Our Jack. Jacky-boy, as his mother, the late Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, used to say.
He had followed Dale through the empty house, upstairs and down, into the basement, dutifully admiring the new furnace and water heater Gilbertson had installed the year before his father's death, the quality of the repairs he had made since then, the shining grain of the wooden floors, the thickness of the insulation in the attic, the solidity of the windows, the many craftsmanlike touches that met his eye.
"Yeah, I did a lot of work on the place," Dale told him. "It was pretty shipshape to begin with, but I like working with my hands. After a while it turned into sort of a hobby. Whenever I had a couple of hours free, weekends and such, I got in the habit of driving over here and puttering around. I don't know, maybe it helped me feel like I was staying in touch with my dad. He was a really good guy, my dad. He wanted me to be a farmer, but when I said I was thinking of getting into law enforcement, he supported me straight down the line. Know what he said? ‘Go into farming half hearted, it'll kick you in the tail sunrise to sundown. You'd wind up feeling no better than a mule. Your mom and I didn't bring you into this world to turn you into a mule.' "
"What did she think?" Jack had asked.
"My mom came from a long line of farmers," Dale had said. "She thought I might find out that being a mule wasn't so bad after all. By the time she passed away, which was four years before my dad, she'd gotten used to my being a cop. Let's go out the kitchen door and take a gander at the meadow, okay?"
While they were standing outside and taking their gander, Jack had asked Dale how much he wanted for the house. Dale, who had been waiting for this question, had knocked five thousand off the most he and Sarah had ever thought he could get. Who was he kidding? Dale had wanted Jack Sawyer to buy the house where he had grown up — he'd wanted Jack to live near him for at least a couple of weeks during the year. And if Jack did not buy the place, no one else would.
"Are you serious?" Jack had asked.
More dismayed than he wished to admit, Dale had said, "Sounds like a fair deal to me."
"It isn't fair to you," Jack had said. "I'm not going to let you give this place away just because you like me. Raise the asking price, or I walk."
"You big-city hotshots sure know how to negotiate. All right, make it three thousand more."
"Five," Jack said. "Or I'm outta here."
"Done. But you're breaking my heart."
"I hope this is the last time I buy property off one of you low-down Norwegians," Jack said.
He had purchased the house long-distance, sending a down payment from L.A., exchanging signatures by fax, no mortgage, cash up front. Whatever Jack Sawyer's background might have been, Dale had thought, it was a lot wealthier than the usual police officer's. Some weeks later, Jack had reappeared at the center of a self-created tornado, arranging for the telephone to be connected and the electricity billed in his name, scooping up what looked like half the contents of Roy's Store, zipping off to Arden and La Riviere to buy a new bed, linens, tableware, cast-iron pots and pans and a set of French knives, a compact microwave and a giant television, and a stack of sound equipment so sleek, black, and resplendent that Dale, who had been invited over for a companionable drink, figured it must have cost more than his own annual salary. Much else, besides, had Jack reeled in, some of the much else consisting of items Dale had been surprised to learn could be obtained in French County, Wisconsin. Why would anyone need a sixty-five-dollar corkscrew called a WineMaster? Who was this guy, what kind of family had produced him?
He'd noticed a bag bearing an unfamiliar logo filled with compact discs — at fifteen, sixteen dollars a pop, he was looking at a couple hundred dollars' worth of CDs. Whatever else might have been true of Jack Sawyer, he was into music in a big way. Curious, Dale bent down, pulled out a handful of jewel boxes, and regarded images of people, generally black, generally with instruments pressed to or in their mouths. Clifford Brown, Lester Young, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Desmond. "I never heard of these guys," he said. "What is this, jazz, I guess?"
"You guess right," Jack said. "Could I ask you to help me move furniture around and hang pictures, stuff like that, in a month or two? I'm going to have a lot of stuff shipped here."
"Anytime." A splendid idea bloomed in Dale's mind. "Hey, you have to meet my uncle Henry! He's even a neighbor of yours, lives about a quarter mile down the road. He was married to my aunt Rhoda, my father's sister, who died three years ago. Henry's like an encyclopedia of weird music."