Strange Country (27 page)

Boyd waited for Gerson to say something, but when he looked over, she seemed to be busying herself with her pen. He tapped his right index finger against the left cuff of his jacket, then said, “The night Prue Stalking Horse was shot.”

“A week ago,” Tel said, interrupting him.

“Yes,” Boyd said. “Early Wednesday morning. She called you Tuesday evening.”

“No,” Tel said steadily. “She didn’t.”

“You have a phone out here.”

“Oh.” Boyd thought he could see something, a certain relaxation of an expression he hadn’t realized was tense. “Everyone uses it.” He waved a hand toward an old-fashioned wall phone near the coat hooks. “She could have been calling anyone.”

“We expect she was trying to call you,” Boyd said, though he didn’t think any of them had any evidence that this was true, just questions layered on questions.

“I wasn’t here,” Tel said. “Pat and I were over in Pierre at an estate auction.”

“Would she have known that?”

Tel looked amused. “Are you asking if we lived in each other’s pockets, Deputy? She didn’t know my cell number. Didn’t have any reason to. And I don’t know any reason she’d have known where I was that night.”

“So she could have been trying to reach you when she called your barn number?”

“Could have been, I guess.” Tel folded his arms across his chest.

“We have a witness who says you were in town the night Prue died.”

“The hell you say,” Tel responded, but his eyes shifted left, away from Boyd’s, as he said it. “Someone says they saw me at three o’clock in the morning in West Prairie City?”

“Four.”

“Four. Well, hell, they were probably drunk.”

“They weren’t drunk.”

Tel shrugged like he didn’t set much store by the witness or Boyd either. He stood and walked to the fireplace, where he opened a small panel to the left of the hearth and fiddled with the controls.

“Were you in West Prairie City on the night Prue Stalking Horse was killed?” Boyd asked.

“Pat and I went to Pierre that morning to an estate auction.” Which was exactly what he’d already said.

“That’s not what I asked,” Boyd said.

“You think someone saw me here,” Tel said. “I’m saying they were mistaken.”

“We’ll need to talk to your wife,” Gerson said. “For verification.”

“Sure,” Tel said. His voice flat. “She’s gone on over to Sioux Falls to visit her sister, but she’ll be back the end of next week.”

“If you give me the address, I’ll send an agent over to talk to her,” Gerson said.

Tel looked at her; then he went to his desk, scrawled something on a blue notepad, tore off the top sheet, and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

Boyd said, “I understand you’re having cash-flow problems.”

That actually made Tel laugh. “My whole life is cash-flow problems, Deputy. I’ve never killed anyone over it yet. I heard you’ve been having some housing problems yourself,” Tel said, still turned toward the fireplace.

“Heard it? Or saw it?” Boyd asked. He generally liked Tel, though he didn’t know him well, but he wasn’t sure what game he was playing now. If he’d been in town two nights ago or the night Prue had died, why didn’t he just say so?

A ranch hand entered the room, a tall man with a dark face and big hands. A battered Stetson shaded his eyes. He didn’t say anything, just came into the room, moved to one side, and closed the door behind him.

Tel turned away from the fireplace, glanced at the silent ranch hand and said with the hint of a smile. “I told you, Deputy. I went to Pierre a week ago to an estate auction. I bought a feed wagon and three sets of oak bookcases. You can check.”

Boyd stood. His back deliberately to the ranch hand and the door, facing Tel square. “Stop stonewalling me,” he said.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Deputy.”

26

In the general way of things, Boyd was more patient than most men. He asked questions and gauged reactions, came back with a new set of questions or the same questions asked a different way. But not today. Today, two people were dead. He had a hole the size of Cleveland in the side of his house. Hallie had Death knocking at her door, and he couldn’t even begin to do anything about that. But this? This was something he was getting to the bottom of.

“We have a photograph,” he began. “We found it with Laddie Kennedy. It was a picture of—”

Again, Tel interrupted him. “Oh, I know what it’s a picture of. Laddie called me about that picture last week.” He rubbed the back of his neck; then he let out a long sigh, leaned back so his shoulders rested against the fireplace mantel. He looked across the room at Agent Gerson, who was sitting comfortably in her chair, somehow managing to watch Tel and the ranch hand both.

