LIEUTENANT JEFF STUTZMAN OPENED THE DOOR TO HIS OFFICE and held it for Erin as she stepped inside. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said. He went to the window, adjusted the wooden blinds to let in as much of the dim afternoon sunlight as the day would allow, then moved around the desk and took a seat.
Erin sat down as well. There wasn’t much to the office, just the desk and two chairs on either side. A metal file cabinet stood in the corner. To the left of it, mounted on the wall, was a sign displaying the police department’s insignia. It was the same emblem as the shoulder patch on Jeff’s uniform, a badge and a wolf in front of a cloudy night sky, the full moon rising in the background. Erin tried to recall if she’d noticed it as a kid, the way the wolf’s pupils were directed upward, as if whatever the animal was looking at was standing behind you, looming over your shoulder. It was strange that the town had designed it that way, but maybe not that strange considering its history.
Jeff leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on the desk. He had been on the high school football team, she remembered, and his neck and shoulders were thick and well defined beneath the uniform. His hair was cut short, only a few millimeters above the scalp, and his face had retained much of its youthfulness. He glanced toward the window with its plastic slatted blinds, the shadows falling across the room in thin blades of darkness. It was 2:45 P.M., and already the sun was low on the horizon.
“I’m sorry to pull you away from your father’s bedside,” he said. “It must be difficult for you to see him like that.”
“Mark says he’s doing better.”
“That’s good. Thank God for that.”
“My father’s too stubborn and too independent to lie there for any longer than he needs to. He’ll want to get back to his farm as soon as possible.”
Jeff nodded. He glanced once more toward the window.
“And yet here I sit,” she said, “in the Wolf Point police station, wondering what the hell is going on, and why there’s an officer stationed outside of my father’s hospital room.”
Jeff frowned. He ran the palm of his hand across the desk’s lacquered wooden surface. “There’s been a . . . complication.”
“Yes,” she said. “I gathered that. Is he behind on his property tax? Is the bank trying to repossess the place?” She sighed. “He operates on a slim margin, Jeff. Some years are leaner than others. If it’s money he needs, I might be able to help him out with that.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “It’s not money. It’s nothing like that.”
“What then? He’s gotten himself into some sort of trouble?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re at the beginning of it. We’re just trying to figure things out . . . here in town and out at the farm.”
The farm, she thought, and it was strange how those two simple words evoked such nostalgia and trepidation, sorrow and longing. It was the place of her childhood and a land that defined her father. In the years following her mother’s disappearance, Erin found that she could not stand in the kitchen without hearing the soft hum of her mother’s voice and the clink of dishes as she washed them in the sink and returned them to the cupboards. It was a place of ghosts, and even when Erin had been living there, it had been hard to shake the feeling that she and her father were among them, wandering the rooms like lost souls in search of a purpose.
The farm was mostly a dairy operation—about a hundred and fifty head of cattle—but David also grew wheat and barley, and had a small alfalfa patch in the rear of the property. His hobby was beekeeping, and he’d set aside an area for vertically stacked hives from which he harvested honey that he sold to the local grocery store. It kept him busy, and the time he spent with Erin when she was younger revolved around the endless tasks and repairs necessary to keep things running. The place was everything to him, drawing his attention in a way that Erin never could, or so it had seemed when she was younger. She resented the farm for that, for the parts of her father it had taken away from her. After her mother was gone, things had only gotten worse.
“Here’s what I can tell you,” Jeff said, and Erin looked up, realizing that her hands had been balled into fists in her lap.
Jeff leaned back in his chair. It squeaked a bit in the hushed silence of the office.
“At the time he collapsed,” he said, “David was working on fixing an underground water pipe that had ruptured. It serviced his irrigation system and spanned about three hundred yards along the back end of the property. There’s a long trench there now, one he created to access the pipe. He seems to have isolated the leak and replaced the broken section. That much he did before he was taken to the hospital.”
“Okay.”
“He has a farmhand, Travis Cooper. I don’t know if you know him.”
“No,” she said. “My father never mentioned him. He must’ve hired him after I left.”
Jeff nodded. “Travis works for David part time. He helps with harvesting and some of the manual labor. He’s originally from Illinois and moved west to Wolf Point about five years ago.”
