Page 35 of The River We Remember

He turned and found Garnet smiling pleasantly at all the men.

“Hello, Connie. Noah,” she said.

“Ma’am,” Bluestone said.

Graff tipped his Stetson. “Afternoon, Garnet.”

“Mission accomplished,” the woman said brightly to Brody. “Shall we go?”

“I need to stay. I’ll get a ride back with Connie. You understand,” he said.

“Of course.” She smiled as if she understood perfectly, but Brody saw the frosty look in her eyes. “Gentlemen.” She turned and left.

“Anything else, Sheriff?” Bluestone said. “I’ve got a tractor here that’s not running right. And there’s lots of other chores to be done now that Jimmy’s not around to help.”

“Why did you work for him?” Graff asked. “You and your wife both, if you didn’t like anything about him?”

Bluestone took a red rag from where it hung out the back pocket of his jeans and wiped grease off his hands. “I was in the Marines for more than twenty years. I worked for a lot of men I didn’t particularly like. In my experience, liking is usually at the bottom of the list of why folks do what they do.”

“Let me ask it another way,” Graff said. “You’ve got a good pension coming from the service. You have a nice little place out there the other side of the Alabaster. Why work for Quinn at all?”

“I have my reasons,” Bluestone said. Which meant it was a question he would not answer. At least not at the moment and not in this way.

“Does it ever gall you?” Graff went on. “Working the land that should be yours but Quinn had the deed to?”

This was a question that came from an understanding of the long, difficult history that existed between the whites of Black Earth County and those in whom the blood of the Sioux ran. It was, at its heart, about an old war and wounds that had never really healed.

Bluestone blinked twice, then replied, “My father worked for Jimmy Quinn and I did, too, before I became a Marine. I never liked the man. Sometimes I even wanted to kill him. But it was never about the land.”

Brody stared into the dark eyes, trying to read what little of the man they revealed. All the while, the stink of the cattle pen below rose up and enveloped them.

“One last thing,” Graff said. “The Quinns asked you back, but not your wife. Any reason they didn’t want her?”

“It was me. I didn’t want her back here,” Bluestone said. “I need her at home. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

“Thanks for your time, Noah,” Brody finally said. “We’ll let you get back to that tractor. Come on, Connie.”

“WHAT THE HELL were you doing at Quinn’s?” Brody said.

They sat in Graff’s truck, paused at the junction of the highway and the lane that led to Quinn’s place. The sun was in their faces, and Graff lowered the visor to shade his eyes. He rested his wrists over the top of the steering wheel and considered Fordham Ridge in the distance, and then the course of the Alabaster, which ran behind a field on the other side of the road, a field that, like much of what they could see, belonged to James Patrick Quinn. Or had.

“I stopped by Bluestones’,” Graff replied. “One of the farms in the area I had to check. Pretty near Inkpaduta Bend.”

“No, you’ve figured it was murder from the beginning and from the beginning you pegged Bluestone for it,” Brody said. “You and everybody else in this town, it seems. Gordy Landis was in this morning, threatening to string up Bluestone.”

Graff shrugged. “Bluestone has a legitimate grudge. And I’m not talking just about this recent thing with Quinn. Goes way back. We both know it. Everyone in this county knows it.”

A big rig rolled by on the highway, heading toward Spirit Lake or Lake Okoboji in Iowa. Graff waited until it had passed and the wind in its wake had died.

“Bluestone killed men in a couple of wars,” he said. “I’m thinking killing one more wouldn’t be much of a stretch.”

“You kill anybody when you fought in the First World War, Connie?”

Graff didn’t respond immediately. It was a question Brody had never asked him, and the kind Graff, for his part, had never asked of Brody.

“Because I did,” Brody said. “And I’ll tell you, when I walked away from the service, I was sick to death of killing.”

“Yet here you are, son, in a job that might require you someday to draw a bead on a man. You telling me you couldn’t do that if the time came? Because if I’d thought that when I hired you, I’d never have given you a badge.”