—
PROLOGUE
1954
—

dancing in the dark

Five o’clock and the tavern empty. Mary Hogan scanned the gravel lot and down the deserted ribbon of county trunk D. No out-of-state plates. No suspicious faces. Just the whisk of trees against a moon gray and ghostly in a sieve of stars. A spectacle not seen in Cicero where smoke from monstrous factories smudged the sky at night. The brothel on Cermak had stunk of booze and sweat when the shifts changed at the Hawthorne Works. Windows opened from stale rooms onto brick alleys.

One day her past would catch up. The crime outfits spread their tendrils. Joey O held influence in the big cities and smaller ones like Joliet and Madison, as far east as Boston and west beyond Denver. She hoped she was safe holed up in this dot on the map. No newspaper, no school, one church and hers the only tavern. She’d left behind her leopard cowls and cloche caps, divvied up the more flamboyant of her costume jewelry with the girls, her soiled doves. Let her eyebrows grow out natural. Despite the money she’d skimmed from Joey and the outfit, her life in Pine Grove was as small and inconspicuous as she could make it.

Look around, Mary Hogan. Ten rickety tables with mismatched chairs, pop cooler broken for a month, peanut machine neglected. Two narrow windows faced the road, her apartment slapped on at the back like a cement dollhouse. Colored bulbs strung around the ceiling pipe and a two-dollar tree by the wood stove were all the yule she could muster. Nothing like the corner Santas ringing bells outside Goldblatt’s on State Street. She’d been out of circulation for five years. Was it worth it?

Mary rang a No Sale on the cash register to spring open the coin drawer. Figured the tavern could spare a few nickels. There were only two Hank Williams songs on the Select-O-Matic jukebox and she punched them both. Dropped ten cents in the slot.

In Chicago she’d listen to Edith Piaf on the phonograph in her furnished room alone. The little sparrow wore black to mourn the tragedy of existence. Her songs expressed the sophisticated sorrow of dark cafes and fated rendezvous, of women with eyebrows plucked and drawn.

Hank pleaded, “Why do you run and hide from life—”

Mr. Williams sang more crudely of lost love and broken hearts in a sharp, nasal moan stripped of guile or romance. A voice rubbed raw by pain. But Mary felt as if she didn’t have a heart to break, that she was trapped so completely inside an airless vacuum like the television tubes offered in this year’s Sears catalog. The constant vigilance wore her out.

She poured a cup of warmed-over coffee. Lowered her ample bottom to a chair facing the windows. A slow leak whistled from the cushion as her two-hundred pounds settled in for the landing. Sweet mother of Jesus, it felt good to shift the load off her feet.

When the door opened, she set her coffee down.

She recognized him. The scrawny farmer. He’d been in the tavern this afternoon with another fellow. Nursed his beer for an hour. Rubbernecking was more like it. She knew the look, knew her size could provoke desire.

He stood uncertain in the entrance, gawping at the empty room. The cold gray night behind him. “Close your mouth and shut the door,” she said.

Funny she hadn’t heard a truck pull in the gravel lot, nor been warned by headlights through the windows. “Where’s your truck?”

“Oh, I parked around the side. Had to rotate the distributor. Rough idle.”

Should she tell him the tavern was closed? Come back after supper? He was barely half her weight, she could handle him if it came to that. Well, she’d made bad decisions before. “I saw you earlier. What does the missus think of you spending so much time at the tavern?”

She could hear the scrape of his hand against his chin. “Ma didn’t favor drink.”

“What about your other missus?”

The farmer stepped into the room. One step, at least. Tentative. Pulled the hunting cap off his head and held it with both hands across his chest like an accordion he might squeeze. “Isn’t one.”

She remembered now. The gossip was he lived alone, odd since most men came to her tavern to escape their wives and burdens. After four beers, one man was the same as any other. She looked him up and down. Patted the table. “Don’t stand on ceremony. Sweep it on over, Jack Sprat.”

“It’s Eddie,” he said as if she should know.

Hank’s tinny voice sliced across the tavern. Eddie pointed his cap at the jukebox. “We heard little Jimmie Rodgers once, brother Henry and me. Came through Oshkosh. He could yodel with the best of them.”

He stomped his boots and set his black wool jacket over the chair back. A skinny fellow.

“What’s your pleasure, Eddie? I don’t do my serious drinking until later.”

“Not much for high jinks myself.” He grinned like a fool boy scout.

“If you’re not here to drink, why are you here?”

