Page 50 of The River We Remember

“Did he ever come and visit you here?”

He watched her hands, folded on her lap, squeeze together. “Sometimes.”

“Did he ever come when your husband wasn’t here?”

He saw that she’d begun to breathe more rapidly. “Sometimes.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He was…” Her eyes searched the room, as if the ghost of Quinn might be hiding in a corner there. “I thought he was not a happy man.”

“Mrs. Bluestone, I have a very serious question to ask you, and I need you to tell me the truth. All right? Did James Quinn ever touch you?”

She didn’t answer. But Graff saw that the fingers of her clasped hands had gone nearly bloodless and her body rigid. Her gaze had left his face, and she stared at the floor.

“Would you look at me, Mrs. Bluestone?”

It took a moment, but her eyes slowly rose, and in them he saw fear.

“Did he ever touch you?”

She said in a firm voice, “I don’t want to talk about that man.”

The door opened at Graff’s back and he knew, even before Noah Bluestone spoke, that he’d gotten all he was going to get from the Japanese woman who was so clearly afraid.

A GOOD DEAL of the Prairie Blooms’ dinner conversation centered on Jimmy Quinn’s death and on Noah Bluestone, who, it was obvious, had become the talk of Jewel.

“As I understand it, one of Bluestone’s relations far back had been a homesteader,” Jack Harris said. He was the mayor of Jewel, had been for three terms, and things were looking pretty good for him being reelected in November. He and his wife, Abigail, had been part of the Prairie Blooms from the beginning. “Maybe a half-breed or something. When the Sioux Uprising occurred, he was warned by his Indian relatives and went off himself to warn some of the white settlers. He never came back. They found his body hanging from a tree. He’d been… Well, things had been done to him. It was never clear who killed him, white or Indian. Anyway, after the fighting ended and the Sioux were rounded up, his wife and kids were taken, too. Everyone was marched off under army escort to Fort Snelling and eventually to South Dakota. When they were finally allowed to return, years later, one of Jimmy Quinn’s ancestors had taken possession of the Bluestone land—good land, it was—and there wasn’t a thing those folks back then could do about it.”

“Hell, the Quinns started out in this county by stealing land, and they got rich through bootlegging,” Gordon Landis said.

“Bootlegging?” Abigail Harris said, looking to her husband for confirmation.

“Rumors, dear, just rumors.”

“The hell,” Landis said. “During Prohibition, Jimmy’s father supplied most of the booze for the illegal joints in this part of Minnesota. Used his money to buy up the property of his neighbors who couldn’t meet their mortgages. Jimmy didn’t bootleg, but he built his holdings off the poor bastards whose farms got foreclosed.”

“The Quinns have always recognized a good opportunity,” Mimi Fowler offered diplomatically.

“They’re thieves, you mean,” Landis said.

“Anyway,” Harris went on, “Bluestone’s people homesteaded that bit of property they’ve got now on the Alabaster. Not the best piece of land but one nobody else wanted. Never productive enough to sustain a family, so the Bluestones always did other work as well. Noah’s father worked for Jimmy Quinn. Noah, too. An ironic situation, working for the family that basically stole the land from you.”

“Noah Bluestone, he’s worked for Quinn all these years?” asked Abigail, who hadn’t grown up in Black Earth County.

“Not all these years,” her husband said. “Noah joined the Marines before the Second World War broke out and made a career of it. He was gone twenty years. In that time, his old man died. The Bluestone farmstead kind of fell to ruin. Then last year Noah turned up, married to a Japanese woman, and started farming again. He also went back to work for Jimmy Quinn. His wife, too. We were all a little amazed, but the Bluestones have always been folks who kept their distance and so were kind of hard to understand. Maybe it’s the Indian in them, I don’t know.”

“And then James Quinn ends up dead,” Mimi Fowler said. “If you wanted to make that book of yours a mystery, Sam, this seems to me a perfect setup for murder.”

Brody said, “I don’t want anybody using that word, Mimi. We’re still investigating.”

“Everyone I talk to thinks Bluestone killed him,” Landis said.

“Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, Gordy?” Charlie Bauer shot back.

The lawyer had been quite vocal during the discussion of the book but had been noticeably quiet in the conversation about Bluestone. Brody liked this woman, who was so different from most of the women he knew. He had seen her at work in the courtroom, valiantly defending the defenseless.

“Look, it’s just talk,” Harris said.