Bad Axe County Page 16

  He looked at her. Through the weeping melt of ice crystals, she gazed back at him with one fog-blue eye.

  Sophie.

  Brandy.

  And any other girl who came too close to that shit.

  A Cave Girl.

  Then Angus had it, what to do with her now. Rattlesnake Cave.

  35

  Because that is what they tell you to do, right? Report to someone what happened? Don’t be silent? Don’t hide it? Say what happened? When someone does sex to you and you don’t want it? Because sex done to you that you don’t want is not your fault?

  Pepper hates to remember, but now as she lies captured with troll-talk beyond the door, the memory is happening, she can’t stop it.

  Aren’t you supposed to tell your mom when someone hurts you?

  So she does. The very first time, just beyond her thirteenth birthday, she tells her mom what her stepdad, Felton Henry, has just done to her upon the sleeper bed inside his tractor-trailer. And this is what Mom says . . . It all leaps forward. She is in Montana, she imagines, telling Marie. Mom tells me, “Don’t make things up.”

  Right here she always thinks that Marie was lucky to be older. Marie never needed Bennie for protection like she did. Right here she always tries to stop the memory. She snaps a band against her wrist, bites herself, steals liquor and drinks it. Or she can be a runner when she wants to. They won’t let her on the team anymore but sometimes she puts her shoes on and runs a million miles. Or she sings, or she screams. But she can’t now. Silver tape binds her wrists and ankles and straps her mouth from ear to ear. So it happens all over again.

  Because when Pepper is about ten, Felton Henry appears, a long-haul trucker, a huge man with a loud jolly style who drinks hard with her mom. He is wary of Bennie and so mostly leaves her alone, but sometimes he makes Pepper clean his cab. But then a week after that big game up here, the one she remembered when she was with Dale, after Bennie’s six home runs, the fight, the long party home, her big brother wraps his Mustang around a power pole and is gone. Felton Henry waits a few months until she turns thirteen and then he’s coming at her.

  Her mom says, Well, don’t let him.

  Her mom says, Don’t lie to get attention.

  So Pepper tells Felton Henry, You can’t hurt me. Then, as best she can, she can’t be hurt. This goes all the way until when she turns sixteen and she decides to kill him and escape. But she fucks it up, both the killing and the escaping. She almost does it right—but almost counts in horseshoes, not rape. She hates to remember . . . but she can’t stop it.

  Felton Henry parks his tractor-trailer in front of the house. They live on a hill. Down the hill, the road turns sharply and runs along a bluff above the Wisconsin River. A hundred feet below is a swirling deep spot behind the Kilbourn Dam. Pepper Googles a few things at the library, studies how his emergency brake works, the yellow knob beneath the dash. The next time she cleans Felton Henry’s cab, while he’s inside drinking with her mom, and just before he comes for her, when she hears the screen door bang against the house, she puts his gear box into neutral. After his cock comes out of her, after he rolls off and starts to snore, she punches in the yellow knob and skims bare-assed across his driver’s seat. She launches herself out of the cab and slams the door as she flies away from it. She lands and goes for his wheel chocks, two ten-pound rubber wedges on a rope. Then she runs.

  But she fucks it up and still wonders what she could have done differently. The truck rolls maybe ten feet before Felton Henry comes across his seat. He slaps the knob in and puts the truck back in gear. He is fast like a bear, and he catches her running with the chocks. He beats her with them, holding their connecting rope and stoning her over and over with the heavy wedges.

  Your little bitch tried to kill me.

  And her mom never asks, Really? Pepper tried to kill you—with all of her clothes off?

  36

  “Mommy, what’s a lady killer?”

  She had banished her mother-in-law for smoking in the house, repeat offender. After that, she had meant to lie down for a few minutes and review her assumptions—Ladonna Weeks, Boog Lund, and Pinky Clausen were all on the same team, playing the same game. At least the black-haired girl from the Dells was caught up in that game, but surely there were more like her—and then she had been dreaming.

