbed her temple because she had a headache the size of Texas. “I don’t … know enough yet,” she finally said. “I want it to make sense.”

“Don’t—,” Brett started, stopped, then started again. “It’s not your fault Dell died,” she said.

Hallie’d been about to say something else, and her teeth clacked together when she closed her mouth. “I know,” she finally said.

Brett stopped in front of Hallie’s pickup. She turned to look at her, throwing her arm across the back of the seat. “No,” she said. “You don’t. You don’t know. You think you have to do these things yourself. You think you’re the only one who can or will or who has to, I guess. But you don’t, Hallie. People would help you if you let them.”

“Okay,” Hallie said, opening the car door. She leaned back in. “Glad to see that psychology degree’s doing you so much good.”

“Fuck you,” Brett said, though there was no heat in it.

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “Okay.”

22

The sun was shining again, but it had turned cold, little patches of ice along the road as Hallie headed back to the ranch to change her clothes. At least four people were dead—Dell, Sarah Hale, presumably dead six months ago, and the two bodies they’d found today—neither of them Sarah Hale’s because, well, because there were two more ghosts turned up where she’d found their bodies.

What the hell?

How had no one noticed?

She stopped the truck, just pulled over to the side of the road because she had to think this out.

She was shivering, but she got out of the truck anyway, stood, and looked at the ghosts, all of them present: Dell, Sarah Hale, and—crap, the other two looked so familiar to her. They were all of a type—except Dell—straight hair and dark, though varied in length, long legged and athletic looking. Dell’s tangled mass of hair, the sharpness of her features, her scrappy boots, seemed to set her away from them. And she seemed older than the others, though how could Hallie really tell? Each of them too insubstantial to judge.

But they looked so familiar. And yet … not. She’d seen them, or thought she had, somewhere. Damn.

And what about Jennie Vagts? She had the same lightning bolt mark that Dell had had. Had these other women been marked, too? Was Jennie next?

She realized Lorie had never called her back.

She could hear the sound of a car several miles away as she climbed back into the cab and fumbled along the seat until she found Dell’s cell phone. She punched in Lorie’s number and got voice mail. She left another message: “Lorie, call me. It’s important.”

She checked her messages. There were three.

The first message was from Boyd. Hallie debated listening to it. “I need to talk to you,” it said. “Meet me at Cleary’s. Around six. I should be finished with everything by then.”

The second message was from Boyd, too. “Please?”

And the third. “I’m sorry about earlier. I can explain. Try to explain. I think. Meet me. Okay?”

It made her laugh, unexpectedly, trying so hard to say what he wanted to say that it took him three messages to do it.

She called Lorie again.

“Did you just call me?”

“I left you a message yesterday,” Hallie said.

“Oh.” A long pause. “I don’t think I ever got it. I mean I didn’t get it.”

“Do you know Jennie Vagts’s phone number?”

“Jennie?” Lorie’s voice squeaked, like they had a bad connection.

“I want to get in touch with her.”

“You haven’t seen her?” Lorie sounded surprised.

“What’s going on?”

“I think—no one’s seen her since the funeral.”

“What?”

“No, it’s like—I mean, I’m sure it’s fine. But her mother was calling around, and what with everything … She has a boyfriend up in Brookings, you know, and her mother doesn’t like her to go up there, but she gets away. And she probably just forgot to call because people do. Even her mother’s not
worried
. At least that’s what she said when I saw her over at Cleary’s.”

Hallie closed her eyes. Dell and Sarah Hale and Ghost Number Three were in the cab with her, Ghost Number Four having disappeared altogether, air so cold, she should be able to see her breath, though she couldn’t. Jennie wasn’t here. Wasn’t a ghost. So that was good, right?

“Lorie,” she said.

“Yeah?” Lorie sounded cautious.

“I need to find her.”

“O-okay. Why?”

“You know everyone. Right?”

Silence. “Yeah, I kind of do.”

“Would you—? Can you see if you can find her?”

“Sometimes,” Lorie said after a brief pause, “I guess sometimes I wish the world was better than it is.”

“Is that a yes?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Thanks.”

Hallie started up the truck, but then had to wait to pull onto the highway for a dusty black Suburban with a long scratch down the passenger side. It pulled into the next drive and sat there until she passed. She watched it in her rearview mirror as it backed around and drove away.

By the time Hallie got back to the ranch, showered and changed and grabbed a peanut butter sandwich, it was five thirty. She went back upstairs to get her wet clothes and throw them in the wash. She fished the watch crystal out of the pocket of her jeans, dumped the clothes in the machine, and went back up to the kitchen.

She set the watch crystal aside for a moment, sat down at the table, and wrote up a new list:

—Blood plus sacrifice plus wall markings

—Lightning bolt

—Same symbols Uku-Weber and demo site fake machine.

