Bad Blood

are down at the far south end of the county, so we didn’t see them every day,” Spooner said. “I really don’t know. I mean, I guess . . . they say, the word is, she was sexually active. I was surprised, but I wasn’t really close enough to her to have any . . . instinct . . . about that. Maybe she was working in town, maybe she got loose somehow. I don’t know.”
    “Were you homeschooled?”
    “Oh, yes,” she said. “Reading, writing, arithmetic, German. Every year, for thirteen years, five days a week.”
    “Is that part of the, uh, religion?”
    “That’s one of the main parts—to keep the kids away from the influences in schools,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve really got to go.”
    Virgil asked, “Jim—was he violent with you?”
    She shook her head: “No. Jim was boring. That’s why I left. He’d get up, eat eggs, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sit on the couch and drink beer, go to bed. Every day. I couldn’t see living my whole life like that. This idea that he could have killed the Tripp boy . . . I mean, that’s very strange. I couldn’t believe it.”
    “Do you know if he was dating anyone?”
    “I don’t know. Really. I haven’t seen him in years. . . . All I know is history.” She looked at her watch again and said, “Now I’ve got two minutes to walk two blocks.”
    “Come on,” Virgil said, “I’ll give you a ride. Where do you work?”
    “At the CVS. I’m the assistant manager, I take care of the non-pharmacy items.”
    On the way down the hall, zipping their parkas, he said, “I’m interested in the relationship between Jacob Flood and the Bakers. Flood and Baker both being murdered. Were they close?”
    “Everybody in the church is fairly close—that’s mostly eighty or a hundred families, I guess. But I don’t know that the Floods were any closer to the Bakers than anybody else—they’re at the other end of the county from each other.”
    Virgil said, “I chatted with Emmett Einstadt about Jacob Flood, and their relationships with the Bakers, Kelly Baker. He seemed to have about the same feeling as you did—close, but not every day. He was pretty upset about Kelly, you know, in a German way. If you know what I mean. . . . My mother is pure German.”
    She smiled. “I do know,” she said. “Emmett never shows much, but because there aren’t so many church members, compared to the big churches, when somebody dies, you feel it. He gave a nice talk at her funeral.”
    Virgil nodded and said, “That’s good. That’s good.” They were outside, and he pointed her at the truck, and they climbed inside.
    “How long has the church been around? Is this a longtime thing, or did you all get converted?”
    “Been around since the families came over from the Old Country,” Spooner said. “My great-grandfather was in it.”
    “Most people marry into the church?”
    “Oh, yeah. Because we know each other all our lives, and we have all these background things—don’t go to regular schools, so we don’t have any regular school friends. I always thought I might marry an outsider, if I fell in love, but when it came time to get married, I wound up with Jim. Somebody I’d known all my life.”
    They pulled into the pharmacy, and Virgil said, “I might come back and talk to you again. I’m puzzled about Jim’s part in all of this. Why he might kill somebody like Tripp, and why he’d be so quickly killed in return.”
    “I don’t have the faintest idea,” she said. “But if the Tripp boy knew both Kelly and Jacob, and you know he killed one of them . . .”
    “But then why did Jim kill him?”
    “That’s the mystery,” she said. “The only thing I can think of, is that he went a little crazy if the boy told him about killing Jake. Maybe he made a joke out of it, or something. Jim and Jake grew up together—they used to hunt and trap together, when they were kids, wander around the countryside. That’s all I can think of.”
    “But then who’d kill Jim? And why?”
    She shrugged. “Don’t know. Have you investigated the Tripps?”
    “Well, we think the killer was a woman.”
    “Oh. Well, it wasn’t me,” she said. “Mrs. Tripp is a woman. . . .”
    “You’re right. You’re right. I’ll think about that,” Virgil said. He put out his hand and they shook, and she popped the door and climbed out, wiggled her fingers at him as she went through the door.
    Virgil sat staring at the door for a minute, running it all