Strange Country Read online

  “Old bones, like a body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a body in Prue Stalking Horse’s cellar?”

  “Old, like it’s been there a long time. Maybe before Prue moved in. We’re checking.”

  “She must have known about it, though. She must have known about the stones.”

  “That’s what we need to figure out. Even if the bones have nothing to do with Prue’s death, we need to know who it was and how they died. As for the stones, they asked me to see what I could figure out, actually.”

  “You? Why?” Wouldn’t they bring in their own experts or take the stones to a lab?

  “Ole says I’m his go-to guy for unexplained phenomena,” Boyd said with a ghost of a smile.

  “Ole? You’ve talked to Ole about this? I didn’t think Ole talked about ‘unexplained phenomena.’”

  Boyd got up, crossed to the sink, and grabbed a paper towel from the roll. He came back and wiped the table underneath his coffee mug, wiped the bottom of the mug, threw the towel in the trash, and sat back down.

  “He says he doesn’t talk about it. He says, figure it out. You know Ole.”

  Hallie tapped a finger on the table. “What happens when you pick one of the stones up? Can you hear the dead? Or anything weird?” She remembered what Laddie had told her, that the stones affected different people differently.

  “I have no idea,” Boyd said. “I haven’t touched them and neither, as far as I know, has anyone else. It just—” He paused as if he couldn’t find the right words. “—it seemed like a bad idea.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie agreed. It probably would be a bad idea. Probably. Someone ought to do it anyway. “Laddie says that Prue was interested in his stone,” she told him. “He said the stones store magic.”

  He nodded. “That’s what he told me too. Magic storage. I don’t even know what that means. Where does the magic come from?”

  “What does any of it mean?” Hallie got up and started pacing. “Prue was shot in front of her house at three o’clock in the morning when you were there.” She stopped. “Do you think the fact that you were there is significant?”

  He considered the question. “There’s no way to know. If you were going to do it at night, this would be the way to do it. Get her to come to the front door, line up the shot and … shoot her.”

  “Couldn’t you shoot her when she came home from work? When she was leaving Cleary’s? Couldn’t you break into her house and kill her just about any time you wanted?”

  “Maybe it means something,” Boyd said, “the timing, making sure someone was there when it happened.”

  “Maybe she had her house protected somehow, like the hex ring.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “And now you have these stones.”

  “Which may not have anything to do with Prue’s death.”

  “Okay,” Hallie conceded, unsatisfied.

  Boyd frowned at her and Hallie realized again how tired he was, thought about how little sleep he’d probably had and that he’d just told her he was going to be working tomorrow. “I know,” she said. “You don’t know.” Why was everything always so slow?

  Boyd rubbed a hand across his face. “Look,” he said, “there’s really not much more we can do with this right now.”

  “I guess not,” Hallie said. But there had to be something. “I think Laddie knows something he hasn’t told me. I don’t know if it’s important.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to him again tomorrow.”

  Hallie could see even that seemed like a lot of effort, thinking about tomorrow, about talking to people, about doing anything. She knew about that, about being that tired, when you couldn’t stop thinking, but every thought seemed to carry the weight of a thousand years, too much and too hard and just …

  “Or, I could talk to him,” she said.

  Boyd stood. “You need to be careful,” he said. And Hallie hoped he would stop right there, but he didn’t. “This is an official police investigation. You can’t interfere.”

  She drew in her breath and held it. It didn’t do any good; the words tumbled out anyway. “Really?” she said. “All of it? It’s all official? What if this is about the stones? What if that’s why she was killed? How are they going to figure that out? Did they ‘officially’ give you one of the stones? Like, you’re the official expert in weird stones? They’re not going to pursue that, they don’t want to pursue it, they don’t even want to know.”

  “It’s an official police investigation,” he repeated. Like, I can’t do this now, can’t come up with anything else to say.

  “Yes,” she said. “And we know how that goes.”

