CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The first stop was the Ellis place.

Deputy Wroten led the way again. He had checked in by radio with Deputy Allen to make sure that Eric Johansson’s body had been picked up and safely delivered to the morgue in Fox Creek. It didn’t seem like there was much reason to keep a watch on the Johansson place with the body gone and everyone who might be interested in poking around Eric’s room safely in jail at the moment, so Wroten requested Allen to meet us at the Ellis farm.

He was standing outside the kitchen door as we made our way down the long driveway. He looked more than a little uncomfortable as the two cars pulled up side by side—the patrol car closest to the house, mine right up next to it. Perhaps Wroten had spoken to him at some point about the way he had behaved toward Carver that morning. At any rate, he had his service hat off and was working the brim with both hands as if he was particularly nervous about something.

Wroten didn’t speak to him when he got out of the patrol car. He just sidled up next to the other deputy and waited, his face solid and solemn, looking rather like it had been recently carved out of a chunk of marble and had not yet been softened by wind or rain or erosion. His eyes were bright and hard.

This was Deputy Wroten in his true ‘official’ mode, not that John Wayne parody we had seen earlier.

I got out of my car first and went around to help Victoria, whose hip was, I think, giving her more trouble than she cared to let on, but before I could open the passenger door, Carver had slid across the back seat, exited the rear, and pulled her door open for her.

“Let me get this, Lynn,” he said. I was pleased that he had used neither “Miz Hanson” nor the ubiquitous “ma’am.”

He extended one hand and helped Victoria, although she did most of the work herself. She seemed stiffer than usual, though.

I leaned over and whispered to her, “Remind me to ask you how long you had planned on suckering Snake into decking you.”

She merely grinned at me and then addressed her attention to Carver.

“Lynn and I are going to wait here a moment, Carver. I do believe I shall need some help in getting to the house, so she is going to put her arm through mine and we are going to progress rather slowly from here over to where the two officers are standing.”

Carver looked confused, obviously wondering why she was saying this, particularly when it was readily apparent that she actually didn’t need any help.

“You can go on ahead, dear, and wait for us at the house. I believe that Deputy Allen has something that he would like to say to you, and I think it would be better that he did so in relative privacy.”

Understanding flooded Carver’s eyes, and he took off.

Victoria and I stood by the car door, pretending not to watch as Allen took a step forward and spoke a few words to the younger man as soon as Carver was within earshot. I suppose that if we had listened intently we could have overheard the deputy’s apology for manhandling Carver so atrociously earlier, but neither of us cared to do so.

To all appearances, we were examining a particularly lovely rose bush nearby.

When Allen extended his right hand and Carver unhesitatingly gripped it and shook it, Victoria and I made our way over to the house.

Wroten seemed satisfied with whatever Allen had said. His face was not quite so angular and stiff as it had been, although he was still solemn and unsmiling.

“Now comes the really hard part,” he said.

We knew what he was talking about.

We found Janet Ellis and Greta Johansson at the kitchen table. The room was bright and colorful, with a row of commemorative plates of varying sorts flashing highlights from a narrow shelf a foot or so below the ceiling. The window was open, its vivid curtains drawn fully open to let the sun stream in. The walls were a welcoming yellow, and the cabinets white, so the total effect was of openness and lightness and cheeriness.

The only mote of darkness in the room was Mrs. Johansson. She was still dressed in the worn chenille robe and formless scuffs. Her hair was still wispy and uncombed. But her eyes were more focused now and her cheeks held a little more color.

She and Janet were sharing a pot of tea. Her hand was wrapped around the china cup as if she treasured the warmth of the liquid inside, but it was steady and firm.

She looked up as we entered.

“Well, did you get them? Did you arrest those hooligans who murdered my grandson?” It was unsettling hearing the harsh words coming from such a fragile-looking woman. There was an undercurrent of hatred that seemed at odds with everything I had been told about her.

Wroten walked over to the table and settled himself into one of the chairs. Victoria took the other one. Allen went on into the living room, apparently following instructions from Wroten, and Carver leaned against the sink not far away.

Wroten leaned across the table and placed his hand over Mrs. Johansson’s.

“Well, ma’am. We arrested the men who beat your grandson. The ring leader made the mistake of taking a poke at Miz Sears here, in front of me and half a dozen other witnesses, so even though we don’t have any direct evidence...yet”—he held up his other hand to forestall her obvious intention to interrupt—“that he beat up your grandson, we will be able to hold him on an assault and battery charge until the coroner can complete the autopsy. Doc will know just what to look for. So I don’t think the man will be seeing the free light of day for some time to come.”

Greta Johansson nodded her approval, but her forehead was still knitted and furrowed, and her eyes glinted with repressed anger.

“But they killed him, didn’t they? They talked him into doing whatever things they do out at that god-forsaken bar and then they killed him.”

Wroten glanced at Victoria as if asking for help.

