Bad Axe County Page 18

  “I make one call,” she said instead, “I can send Homeland Security crawling up your fancy ass.”

  Ladonna’s wide, blue-gray eyes showed nothing. The white letters on her tight black T-shirt said Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms . . . Who’s Bringing the Chips?

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “You sound upset. Someone made a bomb threat? I’m sorry. Where? I’ll bet that keeps you really busy.”

  Off she went, fancy-assing though the glass connecting door to the tavern. The sheriff watched long enough to see her head down the entry hallway that led to the tavern’s front door.

  “Jeepers,” said Holly Hefty, pulling the sheriff’s attention away. “She read me the riot act, and I just started my shift. I haven’t even done anything yet, right or wrong. I mean, the kids dripped a little barbecue sauce on the floor, but I was going to wipe it up.”

  “It’s nice to see you, Holly. Sorry about the sauce. I’ll get it. Aside from you working here, what’s new?”

  “Oh, I am so glad you asked. I’m engaged!” She held up her left hand. The ring was a small blue stone. “Hunter popped the question! I said, Are you kidding? The wedding is gonna be on Labor Day at the Lions Club pavilion.”

  The sheriff’s dark mood got darker. Hunter Vikemeyer was a short-horizon kid with a twelve-pack of beer attached to one hand. His strengths were that he was handsome, he once made second-team all-conference football, and now he was almost a tractor-pull champion. And she wanted Opie to grow up here?

  “I’m going to be Holly Vikemeyer! Isn’t that gonna be great? I should probably wear a helmet and carry a sword. We’re gonna take over my dad’s farm. We want to start a B and B.”

  “Hang on a sec, Holly. I’m getting a call.”

  She stepped outside as Rhino said, “Great news, Sheriff. Your BAC test came back zero.”

  “I see. So that last drink I had, which was 3,005 days ago today, is finally out of my system.”

  “Ha. You’re funny.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Anyway, you can put your badge and gun back on. Bad news is you still can’t drive a county vehicle until that accident assessment is completed. Marge Joss is all over that. The Police and Fire Commission has a meeting tonight. They need to hear your story, because there’s still some questions about how you ended up in the river. And, like, why you don’t remember anything. And how the bottle got in there.”

  “Sure.”

  He waited as if she might slip him the answers.

  “So that’s the news,” he said, giving up. “You still can’t drive a county car. That, and we’re about to get rain.”

  She looked up. Heavy clouds had closed the western sky.

  “Warm, slow rain,” Rhino told her, “on top of all this melting ice and snow. Flash-flood warnings for us and the five counties around us.”

  “Ten four, Rhino. Thanks.”

  Back inside the mini-mart, Holly Soon-to-Be-Vikemeyer had been waiting to tell her, “Hunter’s really matured. You’d be surprised. Last night he went to this meeting, you know, about conservation, about, like, volunteering and taking care of nature, making sure it’s still around for our kids. You know, Ducks Unlimited?”

  * * *

  She was now thinking darkly about her marriage to Harley—all 2,263 days of it—as she herded her kids out of the mini-mart. He knew all these guys, these Hunter Vikemeyers, these Pinky Clausens and Walt Beavers and Brock Pabsts. He probably knew a hundred guys at last night’s “Ducks Unlimited” meeting. He had to know there were stag parties. He had to know about this whole male underworld in the Bad Axe. Maybe he had even been part of it. The night before she accepted the interim position, she had begged him, “You have to tell me everything.”

  Shit. Here came Ladonna again, vamping out the tavern door. “Hon, don’t go,” she called. “I’ve got a present for you.” Just like Coach Clausen had threatened, she waved an Instamatic photo, no doubt one she had just unpinned from the Wall of Shame that lined the hallway entry to the bar—Be careful, Missus Kick, you’re not the only one with pictures—one of the hundreds of snapshots that documented Bad Axers getting drunk and acting stupid at the Ease Inn.

  “It’s such a cute one of Harley Kick-Ass, I thought you’d like to have it.”

