CROSSING THE BORDER into South Dakota, Virgil asked, 'Was Betsy Carlson prominent in any way? I mean, before she came here?'
'Oh, lord, yes. Her parents were very well-off early settlers, owned a good chunk of land along the railroad, one of the banks, at least for a while. Betsy was the life of the party when she was young,' Laura said. 'Everybody was a little surprised when Bill Judd married her sister, instead of her.'
'There were rumors that he didn't actually have to marry her, to get what he wanted,' Virgil said. 'The old 'Why buy the cow if you're getting the milk for free?''
'Could be some truth to that,' Laura said. 'Back then, people tended to look the other way…Have you been talking to other people…mmm…related to Bill Judd?'
'A couple,' Virgil said. 'Margaret Laymon, of course. A woman who now lives somewhere else-I've got a list I'm working down.'
'Well, cough up the names,' Joan said.
'Ah, you don't want to know,' Virgil said. 'Besides, I couldn't tell you if I wanted. I scrawled them all down in my notebook, and it's back at the motel. He apparently got around town, though.'
His eyes caught Laura's in the rearview mirror. She was watching him with just a hint of a smile on her face.
Virgil added, 'The question I was working up to, was, why wouldn't there be any press clippings about Betsy Carlson? I was looking in the newspaper files today, and there's not a single one.'
After a moment of silence, Laura said, 'Well, that's ridiculous. She was in every club in town, she was president of most of them, at one time or another. There should have been a hundred stories about her.'
THE FLOOR NURSE at Grunewald rest home was not happy to see Virgil again, and got in his face. 'Betsy was very agitated after you left. She still hasn't recovered. She tries to walk, but she's too weak. We're here to protect our clients, and you could be hurting her.'
'I'm sorry about that,' Virgil said, with not much contrition. 'But we've got a fairly desperate situation over in Bluestem. There were two more people killed this morning, and we believe they involve something that started in Betsy's time. So: we've got to talk to her.'
The nurse let her disapproval show, but when she took them to see Carlson, the old woman showed no sign of recognizing Virgil. Instead she squinted at Laura Stryker and when Laura said, 'Hello, Betsy,' she quavered, 'Laura?'
'Yup, it's me,' Laura said.
The three of them pulled up chairs, and with the nurse hovering in the background, Laura started talking to Carlson about the old days in Bluestem, about playing up on Buffalo Ridge. Carlson was older than Laura, so they hadn't run with the same groups, but they'd all known each other.
Carlson's memories wandered, sometimes were sharp, other times, vague. At one point, she blurted, 'I remember when Mark died. That was an awful day.'
'Most awful day in my life,' Laura said. She glanced at Joan. 'I was afraid for the kids. Jim was bad, but Joanie…I was afraid she might die. Or go crazy…' She bit off the sentence, realizing that it might not be the most diplomatic thing to say, given whom they were visiting.
Carlson's head bobbed, and then her eyes drifted away, and then she looked at Virgil and said, 'Did you find the man in the moon?'
Virgil smiled and said, 'I looked, but I couldn't find anything. I could find him if I had a better name.'
She shook her head and Virgil could feel her drifting again: 'Doesn't have a name. Not that I knew, anyway. They took him away, but he came back. I saw him.' She shook her head and went silent, and then she said, 'You can't look at all his face. Just look from his eyes to his chin, in this circle.' She moved a trembling hand to her face, and traced a circle from the middle of her forehead, past the end of an eyebrow, down across a cheekbone, around and under her mouth, and backup the other side to her forehead again. 'You can only see him if you look in there. The man in the moon.'
'Do you know anybody who'd like to hurt Bill?' Joan asked.
The old woman looked at Joan for a moment and then almost giggled. 'Who wouldn't, that's the question.'
They pushed, but she declined into babble. They waited, to see if she'd recover, and she went to sleep.
'GODDAMNIT,' VIRGIL SAID, as they were crossing the parking lot. 'Doesn't know the name, but she knows he's here. The man in the moon.'
'What're you going to do?' Joan asked.
'Go back to Bluestem. See what's going on at Schmidt's. Maybe…maybe go talk to the judge about getting a subpoena to look at Judd's bank records. And Gleason's, and Schmidt's.'
'How about the Strykers'?' Laura asked.
'I've ruled out two of the Strykers,' Virgil said, as they settled in the truck.
'Which two?' Joan asked.
'That's the tough question,' Virgil said.
ON THE WAY BACK, he pushed Laura about sexual and business relationships in town when Gleason and Schmidt overlapped as sheriff and coroner.
'You don't think it's about the Jerusalem artichoke scam?' Joan said. 'Around here, that's always a topic of conversation.'
'If it weren't for Gleason and Schmidt, maybe. But with those two…from what everybody tells me, they were all movers and shakers in town, and friendly, but I don't think anybody would blame Russell Gleason for the artichoke thing.' His eyes went up to the rearview. 'Do you?' he asked Laura.
She shook her head: 'It never occurred to me that he could be involved, and us Strykers knew as much about the artichoke business as anyone. No. I don't think that's it.'
'This comes down to craziness, and craziness…craziness isn't usually about some long-ago hustle,' Virgil said. 'There's something else: sex, violence, illegality of some kind…some crazy bitterness that got covered up and suppressed, and now is sticking its head out. I was thinking, maybe…maybe there'd been a homosexual thing, that Judd pushed it on some kid back then, a kid who wasn't gay but did what he was told to do, or forced to do, and that's made him crazy. But my…names…say that there wasn't any male-on-male gay stuff.'
Laura looked at him through the rearview, but said nothing. At her house, she got out, closed the door, walked around to the front of the truck and made a rolling motion, so that Virgil rolled down the window. 'What you want to know about, didn't happen,' she said. 'Absolutely did not.'
'What are you talking about?' Joan asked her mother.
'Virgil knows,' Laura said, and she turned away and headed up her front sidewalk.
'WHAT THE HECK was that about?' Joan demanded, as they rolled down toward her house.
'About eliminating Strykers, as suspects.'
'What?'
Virgil sighed. 'She was telling me that she didn't have an affair with old man Judd, and, as a corollary, that that's not why your father killed himself, and so there's no reason for any Stryker, and in particular, Jim, to have killed him. Or the others.'
She stared, aghast. 'My God, Virgil. What have you been up to?'
Virgil said, 'I've been listening to talk. There's talk that your mother and Judd were involved back around the time of your father's death. She worked in an insurance office that Judd owned. If she says she was not involved, I believe her. I don't think she'd lie, when we've got all these killings on our hands, not if she thought it might make a difference.'
'Of course she wouldn't,' Joan said, angry now.
Virgil shook his head. 'You can't tell what people will do, when their reputations are on the line. But: she didn't. I believe her.'
'It's hard to believe that you suspected,' Joan said.
'I didn't, really,' Virgil said, again, without much contrition. 'I'm just investigating.'
10
