Rough Country

that, so that’s what he did with his wife and son. His wife took off one day, and nobody’s heard from her since, but Slibe was pretty hosed. His kid, Junior, is another one to keep your eye on. He might not be violent, but he’s not right.”
    “How about Wendy? Did Slibe abuse her?”
    She said, “You know, I don’t think so. Wendy is the apple of his eye. Probably the only apple his eye has ever had. Except maybe for his wife.”
    “Does everybody around here know about the boys going up to the Eagle Nest?”
    “I don’t know if everybody does,” she said, “but I suppose quite a few people do. The word leaks around.”
    “The sheriff didn’t tell me anything about it.”
    “Well . . . nobody’s going to tell the sheriff. He’s really straight,” Signy said. “He’d probably think he had to do something about it.”
    “And you don’t think so.”
    She shrugged. “Hey. It’s a little goddamn squirt in the dark. People having a good time, nobody gets hurt. So why would you care?”
    “I know most people don’t think about young guys this way, but if they were under eighteen, there could be some legal issues with older women. Statutory rape, child abuse . . .”
    She said, “I don’t believe the boys would be thinking that way.”
    “A lot of female hookers think they’re in the entertainment industry—you know, like movie stars,” Virgil said. “But they’re not.”
     
     
     
    SIGNY GOT ON HER CELL PHONE , pushed a speed-dial button, identified herself, and asked about the pizza, said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh. When do you think, then?” When she hung up, she said, “Jim’s on the way. Probably ought to get back.”
    He trailed her back up to the cabin, and she flopped on the couch and he arranged himself cross-legged on the carpet and asked, “Hear anything more from Joe?”
    She laughed and said, “Yes! Today.” She jumped up, went out to the kitchen, and came back in a moment with an envelope and took out a picture, laughing as she did it. The picture showed two men, one of them Joe, looking down at a furry black lump; it took Virgil a moment to recognize it as a dead black bear. “He was sleeping in his car and a bear tried to get in with him,” Signy said. “This was at a campground by Fairbanks, and he started yelling and the bear started running around knocking everything over and somebody came out and shot it.”
    Virgil shook his head, feeling bad for the bear, and gave the photo back to her. “I’ve been to Fairbanks. I was told that in the winter, it’s the coldest place on earth.”
    “Well, Joe hasn’t been there for a winter, yet,” she said. “He’s thinking of going to Anchorage and getting a job on a fishing boat.”
     
     
     
    A PAIR OF HEADLIGHTS swept the house and she said, “Pizza,” and went and got it. They ate it in the living room, sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth from her arm. Virgil asked her about Grand Rapids, and the schools, and her friends, and the Eagle Nest, and the Wild Goose, and Wendy and Berni and Zoe.
    About halfway through the pizza, when Virgil was thinking about declining the next piece, she said, “Actually, I have a piece of information for you—I thought of it one second ago. I don’t know if it’ll mean anything to you, or not. Because, I don’t know . . .”
    “I accept all information,” Virgil said.
    She said, “Erica McDill wasn’t the first lesbian who was murdered after messing around with Wendy’s band. Or who stayed at the Eagle Nest.”
    Virgil forgot about the pizza. “What?”

10
    SIGNY ONLY HAD BITS and pieces of the story. A woman whose name was Constance Stifry, Lifry, Snifry, something like that, had two years earlier come up to the Eagle Nest on vacation from Iowa—Iowa City, Sioux City, Forest City, Mason City—“Something-City, I can’t remember which, but it was definitely Iowa.”
    “I can find it,” Virgil said.
    Signy added, “I think somebody said she’d been here before, but I’m not sure about that.”
    Wendy’s band was playing the area, Signy said, and did a one-week stand at the Wild Goose, but was not yet the house band. Constance whatever-her-name-was was an older woman, but knew a lot about country music. She was also friends with a guy who ran a major country-western nightclub, one of the circuit clubs where the about-to-be-big acts often played, and she suggested that Wendy might want to talk to the guy.
    When she went back to Iowa, she did, in