From the Black Hills Read online

  The office was on Collier Street and shared a building and parking lot with Anderson Chiropractic Arts. Mike arrived before the insurance agent did and sat in his mother’s Buick to wait; his father’s car had been impounded by the police. Mike watched people walk into the laundromat across the street.

  It was a sunny, warm morning, gusts of wind whipping up dirt from a construction site half a block away, where a new police station was being built to replace the deteriorating building behind the public library. Fewer than fourthousand people lived in Wheatley. Mike had lived there all his life. He recognized two of the people driving past, both slowing down when they saw his mother’s car, then him. Neither stopped, but both of them—classmates from high school—honked and waved. Mike hadn’t ridden his motorcycle because he would have felt that much more conspicuous. He was still conspicuous, but it was better than going inside. He turned the ignition key and listened to the only cassette his mother had that wasn’t classical—Keith Whitley. Mike had given it her.

  Stuart Wells drove up in a new Chevy. “I thought your mother was supposed to be here,” he said when Mike got out of the car. He was a heavy man, younger than Mike’s father, with slicked-back, wet-looking hair.

  “She didn’t feel well,” Mike told him. “She asked me to do it.” He unlocked the door but didn’t go in himself. The insurance agency was a wide room partitioned into two sections—a larger space on the left, for Mike’s father, and a smaller space on the right for the receptionist. The spaces were open in front, then separated farther back by a thin, laminated wall. Through the window Mike watched Stuart Wells go straight to his father’s computer.

  Less than a minute later Tom DeWitt showed up. He had on jeans and cowboy boots—dressed as if he could have been anyone, Mike thought. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said to Mike. “I wanted to look around a little.”

  “I thought you came yesterday.”

  “I wanted to see it again.” He put his hand on Mike’s back at the same time that he opened the door to walk inside, so that Mike had no choice but to go in with him. He introduced himself to Stuart Wells. “You’re getting his accounts?” he asked.

  The few he had.”

  “It’s a shame it’s not quality that matters in business,” Tom DeWitt said lightly, and moved into the other part of the office, where Mike was standing.

  “My father wanted to be an engineer,” Mike said. “It was only when that didn’t work out that he settled for insurance.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mike watched him turn on Mary Hise’s computer, look through the papers on her desk, and empty out a white plastic container, shaped like a lamb, that held pens and pencils. “Call me Tom,” he said to Mike. “I don’t like sir.”

  “It’s what I was brought up to say.”

  “Did your father make you call him sir?”

  “No,” Mike said. “He didn’t make me do anything.”

  Tom sat in Mary Hise’s chair—a cushioned brown office chair that swiveled and could be adjusted up or down. He looked through her desk drawers and filing cabinets. In the back of one drawer, under office stationery, he found the photograph of Mary and her dog that she had shown Mike that day in December. “She had a dog?” Tom said. He stood up, holding the photograph. “Where is it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said.

  “But it was hers.”

  “I guess.”

  Tom took the photograph and went outside, motioning for Mike to walk out with him. They stood between their cars. “Do you know anything at all about Mary Hise?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Her parents are on a camping trip in Canada. We can’t get in touch with them. We’ve reached a brother in Sioux Falls, who hasn’t seen his sister in two years. He wants us to keep the body here until his parents get back.” Tom put on his sunglasses. “Does that seem cold to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “I hardly knew her.”

  “Would you like to see where she lived?”

  “No,” Mike said. “Why would I?” Then he realized how unfeeling that sounded. “Why do you want me to?”

  “I thought you might be curious. I’m going there now, anyway.” He opened the passenger door of his car. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride back here afterward.” Mike hesitated, and Tom said, “You don’t have to come if it makes you uneasy.”

  “It doesn’t make me uneasy.”

  “Good,” Tom said. “Get in.”

  They drove past the construction site and the elementary school, and past Saint Ann’s, the small Episcopal church Mike’s mother attended weekly and Mike attended on Christmas and Easter. His father used to belong to the Lutheran church his parents had attended—they were buried in the cemetery beside it—but Mike couldn’t remember his father ever having gone to a service. “I don’t believe there’s a God,” he’d told Mike recently, one Sunday morning. “Not many people are brave enough to say that.”

  Behind the trailer park on Montana Street, Tom DeWitt parked in front of an older two-story building divided into apartments. Mary Hise’s was on the first floor, second from the end. There was a cement walkway that ran the length of the building.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he told Mike, unlocking the door. “So don’t mention it to anyone.”

  “I can wait outside.”

  “No. Go ahead and look around.” He took off his sunglasses and turned on the kitchen light. “Just walk through the rooms,” he said. He stayed behind, in the kitchen.

  It was eerie for Mike to be there. He looked at the walls, which were in need of paint, and the green carpeting covering the uneven floors. She hadn’t had much furniture, just the basic things, like a couch and coffee table, a television but not a VCR. Mike walked into each room, knowing that what Tom DeWitt wanted was for him to feel worse than he did about Mary Hise’s death. And he did think he should feel sorrier. But no one had forced Mary Hise to be with his father.

