Beast of the Field (22 page)

30.

The Methodist Home for the Feeble Minded and Wayward Girls of Kansas sat like a bulldog next to the lithe and high-reaching First Methodist Church of Fredonia.  Both buildings were of brown and gray bricks, but one of the two had these bricks comprising a six-foot high wall that closed in its courtyard.  Lightless windows on the upper floors completed the building's feel of a prison.

The only light on in the building was in the receiving room, where a woman no younger than ninety with the skin of an onion strewn with black veins stared up at Sterno in amazement.  "You want to see her now, you said?  At this time of night?"

He flattened his lips in way of a response, as though these were the facts and there was nothing he—or more importantly she—could do to change them.  The old lady was slow to buy it.  Although she couldn’t see his ripped pant leg and scraped ankle, she could see his jaw, which Mrs. Donnan had done well to clean up but not hide away.  After blinking at him roughly ten times without stopping, the lady pushed herself up from a desk, limped away from the lamplight into the darkness of a corridor.

Sterno was back at the window, looking out at his partner, who like it or not, Sterno had ordered to stay outside.  Not.  She sat with her legs hanging out the passenger’s side door, her black cowboy boots dangling, arms over her chest, glaring at him.  Sterno had had to do it.  He did not know what kind of shape this Greentree girl would likely be in—she might have gone feeble after all—and it was best to keep his partner outside.

Footsteps in the corridor brought him back to the desk.  The old woman returned.  With her, however, was not Flora Greentree, but a woman with loud shoes, a square build, high round shoulders like Jim Thorpe and an unfair share of facial hair on the sides of her jaw.  Her name was Mrs. Biertzer.

"Are you a police man?" Mrs. Biertzer asked after bringing her bulk to a military-style stop.

"I am," he said.  He showed her his identification.

"A Pinkerton," she said, holding it up to her spectacles.  "What is it you want with Miss Greentree?  At this time of night."

"Her mother is ill, terminally ill, I'm afraid.  I’m a friend of the mayor's—Mayor Greentree, that is—and I help the family out from time to time.  They asked me to come and give Miss Greentree the news.  I won't be but a minute."

“Terminally ill,” she said.  The woman looked over Sterno's face, his swollen jaw, his clothes, raised an eyebrow at him.  At last she handed him back his wallet.  The two old women exchanged looks.  The Biertzer woman then turned on her feet, marched back the way she had come.

Sterno sat until he heard them coming back down the corridor.

The swollen belly came out of the shadows a full second before the rest of the nightgown.  She held it with both hands, shuffled along the floor with her shoulders thrown back behind her, for it was nearly a third the size of her frame.  For a handful of seconds Sterno watched her walking, his heart beating against his ribs.  It was not like seeing into a dream this time; it was like seeing into the past, directly into a long lost place and time, to Elizabeth, using her own two hands to hold up the living load beneath her nightgown.

Flora’s hair was in a sleeping cap, but this only brought more attention to the sad blue eyes Sterno had till now only seen in pictures.  She then removed the cap to let her sun-gold hair fall over her shoulder. 

Sterno could not tear his eyes from her.  He held out his hand in greeting, albeit a trembling hand.  He smiled at her in the friendliest way he could muster through the bruises on his face.  "Miss Greentree.  My name is Charlie Sterno.  I'm a friend of your father's."  He had said this for the sake of the old ladies.  The girl, however, pulled her hand back from him to cradle it in her other hand. 

"I'm a friend of Tommy's too," Sterno added.  He gave her a look as he said this that erased the comment about her father.  She caught on right away.

"Hi," she said.  Her voice was like white down.  So was her hand shake. 

"Can we have a little privacy?" he asked the women.  He didn't expect to be able to talk straight with these women standing over the girl's shoulder.  "It's a private issue."

The women allowed them to sit in two chairs by the front windows.  Sterno helped the girl down into the chair.  She was visibly relieved to be off her feet.

"You're holding up okay?"

She smiled through her discomfort.  "I'm holding up," she said.

