Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [30]
“There were only twenty-eight kids in our graduating class.”
“Do the math, do the elimination process. Who busted Jeannie’s cherry?”
“Jesus, who are you?” said Karl, offended.
“You’d have to know who it was, small place like this.”
“You did your best to find out back then,” said Odd, boring another hole into Karl.
“Huh?” was all he could say.
“You were hurt and embarrassed and belittled and finally pretty pissed off, weren’t you?”
Karl started hiccuping again. “I was a kid in high school. Ever happen to you?”
“You should have quietly sat and waited for all of that to pass away, but you let your anger consume you.”
I didn’t want Odd to go off on his sitting-still riff again. “What did he do with all that anger, Odd?” I asked.
“Huh?” said Karl.
“He followed her.”
As I said, it was sixty-one, -two degrees, but sweat beaded out right there on Karl’s forehead. Me, the usual spots: my butt, my armpits, my cleavage.
“You followed her!” Odd said, a girlish indignation in his voice, I swear. “You spied on her. You asked all her friends. You tried to break into her locker and read her secret notebook.”
The way Odd held his breath in his sleep? That’s what Karl was doing now, interrupted only by his hiccups.
“You were outraged,” Odd laid into him. “Now you know it was yourself you were mad at, but back then you had to blame it all on her. You were so mad at her you could have killed her!”
The air exploded from Kart Gutshall. “But I didn’t! I didn’t!” He threw his half-full Coke bottle into the trees next to us. I never heard it break. “I didn’t kill her. I loved her. I love her to this day.”
“And you never found out who it was she gave herself to after you refused her.”
“No, I never did, and neither did anyone else, not anyone else who was willing to come forward. Go back to Spokane. Leave me alone.”
He walked in his sad gait back to his garage, in baggy coveralls, reaching back for his cap again and forcefully fitting it to his head.
“Thanks for the Cokes,” I yelled after him.
He stepped under the shadow of the big Suburban and buried his head in its undercarriage.
Odd and I got back into the car, I behind the wheel. We sat for a moment. I didn’t know where we would go next, but I knew where we must finally go eventually.
“You did know a bit about him,” I said.
“Not enough.”
“Here’s what I don’t get. Why can’t you just say it. Just say who did it. You know so much, why don’t you know that?”
“I have looked down the barrel of that shotgun. I have seen James’ head blown away, all over me…but I can’t see who’s holding the shotgun. If you asked me what kind of dancer he was, Karl, I could tell you. Lousy.”
I had to chuckle. We were watching Karl as we spoke. You could tell he was rattled, trying to get his head back into his mechanics.
“You were no angel, though, were you?” I said, suppressing another chuckle. “Little Miss Hot Pants, grabbin’ the boy’s johnson.”
He looked at me, rolled his eyes.
“What are we doing here, Quinn? Why’d the lieutenant pick us?”
“Shit detail, where’s Quinn and Gunderson?”
“For that matter, why even Spokane? I’ve lived there my whole life and hated it. Why didn’t I ever move somewhere else?”
“Hey, I married into it. Compared to Shenandoah, though, it’s the Ritz. I always knew I would leave that place. I had to go, just felt pulled away, to the west. Never thought I’d wind up so far away. Where we sit right now? I couldn’t be any farther away from home and still be in the continental U.S. You said barrel.”
“What?”
“You said you looked down the barrel of the shotgun. Odd?”
“I said that?”
“You said barrel. So it wasn’t a double-barrel?”
“No…it was a single barrel shotgun.”
“You can see that. Who do you see behind the shotgun?”
“Karl, maybe, I don’t know.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it.”
“I doubt it too,” he said.
“You gotta try to remember your secret lover.”
“Please, Quinn, don’t put it that way. I’m having a hard enough time here…can this possibly