Dark of the Moon

Let Homer out: worked on a little fiction.
    Laura Stryker rolled away from Bill Judd, both covered with a sheen of sweat, gasping from the sex, and dropped her feet to the floor. No doubt about it: she was missing life with Mark. Nice guy, but not what she needed. “I’m going to tell him,” she said, pulling up her underpants.
    “Aw, don’t do that. You know that we’re not long for this. We’re just fooling around, honey.”
    “Doesn’t necessarily have everything to do with you, Bill. Has to do with me: and I’m telling him…”
    Try again.
    Mark Stryker, trembling with anger, rigid there in the kitchen, shaking: “I won’t put up with it. I put up with shit all of my life, and I won’t put up with this. I’ll tell the kids, I’ll tell your folks, I’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen. You’re not leaving me, you’re leaving Bluestem. You won’t be able to walk down the street…”
    “I wanted to be civilized…”
    “Civilized, kiss my ass,” Mark Stryker said, his voice rising, shrill. “This is the last time you’ll ever see the kids. I’m not letting some whore come around to the farm…”
    He turned and went outside, shouted back at her, “I knew what you were doing, whore. I knew…”
    Laura, the anger rising in her, with the fear, hadn’t thought about the kids; Mark was outside, looking up at the screen over the sink, still there, shouting. The gun was there, in the kitchen drawer, behind the towels, the clip in the next drawer, took only a second to slam the clip into the butt, jack a round into the chamber…the gun right there in her hand, hot, Mark in the yard…
    “I killed him…I’m freaking out here, I killed him in the yard.”
    “Jesus Christ, Laura…”
    “You fix this.” Not weeping, but out of control. “You tell them it’s suicide. I’m not going to lose the kids…”
    “Jesus Christ, Laura…”
    “You call Russ Gleason…you tell him…I know about his little abortion mill. You tell him that Mark committed suicide…”
    Virgil yawned and opened his eyes. Fiction. But a story was going there, beginning to feel like something—at least he was pulling the dead people together.
    And then he thought, what if this wasn’t about the men? What if it was about the wives? What if Gloria Schmidt and Anna Gleason had been in bed with Judd, and now somebody was killing them, and the shooting of their husbands, through the eyes, was symbolic of some kind of blindness, or a looking-away…
    What if Laura Stryker wasn’t the perpetrator, but was the next target?
     
    H E SAT in the morgue for two hours, altogether, typing notes into his laptop, thinking. Every few minutes, the outer door would rattle, he’d hear change go into the coin box, and the door would close again. Once, there’d been no change, and he’d been tempted to peek and see who it was, stealing a newspaper; but he stayed with the clips.
    When he was finished, he knew a lot more than when he’d started, but nothing that seemed to connect with the murders. Everybody in town may have known that Judd was sleeping with local women, and sometimes in a pile of them, but it never got into the newspaper.
    He took ten minutes to get the clips back in their envelopes, close down his computer. He walked back through the newspaper office, picked up the note on the floor, taped it back on the window, and went to his truck.
    Laura Stryker.
     
    H E CALLED J OAN: “Did you hear about Roman Schmidt?”
    “I did.” Her voice was hushed. “Virgil, this is god-awful. Completely aside from the fact that Jim is going to lose his job—it’s god-awful all on its own.”
    “Well, if we catch the guy, Jim could still pull out of it,” Virgil said.
    “Gotta be soon,” she said. “Do you have any ideas?”
    “We were talking about going to Sioux Falls with your mom. Think I could take her right now?”
    “I’ll call her. Do you want me to come?”
    He hesitated, then: “If you want.”
    “I’ll call her. I’ll get back to you in two minutes.”
     
    L AURA WAS happy to go. Virgil drove to Joan’s house, rang the doorbell, and she waved him inside: “I just got here, I was out at the farm,” she said. “I have to change into something that doesn’t smell like dirt. Maybe take a really fast shower. I told Mom we’d be there in twenty minutes.”
    “Happy to wash your back,” Virgil said.
    “I need that,” she said. “There’s always that one spot right in the middle, it’s been dirty for