Erin listened from the other side of the desk. She tried to imagine where this might be leading.
“A ruptured water pipe causes a lot of trouble,” Jeff said. “Finding it was one issue, fixing it another. The trench had to be filled in, but there was also a large section of earth that had become saturated with water and was caving inward.”
“A sinkhole.”
“Yes,” he said, “a sinkhole. It was about fifty feet in diameter.”
“Sounds like a mess.”
“It was. And . . . well, now it’s even worse.”
“Why is that?”
“We’ve been digging,” he said, “uncovering as much as possible.”
“Why would you do that?” Erin asked. “Let the ground dry out. You can fill it in—”
“We found something,” Jeff told her. “Or at least Travis found it, down there in the mud.”
Erin sat perfectly still, watching him.
“It was a skeleton,” Jeff said, “the remains of a body. I’m sorry to be telling you this, Erin, but we think it’s human.”
Erin leaned forward in her chair. She fixed her gaze on the surface of the desk. The room faded in and out, the way lights sometimes do when a building’s about to lose power. It was actually fake wood, she noticed, some kind of plastic laminate. The overhead light reflected off its shiny surface, the darker lines blending together like tiny strands of rope.
“Erin?”
She looked up.
“I’m not saying your father has anything to do with this. I’ve known David a long time.”
“He killed your brother,” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“An accident. I’ve made my peace with it.”
“He ran him over with the Bronco in the middle of the street.”
“It was raining. Kenny ran out in front of the truck. David told the officers he didn’t even see him. There was nothing he could’ve—”
“He’d been drinking.”
“Two drinks an hour before at Old Town Grill,” Jeff said. “By the time they tested him, the alcohol barely registered in his system. He wasn’t drunk, Erin. It was the storm more than anything.”
“He was convicted, Jeff. As much as I missed him during that time, he deserved to go to prison.”
“None of us deserved the things that happened.”
They sat there in silence, each of them angry for their own separate reasons.
Jeff leaned forward in his chair. “Listen,” he said, “this isn’t about that.”
Erin couldn’t look up at him. She kept her eyes focused on the desk between them, on the way the lines of imitation grain separated and came back together.
“You have an officer,” she said, “stationed outside of his hospital room.”
“Precautionary,” Jeff told her. “David could be a witness. Right now he’s in a vulnerable condition. We have a responsibility to protect him.”
She looked up. It was strange how things could change so quickly, how the course of your life could be derailed in a single conversation. They had found something. Down there in the mud. She kept coming back to that, turning it over in her mind.
“Whatever happened to that body,” she said, “you don’t think he was respons—”
“No, I don’t,” he said, and frowned. “But we’ve uncovered a body. We have to investigate. If you want me to recuse myself from the investigation, I will. David has the right to an unbiased—”
“Who else do you have?”
He thought about it. “Nobody, really. The chief, I guess, or one of the patrol officers.” He shrugged. “We’re a small department, Erin. Nine officers total. I’m the only one who handles this sort of thing. But that’s our problem, not yours. I could bring in someone from the state or federal level.”
“Someone who doesn’t understand Wolf Point,” she said. “Someone who wasn’t here during the time that all those people went missing.”
“Yes,” he said. “It would be someone from the outside. There are protocols for situations like this.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want someone from the outside. I want one of us.”
One of us, her mind echoed, and that was the heart of it. She’d been back in Wolf Point for only a few hours, but already she had become one of them again, as if they’d been waiting all this time for her to return to them, as if part of her had never really left.
Jeff nodded and laced his fingers in front of him. “This guy Travis,” he said, “he’s not from around here. He rents a room from Margery Turner, who says he keeps pretty much to himself. I’ve listened to his story, and there’s something about him that makes me wonder what a guy with no ties to the area is doing here in the first place. People don’t move to Wolf Point unless they’ve got a pretty good reason.”
Erin tried to concentrate on what he was saying. She glanced again at the police insignia mounted on the wall behind his desk.
(“It was a skeleton, the remains of a body.”)
“What did you do with it?” she asked.
“What did we do with what?”
“The body.”