  Boyd looked at her for a minute. “Damnit, Hallie,” he said wearily. “Just … damnit.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was swearing in general or at her. She was sorry about not leaving it alone, about his lack of sleep, about Prue’s death, about all the things they hadn’t even touched on—Beth and Death and what would happen next, but she wasn’t going to tell him she would leave it alone. Because she wouldn’t. And she wanted him to know it. That was how they did things.

  He didn’t say anything more. He crossed the room, poured his undrunk coffee down the drain, rinsed the cup, and set it in the sink. Then he put his coat on and went outside. Hallie looked at the closed door after he left. Damnit. Was this what all men did when they didn’t want to talk or just the men she knew? Her father, Laddie, Boyd. Who wouldn’t want to stand outside in the cold instead of inside somewhere where it was warm?

  She waited a few more minutes, didn’t hear the sound of his car starting up, so finally, she got up too, put her own coat on, and followed him.

  She found him on the leeward side of the old barn with his hands shoved into his pockets and the collar of his jacket turned up against his neck. She went over and put her arms around him without saying anything. She laid her head against his chest. She could smell the clean scent of aftershave and soap. After a minute, he pulled his hands free from his jacket pockets and pulled her closer, resting his chin on the top of her head.

  “Don’t we ever get a break?” he said.

  Hallie almost laughed. He had no idea. Which wasn’t fair and she knew it wasn’t fair. They’d spent the whole night talking about Prue’s murder and who knew or had seen what and when, and still, he didn’t know the half of what was going on.

  She took a moment she didn’t usually take, a moment where she didn’t say—hey, I have something else to tell you or I saw Beth Hannah today, though she would, and before he left. But for a minute, for the length of a long breath and less than the time it took for the cold to penetrate to her bones, she stood with him like the world had finally left them space, even though it hadn’t and probably never would.

  She tilted her head up and kissed him, long and slow, like it wasn’t ten degrees outside, like they hadn’t both spent the day on things that shouldn’t have happened and couldn’t be believed. He tightened his arms around her waist and kissed her back.

  She could feel the rough stubble of the short hairs on the back of his neck, could feel him tight up against her, couldn’t feel the cold at all, because this was what mattered, this moment, right here. Reluctantly, she broke the kiss and stepped back.

  “Beth Hannah was here today,” she said.

  Boyd stepped back too, almost as if he couldn’t help himself.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked.

  She said, “I am saying something.”

  “Hallie.” Like she was missing the point.

  “Boyd.” Like, no.

  “She’s been missing for months. I’ve been looking for her for months. I was worried about her.”

  “I left you a message.”

  “What?”

  “On your phone, after she left, I called you.”

  “What did she want?”

  “It’s … complicated.”

>   He moved so that he was backlit by the yard light and it threw the planes of his face into relief so that he looked older, or his actual age instead of like a kid who was barely out of high school. “Complicated like you don’t want to tell me or complicated like it’s actually complicated?”

  “Are you trying to start an argument with me?” she asked.

  She could see his breath in the stillness of the night air, spooling out in slow motion. “I just…,” he finally said. “I don’t understand. Why did she come here? Why hasn’t she called?”

  Because she doesn’t need you to lean on anymore, she thought. What she said was, “That’s part of what’s complicated.”

  “Is she okay?” he said.

  “As far as I can tell,” she said.

  He didn’t say more, didn’t ask the dozen questions she thought he wanted to ask, which was good—it was good—because it was complicated. Not least because Boyd thought that Death wasn’t coming back, thought that even if he did, Hallie would say no and it would be fine. Because there are rules, right, he’d asked her. The rules are back in place. Which, maybe. But the rules said that she owed Death. She’d been supposed to die and she hadn’t. She’d already broken the rules. The question was whether what happened next was her choice or Death’s.

  She reached toward him, then let her hand fall because it would be easy, she could already see that. Kissing him again, wrapping her arms around him, taking him upstairs right now to her bedroom, those were all things that made sense of the world—or denied it—made her feel as if she were sufficiently weighted, as if nothing could free her of this place, this land, this earth. Not even Death.

