Dark of the Moon

examined the front of Virgil’s truck, realized that it didn’t belong to anybody in town, and so ambled off to the side, keeping an eye out for trouble.
    The Laymons’ house was on the left side of the main street, a white-clapboard story-and-a-half with a brooding dark roof and a brick chimney at one end, a narrow front porch with a white-painted railing. Orange earthenware pots of geraniums sat on the railing, and hollyhocks grew next to the steps. A huge cottonwood stood in back, towering over two smaller apple trees.
    A side yard was occupied by a vegetable garden, neatly laid out, tilled and weeded. The sweet-corn leaves were showing brown edges, the corn silk brown, the ears ready to eat. Four rows of potato plants marched along at eighteen-inch intervals, and cucumber and squash vines sprawled around the corn. The whole thing was edged with marigolds, which, Virgil thought, were intended to ward off some kind of rootworm.
    In any case, his parents still did the same thing: grew an annual vegetable garden, and edged it with marigolds.
    Virgil parked and got out and the white dog barked at him, but only once, and then tentatively wagged his tail. Virgil grinned at him: a watchdog, but not an armed-response dog. At the house, a blond woman came out on the porch. She was dressed for an office in black slacks and a white blouse. She said, “You’re Mr. Flowers.”
     
    M OTHER AND DAUGHTER didn’t look much alike. Margaret, the woman who’d met him on the porch, was in her mid-fifties, Virgil thought, and dressed from Target or Penney’s, standard office wear. She was about five-six, a bit too heavy, and busty, with short, heavily frosted hair, plastic-rimmed glasses, and the lined face of a woman who’d been long out in the wind. She’d been pretty; still was, for her age.
    Her daughter was almost her opposite: long dark hair, eyes that were almost black, slender, with high cheekbones and a square chin. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a plain white T-shirt. She had pierced ears, and was wearing silver crescent-moon earrings. She was waiting in the living room, standing next to an old upright piano. An electric guitar was propped next to it, with a practice amp; the window ledges were lined with pots of African violets.
    Virgil stood in the living room for a moment, blinking in the dim light, and Jesse asked, “Ooo. Do you like to rock ’n’ roll?”
    “I do,” he said. He recognized her. She’d been at Bill Judd Sr.’s house, the night of the fire. She’d had a beer can in her hand.
    Jesse, to her mother: “He looks like a surfer dude, doesn’t he?”
    “He’s a police officer,” her mother said dryly. “You probably should remember that.”
    “Police officers gotta fuck,” Jesse said, flopping back on a worn couch, smiling up at him. “If they didn’t, where’d we get all those goobers who go to monster truck rallies?”
    “Jesse!” her mother said.
    “Thank you,” Virgil said. Jesse teased her mother with the f-word, and her mother pretended to be shocked, but wasn’t; it looked like an old mother-daughter game. “If I ever have any little goobers, I’ll name one of them Jesse.”
    She laughed, and said, “Want a Pepsi?”
    “No thanks, I just want to chat,” Virgil said.
    “Might as well. The newspaper just called, and every single soul from Fairmont to Sioux Falls will know about it tomorrow morning…”
     
    H ER MOTHER had been at work when the Judd mansion burned down, and had no idea where she’d been when the Gleasons were killed. Jesse had been on her way to a bar in Bluestem, and saw the fire on the ridge, and trucks pulling out of the bar’s parking lot, heading up the hill.
    “That good enough?” Jesse asked.
    “If you hadn’t been to the bar, where’d you get that beer? The one you had at the parking lot?”
    She tipped her head toward the kitchen: “Out of the refrigerator.”
    “So you just went up to the fire to look at it?”
    “Of course,” she said. “What do you think? You ever lived in a small town?”
    “I have, and I know what you mean,” he said.
     
    “T HESE PEOPLE who got killed, the Gleasons and Judd. They were the same age, and friendly, at least,” Virgil said, turning to Margaret. “I’m wondering if there’s something way back that’s only coming out now. Something that really pissed somebody off, thirty or forty years ago, and winds up in these murders.”
    Jesse looked at her mother, and Margaret shrugged.