I didn’t need Bayard Clements’s prodding to get to my feet: Albritten was clearly at the end of her strength. I waited in the front room while he escorted her to her bedroom. The pictures on the television had been rearranged, I noticed idly; the one of the women joyously celebrating St. Silas’s 150th anniversary had been removed. Curious.
Clements reappeared. He said he’d walk to St. Silas with me, show me the church’s undercroft so I could see for myself it didn’t harbor any fugitives.
We made the usual small talk while we walked to the church—how long had he been here, what did he know about the town. He’d grown up in Atlanta; his mother had worked for Bayard Rustin, which was how he’d gotten his name. Lawrence was an adjustment, small town, small African-American community, but he loved the spirit in the place and loved bringing the university students into the St. Silas family.
“You weren’t here for the St. Silas hundred-fiftieth anniversary?” I asked.
He stiffened. “What do you know about that?”
“Just making conversation. I saw the photo in Ms. Albritten’s living room yesterday,” I said. “It wasn’t there today.”
“I came here the following year,” he said. “Sister Albritten wanted the picture next to her bed. I moved it for her this morning.”
“When you saw me coming up the walk?”
He gave another social laugh. “Chicago manners are more unceremonious than I’m used to, Detective. I always thought coming to Kansas meant moving north, but manners here are much more southern.”
I nodded, acknowledging the rebuke but still wondering about the picture. Our conversation had brought us to the church door, which meant an easy change of topic.
“God’s house ought to be open to anyone needing a sanctuary,” Clements said, “but we can’t afford to employ anyone to look after the place, and it’s sad but true that people help themselves to what they see sitting around, even in a church.”
The sanctuary had a musty smell, not unpleasant, but I could see the warping in the floorboards from the river damps. I asked him about floods, and he said they’d done the best they could with foundation protection. After the 1951 flood, the Corps of Engineers had put in dams along the river, which helped as well.
“Lately Kansas has been more plagued by drought than flood, so we forget the menace the river can offer.”
He led me into the cellars. I was worried about my precious Italian boots, but the floors were cemented over. Even so, water had pooled in the uneven surface and the walls felt clammy when I ran my hand over them. Clements turned on the lights—naked bulbs strung across low-hanging ceilings—and stood in a corner, arms folded, watching me with an ironic smile while I looked for any signs that someone had been here recently. Not so much as a La Perla bra strap or a USB port.
It was also cold. Someone desperate—a runaway slave, a black youth scared of the cops—might tough it out, but I doubted that Emerald Ferring would want to. She might have come up the hard way, but that had been fifty years ago.
Clements was parked behind the church. When he realized I was on foot, he offered to drive me to my own car, but he seemed surprised that I’d parked at the library.
“I was using the collection this morning,” I said. “It seemed easier to leave the car there.”
I didn’t feel like explaining my worries about being tracked. I wondered if the fact that the sheriff or the colonel or whoever could track me through my phone meant they no longer needed to use their SUV. I put a reflexive hand on my throat, which suddenly felt tight.
When Clements dropped me at the library, he brushed aside my thanks with a brusque comment. “I hope you won’t go doubling back to trouble Sister Albritten again.”
I smiled perfunctorily. “Could she stay with her son for a few weeks? I don’t know what’s going on or who’s instigating it, but the violence at the McKinnon farm and at August’s home in Chicago—if those thugs think that she knows something—”
“I know.” He cut me off. “That’s why I’ve organized people in the community to stay with her. I wanted her to go to her son Jordan’s, but she’s a stubborn woman. Old, besides, and the old need to be in their own places. Jordan will come back tomorrow. He has to get his business organized so that someone can take care of things while he’s away, and then he’ll stay with her, or his oldest boy will. It’s not perfect, but it will have to do.”
I didn’t offer to help with guard duty; I didn’t know where my investigations might lead or when, but Albritten’s safety was yet another worry.
Back in my own car, I took my electronics out of their foil casing. I had a raft of messages, some urgent, but my own first priority was to collect my dog.
Peppy was delighted to see me, although the manager assured me that everyone had fallen in love with her; I could bring her back anytime. Peppy had played fetch longer than they thought possible for any dog, had worked well with the rest of the animals, and so on. I felt as though I were reading a kindergarten report: Your little Peppy is the ideal child, bright but caring about others. Not that I disagreed with a word of it.
As we drove into town, I was thankful she’d had enough exercise that I didn’t need to walk her tonight. We went back to the Hippo. It was five-thirty, sun over the yardarm, whatever that was.
The bartender/barista I usually saw in the mornings was on duty, so I brought Peppy inside with me.
I put two twenties on the counter and asked for a double Oban, neat. My usual drink, Johnnie Walker Black, is half the price, but I wanted pampering. “Do you need proof that she’s my emotional-support dog, or can you take my word for it?”
“I can tell by looking at the two of you,” the woman said, picking up one of the twenties and giving me back a five along with the second. “Keep your change. We all need emotional support around here.”