  Her mom’s and dad’s slain bodies were laid out on the floor of the milk room—but the floor was putty-colored carpet, squishy with blood puddles, smoke billowing through the scene from the Bishops Coulee murders—her beloved cows were standing around talking in human voices about what a pity something was—but only a farmhand would know where he kept his gun, she was telling the bell cow, Ophelia, who said back, Don’t worry I will find you—then an electronic traffic billboard was scrolling her list of suspect farmhands: Greg Schatz, Carson Troutman, Darrold Dinkle, Robert Who Slept in the Woods, all the rest—and then dream-Heidi had shot this really nice old man who used to fix the hay elevator for her dad, and in her blood-spattered boots she was standing over Wayne Pitzer’s blown-out brains when Ophelia’s question awakened her.

  “A lady killer?”

  She took a moment. That yearbook photo of Harley had been sitting on the kitchen table all morning, the kids looking at it. Harley Kick, Lady Killer. Some woman issuing a “bomb threat,” Belle Kick had advised her.

  Flat on her back, head throbbing, she felt dizzy and sick. Be careful, Missus Kick. You’re not the only one with pictures. She had to rouse herself, get back to work. A different photograph had to be reconstructed of what had seemed like a second shrine in Walt Beavers’s home, the one not dedicated to his drowned daughter. That photo was lost, that phone ruined by her plunge in the river, but she aligned the elements in her memory: the calendar date, the blue butterfly hair clip, the mustard crock full of ashes. That arrangement, she thought, was her hinge between the past and the present. The calendar page was the same as the date of the baseball game that Harley said he missed and the Rattlers lost badly, the game that the girl had looked up in the library to win a bet, panicking Walt Beavers. Get up, she told herself. You mean Rattlers first-base coach Walt Beavers, who kept a girl’s barrette and a crock of ashes on his shelf—and last night got himself beat up by Coach Clausen, via Brock Pabst. All of that was the past, and the black-haired girl from the Dells was the present.

  “Lady killer is just an expression, honey. It doesn’t mean killing, really.”

  “Why? What’s an expression?”

  This was Dylan. She felt all three awake now, quietly beside her. Goddamn Ladonna, she thought, the bitch knew what she was doing. But the Kicks were stronger than that.

  “Like when Daddy calls you guys cookie monsters. You’re not really monsters, right?”

  “I am.” Taylor started roaring. The sheriff opened her eyes. Bright sunlight streamed into the bedroom. Ice dripped everywhere. She found her phone. Shit. It was after two o’clock. She had slept three hours. She had three messages.

  “Your daddy means that you really love cookies, like Cookie Monster on Sesame Street.”

  “Can we have cookies?”

  “We forgot to have lunch. Let’s do that first.”

  She struggled onto the elbow of her injured arm. Ouch.

  “How about macaroni and cheese?”

  The boys celebrated, letting go of semantic concerns. Opie was not that easy. She sat against the headboard, reading her book about dragons. “So that means Daddy really loves ladies?”

  “Yes. Women. That’s all it means.”

  “How many women?”

  “All women. He thinks women, and girls, especially smart ones, are really cool.”

  “But he loves you special.”

  “That’s right, sweetheart. That’s why we got married and made you. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Opie in a baby carriage. Did you ever hear that one?”

  Very solemnly, Opie said, “Mary Beth Sime sings that about me and Danny Wertzelbakken because s
he’s jealous that Danny’s desk is next to mine. I ignore her.”

  The sheriff dumped Taylor off her legs. She sat on the edge of the bed, testing her stiff ankle where Pabst’s initial bat blow had connected. She was not quite ready to stand.

  “You mean you’re not going to marry Danny Wertzelbakken and be booger farmers?”

  “Mommy . . .” her daughter warned her sternly.

  “Well, if you’re going to scold me, I’m just going to go make lunch.”

