Dark of the Moon

started to tap-dance. “You hear things, over the years…What I’m telling you, could be all wrong…”
    “Just tell me, Gerald,” Virgil said. “I’ll sort it out.”
    “The story was, something happened between this woman and Judd. The other people were out in the yard with a telescope, seeing if they could see the men on the moon. There wasn’t any chance, of course, but they had this telescope and they were way up on the ridge and they were drunk…”
    “Gerald: the pregnant woman.”
    Johnstone nodded. “So late at night, they’re out there, and they see a car that looks like it’s come off the driveway. It’s going down the hill, away from the party, sort of aimed down this crease in the hillside, and people are going crazy, yelling, they think the woman in it is drunk and lost, and they run down that way…
    “And damned if she doesn’t drive the car right off Buffalo Jump,” he said.
    “The bluff.”
    “Right below Judd’s house. Supposedly, Indians used to stampede buffalo right off the cliff. So this car goes over the side and people are running around yelling and screaming. Judd comes running out of the house, and then he and a couple of guys jump in a car and they go tearing down the driveway and around to the bottom of the jump…
    “And in the meantime, one of the other girls said, ‘She’s gotta be hurt bad,’ so they called the fire department and the fire boys got a rescue truck headed out that way.”
    “She was killed,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, but not right then. She was what we call brain-dead now—she had head injuries, and neck injuries, but her heart was still going when Judd and the other guys pulled her out of the car. Then the fire boys got there and they hauled her over to the hospital. She died in the emergency room, but the doctor…”
    “Gleason,” Virgil said.
    Johnstone stared at his daughter for a long time—ten seconds, fifteen—and then he sighed and said, “Yeah. Russell Gleason. Russ delivered the baby. Tough delivery, but the baby lived. There was a story in the paper, called it the ‘Miracle Baby.’”
    “So why would somebody kill Gleason for delivering the baby?” Virgil asked. “If he was there at the emergency room, he couldn’t have been at the party, he had nothing to do with the woman.”
    “That I can’t tell you,” Johnstone said. “I can tell you a rumor, and I can tell you a thought that passed through my mind.”
    Virgil flicked his fingers at Johnstone, a “gimme” gesture.
    Johnstone said, “There was a rumor that the woman hadn’t been there for the party. Hadn’t been invited. That she came down on her own from the Cities, in her own car, and that she’d been there before the party, and had had a fight with Bill. Bill could be rough as a cob.
    “Nobody knows what happened, but there were rumors that he wasn’t right there with everybody else when they saw the car rolling down the hill. He came running out of the house a minute or so later. The question was…Where was he when the car came off the driveway? Once it came off the driveway, going down that seam in the hill, it was going to go over the bluff. Was the woman committing suicide? Why didn’t she turn, or put on the brakes?”
    “Or was she dead unconscious when she went in the car?” Virgil asked. “Did somebody else steer it off the driveway?”
    Johnstone’s head bobbed: “It could have been done. Could have rolled the car down to the seam, let it go, run back over the shoulder of the hill—this was at night, remember—then up and into the house, and then out the front…”
    “Was there any suggestion of that at the time?” Virgil asked.
    Johnstone shook his head. “No.”
    “Was there an investigation?”
    Quick nod.
    “Roman Schmidt,” Virgil said.
    “Yup.”
    “Jerry, you really messed this up,” Virgil said, lying back in the rocker and letting it rock a few times. “God help you if anybody else gets killed in the next couple of days, before I can figure this out.” He rocked a few more times, and then remembered: “You said a thought passed through your mind.”
    “Yeah.” Johnstone reached up with both hands and scratched his head above his ears, and then said, “I didn’t want to tell you all of this, because I really don’t know anything. But. I remember when I saw that girl’s body, on the dressing table, all bashed up in the accident, cut up in the hospital…How’d she get those bruises? Some of the bruises were