“You popped a stitch or two. Or eight. You’re bleeding through your shirt,” Virgil said. He looked at Jenkins. “You want to take him?”
Shrake: “I’m not...”
Jenkins: “Yes, you are. Don’t fight it; don’t be a jackass. C’mon.”
The two big men went out the door, and Shrake spent another two days in a Fairmont hospital bed.
Later in the summer, he told Virgil that Jenkins had been right: the scar tightened up his golf swing and took three strokes off his handicap.
—
The plastic surgeons at the Mayo were fascinated by Ann Apel’s injuries, and she became something like a lab case. They could do a lot to help her because she hadn’t totally destroyed anything on her face, though she’d injured much of it. She would always speak with a severe impediment because of the damage to her tongue, which was impossible to completely fix. The combinationof missing tissue and scarring, and the lack of suitable transplant tissue, meant it would be permanently twisted and rigid.
Bone grafts repaired her jaw and made it nearly as good as new. Her lips had been ample, and after several surgeries, the bullet damage had been diminished to the point that strangers couldn’t see it at all. Skin and cartilage from her ears re-formed her nose.
Not that it mattered too much. Disfiguration in a person is easily adjusted to by friends and coworkers, who become familiar with the situation. Since Apel would be in the same penitentiary until she was in her seventies, her friends and coworkers would have plenty of time to adjust.
—
Davy Apel was tried simultaneously with his wife. They were both convicted and got identical sentences. Their lawyers submitted bills to the Osbornes’ estates and got all the money due to the Apels. Even that wasn’t quite enough: their house and heavy equipment was auctioned off, and the lawyers got that, too.
The main evidence against them were the recordings picked up by Harry’s bugs, but the rifle, and the threads of fabric taken off a barbed-wire fence and matched to the fabric of Davy Apel’s coat, were the nails in the coffin.
—
The Wheatfield pilgrims came back when the church reopened, and the numbers even bumped up after the History Channel did a documentary,The Mystery of Mary, in which Wardell Holland, J. J. Skinner, and Wheatfield played starring roles. One shotshowed Holland sitting in an office chair with a photo on the wall behind him, the platoon he commanded before he was wounded, all the members looking fit, tough, and happy. After Virgil saw the movie, he recalled searching Holland’s trailer, finding not a sign of his having been in the Army. Passing through Wheatfield several months later, he asked Holland about the shot, and Holland said the movie people got it from a squad leader. “I don’t do memorabilia. Too many people wound up dead. When I start feeling nostalgic, I look at my foot.”
—
Virgil had been passing through Wheatfield, mainly to get a haircut and shoulder rub from Danielle Visser. She said she’d been involved in a tiff with Holland because she’d exposed his price gouging on “Wheatfield Talk.” “He and Skinner were going over to Walmart and buying potpies for a dollar ninety-five and selling them here for four dollars each.”
“So, you’re, like, an investigative hairdresser?”
“Hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, that’s right,” she said.
Roy Visser had been waiting in a customer’s chair, reading theFaribault County Register, and he said, casually, “Get your tit out of his ear, Danny.”
Pat, the dog, who was sitting by his feet, panted in agreement, and Visser reached down and gave him a scratch.
—
Margery Osborne hadn’t changed her will to benefit the church, so St. Mary’s got nothing from her. Barry Osborne didn’t have a will. The total of Barry’s estate, which included his mother’s, after everything was shaken out, amounted to a littleover two million dollars. The lawyers got a third of it, and the rest went to some impecunious Arkansas cousins who hadn’t seen or spoken to the Osbornes in decades. For them, the money was Manna from Minnesota. They spent it all in four years and were broke again, though they still had four nice cars.
—
Janet Fischer met a divorced instructor in wind generator repair at the local community college. She got pregnant and married, in that order. The baby had her yellow-blond hair and blue eyes, and she and her friends all sighed in relief, as did Skinner, then a student at the University of Minnesota. Fischer made a claim for an insurance company reward for turning in the Van Den Bergs on the Lego theft. After some threatened litigation in both directions, she collected seventy-five hundred dollars of the pledged ten-thousand-dollar reward, reduced because a portion of the Legos were not recovered. Of the seventy-five hundred, a lawyer got a third. With the remaining five thousand, Fischer bought herself a new, and larger, engagement ring, and a new clarinet for her then fiancé.
—
Rose and Clay Ford did well in his business. He was not one for paperwork or bill collecting, but she was. Rose also pushed Ford into pistol competitions, which he hadn’t been much interested in since he was primarily a rifleman. She liked handguns, though, and by cross-training each other, they came to dominate their respective divisions of the Midwestern competitions of the International Practical Shooting Confederation. Rose might even have been a tad better with the lighter calibers.
—
Father Brice couldn’t root the last vestiges of skepticism from his heart, but the archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis took him aside, and said, “George, accept what is. A poor parish has been revived, a town is given new life, and coreligionists from all over North America come here to celebrate the Virgin.”
“You’re ordering me to believe?”
The bishop shook his head. “No, I’m asking you to relax.”
