Beyond the lines, high and off to the left, the pumpkin and green balloon floated in the breeze, moving away from me. Outlined against the blue sky beyond, I could see the silhouette of Desmin Grizzel from the waist up, standing there in the hard weave of the wicker basket, looking back down at us, motionless and intent. I stood up, favoring the right leg. I was dazed, and I was sickened by the pale and dying dance of flame on Kesner’s body and the small silence of Linda. Out of some vague impulse I raised an arm to Desmin Grizzel as he dwindled against the morning sky and saw him wave in response.
I heard the hard whine of the engines of the chase cars and looked for a place to hide. I could not run to the, distant row of trees. I hobbled over closer to Linda’s body, stretched out face down, dug with two paws like a dog, wormed myself against the soil, lay with my face wedged into the breathing hole. As a final act of guile, I pulled the wallet out of my pocket and pushed it down into the dirt at the bottom of the hole under my face. The earth smelled rich and moist.
They came running, feet thudding, breathing hard.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Look at that one, Ted!” There was a coughing sound, a gagging sound, and then a gush, coughing, and another voice saying weakly, “I’m sorry, guys. It was the smell.”
I took a deep slow breath and held it. Somebody put a foot against my hip and shoved. “Maybe this one’s alive.” I felt hands poking at my pockets.
The hands went away. A deeper voice said, in exasperation, “What are you doing, Benny?”
“Nothing.”
“Get your hands off her.”
“She’s got something here on a chain around her neck.”
“I said get away from her!”
“Okay, okay, okay. What’s the matter with you?”
“Ted, come over here. Look, guys. I think we ought to go back to town and split and keep our mouths shut.”
“What about that balloon still in the air?”
“There’ll be guys after it. This thing got out of hand. Right? Everybody got too excited. I saw Wicker kill a little old guy. I saw him do it on purpose. Nobody agreed to anything like that. Nobody said anything about setting fires. I saw Davis go down, and it looked as if he was hurt bad. There was a lot of blood on his face. Here we got two more dead people and one maybe dying. It got too big. There’ll be television guys and newspaper guys from Des Moines all over the place.”
“You remember what we all agreed, Len. It was for Karen and Jamie. It was in their memory. These are evil people.”
“ ‘Justice is mine, saith the Lord.’ I think we ought to cut out right now, guys.”
They seemed to reach an agreement. When I heard voices again, they were too far away for me to hear what they said. I knew the explosion wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Others would be arriving. I retrieved the wallet. Somebody had scooped dirt onto Kesner and put out his fire. I brushed dirt off me as I walked out of the big field. The knee had popped back in, leaving the tendons stretched and sore, okay for limited and careful use. When I reached the tree line, I found that they were planted alongside a narrow asphalt road. I looked back and saw a glinting of vehicles back near the power lines and some tiny figures moving about in the field.
There was no traffic. I walked and rested, walked and rested, and finally reached a crossroad. Bagley and Perry were off to the east, Coon Rapids and Manning off to the west. A rumpled old man with a harelip and a lot of opinions about that mess in Washington gave me a ride to another crossroads, where a very fat woman in a van upholstered in sheepskin gave me a ride through Rosedale Station and on out to the location. When she stopped, the cops tried to wave her on, but I got out. She drove on. A young officer said, “This area is closed.”
I pointed out my rental Buick and showed him the keys. He took the keys and made certain they worked. He wanted to see the rental agreement, and I took it out of the glove compartment. Then he asked for identification.
“What’s going on here anyway, officer?”
“All hell has been going on here. How come your car is here and you weren’t?”
“I left it here last night when I rode into town with someone else. I meant to come back and get it, but I didn’t get around to it.”
“Where did you stay last night?”
“The Rosedale Lodge.”
“Are you with this movie company?”
“No way.” I said, and from the back compartment of the wallet I slid the folded machine copy of Lysa Dean’s letter to Kesner. He read it carefully, his lips moving. He was broad and young and plump, and he had high color in his cheeks, a thick chestnut mustache.
“That Lysa Dean, she is a really quick-witty person,” he said. “She’s been around. When I was maybe fourteen, I had a terrible case of the hots for her. And, you know, she still looks damned good. What’s she really like, McGee?”
“She’s a very shy and retiring person, officer. All that sex-pot front is just an act.”
He sighed and said, “You’d never know it,” and gave me back the letter. “I’m sorry you told me that.”
“What did go on here?”
“Were you going to use some of the balloon stuff on the TV?”
“I’m going to recommend against it. Was there a fire here?”
We stood and looked out across the field. A lot of the trucks and private cars were gone. There were two television news teams at work, interviewing people out on the field, taking shots of the bright empty envelope on the ground, the overturned basket.
“What they were doing here, on the sly Mr. McGee, they were making dirty videotapes, conning some of the young people around here to appear on those tapes, paying them for it, making them sign releases. It didn’t all come out until one of the young girls they made perform for them got killed yesterday, and her girl friend broke down and told what had been going on. This is a Christian, Godfearing community, Mr. McGee, and a big bunch of the friends of Karen Hatcher came out here early this morning to bust everybody up. And they pretty much did. We’ve got twelve high-school seniors locked up, and three in the hospital, and warrants for the rest of them. There were two dead right here on the field, two of the movie crew, and another that will probably die. A lot of expensive equipment was destroyed and burned, and from what we can find out, a lot of the movie film was burned up too. A report came in a while back that two or three more got killed running into hightension lines way southeast of here. Some of them got away, in time in balloons, apparently. It’s just one of those things that happen. It’s a godawful mess. It’s hard to say who’s to blame in a thing like this. It really is. One of the ones in jail is my kid brother.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Billy would never in this world set out to kill anybody. His dog fell out of the loft one time and broke his back. Dad said it was Billy’s responsibility to shoot old Boomer. He plain couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him. Of course, he was only twelve. I had to do it for him.”
“It all got out of hand, probably.” I said.
“That’s exactly it, mister. That’s exactly it. They don’t want people who don’t belong here hanging around here, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Oh, wait a second. If you know anything about that sideline of making those tapes, maybe they’d want to talk to you some.”
“Officer, I got here yesterday morning. All I’ve seen are balloons.”
He nodded. “Okay. You can take off.”
Eighteen
THE WORLD turned further toward summer. Vennerman scheduled my knee in May, and by early June I was walking at a reasonable pace, but only for a mile at a time, and I worked with the weight Velcroed around my ankle every evening-swing the leg up straight and hold it, and let it down very slowly.
In mid-June there were a few unusual days when Florida became almost too hot to touch. Annie Renzetti came over from Naples, and while she was there, making lists of what she’d bring on the promised cruise aboard the Busted Flush, Ron Esterland came to town for our long-delayed accounting. He had been out in Seattle making additions and changes in a big show of his paintings which were about to go on the museum circuit, all of them on loan from museums and collectors. Meyer came over in the morning and got his big pot of Italian meat sauce started, checked it out at noon, and came back at drinking time, toting a sufficient amount of Bardolino.