Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (14 page)

    "I told you. No questions. I don't know any more than you do. I just know what Mrs. Cronin told me. And what she told me, I just told you."

    DeWitt stood up. "I move that we adjourn this meeting. Is there a second?"

    One of the board members raised her hand.

    "I appreciate your interest in this matter," DeWitt said, "but maybe it's just as well that it ends like this."

    "Oh, it ain't over," said a particularly angry man. "Not by a long shot, it ain't."

    His mood proved typical of the anti-Helen Toricelli crowd that gathered outside. There were even a few brief scuffles among men on opposing sides of the issue.

    "These people scare me," Natalie whispered, putting her arm through mine.

    "Yeah," I said, feeling that I was betraying my own townspeople, "they scare me, too."

    

    

    With the top down on my ragtop, and the going slow because the gravel road out here in the country was rutted from recent rains, you could hear the farm animals settling in for the night: horses, cows, pigs. My uncle had this horse once who snored so loud you could hear him from the house if you kept the windows open on a summer night.

    "May I ask you something?" Natalie said.

    "Sure."

    "This woman who left you, this Pamela, aren't you in great pain?"

    "Yeah. About every fifteen minutes it hits me."

    "A Dartmouth boy left me for a Smith girl one winter, and I couldn't get out of bed for a month. It was very dramatic. I felt purely Russian for the first time since I'd come to the States." She paused. "You hide it very well, your pain."

    "I've had practice."

    "Oh?"

    "She's broken my heart somewhere in the vicinity of three thousand times. You never get used to it, but you get better at handling it."

    Then we were there. With all the new silos and barns and metal outbuildings, most of the countryside looked different these days. When I was growing up, you could go places that hadn't changed much since the Indians had wandered here untroubled a couple of centuries earlier, before French trappers reached the Mississippi River, sixty miles to the east.

    This back pasture had none of the modern accoutrements except for barbed wire fencing. Heavy dark rain clouds kept obscuring the moon. With a forest nearby and pastureland before us rolling up toward the dark empty hills, it had a feeling of isolation. What would Jeff Cronin be doing out here? If he was going to eavesdrop on the Connerses, he certainly would have gotten closer to their house. This field was a good mile from the farm itself. It didn't make any sense.

    We heard her before we saw her.

    There was something timeless and thrilling about the sound of the solitary rider and horse in the shadows before us. It was a noise - the hooves and the heaving chest of the animal - heard upon this land for centuries.

    She dismounted easily, with the experienced rider's disdain for perfect form; she simply dropped to the ground. In her blue suede jacket, white shirt, and jeans and a goddess's head of blond hair, she was the Potomac's version of the grand prize in the young-beautiful-wife sweepstakes. Out here the grand prizes tend to have dimples and cuddly breasts and say inanely cute things. In Washington, D.C., they discuss Sartre and foreign policy and dare you to make a move on their fierce, slim bodies.

    "Sorry I'm late," Dana Conners said, more civil than usual. "Chris and I were having a little disagreement."

    "You were having a disagreement two days ago when we saw you at the Garst farm with Khrushchev," I said. "You shoved her, in fact."

    "She had it coming, believe me." Before I could say anything more, she put out her hand to Natalie and said, "I'm Dana Conners. And you are -?"

    I introduced them properly.

    "I'm sorry about your brother," Dana said. Then: "Oh, what a hypocrite I'm being. I'm not sorry about your brother at all. He was our enemy. And I think he had something to do with my husband's murder."

    "I'm not going to defend my brother," Natalie said. "I can't. But I can mourn him. I owe him that. I know what you're going through with your husband's death," she added.

    Dana nodded.

    I turned on my flashlight. "I checked the back weather reports. Three hours before Cronin's car was seen up here, it rained. So it should be easy to find some tire tracks. He drives a new Studebaker. I checked the tread on his tires: a diamond pattern."

    Dana said to Natalie, "Impressive, isn't he?"

    Natalie laughed. "So far, anyway."

    I walked back to the gate and started playing my light around on the ground. The grass thinned as I began walking back toward the two women. Then, in areas of open soil, the tire tracks appeared. They didn't reach out and sock you in the knee for attention, but they were there when you got down on your haunches and looked for them. Diamond-shaped tread.

    Then, as I reached the section where grass was growing heavily, the tracks disappeared. I was halfway to the women. It was one of those nights that were alternately muggy and chilly. It smelled of fresh, good earth.

    "Any luck?" Dana said.

    "Yeah."

    "Well, then, at least we can ask Cronin to explain what he was doing out here."

    I didn't say anything. I'd found another long patch of soil. At the halfway point in this stretch, the tire tracks stopped. For some reason, Cronin had parked here. Above me now, hidden in the overcast sky, a big commercial airliner roared through the night.

    I looked around, trying to see a reason for Cronin to park here.

    Then I saw the footprints. In the criminology course I took while getting my private investigator's license, one of the guest speakers - they brought in detectives from all over this part of the state - talked about how the footprint was too often overlooked as evidence. The professor said that Indians had been reading footprints for centuries, hence their abilities as trackers. Footprints not only told you the direction somebody was headed in, they also told you about weight and height and even certain characteristics about the person's walking patterns. In modern times, they also told you the size and type of shoe. Tread on the sole was a good means of identification. Take two pairs of seemingly identical shoes. They won't be identical for long. Each person wears shoes differently - length of stride, angle of wear on the heel - and thus creates a mark as singular as a fingerprint.

    I could follow the footsteps from the car. A single set of prints. One man walking to the back of the car. Then there were two sets of prints. Both were pointed toward the front of the car along the passenger side.

    "Here's something interesting," I said.

    They'd been talking. Now they came over.

