Ronette and I spoke at the same exact instant.
“No,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Are they rabid?” Indigo asked. “Is that why they’re attacking livestock?”
“There is no evidence to suggest that,” said Ronette.
“This might sound like a strange question,” I said, “but does anyone in your family own a crossbow?”
“Like a slingshot?”
“It’s a kind of mechanical bow and arrow.”
Her voice rose noticeably. “We don’t have anything like that in this house.”
“What about your neighbors?”
“I think I would remember that kind of contraption if I had ever seen them using it.”
Indigo ran a hand along her face, almost as if to calm herself. “Is it dead?”
“Excuse me?”
“From what you’re saying, it sounds like someone shot the black one with a crossbow. Why else would you have mentioned it? There’s something you’re not telling us.”
As stoned as she was, the young woman was quick-witted.
“You are so distrustful, Indigo,” said the Amish woman. “It makes me sad.”
“It makes me sad that you’re overly trusting.”
Anna Stoll shook her head. “Would you like some pie before you go?”
Ronette and I exchanged hopeful smiles.
21
The pie was a variety I had never before tasted. It was very sweet—predominantly molasses flavored—with a hint of ginger and cloves in addition to the cinnamon and nutmeg I had smelled on the warm air. Anna served it to us with big glasses of unpasteurized milk from a literal icebox.
“Is this shoofly pie?” Ronette asked.
The Amish woman gave us a delighted grin. “You have had it before?”
“Not like this.”
“It’s delicious,” I agreed. I had always been a sucker for baked goods flavored with molasses.
Indigo Mazur excused herself before we had finished cleaning the last crumbs from our plates. She said she had chores to finish back at home, but I knew she had concocted the excuse to get away from us. Habitual users of intoxicants don’t make a practice of hanging out with law-enforcement officers. I had to wonder what had happened in her history to make her so reflexively cynical. By contrast, Zane Wilson had come across as a naïf, which made me question the future of their relationship.
We had just said our goodbyes to Anna and her peekaboo daughters when we heard Gorman Peaslee’s truck roar past again. This time, he was headed out.
“I guess he was serious about not wanting to be interviewed,” I said to Ronette.
“Gorman wouldn’t have spoken to us in any case. The only authority he acknowledges is his own.”
I removed the dirt-stained Constitution from my pocket. “What about this?”
“Didn’t you hear? Gorman Peaslee was that document’s sole author. And the sole arbiter on its legal interpretation.”
I put away the pamphlet. “Does anyone else live down that way?”
“Not this time of year. There are a couple of seasonal cabins, all for sale. The buyers didn’t know what it meant to have Gorman for a neighbor. Not until it was too late.”
I recalled the vandalized real estate signs at the corner. Unconsciously, I found myself looking around for Samuel, but the boy must have tired of playing shepherd and wandered off to pursue some new adventure.
“I’d like to have a look at Peaslee’s house, anyway,” I said.
“What for?”
“Because he doesn’t want me to.”
The sky was growing darker. It wasn’t all that late in the afternoon, but heavy clouds had begun to descend on the summits of the taller mountains to the north, giving them an almost bisected appearance, as if they had been chopped down to the exact same elevation. The likelihood of a snowy drive home weighed upon my mood.
We passed the two other Amish farms. One of the families kept dairy cattle. The Holsteins paused in their cud chewing to turn their wide, empty eyes in our direction.
“I find it hard to believe that Anna Stoll has never heard of a crossbow,” I said.
“That did seem odd.”
When I didn’t speak again, Ronette filled in the silence. “Now you understand why I called Indigo Mazur a firecracker.”
“How does someone like her end up living in a yurt in the middle of the woods?”
“How else? Love.”
“Should we have told her about Zane’s mishap with the truck?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t—knowing the delight you take in mischief making.”
“Who says I take delight in it?”
“A certain state police trooper, for one.”
I needed to keep in mind what close friends Ronette and my girlfriend were. I hadn’t communicated with Dani since she’d left my house the day before. How was she interpreting my prolonged silence?
I had always attributed my successes in life to my ability to focus in the midst of chaos, but that same focus inclined me to self-involvement and a careless disregard toward the people around me. The moment was wrong for a phone call, but I needed to reach out to Dani as soon as I was alone again, if only to explain about Shadow.
The vacant cabins Ronette had mentioned began to flit past, one after the other.
“In a way it’s kind of impressive that one man could drive away so many people,” she said. “Awful, but impressive.”
I didn’t find Peaslee’s tactics unusual. I had encountered plenty of men, and women, in the Maine woods who’d borrowed the same playbook. The prisoner Billy Cronk had killed, Trevor Dow, had been one of the worst offenders. For years, he and his redheaded clan had bullied an entire community into keeping mum about their multifarious crimes.
“Is Peaslee married?”
“Why get married when his money attracts an endless supply of girls? How that middle-aged creep manages to keep persuading young women—I was going to say it was a mystery, but the truth is it’s not mysterious at all. There will always be frogs willing to carry scorpions across the river.”
“Is he gratuitously hateful or does he have an actual reason for acting like a shit heel?”
“I’m no psychologist, but I think he’s terrified people are going to discover he’s not the big man he pretends to be. My priest would probably say Gorman’s fear has made him a slave to sin.”
For Ronette everything came back
