Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(41)
Instead, he spent some time thinking about Margery Osborne and what her son had said about her. She’d been born during World War II; her father was a veteran of the Pacific Theater and hadn’t seen his daughter until she was three years old. He’d suffered from every disease the Pacific had to offer, frightening her with his random onsets of malaria. She’d been in junior high school before the farm got reliable television reception—she’d missed the advent of Elvis Presley but was there for the Beatles. She lived through the Vietnam era as the wife of a small farmer who, like her father, was a war veteran. She’d had two children, one of whom died shortly after he was born. She and her husband had struggled with a noneconomic farm, and she’d gone to work as a health care aide in Fairmont, seen the farm sold, and her husband die . . .
A world of experience and memories, all gone in an instant. For what? Money? What else could it be except the product of insanity?
But he wasn’t getting that feeling, that edge of craziness.
Margery Osborne, he thought, had probably been sent into the final darkness for nothing more than the God Almighty Dollar.
11
Larry Van Den Berg rolled into Wheatfield at midmorning, parked his truck beside his house, went inside, made himself a pimento loaf with mustard and onion sandwich, got a beer from the refrigerator, and checked his secret email account for messages from his brother. Lego sales were holding up, though they hadn’t gotten rid of them as fast as they’d hoped. But, then, there were a lot of them.
The last note said “This week, $1,400.”
Nice.
He thought about the other iron he had in the fire: could he have been the only one to see the remarkable resemblance between Janet Fischer and the Virgin Mary? He’d give her a call. She didn’t go to work down at Skinner & Holland until later in the afternoon. Even if she didn’t confess, he might have time to rip off a piece of ass before she went to work.
She answered her phone on the first ring. “I’m not talking to you anymore, after what you said.”
“I don’t think you got any choice. Besides, you know you still love me,” Van Den Berg said. “Tell you what. You at home? I’ll come over, and we’ll talk about it. Maybe snuggle a little.”
“Well, you can come over anyway,” she said, and she hung up.
Van Den Berg looked at the phone. Not the first time she’d hung up on him, although lately it had been happening more often. Still, he was the confident sort. He jumped in the shower, hit his pits and crotch with some 212 Sexy Men deodorant, in orange mandarin scent, got dressed, smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, and started off for Janet’s, smelling like an orange.
Nice day outside, warm, and redolent of the oncoming summer. Lilacs blooming; he stopped to sniff one, closing his eyes, remembered his mother. Okay, that wasn’t good, but everything else was. A hot girlfriend, steady work, if not exactly the job of his dreams, money in the bank with the prospect of more. Maybe it was time to buy a boat. From Wheatfield, pulling a trailer, he could be at Lake Okoboji in an hour, and the Iowegians kept it stocked with walleye, pike, bass, and muskie.
Of course, as is the way of the world, and most of his dreams, it all went straight into the toilet when he got to Fischer’s.
* * *
—
Janet Fischer lived in a tiny house that looked exactly like a big house only shrunken; it was roughly the size and shape of a boxcar. The roof was peaked, with a small window at its apex; the roofline couldn’t have been more than twelve feet up; a narrow plank porch framed the front door.
The house had been built by the same man who’d built all the town windmills, sometime after World War II. It contained a compact kitchen that was separated from the living room by a breakfast bar; the living room contained a two-cushion couch and two easy chairs, separated by a coffee table. The single bathroom had only a sink, toilet, and shower, no tub. The single bedroom contained a queen-sized bed. The bed frame butted against the wall at the head end, with not more than a six-inch-wide clearance on one side and two feet on the other, and no more than four feet at the end of the bed. When the sex got intense, the bed knocked on the wall between the bedroom and the living room and shook the entire structure.
Van Den Berg crossed the porch and walked in without knocking, where he found both chairs at the coffee table occupied, one by Fischer and the other by Skinner. A laptop computer sat in the middle of the table.
“What’s the kid doing here?” he asked.
Skinner shrugged, and Fischer said, “I went over to your house to clean it up a little bit and I got curious and I looked in your computer and you know what I found? Porn. All kinds of disgusting porn. You pig. We are no longer engaged.”
She had her one-third carat diamond ring in her hand and she threw it at him. He tried to grab it, but it bounced off his chest and landed on the floor. She threw something again, this time a house key, and he managed to catch it. “I’ll want my key,” she said. “Right now.”
Van Den Berg was taken aback, and some of his confidence leaked away. He thought he might be able to talk his way out of it, but it’d be tougher with the kid sitting there. “We can chat about it,” he said, as he stooped to pick up the ring. To Skinner, he said, “Get lost, dickwad.”
“We’re waiting for Wardell,” Skinner said. “He should be here in a minute or two.”