Everything You Want Me to Be(21)

“Man, you won’t believe this stuff, Del. Listen to what I found.”

Jake brought his laptop into my office and started reading aloud. Nancy hovered at the door.

“The curse is one of the most widely held superstitions in theater, dating back centuries. It’s rumored that Shakespeare wrote actual witches’ spells into his play, which angered the real witches living during that time. Every performance of Macbeth, or ‘The Scottish Play’ as generations of frightened actors refer to it, is considered dangerous and ripe for accidents and foul play.”

“What curse?” Nancy asked.

“What are you looking up that shit for?” I balled up my sandwich wrapper and threw it away.

“You’re the one who asked Tommy about it.”

“Then you weren’t listening too well.” I left the two of them and found some leftover coffee in the pot, smelled it, and put the whole thing in the microwave. By the time I’d gotten back it seemed like Jake had filled Nancy in. I glared at her big, frightened eyes.

“I didn’t ask Tommy about the curse. I asked a murder suspect if he wanted to deflect some suspicion somewhere else. And he didn’t.”

“So what does that tell us?”

“Either he killed her and he didn’t know about the curse, or he didn’t kill her and someone else did. Someone who isn’t some goddamn ghost story.”

“Witch’s spell,” Nancy corrected.

“Witches’ spells, my ass.” The microwave beeped and I went out and poured the sludge into a cup.

“Listen to this,” Jake said when I came back again.

“Laurence Olivier nearly died several times while he was performing Macbeth. Three people died in a London performance in 1942. In Manchester in 1947, the actor playing Macbeth said he didn’t believe in the curse. He was stabbed during a swordfight in rehearsal and died.”

“So some guy didn’t like him and thought it was a good opportunity to off him.”

Jake wasn’t paying attention to me. “When Charlton Heston played Macbeth, he was severely burned.”

“That’s what happens when you stand too close to a fire.”

They were both sucked into it now. Nancy read over his shoulder as Jake clicked through web page after web page.

“The legend is that Lady Macbeth died in the very first production back in 1606 for King James. The actor collapsed and died backstage. No one knew why.”

I shook my head over the coffee, draining the cup. “You two are acting like that girl, Portia.”

“It’s a lot of stuff to happen around one play, and now Hattie, too. Makes you wonder.”

“Makes you wonder, maybe. Makes me think I need another deputy on this case.”

“Come on, Del.”

Grabbing my coat, I left them both with their heads full of nonsense and headed back over to Bud’s place. I needed to dig into Hattie’s life more, see where she was spending her time, and I also wanted to see Bud and Mona. Make sure they had pulled themselves off the floor.

Curses. Jesus. It took all kinds. There wasn’t anything to a curse but words. Just like blessings and prayers and all the rest of it. People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference. I drove past the turnoff to Bud’s and kept going for a ways, just to let the land settle into me and put everything back in perspective.

They called Montana big sky country and that’s what it was here, too. This land was all soft hills of corn and soybeans rolling out into the clouds in every direction. Farmhouses hid in clumps of trees here or there, but there wasn’t anything to break up the horizon. The sky ruled, whether it was the sun baking the crops or the wind whipping dust devils across the roads. Some mornings the sky wouldn’t even let you see the land; it’d lay a fog so thick you couldn’t make out the car ahead of you. Everything came from the sky and it put you in your place, made you feel how small you were. For years after Nam, I parked out next to the highway and watched those big old thunderheads roll in. It was like a balm, seeing how they made everything under them dark and cowering, like seeing a piece of my soul laid out. That’s why we had such good church people here. In the city the sky was all covered up by buildings and bridges and everything else. People forgot how little they were. They forgot they weren’t in charge. Out here it was plain as day. You just looked out in front of you and saw God. Now, I didn’t take to those ministers who said God listened to each and every one of us and intervened in our daily lives like some meddling boss. I used to believe it as a kid, I guess, but I’d seen too much to put any stock in it now. Look at Hattie. Who could see that mutilated, bloated body and tell me it was God’s will? No, God had nothing to do with that. He had bigger things to worry about than how we managed to muck up our lives and deaths.

Just as I was turning back toward Bud’s I got a call from the morgue.

“Sheriff Goodman,” a voice said. Fran didn’t say hi like everybody else. Made you feel like you were being allowed to talk to her, even when she was the one calling you.

“What do you have?”

“No foreign fibers or hairs anywhere on her. No sign of a struggle either.”

“So she didn’t see it coming?”