  But tonight—today—was not about easy.

  “Boyd,” she said. “I will always tell you. That’s what I’m telling you. But Beth is okay. You have a lot on your plate. And the details can wait until tomorrow. I wanted you to know that she’d been here, but you don’t need to know all the details now.” She sounded cool and rational and not like herself at all.

  The truth was, she wanted him to leave it, to concentrate on Prue’s murder and leave this to her. She didn’t want his advice, she didn’t want his help, she didn’t want to talk to him about it. And she didn’t know why, like a wall had gone up that she couldn’t see through or around and didn’t even know why it was there. Just—wham!—barriers to the horizon. Or between her and Boyd, at least.

  Finally, he nodded. He rubbed a hand across his chin. “All right,” he said. “I understand.”

  Though he didn’t. She could tell. She didn’t even understand it herself.

  He kissed her again and Hallie wanted to kiss him back like it was the last time, though she had no idea why. He got in his SUV. The engine started with a reluctant whine against the cold, and he was gone.

  She watched him go, his taillights red against the darkness of the night. She’d been alone before—on the ranch, in the army. She’d vacationed once in a cabin in the mountains in North Carolina and hadn’t talked to anyone for three days. All that had been fine.

  But tonight she felt lonely and smaller than seemed fair.

  15

  It was dark when Boyd woke the next morning. The fleeting edge of a dream left a nagging sense of urgency and foreboding. He’d left the bedroom window open an inch the night before, and the early morning air was sharp and chill. Damp too. Damp the only promise that spring was coming, but at least it was a promise and there would be a spring. He turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling. He had a pretty clear idea of what to do today—go back to Prue’s house and look around again, this time without a dozen police officers obscuring everything. He wanted to look more closely at the stones Gerson had given him. He wanted to know more about Gerson, what she knew and whether she could point him toward reference material, toward any information at all about magic, about reapers and black dogs, about prescient dreams, about any of it. Because if there was one thing Boyd had, it was questions.

  Last night when he left the ranch, he’d been, not angry, but tired and unhappy and wanting something he couldn’t quite name. Beth was back. And Hallie hadn’t told him. That was how it felt, though it wasn’t true. She did leave a message; he’d checked. But for some reason, in his head last night, in the way everything had come together—Prue’s death, the stones, going for a day and a half on three hours’ sleep—it seemed not enough. And as he drove, the moon rising slow in front of him, the night sky clear and cold and bowing deep to the distant horizon, he had realized that what Hallie had or hadn’t said about Beth Hannah was not the problem.

  When he first met Hallie—which hadn’t been that long ago, but seemed like a lifetime, like he’d always known her or been waiting to meet her—it had been clear that she didn’t need anyone. It had also been clear that she could use help, whether she knew it or not, and he’d done his best to deliver. She’d appreciated it, but she didn’t look for it. Over the last few months, they’d achieved an understanding about whom to talk to and whom to look for in a crowd, and whom to call when something happened. In a way, last night felt like they were back where they’d begun. He was pretty sure that if a challenge came along, say, this afternoon, Hallie would do her damnedest to keep him away from it. Not because she didn’t trust him or believe that he could help. Not even—he didn’t think—because she wanted to protect him, though she probably did; he knew he wanted to protect her.

  She wouldn’t keep it from him because she didn’t trust him. She’d do it because she didn’t trust herself.

  For the next three days he didn’t see Hallie at all. He called a couple of times, got voice mail. She called him back. They talked briefly once and arranged to meet for breakfast at the Dove, but then canceled on each other in crossing voice mail messages.

  He spent a day and a half tracking down the phone number in St. Paul that Prue had called on the evening before she died. Ole said that DCI should take care of it, but he expected they weren’t going to get to it for a while. There’d been a triple murder in a parking lot in Rapid City, which everyone suspected was drug-related and which even the governor was demanding fast action on. Prue’s death all the way out in Taylor County merited a half page in the local section of the paper, and no one outside Taylor County was all that worried about it. Even Gerson, when Boyd called her to ask about the lab and forensic results, acted like she hadn’t thought much about the case since she’d left the day before.

