The Heirloom Murders - Kathleen Ernst [87]
“Yeah. We’ve got all the classic signs of abuse. After Bonnie married Sabatola she withdrew from friends and quit a job she loved. Sabatola gets drunk at a blue-collar bar every week. He’s somehow involved with the woman who owns it. They go way back.”
“An affair?”
“Maybe. And maybe that’s why Sabatola wanted me off his tail, and tried to scare me by running me off the road. His wife just committed suicide, and if it came out that Sabatola was involved with another woman … or a man … well, it wouldn’t look good. Especially right now, when he’s desperate to get board approval to take the big corner office at AgriFutures.”
Sordid stuff, Chloe thought. “I hate to think that Dellyn is spending time with Simon.”
“Can you warn her to stay away from him?”
“What would I say? We can’t prove anything. Simon’s all the family she’s got left, and he’s been making nice lately.”
They drove in silence for a few more minutes, passing pastures of placid Holsteins, fields of corn and soybeans, weathered old houses and barns crouched beneath huge blue silos, women weeding gardens. It all seems so peaceful, Chloe thought. So at odds with the events circling in her head. “Where are we?”
“I grew up near here.” Roelke flipped on his turn signal.
A few moments later he pulled over and turned off the engine. “This is it. The old Roelke place.”
“Wow.”
“My mother was born here. My grandparents farmed it. It didn’t go out of the family until my grandfather died. I spent a lot of time here when I was a kid. Milked a lot of cows.”
Chloe stared at the abandoned brick farmhouse. It was tired but had, as one of her professors used to say, good bones. From the distance of the truck cab, she received no particular perception from the building; from the layers of Roelke’s ancestors still dusting worn floorboards and walls. Much more palpable was Roelke’s sense of ambivalence about the place.
“I don’t know who owns it now,” he added. “Nobody lives here. They just rent out the fields, I think.”
“Oh,” Chloe said. A song sparrow landed on a bobbing teasel plant, then flew away. They sat for a few minutes longer, watching the farm doze like an old cat in the sun.
“I gotta ask you something,” Roelke said.
Something in his tone made her wary.
“I want you to tell me what it feels like to be depressed. I mean—you know. Really depressed.”
Chloe’s shoulders hunched. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it. I’m better now. I don’t want to go back to that place.”
“I’m sorry to ask. Really. But—”
She turned on him. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I need to understand what took Bonnie to that place. That place where she felt compelled to put a gun to her own throat. You’re the only person I know who might be able to tell me.”
“Is this about Bonnie Sabatola?” Chloe slid down on the seat and propped her feet on the dashboard, finding some comfort in the semi-fetal position. “Or is it about me?”
He was silent for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he said, “Both, I guess. I keep thinking that if I can find a reason why Bonnie killed herself, then …”
“Sometimes there’s a concrete reason, but sometimes it just comes from inside. A chemical imbalance.” Chloe sighed. “Look, if you want to find some conclusion that will convince you that I’ll never get depressed again … well, that’s not going to happen.”
“But to reach a place where you would want to—”
“Why are you assuming Bonnie wanted to kill herself ? Maybe she’d been fighting that urge for weeks. Maybe she just woke up one day and was so tired, so damn weary, that she knew she simply couldn’t keep going. Maybe the grayness had seeped into every corner of her life.” Chloe realized that her voice was rising, and tried to bring it down to normal range. “And maybe she didn’t have a best friend to call.”
“I just …” Roelke avoided her gaze. “I know I’ve lost perspective. There’s something about the Sabatola stuff that—that just eats at me. I need to figure it out before it does cost me my job. All I know is that women … Dammit, men