Passing the turnoff to Bud’s, I headed out to the lake. On the way I called the crime lab to check on the samples. They told me the file was still pending and they couldn’t give me a date on when it would be processed. They were working through an “unusually large number of files,” according to the pissant who finally answered my call.
I pulled into the lot where Hattie and Tommy went parking on Friday night, looking across the lake to the Erickson barn with its old roof bowing down toward the water. There were a few trees along the shore next to the barn, enough cover to hide in even without the long grasses that would wave up in a few more months. According to Tommy’s story, she’d gotten out of his truck and walked to the barn on her own. Meeting someone. Why would she go there if she wasn’t meeting someone? It probably would have been around 10:00 p.m. Lund could easily have met her out there after he left Carl’s place. Someone could have followed her, too—Tommy, or even someone else, but whoever it was had to have a reason to be out here in the middle of the night. I rubbed my face and thought through my short list of suspects. Lund and Tommy both had motive, both might have had reason to want her dead.
I got out of the cruiser and retraced Hattie’s last steps—across the parking lot and then along the lake that lapped up the shore with a warm, lazy wind. It was cooler and partly cloudy last Friday, in the low fifties and dropping after sundown. She would have been cold, probably walking fast, both from the chill and to put distance between her and Tommy. There weren’t any houses or barns on the horizon in any direction. The security light in the parking lot would have been on, but it didn’t have enough wattage for more than a hundred-foot radius, so she only had a partial moon to light the way. Was she afraid? I didn’t know. If she was alone, no. Walking alone in the cold and dark wasn’t anything to a country girl. Maybe Hattie was aiming toward the city, but she was as much a part of this land as any other Pine Valley kid, and the land comforted folks here. Its openness and vastness were a balm. No, if she walked to her death alone, she walked unafraid. I crunched along the trail and scanned along the edges of the grass again. Nothing was trampled, no mud kicked up. There were no signs of any struggle. We’d already been over this ground; me, the forensics team, and Jake to boot, but it never hurt to retrace your steps, especially when you were thinking things over or waiting for a lab tech a hundred miles away to squirt something into a vial.
Halfway to the barn I stopped and looked back. The parking lot had disappeared under a slight rise in the land. I couldn’t see the cruiser anymore. Had Hattie looked back? Was Tommy—alibi-less Tommy, who didn’t know why she’d broke up with him; horny, angry, hormone-riddled Tommy—following her?
I hadn’t followed Angie. When she left, over thirty years ago, I’d let her go. I was angry, maybe even angry and drunk enough a few of those dark nights to kill somebody, but I never pursued her. She made her choice just like I’d made mine. I’d chosen war. She chose Iowa. She sent the divorce papers in the mail and got herself married to a pharmaceutical salesman the next spring. I went to school on the GI Bill, got a patrol job in Wabash County, and didn’t have anything good to say to anybody until Bud started waving at me from across Lake Crosby.
He was only a few years younger than me, but it was the difference between being drafted or not. He and Mona were newlyweds starting out on the farm and that first summer all we talked about was fish. Just a quick wave and confirmation on what was biting. I could handle that. By the next summer, he got me to come over a few times and Mona would fry up our catch. The year after that we took our first trip to Lake Michigan. He was the first person to put up a Goodman for Sheriff sign in his yard, until he realized no one would see it and then he stuck it on the back of his pickup truck instead.
By the time I heard from Angie again, when she sent a letter congratulating me on getting appointed sheriff, all the hard feelings were gone and that was probably all due to Bud. I wrote her back and she sent me a Christmas card every year after that until the year she died. There was usually a picture included of her and her husband and some kids who were on the chubby side. She was a handsome woman, stayed that way, too.
I turned back toward the barn and kept walking. It had been awhile since I’d had Angie on the brain, but I supposed it made sense. Carl and Lanie. Hattie and Tommy. Relationships hitting their breaking point. Tearing apart.