“Do you hate me so much because of Alison Greening?” I ask. “Pay for what?”
“For being you.” He says this flatly, as if it is self-explanatory. “It’s all over for you, Miles. Hovre is gonna put you away, I just talked to him. Twenty-four hours at the most. If you try to run, they’ll get you.”
“You talked to Hovre? He’s going to arrest me?” I feel the beginnings of relief.
“You bet your ass.”
“Good,” I say, startling Duane. “That’s what I want.”
“Jesus man,” Duane utters softly.
“Alison Greening is coming back tonight. She’s not what she used to be- — she’s something horrible. Rinn tried to warn me.” I look into Duane’s incredulous face. “And she’s the one who has been killing those girls. I thought it was Zack, but now I know it was Alison Greening.”
“Stop-saying-that-name,” Duane says.
I turn around and begin to sprint toward the house. Duane shouts behind me, and I yell back to him, “I’m going inside to call Hovre.”
He follows me inside and glares at me suspiciously as I dial the number of the police station. “Ain’t gonna do you no good,” he mutters, stumping around the kitchen. “Only thing you can do now is wait for it. Or get in that heap of yours and try to run. According to Hank you can’t do more than forty in her, though. You wouldn’t get to Blundell before Hovre caught you.” He is talking as much to himself as to me; his bowed back faces me.
I am listening to the ringing of the telephone, expecting Dave Lokken to answer; but Polar Bears’ voice comes to me instead. “Chief Hovre.”
“This is Miles.”
Duane: “Who you talkin’ to? Is that Hovre?”
“This is Miles, Polar Bears. Why aren’t you on your way out here?”
There is a baffling pause. Then he says: “Why, Miles I just been hearing about you. Seems you couldn’t stop. I reckon your cousin Du-ane is there with you.”
“Yes. He is.”
“Fuckin’-A I am,” says Duane.
“Good. Say, we got results on that blood. It’s AB, all right. It’ll take another day to break it down further to see if it’s male or female, the lab boys say.”
“I don’t have another day.”
“Miles old friend, I’d be surprised if you had another five minutes. Isn’t Duane carrying a twelve-gauge? I told him to bring one when he went down to see you. The law can overlook some things a man might do, if he’s been pushed too far.”
“I’m asking you to save my life, Polar Bears.”
“Some might say that you’d be a whole lot safer dead, Miles.”
“Does Lokken know what you’re doing?”
I hear the wheeze of his coughing. “Dave had to go all the way to the other end of the county today. Funny thing.”
“Tell him to get out here now,” Duane says. “I can’t stand having you in the house any more.”
“Duane says you should come now.”
“Why don’t you and Duane keep up your conversation? Sounds real fruitful to me.” He hung up.
I turn around, still holding the receiver, and see Duane looking at me with dull eyes in a flushed face. “He’s not coming, Duane. He thinks you’re going to shoot me. He wants you to do it. He sent Lokken off on a wild goose chase so nobody will know how he arranged things.”
“You’re talking guff.”
“Did he tell you to bring a shotgun?”
“Sure. He thinks you killed those girls.”
“He’s more devious than that. He told me about Alison Greening. He told me what happened. He’d rather have me dead than in jail. If I’m dead, I’m still guilty of the killings, but I can’t talk to anybody.”
“You shut up about that,” he says, his arms swinging at his sides. “Don’t say one word about that.”
“Because you hate thinking about it. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t rape her.”
“Huh,” Duane snorts, his face red and strained. “I didn’t come here to talk about this. I just wanted to hear you admit you put the dirtiest part of yourself into my girl. Do you think I liked beating it out of her?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes. I think you did enjoy it.”
Duane whirls and presses the palms of his hands against a kitchen cupboard, supporting his weight on his arms, as I had seen him do against the engine block of a tractor. When he turns around again he is doing his best to smile. “Now I know you’re crazy. Boy, that just says it all. Maybe I oughta kill you, like you say Hovre wants.”
“Maybe you should.” I am transfixed by his ghastly attempt at relaxation. His face is colorless now; it looks as though you could pluck gobbets off it, like clay. His personality, which I had thought as stolid and bull-like as his body, appears to be breaking up, shaking apart into its facets.
“Why did you let me come here at all?” I ask. “Why didn’t you write back to say that someone else was staying in the house? And why did you pretend to be friendly when I first came?”
He says nothing; he simply looks at me, dull and sullen anger expressed by every inch and angle of his body.
“I’m as innocent of the deaths of those girls as I was of the death of Alison Greening,” I say to him.
“Maybe that was the first warning you had,” Duane says. “I’m gonna be listening for the sound of that junker of yours, so you’d best sit tight until Hovre comes to get you.” Then a smile which appears almost genuine. “I’m gonna enjoy that.” His gray face breaks, alters, as a perception hits him. “By God, if I’d of had my shotgun here, I would have cut you in two.”
“Then Alison Greening would come for you tonight.”
“It don’t make any difference how crazy you pretend to be,” Duane says. “Not now it don’t.”
“No. Not now.”
When Duane left the farmhouse he said, “You know, my wife was as dumb as the others. That cow actually wanted it. She couldn’t even pretend she was better than that. She used to yammer about how dirty I got out in the fields, and I used to say the dirt on me is nothing compared to what’s in your mind. I just hoped she would give me a son.”
When dusk began to devour the landscape, I knew that I had approximately three hours to get where I had to go. I would have to walk. Duane would hear the car, and telephone Hovre. They did not belong where I was going. The alternative was to wait in the farmhouse and take every creak of the boards for the sign of her coming. No. If she were going to appear and spring the trap of our old vow, the Pohlson quarry, where it started, would be where it would end. I had to go back, alone, to where it had begun, to see it as it was on that night, without the Woodsman and Zack, to stand in darkness on those flat slabs of stone and breathe that air. I felt almost that if I stood on that spot again, I might go back to the beginning and reverse things: might find an echo of the living girl, and reclaim myself and her in that salvation. Duane and his furious repressions, Polar Bears and his schemes, were tiny in the light of this immense possibility. I forgot them both five minutes after Duane left the farmhouse. Starving Paul Kant had worked through the fields; so would I.