kill her.”
“But you didn’t believe it.”
Schmidt jabbed a calloused finger at them. “Sometimes you have to decide whether you’re a cop or a human being, okay? Maybe it’s not that way in the big city, but it sure as hell works like that in a small town. The way I figure, Inger Mathisen’s murder was an act of mercy.”
“What do you mean by that?” Maggie asked.
“Inger was a mean fucking bitch. Why do you think her husband got drunk every night and finally wound up on the business end of a semi? He hated being in that house. He was weak. He didn’t stop it.”
“Stop what?”
Schmidt sighed with disgust. “The word in town was that Inger did stuff to her kids,” Schmidt said. “Sick stuff. Back then, you knew about that kind of thing, but you didn’t talk about it. A lot of fucked- up kids came out of those farms.”
“Go on.”
Schmidt coughed and spit on the ground. “The boy, Finn, was fourteen or fifteen. Already messed up. Into drugs. The way we figure it, he got stoned and decided he was done with his mother once and for all. It was his bat. His fingerprints were on it.”
“You said he wasn’t home,” Serena said.
“That’s what his sister told us.”
“Rikke?”
Schmidt nodded. “She got out of that hellhole when she went off to NDSU and got her teaching license. She was working in Fargo and living in an apartment there. She swore that Finn was with her that weekend.”
“Were there any witnesses near her apartment to back that up?”
“A couple people remembered seeing the boy,” he said. “They couldn’t be sure if it was Saturday or Sunday.”
“You think it was Sunday,” Maggie said.
“Yeah, I figure Finn killed Inger on Saturday night and then called his sister. She came out to get him and take him back to Fargo to sober him up and get their stories straight. No one saw a thing, though, so there was no way we could prove it. Rikke took Finn home on Tuesday, and that’s when they claim they found the body smelling up the house. She called us, and I came over.”
“Did you interrogate them?”
“Interrogate kids whose mother had just been killed? Yeah, not so much.”
“Except you didn’t believe them, did you?”
“Let’s just say I didn’t push too hard. Okay? None of us did. We talked about it. Everybody in town was going to be happier if it was just some stranger who killed her. The kids had suffered enough, so we figured, let them get on with their lives.”
“An act of mercy,” Serena said.
“Exactly right.”
34
Tish parked on a dirt road two blocks from Finn’s house, sheltered by the sagging branches of a weeping willow. She dangled a cigarette outside the open window of the Civic while she waited. She knew she should quit, but she had spent most of her life alone and anxious since she left Duluth, and smoking was like morphine in her bloodstream, dulling the pain. Her cigarettes were always there with her. On a sailboat in the harbor in Dubrovnik, after the war ended and the tourists started coming back. In a mud and stone hut halfway up a Tibetan mountain. In Atlanta, crying in the parking lot of a Borders bookstore in Snellville, after the breakup with Katja. In Duluth, when Laura ran away and shut Tish out of her life.
If only she had stayed. Things would have been so different.
She felt the car shiver as a train snaked its way toward her from the harbor. The engine came slowly, snorting like an animal and cutting off her view of Finn’s house. Coal dust blew off the overflowing boxcars and settled in a grainy film across her windshield. The clattering, rattling, squealing thunder made her clap her free hand over her ear. When the last of the freight cars passed, she saw Rikke, in a navy blue dress, marching down the front steps of her house. It was the first time she had seen Rikke since coming back to Duluth. The years hadn’t been kind. Her austere beauty and her Amazon physique had both flown away with age. Even from a distance, she could see a lifetime of unhappiness in her face. Rikke clutched an umbrella in her hand and cut across the lawn to a tan Impala. She drove out of the weeds onto the dirt road and across the maze of railroad tracks, not far from the car where Tish was waiting.
Tish ducked low so that Rikke wouldn’t see her. She waited until the Impala was gone, then climbed out of her car and headed for Finn’s house. She picked her way through the bed of rocks between the tracks. Her T-shirt clung to her skin in the sticky air. Looking around, she felt as if time had stood still in places like this. The town, the dirt roads, the house, and the trains were like a snapshot from her childhood. It made her think of old things. Cold, sweating bottles of Mountain Dew. Wham-O Frisbees. Black-and-white television. It made her think of a time when people she loved were still alive.
She knocked on the door. When no one answered, she peered through the cream- colored lace on the window. She wondered if Finn was sleeping.
Tish turned the door handle, but the front door was locked. When she checked each of the window frames, she found one where the inside latch was undone. She slid the window open and climbed through the flimsy curtains into the living room. The house was silent and close. When she felt something brush against her leg, she jumped, then realized it was a cat pushing past her feet. She closed the window behind her.
“Hello?” she called. “Finn?”
No one answered.
She did a nervous survey of the downstairs space. The kitchen was small, with avocado appliances that hadn’t been replaced in years. The screen door to the backyard was tattered, its mesh hanging down from the corner. She pushed open a door and found a small toilet, no bigger than a closet, with a bare bulb hanging overhead for light and an empty pill bottle on the ledge of the sink. Tamoxifen. She felt a stab of sympathy for Rikke.
Back in the living room, she saw the narrow steps near the front door that led to the second floor. She hesitated at the base of the stairway.
“Finn?” she called again.
Tish climbed the stairs, wincing at the noise as her feet pushed down on the warped slabs of wood. Upstairs, she was faced with a closed door immediately in front of her. Without knowing why, she knew Finn was inside. She didn’t knock. She nudged the door with her foot and waited in the doorway while it swung open.
The room was dark, the curtains drawn, letting only cracks of daylight knife through the gloom in narrow, dusty streams. Her eyes adjusted. She saw Finn on the floor, sitting with his back against the bed, his arms hugging his knees. His forearms were swaddled in white bandages. He wore underwear but nothing else.
“It’s me, Finn,” she said. “Tish.”
His eyes were lost in the shadows. He didn’t look at her, and she wasn’t sure if he knew she was there. Then he spoke in a tired voice. “You should go, she’ll be back soon.”
“I don’t care.”
“She won’t want to see you.”
“I’m here to see you. How are you?”
“How am I?” Finn said. “I wish I was dead.”
