Girl Gone Missing Page 5

  Wheaton looked over his shoulder at the puppy. Wheaton was a big guy. He filled the front seat, his build like an ex-football player. He kept his hair cut military short and more often than not his face was stern, the face of a cop who knew he had to mean business. But when he looked at the pup his whole face softened.

  “Kinda cute—for a runt. What’d you name him?”

  “Gunner.” The little dog perked his ears up. “Gunnysack is too long a name.”

  “Now you have a full-time deputy to ride with you,” Cash said, shaking her head in amusement. “I’ll meet you at the farmstead.”

  She pulled out, spinning gravel just for the heck of it and took off about twenty mph over the speed limit for five miles before dropping down to the posted limit. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw Wheaton cruising up behind her.

  As long as she’d known him, he’d never had a wife or kids or a pet. Once she dared to ask him if he was married. He brushed off the question with a quick no and moved on to another subject.

  At the farmstead she hopped out of the Ranchero and got into the cruiser. Gunner jumped over the front seat and sat straight up between Wheaton and her, giving a low throat growl in Cash’s direction.

  “Look at him,” she said. “He’s protecting you from me.”

  Wheaton scratched the pup behind the ears. “Enough Gunner. She’s okay.” The dog laid its head on Wheaton’s leg.

  “Looks like a mix between a black lab and a shepherd, you think?”

  “Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought too.”

  Wheaton put the cruiser in gear and headed out of the farm and down the county road. Cash caught the pup’s eye. He gave another throat growl.

  “You better get used to me, mutt. I knew Wheaton long before you.”

  “What’s with you and strays on gravel roads?” she asked Wheaton. “You picked me outta the ditch when I was a kid. Haven’t seen my mom since she rolled the car there, but somehow I have the law on my side. Not complaining, mind you but…” She looked down at the pup. “And now here’s this guy. How could someone just put ’em in a gunny sack and leave ’em for dead?”

  “You know, folks do it all the time with cats. They want cats to keep the rats and mice out of the barns and grain bins, but after a few generations you can end up with twenty feral cats. Ain’t nothing to find a bag of them thrown in the river or down at the county dump. But this little guy, someone just threw him out like trash. He must have wanted to live, running down the road inside a gunny sack.” The pup laid its head back down on Wheaton’s lap.

  Wheaton turned the car north on the paved highway going toward Shelly, a small town north of the county seat. Like all the other small towns around, the actual town’s population was under two hundred. It had one main street and it was the highway they were driving on. The prairie was so flat Cash could see the water tower seven miles out.

  “Where’s their farm?”

  “Just a couple miles north of town, then east a quarter of a mile. Told them we’d get there about 4:30.”

  Wheaton checked his watch. They rode the last seven miles into town in an easy silence. Cash looked out her window at the fields that had been plowed under for the season. Corn and wheat, alfalfa and barley all harvested and either on trains to the Twin Cities or stored in barns and grain bins throughout the Valley. The only fields where men were still working were the beet fields. Even now, machines were out in the fields picking the beets. And trucks that only a month ago had been following combines around a wheat field were now loaded down and piled high with the grey-colored sugar beets, all headed south to the sugar beet plant.

  Beet season took a toll on the county roads that the other crops didn’t. The truckload of beets weighed a lot more than corn or wheat, probably because the beetroots were water dense. They also tended to have field dirt clinging to them even though the newer machines were better at cleaning the large clumps off the roots before they were ever loaded on the trucks. As a result of the weight and the mud and the sheer number of trucks running night and day during beet harvest season, the county roads got torn up bad. And the paved roads developed a sheen of mud. This close to the Red River, the mud was mixed with river clay that was slicker than ice if a rainfall or early frost or, god forbid, an early snow coated the road.

  They passed quickly through the small town of Shelly in the same easy silence. Main Street was bare of traffic. One lone pickup truck sat in front of the town bar. Cash felt the itch, wondering if they had a pool table. Not something Wheaton was likely to stop for. A trio of three teenagers walked down a side street. The yellow school bus that had just dropped them off was closing its door and pulling away. In towns this small, everyone knew everyone: those kids knew the Tweed girl. If not her, her brothers and sisters. Maybe they all went to the same church or 4-H club.

