"So…what's the one thing?" Virgil took a sip of the wine, which was so mild as to be almost tasteless.
"Abortion," Garber said.
"Abortion?"
"It didn't come in until, when, the seventies? Bill's wife must've died sometime in the early sixties. I think that's right," she said. "Anyway, he wasn't a big one for condoms, or prophylactics, as we called them back then. It wasn't so easy to get abortions around here. There were stories that Russell Gleason helped some people out. Including Bill."
"Huh. I don't see exactly how that would lead to murder. I mean, we're talking about the absence of a person, a child, not a presence. Unless…"
"Unless the antiabortion folks got to someone, who's been sitting there brooding about it all these years, thinking about her lost child," Garber said. "Maybe she got pushed into it by Judd, maybe Gleason did it…maybe she's just been sitting out on a farm somewhere, no kids, thinking about the one she aborted."
Virgil sat back: "Maybe you ought to be a cop. That's the best idea I've heard."
"Well, if it's something that goes way back," she said. "If my father had known some of the things I got up to, he might have done something about it. At the time, anyway. But we're all older now, the girls that hung out with Bill, our parents most are gone or too old to do something like murder." She took a hefty gulp of the wine, in a quick hungry way that made Virgil think she might have a problem with alcohol.
"Margaret told me that there were sometimes group…encounters…at the Judd place," Virgil said, chasing around for the right word. Encounters, say, as opposed to gang fucking. "She said she didn't know the people involved, because she went one-on-one with Judd. Could you tell me if these group get-togethers, if there were any other males involved other than Judd? Particularly married younger males? I mean, did he bring in any couples, as opposed to just single women? I'm thinking somebody who might be looking back at that time, feeling abused, feeling badly used."
She looked at Virgil for a moment, and then said, "If you get into the details of the whole thing, it sounds bad. But you know, at the time it just seemed kind of exciting and…dirty, but in a good way. I'd get almost sick to my stomach on the way over there, but I couldn't wait to get there."
"So there were guys?"
"One guy, at least. Barry Johnson. He was there a lot." She took another gulp of the wine, nearly finishing it. "He was the postmaster in Bluestem. You never would have thought of it, to see him in the post office. Bill got him appointed to the job, through the congressman."
"Were he and Judd involved in a homosexual way?"
"Oh, no, no. Most of the time there were just two women and the two guys, and we'd lay around and drink and sometimes somebody would have some marijuana, but that was about it," she said. "Sometimes there were three women, and us women would, you know, do things with each other, and the guys liked to watch, but they didn't, they weren't-they didn't do anything gay with each other."
"Where's Johnson now?"
She cocked her head and said, "I ought to know that. But I don't." Finished the wine and said, "I think he left here sometime in the middle eighties. This was when Bill was getting older and the whole scene at his place was over. I heard that Barry went to California. Or maybe Florida. Maybe somebody at the Bluestem post office could tell you."
Again, she said, "Excuse me for another minute." She went back into the kitchen, rattled around some more, and then after a moment of silence, Virgil heard a faint pop. A moment later, she returned with another bottle of the sauvignon blanc, and poured herself another glass.
"Here's a question for you," she said. "What could possibly have happened back then-think of the worst possible thing-that would have brought Barry back here to kill people? And something else: How could Barry even get around town without being seen? Hundreds of people there know him by sight, and him coming back, everybody would be talking about it. He'd have to be an invisible man, if he's doing this."
Virgil nodded. "That's a point. But the main thing is, we don't really know what it might be. What if he and Judd had done something really ugly, killed somebody…?"
"But Bill was going to die anyway. Soon. Probably weeks. Why wait all this time and then come back and kill him?" She shook her head. "You know, it doesn't sound to me like a cover-up. It sounds to me like revenge. And it's revenge by somebody you don't see, because everybody can see him. You know what I mean? He's just an everyday guy. He's there all the time, so nobody notices him."
SHE GAVE HIM the names of three more women involved with Judd. Two of them no longer lived in the area-one had moved to St. Paul, and the other had gone north to Fargo. The third one lived in Bluestem, but was divorced and had gone very fat. "I can't see her managing to kill anyone. She can hardly walk a block."
"Huh. Let me ask this: have you ever heard of a character called the man in the moon?"
She looked puzzled, and shook her head: "No. Who's that?"
"I don't know. But I'd like to."
They talked a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, "Is that it?"
She took a third glass of wine; was half drunk and wasn't putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. "Are you working with Jim Stryker?"
"Yes, I am."
She eyed him for a moment, and then said, "I heard one time…long time ago…that his mother, Laura, might have been sleeping with Bill Judd. And this would have been after she was married. Mark Stryker-Jim's father-was one of those odd guys that you could push around, and people did. I'm not saying there's anything to it, but when Mark killed himself, there were rumors that it was more than losing some land. That he found out that Laura was sleeping with Bill and wasn't planning to stop."
"Is that right?"
"That's what I heard. I don't know how the Gleasons would fit into that. Anyway…" Her eyes slid toward the bottle.
"Thank you. You've been a help," Virgil said, standing up.
"If I could go back to those days…" Her voice trailed away.
"Yeah?"
"I'd do it in a minute," she said. Virgil realized that she was seriously loaded. "I'd jump right back in the pile. That was the most fun I ever had in my whole damn life."
A BLEAK REALIZATION for a fiftyish schoolteacher, Virgil thought on his way back to Bluestem. Would it lead to something? A commune for elderly rockers on the West Coast? Hitting on a high-school jock? More alcohol?
HE PICKED UP Joan Carson at her house and took her to the McDonald's for dinner-Big Macs, fries, shakes, and fried pies, and she said, "I can feel the cholesterol coagulating in my heart. I'm gonna drop dead in the parking lot." But she didn't stop eating.
"Ah, it's good for you," Virgil said, shoving more fries into his face. "Eat this until you're forty and then nothing but vegetables for the rest of your life."
"Makes for a short evening, though," she said.
"I was hoping you'd take me out to the farm," Virgil said.
She looked at him: "What for?"
"You know…to see what you do."
She shrugged. "Okay with me. You know anything about farms?"
"Worked on one, up in Marshall," Virgil said. "One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I'd be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos-we didn't do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We'd box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now."
She eyed him for ten seconds and then said, "You do have a remarkable capacity for bullshit."
THE STRYKER FARMSTEAD was an archaeological dig in waiting: a crumbling homestead, a woodlot full of abandoned farm machinery and a couple of wrecked cars, a windmill without a prop. The farm was built a quarter mile off a gravel road, in a grove of cottonwoods, at the base of a steep hill. Red-rock outcrops stuck out of the hill, while below it, all around the farm buildings, all the way to Bluestem, and really, all the way to Kansas City, was nothing but the darkest of black dirt, a sea of corn, beans, and wheat.