  Groggily boiling wagon wheels and grating Colby cheese, she played her messages. Day-shift dispatcher Rinehart Rog informed her that Deputy Yttri was headed out to the farm—unofficially, Rhino was clear—with a report. Yttri had attended the county board’s Finance Committee meeting, and he had news about the auditor’s analysis of Gibbs’s budget. Next message, Rhino told her that Wisconsin Dells Police Department had called back. They had received the photograph Denise sent of the blue panel van and its plates. They knew the vehicle. They were looking for the owner and would be back in touch. “Oh, uh, and, Heidi? A clerk at the IGA in Lansing told me that he sold someone a half pint of Mr. Boston butterscotch schnapps last night, right before he closed. Um. Yeah. So if you want to know who the clerk said the customer was, just call me back.”

  She did. She asked him, “Who, Rhino?”

  “You.”

  “I see. Then I should show up on IGA’s security recording.”

  “But you won’t,” Rhino said. “Because he said their system was down.”

  God, what a bush-league attempt to set her up. It went along with sticking shit in her mailbox, baiting her with lurid hints about her husband, and vaguely suggesting that she would regret doing her job. But why? With this on her mind, a minute later she had overboiled the pasta. The wagon wheels were one solid formation. She dumped in cheese anyway, added milk, and tried her best to stir. Back into her thoughts circulated Walt Beavers’s shrine. Who was dead?

  “I have a riddle, and if you get it right, it’s lunchtime. Why is cheese orange?”

  “Because God loves oranges!” Dylan shouted.

  “Because God loves cheese!” Taylor piled on.

  “You are both absolutely correct.”

  “They are not. Cheese is made from milk, and milk is white. They dye it.”

  “And a score for Opie too. It’s lunchtime, everybody. Wash up.”

  She hardly looked at their wet little hands, held out for inspection. She cleared the Lady Killer photo of Harley off the kitchen table and folded it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  She set out bowls of steaming orange muck. It got very quiet, just the sounds of gummy mastication. She drifted to the front window. Should she drive back to Coach Beavers’s place and double-check her memory? No, no, she was sure. But what if the shrine disappeared, or was destroyed?

  She had to let these thoughts go because Yttri’s cruiser was bumping and splashing along the driveway. She rushed to the kitchen. “Another riddle,” she said to the kids. “Who is a big gray baby who can fly with his ears?”

  “Dumbo! Dumbo! Dumbo!”

  She herded them into the family room, started the video, and closed the door. She checked her face in the bathroom, checked her sweatshirt and jeans for cheesy wagon wheels, then let in Olaf the Handsome. He put a folder on the kitchen table that said Strong & Pritzle, CPA.

  “I’m on dedicated rounds,” he said. “That’s my story, and Rhino’s got my back. Lund is telling everybody not to talk to you. But here I am, and you’re not going to believe this.”

  He opened the folder and put his finger on a sum. “I didn’t let on to the Finance Committee. I wanted to show you first. Look. This number, right here, is the sheriff’s department’s contribution to that Second Amendment bullshit at the Ease Inn.”

  She exhaled. Ladonna Weeks and her brother, Dermit, annually put on what they called a Second Amendment Celebration, essentially an unlicensed gun show—a munitions swap, fueled by bratwurst and beer—apparently with the unpublicized sponsorship of the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department, via the taxpayers. Wow. The figure, what Gibbs gave to Dermit and Ladonna Weeks to sell beer, brats, and weapons, was $2,682.97.

  Yttri said, “Weirdly specific number, right?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Unless you look up the property tax on Faulkner’s farm, where the party was last night.”

  He showed her a printout from the county clerk’s online records. The official owner of the property, Emerald Faulkner’s daughter, Prayleen, had last year been billed exactly $2,682.97 for the taxes on an eighty-three-acre farm on Bottom Road. Yttri spread his big hands on her kitchen table as if to brace himself and to suggest that she do the same.

  “So I called Prayleen Faulkner,” he began. “She told me that ‘somebody up there’ pays the tax in exchange for hunting rights on the land. So who is ‘somebody,’ right? I called the clerk’s office, and Beth Lovaas says to me, ‘Oh, yeah. Ladonna Weeks walks in with Faulkner’s tax payment in cash every year. This year I had to give her three cents back. She says her family hunts the property.’ In other words,” Yttri concluded, lowering his voice for emphasis, “the taxpayers of Bad Axe County are directly funding the venue for secret stripper parties.”

