“You got a rental?” Johnson asked.
“Yeah, a Prius.”
“Jeez, that’s like driving an ice skate,” Johnson said. “Got thosehard little tires... You better not be on the road if it starts snowing.”
—
Griffin finished her hot cider, pulled on her coat, said, “Back to the iceberg,” and left. They watched from the window until she turned onto the highway, and Virgil looked at the other two and said, “You guys were lying through your goddamn teeth. Where’s Jesse McGovern?”
“Couldn’t tell you that,” Johnson said. Clarice shook her head.
“What’s going on here?” Virgil said. “Goddamnit, Johnson...”
Clarice said, “You haven’t been here much in the winter. Next time you drive through town, check it out. If you don’t already have a job here, there’s none to be had, unless somebody dies. Jesse’s found a way to bring in some money for a dozen or so folks that don’t have any. I’ll tell you, Virgil, you’re a good friend and all, Johnson’s best friend, but you won’t find out about Jesse from us.”
“She’s like Jesse James,” Johnson said. “The outlaw heroine.”
“She good-looking?” Virgil asked. Outlaw heroines in the media age usually were.
Johnson laughed and said, “Yeah, she is. She really is.”
Clarice changed the subject. “What about Gina? What’d you find out, Virgil? Have you been to her house?”
Virgil told them about his visit with the medical examiner. When he mentioned the body bruising, Clarice and Johnson looked at each other, considering the possibilities. Then Clarice shook her head and said, “I don’t doubt that it happens here, with the long winters, but I don’t know who’d be into it.”
“I experience enough pain cutting timber,” Johnson said. “And if I tried paddling Clarice...”
“You’d have to sleep with both eyes open,” Clarice said.
“I’ve dealt with sex crimes, but this... I’ve never done anything like B and D people, where it’s voluntary,” Virgil said. “I need to do some research, I guess. I mean, do they tend to violence? Or are they just playing? Or what?”
“You get a thrill out of spanking somebody hard enough to leave bruises, I think you might get excited by violence,” Clarice said. “Especially if the... spankee?... is tied up and helpless. And even if that’s voluntary, there’s something wrong in that somewhere.”
“I hear you,” Virgil said.
“Got a thought for you,” Johnson said. “When you’re doing your research, I wouldn’t go to the library and ask for a book about it. The town is not all that big, and you might not want that kind of reputation.”
Virgil said, “I don’t know. Could bring me some compelling new local contacts.”
“Since it’s B and D, it’d even be heavy on the ‘compelling,’” Claricesaid.
SIXThat night, in his regular pre-sleep contemplation of the mystery of God’s ways, Virgil thought about the unfairness of personal appearance. When he asked Johnson if the Barbie-O maker Jesse McGovern was good-looking, he hadn’t been asking idly.
Pretty people, Virgil believed, both male and female, had a totally unwarranted, unearned lifelong advantage over average and ugly people. The advantage began in their earliest years—What a pretty baby!—and persisted for most of their lives. Quite often, they didn’t believe in their advantage. Oh, they knew they were pretty, but they took it as their God-given right rather than an unearned gift.
Jesse McGovern was being forgiven even as she apparently, and repeatedly, broke and evaded the law, even if the lawbreaking in this case seemed trivial to most people, including Virgil’s friends.
Gina Hemming had also been a pretty woman and well-off since birth. Both Johnson and Clarice had described her as haughty, better than thou, assuming appearance, brains, andmoney not only as her righteous heritage but as weapons to be used.
Hemming might very well be dead because of all that, Virgil thought. Rich and pretty attracted attention, not all of it good.
Why would a just God allow this to happen? Was it all part of an evolutionary clockwork that God allowed to work through itself, unguided, an enormous experiment of some kind, for good reasons that humans couldn’t perceive?
Not something Virgil could work out in one night.
—
Virgil got up early the next morning, looked out the window at the thermometer—one below zero. He could see dead brown leaves fluttering on a riverside oak, so there was some wind, too, which would make things worse. He cleaned up, pulled on his long underwear, wool socks, put on his Pendleton wool shirt, jeans, and insulated boots, parka, double-layer watch cap, and driving gloves, with his ski gloves carried in the parka pockets.