“To tell you the truth,” Tel finally said. “I haven’t seen that photograph in at least fifteen years. Back then…” He paused. “Well, back then, when that picture was taken, I’d just turned thirty-five. Laddie was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, and he’d just gotten out of the army. Prue wasn’t new in town, but something had changed recently about her, like she’d learned some basic secret about the world.”

“And the other people?” Boyd asked. “There were five of you in the picture.”

“Is that really important?” Tel asked. He looked at Gerson, looked back at Boyd.

“We don’t know what’s important,” Boyd said. “Right now, everything’s important.”

“Laddie carries a stone,” Tel said.

“I know,” Boyd said. Then, he added, “Agent Gerson knows too.”

Tel nodded, but didn’t say anything. He pushed himself away from the fireplace and began to pace. Finally, he looked at the ranch hand by the door as if he’d just realized the man was standing there. He waved a hand, like a silent signal, and the man went back out the office door as quietly as he’d entered. Tel stopped pacing, back in front of the fireplace again.

“You say you know about Laddie’s rock,” he said, his voice gone two levels quieter. “Do you really know?”

“I know dead people talked to him,” Boyd said evenly.

Tel huffed out something almost like a laugh. “Yeah. Lucky Laddie. That was what we called him, you know, back then. Not because he was. Lucky, I mean. Or, I mean, that was why. Because he was never lucky. Not after he got that stone.”

Tel shook his head. “Crazy thing. He and Prue were dating—I bet you didn’t know that. She was a little older than he was, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. Laddie’d told her about the stone—well, hell, Laddie’d tell anybody, wasn’t a secret—and Prue come to me, had an idea, she told me. Told me she’d been doing some research and she thought there might be other stones, that there might be a way to make some money.”

“From the stones?” Boyd asked.

Tel nodded. “I couldn’t see it myself. I mean, let’s say I believed what Laddie said about that stone—that he could hear the dead talk. But saying I did, what good was it? How could you make money off it? But Prue thought she had an answer to that, said the stones would manifest—that’s exactly the word she used too—that they’d manifest differently depending on the person they attached themselves to.”

“What were—what are the stones? How do they—?” Boyd wasn’t even sure what the question was. “How do they work? Who makes them?”

“The way it was explained to me,” Tel said, like he’d learned it in a classroom, “the stones hold magic. Like a sink. A magic sink.” Which Boyd already knew, but it didn’t tell him much.

“Where do they come from?” Boyd asked.

Tel leaned against one of the windows and didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his boots. Everything he wore fit like it had been tailored, but nothing was new, like he bought his shirts and his jeans and his boots to last, then he used them up and wore them out. Tel was a working rancher, albeit one of the few with money. He looked up.

“You don’t know this, neither of you.” He looked from Boyd to Gerson. “You know my son, Brian,” he said to Boyd, who nodded. “I had a daughter too, would have been twenty-five the end of next month. Christmas kid. Or, just two days after. But she got her own day. We made sure she didn’t feel like her birthday wasn’t a big deal. She was our oldest, you know, and we thought, then, we’d have a big family—five, six kids, maybe. Ranch has got room, you know, for kids. Things to do and they keep each other company. Pat and me, we both—” He stopped, shook his head, one sharp motion, like waking himself up.

“Well, none of that matters now. Nothing gets done or undone that’s already happened. Barbie—that was her name—Barbie had a brain tumor. Inoperable. We’d more or less just found out about it when Prue Stalking Horse come around talking about magic stones and there was Laddie with one of these stones and I believed Laddie because Laddie doesn’t—didn’t—” He corrected himself. “Didn’t know how to lie. If Laddie Kennedy told you something, you could believe it. He might have been better off if he had lied.” He paused, considered the man and woman in front of him, and continued. “I thought it was worth a chance, you know. Like Mayo Clinic and this place in Mexico we looked into. You try everything. I thought, what the hell.”

He stared into the fireplace. “It was the money and it wasn’t the money. If it worked, if something magic could cure her, then the money didn’t matter. If it didn’t work, then the money didn’t matter either, but it was all tangled up together like somehow helping Barbie depended on helping Prue and Laddie and whatever it was they were trying to do. You understand?”

