sixty-two

Detweiler hadn’t warned me that Patty was a speed demon behind the wheel. My seat belt snapped tight twice before we rumbled out of the Detweiler driveway, leaving me gasping for air. Patty was careful enough, looking both ways before pulling out on an empty stretch of county road, but her lead foot sent me bouncing this way and that over the poorly maintained pavement.

“I don’t hate you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Given time, I might even come to like you.”

“Or not.”

“Or not.” She laughed. “At least you don’t take yourself too seriously.”

“How could I? I’m the mother of a pre-teen. I get potshots taken at me on a regular basis. That reminds me, I heard that your brother and your father used to go to a shooting range and practice every Sunday. Where is it?”

“Down the road from my parents’ house. Maybe five miles to the north.”

We raced into an intersection obscured by rows of corn. She brought the car skidding to a stop and pointed a finger to the left. “Here’s the crossroad. Harbinger Lane. The GM range is at the intersection of that and County Road 1200. Colby Nesbit added it to his farm to bring in extra cash. My house is ten miles northeast of here.”

She sped away from the four-way stop, leaving a cloud of dust behind us.

“You and Brenda must have been good friends.”

“You try spending two hours a day on a bus with someone. Gives you a lot of time to talk. Of course, things changed after we graduated, but we were still neighbors, sort of, so we stayed close. I think she had a crush on Chad for years.”

We came to another crossroads. Patty pointed over her left shoulder. “The Kloss farm is six miles that way. It’s a deep piece of land. The back of it runs up against County Road 1400, but the house is actually on County Road 1300. The place has been in their family two generations. Not as long as we’ve had our farm, but still …”

By my calculations, Brenda had been killed thirty miles from here, twenty miles past Patty and Paul’s house, on the way to the city of Springfield, Illinois. I asked Patty if she knew anyone who lived along that stretch of highway.

“No. I know why you’re asking. I’ve even gone through our yearbook and looked up our classmates. Most of them stayed close to home. Even though the employment situation here is pretty dismal.”

“We gravitate to what is familiar, even when economic times are tough,” I said.

“A few of our classmates have dabbled in growing pot. As you might imagine, if you know much about agriculture, growing hemp is easy enough to do. Especially if you have a greenhouse. A lot of farmers put in greenhouses to grow specialty crops like Beefsteak tomatoes, Big Girl and Better Girl varieties to sell at roadside markets. Of course, back in 1943, the government actually distributed hemp seed to Illinois farmers to meet wartime demands for rope, twine, and so on. You still see it growing beside the road. Today’s plants are different, with a higher concentration of TCH in the buds, so it doesn’t take a lot of marijuana to turn a good profit.”

I channeled Sheila for a second and had to stop myself before her voice came out of my mouth, or I would have said, “Really?”

Instead, I tried to sound noncommittal. “Uh, that’s interesting. You think it has anything to do with Brenda’s death?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. It’s possible. I mean, maybe someone local was supplying her.”

“But marijuana is different from prescription drugs.”

Patty sighed. “I know. I’m just trying to make sense of it, you know? Find a connection somewhere, somehow to help Chad! Besides she could have been trading prescription drugs for dope. It happens. Dope is easier to sell.”

She sounded desperate. I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right. We have to trust that it will. Schnabel is the best there is. Chad didn’t do this, and we’ll all stand by him.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m just telling you something I was thinking about. I mean, maybe Brenda knew about a marijuana operation, and that caught up with her. She could have threatened to rat someone out.”

“Anyone you know?”

“No!” she said too quickly. A slow blush stained her face. Was it possible that Patty and Paul grew dope for Brenda to sell and harvested a peck full of trouble? Was this the “investment” that went bad? Paul had been out of work for a year or so by my calculations. Jobs were hard to replace in rural communities. Houses tough to sell.

Could it be that Patty Kressig knew a whole lot more about the circumstances surrounding Brenda Detweiler’s death than she let on?