  The sheriff snatched the photo from Ladonna’s hand. Just like Clausen’s sleazy hint had predicted, it showed Harley with a female that wasn’t her. She knew at a glance that it was taken the summer the twins were born. She had given him that haircut on the deck of their duplex in Middleton. What Ladonna wanted her to see was her husband sitting at a bar table, wearing the white shirt with the orange three-quarter sleeves that went beneath his black Rattlers jersey. At the table with him, with a burger and a soda in front of her, was a busty blond girl with a ponytail, not more than sixteen years old.

  “Isn’t that sweet?” Ladonna said. “Isn’t she special?”

  The girl’s face was pretty except for her eyes, which looked haunted and scared, with dark circles under them. They were fixed on Harley’s handsome face. A thin gold necklace dangled between her heavy breasts and disappeared beneath a white halter top that did not look clean. At the bottom of the picture, the girl’s pale thighs ran under the table. Pressed against the outside of one her thighs was Harley’s big brown hand.

  The sheriff’s face burned. She stared into her husband’s eyes as he showed his surprise at the appearance of the camera. Then it seemed like Ladonna spoke from a distance. “Listen, hon. You married into the Bad Axe, OK? You’re kinda-sorta new here, and you kinda-sorta don’t get the culture.”

  I was born thirty miles away. She ground her teeth and glared at Harley. You have to tell me everything.

  “And you’re only temporary, remember?”

  She looked up. Ladonna was waving at the kids in the van. Then she crossed her arms beneath her tits and smiled.

  “And you already can’t handle it, am I right? They had to suspend you?”

  “I’ve been reinstated.”

  Ladonna shrugged. “You keep that picture for looking at,” she said. “Help you remember that until July your job is playing donkey basketball and doing karaoke fund-raisers. Take a good look, OK, hon? Either chill out, or what you see is what you get. Do you get it?”

  * * *

  Did she get what? That they’d drag Harley and her family through the mud in an effort to shut her down? She glanced once more before she jammed the picture into her shirt pocket. They were playing chicken with the Kick family, and she wasn’t going to flinch. Still, it seemed pretty clear that nobody had dragged Harley into that photo with that girl. It seemed pretty clear that he had made his own mud. Ladonna, Clausen, maybe Lund—they knew that picture would slug her in the heart. So what did they fear she was so close to knowing? She sat behind the wheel for too long, unable to answer the summary question now coming from Ophelia. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Goddamn it, Harley.

  “Mommy, what’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking about something. Shall we go visit Daddy?”

  As she started the engine, a few fat raindrops smacked the windshield. She started her wipers—then stopped them immediately as their tips lifted something from the bay. In the center of the windshield, dragged up just onto the glass, was a thin gold necklace.

  To reach that far across the hood of the van, she had to go up on her toes, then up on just one toe, before she could just barely pull the blades and free the tangled necklace. She unwound the chain. It was a cheap thing, from a drugstore or a kiosk at a mall. The pendant at the bottom was connected letters in thin script that spelled Sophie.

  For a moment she considered Ladonna’s whereabouts over the last ten minutes. No, the bitch had not been near the Kickmobile until she had come outside with the picture. The necklace came from somewhere else, and from someone with longer arms than hers. She considered where the van had been: their barn, Pabst’s place in Blackhawk Locks, Clausen’s driveway, Beavers Salvage.
r />   Angus Beavers.

  39

  She stopped the van at a distance and gathered herself. Ahead of her was Harley’s baseball practice on the high school parking lot, surrounded by a moat of ditched cropland, the approaching rainstorm now massing slowly overhead. Her husband was hitting fungoes at his outfielders, smacking rubberized baseballs that sailed over the faculty parking stalls and drove the players back to a chain-link fence at the edge of what would be corn in a month. Other players held pepper games on the handicap spaces, lobbing, bunting, fielding. And, speak of the devil, there was Pinky Clausen, forced on Harley as a volunteer hitting coach, leaning into his crutches and tossing beanbags to a tall, left-handed hitter, who drove them against the brick wall of the school building. Beyond the margins of the parking lot, Harley’s freshmen slogged after balls that had escaped into the mud.

