Dark of the Moon

a cooling sprinkle on the face and hands.
    “Keep coming…”
     
    A T THE TOP of the canyon, two hundred yards into the hillside, was a natural rock pool fifty or sixty feet across, fed from a spring that fell down the back wall of the canyon. A few small trees struggled to stay alive in the thin dirt, and cattails rimmed what must’ve been a muddier flat on the far side. “Cool,” Virgil said.
    “Called the Stryker Dell on the geological surveys,” she said. “Us kids used to come up here and swim. It’s good in the evenings, when the sun’s coming down the canyon. It’s a little gloomy in morning, and cold.”
    Virgil stepped down to the water, stuck his hand in. Cool, but not frigid, and he said so.
    “Because the water’s trickling down that rock in the sunshine,” Joan said. “This spring will go mostly dry in the fall, it’ll just be a stain on the rock. The pond never goes dry, because it’s too deep—twenty feet, right below our feet—but sometimes, no water runs out of it. There used to be a pipe up here, that’d feed the stock tank down below. Anyway, it’s why the farm was here: year-round water without much work, just by siphoning. If it wasn’t for this, my great-grandfather probably would have built out by the road.”
    Virgil took a picture of her standing on a rock on the edge of the pond, said, “Must’ve been a great place to come when you were a kid.”
    “It was; if only there’d been more people around, it would have been perfect.”
     
    T HEY SAT on the rock, in the sunshine, and Virgil showed her how the Nikon worked. A red-winged blackbird showed up and did some stunts on the cattails, and he took a couple of shots. They compared small-town childhoods, and chatted about college years, dope-smoking and rock ’n’ roll, the price of corn-ethanol, about their parents. “My mom lives one street over, and one block down from me,” she said. “By now, she knows about your trying to feel me up last night.”
    “Only teenagers get felt up,” Virgil said. “I was expressing a physical affection.”
    “Huh. Seemed like getting felt up,” she said.
    “I’d like to dedicate some time to do it right,” Virgil said. “But this Gleason case, Judd…”
    So they talked about the case, and he worked the conversation around: “So your mom and dad were good friends with Judd? You think your mom would know something that went on back then? There’s gotta be something. Who the hell is the man in the moon?”
    “Maybe if we took my mom over to see Betsy Carlson, she could find out,” Joan said.
    “We could do that,” Virgil said. “Think she’d go along?”
    “If they let you back in. They might not be too happy to see you, if you had Betsy all freaked out when you left.” She stood up and brushed off her seat and yawned. “We oughta get back before dark. I’ve got my payroll to put together for tomorrow.”
     
    H E LEFT HER at her house, in town, after spending another two minutes on her porch. She offered him a cup of coffee, but he had some online research to do, and she had her payroll. “Will you have time tomorrow night?” Virgil asked. “Maybe we could run up to Marshall, go to a place that has candles and wine.”
    “I’d like that.”
    “Call your mom,” Virgil said. “Ask if she could run over to Sioux Falls to see Betsy.”
    “Yeah.” She looked out at the coming night, the houses with big backyards, a kid’s voice not far away, laughing, and the first of the lightning bugs. “What a great night,” she said. “If it were July in Minnesota all the time, you’d have to put up fences to keep people out.”
     
    V IRGIL WROTE a little more fiction that night, and invented characters named Joan and Jim Stryker, and himself, whom he called Homer. Homer was terrifically good-looking, and certainly well hung, which might possibly come up later in the story. He smiled in the glow of the computer screen, thinking about it. Had to be funny, however he put it…
    He wrote,
    Homer felt as though he were being pointed at the Strykers. But if the Strykers had been involved in the murders, why would they call in Homer? They had to know about Homer’s clearance record on murders. If Jim Stryker remained in charge, he might take a risk of losing an election, but that was better than dong thirty years in Bayport max.
    The abortion thing was out there—and abortion would be a major matter for Feur, of course. Godless commie feminists with their coat