younger one said, “Helen.”
He followed them up four stairs into a kitchen and around a corner and through another door into a living room. One of the girls called ahead, “Mother, Mr. Flowers is here.”
Alma Flood was sitting on a couch in a book-lined living room, a reading lamp over her shoulder, a Bible on the arm of her chair. A man, older, big, farm-weathered with a white beard, a big red nose, and small black eyes, sat facing her on a recliner chair. A glassed-in bookcase, built under the stairs going up to the second floor, was full of what looked like fifty-year-old novels, the kind you’d find in a used-book store or an aging North Woods resort.
Alma Flood was square in the body, as the girls would be, with her hair pulled into a bun; she wore a dark brown dress. There was a resemblance between her and the older man, and Virgil thought he might be Alma Flood’s father. She said, “Mr. Flowers. You have news?”
“Maybe,” Virgil said, smiling. The man gestured at the second recliner in the group of furniture, and Virgil sat down. A comfortable chair, and the house looked prosperous; but no sign of a television set. Virgil said, “You know the sheriff arrested Bob Tripp for Mr. Flood’s murder. Bob Tripp was then killed in jail—”
“I thought he committed suicide,” the older man said.
Virgil said, in his polite voice, “I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Emmett Einstadt. I’m Alma’s father.”
“Okay. . . . An autopsy was done on Tripp, and the medical examiner believes that he was murdered.”
“That’s nonsense,” Einstadt snapped. “We were told by the sheriff herself that there was nobody there but Jim Crocker.”
Virgil nodded. “That’s correct. The autopsy turned up indications that Tripp may have been killed by Crocker.”
“Oh, no, that’s not possible. Jim Crocker is a righteous man,” Alma Flood said.
“When we went to talk to Deputy Crocker this afternoon, we found him dead at his house. He’d also been murdered.”
They were astonished. Not faking it at all, as far as Virgil could tell. Alma’s hands went to the sides of her head: “Jim Crocker is dead?”
“Somebody shot him,” Virgil said. “There are indications that it may have been a woman.”
VIRGIL GOT ALONG okay with animals—dogs, horses, chickens—but his relationships with them were nothing special. Cats were different. For some reason, which he didn’t entirely understand, cats liked him.
He’d come from a cat family, of course, and that might have had something to do with it. They’d supported numerous cats over the years, ranging from the conservative red tabby Luther to the radical black Savonarola, with a dozen in between, all named for religious figures by Virgil’s minister father. Now a cat walked into the Floods’ living room and sniffed at him, and Virgil reached out a hand.
Alma Flood and Einstadt exchanged exclamations about Crocker—“Can you believe that? How could that happen? What’s going on?”—and then Edna Flood said to Virgil, about the cat, “Don’t try to pet her. She’ll bite your fingers off.”
Virgil nodded and pulled his hand back, and he gave them a short summary of the findings at Crocker’s place, then asked, “Do you know any reason Jim Crocker would want to . . . take revenge on Tripp, because of what happened to Mr. Flood?”
“Well, they were friends all their lives,” Einstadt said. “If they weren’t hanging around here when they were kids, they were hanging around the Crocker place. Started rabbit hunting together when they were ten, when we gave them their first .22s.”
“So there might be something,” Virgil suggested.
“There might be, but I can’t see Jim killing because of that. He’d let the law take its course,” Einstadt said. “If justice didn’t get done, then he might . . . well, as a matter of fact, I doubt he’d do anything. He wasn’t that kind.”
The cat sniffed Virgil’s pant leg, then hopped up on the arm of the chair, sniffed his ear, and then crawled up on his shoulders and settled down behind his neck. He could hear her purring.
“That’s the darnedest thing I’ve seen in years,” Helen Flood said, as though she were forty.
Virgil reached back and scratched the cat under the ear, and asked, “Did any of you know, or did Mr. Flood know, a girl named Kelly Baker, who was killed a year or so ago down by Estherville? She came from down south of here, a few miles . . .”
Flood and Einstadt looked at each other, and then both shook