  Sated on corn dogs and the slaying of digital deer, all three kids had passed out on the short drive from the Ease Inn. She cracked the sliding door for air. Harley’s outfielders lobbed baseballs back toward a five-gallon bucket. Most went long and settled against a parking cleat. She gathered as many as she could and dropped them in the bucket.

  “We need to talk.”

  He hammered a line drive right at the throng of outfielders, not waiting for the next player to step out. She had thrown off his rhythm.

  “Sure. Why not?” He tried to grin at her. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “This is serious.”

  “What is?”

  He swung and skipped a weak grounder across the asphalt. Voices rose on the breeze, his outfielders giving him shit.

  “You knew there were these stripper parties going on out in the hollows.”

  He checked his swing and caught his toss. “I knew there used to be.”

  He retossed and hit a weak pop-up. The razzing grew stronger, but Harley wasn’t liking it right now.

  “We’ve been married six years, Heidi. I haven’t gone. I haven’t heard. I haven’t even thought about it. I never liked those parties in the first place.”

  “So you did go.”

  “I went twice. The team went, after games. I went with.” He lifted his next ball from the bucket at his heel. “Not my kind of thing.”

  “Really? Then why in the hell wouldn’t you tell me that this went on? There was a party last night.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it.”

  “You didn’t think that Ray Gibbs and Boog Lund must be letting this happen, so as the next sheriff I should know about it? You didn’t think about laws broken and girls in danger?”

  “Heidi, I’m sorry. It would take forever to tell you everything that anybody ever did wrong in the Bad Axe.”

  “What good does sorry do me?”

  He muttered. Then he swung hard and hit one square. A player turned and tracked a towering fly ball into what would have been left center on a baseball field. He settled under the ball and caught it. She touched the picture in her pocket but didn’t want to show it yet.

  “Let’s go back to this game in 2012 against the Dells . . .”

  “Again? Why are you interrogating me? All I do is support you, watch the kids, sleep alone half the time while you’re out working all night . . .”

  “According to the box score, you gave up a whole season’s worth of runs and cost your team the state tournament. But this morning you claimed you were never even there.”

  Again he checked his swing and caught his toss. “Goddamn it, Heidi. I wasn’t.”

  “You’re in the box score.”

  “Coach Clausen was pissed off that I didn’t show up. The Dells hit the shit out of Aspinwall and whoever else pitched instead of me. For payback, Coach gave me all the stats that he sent in to the league. My ERA ballooned up, and it knocked me off the WBA All-State Team. I took the loss in the scorebook, but I wasn’t at that game.”

  “Why not?”

  “I promise you it wasn’t important.”

  “That game keeps coming up for some reason. And you keep coming up. It’s important.”

  Crack. He nailed this one. It sailed too far. A body rattled the chain-link fence. The ball dropped without a bounce into the mire beyond. A small muddy freshman trudged after it. In that slow moment Ladonna’s intentions came alive. She had never had a reason not to trust Harley. Now, suddenly, she almost didn’t want to know if she had been a fool.

  “I’m trying to hold a practice here, Heidi.”

  “I’m trying to do my job too.”

  A wail came from the van. Taylor had awakened. Opie, quickly alert, could manage her own car seat, and she tried to unbuckle her little brother while he wheeled his feet, kicking her.

  “What happened to Mom watching the kids?” Harley asked.

  “I sent her home this morning.”

  Here came Taylor in a postnap wrath galloping toward them. Harley checked his swing as their little boy came close. Taylor hesitated between them, then plowed his forehead straight into his mommy’s groin. Harley stepped to a distance and ripped a ball to imaginary right center. His face was red, his jaw set. With a shaky hand, the sheriff caressed Taylor’s sweaty head, pulled him to her hip, and stopped his ears. “Was there a stripper party that night, after the game that you didn’t play in?”

  “I think there was. I’m pretty sure. I didn’t go.”

  Now she showed him the picture: at a table in the Ease Inn, his hand on the outer thigh of a troubled-looking teenage girl.