  He stood longest in her bedroom, looking at the radio and lamp on her nightstand and at the yellow curtains on the small window. On top of her bureau he read what was on a slip of paper: “milk,”

  “tomato soup,” and “frozen peas.” Next to it was a framed picture of herself—her high school graduation picture, Mike guessed, because she looked younger, her smile hesitant or uncertain.

  On her double bed was a thick, yellow-flowered comforter. Mike wondered how many times his father had been in that bed with her. It was even more disturbing for him to imagine her in it alone, because he could still envision how she’d looked in a bathing suit. Behind the door—Mike almost didn’t see it—was a laundry hamper with pink underwear thrown on top.

  In her bathroom he looked at her toothbrush and toothpaste, her comb and brush, and something Mike knew his father had given her: a little porcelain hummingbird on a green base. It used to be in the upstairs bathroom of Mike’s house, until his mother had said, “Let’s get rid of that thing.” She’d forgotten that it had belonged to Mike’s grandmother—Glenn’s mother—and Mike’s father hadn’t reminded her.

  Mike went back into the kitchen, where Tom DeWitt pointed out to him a bowl of water on the floor. “It was under the edge of the dishwasher,” he told Mike. “We missed it somehow.”

  He had opened all the cabinets; in the back of the second one were three cans of dog food. “How does your father feel about dogs?” he asked Mike, before picking up the phone and dialing. Mike didn’t answer. He was looking at the magnets on her refrigerator door, each one a miniature kitchen gadget. Under the teakettle was a reminder of a dental appointment on June 22, two days from then. Mike was thinking that Mary Hise had been only six years older than he was, and that she’d talked to him that day in December as if she might be lonely.

  Behind him, on the phone, he heard Tom DeWitt say, “This is our fuck-up. We should have known Thursday.”

  TOM drove back to the insurance agency by way of the root-be
er stand on Laramie Street. “Do you mind?” he asked Mike. “I’m thirsty.” He got a root beer for each of them, and they drank them in the car. Across the street was the post office, a square stone building designed a long time ago by somebody famous, whose name Mike couldn’t remember. Mike watched as somebody from out of town—Oregon, her license plate read—snapped a picture of it.

  Tom turned toward Mike. “Do you know how Mary ended up in Wheatley?” he asked. “She moved here a year and a half ago, to be close to a boyfriend working on that dude ranch south of town. We learned that from a neighbor.”

  Mike didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to seem interested.

  “According to the neighbor, the boyfriend moved away last October, then came back for a visit. We’re trying to find him. Do you know anything about him?”

  “No.”

  Tom looked at Mike in a friendly way. “Did you open Mary’s closets or drawers?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, you should have, because they’re interesting. My sister’s a buyer for a department store in Rapid City. I brought her over here last night to look at Mary’s clothes. I said, ‘Tell me what kind of person she was.’ ” He put his empty glass down on the seat. “I don’t know anything about women’s clothes. And neither do the female agents I know. Not like my sister does. It’s a specialty, like anything else. To be a good detective, you have to be smart enough to know who the experts are.” He smiled at Mike. “That’s my ego talking. So now you know I think I’m smart.”

  “Why do you care about her clothes?”

  “I don’t, exactly. But you can never predict what things will be important and what things won’t.”

  He took Mike’s empty glass from him, picked up his own, and returned them to the person behind the counter. He had an easy walk that Mike didn’t trust. He’d seen wrestlers who walked that way, who could move as if they were less muscular than they were. They were so flexible that their strength was disguised, and they fooled you into thinking they couldn’t take control.

  Tom got back in and put on his seat belt. “What was I saying?” he asked Mike.

  “You were talking about your sister.”

  He pulled back onto Laramie. “She looked through the closet and dresser and said that Mary probably hadn’t bought much since high school. My sister dated the clothes. Just like a coroner figuring out when somebody died.”

  He drove past Wheatley Western Wear and the Rush School of Beauty, which Donetta’s mother owned, and stopped at the red light on the corner of Pearson Street. “My sister said that Mary bought childish-looking clothes,” he told Mike. “Things that hid her body, especially her breasts. Mary wanted to look younger, and maybe more carefree than she was. She didn’t want to be held responsible. And something major must have happened to her in high school, my sister said, to make her quit shopping. I laughed when she said that, but she was serious. For girls, my sister told me, not shopping anymore is like not sleeping, or not eating. It’s a sign of disturbance.”

  They were back at the insurance agency. Tom pulled in next to Mike’s mother’s Buick. “What do you think?” he asked Mike, as if they’d been exchanging opinions all along, as if he hadn’t done all the talking.

  “I don’t see why Mary Hise matters so much. It’s not her you’re trying to find.”

  “Do you think it’s random,” Tom DeWitt said, “who people end up with? Don’t you think you can define people by who they choose? For example, what kind of wife do you think I’d have?”

  “Mary Hise wasn’t married to him.”

  “Sometimes wives and lovers are the same people, and sometimes they’re not.”

  Mike looked at his mother’s dark red car. “If a person has a wife and a girlfriend,” he said carefully, “which one do you define the person by?”