His silence was enough of an answer. His simplicity refreshing. His heavy eyelid, a swollen deformation of the flesh, made him seem sleepy and unbalanced. Like Robert Mitchum if the actor were stranded on an island, or on a starvation diet, and didn’t shave. And older. And a foot shorter. But there was something there. Eddie didn’t seem half so bad—gentle and quiet, a plain slice of store bread. She’d had her fill of men who pushed, men who thought they owned the rights to a woman.

Hank’s second song dropped in the jukebox. Twangy guitar filled the empty tavern. The colored lights and the scrimpy tinsel on the Christmas tree suddenly saddened her. Sad, sad little Mary Hogan. Didn’t want to spend the night alone. Eddie lived alone, she could see it in his face. Or she projected a pain there, a shared wisdom. Of course he was shy. No one to talk to on his lonely farm, nothing to see but the four lonely walls.

Hank’s voice rose above the guitar, “Another boy down the lost highway—”

Her life had been guided by a series of leaps. A quarter century ago, she’d made a leap. Left her child at the doorstep of St. Mary of Czestochowa, the gangster’s church. The nuns would look after Christine. Life had turned mean and selfish after the crash, the favors of men cruel payments. There was no room for a child. A business decision, she told herself. An act of decency.

“You much for dancing?” she said.

She wasn’t sure what she expected. Wasn’t sure if this was business or a desperate leap, but she knew it was best to keep moving. The past lay behind her like a dark pit.

Eddie didn’t say no. He looked around the empty tavern. “Ma didn’t take to festivities.”

“Then you’ve missed out, Eddie. Is your Ma here now?” She pulled his hand, soft for a farmer, with callouses on the tips like her own mother from sewing. Eddie looked around the tavern again, as if to confirm his mother wasn’t watching.

“Don’t be a wallflower. I’ll lead.” She had danced by herself in her apartment listening to La Vie En Rose.

She pulled him up. He was barely a twig, and a stiff brittle one. The twenty by thirty foot tavern made a tolerable dance floor—tables ringed the walls leaving the center clear. Eddie shuffled in his farmer boots. He kept an arm’s distance. He was no Arthur Murray, but his hands lay on her shoulder and waist as they should. She absorbed the heat pulsing from them. His head barely higher than hers. Then his arm bent and he stepped closer.

His fingers touched her neck. There was something tentative and spidery that made her want to recoil. She backed away, pretending they were taking a turn. Human warmth trailed in his wake as she led him around the tavern. He played the woman’s role and followed.

Mary reflected on the stink of the human body, men more sour than women. The fuggy aroma of her whores on Rush Street in Cicero. The farmers here smelled of manure, but it was a fresh grass-fed odor. Eddie was more sweet, the stink of the unwashed, not the residue of hard work. Her girls had earned their perfume, but there was a sense of laziness to Eddie’s smell. The men who worked the meat saw at the locker plant had it also, a trace of things unattended and left to rot. A hint of decay.

She scuttled with him like two crabs across the dim floor. Artificial light made all rooms alike, a cold dark root cellar world. The sound of leather scraping the linoleum. Eddie looked as though he struggled to speak. Mary put a finger to his lips. She preferred the silence. She lay her head on his shoulder. Her hand slid down to rest on his hip. Or maybe she wandered lower.

Eddie startled then and pushed her away. A sliver of light from the bar lamp by the register cut across his face. A look in his eyes of befuddlement. Confusion. Mary was used to men ambushed by the urgency of their desire. She was big. Men could sink into her warmth, her weight, her soft dipping flesh.

“Anything in particular, Eddie?”

She couldn’t see his face properly. The music went on but Eddie stood frozen, his arms dangling at his sides. Maybe she’d been wrong about the look in his eyes.

“I saw you earlier,” she said, “window shopping. I don’t mind.”

He showed the signs of interest, looking hungrily at her waist and what was down there. “What size dress do you wear?”

“That’s a strange question. Big enough to do the job.” She wore her white belt-cinched blouse with bakelite buttons. “You don’t like it?”

He blinked like he was fighting to keep his thoughts on track. Reached out to tangle his finger in her hair. “Ma wore hers up tight. Shorter than yours but same color. Let it down at night, draped on her pillow. When she was sick it hung like a veil over her shoulders. The sweat glued to her skin.”

If Mary didn’t know better, she’d say he was drunk. Eddie was stuffed with odds and ends like that closet on the radio program, when Fibber McGee opened it everything came tumbling out in a crash.

“It’s do or die,” she said.

