Strange Country Read online

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  To Sarah, Jenn, and Greg. Your friendship means the world to me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are a great many people who have been there throughout the writing of each of my books offering encouragement and insight. Without them, these books would not have been conceived, would not have been written, and you would not be reading them now.

  To Stacy Hill, my terrific editor, who provides exactly the right amount of feedback and whose critical analysis has made every one of these books better. To Caitlin Blasdell, my agent, who continues to offer me good advice about my books and my writing and my career. To Marco Palmieri, who kept this book and me on track. To Eliani Torres for “sharp” and helpful copyediting. To Irene Gallo and the Tor production team, who have produced a great-looking book.

  To Charlie Finlay and the rest of the writers at Blue Heaven for many conversations and critiques and all-around support.

  Sarah Prineas, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout, not just for being supportive and encouraging but also for being critical and honest. I hope my books get better with each one I write, but if they do, it’s because I have good friends who insist on it.

  And, as always, to my family, to my dogs, to the farm I grew up on, to Iowa and South Dakota and the land.

  Thank you.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Also by Deborah Coates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  It was three o’clock in the morning and the car had been parked in the same spot since the night before, had been there long enough that it iced over; the ice had half-melted and it iced over again so that it now looked permanent, like brittle armor. A Toyota, twenty years old, maybe a bit more, a nice car when it was new and it still looked pretty good, with nothing more than a little rust along the wheel wells. There was a web of spidering cracks in the back window on the passenger side, from a kicked-up stone or a hard stab with something pointed, not much yet, but as warm days and cold nights heated and cooled the glass, the cracks would spread.

  Boyd Davies left his patrol car running, light from the open driver’s door spilling out, frost-white exhaust puffing out the rear. He shrugged his jacket up close and shone a flashlight at the car, the yellow beam bouncing off the icy windows. West Prairie City was quiet as a tomb. That’s what people said—quiet as a tomb, because no one else was around, because there was that peculiar sense of emptiness that came with early morning and loneliness and cold. Boyd checked the license plate, had to scrape ice and old dirt away to read it. South Dakota plates, but not local. He went back to his car and called it in, sat in the driver’s seat with the door still open.

  It was cold and clear, but there wasn’t much wind. Boyd liked it, liked this time of year when winter was still heavy in the clouds and in the pale sun, when the temperature still hovered down in frostbite territory. He liked the way the grass lay over, the way the trees looked, stark and forbidding, liked the faint hint of a promise of warmth underneath all of it, something changing in the wind and the slant of the sun in the afternoons. It was mid-March and it felt like it had been winter forever, but spring would come.

  It always came.

  Dispatch came back and asked him to repeat the license plate, which he did. A coyote trotted down the middle of the street, stopped in the wash of his headlights, its eyes gleaming. A moment passed, watched and watching; then the radio crackled and the coyote slipped sideways into the shadows.

  “Go ahead,” Boyd said when the dispatcher, Chelly Sweet, who was new, asked if he was available.

  “That plate belongs to a 1987 Toyota Corolla, light blue, registered to a Tommy Ulrich. You want the address?”

  “Yes.”

  She read off an address in Rapid City, on the west side, Boyd thought, though he’d have to look it up to be sure. “Phone number?”

  “Hold on,” she said. He could hear papers and the soft sound of computer keys.

  “Yeah, looks like he called in earlier,” Chelly said. “Said he was in town yesterday evening—not, yesterday, like eight hours ago. The night before that. His car broke down and he’s getting someone to tow it.” She made an irritated noise. “Somebody just wrote it down on a scrap of paper. There’s no call record.” She sighed. “Probably the new dispatcher.” Like the extra two weeks’ experience she had made all the difference between sloppiness and proficiency. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Boyd said. “It’s fine.”

  He fastened his seat belt and closed the door. Templeton had its own two-person police force, but the rest of the county was his—the sheriff’s department. Nights like this when it was just him, the central dispatcher, and the overnight cashier down at the Gas ’Em Up on CR54, he felt as if it had all been created just for him, as if the wide-open prairie and the distant smattering of lights at scattered ranches and mobile homes and crossroads were a separate world, his world.

  He drove out of West Prairie City and headed south. He’d swing down past the ranch, though he’d already been that way earlier. It pulled at him, that ranch, so that he always knew where it was in relation to where he was, like magnetic north or homing pigeons.

  Three cars passed him on the long loop, enough traffic so at this hour—three in the morning in the middle of the week—he watched them close. A cold dry wind blew out of the northwest. A tumbleweed bounced onto the road, hit the side of the car with a hollow scratch, and was gone somewhere behind him. A half mile later, he slowed to turn back onto the county road, no lights out here other than the stars and his own headlights. There was something ahead, a shadow in the twilight at the edge of his high beams. He slowed. Coyote. Another one. He tapped the brakes. Light from the coyote’s eyes reflected straight back at him, sharp and otherworldly. It trotted toward him along the road. When it drew parallel to the car, it turned its head and seemed to look directly at him before it angled across the old pavement and disappeared back into the night and the prairie.

