He pulls Lotte to him. She trips and stumbles on one of the loose cobblestones, but bites back a cry because she knows K?the is watching, ready to make fun of her for her clumsiness.
Herr Herschel bends to replace the loose stone. The ground underneath has subsided, leaving a sizable hole; all the stones in this section of the courtyard are loose. Courtyard—what a grand name for a small circle that has nothing courtly about it at all, just dead trees and bare glass-shard-filled earth where grass once grew. Only the stench of rotting waste connects it to a medieval court.
He puts an arm around his granddaughter and leads her back into the building.
21
DOWN ON THE FARM
PRIVATE EYES ARE REQUIRED to tell local LEOs when we’re about to start stalking or staking out on their territory. In Chicago, I don’t bother: the cops would either snarl at me to get out of their hair, or tie me up for hours in useless interrogations about my investigations. In Palfry, though, I began my day at Doug Kossel’s headquarters. In a county like this, everyone knows everyone. If the first person I questioned didn’t rat me out to the sheriff, the second would for sure.
“Your funeral,” he said. “No one’s talked to me about the boy, but if he’s putting the same things up his nose as his ma, he likely sneaked in and out when the farmers were sleeping. This is an early-to-bed kind of place, you know.”
I nodded meekly: there was no point in offering the sheriff my version of Martin Binder. The sheriff’s office was in the city-county building at the south end of Main Street. I’d found a parking space without any trouble: the Buy-Smart outside town had decimated Palfry’s stores even before the economy collapsed. Now there was just a handful of survivors: a small drugstore that did a brisk business in alcohol and lottery tickets, a dusty furniture store, and a few diners.
I’d left Chicago at six, covering the hundred miles down I-55 in under two hours, but as the sheriff had said, this was an early-to-bed town. People had been working their fields since before sunrise. At eight-thirty, they were taking a break at Lazy Susan’s Coffee Shop, which looked like the one lively place on the street.
When I walked inside, heads turned. Strangers were rare enough down here to merit a second look, but I was merely another woman in jeans whose dark hair showed flecks of white, nothing out of the ordinary. Conversations resumed.
Lazy Susan’s was a no-frills kind of place. Padded red banquettes along the walls, tubular chairs around Formica tables in the middle, paper placemats, and a couple of waitresses who dashed around far too quickly to be called lazy anything. Most of the tables were filled, but I found an empty stool at the counter.
“What’ll yours be, hon?” A waitress appeared out of nowhere, pouring coffee into my mug without asking.
The flimsy placemats had the menus printed on them. Eggs, hash browns, waffles. I’d had coffee before leaving Chicago, but I realized I was famished.
“A short stack and OJ,” I said.
She didn’t write it down, just hollered it to the griddleman behind her and zipped off to her next battle station.
“How’s the dog?”
I turned to see a woman in uniform standing behind me. Jenny Orlick, her badge read. One of the deputies who’d come when I found Ricky Schlafly’s body in the cornfield. She’d done a better job than me—I wouldn’t have recognized her again.
“She’s on the mend, Deputy. Would you like her when she’s shed her heartworm larvae? She seems to have a sweet disposition.”
“No dog from that hellhole can have a sweet disposition,” Orlick said. “Anyway, I have three cats who would rip her to ribbons within a week. Is that why you came down? To find her a home?”
I pulled Martin Binder’s picture out of my briefcase. “I’m hoping someone around here might have spotted him. I need to find him.”
“Is he a Chicago kid? Why would he be down here?”
“He’s the son of a woman from the meth house.” I gave Orlick a quick thumbnail of Martin’s disappearance, his grandmother’s murder, the drug house in Chicago where I’d flushed Judy Binder earlier in the week.
Orlick frowned over Martin’s face. “I think I’d remember him, he looks so, well, New Yorky. We only have two Jewish families here in Palfry, so he’d kind of stand out, if you know what I mean. If you want, I’ll take it over to the Buy-Smart, put it up on their bulletin board. At the County office, too, if you have an extra.”
I pulled a half-dozen copies out of my case and printed my cell phone number on the bottom of each one. My short stack arrived as Jenny’s partner, Glenn Davilats, came over to clap her on the shoulder and tell her it was time to roll. Both of them looked better than they had when we’d met at the cornfield.