  Wheaton sped up as they reached the town’s edge. Within minutes he was pulling into a farmyard. The house was an older two-story farmhouse, not one of the ranch-style houses some of the better-to-do farmers were having built. Their wives had grown tired of living in the “old” farmstead house, which had been built when the farms were first homesteaded in this area. Over the years, rooms were added on. Indoor plumbing was installed. Attics were turned into bedrooms as the family had more children.

  Cash had lived in a few houses like that during her time in foster care. Once her room was a lean-to porch that was hotter than hell in summer and freezing cold in winter, while the social worker was made to believe she slept upstairs with the oldest daughter. In another home, her room was in a musty basement, the walls of fieldstone always damp to the touch. Cash hadn’t stayed there too long. Just long enough to be nursemaid to the foster mother after she gave birth to her seventh child. An ugly squalling bald lump of flour dough is how Cash had thought of the newborn.

  A ginger-colored collie mix ran up to the cruiser. Gunner jumped on Wheaton’s lap growling furiously, the black fur on his neck standing straight up.

  “Calm down, Gunner. Calm down. Get in back. Everything’s okay. Stay.”

  Wheaton and Cash got out of the car. A man in work overalls and a blue shirt stood holding the door open, waiting for them to reach him. His blond hair hung over his furrowed forehead. His shoulders slumped. He wasn’t that old, probably not even forty, but he’d become an old man in the time since his daughter had disappeared. He didn’t say a word when Wheaton and Cash got to the door, just held it open and gestured with his hand to go on in.

  Right inside the doorway, work clothes and jackets hung on farmer nails pounded into the wall. Work boots and shoes sat in a tidy row on a linoleum floor, right off the edge of a braided rag rug.

  Mr. Tweed walked them to the round oak table in the kitchen with seven wooden chairs around it. He pulled one out for each of them. Cash looked around the room. Stove and fridge along one side. Kitchen sink underneath a window facing the driveway into the farmyard. Homemade curtains hung from the window. Tweed’s wife placed two ceramic mugs of hot coffee in front of them. Her shaking hands caused some coffee to spill on the table in front of Cash. “Sorry,” she mumbled as she turned and walked back to the kitchen counter.

  She was tall and bony, wearing a yellow cotton dress printed with small violet flowers. Cash could see she’d sewn it herself. She recognized the pattern from one she had seen in the Life section of the Fargo Forum a few months before. Each Sunday the paper ran a picture of a sewing pattern women could mail order. When the pattern arrived, wives would go shop for fabric at JCPenney or the larger fabric store in Moorhead.

  Mrs. Tweed had clearly taken pride in sewing the dress. The dress was topstitched in all the right places and even had front pockets with buttons sewn on. Judging by the wrinkles and food stains on the sides of the dress, Cash figured she’d been wearing the same dress for a few days. Her home-permed hair was pulled back with a rubber band. Loose strands hung limply around her sorrowful face. She grabbed a dishrag from the sink and another cup of coffee for her husband
. She wiped up the small spill in front of Cash and sat down heavily on a wooden chair by her husband, damp dishrag still in her hand. He put his hand on her arm as if to assure her things were fine, though neither of them believed it.

  “This is Renee Blackbear. Folks around here call her Cash. Sometimes she works with me, but right now she’s going to school up in Moorhead.”

  “You’re the one who almost got burned up by the men that killed the man from Red Lake, aren’t you?” Mrs. Tweed leaned forward anxiously. “Do you know Janet?” she asked before Cash could answer yes to the first question.

  Cash shook her head no. “We’re in the same science class. I don’t know her though. She sits in front. I sit in back.” Cash took a sip of the strong black coffee.

  “I’m wondering if there’s anything new you’ve thought of since I was last out,” Wheaton spoke in Mr. Tweed’s direction.

