Page 62 of Everything You Want Me to Be
There was a pause and then the line went dead. I dropped my forehead on to my hand.
After a minute, I got up and walked to the window, where the sky was lightening up behind the houses. Normally it was the kind of sunrise I liked to watch, all hellfire burning against the clouds, the kind where Bud and I would ignore a pull on the line to just sit in the boat and stare at the horizon. Over two decades we’d been fishing together. Every year he invited me to his house for Easter dinner and this year we’d all sat around their dining room table eating honey-glazed ham. Hattie’d been trying to get me to tell her how fast over the speed limit she could drive without getting pulled over, while Bud and Mona and I all laughed, and now she was never going to speed anywhere again. Bud, who’d told me to slap a ticket on her right then for “conspiracy to speed,” was threatening vigilantism. And I—if I couldn’t find Hattie’s killer fast and quiet enough—I might end up losing Bud, too.
The badge weighed heavy this morning. I downed the rest of my coffee and left the house with a blazing need to do something, anything, that would push this case forward.
I went to Carl Jacobs’s house. When Jake talked to Carl yesterday, he’d corroborated Lund’s story and most of their answers had matched dead-on. Both said they’d gone to Carl’s house after locking up the school, driving separately, Lund following Carl. They sat in Carl’s basement having a beer—Budweiser, by both accounts—and shot the shit for a while before Lund left. Carl estimated the time at 10:25, because he’d turned on the last of the news afterwards.
What wasn’t so clear was their topic of discussion. Lund said they talked about the play and about work. Carl didn’t remember straight off, according to Jake. Then he claimed they talked sports—how the Twins were looking this season. He didn’t think they’d talked about much else.
It was a quarter to seven when I got to his house, early enough that Carl wouldn’t have left for work yet. He answered the knock like he’d been waiting right on the other side, dressed and shaved for the day.
“Sheriff. Little early, isn’t it?” He glanced past me toward the cruiser.
“Early enough that you can spare a few minutes.” I nodded behind him and he let me in. His boy stood in the hallway, still in his pajamas but wide awake and half afraid, by the looks of him.
“Morning.” I tipped my hat to him, which put most kids at ease, but not this one. He just dropped his eyes to the floor, not moving.
“Maybe Lanie can watch him for a minute while we talk.”
“Lanie!” Carl shouted and his wife appeared, also in pajamas. She didn’t look very awake or pleased.
“What?” She didn’t greet me.
“I’ve got to talk to the sheriff.”
“Again?”
“Just get Josh ready, okay?”
She shook her head and collared the boy, taking him back down the hall and slamming a door.
Carl gestured me into the kitchen.
“Not a morning person, is she?” I asked pleasantly.
“What is it, Sheriff? I answered everything your deputy asked me and lost an entire period of class doing it. You know how people are looking at me?”
“How’s that?”
“Like I was—” He shook his head. “Like I had something to do with this mess.”
“Did you?”
“What are you asking me?”
“What do you know, Carl?” I put my hat on the table and stared him down.
“I know Hattie Hoffman’s dead, that’s all. I had her for history two years now. American history last year and European this year. She liked Europe better.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at. Why’d you lie to Jake?”
“Lie!”
“I want to know what you talked about in your basement on Friday, and you’d better not say the Twins.”
He stared at me, frozen for a minute, before going to the doorway and glancing down the hall. Then he dropped into one of the chairs at his kitchen table and spoke quietly.
“Lanie.”
