TWENTY-FOUR

“Mr. Sports, Mr. Action, Mr. Jim Ed Poole,” were the first words Palmer Knutson heard through the darkness of a new day. For a time, he stared at the radio clock, unable to comprehend that it was really 6:40 in the morning. He had slept badly. Ellie, bless her heart, had decided that a successful end to a murder investigation deserved something special. She had made Palmer’s favorite, beef Stroganov, and served it with a rather expensive Cabernet Sauvignon. Reluctantly, Palmer thought to himself, “I’ve got to get another favorite meal. This one is killing me.” He hadn’t kept count, but the food must have consumed forty-seven times its weight in Rolaids. He loved red wine, but it always gave him a headache. He had tossed and turned all night, and now his tongue felt like it was coated in creosote.

When he had slept, he had dreamed. The dreams made no sense, but were a jumble of high school memories and events peopled with individuals from the recent past. He thought he would tell Ellie about them, but when he opened his mouth to do so, he realized he remembered nothing. He reached over and lovingly patted his wife to see if she was awake. Ellie was proud of herself for serving Palmer’s favorite meal, as well she should have been, for she was an excellent cook, but as she turned on the light and gave him a pleasant morning smile, he wondered if he dared to suggest that next time they celebrated it should be with a nice chicken salad.

The sheriff was reluctant to get out of bed, but he knew it would be a busy day. There was paperwork to suffer through, calls to make, and he had to meet with the media who always found murder so fascinating. At last he heard Trygve get up and decided he could put it off no longer. He went down to make coffee while Ellie helped Trygve get his own breakfast. This endeavor required much more work than if Ellie had just done it herself, but she consoled herself that, in the long run, she was preparing him for life.

Palmer took his coffee over to the kitchen table and quietly stared off into space. He administered the usual “you better hurry or you’re going to be late” advice to Trygve, but his heart just wasn’t in it. When their son had finally gone off to school, Ellie refilled his cup and sat down across from him. “What’s the matter?” she asked gently.

“Huh, oh, nothing, nothing. I just didn’t get much sleep last night, that’s all.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Sure, it’s just that, oh, I don’t know what it is. Something keeps gnawing at me about the Hofstead case.”

Ellie scowled, “But you have the evidence and you have a confession. What more could you want?”

Palmer sucked the cooler coffee off the surface of the cup in an unattractive slurp and agreed. “Right. It’s cut and dried from here on out. But it’s funny, you know. We had this core group of people who knew the victim, a man who was going to cause a big change in their lives, and it wasn’t one of them that killed him. Instead, it was some guy he had the bad luck to meet again after over thirty years. It’s just so coincidental. Like I told Orly, it’s a fluke.”

“Well that may be, dear, but remember that Hofstead would probably have caused a big change in Hoffman’s life, or Hart’s if you prefer, if he had lived. What’s the difference?”

“Promise you won’t bring it up again if I tell you? Orly’s already enjoying the fact that I said it.”

“All right, I promise. What is it?”

“The guy doesn’t seem like a murderer.” After a pause, he repeated himself, “He just doesn’t seem like one!”

“So what’s wrong with feeling that way?”

“Don’t you see? It runs counter to the facts. I would have been totally blind to David Hoffman ever being a killer unless the fluke with the fingerprint happened.”

Ellie shrugged and dismissed his concerns. “So you can’t be right all of the time.” Ellie paused and stared at her husband over the rim of her coffee cup. “But you know what I think, Palmer? I think that after all these years of being sheriff, your feelings are sometimes more accurate than somebody else’s facts. So they weren’t in this case. So what? ‘Trust the Force, Luke.’”

“Thanks, Ellie. I suppose I’d better get going.”

But the sheriff didn’t go. Instead, he sat staring at the wallpaper while he held a piece of toast halfway to his mouth. Ellie knew better than to bother him at times like this, and she tried to interest herself in an old Newsweek. At last, Palmer shoved the cold toast in his mouth and said, “I think I’m going to take a little time this morning and go home. I haven’t been there in the winter for a long time.”

Ellie, who knew what “home” meant to her husband, smiled knowingly and said, “Want another cup of coffee before you go?”