“Oh,” he said. “The bones were sent to the state crime lab in Missoula. They’ll try to determine the cause of death, the identity of the deceased, and how long the remains have been there. They have two medical examiners and perform about three hundred autopsies per year. There’s quite a backlog. I’m told the results could take weeks, maybe months.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, your father needs you,” he said. “There’s a reasonable explanation for all of this, and I’m confident we’ll get to the bottom of it. The important thing right now is for David to recover.”
“Yes,” Erin said. “I’m sure you’d like the opportunity to question him.”
“To be honest,” Jeff said, “I just want him to get better.” He looked at Erin. “I’ve known your family for a long time,” he said. “You’ve been away for a while, but this town hasn’t changed. We look out for each other. When one of us suffers, we all do. You remember how it was back then.”
“Of course.”
“And I don’t blame you for going away. I can understand why you wanted to be rid of this place.”
“I went off to college and got a job in Colorado.”
“And never came back,” he said, “until now.”
“That’s right,” she told him. “I wanted to be done with it.”
“We all did. But the people here haven’t forgotten, Erin. The things that happened back then are still part of this community. We carry it inside of us, and a body discovered on your father’s farm is going to rekindle a lot of those emotions.”
“Who else knows about this?”
He crossed his arms in front of him. “People know. We tried to keep it quiet, but . . .”
“News travels fast in Wolf Point.”
“Yeah. And the Wolf Point Herald News ran an article.”
“So you’re sharing details of the investigation with the paper?”
“No,” he said. “‘Anonymous sources,’ they cited. I still don’t know who leaked the information.”
Erin shook her head. “So everyone knows by now, and you thought you’d warn me.”
“I didn’t want you to be blindsided.”
“And a police officer is watching over my father. Just in case.”
He shifted in his chair. “Like I said, it’s just a precaution.”
Erin nodded. She could hear the hiss of air coming through the heating vent in the far corner. It reminded her of the ventilator, of the noise it made every time it filled David’s lungs with the contents of its churning mechanical circuits.
Jeff reached across the desk and touched her forearm. “I’m glad you’re here, Erin. I know you’ll do everything you can to help us get to the bottom of this.”
“Of course.”
The lieutenant rose from his chair. He seemed relieved, less somber than he’d been when they first arrived. “I assume you’ll be staying in town for a week or two?”
“Is that your way of asking me not to leave?”
He shook his head. “It’s my way of saying, ‘Welcome home. I hope you decide to stay for a while.’”
Erin stood up and followed him into the hallway. She waited while Jeff pulled a set of keys from his pocket and locked the door to his office.
They left the building, walking around the corner to where Erin had parked her truck. Diesel was waiting for her in the cab of the vehicle, his black nose pressed against the glass.
“I wish your father a speedy recovery,” Jeff said. “If you need anything”—he pulled out a card and jotted something on the back—“this is the number to my cell phone. Give me a call anytime.”
“Thank you,” Erin said, and she tucked the card into her pocket. She opened the truck’s door, climbed inside, and started the engine. Diesel turned his body in a tight circle and lay down on the bench seat, his muzzle resting on her thigh. She placed a hand on his head and stroked the coarse fur between his ears as she pulled out onto the street.
The trip back to the hospital took less than ten minutes, but Erin registered none of it, her thoughts sifting through the things Jeff had told her.
(“We found something . . . down there in the mud.”)
(“You remember how it was back then.”)
(“I’m sorry to be telling you this, Erin, but we think it’s human.”)
She tried to picture her father, the way he’d been when he was younger. It was a turbulent time for them, and like always, David had sought refuge in the farm. Crops and cattle needed tending. When everything else was falling apart, there was clarity in the work, in the steady unrelenting pace of it. She could picture him digging, his calloused hands wrapped around the wooden handle of a shovel, the muscles of his back bunched with effort.
“What are you doing, Daddy?” she asked aloud in the cab, and Diesel whined and looked up at her.
She kept her foot on the gas, and the truck rolled through the neighborhood. When she passed the homes where her childhood friends once lived, this time she didn’t look at them. Instead, she kept her eyes focused on the road ahead. There is a way through this, she thought. I can move forward without going back.
But the image was with her now, the silhouette of her father working the land, the sound of the shovel scraping the earth, and the hunch of his shoulders as he filled in the dirt.