Everything You Want Me to Be(57)

It was a quarter to seven when I got to his house, early enough that Carl wouldn’t have left for work yet. He answered the knock like he’d been waiting right on the other side, dressed and shaved for the day.

“Sheriff. Little early, isn’t it?” He glanced past me toward the cruiser.

“Early enough that you can spare a few minutes.” I nodded behind him and he let me in. His boy stood in the hallway, still in his pajamas but wide awake and half afraid, by the looks of him.

“Morning.” I tipped my hat to him, which put most kids at ease, but not this one. He just dropped his eyes to the floor, not moving.

“Maybe Lanie can watch him for a minute while we talk.”

“Lanie!” Carl shouted and his wife appeared, also in pajamas. She didn’t look very awake or pleased.

“What?” She didn’t greet me.

“I’ve got to talk to the sheriff.”

“Again?”

“Just get Josh ready, okay?”

She shook her head and collared the boy, taking him back down the hall and slamming a door.

Carl gestured me into the kitchen.

“Not a morning person, is she?” I asked pleasantly.

“What is it, Sheriff? I answered everything your deputy asked me and lost an entire period of class doing it. You know how people are looking at me?”

“How’s that?”

“Like I was—” He shook his head. “Like I had something to do with this mess.”

“Did you?”

“What are you asking me?”

“What do you know, Carl?” I put my hat on the table and stared him down.

“I know Hattie Hoffman’s dead, that’s all. I had her for history two years now. American history last year and European this year. She liked Europe better.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at. Why’d you lie to Jake?”

“Lie!”

“I want to know what you talked about in your basement on Friday, and you’d better not say the Twins.”

He stared at me, frozen for a minute, before going to the doorway and glancing down the hall. Then he dropped into one of the chairs at his kitchen table and spoke quietly.

“Lanie.”

“What about her?”

He sighed. “We talked about her a bit. When Peter came back with me on Friday she was upset. We started fighting. We’re always fighting these days. And after she stomped upstairs, Peter and I talked about it.”

“About what?”

“About getting married young. Not knowing what the hell you’re getting into. He got married right out of college, too.”

“Was he having marital troubles? Did you talk about that?”

He was quiet for a second. “No. Not exactly. He asked me something, though, and I’m not proud of what I told him. That’s why I didn’t tell your deputy.”

I waited and eventually he came out with it.

“He asked if I would’ve stayed with Lanie before Josh was born. If I could’ve done it over again when there weren’t any kids to think about, would I have stayed?”

His voice dropped even lower. “I said no. I said I thought even Josh wished we were divorced sometimes. The stupid things we fight about . . .”

“What kinds of things?” I smelled a domestic brewing.

“Everything. You ever been married, Sheriff?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that. What happened?”

“Vietnam.”

“She left you while you were gone?”

“Nope. About two minutes after I got back. Turned out she liked me better on the other side of the world.”

I never talked about Angie. Not that I was torn up about it anymore. There was a time, a long time, when I was bitter about how she left, but that all faded. She hadn’t known what to do with an angry war vet anymore than I knew myself. She just wanted a happy, regular life. Before I shipped out, she’d begged me to go to Canada with her. I took the honorable path, though; I put my country before my girl. Her letters were one of the things that got me through my tour and that’s what I remembered about her now. When I heard she’d died in a car crash outside Dubuque a few years ago, I pulled out all those letters again. It was a strange thing, reading all the warnings to be careful and not let myself get hurt, all that concern pouring out of Angie’s dead hand. I put them away in the box with the medals and the note from the president and hadn’t looked at any of it since. No need to dig up the past, except I felt for Carl. Angie and I had been kids ourselves, no property or children to muck up the divorce. There was just a See you later and a few papers to sign. But Carl and Lanie had a life together—a home, a son.

“That’s horrible, Sheriff.” He looked mad. “Leaving a war hero as soon as he gets home.”

“What’s done is done.”

I picked up my hat and made my way back toward the front door. “Lund never complained about his wife?”

“Not really. Mostly his mother-in-law. Seems she doesn’t care too much for him.”

“You talk about Hattie that night?”

“No.” He opened the door and walked me out to the cruiser. “No, I would’ve remembered that.”