‘Johan lives in St. Croix,’ Marco added.
‘Oh, really?’ Chris said. ‘So you know my daughter.’
‘She lives across the street.’
Chris found it odd that his teenage daughter lived so close to a boy who looked like a Norwegian god, and she had never mentioned him. Not once. He thought about Hannah’s warning:
‘Marco says a lot of people think Olivia is guilty, Johan. What do you think?’
The boy looked pained. ‘I guess nobody really knows what happened,’ he replied, but his face said something else.
‘I’m here to help her,’ Chris told him. ‘Maybe you can help me.’
‘How?’
‘By telling me about the bad blood between the kids in Barron and St. Croix.’
Johan frowned. ‘I try to stay out of it. It’s like a poison.’
‘That’s smart.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I told Olivia, but she didn’t listen.’
‘No?’
‘No, she’s stubborn. She couldn’t let go.’
Marco interrupted them, as if he didn’t want the feud carried inside his walls. ‘Is Mr. Hawk’s room ready, Johan?’
The boy nodded.
‘Put his suitcase inside, all right?’
Johan grabbed the suitcase, swinging it as if it were practically weightless. He nodded at Chris as he left the office, and his sculpted face was pure Minnesotan: polite, handsome, but yielding no secrets.
‘Johan is a good boy,’ Marco said when he was gone. ‘He cares for your daughter.’
‘He looked at me like I was from another planet,’ Chris said.
‘Ah, but you are, Mr. Hawk. You’re an outsider.’
‘Is that a crime around here?’
‘Oh, no,’ Marco chuckled. ‘It’s worse. Most people here would happily choose a local criminal over an honest outsider.’
Chris smiled at the man’s jowly Italian face. ‘You look like an outsider yourself.’
‘Yes, you’re right about that. I bought this place in December. What a shock, all that snow and cold! I hate winter, but I needed to get out of San Jose. My wife passed away last year, and all I had was my city pension and a house full of memories. I asked a realtor to scout motels for me, and this place looked like a nice business in a beautiful area. I figured, that’s for me.’
‘Have the locals accepted you?’ Chris asked.
‘No, I could be here twenty years, and I’d still be a newcomer. The people are perfectly nice, but that’s as far as it goes. I don’t mind. I didn’t come here to make friends, just to get a little peace. It will be worse for you, Mr. Hawk.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because a man who tries to stop a dog fight usually gets bitten for his trouble.’
‘I’m just here for Olivia,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t care what’s going on between Barron and St. Croix.’
‘It doesn’t matter whether you pick sides. You will not be trusted. People will not tell you things you need to know. They will want to see you gone. Be careful, okay?’
‘I appreciate the advice,’ Chris said.
Marco shrugged. ‘No charge for that. It’s free from one outsider to another.’ He added, ‘If you want to know more, talk to Johan’s father. Glenn Magnus is the minister at the church in St. Croix. They were among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Mondamin Research.’
Chris felt a heaviness in his heart. He knew what that meant. Death.
‘Who did they lose?’ he asked.
‘Johan’s sister,’ Marco said, shaking his head. ‘Her name was Kimberly. Johan has shown me pictures. A lovely girl. Grief leads to some dark places, Mr. Hawk. When you get a cancer cluster in a place like St. Croix, especially among young people, it can’t help but cut out the heart of the town. It makes people crazy. It makes people want revenge.’
2
The main street of Barron looked like Hollywood’s idea of a small town. Chris drove by nostalgic storefronts, like the pharmacy with an oversized mortar and pestle stamped on its sign, the hardware store advertising lawnmower repair, and the Swedish bakery displaying racks of fresh kringle cookies. The brick walls were bright and clean; the paint on the stores was fresh. He saw none of the economic decay he expected. In a time when rural areas were bleeding young people into the cities, the streets of Barron bustled. The smell of money was everywhere, and most rural towns hadn’t known that smell in a long time.
It was easy to see why, to the people of Barron, the ten-year-old biotechnology company on their borders felt like a godsend. Their prosperity had a name: Mondamin Research.
Ten miles south along the highway, in the neighboring town of St. Croix, families had a darker view of Mondamin. They blamed the company’s pesticides for the deaths of their children. They’d sued to prove it, but the litigation had been thrown out of court, and in the year that followed, a wave of violence and vandalism had spread into the streets. Teenagers in St. Croix attacked the town of Barron. Teenagers in Barron struck back. The two towns, which were near enough that most people who lived in St. Croix worked or went to school in the larger town of Barron, became enemies.
Now it was worse, because a line had been crossed. Blood had been spilled.
Even among the primped store windows and flower baskets hanging from the street lights, Chris saw evidence of the feud. A concrete statue of a founding pioneer in the street’s roundabout had been beheaded. The doorway of a clothing shop showed the black scars of a recent fire. He saw tiny starbursts popped through the glass of second-floor windows. Bullet holes.
The bullets had targeted one building in particular. The white lettering stenciled on the pockmarked windows above the street advertised the Grohman Women’s Resource Center. The Center was housed in Barron, but the woman who ran the organization lived in St. Croix, where her parents had lived, where her grandparents had lived, where her great-grandparents had settled after emigrating from Uppsala. Chris knew her. She had a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Minnesota. She had a freckle in the swell of her left breast that he had kissed a thousand times.
Chris understood. Hannah was where she always wanted to be. In the center of the storm.
He drove two more blocks to the end of Barron’s main street and found the county courthouse. Like a cathedral out of the Middle Ages, it looked oddly elaborate for its rural surroundings. It was a majestic three-story building with brick gables and a massive central clock tower. He parked and climbed terraced steps leading up from the street. Outside the oak doors, he turned to overlook the town from above. The river flowed immediately behind the downtown shops, and he saw a pedestrian bridge stretching across the water to a swath of forested parkland on the far shore. Away from the main street, he saw a neatly organized grid of houses built between the water and the rocky bluff that bordered the river valley.
From up here, Barron looked peaceful. Not violent at all.
Chris went inside the courthouse, which glistened with lacquered oak. He checked the directory. The sheriff’s office and the facilities for the county jail were buried in the basement. He headed downstairs, where the surroundings were institutional, not ornamental. Security was modest. It wasn’t a place that housed hardened criminals.
He told the uniformed officer at the desk: ‘I’d like to see Olivia Hawk. I’m her lawyer.’
Her father. Her lawyer. It didn’t matter which hat he was wearing. The policeman, like everyone else in town, knew who he was.