Victoria responded, as I knew she would.

“Greta, dear, I know this is all very difficult for you. And I know that you think it might be easier if there is someone to blame. But the fact is that those men, however evil they might be, whatever evil things they persuaded Eric to do..., they didn’t kill him.”

“But....” Greta was no longer angry. She simply needed Victoria to comfort her, to tell her the truth, whatever that might be.

“Eric was...well, he wasn’t behaving the way that you would have wanted. He made some mistakes, serious mistakes, and because of one of them, those men beat him up, beat him badly. But he would have healed. And I would like to think that he would have learned from those mistakes and healed inside as well as outside, spiritually as well as physically.”

I wasn’t so certain of that. From what little I had learned about Eric Johansson, I think that he would have remained a thorn in his grandmother’s side for a long while yet. Some of my old friends from school had made the same mistakes, had begun the long, tortuous, and all too frequently one-way trip along that same road, and precious few of them had managed to turn their lives around.

I was by no means convinced that Eric would have been one of the few.

Truth to be told, part of me was glad that he was dead, for his grandmother’s sake and for the sake of her memories of him. She would be able to construct—or maybe reconstruct—an idealized grandson in her mind and treasure him in ways she might not have been able to do with a living, breathing, wayward one. The one she would create would make no more mistakes. He would remain her darling grandson to the end of her days.

“Then how...? What...?” She needed to know more.

So Victoria, now holding both of her old friend’s hands in her own very capable ones, told the true story, leaving out nothing.

Greta’s eyes filled with tears.

“That was it? Snake-bite? From a dead snake?” From the sound of her voice, she was blaming, not her grandson, but someone or something larger, more all-encompassing, something cosmic. I doubted that she would come right out and blame God—she didn’t seem like the type—but she needed some way to keep Eric’s death from seeming merely trivial, accidental.

“I’m afraid so.”

“But I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Greta said. I could hear her pleading for more.

“I have,” Victoria said. I wondered if she would re-tell the story she had shared with us earlier, but she didn’t. “And in a way, poor Eric was at least partially responsible.”

“Eric? How? How could he have known...?”

“Of course he couldn’t have known. That’s not what I meant, dear.” She patted Greta’s hands lightly. It made no difference, whether on the shoulder or on the folded hands, her “There, there” gesture worked. Greta calmed noticeably.

“You see, Eric brought a number of...bits of baggage, should we say?...with him when he came up here to live with you. Partly, it was his attitude. Now don’t try to explain it away, dear. You and I have talked often enough over the years that I could hear the pain in your voice when he...well, when he didn’t behave quite like the boy you had known and loved as he was growing up.

“Some of it was no doubt his grief at losing his parents so suddenly. Some of it was his desperate need to find himself, to build an identity that would protect him against any further loss. Some of it was a need to be independent, a need that struggled constantly with his need to have someone to comfort him and guide him.

“He had you, of course. But he chose to ignore you—don’t deny it, dear, he did. And he chose instead to follow others, men who did not love him and did not care for him the way you did but who did not—in his eyes at least—threaten to smother him with love.”

“I never...I always....”

“I know. But he didn’t. So he continued to play the role he had carved out for himself long before. There was his spiky hair, his piercings. Nothing wrong with them, of course, but they set him apart from others up here, made him more definitively a loner, an outsider.

“And there was his clothing.

“His spiky hair couldn’t hurt him, other than perhaps to make him the object of attention. But his torn jeans could, and ultimately they helped to kill him.”

Greta had given up trying to interject or explain. She just sat there, listening to Victoria’s calm, warm voice.

“You see, someone like Carver might be tempted to wear fashionably distressed jeans, say, if he were courting a certain kind of girl.”

Carver actually blushed at this.

“But he would know that when he was hiring himself out for field work, he would need to wear jeans designed, not for show, but for hard wear. He wouldn’t wear jeans ripped across the knees, because he would know that he might have to get down on his knees to fix something underneath the frame of a truck, or boost something with his knee to get it to a needed height...for example, a bale of hay. He would know that the jeans were primarily for his protection.

“Eric might have known the same things. I’m sure Carver would have mentioned it the first time they worked together”—and Carver nodded slightly in affirmation—“but he chose to ignore that. He chose to make a statement in the clothing he wore.

“And in the end, that was a mistake that he couldn’t rectify.”

Greta seemed wordless.

I think part of her wanted to reject everything that Victoria had just said, wanted to believe that Eric had been absolutely blameless. But I also think that, deep within her heart and her mind, she was relieved. She had tried her best. She had given him the best home she knew how. She had tried to make him accept the responsibilities of becoming an adult.

And he had chosen to ignore her values and her life.

This time, Greta patted Victoria gently on the hand.

There was no need for a formal ‘thank you’ between two old friends.

Her loss would pain her, perhaps for the rest of her life, but her loss would at least be bearable.

I knew how that felt.