He sniffed the air, lifting his nose to catch a phantom scent. Looked about the tavern as if he were trapped. Pulled his hunting cap folded from his back pocket and brushed past her to his jacket. “Got to go,” he mumbled, apologetic.

And like that, the tavern was empty. She wasn’t sure whether she felt shock or relief. A little bit of anger. Eddie wasted her time. The two songs on the jukebox left the tavern more silent than before. She switched on the overhead bulb, its wire mesh globe casting vague shadows across the floor like a net tumbling down to entangle her.

She settled into her chair, hearing again a wisp of air leak from the cushion. Her coffee was cold. The headlines in the local paper described a world as distant as ever. Senator McCarthy fighting with Eisenhower. A plane downed in the Pacific, all those lives lost. The stories seemed as foreign as dispatches from Korea. She flipped to the familiar safety of the crossword, her refuge from men. In a minute her hand stopped shaking.

It took another minute, two minutes, to realize she hadn’t heard him leave. No engine, no truck. No headlights.

As the significance of the thought formed in her head, the front door to the tavern flapped open. A dry snow already falling, flecked white by the moon. The cold night air sucked into her lungs.

There was something wrong with him, she saw it right away. Had she missed it before? The tilt to his head. Dogs did that, hearing a voice on the breeze or a sound too high for human ears. His head cocked left, as if the growth over his eye weighted him down.

The overhead light exposed blank, unfocused eyes in his slack face, his stubble glistening. He bent slightly forward. His clothes wet and filthy, like he’d been rolling on the ground. A bulge in his trousers, but not the tent of desire she might have expected. The bulge went all around his waist as if he were wearing a child’s diaper underneath his clothes. She could see it, the lip of it peeking over his belt, stiff and gray and skin-like. And a crisp scraping sound, a crackling when he moved, like dry leaves. He stepped toward her. She had noticed the odor before. It was stronger now.

His left hand hidden behind his back. Was he holding flowers?

“Too late to apologize, Eddie. I’ve changed my mind. We’re closed.”

But it wasn’t flowers. The pipsqueak held a small metal pipe in his hand, what looked like a ridiculous dull gray children’s toy. He lifted his arm.

The hole in the barrel of the gun was black like a doll’s eye.

It blinked white.

—
PART ONE
welcome to plainfield
—

1 | soft skin

Once we collected three weeks of urine, we were ready.

We siphoned the urine into a wooden trough, deep enough to dip the skin. Six hours to soften, an hour to scud the hair. There was more hair than you would think.

We wanted it soft and hairless.

Pa had been a miserable drunkard. The gusher that surged from his cock eroded the soil in deep runnels outside our shed. A primitive, animal piss with a smell like vinegar and rennet. Our own thin stream wouldn’t brown the grass.

Pa could fill the metal washtub in a week. His one success. He showed us how to soften the skin that way—cheaper than lye, no preparation, and nothing wasted. A philosophy of which Ma approved. She approved of nothing else about him.

The skin was in the summer kitchen. We stored it there after dressing out the body. Soaking in the trough, soft enough to prod with a stick. One good poke made it billow like a woman’s dress against the breeze. We laid the skin still wet on a beam and used the dull side of a knife, scraping at the hair and stubborn tissue.

It was beautiful skin, translucent and nearly white. We wished it could stay that way, like fine curtains when the sun came through. But once we coated it with brain, it would darken.

One swing to the nose, that’s how Pa split a skull. He’d worked as a tanner in La Crosse for a month before he drank himself out of the job. Every animal carried brain enough to tan its own skin, he taught us.

But that was pig, hung from the ceiling of the shed behind our store. We were eight. Ma elbow deep in its belly, the wet of blood on her apron soaked to the swell of her breasts. At her feet the entrails. Pa sat on a bench scooping gray meat.

This morning we’d gone to Norris Digger’s farm. For a nickel, he saved the brain when a calf went down. His farm only four miles away.

We wrapped the brain in an old sock and mashed it with rain water in a barrel. Lowered the skin so it would soak overnight. We set the lid on top just in time before we heard Don Foster’s old pickup slowing down and churning gears off the county road.

Coming louder toward us.

2 | out of state

There was nothing Wise could do about the Illinois plates.

His Nash drew enough attention already. At this rate he would never blend in. He could lose his fedora for a plaid cap and gum-sole boots, it wouldn’t help. His face too long in the dark canyons of Chicago, like some pale creature prodded from its cave by Marlin Perkins.

Wise didn’t intend to spend more than a week in this palookaville anyway. Just long enough to find out what happened to Mary Hogan and recover the money, although he doubted there would be any left after all this time. Nuts to that, he got paid either way.