  “We’re a little busy here,” she said.

  “We’re a little busy here too,” Boyd said. He wondered if Taylor County sat in some sort of psychic zone, something that made people forget what happened there once they’d left. Then he was sorry he’d thought it, because the way things had gone the last six months, it would probably turn out to be true.

  The phone company didn’t keep records back more than five years, and all that time the phone number in St. Paul had belonged to the copy shop. When he called the shop directly, they said for a year or so after they’d first opened, they’d gotten calls for a meat locker that had gone out of business.

  “We did get a call once for—let me think,” the owner told Boyd when he’d finally tracked her down. “Well, they called the franchise office, looking for old records, and the franchise office sent it to us. They couldn’t be bothered, I guess,” she said. “But, anyway, yeah, there was another name, because this person who called was looking for someone who had this number before the meat locker. Cheryl, maybe? Or Shannon? A woman’s name anyway. I remember because the person who called laughed when I told her we didn’t have any information back more than four years—never hurts to check, they said. Which struck me odd, you know. Check what?”

  “Wasn’t that Stalking Horse’s sister’s name?” Ole said when Boyd told him. He thumbed through a yellow notebook with a cheap cardboard cover bent in at the corners from wear. “Yup. Shannon Shortman. Funny Stalking Horse would call that number twenty years after her sister disappeared. Not like she didn’t know.”

  The
second morning when he’d been supposed to meet Hallie for breakfast, someone called to say that they’d heard shots fired out by the old Uku-Weber building. Normally, gunshots—particularly shotguns or rifles—were something people in Taylor County didn’t pay much attention to, but, “After Prue Stalking Horse,” the person on the phone had said, “well, I just don’t know.”

  Boyd and Ole had driven out there, but all they’d found was debris from the stone fountain still scattered across the parking lot, and an empty building that looked like it had been standing unused for twenty years instead of just six months. There was a FOR SALE sign by the road with 24,000 SQUARE FEET and INDUSTRIAL in big red letters. There was a row of neat bullet holes around one of the zeros in 24,000, but when Boyd got out to look closer, it was clear they weren’t new.

  “Who do you think will buy this place?” Ole asked as Boyd turned the patrol car around and headed back to town.

  “No one,” Boyd said.

  “Yeah.” Ole looked at him closely, as if he were seeing more than Boyd was comfortable revealing. “You’re probably right.”

  Boyd asked Ole for time to go back to Prue’s house now that the investigation teams were finished and to figure out what he could about the stones. “Well, sure,” Ole said. “I’ll just send DCI a bill when you’re done. Since we seem to be doing their jobs for them.”

  The house looked empty when Boyd parked on the street in front. The stark landscaping and blank white front giving the impression that it had been abandoned for years. Weedy grass grew along the corner of the garage, heeled over from months of winter snow and frost. He approached the house up the old sidewalk that ran from the street to the porch steps. He wondered if Prue had gotten many visitors, if she’d gotten any visitors. The house wasn’t inviting, impossible to tell, day or night, if anyone was home.

  He stepped around and let himself in with a key through the kitchen door. Everything looked disturbed, a film of dust on the counters and furniture, and yet it all looked just the same. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for beyond a better sense of who Prue had been and what she’d done. He spent a little over two and a half hours going through closets and dresser drawers. In the attic he found a stack of old photo albums, dusted for fingerprints but still there. It looked as if half the pictures were missing. Most of the remaining photographs were of open prairie, mountains he didn’t recognize, and oceans against gray-white skies. There was a series of photos, a total of five in all, shoved into a pocket in the front of one of the albums. He pulled them out to look at more closely because at first glance they reminded him in some way he couldn’t identify of the dream he’d had the night before. Though he angled them toward the window and toward the dim overhead light, it was impossible to see clearly what they were actually photographs of.