“The back door was open.”
“Bullshit. I locked up tight before I left, and I got good locks.” He stalked toward her, pushed the pile of clothing—hard—forced her back. Pushed her again, and again, until she was in the kitchen. He looked at the back door, which had little, diamond-shaped windows set at eye height, so he could see out to the porch. One of the diamonds had been broken in, and there was glass on the floor. “You fuckin’ broke in.”
“I wanted to get my stuff while you were away...”
Her black eye had started to turn purple, her lip was still swollen, but Van Den Berg didn’t even think about that. What he did was, he hit her in the other eye, and she screamed and dropped the clothes and put her hands up, and he hit her again, high in the stomach, knocking the breath out of her, and she sagged against the kitchen counter, and pleaded, “Larry, don’t... Larry, don’t...”
He hit her in the mouth again, and she went down, and he kicked her in the thigh once, twice, and finally thought, now what? And, I’m out on bail...
He looked at her, cowering on the kitchen floor, and backed away and took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911. When the county officer answered, he said, “I found somebody broke into my house and I’m holding her until a cop gets here. She attacked me...”
—
Virgil had talked to Frankie the night before, and she’d said he better come out to the farm. “I’m kinda hung up here.”
“By what?”
“You’ll see when you get here,” she said.
When he got there, he found a strange car, a new Chevrolet, parked in the driveway; and when he went inside, he found Frankie sitting in the kitchen with her sister, Sparkle, who was apparently the hang-up. Sparkle was a thin, pretty blonde of suspect morality with a freshly minted Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
She said to Virgil, “How ya doin’, good-lookin’?”
“Sparkle was going by on her way back to the Cities. She dropped in to see how I was,” Frankie said.
“So how are you?” Virgil asked, taking a chair.
“Today wasn’t bad, until Sparkle got here,” Frankie said. The sisters loved each other—maybe—but had a thorny relationship; Sparkle deliberately exacerbated the thorniness by flirting with Virgil.
Frankie asked him how the investigation was going, and Virgil said, “We might finally be seeing some movement,” and then had to explain it to Sparkle, and Sparkle asked, “Listen, if you were to arrest me for some reason... would you put handcuffs on me?”
“Probably around your ankles,” Frankie said. “Then you wouldn’t be able to spread your legs apart.”
Sparkle: “Says the woman who has five children with five different men and has a bat in the cave with a sixth guy.”
“Maybe I ought to go home and mow the lawn,” Virgil said.
—
Sparkle left a half hour later, after some further snarling and spitting, promising to return as soon as she could. Virgil and Frankie got Frankie’s youngest kid off to bed—the others could take care of themselves—and then they sat in the farmhouse living room and talked about the case. Frankie suggested they get a padof paper and think up and list all the possible reasons for the murders in Wheatfield.
“There’s greed,” she said. “Money—that’s number one. Always is.”
“Or a religious kink in a crazy guy,” Virgil suggested.
“Outright love or hate,” Frankie said.
“Does somebody benefit if the town is ruined? Or was somebody damaged when it started doing well?”
“That should be under ‘Money,’” Frankie said.
“I’m not making that kind of a list, where there are subtopics,” Virgil said. “Besides, the benefit or damage wouldn’t have to be financial, it could be psychological.”
Frankie was skeptical. “Somebody got hurt when the Virgin Mary showed up? How?”
“Don’t know.”
“Something else you have to rethink,” she said. “You’re stuck on the idea that this whole thing goes back to the church and the apparitions and the change in the town. Maybe it has nothing to do with the town or the church or the Virgin Mary. Maybe it’s totally personal. Something completely off the wall.”