His expression held a sort of mute appeal, like he knew there was no logic, hadn’t been at the time, but Boyd nodded because he did understand—sometimes you did everything you could think of precisely because you knew none of them would work.

Tel left the fireplace and went over to the window. Snow swirled, but not heavy, light enough that it might have been blowing off the ground rather than falling from the skies.

“What happened?” Boyd asked.

“I’ve never been entirely sure,” Tel said. “The way it was explained to me, the stones have to be a certain type—granite, some particular proportion of quartz and feldspar. There’s a lot of it up in the Black Hills, but it’s not anything special in the regular scheme of things. If it hasn’t been ‘charged,’ I guess you’d call it, with magic, it’s just rock. So what Prue and her sister were trying to do—oh, and Billie Packer—was figure out how to charge the stones. They thought they could use Laddie’s stone. Reverse engineer it, so to speak.” He laughed. “That should have told me something right there. Because magic isn’t something you can engineer. Think about it. If it works at all, it’s not going to work like engineering.”

“So, Prue and her sister figured out how to—what? Store magic?”

Tel wiped his hand down his face. “You know Jasper? The tornado?”

Boyd nodded.

“You know that happened in the fall, right? Practically winter. They said it was a freak storm, came up out of nowhere. Yeah, it wasn’t natural.”

Boyd leaned forward. This was a new thing, something he’d never heard talked about. And Taylor County was a place that talked about things. “That was Prue Stalking Horse?”

Tel shook his head. “She says—said—not. And I gotta say, it was right after that they took Lillian Harper Jones away—that was Martin Weber’s grandmother. Always figured it was her somehow, though I didn’t really know how—well, she pretty much said it was even if no one believed her. Except apparently the Weber kid. No, it was what happened after. I was out of it at that point, desperate, sure, but…” There was something haunted in his expression as he looked at Boyd. “You don’t talk about it straight out. You get hauled away, you do that. But, people died in that tornado. They never had a chance. I figured it was past time to walk away.

“Of course, if I’m being honest, I have to say I might have gone back. Might have begged. I don’t know. Prue told me they were going forward with or without me. She said she’d come back, tell me how great it worked, said I’d pay anything then. And maybe I would have. But she never did.”

“Never came back?”

“Never mentioned it to me again. Her sister disappeared. Billie Packer disappeared. The Jones place burned. And it was like it never happened. We took Barbie over to Mayo about then and we were gone two months altogether and not really talking to anyone for a good while after that. So, I don’t know what people were saying—whatever it was, they weren’t saying it to us.”

“What do you think happened?” Boyd asked.

Tel walked back to sit on the desk again. He looked Boyd straight in the eye as he spoke. “I think that tornado charged those stones. I think Prue and her sister and Billie Packer tried to use them. I think something went bad wrong out there at that old farmhouse. I think Billie Packer died and Prue killed him. Or she might as well have.”

There was a long moment of silence. Tel’s sequence of events was speculation at best, but it made a certain amount of sense to Boyd. The questions he was left with were: What did the events of twenty years ago have to do with Prue’s and Laddie’s deaths in the present, and where was Prue’s sister?

“This picture,” Gerson said, taking a copy of the photograph from her purse and offering it to Tel. “Can you identify the people in it?”

Tel didn’t take the picture. Didn’t even look at it. “There’s me and Laddie Kennedy,” he said, “which you already know, and Prue Stalking Horse. The big man in the back would have been Billie Packer. He wasn’t the brightest kid and he never had any ambition, but that’s a hell of a way to end, rotting away in someone’s cellar. Prue said he had the touch, that was why they kept him around, I think.”

Boyd took the picture from Gerson and looked at it again. “‘All the talents,’ what does that mean?” he asked.

“It was about the others, not me. I was the money guy. But it was the stone, you know. Prue would hand it to people who came in and ask them what they thought.”

“What did you think?” Boyd asked.

Tel laughed. “I wouldn’t touch it. I just looked at it and told her it was not something I wanted to have anything to do with. She smiled, like she already knew everything she needed just from that, like I’d only done exactly what she’d expected, and said that was fine. Wish I’d known then,” he said.