  Boyd idled his car. A vast nothingness surrounded him. Darkness and grass, wind and cold. He put his foot back on the gas, put a hand up to check the set of his collar, smooth th
e flap of his shirt pocket, brush nonexistent dust from the yoke of the steering wheel—so automatic, he barely noticed that he did it.

  He felt a familiar tug as he passed the end of the drive up to Hallie’s ranch, like something real, like a wire. He didn’t answer it. It was past three, he was on duty, and he wasn’t that guy. The one who signed in, picked up his car, then drove home to sleep a few hours when he was supposed to be on patrol. He would never be that guy. Though he’d met guys like that—one or two—in the five years he’d been a police officer, met them at out-of-town trainings where they bragged in the bar after class. He didn’t understand—understood the pull, but didn’t understand—couldn’t—the dereliction. Because it was a promise, not to the job, but to the people in the towns and on the ranches. A promise that he would be where he said he was and that he would be ready. People said he was a Boy Scout, all honor and duty and service.

  And he was.

  So, there wasn’t any question when he passed Hallie’s drive that he would drive past. No question that patrolling an empty road was more important than to see her, hear her say—as she did—“Jesus, Boyd, it’s three o’clock in the morning.” More important than her lips against his, the clean soap scent of her hair, the soft exhale of her breath against his neck.

  Lately there’d been an on-again, off-again feel to their relationship, not on his side, but on hers. He liked her, liked her a lot, maybe loved her, though it wasn’t a word he said quickly and when he did say it, he meant it honestly and deeply. But like her? Love parts of her like coming home? Yes. He liked the way she thought and even the way she acted, impulsively but worried about the consequences. Or acknowledging them but going ahead anyway. And he liked her, liked the way they fit together, opposite and yet the same.

  After Hollowell, after the walls between the living world and the under had rebuilt themselves, after Hallie had told him what happened at the end—because he didn’t, had never remembered on his own. After all that, she’d been different. Maybe no one else noticed. He’d figured it was the result of everything that happened, not just killing Travis Hollowell the way she had, but also the way her sister, Dell, had died, the way Hallie herself had been forced out of the army, the way Pabby’d died and Beth had disappeared and Death, especially Death who had asked her to take his place in the under, to control the reapers, the harbingers, and the unmakers. It was as if she’d decided, why commit to anything? And that would weigh on her, he knew, because whether she recognized it or not, it was what she did—commit—to everything she did.

  Whatever it was that bothered her, it was evident in their relationship these days, three steps forward, two steps back.

  The radio crackled, almost startling him.

  “Are you there?” Chelly Sweet’s voice sounded thin like old wire, like she thought maybe the world had disappeared in the last thirty minutes, like if she looked outside, there would be nothing but flat and dark and empty, which the prairie wasn’t, not empty, and not as flat as people thought it was.

  “Go ahead,” he said. Precise as he was, he didn’t bother to identify himself. This time of night he was the only one answering.

  “Got a call from a woman over on Cemetery. Says she thinks she has a prowler.” She gave him the address, which he punched into the GPS even though he didn’t need it, knew pretty much where every occupied house in the county was. He flipped on the lights and did a quick U-turn.

  No siren.

  No one would hear it anyway.

  Twenty minutes later he pulled to a stop in front of the address Chelly had given him. It was an ordinary house, vaguely Victorian, but with no extra flourishes—no shingle siding or fancy paint, the porch had been enclosed years ago so that it faced the street white and stark and blockish, seeming to glow in the early morning darkness. Boyd turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. He zipped his jacket against the cold, slipped the hem up over his holster so he could reach his gun if he had to, and stood for a moment, assessing. The narrow front sidewalk had a crack running lengthwise and jagged through the middle of three separate sections. There was no yard light, no porch light, though a dim glow shone through the closed curtains of the inside porch window.

  Boyd checked up and down the street. Wind burned across his cheekbones, cold and dry. Cemetery Road was on the north edge of West Prairie City. The cemetery for which the road was named occupied two lots directly across the street with an open field gone to grass and the county road beyond it. To the east of the cemetery sat a two-story-and-attic Queen Anne; to the west, a three-bedroom, no-frills ranch house built nearly a hundred years later. Three houses down, there was a light on in a second-floor bedroom, a garage light on in the house across, but otherwise the entire neighborhood was dark and quiet.