  Mr. Tweed tightened his lips. “No, nothing. I don’t know where she went. Why would she go anywhere? She said she was going to the Cities with some friends. We told her not to go, didn’t we, Ma? But she was always strong-headed. Hard enough having her go off to school. She didn’t have any business in the Cities. But Ma here, she’s the one that finally said go ahead and go. See the world. Nothin’ but hard work on a farm for a woman.”

  His head was hung over his coffee cup, resting on the palms of his hands held up by his elbows.

  As he rambled on, his wife started to cry, tears running from her blue eyes down her reddened cheeks. Mr. Tweed looked up and saw Wheaton and Cash looking at his wife.

  “Oh, Barb, I didn’t mean nothing by that. I’m always putting my big foot in my mouth. It’s not your fault she went. I didn’t mean it like that.” He put his arm around her shoulders, as if they were just starting to date instead of a few years short of their silver wedding anniversary. He patted her shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Maybe you could show me her room.” Cash spoke to Mrs. Tweed. She stood up.

  Mrs. Tweed wiped her eyes. “Sure.”

  Cash followed her through the living room, their footsteps deadened on the hardwood floor as they crossed a room-sized braided rug. Mrs. Tweed opened an oak door leading to a narrow wooden staircase. “She slept upstairs. Bob fixed up the attic for her when she went to high school.” She chattered breathlessly as she led Cash upstairs. “Girls need more privacy than boys. Steve has a room down off the sun porch. He’s starting for the A-team in football this year. Sophomore. Running back.”

  At the top of the stairs was another linoleum floor. Sears must have had a sale on this particular pattern because it was a match for the entryway downstairs. A double bed with a handmade quilt sat under a narrow attic window. Two pillows with matching embroidered pillowcases lay side by side at the head of the bed. A curtain rod hung from the rafters, filled with cotton dresses, some summer shifts, others darker wool blends suited for Minnesota winters. A six-drawer dresser held a cheerleading trophy from a couple years back. It was a clean and tidy room. Nothing out of place.

  Mrs. Tweed stared at Cash, her hands twisting the fabric inside the pockets of her dress. “Do you ever take off on your parents like this?” she asked.

  Cash looked at her. She paused before shaking her head slowly. “No.”

  “Are you working for the county now?”

  “No. Wheaton just likes to get my opinion sometimes. Do you mind if I look at her clothes?” She gestured at the clothes hanging on the metal rod.

  “Go ahead.”

  Cash leafed through the dresses as if they were pages of a book. Images flashed through her mind as she touched each one: A classroom full of laughing kids. A dance at the Legion Hall. A church choir singing loudly. She touched a soft blue wool sweater—goose bumps ran up her arm. She shivered and saw a girl floating over a dirt field calling, “Help me.”

  “It gets a might cold up here now that fall is settling in.” Mrs. Tweed must have seen Cash tremble. She sat on the bed, the metal bedsprings creaking with her weight.

  “Yeah. When’s the last time Janet wore this sweater?”

  “I think she wore it to the college football game. That was just a couple weeks ago. Seems a lifetime now. Her grandma gave it to her as a going-away-to-college present. She didn’t wear it that much. It’s wool but it was chilly out that night. She was all giggly and happy. Some big date, I guess. I never dated anyone but Bob. You girls are living in different times. I just don’t know.” She started sobbing again.

  “We can go back downstairs,” Cash said. “It is chilly up here.”

  Mrs. Tweed leaned over and took the hem of her skirt and wiped her face. She stood up and led the way downstairs.

  Mr. Tweed and Wheaton were sitting silently at the kitchen table, half-empty coffee cups in front of them. Wheaton raised his eyebrows as Cash walked into the kitchen. She nodded, she was ready to go.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have any more information at this time. We’ll keep looking for her,” said Wheaton.

  Mr. Tweed stood and reached out to shake Wheaton’s hand. “The hardest part is the gossip. Folks saying she ran off like that Bakkas girl did with the fair carnies a few years back. My girl isn’t like that.”

  “Of course not. We’ll keep looking.”

  The collie followed them to the cruiser. Gunner peered out the driver’s window and growled. “Get in back,” Wheaton said,

  “Got yourself a police dog like a big city policeman.”

