“This here’s my number,” Orlick said, handing me a card from the Palfry County sheriff’s department. “I’ll call you if I hear anything, but you get in touch if anything gets squirrelly, or if you find another druggie with his pecker getting pecked.”
“Pecker pecking” must be a local idiom, not a sign that the sheriff was a psychopath. Jenny and her partner took off, but my waitress and one of my counter-mates had heard our conversation, which meant it spread through the coffee shop at warp speed. While I ate my pancakes, most of the people in Lazy Susan’s stopped by to look at Martin’s picture. None of them admitted to having seen him before.
As the diner cleared out, the waitresses took a breather. Two went outside for a smoke, but the third perched on the stool next to mine.
“You really a detective?” she asked.
I nodded. “These pancakes are delicious. Housemade?”
She grinned. “You flattering me because Jenny Orlick told you I’m Susie Foyle?”
I shook my head. “Lazy Susan? How come? Stevedores on the waterfront don’t work as hard as you.”
She was pleased by the compliment, but said, “Oh, you know, it’s how the two words come together. When I was a kid, my brothers used to tease me, calling me Lazy Susie. How come you want to find this Martin kid?” she asked.
“His granny raised him,” I said. “He disappeared two weeks ago. His granny died in my arms night before last. I owe it to her to find him.”
Susie nodded soberly. “A lot of that going around. Not grandmas dying in your arms, I mean, but grandmas having to raise their own kids’ children. We see it down here as much as you do in Chicago. It’s hard.”
She picked up the picture and stared at it. “I haven’t seen the boy, but I’m sure he was in town, even though everyone’s saying ‘no,’ to you. One of those rumors that zips around, you know how that goes. If I was you, I’d talk to the Wengers. They have the farm closest to the Schlafly place.”
“The sheriff told me it’s a quarter mile away, that no one there saw anything.”
Susie grinned again. “Don’t know why he’d say that. If you think every farmer in the county doesn’t keep track of the comings and goings of the neighbors up to a mile away, that only proves you’re a city girl. I should know—I grew up on one of those farms. The gossip could crush a combine. By the way, you never did tell me if you were really a detective.”
“Private.” I took my license out of my wallet to show her, and handed her one of my cards.
“Well, V. I. Warshawski, good luck to you. If you’re still around at lunchtime, I bet you’ve never tasted as good a BLT as what I serve here.”
She sketched a map on the back of one of her placemats, showing me how to get to the Wengers’ house. She also told me to put Martin’s photo on the corkboard by the front entrance. I found a place in between ads for a used tractor, an offer to exchange haircuts for fresh vegetables, and an announcement of the Palfry County haybale-throwing contest.
In my car I studied Susie’s map. East of town, toward the Schlafly place, then right at a crossroads, left to a county road that ran parallel to the one in front of Schlafly’s. I took a minute to look up the family on my iPad. Frank and Roberta, early fifties; one child, Warren, a high school senior, still at home; two daughters who’d moved away, one to St. Louis, the other to Columbus, Ohio.
Before going to the Wenger farm, I detoured past the Schlafly place. There were no crime scene tapes, either at the house or the field, just the broken stalks to show where the county van had driven in to collect Ricky Schlafly’s body. The house looked abandoned, but I walked around the perimeter, checking for any movement behind the windows that weren’t boarded over. I hoped the sheriff had gotten someone to remove the dead Rottweiler from the kitchen.
The road to the Wengers’ was a badly pitted gravel track. I went slowly, to preserve my tires. I had to pull over to the verge a couple of times as pickups roared past me, covering the Mustang with a fine white dust. As I bumped along, I passed a hand-painted sign telling me that the Wengers’ Prairie Market was straight ahead. Fresh eggs, flowers, tomatoes and “notionals,” whatever those might be.
The corn on either side of the car looked brown and tired, signs of the terrible drought gripping Illinois. Blackbirds and crows were darting through the stalks, even though I couldn’t see any ears worth harvesting. Unless there was another body in there.