I left the five on the counter and went to a corner table with my devices and my dog. Among the messages from my Chicago clients was one from Troy Hempel: he’d talked to his mother, and he’d get back to me when he could. I had seven texts from Bernie, telling me if I didn’t find August by tomorrow, she was flying down, no matter what I or her coach or her parents had to say.
I replied to my most important clients, texted the Streeter brothers to ask them to do some legwork for me, and wrote an emphatic no way, josé to Bernie. people are killing each other and leaving the bodies for rats to eat. stay away.
After that I looked up Barbara Rutledge, who’d talked to Doris McKinnon at the farmers’ market a month ago. Although there are services that search for cell-phone numbers, they’re slow and costly, so I was glad that Rutledge turned out to be old-fashioned enough to have a landline. She answered on the third ring, too, so I didn’t have to waste time trading calls.
I introduced myself and asked if I were right in thinking I’d met her the day before at Riverside Church.
“Oh, yes. The detective who got everybody so agitated. Did you call on Nell Albritten?”
“Yes. I’m sure you’ve heard she collapsed when I was with her.”
Barbara was astonished. “I didn’t know— Has she seen a doctor? What did you do?”
“I made sure she went to the ER,” I said. “She’s home again, depleted, the way one is after an episode like that, especially someone who’s in her nineties, but they say her heart is fine.”
“Why did you think I already knew?”
“Everyone in Douglas County keeps stressing to me how you all know one another,” I said. “That’s been proved true to me so many times that I’ve started to think my job here is to phone people and have them tell me what I’m doing.”
“We do all talk about one another all the time,” Barbara agreed. “Probably no different from a big city, but so many of us grew up together or have worked together for such a long time that maybe we’re in one another’s business more than you’d be in Chicago.”
She hesitated. “Me not knowing about Nell Albritten is typical of what I was trying to say yesterday at church. There’s a divide in this town between black and white and between the people north of the river, North Lawrence, and the rest of the town. Only a handful of people at Riverside know Ms. Albritten, and unless they’re connected to the hospital, they won’t have heard a peep about her. If it had been Gertrude Perec or Joy Helmsley, we’d all have our casseroles baked by now.”
“On the subject of casseroles, or at least food,” I said, “Ms. Albritten told me this afternoon that Doris McKinnon talked to you at the farmers’ market about a month ago. She was upset that someone was planting on her land?”
“No-o-o.” Rutledge drew the word out, trying to remember. “She was upset, but she was talking about the land she’d had to sell to the air force. She said it looked as though they’d sold it to another farmer instead of giving her the chance to buy it back. ‘They’re growing something there, and I need to know why’—something like that.”
“If she was digging up the ground in the middle of the night, trying to prove something, then it would be on that land?” That would be a wonderful break. I could ID the fifteen acres she’d had to cede and inspect them for signs of digging, instead of going all over the county.
“She was digging in the middle of the night?” Rutledge was startled. “She was always . . . I don’t want to say eccentric—we’re too fast to slap that label on any woman who marches to her own beat—but she was always more out there than most other people. She let the anti-nuke kids camp on her land, back in ’83. That caused a lot of antagonism out in the county, hippies or Communists spoiling the landscape.”
We’d hung up, and I was looking at the maps I’d used this morning, trying to work out where McKinnon’s old fifteen acres overlapped with the Sea-2-Sea experimental farm, when Sergeant Everard came in.
He and the barista chatted for a minute—banter, it looked like—while she pulled a beer for him. He brought it over to my table.
“Just got off duty.” He waved the beer stein. “So she’s an emotional-support animal, huh?” He leaned over to scratch Peppy’s ears. “I thought she was your analyst.”
“She’s an exceptional multitasker.”
“They told me you usually come here in the mornings for coffee.”
“Best in Lawrence, at least for my taste,” I agreed.
“That doesn’t look a lot like coffee,” he said, “but I took a chance that you’d come in at night. It’s how we LEOs catch perps: people like their routines.”
“We perps do,” I agreed, “but maybe you saw my GPS come back on stream.”
He raised his brows, surprised. “Not tracking you, Warshawski, just looking for you.”
“Okay,” I said. “You found me.”
“A friend of mine at the state lab called me a little bit ago, about Doris McKinnon, or at least the woman whose body we assume belonged to Doris.”
I waited some more.
“Dr. Roque collapsed in the morgue this morning while he was starting the autopsy. He was there on his own: state can’t afford full-time tech support anymore, so it wasn’t until a guard saw him on a TV monitor that they called for help. He was airlifted to the med center in Kansas City, with some kind of acute flu.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said formally. “Does this mean the autopsy is on hold?”
Everard grinned humorlessly. “We’re not quite a hick place down here, Warshawski, despite what the New York Times says. We do have more than one pathologist in the state. No, the problem is that McKinnon’s body is gone.”