  “What’s this?”

  “Lunch.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Some girl.”

  “Did you pay her, or did you get it for free?”

  “You act like you don’t know me.”

  “Imagine that.”

  She reached into her breast pocket again, showed him his yearbook shot, Lady Killer.

  “Why would someone leave me this?”

  “To jerk you around. Make you jealous. Get you out of your lane.”

  “Why? Why today?”

  “Heidi, honestly, I have no goddamn idea. You’re the one with the information here. You’re not telling me what this is about.”

  “Who is Sophie?”

  “No clue.”

  “You had that little girl by the thigh. Is she Sophie?”

  “I don’t remember what her name was. She was hanging around by the gas pumps and I bought her something to eat. She kept wrapping her leg around mine. She wanted to leave with me. Go wherever I was going. Anywhere. Look at the picture. Look at my hand. I was pushing her leg away. Jesus Christ, Heidi, she was about fifteen years old. I called the sheriff’s department. But guess what. Gibbs was in charge, Lund was chief deputy, you didn’t work here then, and nobody gave a shit.”

  Here came Opie. Bless her heart, she carried her other little brother, forty-pound Dylan, piggyback. With their sharp-eared daughter on the way, the conversation, the fight, whatever it was, was nearly over.

  “She was trying to get away from her pimp,” the sheriff guessed.

  Harley looked surprised. Then he exhaled hard.

  “Turns out you’re right,” he admitted. “Sweetheart, OK. Here it is. It was the day of that game. I was getting gas and she came up to me. I took her inside and tried to make her eat. She wouldn’t tell me who she was or what was wrong, she just wanted to go wherever I was going. Ladonna took that picture without asking. You know how she is. I called, but the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department didn’t have anyone they could send, they didn’t give a shit, so I tried to drive her up to La Crosse and give her to somebody who did.”

  He paused, squeezing a rubber baseball in his fist. “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Right. And here’s why. Because putting that girl in my truck and driving was a bad idea. There was an Amber Alert. She had to use the bathroom at the Pronto in Bishops Coulee, and somebody who saw us there called the cops on me. I got pulled over by the state patrol on Great River Road. I got hauled out an
d arrested in front of about a hundred vehicles going by. Pandering. Sexual assault of a minor. Cuffed and hauled away. Your husband.”

  His face had turned splotchy red-white. His outfielders stared from a distance.

  “I missed that game you’re asking about, and no, I didn’t spend the night with friends, like you thought I did. I spent the night in jail. It took La Crosse County until the next morning to believe that girl and let me go. You were sad and angry when I got home, Heidi. You thought the world was a terrible, dangerous place. You handed me all three kids and went to bed.”

  He tried to shake the memory off. He tossed the ball in his fist and smacked it with the bat. His startled players just stood and watched it sail.

  “I was fine,” he said. “It was weird, I was embarrassed at being so stupid, but it was nothing, and I didn’t want to upset you. I just dropped it. I should have told you then. I know you’re angry at me now. I don’t blame you, except you never told me what any of this was about. End of story.”

  Opie was joining them now. “End of what story?” she wanted to know.

  “No, wait,” Harley said. “That’s not the end of the story. A couple weeks later her mother tracked me down and thanked me. She made the girl get on the phone. I just remembered her name. Her name was Karen.”

  “Who’s Karen?” Opie asked. With her flawless instincts, she drifted to her father and hugged him.

  The sheriff’s brain had locked. She tucked both pictures back into her pocket. She felt like she had stabbed herself.

  “Come on, kids. Let’s go. Daddy’s doing his job.”

  Back in the van, she buckled the kids in and sagged behind the wheel. Opie had to tell her that her phone was ringing.

  “Hello? Sheriff? You there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Wisconsin Dells PD is on the line,” said Rinehart Rog. “One of their officers just found the blue van with the stolen Illinois plates. They’ve got the driver in custody, and they want to know how soon we can get somebody there to question him. Either Deputy Bench or Deputy Yttri can drive you.”

  She jerked upright.