I wandered over to the window that faced the Schlafly place. I heard her suck in a breath; when I looked over at her, she was staring at the shelf next to the window, but she quickly returned to her work.
The shelf was filled with packets of dried herbs, but next to the window a blue baby blanket covered something lumpy. I lifted it to find a pair of binoculars. When I picked them up and looked across the field at Schlafly’s, the whole ugly yard behind the house rushed forward to greet me: the deep pit with its toxic brew, the broken gate, the back door hanging on its hinges. I could even make out wasps circling under the eaves.
Roberta glared at me. “You can’t come in here and dig through my things; this is private property.”
I put the binoculars back on the shelf. “If I had a house full of crazed dopers that close and a sheriff who couldn’t get here fast in a crisis, I’d be keeping an eye on the place, too. You see whoever shot Ricky Schlafly?”
The flush underneath her sunburn died away. “I heard a shot as I was starting to get up, but it wasn’t five o’clock yet, which is still dark this time of year. I went down to put the coffee on, then I heard another shot. Of course, like Frank said, there were always explosions and such coming out of the house, but a gun doesn’t sound anything like a window blowing out. I slipped out and came into the market here.”
She gave the ghost of a smile. “Frank and Warren, Warren’s our son, he’s a senior over at the high school, they think it’s wrong for me to be looking at the neighbors. Spying they call it.”
“Could you see anything?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It was still too dark. If I’d known they were murdering Ricky, of course I would have called the sheriff, but I guess they killed him out in the north field. I didn’t even hear the shot, with the Schlafly house being between us and all. The only thing I did see that early was a car taking off. SUV, I’d guess, from the height of the headlights. I know now it must’ve belonged to the killers, parked by where they cut the fence out when they went in. I suppose the gal took off in it, because I heard all this shouting, and more shots.”
She started twisting a pipe cleaner round and round in her fingers. “I told Frank when I went back in to make breakfast, but he said not to get involved, if drug addicts were shooting at each other they wouldn’t thank me for interfering. Of course, he was right. If I’d driven over, like I had half a mind to, they would have murdered me just like they did Ricky.”
“Very likely,” I agreed: whoever had torn that house apart had been way more savage than Ricky’s poor dead dog.
“Ricky Schlafly was bad news from day one, but I went to school with his older sister. She died of breast cancer three years back, or the house would have gone to her. I hate to think of how she’d feel, knowing Ricky had lain out in that field all day getting eaten by crows.”
The pipe cleaner broke in her fingers, but she kept twisting the ends around. “All day long I kept looking over there. One time I saw this woman—” She broke off and the flush returned to her face. “That was you, wasn’t it? I thought you looked familiar. You have any idea what happened to that gal who’d been living there, the one who took off in the SUV? She didn’t go through town, or someone would have told us.”
“She drove up to Chicago, to a drug house on the city’s West Side,” I said, “but she ran from there to her mother’s place. Whoever was after her caught up with her there. They shot her, but she’s still alive. Her mother, Martin Binder’s grandmother, died protecting her.”
Roberta’s face softened in pain. “The things we do for our kids, even when they keep breaking our hearts. I know that story, beginning to end.”
“Did you see Martin over there?” I asked, pointing toward the Schlafly place.
She picked up a fresh pipe cleaner and started to wrap a piece of gauze around it. “I may have done. So many kids came and went there, buying drugs, you know, that I didn’t pay attention to one more than another. Still, a couple of weeks ago, about the time you say this Martin disappeared, there was a kid out there got into a fight with the woman. Judy, you say?”
“Physical fight?”
“Not exactly. They were arguing over some papers, an old envelope full of papers. He was pulling them away from her and she was hanging on to them. He ended up with them and took off.” She paused. “I don’t know if it’s any use to you, but a couple of ’em fell into that waste tank they’ve got dug out back.”
I groaned. The last thing I wanted to do was climb into that pit. Besides which, after thirty minutes in that stew, paper would dissolve. Would anything be left after fifteen days?