And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(9)

He was a senior in high school when his grandparents finally decided to sell the cabin. Packard’s parents divorced a year later. They kept in touch with police until they got tired of hearing there was still nothing new to report. Sandy Lake became a time and a place in family history that no one talked about. Nick was still out there, forever seventeen, even as life moved on for the rest of them.

Packard had put Sandy Lake out of his mind for almost two decades. It wasn’t until Marcus was killed that he thought of it again.

***

Back in Minneapolis, most people Packard mentioned Sandy Lake to had never heard of the town. Is it up north? they’d ask. Everything this far from the cities was “up north.” Duluth was up north. Grand Marais was up north. Brainerd, Hibbing, Thief River Falls. Hell, if you were from Rochester, St. Cloud was up north. Only politicians and reporters bothered to think of any place farther than commuting distance from the Twin Cities as anything but a homogenous north.

There used to be agriculture, mining, and logging jobs in this part of the state. People could live comfortably with a certain degree of economic security and raise children who wouldn’t immediately flee the area. Now what could be sold had been sold, consolidated into fewer hands, and what remained supported a dwindling number of jobs. There was a poultry processing plant twenty miles to the south, and an outdoor Sportcraft manufacturer forty miles north. Most other employment around Sandy Lake was in the service industry, tourism, and retail, none of which paid for shit.

From Packard’s limited perspective, the economy was the kindling that fueled almost all the crime in the area. Chronic unemployment and underemployment made it difficult to raise a family. Financial uncertainty made people do crazy things. Hopelessness made them indifferent to the consequences.

Then there was random nonsense like the ongoing feud between Gary and Cora, two people who just plain-old-fashioned hated each other.

***

Fifteen miles out of town, off a two-lane highway that ran east–west, he came to Gary Bushwright’s house. It was set back from the road at an angle, a single-story rectangle painted yellow with green trim. A wheelchair ramp ran up to the front door, with mulched flower beds on either side. The wide, unfenced yard was mowed prairie grass and weeds.

Packard pulled up behind a Peterbilt cab and chassis parked beside the house. Gary was sitting on one of the chassis’s eight rear tires, smoking a cigarette. He was bald with a reddish-brown beard that blanketed the top half of his chest, and dressed in a quilted jacket and denim overalls. He had a birthmark on one cheek the size and shape of a chocolate thumbprint. A white pit bull was stretched out on the gravel at his feet.

Packard checked his phone as he got out of the sheriff’s SUV. He had a text from Kelly with Ann Crawford’s home number.

“What’s going on now, Gary?”

Gary ground his cigarette out on the bottom of his boot and stuck the butt in his pocket. He was indistinguishable from any other overweight, bald, bearded trucker in his sixties until he opened his mouth. “Honey, let me tell you something. I have had it with that bitch next door.” He gave a dismissive point in the direction of Cora’s house and turned on his heel. “Follow me. Let me show you something. You, too, Baxter. Come on.”

The pit bull got up and followed even more reluctantly than Packard. The three of them went around the semi cab to the back of the house.

“Feast your pretty blue eyes on that,” Gary said.

He pointed at the orange shaft of an arrow with green fletching sticking into the back wall of his garage. “This is a whole new level of nonsense. She could’ve put that arrow right through me.”

Gary Bushwright and Cora Shaker had been neighbors for more than two decades, ever since Gary had come back to Sandy Lake in the early 1990s to help his mother after she had a stroke. He used to be a commercial truck driver, on the road for three or four days a week, then home with his mother the rest of the time. He took care of her for twelve years until a heart attack punched her clock for good. After she died, everyone expected Gary to tear up the road in his hurry to get out of Sandy Lake. They assumed he’d move to a big city, or at least Minneapolis, where there were more of his kind. Instead, he did the unthinkable. He kept driving his truck and he kept coming home to Sandy Lake.

“And don’t you dare tell me I’m overreacting,” Gary said.

“I’m counting on you not to respond in kind,” Packard said.

“I’d have to go out and buy a crossbow in order to respond in kind!”

“I meant stand down. I need you not to retaliate.”

Gary stood with his hands on his hips. “I am doing my best to take the high road, but she has pushed me. To. The. Limit!”

On the acreage behind his house, Gary had built a white aluminum building, out of which he ran a dog rescue. The building was the size of a small barn with a row of windows around the middle and a fenced dog run off the back. Packard could hear dogs barking inside.

He turned from the kennel building and looked down the dip in the land to Cora’s blue, two-story house with its three-car garage and concrete driveway. The two lots sat on acres and acres of land, but only a few hundred feet separated the houses.

Cora must have been watching them the whole time. She came out of her house just then with the crossbow by her side. “I didn’t do nothing wrong,” she yelled across the way. “It was an accident. I got my rights. Second Amendment.”