  “Huh.” Wheaton reached back and patted the dog’s head. “Lay down.”

  “Did her dad say anything new?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did her mom. Seems like something happened a couple weekends ago at the football game.”

  “Like what?”

  Cash shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll ask around and see what the talk is.”

  They rode in silence back to the Wangs. Halfway there Gunner jumped from the backseat to the front and laid his head on Wheaton’s lap. Wheaton patted the dog’s shoulder. Cash watched the whole thing out of the corner of her eye. She had never seen Wheaton look so content. A dog suited him.

  Cash hopped out at the farm. “I’ll be in touch. Gotta run get in line with a truck.”

  For the rest of the week Cash drove beet truck ’til two a.m. It was slow going from the field to the beet plant, the truck heavy with tons of beets. The drive, the wait in line, gave her hours to think about the missing Tweed girl. The only thing clear to Cash was that there was a blonde girl who was alive enough to call out to her for help across the time of dream space. Each night she would fall into bed dreading her dream time being as busy as her work time.

  She lifted the lever of the truck’s hydraulic system and heard the steady thump thump of fat sugar beets falling onto the conveyor belt that carried them into the factory. Cash felt the truck start to float as the thumping got louder and louder and took on the rhythm of “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

  Cash sat up quickly in bed. She glanced out a crack in the curtain hanging over the bedroom window. It was still night out. She threw off the sheet and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt from the floor. It couldn’t be Jim knocking like that. He would knock softly. If she didn’t answer right away, he would creep back down the wooden stairs and go home.

  The knocking started again. Cash walked to the kitchen door without turning on any lights. Outside the door, silhouetted in dim light from the streetlights, stood a guy wearing an army fatigue jacket.

  “Renee?” he said loudly, hand mid-knock. “Renee Blackbear?”

  Cash opened the inside door but not the screen door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Open the door for your brother, why don’tcha?”

  “Huh?”

  “Renee, it’s me, your brother, let me in.”

  Cash’s heart was beating louder than the knocking. She looked out into the street. It seemed solid. She looked at the kitchen table. It looked solid too. She reached over and touched the back of the wooden chair she
always sat on. It was solid. She reached across her body and squeezed her left bicep with her right hand. Bare seconds passed while she checked reality, making sure she wasn’t dreaming.

  She pushed the screen door outward. The guy in the army fatigue jacket stepped into her kitchen. He set a green duffle bag down on the floor. Cash pulled the string above the kitchen table to turn on the overhead light. She walked back to bed in the living room and looked at the clock. It was six a.m. She had set her alarm to go off at eight so she could make it to her eight-thirty class. She stood there, her back to the kitchen, her heart beating, her chest tight, wondering if she was going to pass out. She took a deep breath and turned and walked into the kitchen again without really looking at this guy who said he was her brother.

  He had pulled out a chair and was sitting at the table watching her. She put water from the sink faucet into her aluminum coffee pot, and then measured a small handful of coffee grounds to dump into the pot. She used a match to light the gas burner. She set the pot on to boil. All the while she looked at him out of her peripheral vision.

  He wasn’t very tall. His black hair was cut military short. Lean. Sinewy is the word that came to her mind. Brown skin, scarred knuckles. His brown eyes, distant but lively, jumped around her apartment—watching her, checking out her space. He lit a filterless cigarette from a pack of Camels. With the first puff he blew smoke rings over the table. Cash stood at the stove, waiting, watching for the coffee to boil. All the while checking him out. Her chest was still steel-trap tight but her heart had slowed a bit.

  She watched small bubbles form, steam rise from the top of the coffee pot, her hand at the ready on the stove knob to turn the flame down when the water reached a hard boil. She caught it right on time, turned the heat to low without any of the grounds rolling over the top of the pot. With the coffee simmering, she rotated around, reached into the open cupboard behind her and took out two thick white ceramic coffee mugs. If she remembered right, she had two cups, both from the Silver Cup Diner, carried out absentmindedly at one time or another.