church are intermarrying with each other, and some of them, the girls especially, at a pretty early age. And to some pretty odd guys. You see a lot of eighteen-year-olds getting married to guys who are thirty or forty, and you wonder, how’d they get to know each other that well? When they are that young? Then Kelly gets murdered, and the Iowa police came around and asked if we knew who she dated, and we said, ‘No,’ because we didn’t. We had no idea she was dating anybody. But every once in a while, you’d see her riding around with some older guy, somebody old enough to be her father, somebody who’s already married. All members of the religion.”
“Do you think, uh, these young girls are being abused?” Virgil asked.
“Haven’t ever seen any proof—but I wouldn’t want my kids around them,” Brian Craig said, unknowingly echoing the verdict of the man who’d known that Bobby Tripp was gay.
“They meet on Sunday? I understand they meet in people’s barns and so on.”
“Yes. Not everybody’s barns, just a few of them. The Floods, the Bochers, the Steinfelds. The biggest barns, all sealed up, with some heat. They meet Wednesday nights, too. Sundays in the mornings, Wednesdays after dark. Sometimes they’ve got something going on Fridays.”
They talked about that for a while, and then Virgil moved on to the Tripp angle: “Had you ever seen Kelly Baker around with a boy who you thought might be gay?”
Craig frowned. “Don’t have many gays out here.”
“There must be some,” Virgil said. “There usually are.”
“I just wouldn’t know that,” Craig said.
“Do you know Peter Van Mann?”
“Sure, we know Pete,” Craig said. “He’s not gay. What’d he do?”
“I was told he’s another guy who might not care for the Bakers.”
“That’s true,” Judy Craig said. “He once had a German shepherd who bit Louise Baker pretty bad. He paid for the doctor and everything, but then the Bakers sued him for pain and suffering, and they won. He had to sell off some land to pay up.”
“She wasn’t disfigured or anything, was she? I didn’t notice anything,” Virgil said.
“No, not much of that. I think it was just pain and suffering,” Craig said. “They saw their chance, and they took it.”
Craig, on his way back to the barn, walked Virgil to his truck and said, “If you really need to find out what’s going on in that church, it’s gonna be tough. I don’t know anybody around here who really walked away from it. It’s all the same families, and they stick to it.”
VIRGIL WENT DOWN the road to the Van Mann place, and saw a lonely figure walking up a snow-packed drive, followed by a black Labrador retriever. Virgil turned in, and he and the man got to the farmyard at the same time. Virgil hopped out of his truck, introduced himself, and Van Mann said, “Come on in. Come on, Jack.”
They settled at the kitchen table, with Jack lying by Virgil’s feet, where he could smell Virgil’s pants.
Peter Van Mann was a widower farmer, a tall, thin bald man with gold-rimmed glasses and a way of looking at Virgil from the corner of his green eyes. From their chairs, they could look out through a bay window, at a tree with a tire swing. His kids had all gone out to California, Van Mann said, one after another, looking for jobs in computers. “They won’t be coming back, except to sell off the property when I croak,” he said.
“Gets dark here in the winter,” Virgil said.
“And quiet and cold,” Van Mann said. “I think it was the quiet that pushed them out. I’ve always liked it, the quiet and cold both.”
His wife, he said, had died of cancer, which he suspected was brought on by farm chemicals used when she was a girl, after World War II. “I can remember when the mosquito sprayers used to come, and blast everything with DDT. We’d walk around in a cloud of it, sometimes. Now I think we’re paying for it.”
He didn’t have much to say about the Bakers, except that their lawsuit against him had been a fraud. “The thing is, there’s a lot of asparagus that grows in the ditches, and Louise Baker was out cutting a mess of it. Old Pat, that was my dog back then, went after her. I don’t know why, he’d never bit anybody before. I suspect she threw a rock at him or hit him with a stick or something,