"My wife didn't fare
too well either," Sterno heard himself say.  He was trying to reach out to the girl, but had never expected these words to leave his lips.

"You have children
then."

"No," he
said.  "They didn’t make it—"  He stopped himself from saying what they didn't make it through.  What his wife and baby didn't make it through was the last thing this girl needed to hear just weeks or days away from her own battle.

Flora Greentree apologized with a shy smile.  This soon faded as Sterno took on a businesslike tone with her.

"I'm here about Tommy Donnan," he said.  "I'm a detective with the Pinkerton Agency.  Braun and Marnie Donnan hired me to find out what happened to Tommy."

She listened with a face that looked worried, but was actually a face intent on listening.  "He was murdered," she breathed.  This was a stating of a fact she already knew, not a question.

"Yes, I believe he was," said Sterno.  "And I think you know who is responsible."

It took some strength to compose herself for her answer—she had the strength.  "Yes," she said.

"If you can help me, Miss Greentree--"

"Don't call me that, please.  Call me Flora."

"If you can help me," Sterno went on, "with the events of that night, May the first, then I can build a concrete case, can face your father with formal charges.  Right now, as you may understand, there is little I can do in Price without having to deal with him and the sheriff.  It’s not safe for me there right now," he continued.  "For that matter, neither is it safe for Tommy's family.  I’m trying to get what I need tonight, so I can bring charges in the morning.  The quicker, the better, for everyone's safety.  But I need your help.  You must understand, if you speak to me, you will be likely be called on to testify in court."

Her head jerked up on his mentioning of Tommy’s family.  As she had waited for him to finish the rest, a hundred possibilities seemed to run across her mind.  "Is Millie okay?  Tell me Millie is okay…?" 

Her eyes found something over his shoulder as she said this.  Sterno didn’t need to turn to know what it was she saw.  Who it was. 

“Well well well,” the girl said with no mirth.  “You got a bun in the oven, Miss Flora
.”

“Young lady!” said Jim Thorpe from the front desk.  Flora smiled, however, and a smile began to find its way onto Millie’s face too.  Millie got directly to her knees in front of her.  Her hands went straight to the belly.  Flora soothed down Millie’s hair, a natural gesture, easy to her.

“A big ol’ bun in the oven, Miss Flora!” Millie said.  She was smiling too, a dumbfounded smile.  It was dawning on her quickly who was the father of this baby, and what that made this baby to Millie. 

"As you can see,” Sterno went on, “she is holding up okay.  However, she knows a lot, a lot more than your father would care—"

"I no longer consider him my father.  Not anymore.  I could never love a man who has done the things that man has done."

Sterno slowed down.  He took a breath.  His jaw hurt him, all the way to the top of his head.  She watched him work his hands over the swelling areas of his face while she ran her hands over her own swelling area. 
As if awakening from a daydream, Millie finally let go of the belly, came to stand behind Sterno. 

"
What happened to your jaw?" Flora asked.  “It’s a little difficult to understand you.”

He gave her the straight answer:  the mayor’s back yard, the sheriff's right hook.

"Yes, well, Sheriff Jake can be a little rough.  But Mr. Sterno—Mr. Sterno, right?—the sheriff had nothing to do with what happened to Tommy.  He wasn’t there that night, with them.  He was trying to help me find him."

Sterno had not been expecting this.  He didn't believe it, either.  Not yet.

"It seemed that way, anyway."  Her gaze traveled away to the months before.  "It's hard to recall now.  I have trouble remembering."

Sterno gathered himself, adjusted himself to this new twist,
went forward with care.  "Try to focus on that night of the tornado," he suggested.

"Yes," she said, still floating away.  "Yes.  We had a plan to leave Price, you know."

"I do know.  I've read your letters."

She drew in a short breath, sat straight in the armchair.  "You have?  How did you get our letters?  Do you have them here?"

“They’re safe,” said Millie.

“We should have thought of that.  I will see that you get them."

The tears trapped behind her face were gaining strength.  Her voice was losing it.  "We loved each other so much, Mr. Sterno.  So much..."