First step was to find a diner. Turned out to be the only one in town, next to a Phillips 66 and across from Worden’s Hardware on the main stem. Downtown Plainfield snuck up on him, a few blocks tossed along Highway 73 like spare change before the horizon emptied out again. He U-turned when he realized that’s all there was. Parked the Nash by the gas pumps, a fresh crust of snow crunching beneath the whitewalls.

The diner was his best chance to ask questions. Besides, he couldn’t go wrong with a grilled cheese and coffee. The waitress who served him looked like she had a few questions of her own. Maybe they could trade notes.

The women he knew in Chicago smiled for a living. Long hours gave them a predatory, unnatural look. This waitress wore the kind of bleak face he expected to find in a small town, but it fell away when she smiled. Easy and natural, with plenty of tooth.

She smiled at him now. “You must be a hunter. Deer season opens in two days, the town goes a little crazy. I saw you drive through.”

He noticed the fresh scaffold to string deer at the filling station across the street. “I’m not hunting deer,” he said.

Another question waited on her lips, but she held it when two customers pulled up stools at the counter. She joked with easy familiarity, filled their cups with coffee, and made a show of glancing over while he watched her.

The front windows looked out onto North Street, another name he’d heard for the highway along this patch of dirt. An unmarked car he recognized as a standard police model slowed when it passed.

A minute later it circled back to park behind his Nash, blocking him in.

3 | deer season

The day he got himself appointed Sheriff of Waushara county, the Milwaukee Braves fell 3-1 to the Yankees in the first game of the ’57 World Series. All of six weeks ago. He’d barely hung his photo beside the official portraits of Eisenhower and Governor Thomson when the losing pitch broadcast over the radio at the county jailhouse in Wautoma.

The loss should have told him something. He’d grown up with signs. His uncle read them in the gray Wisconsin sky. But at six foot three, Arthur Schley preferred to tuck his chin and shoulder through. He ordered his life strictly by reason. Signs, he left to the State Crime Lab.

When the Braves finally took the big-city Yanks to the woodshed in game seven, he encountered his first problem. It was the long Wisconsin winters to blame. The empty land bred dark forces in the mind like cellar mushrooms. All it needed was a shock to the system, a sudden blizzard, a World Series win, to set them loose. Good folks put their orderly ways aside and gave in to passions. He allowed that alcohol played a role.

The best he could do was tamp down enthusiasm and lock up the worst of them. Seems he’d spent his first six weeks in office tamping down enthusiasm.

If the World Series had been the frying pan, deer season was the fire. Last week he arrested a farmhand who shot his buddy in the stomach. The friend was laid up at the Wild Rose hospital while municipal court slapped the boy with a thirty-five dollar fine and the two dollar court fee. They’d been arguing at a beer bar over who would bag first buck on opening day.

When Sheriff Schley spotted the fancy Nash with out-of-state plates parked on North Street, he knew it was another sign. Figured this was one he should pay attention to. The last thing he needed was a big city fool with a shiny rifle and itchy fingers tramping through the woods for a thrill.

Best to check it out.

4 | true detective

Don Foster stepped from his truck just as we closed the shed door behind us. We didn’t care for folks in the house. We met them in the yard or on the porch. Seems most didn’t want to come too near anyway.

Don slapped a newspaper against the hood of the truck. “The Plainfield Sun came out this morning.”

That’s not what he wanted to say, we could tell there was something else. He went on, “I read the best parts already. Comics mostly. You might want to borrow it, if you didn’t get to town yet.”

We took the paper even though we didn’t follow the death notices this late in the year. The ground was too frozen.

“Is that all you came for?” We wanted him to leave. We had some organs under a mattress and needed to dig a hole out back by the tree line.

“No, Georgia sent me out for extra meat at the locker plant. We thought you’d come to supper and babysit with our Howard and Linda. Georgia’s cousin took ill and we’re going to visit. Back later tonight, but Linda’s too young to look after Howard just yet.”

We waited. When we didn’t speak, people filled the silence.

“I’ll drive you over and back, so it won’t cost you any gas,” he added.

Don was a good one. He and his pretty wife treated us decent, fed us supper, took mind of our ways. Georgia was a dark-haired woman now, young and thin. We wondered what she’d look like with a few more pounds.

“Can we stop in town to buy a magazine?” we said.

“Sure, I’ll drop by Lester Hill’s store. It’s on the way.”