    "You find something?" Dana said.

    I showed her the outline I'd constructed. "Here'd be the front of the car. He walks to the back - follow the flashlight here - and all the time there's a single set of footprints. But now look."

    I played my light on what I wanted them to see. "Suddenly, there's a second set of footprints."

    "Did somebody else drive in?" Natalie asked.

    I trained my light on the long patch of earth behind the end of the car. "No new tire tracks. Just Cronin's."

    "But where -?" Dana started to say. Then: "The trunk."

    "Exactly."

    "He had somebody in the trunk?" Natalie said. "Richard Conners!"

    "You said he'd been missing and wasn't sure where he'd been."

    Dana said, "But why would Cronin kidnap him?"

    "That's what we need to ask him. I think he turned him loose right here. Then Richard walked the rest of the way to your farmhouse."

    "But why wouldn't he remember any of this?"

    "Shock, trauma, who knows? It happens."

    Dana shook her head. "I wonder if anybody told Cronin that kidnapping is a capital offense."

    I said, "I'd like to finish talking about Chris."

    "Chris is none of your business, McCain."

    "Why did you shove her the other day?"

    "That's none of your business either."

    "It may have something to do with your husband's murder."

    "It doesn't." Then, changing the subject again, "How did that stupid school board meeting go tonight, by the way?"

    "Cronin didn't show up."

    "What?" She looked and sounded genuinely surprised. "After all the hell he's been raising, he didn't show up?" And then an odd look came across her face, as if a remarkable idea had just occurred to her. "I mean, that's strange, isn't it?" But the fire of her initial response was gone. And now there was a sense of agitation about her.

    Natalie said, "The police gave me some of my brother's belongings. Would you like to look through them, Sam?"

    "Thanks."

    We'd left the question of Chris hanging again. Why had Dana shoved her the other day? And why did Dana ease past the subject of Cronin now?

    I went back over the tire prints. Cronin had come in here, yanked Conners from the trunk, and sent him staggering on his way home. Conners wouldn't remember any of it. Conners had probably been drugged, and that inevitably involved Natalie's brother, but what had they been after? Did they get it? And if they got it, what and where was it?

    In the distance, you could see the lights of town. Nothing made me feel better than coming home late at night from a trip to Cedar Rapids or Iowa City and seeing those lights. It was like one of those science fiction stories where you can travel back in time to a town that hasn't changed from the good old days. Maybe Black River Falls wasn't ideal, but it was still a town of good people with good hearts for the most part, which had made this whole "red scare" thing so difficult for everybody. All you could liken it to was the Civil War where, in places like Missouri and lower Kansas, families split down the middle, one half blue, the other half gray. Nearly a hundred years later, the spiritual wounds of that war were still with us. The wounds of the McCarthy era threatened to last just as long. Some people I liked and admired had said a lot of ignorant and nasty things about some other people I liked and admired.

    Dana still looked preoccupied and eager to leave. "Just close the gate behind you, McCain. I need to get back." She swept up on her horse. "It was nice to meet you, Natalie. Despite the circumstances."

    And then she was gone, not trying for drama, but how could you miss, all that icy beauty astride a horse in the dead of night?

    We watched her ride away until she was lost in the prairie shadows.

    "You like her, Sam?"

    "Not much."

    "Me either. I wanted to feel sorry for her. Because of her husband. But I couldn't quite - I resent strong women. Probably because I've never been very strong."

    I laughed. "Kiddo, you're strong enough to chew on barbed wire." I slid my arm around her shoulder and gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. "Look at everything you've survived in your life. Not many people have to face up to what you have."

    She slid her arm around my waist. "That doesn't make me strong, Sam. It just means that God has blessed me. Or aren't you religious?"

    "Most of the time. In my own sort of way."

    "Now there's a deep profession of faith."

    I looked up at the few stars in the overcast night. The vast loneliness that is the religious impulse - as opposed to the church impulse, which is about social rules - overcame me, and I had a racial memory (probably owing to all the wonderful Edgar Rice Burroughs books I'd read as a kid) of man in his various incarnations - lizardlike, monkeylike, Cro-Magnon - standing here just as I stood here, looking at the same stars, and feeling the same vast loneliness. Millions and millions of years later, and still, for all our inventions, we faced at least once a day that quick inconsolable grief of wondering why we'd been born and what, if anything, it meant. "I want to believe. I really do."

    "If I didn't have my faith, I wouldn't have anything."

    And then we were making out.

    Now, you probably wouldn't think a discussion of faith could lead to making out, but it did. And notice I didn't say "And then we were kissing," because it went way past kissing right into open-mouthed, groin-pressing, hair-raking making out.

    It happened just that fast. And God, was she a good kisser! During my short time with her, I'd had the stray sexual thought but then the rational side countered that it was nothing serious because I was too pained about good ol' beautiful Pamela to do anything about stray sexual thoughts.

    Boy, was I wrong.

    Where we ended up was in the back seat of the ragtop. With the top up. She asked if I had a "thing." I said yes - the emergency thing in my billfold, right next to my photo of John Foster Dulles - and then we were making sweet sad love because that happened to be the mood upon us. Healing love. She was a quiet lover, fragile in some ways, and when we were done she said, "Sometimes I can get pretty wild."

    "So can I," I said. "I play the banjo."

    She laughed. "While you're making love?"

    "Just at the pinnacle moment."

    "No wonder women are so crazy about you."

    "Yes, they are, aren't they?"

    When we were dressed again, we stayed in the back seat and she sat on my lap. It felt completely natural and comfortable. Sat on my lap with her arms around my neck, smoking a cigarette and giving me a drag every so often.

    She said, "Are you thinking of Pamela?"

    "No."

    "Liar."