Before he left the house, Palmer called his deputy. “Orly? Look, I’m going to be a little late this morning. There are a couple of things I need to think through … Huh? Yah, matter of fact, I am going up to the home place … No, nothing’s wrong with the case, at least part of it, anyway. There are just a few loose ends I want to clear up, that’s all. But I should be back before noon. Try to keep the media happy … Sure, you’re welcome to that duty. Tell them everything you think they need to know … You mean, our investigations surrounding Hofstead Hail? Probably not, at least for the moment. I mean, there’s this meeting this morning and everybody is sure to be in a little state of shock when they see how it turns out. There will be a pretty significant absence at the meeting! … What? You figure it out!”

The sheriff drove his Acura to a lonely place about four miles outside of the village of Underwood. The county snowplow had passed and left a wide shoulder on the gravel road. Knutson sat in the warm car and read again the report from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. It was short on detail, but long on significance. The three sets of prints found on the snowmobile, the helmet, and the zipper pull were all traced to Hofstead, Sharon Hoffman, and the man who called himself David Hoffman. No other prints were found anywhere. David Hart’s prints were found in several places on both the helmet and the snowmobile, and it was a simple matter to run them through the computer until they hit the jackpot. Since Mrs. Hoffman assisted her husband in the resort business, it was only to be expected that her prints would also be there. Still, as Palmer pulled down the fur flaps of his hat over his ears and prepared to inspect his old home, the seeming incongruity of David Hoffman being a murderer nagged at him.

“Home” was now little more than a two-acre patch of ground connected to the road by a dirt approach. Once, it had been a farmstead, built by Palmer’s grandfather shortly after he came over from Norway in the 1890s. The original small house had grown as the Knutson family increased, and in time a large red barn, a chicken coop, a granary, a hog shed, and an outhouse had graced the property. This was the only home Palmer had known until he went off to the army. It was the home of a weeping willow, of a tire swing, of kittens in the barn, of morning glories climbing up the windmill, of little wooden boats that Palmer made and sailed, sharing the stock tank with the noses of thirty head of cattle. It was the home of a little boy who spoke a lot more Norwegian than English when he had started first grade, and Palmer sometimes felt like he needed to get in touch with that little boy again.

There were two pieces of evidence that this had once been a farmstead. The first was a thin line of box elders that ran to the north and west of where the buildings had stood. The second was a tall windmill, standing stark against the cloudy gray sky. Its wind blades were still largely intact, and, as the cold wind blew, the wheel turned with an eerie creaking voice as if it were a fifty-foot skeleton standing watch over an abandoned graveyard. Palmer stepped out of his car and waded in the snow toward where the house used to be. The wind changed direction and the windmill screamed as if to warn him to turn back.

Palmer stood where, as a boy, he had built one of his best snow forts. The wind had created a drift that ran between the house and the weeping willow tree. The drift became so hard that he could climb the side and leap from the top and catch the tire swing and sway like Tarzan before he jumped into a soft pile of snow. On the other side of the drift, he had carved an entrance into his private cave. He remembered how he had been able to stand up straight in his little cavern and mentally projected the drift to have been about seven feet high. Then, as a smile crept across his face, he realized that for him to have been able to stand up straight when he was nine years old would have required a much smaller snowdrift. He looked down into the pit that had been the basement of his house. The current owner of the farm was using it as a place to dump rocks. “No,” he said to himself, “it would be hard to play with my wind-up train set down there this winter.” He wandered around thinking about families and husbands and wives and how his parents had struggled on the farm, and how Mr. and Mrs. Hofstead had lived together for so long, and how Gary and Faye Janice seemed to embody what couples were like today, and how David and Sharon had shared a life on the run for more than thirty years. To what extent would couples go to help each other? He turned to look where the old barn had been and suddenly the wind shifted and blew a wisp of snow right into his neck. He automatically reached down and pulled the zipper up under his chin. It was like the cruel wind blew an idea into his head. He didn’t like the idea, but as he took a last look around home, he knew it was right. There were telephone calls to make, more paperwork, and another arrest warrant to be made out, but now, at last, the whole truth would be told.