"Tell me about that night, Flora."

She dipped her head, swallowed down the emotion.  By and by, a spell fell over her.  She was remembering it, feeling it again, putting herself there on that night.  Exactly what he needed from her.  Eventually her eyes lost focus altogether.  Her words barely made it past her lips.  Her sentences were islands, small and round and set apart from one another.

"Our plan was to leave that night.  Run away, west.  We were to be married.  I never told Tommy about the baby—I knew it would make him crazy.  He would want to leave right away.  I was just beginning to show, but I didn’t tell anyone at all, in fact, not till that day.  I knew Daddy would not stand for it.  He never liked Tommy anyway.  He hated the Irish, and Italians—he thought all Catholics were immigrants and all immigrants were un-American.  But never mind being Irish and Catholic.  Never mind what Tommy and I had together.  He just didn't like Tommy, never had.  When I told him about the baby...my God, he was so angry.  I have never
seen my father like that.  He was like, he was like a monster.  He was almost black in the face he was so mad.  It was strange, him being so angry, over a grandchild of all things."

"So you told him that day." 

She nodded her head, remembering.  "I told him just before we were to leave.  I hadn't been planning to tell him at all.  I never should have said anything."

"What happened
then."

"Daddy had Gomer Neuwald—do you know the Neuwalds?—guarding the house, right outside the house all day.  Daddy just left."

"Where."

"He went to find Tommy, Mr. Sterno.  He said, that day, he told me outright he would kill Tommy before he would let us marry.  The baby made something inside him unravel.  I watched it happen right in front of me."

She thought about the next bit before proceeding.

"Still, I never stopped believing we were going to leave that night.  The plan was for him to come to the house to get me; but we had never said what time.  It all depended on what was going on around us that day.  It was impossible, Mr. Sterno, impossible.  You see, the Donnans have no telephone—I couldn’t call him.  He couldn’t call me.  Our letters and our love were all we had.  We each set out to look for the other and we both got lost in the storm."

The desperation, the hopelessness, the folly of it all—so apparent to Sterno—now seemed to be landing on her, too.

"So…" she sighed.  "So I was all packed, I was ready to go.  I was sure Tommy would come to the house for me.  With Daddy on this rampage like he was, I was getting scared.  My senses were fogged.  I had not even made a plan.  All that time sitting around, waiting, and I
hadn't thought about how…I didn’t think.  I panicked.  I decided I wasn’t going to wait, even if Tommy was.  The thing is, I swear I saw him—Tommy—on the road, but it was raining so hard, I couldn’t tell.  I couldn’t stop.  Or maybe I dreamt it, I can't even remember.  I don't want to remember, Mr. Sterno."

The words were tumbling out now.  The memories were resurfacing, despite her wants.

"Jove Moreland—that's Daddy's driver—took me to the woods in his car.  He was the one who muscled Gomer out of the picture—all to help me.  Oh, Mr. Sterno, there was a tornado coming.  There was such a bad thunderstorm...so much lightning and thunder—oh, and the wind was terrible.  It was all so scary, and so confusing.  Mr. Sterno…we were so close...I swear I saw him then.  Right there on the highroad north of Daddy’s—of my home."

Her voice cracked.  Her strength faltered.  He needed her strong, so he kept at her angry side.  "Keep going, Flora.  If I am going to finish this, I need to know what happened at the barn, and at the cabin.  I want to know how those men killed Tommy."

"I don't know, I don't know," she said, the tears beginning to break through.  "I left his letters I had there at the cabin.  I waited there as long as I could.  I told Jove to leave me; he didn’t want to but I made him.  I wanted to wait for him.  I did not want to leave without him.  I wanted to die there waiting for him, before I would leave there without him…but the storm…Jove wouldn’t leave me there.  His daddy is a preacher in New Bremen, and he has a strong sense of right and wrong.  He saved my life more than once that day.  He came and took me from the cabin, took me to the barn.  Oh Millie, I am so sorry, Millie.”