Bad Blood

winter,” Virgil said.
    “And quiet and cold,” Van Mann said. “I think it was the quiet that pushed them out. I’ve always liked it, the quiet and cold both.”
    His wife, he said, had died of cancer, which he suspected was brought on by farm chemicals used when she was a girl, after World War II. “I can remember when the mosquito sprayers used to come, and blast everything with DDT. We’d walk around in a cloud of it, sometimes. Now I think we’re paying for it.”
    He didn’t have much to say about the Bakers, except that their lawsuit against him had been a fraud. “The thing is, there’s a lot of asparagus that grows in the ditches, and Louise Baker was out cutting a mess of it. Old Pat, that was my dog back then, went after her. I don’t know why, he’d never bit anybody before. I suspect she threw a rock at him or hit him with a stick or something, though she says he just came at her. Anyway, she got bit, no doubt about that. Mabel Gentry, she was the rural route carrier out here then—this was years ago, maybe twenty years now, all the kids were still here—carried her down to her house, and then her old man took her to the doc. I paid for that, a couple hundred bucks, she had stitches and pills and so on. Then they sued. This was back when farming times was pretty bad. When they won, I had to sell forty acres to pay them off. Land prices was nowhere at the time. That same land is worth five or six times as much now. Pains me every time I see somebody on it.”
    “So why was it a fraud?”
    “Well, it wasn’t exactly, but you know what I mean,” Van Mann said. “Things happen when you’re farming. She was bit, and it hurt, but it was nothing anybody else would have thought was serious. No farmers, anyway. And sure as hell not fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”
    “No insurance?”
    “Let it slip—the liability. Like I said, things were really tough back then,” Van Mann said. “This was back before gasohol.”
    They talked about bad times for a couple of minutes, and Van Mann said that he didn’t know much about the church, but that his father had said that it was “bad business” and wouldn’t talk about it. “They keep to themselves, and always have. They’re very tight. Don’t socialize with their neighbors, don’t get involved in politics, never run for anything.”
    “Is there a sex thing going on in the church?”
    Van Mann leaned back and crossed his legs, a defensive move, but then said, “The thought has occurred to me. But I don’t have any direct information.”
    “You ever know anybody to take off? Leave the church?”
    Van Mann’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it, and he said, “There was some talk about a woman who ran away to somewhere. Her name was Birdy, that’s what I remember about it. Must have been ten or twelve years ago. Birdy Olms. I can’t remember what the situation was, or even how I know about it, but it seems to me that she was going to a doc, and left the office, and when her husband came to pick her up, she was gone. They went looking for her, and it turns out she’d gotten on a bus and that was it.”
    “Never came back?”
    “Not that I know of. She was an outsider. From up north, somewhere. I don’t know where Roland Olms picked her up. “
    “Birdy Olms.”
    “Yup.”
    Virgil asked the gay question, and Van Mann shook his head. “The thing about those people is that they’re standoffish. If Kelly Baker knew a gay boy, he was probably a member of the church. Or maybe a relative.”
    “She worked at a Dairy Queen in the summer.”
    “Yeah, you see some of them working around,” Van Mann said. “I think maybe the Bakers needed the money. For somebody who’s been doing it as long as he has, Baker is one horseshit farmer.”
     
     
    BY THE TIME Virgil left Van Mann’s place, it was dark. He tried calling the newspaper again, and was told that Sullivan had already filed his copy from Mankato, and might be heading north to the Cities to spend the night.
    He called Coakley as he turned onto I-90 and said, “Holiday Inn, twenty minutes?”
    “The restaurant. See you there.”
    He thought about that as he drove into the gathering darkness: they could have met at the restaurant, or they could have met in his room. He’d known and carefully observed a reasonably large number of women in his life, and the choice of the restaurant was significant, he thought, and in a good way.
     
     
    COAKLEY WAS BACK in civilian clothes,