American Boy - Larry Watson [3]
2.
IN THE STATE THAT BOASTED OF HAVING ten thousand lakes, Willow Falls was near none of them. Located in the southwestern corner of Minnesota, our town was closer to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, than it was to Minneapolis. We were out on the prairie, the land flat or gently undulating, sparsely populated, and mostly plowed for farming. As for recreation, the grassland was good for upland game, and a few nearby potholes and sloughs attracted wild fowl and the men who hunted them, but we were not a region of cabins on the lake. We did have a river, of course, the Willow, on whose banks the town was built. But it slowed to a trickle in dry years—of which there were many—and its falls, which gave the town its name, were in fact little more than a series of steps the river took as it stumbled over rocks and boulders near the center of town.
And if neither river nor falls merited their names, the same was true of our forest. In that part of Minnesota, only by an occasional stand of cottonwood and bur oak was the prairie interrupted—and then buckthorn, juneberry, and golden currant bushes filled in some open spaces along the river. It was a combination of these that made up Frenchman’s Forest, and without historical incident—in the nineteenth century, a trapper apparently hid in the undergrowth in order to escape a Sioux war party—the area probably never would have been named.
Frenchman’s Forest was on the north edge of town, about a mile from the Dunbars’. We could have walked it, but since time was crucial Johnny drove his father’s black Chrysler Imperial. And once we entered the forest we had no trouble finding Lester Huston’s shack; we just followed the tracks made by other vehicles in the fresh snow.
Deputy Greiner and his search party were back at the site as well, ten men walking in slow, ever-widening circles, searching for any trace of a trail that would lead them to the victim. We climbed out of the Chrysler, but before we could get started, Tiny Goetz drove up in his old Chevy truck and loudly announced from the driver’s seat that footprints, and perhaps blood as well, had been found along the road on the other side of the woods. With that news, the group immediately redirected their search. But Johnny and I declined to join them. We’d already decided to focus on the terrain most familiar to us—the overgrown paths and twisting trails of Frenchman’s Forest.
Before the deputy and his men climbed into their cars, Johnny said, “Wait—shouldn’t you give us a description of the woman?”
Deputy Greiner, a lean, perpetually sour-faced man who wore the same greasy fedora no matter the season, replied caustically: “I’ll tell you what: if you come across a woman and she ain’t been shot—you got the wrong woman.”
Johnny thanked the deputy, but I knew that if Dr. Dunbar had been there, Greiner never would have spoken to him like that.
Also among the searchers was Ed Fields, my fifth-grade Sunday school teacher, and I asked him where the blood had been discovered. He pointed to a break in the woods near a fallen tree, and then he drove off with the deputy and the other men, their vehicles bumping along the snowy ruts of the unpaved road.
Even without Mr. Fields’s direction, Johnny and I could have found the blood simply by going to the spot where the snow was packed down. We stood where the searchers had, looking down at two or three smears, the blood’s crimson diluted in the snow. By then it was apparent that we wouldn’t be able to follow the Lindahl woman’s actual footsteps, because the other searchers had tracked up the snow completely.
Johnny and I entered Frenchman’s Forest slowly, looking not for footprints, but rather another red stain in the snow. In the woods there was less snow but more debris—fallen branches and leaves and undergrowth—and these made for slow going.
Not having discussed a strategy, we each began to search in our own way. Johnny moved rapidly through the woods, hopping over branches and zigzagging through the brush in an effort to cover