  “Which do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, you get a third defining thing,” Tom said, “which is the fact of the girlfriend—the fact that he’d have one.”

  “So I guess you think that automatically makes somebody a bad person,” Mike said. “Like you and people like you are in a special category. You’re always faithful, and you’re never for one minute attracted to somebody else.”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’ve never been married.”

  “But I’m supposed to guess what your wife is like?” Mike opened the car door angrily. “You try to trick people you think aren’t as smart as you. You think you know people when you don’t know shit about them.” He banged his knee on the dashboard as he got out, and shut the door as hard as he could. He was so unnerved that he tried to open his mother’s car with the wrong key.

  Finally, leaving the parking lot and driving home, he said to the empty car, “Her dog’s name is Harrison. And my father would sooner shoot a person than a dog.”

  He didn’t see the humor of it until after he’d said it, and then he understood for the first time something his English teacher had once said, quoting some dead writer: “Humor is almost never about happiness.”

  SIX

  THE fact that Mike knew these small things became more important to him than the things themselves. They wouldn’t have given Tom DeWitt much more information than he had figured out on his own. But they made Mike feel more in control. He found himself repeating them in his mind, along with something else that only he and his mother knew: that when Mike was in the fourth grade, and their dog, Lucky, had been killed by a car, Mike’s father had been so grief-stricken that he’d walked around the house half the night and had never allowed them to get another pet. His father’s reaction had seemed extreme even to Mike, who had loved the dog as much as anyone did. Even more extreme was that a month later, when Mike’s parents had driven Mike to summer camp, his father had seemed unable to leave him there. Mike remembered standing in a clearing with his duffel bag, watching his mother help his weeping father into the passenger seat, so that she could drive him home.

  Mike didn’t tell anyone about going to Mary Hise’s apartment. He would have felt like a traitor, not to his father but to his mother. What made him angry was knowing that Tom DeWitt probably counted on that; he and Mike had a secret now. And it was hard for Mike to stop thinking about that apartment, especially about Mary Hise’s pink underwear on top of the hamper. It wasn’t a perverted thing that he felt, though. It was just too private, and he pictured her in it even though he didn’t want to.

  HE spent that Saturday afternoon and the rest of the weekend mowing the yard, trimming hedges, and cleaning out the gutters. He didn’t know what else to do. He would have worked at the ranch, but his mother had said that they should both stay home. She said that on Monday they would go back to work and try to get back into a regular routine.

  They had their meals in the kitchen instead of the dining room; the dining room table was covered with documents his mother was going through—bank statements, insurance policies, and the mortgage information on the house. “We have to act as if he’s never coming back,” she told Mike. Sometimes she got emotional, but other times she got angry. She snapped at him about tracking grass clippings into the kitchen; she insisted that he come in and eat the second she wanted him to.

  On Sunday morning Mike was relieved to see Noleen Watkins come over to have breakfast with them and to attend church with his mother. As they were eating, Noleen listed all the people who had asked about Carolyn and Mike. “Everyone’s sympathetic,” she said. “People are concerned about you two.” Mike’s mother had been afraid that she might have trouble at work, but her principal and vice principal had called, asking what they could do to help. Only a few people had called in order to fish for details.

  And the phone was tapped. The Division of Criminal Investigation had gotten permission to do it, although even Tom DeWitt had told them to stop thinking that the next call might be from Glenn. Mike didn’t think his father would call, anyway. He’d let more time pass, if he called at all. “How could he face
talking to us?” Mike’s mother said now, to Noleen. But Mike thought of it differently. He thought that his father might be not ready yet to tell them what really happened, why he did what he did. There might be some reason that he couldn’t explain yet.

  Mike waited for his mother and Noleen to leave for church before calling Josh Mitchell, in Sheridan, Wyoming. He’d been waiting to be alone to do it. Mike and Josh had been best friends almost all of their lives, and Mike hadn’t seen him since February, when Josh had moved away. When school was in session they’d E-mailed each other—whatever they could get away with in case their teachers were reading the mail. Josh would quote from a book he’d made up, called Sexual Guide for Teenagers in the Twenty-first Century. He’d quote things like, “Girls: Keep in mind that oral sex is a healthy alternative to intercourse.”

  “I heard about your dad on the news,” Josh said now, when Mike called. “I didn’t know what the fuck to do. My dad said, ‘Let him call you first, when he’s ready.’ But, then, my dad’s a prick.”

  Mike couldn’t let himself laugh.

  “Your mom must be freaking out,” Josh said. He cleared his throat. He was doing something in the background—making coffee, Mike guessed. Josh had started drinking coffee when he was twelve. “I like the buzz,” he used to tell Mike.

  “She’s at church right now,” Mike said. “Ms. Watkins went with her.”

  “Is Watkins still fucking Coach?” Josh asked. “Wait,” he said then. “I’m being an asshole.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke in a more serious voice. “It seems crazy. How could he do that? That’s what I said when I heard it on the news. My dad said, ‘People can do anything.’ ”

  “I know some stuff,” Mike said awkwardly. “He was, you know, seeing her.” He didn’t feel like saying “fucking,” or even “sleeping with.”