The room Fallon had
expected to find dark was filled with light and life.
Her husband stood busily before their kitchen stove.
He was not a tall man but he had a quiet, confident
manner she had found comforting.
He wore a loose
sweatshirt and jeans. Dappled sunlight played across
his shoulders and back. The morning smells of bacon
and coffee and toast filled the room.
She stepped past the
doorway. He turned toward her and smiled -- his face
a medley of tenderness, passion, and love
"I thought you were
gone," she said.
"I know."
"But these past
years? Those long, unbearable last months?"
"They’re behind
us," he said softly.
Fallon wondered how the
ordeal could be over. It still seemed so real to her.
She could remember its beginning to the day. Adam had
just come through their rear door. She had been
baking. The room smelled of chocolate chip cookies.
She had turned from the
sink at the sound of the door opening and she had
watched with a smile as Adam had removed his gloves,
coat, and muffler. Slowly, as he had quietly
unbundled himself, she had realized something was
vitally wrong and her smile had faded.
"What did he say
then?" she had asked wiping her wet hands on a
dishtowel.
"It isn’t good,
Fallon."
"What do you mean,
it’s not good?"
Adam had complained for
months of not feeling well. It had been nothing he
could quite put into precise words but was rather a
general feeling of malaise. She had finally convinced
him to go see a doctor. Something Adam disdained.
She had offered to go
with him. It was an offer he had instantly pushed
aside--a fact, at that moment, which Fallon deeply
resented. Had he allowed her to go with him, she
would not have been standing there waiting for news,
news he obviously did not want to give.
"It’s cancer. A
rare form. The prognosis is not good."
But Fallon abhorred death--an
aversion that had started when her father had died on
her twelfth birthday. Since then, she had routinely
railed against death. It was what had driven her into
her life-long profession.
"We’ll fight
it," she had told him.
But that was then. And
this was now. She heard a cardinal song through the
open kitchen window, felt the warmth of summer around
her, and Adam stood quietly before their stove. He
was the picture of health.
He moved to her. She
hesitated then stepped forward, too. He wrapped his
arms round her. They kissed. His mouth warm, his arms
as familiar to her as the sound of her own heart beat.
"I’ve missed
you so much." She rested her head against his
broad shoulder, drawing strength from the press of
his body against hers.
Chapter
1
Fallon Magare forced her
eyes open. Beside her the telephone shrieked. She
wished its ringing would cease. She longed to return
to her dream.
In the days to come, she
would occasionally regret not giving in to that
instinct. But duty was duty. When the phone rang, a
sheriff answered the call. So she eased her arms from
beneath the covers, heaved onto an elbow, and grabbed
the receiver with her free hand.
"Sheriff Magare,"
she mumbled into the mouthpiece.
"Ah, Fallon," a
deep voice rumbled. "I’m sorry to call at
this hour, but we need you. We’ve got a dead
body. An obvious homicide."
"Where?"
"Out on County Road 650
East. Matty Williams’ place. I’ll explain
later."
"I’ll be right
there," Fallon ran a hand through her matted
hair, "twenty minutes max."
She signed off, replaced the
receiver, and lay quietly a moment, giving her
startled mind a chance to focus. Her eyes studied the
blank ceiling. The room she woke to was dark. Lined
drapes banned all but a faint suggestion of sunlight
from the room.
Beyond the windows, the heat
of late August droned on. Even at that early hour,
late-summer Midwestern humidity bore down on corn
fields and bean fields surrounding the town. In town,
air conditioners hummed with abandon.
The sheriff sat up and
pushed herself off from her bed. She rushed through
her morning ritual, slapping cold water onto her
face, and running a brush through her short hair.
Her uniform with its brown
shirt and matching skirt was draped over the back of
a chair in her bedroom. Underwear and socks were
stacked on the chair seat. Heavy brown, sensible
shoes sat to the front of the chair. Fallon Magare
was prepared to begin a day quickly.
Alone in the darkened
bedroom the silence of the house pressed against her.
Normally at this hour, she would have turned on the
television. The radio in the kitchen. Anything to
submerge the silence of living alone. As she donned
her uniform, she struggled to shake off the feeling
of loneliness -- the lingering sense of abandonment.
Finally dressed, she grabbed car keys from the
bedroom dresser and fled her silent home.
*****
The drive to Matty Williams’
field took Fallon less than ten minutes. Windtree
County was of medium size geographically. Nestled on
the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, it
encompassed about six hundred square miles, contained
six towns, and had a population of little more than
twenty-five thousand.
Matty Williams' farm sat
near the northeast corner of the county about as far
from the river as one could get. The land there was
flat, rich, and fertile. It was good farm ground,
which had for generations provided its owners with
comfortable incomes.
Turning left off County Road
650 East, Fallon eased her Jeep through an open gate
and into a harvested oat field. She switched off the
ignition, stepped down from the Wrangler, and walked
slowly toward the far edge of the field.
Four men from the Illinois
State Police were already at work there. They were
members of the state’s tech squad. They handled
crime scene investigations for small counties that
could not afford their own experts. Bob Jeswalt was
the unit’s lead investigator.
"Hi Fallon,"
Jeswalt said looking up when she reached his side.
"Sorry to have called you so early."
Jeswalt was a large man with dark brown eyes, square
jaw, and cleft chin. In his mid-forties, he had the
body of a weight lifter gone soft with age.
It had been an early morning
for both of them. Normally fastidious in his
appearance, Fallon saw on his chin stray wisps of
whiskers highlighted in the bright sunlight. They had
apparently been missed in his rush to respond to an
early morning phone call.
"Hello, Bob."
Fallon answered. In her early forties with a short
round body, but also with wide-set and intelligent-looking
gray eyes, she was one of only a hand-full of women
to serve as a sheriff. In Windtree County, she was
the first ever.
She knew all eyes in the
county and even beyond it would be centered on her
actions over the next few days or weeks.
"So do we know who
we've got here?" she asked.
Jeswalt rose from beside the
bloated corpse.
"It’s Olny Parkman.
The corpse has been out here so long, I almost wouldn’t
have known him if he hadn’t been wearing that
damn belt buckle. Always claimed it was his good luck
charm." He gave a swift shake of his head.
Magare glanced at the buckle.
It was large and made of silver and decorated with
turquoise and red-onyx stones--an odd talisman to
serve as an identity marker in death.
The body lay on its right
side. A thick cord bound its hands and feet. A short
strip of duct tape sealed its mouth. Blood had spilt
from a gaping throat wound and had dried in a puddle
to the right of the body.
Spikes of dried oat stubble
protruded from within the crusted brown blood. The
few broken oat straws surrounding the body suggested
the elderly man had not fought hard when death came.
© M. E. Fuller. All rights
reserved.
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