LEONARD AND JUNIOR were hard men in their forties, both farmers, dark hair, dark eyes, perpetual five o’clock shadows across the saturnine faces they’d inherited from their mother. They met at Emmett Einstadt’s house on the hill, climbing up the driveway past the line of bare apple trees, Concord grape arbors, and snow-covered garden flats.
Einstadt told them what he thought: that as desperate an act as it was, Spooner had to be eliminated. They listened wordlessly, then Leonard looked at Emmett, and at Junior, and asked, “What do you think?”
“Makes me sour just thinking about it, but Father’s right,” Junior said. “If they’re really testing for her DNA, I don’t know how long that takes, but it can’t be too long. So we’ll have to do it soon.”
All three of them had grown and butchered animals, so death was not an abstract concept to them. They could do it; the question was, How?
Einstadt said, “She’s always liked you, Leonard. You could send Mary and the kids on the way, tonight, get her there after they’re gone. Get it done, take her over to Junior’s, get her in the ground. Out in the woodlot, we’ve been in there working. It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow night. Once it snows—”
“Give me the creeps, knowing she’s there,” Junior said.
“You can live with it,” his father said, and Junior nodded.
“What about her car?” Leonard asked.
“Put it in Junior’s barn, stack hay around it. Soon as we’ve got a little space, the two of you put it on a trailer, drive it to Detroit, leave it in the street with the keys inside, drive back.”
“That’s a risk,” Leonard said.
“We’ve got to take some risks,” Einstadt said. “If Kathleen hadn’t killed Crocker . . .”
“But she’s right about Crocker. He might’ve talked.”
“If she’d come and talked to us, we could have handled that. She didn’t, and so now she’s got to pay,” Einstadt said.
“We all ought to sell out, go up to Alberta and start another colony up there,” Junior said.
“Maybe someday,” Einstadt said, “but we can’t right now. Right now, we’ve got to do something about Katheen. And I’ve been thinking: here’s how we do it, keeping in mind that gun of hers.”
THEY WORKED IT OUT in detail, right down to the rope they’d use, and then Leonard went to his home phone to call her, with the other two listening in on handsets in the living room and the upstairs bedroom. They called on her cell phone, and she answered on the second ring.
Leonard said, “We need to talk, seriously, Kathleen. The police are looking for Birdy. We know where she is—she’s down in Dallas—and somebody’s got to go down there and . . . settle her. We thought of you.”
After a silence, she said, “Where in Dallas?”
“Dad’s got the exact address, I don’t know it myself. But they’re going for her. What we want to do is, meet here at my place tonight, while the others are headed off to church, figure out exactly what we want to do, and then get it done. We need to set it up so you can get down there, do it, and get back before anybody notices. We’re thinking next weekend, so there’ll be two days. Junior will drive down with you. Go down in one shot, twelve hours straight through, trade driving, one of you sleeping in the back of the truck. Do the whole thing in twenty-six hours.”
“I’ll call you back in two minutes. I’m going to take a cigarette break outside,” she said.
The three of them looked at their phones until she called back, and when she did, she said, “Don’t ever think I’m as much as a dumbass as you Einstadts are,” she said. “The chances of my meeting with you, in your farmhouse, at night, are zero. You get me in there, wring my neck, and you’re just goddamn dumb enough to think that would solve your problems. But it wouldn’t, it’d just get you in deeper. This Flowers guy, from what I hear, is about to tear the ass off the World of Spirit. You got one chance, and I’m it. And I’m going to give you the chance. Are you listening to this, Emmett?”
Emmett, embarrassed, didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then, grudgingly, “Yeah.”
She said, “You come down to my house, you and Leonard. No guns, but I’ll have mine, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.