tutor, and here was this woman, a refugee from the war.”
“My dad arranged it?”
“She was lonely by then.” His mind raced, remembering. “Pastor Schoenwald had gotten fixated on the idea that she was some kind of witch, and he spoke against her. People stopped going to her salon. So my brother would visit in the early afternoons, and they drank tea together, practiced in her home language.” He paused. “ ‘She’s seen things you can’t imagine,’ Wylie told me once. I guess you could say they grew close in more ways than one. Both our parents were dead by then, and I think he was lonely, too.”
“What happened?”
“When the affair was discovered, her shop was shut down for good. She went away. They both went away. We heard later that she was in some kind of institution. A mental breakdown. Her English wasn’t so good. She may not have even understood what was happening until too late. When she got out, she started writing Wylie letters again. I paid the phone bill and saw the long-distance charges to the Cities, nearly twice a week. I made my brother go and see Pastor Schoenwald, made him confess. For a time, the phone calls stopped, and I thought that was the end of it.”
“He never saw her before she got pregnant?”
He looked at her, for any sign of his brother in this woman. Wylie, small and dark and wiry. No, it wasn’t possible. “I know what you’re asking. I believe Stanley was your father. I feel sorry for him, despite everything that happened. He didn’t ask for any of it. She came here, you know, driving from the hospital just ahead of a storm. Blizzard predictions all over the radio, and she shows up in a DeSoto. Wylie went with her with only the clothes on his back. I grabbed hold of him, shook him. She was a married woman. But he shoved me aside.”
“It was you who called the sheriff.” Clara held herself, rocking in the chair.
“No. I didn’t know she had a baby with her in the car. I let them go. I didn’t expect to ever see them again. It might have been that your dad called him from the Cities, but Sheriff Steve has always had a sense when something’s wrong. They told me later that that Wylie died at the scene of the car accident. He never made it out. It wasn’t until the next day I heard all this, about her getting out of the car, coming on through the woods.”
“Were there coyotes back then? Some kind of wild dogs or wolves? It’s how I’ve always imagined it because of my father’s stories.”
His mind had often gone over the same territory. The woman found without any clothes on. Sheriff Will Gunderson, freshly graduated from the vo-tech, had been out there that night as well. “Wolves?” he said quietly. “If there were any wolves, they came in human form.”
Both of them startled when a rotary phone sitting on a small table rang. Grizz had finally bought a new phone a few days ago to replace the one he had destroyed. “Did anyone see you come here?” He couldn’t account for his paranoia. The ringing phone was a jarring sound, and at first he just let it go, wanting to finish his story. He had always suspected that something else had happened out there. The DeSoto had been found at the bottom of a ditch with minimal damage, a missing headlight, the windshield caved in. Sheriff Steve had hated Wylie for the headaches he caused. The story, the adulterous couple punished by Mother Nature, was too convenient for him to fully believe.
When the phone’s insistent ringing kept on, Grizz finally answered it.
“Mr. Fallon?” said a quaking voice at the other end. He heard the hesitation in the voice and what sounded like another voice in the background, whispering instructions. “We need your help. Please hurry. It’s Leah. She’s fallen into the hog pit.”
“You call the paramedics? The sheriff?”
The other end of the line had gone dead.
“What’s going on?” Clara asked when he hung up.
“That was Lee Gunderson. He said Leah fell into one of the holding ponds of their hog farm near as I could tell.”
“They can’t get her out?”
“It’s worse than you could imagine. The chemicals will suffocate you if you get too near. I have to get there, or she’ll drown. He must have called here because this is the closest farm.”