  He skirted the house once: straggly shrubs underneath the porch windows in front, a single car garage down a narrow drive, a long row of overgrown privet along the garage, a big old maple tree in the center of the backyard with a few clusters of dried leaves rattling in the wind. There was a small back porch, enclosed like the front one, and in the east side yard, a row of paving stones, like someone had once intended a garden, but had run out of steam. No sign of a prowler, but the ground was frozen hard and there was no snow to leave tracks.

  His knock on the rattly porch door sounded like a trio of gunshots, too loud for three o’clock in the morning. He waited. There was no movement behind the curtained windows where he presumed the living room was, no sound of footsteps approaching the door. He knocked again.

  Finally the inside door opened and he saw, framed against the hall light, who it was who’d called—Prue Stalking Horse, who worked as a bartender down at Cleary’s and who always seemed to know things, whether she was willing to talk about those things or not. Boyd dropped a step down and waited for her to open the porch door and let him in.

  She was tall, though not as tall as he was, with long white-blond hair, high cheekbones, and light blue eyes. There was a certain agelessness about her, but he’d never been able to figure out if that was because she really did look young or because she so rarely smiled or showed any sort of intense emotion.

  He’d dreamed about her once.

  Not—yeah, not in that way.

  Boyd’s dreams were, or at least had always been, about events that were going to happen. He’d dreamed about Prue maybe four months ago, just after Hallie came back to Taylor County, after Martin and Pete died, after the end of Uku-Weber, but before the rest of it. It had been a short dream, barren landscape, gray skies—not cloudy skies, but a flat gray, like old primer or warships. There’d been three people in the dream, all of them so far away, they’d seemed to him like nothing more than dark silhouettes, and yet he’d known just from their dark profiles who two of them were—Prue Stalking Horse and Hallie Michaels. The third figure wasn’t someone he knew, or at least not someone he recognized within the context of the dream. He’d known it was that person, the unrecognizable one, who was important, who could have answered his questions, if he’d known which questions to ask. Of all of them, that third person was the one, in the dream, who knew exactly what was coming.

  Tonight, Prue’s hair was smoothed back flat and tight, caught up in a neat knot at the nape of her neck. She wore an oversized denim shirt with old paint stains and black leggings to her ankles. Her feet were bare despite the late hour and the freezing temperatures.

  Boyd held the door as he entered, then let it close slowly behind him. Prue still hadn’t turned on a porch light, so they stood in a sort of gray twilight illuminated only by the streetlights out along the road and the light inside in the hallway. The enclosed porch was a clutter of mismatched furniture, old rag rugs, and cardboard boxes stacked three high. “You reported a prowler,” Boyd said, his inflection settling the sentence somewhere between a statement and a question.

  She turned away without answering him and walked back into the house. Boyd took a last look at the porch and the yard just beyond the windows and foll
owed her inside. He wondered if this was one of those calls that came in the middle of the night sometimes, when sunrise seemed infinitely far and loneliness crowded in. People called because they couldn’t admit the real problem, that there was no sound in the house except their own breath moving in and out of their lungs. They called with whispered voices—something outside, they’d say, please come. Prue Stalking Horse had never struck Boyd as that sort of person. But then, people weren’t always who you thought they were.

  The living room was dark, shades pulled tight over double windows north and east. Like the porch, it was full of mismatched furniture, mostly overstuffed chairs upholstered in faded chintz and small side tables with delicately turned legs, everything looking like it was bought at church sales and auctions after people died. The room smelled like lemon polish and carpet shampoo, though dust danced along a stray shaft of gray light from the floor lamp by the north windows.

  “I heard a sound,” she said.

  “In the house or outside?” he asked.

  “Out … outside.” She stumbled over the word and it was the first sign Boyd had seen that she was even a little nervous. She didn’t wring her hands or tug at her clothes. She didn’t stare uncomfortably at his face as if looking for a sign that he believed her or understood, that he could stop whatever it was that had frightened her. She swallowed and continued, her voice smoothing out as she spoke. “We close at midnight on weeknights,” she said. “I usually get home around twelve forty or so, after I let the cleaning crew in and cash out. It’s not far. A mile, maybe?” Like it was a question. Like he would know the answer. “Sometimes in summer, I walk,” she said.

  “But you drove tonight.”

  Boyd could be patient. It annoyed Hallie, when he was patient. Hallie acted. Even when they didn’t know anything, even when there were important questions still to be answered, she preferred to do something. But patience worked. In this job, sometimes patience was all he had.

  2

  After a moment that was mostly silent, Boyd unzipped his jacket halfway, unbuttoned the flap on his shirt pocket, and pulled out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen. He clicked the top of the pen and flipped the notebook open to an empty page. He did it all slowly and deliberately, wanted to give her time to see him do it, to take a breath, to get what she wanted to tell him straight in her head.