  He wore his look of cold amusement very well. What stood out was the lack of any common-sense effort to conceal what essentially was theft and money laundering. Gibbs hadn’t even smeared the numbers around a little bit. “It’s not very clever,” she said.

  “Gibbs didn’t need to be clever. He’d have been sheriff another twenty years if he hadn’t bought the farm.”

  “Ha. Right. But what did he get out of paying Faulkner’s tax and protecting the stag parties? I doubt he attended.”

  “Good question.” Yttri preened his perfect blond mustache with subtle tugs of his lower lip. “There’s another angle, for sure. We don’t know what it is yet, but I’ll bet Lund is part of the equation. If you solve that equation—I mean, if you’re going to run in the election—then you’re going to beat him by a landslide.” He glanced out the window. “With this melt on, by a mudslide.”

  She heard the kids laughing to Dumbo. She would love to beat Chief Deputy Lund by a mudslide. If you’re going to run in the election. In the last two days that big decision had dropped off her radar. Meanwhile Bob Check was out collecting signatures. Hadn’t she already given up on the job? Then why was she worried? Did she want it? The questions clenched her stomach.

  “I know the Faulkner property a little bit,” Yttri interrupted her thoughts to say. “There’s the house and the barn. But there’s also a whole lot of wild and remote land. Rush Creek flows into the Bad Axe River out there. It’s great trout water. They fence and post the living shit out of it. Whoever does that seems really freaked about someone getting in there, but . . .”

  He paused and looked at her sheepishly.

  “But you know how to get in?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, it’s good fishing.”

  “And you want to look around?”

  “There are other buildings deep in there, not close to where they have the parties.”

  “Do we need a warrant?”

  “Not if I’m off duty, use my own vehicle, and go fishing. Then I’m only trespassing.”

  He grinned at her, his question in the air.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “Right now I’m a civilian. But while you’re trespassing in the neighborhood, can you go into Walt Beavers’s house, take pictures of everything on his trophy shelf, and, when you get reception, text them to me?”

  “Done.”

  She stopped him at the door.

  “Who can I talk to about Walt Beavers? Somebody who knows him well.”

  “Lyman Beavers?” Yttri said. “He’s Walt’s younger brother.”

  “I’ve never heard of Lyman Beavers.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s seen him in a while,” Yttri said. “He used to get drunk and holler at the Rattlers games. He
thought his kid should play, and from what I hear, he was right. Then the kid went away to a baseball academy and ended up in the minor leagues. Angus Beavers. There’s a girl too. Brandy Beavers. She must be a teenager now. The family runs a junkyard.”

  The alternative was waiting all day, she decided.

  “Kiddies,” she announced over the Dumbo video after Yttri had left, “I’m so sorry to interrupt you, but we’re going for a ride . . .”

  37

  The scene stunned and appalled her. On the approach, trash littered the shoulders of Lost Hollow Road. More trash floated in the flooding meadow beyond. Then the tight gravel curve resolved and the actual junkyard came into view. She slowed the Kickmobile to a crawl. On the uphill side, where the house and barns were, the accumulated wreckage was dense, incomprehensible. From there it flowed downhill, straddled the road in a rust stain at least a hundred yards wide, and then resumed in a random strew of vehicles and other junk that extended across the valley bottom all the way to the underside of Battle Bluff.

  The sheriff turned her engine off and looked up. At the southern reach of the Bad Axe, Battle Bluff was close enough to Crawford County that she knew it as a party spot, a place to drink and throw beer bottles off the retaining wall of the Blackhawk monument and listen to them crash on the rocks below. She remembered looking down on this exact place. It was not a junkyard all those years ago. But life created junk, and here it was. She touched Ophelia’s hand on her shoulder, followed her daughter’s gaze, and tried to answer her question.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, sweetie. This is just how they live.”