Rough Country

perimeter, and Wendy went to work. She was good with the shovel, cutting down a foot at a time, over the whole perimeter, dumped the dirt to the side, out of the garden, the black-and-tan soil piling up as she went deeper and deeper. At two feet, Virgil could see her crying, and stepped up next to the Bobcat and called, over the engine beat, “You okay?”
    “Somebody’s been digging here, deep. The soil’s all cut up. Get back . . .”
    Sanders showed up with another deputy, and Virgil walked over. The sheriff got out of the car, gawked at Wendy in the Bobcat, and asked, “What the hell’s going on?”
    “I think Hector Avila and Maria Ashbach are down there.”
    “What? ”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL EXPLAINED and Sanders said, “You can’t be having her dig them up. Get her out of there. What the hell . . .”
    But they were down three feet, and as Sanders was speaking, there was a shriek of metal. Wendy lifted the shovel and backed off, and one of the deputies jumped down into the hole, dug around with a spade, then stood up and looked at Virgil and asked, “What color was the Blazer?”
    “Blue,” Virgil said.
    “We got blue,” the deputy said.
     
     
     
    WENDY WAS IN CONTROL now, her face tight, cold. After a short argument with Sanders, she moved back up to the hole and removed two inches of dirt, and then another inch, and then began to hit metal along the whole length of the hole.
    She backed off, and the deputies climbed down into the hole with a long-handled shovel and a spade.
    Wendy wandered away, through the picket fence around her father’s house, and sat on the porch, her feet on the porch step. Virgil and Berni sat on either side of her.
    “Dad used to whip her ass. I remember it. I remember her fighting him and crying. He used to cry after he did it—but he said he had to, because she’d screwed something up. I thought that was . . . the way men acted. Most of the time, everything seemed all right. . . .”
    “We got a letter from Mom. Dad showed it to me, he read it to me. All about she was going to have a new life, and it was better if we didn’t get involved. She said good-bye. I remember Dad telling the Deuce that she wasn’t coming back, and the Deuce starting to cry because he didn’t understand where Mom went. It was like she was dead or something. . . . And then Dad told me a couple of years later that they were getting a divorce, and then they had gotten one, and I told all my friends. . . .”
    “And I told my mom,” Berni said. “And the way things are here . . . everybody knew they’d gotten a divorce, and what happened.”
    “He was building a story,” Virgil said.
    They sat and watched the deputies dig, and then Virgil asked Wendy, “Why’d you lie to me about that lipstick card? The kiss mark you made for McDill?”
    She said nothing for a moment, then turned her face toward him: “I don’t know. I was scared of you. I was going to deny everything. . . . I don’t know. It was stupid.”
    Across the drive, in the hole, one of the deputies knelt, and started working with his hands. Virgil got up and said, “Wait here.”
    “Bullshit,” Wendy said.
     
     
     
    THE DEPUTIES HAD CLEARED off a roof, and in another few minutes, had cleaned off a foot-long patch of windshield. Sanders got a flashlight from his car and handed it down, and the deputy, on his knees, shined it through the glass, pressed his face closer, moved the light, then stood up and looked at Wendy and then at Virgil.
    “Got some clothing.”
    “Some clothing,” Sanders said.
    “Got some clothing and . . . some bones and hair.”
     
     
     
    WENDY SAT DOWN, suddenly, in the raw dirt, then flopped backward, her irises rolling out of sight.
    “She’s fainted, or something,” Virgil said, holding her head up. “We better get, uh, what do . . .” He’d never dealt with a woman who’d fainted.
    Berni came to hold her head and shouted at Sanders, “Get her to a hospital, get—”
    Then Wendy stirred and Virgil said, “Don’t move. You fainted, is all, just stay like that.”
    But Wendy rolled to her hands and knees and looked in the hole. “All these years,” she said. “All these years, I thought she’d come back someday. Or I thought I’d be famous, and I’d have a show in Arizona, and she’d come up and talk to me. . . . I still have that dream. All these years . . .”

26
    SANDERS WALKED OVER, a radio in his hand, and said, “They’re there—and he’s gone. The