—Dell … Who killed Dell? Why? Like/not like the others?

Because they hadn’t hidden her. Had Dell found out what was going on? Had she tried to stop it?

But what was it? How did it all come together?

It all led to Martin—or seemed to; that much she knew. But what was he doing? Did he seriously have some way to control the weather? And if he did, what did that have to do with Dell and the others?

Shit.

The clock in her head ticked inexorably. Two and a half days to figure this out, not just Dell’s death anymore, but to stop it, whatever it was, to keep anyone else from dying.

She picked up the watch crystal, fingering it slowly. She’d seen a watch shaped like that recently. She knew she had. A ghost nudged at her elbow, like a cold dull knife. She shifted away, but it came back again—nudge, nudge, nudge.

Hallie shoved the crystal back into her pocket, and went back to her father’s office. She found the key and unlocked the gun cabinet, took out a shotgun and a box of shells. She stood there for a long minute, looking at the shotgun in her hands. This was not a war zone, was not Afghanistan. This was her home. But there was a war going on here, all the same.

She turned to leave, and a ghost was suddenly there, batting at her like back in the field—
fear, fear, red, pain, omgwhywhywhy?

Hallie drew a sharp breath. She stepped forward; the ghost—it was Ghost Number Four, she saw now—advanced on her again. She stepped back. It stopped. She stepped forward. It batted at her again.

“What? I can’t leave the office? The hell? There’s no body here.” Her voice was snappy, because hadn’t it already been a hell of a day? And she was talking to a ghost. She put down the gun, put down the shells. The ghost drifted in the doorway, unmoving.

She took a sideways step to see if there was a gap to the right, and the ghost moved sideways with her. Hallie moved back, thinking she could get through the door. The ghost moved back.

Shit.

She moved another step to her left. The ghost didn’t move. Was it actually trying to tell her something? “Oh, for god’s sake, just learn to talk,” Hallie said. She took two steps to the left. The ghost moved with her. Another step. Still with her. She was in front of the computer desk. In front of the computer. Surely it wasn’t telling her to use the computer. The stack of papers she’d printed out the other day when she’d been doing research was to the left of the monitor. She held it out.

“You want to show me which one?”

The ghost bobbed in front of her, like it had no interest whatsoever in anything that Hallie did.

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “Okay.”

She flipped through the printouts quickly because she didn’t have time for this, or maybe this was all she had time for, because if it helped—

Karen Olsen.

In a photo taken in a Colorado library two years ago.
Two years ago
. Her right hand on Martin’s arm showed an antique watch with a hexagonal crystal.

Shit.
She looked at the ghost. Not exactly the same—longer hair, different style—but close enough.

Well, at least she knew.

There was a sharp rattle on the roof, and Hallie looked out to see tiny pellets of hail pelting down. They came harder, so that it felt like the house was shaking, though it was only the rattle of hundreds of hailstones on the roof. The storm kept up for almost ten minutes, long enough to cover the ground with the tiny pellets. Then it stopped, like someone flipping a switch. Hallie grabbed a jacket, her keys, and the shotgun, but when she walked out the door, the temperature was warm—nearly seventy, she figured—and the hailstones were melting so fast, they looked like they were vaporizing.

If Martin was controlling the weather, Hallie thought, he really wasn’t very good at it.

She was hardly out of the long drive, just making the turn from gravel onto hard-surfaced county road, when the cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.

“Hallie, so glad you’re there.”

Martin
.

“How did you get this number?” she asked.

“It was your sister’s number.” Like somehow that made it obvious he would use it to call Hallie.

“Yeah,” Hallie said. “How did you know I had it?”

“I don’t know.” He actually sounded surprised, like it was a mystery even to him. “You didn’t tell me, did you? No, of course not. Someone else must have told me,” he said. Well, it wasn’t like Pete didn’t know it, Hallie thought. Martin must have gotten it from him and didn’t want to admit it. Which, frankly, if she had anything to do with Pete Bolluyt, let alone was doing business with him in some way, she wouldn’t want to admit it either.

“What do you want?” Hallie asked.

“I heard you found a body.”

I found two bodies,
Hallie thought,
so apparently you don’t know everything.
She said, “Word gets around.”

“It’s a small place,” he said, and she thought she could hear the smile in his voice. He was originally from Rapid City, or at least had been from Rapid City when she’d met him for the first time, but he’d certainly embraced Taylor County while she’d been gone. His “spiritual home,” wasn’t that what he’d called it? “Maybe it’s macabre of me,” he said, “but do you know who it was? The sheriff isn’t saying yet. Pending notification, you know? And I—I knew a girl once who … She wasn’t, strictly speaking, from around here, but you never know. Well, you always wonder, don’t you? And she was from over—”