That’s not what we wanted. “They get the True Detective at Worden’s in town. Bernice knows I buy it special. There was one about a woman found naked in a burlap bag, last issue. She stores them in the back room.”

Don chuckled at that. “All right, I’ll swing through town. But mind you keep that away from Linda. Georgia would skin me alive if she found out.”

We must have looked at him funny when he said that, because he cocked his head at us. Or maybe he noticed the blood on our shirt. We kept a shirt with no blood up at the house.

“You wait in the truck,” we said. “This won’t be a minute.”

5 | skating

Bernice could always sell spiral shank nails and scythe handles. But she made her profit on the sudden purchase. She capitalized on weakness. Take Willard Fay. He suddenly thought he might need an extra box of shells for his 12-gauge. The fool, that’s because she kept them right behind the register, eye level and hard to miss. Willard sure didn’t come in looking to buy ammunition. Baling wire more like it and twine for Winnie Fay, but there he was laying down an extra seventy-five cents.

“Tell Winnie we missed her at the Methodist Episcopal last Sunday. The pew felt mighty empty without her.”

Poor Willard didn’t know what to say. She really shouldn’t make her customers uncomfortable like that, but Winnie was holier than thou and Bernice couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

Still, Bernice Worden knew how to run a business. Yes she did. She didn’t get to be Plainfield’s Citizen of the Month last July by twiddling her thumbs. When Leon passed some twenty-odd years ago, she kept the store going through the lean years. Added appliances. Western Union. The only dealer for International Harvester in three townships. She paid attention to what people wanted.

Eddie Gein was a good example. She watched him step down from Don Foster’s truck out front. He must be babysitting again, they wouldn’t associate otherwise. She knew him to be a filthy bachelor, he read those trashy magazines. It was none of her business if he wanted to pay extra to order them, she’d mark the price up a nickel and make sure her church-going customers didn’t find out. That’s the way to run a business.

Willard had gone now. She didn’t like to be alone with Eddie, but really he was harmless. It was only that he’d been bothering her lately. What a time for no one in the store and her son Frank away on delivery.

“November detectives in?” He came straight to the counter.

“I’m afraid not yet, Eddie.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

There was that little smile of his. She never knew what lay behind it. Sometimes he stared too long. She knew what lay behind that and she didn’t care for it. He stared at her now, his lazy left eye drooping enough to make him look dazed. She guessed at why he pulled his plaid cap so low, he was trying to hide it.

“They’ve got the new roller skating rink over to Hancock. Want to try out the floor with me, Bernice?”

She hadn’t gone roller skating in years, and it was sure as Eisenhower’s stroke she wasn’t going to pick Eddie Gein to break the habit. He was a paying customer so she bit her tongue. But she couldn’t resist a little rebuke.

“Maybe you’ll take me home after. Show me around your farm.” She knew no one had been on the Gein farm since his mother died, must be since after the war. All run down and no electricity, it was no wonder school children whispered that the house was haunted.

Eddie must have thought she was being funny. “Just passing the time. You know I don’t skate, never took it up. But maybe you’re right, maybe I will bring you out to the farm.”

That little smile showed there was more to the joke than he let on. Eddie smiled all the way to the door. She saw through the window where Don Foster had pulled his truck over to Bernie’s filling station across North Street. Eddie joined him there and gave a little sideways glance back at her store.

6 | counter talk

When Sheriff Schley stepped into Skeel’s Diner, Marjorie supposed it was the usual. She set aside his cup, but the sheriff shook his head when she sliced into a pie. It’s true the apples were past season. Angie mixed more sugar to compensate, maybe that was it.

He leaned over the counter. Reminded Marjorie of a doctor about to tell her something hush. He covered his cup before she could pour. His knuckles stained dark with oil or dirt. She didn’t think of a doctor after that.

“Fellow drove that Nash, he come in?”

Marjorie had to lean forward herself. The car was there, in late afternoon shadow thrown by the bulk of Worden’s across the street.

“Sure. He ordered grilled cheese and coffee.”

The stranger in the suit, the sheriff asking questions, it was like a movie. “Is anything wrong?” she said. She hoped there was.

“What did he talk about?”

“Chicago. That’s where he’s from. He said I should work as a model in a department store.” Marjorie thought the sheriff might at least say he agreed. He just grunted.

“What else?” he said.

“Asked my name.”

“There’s no news in that.”

She couldn’t be sure what the sheriff meant. After her return from Milwaukee, she’d found accusations behind every hello. She hoped hunting season would prove a distraction. At least the stranger didn’t judge her.

“He said he’s not here for the deer.”

That stuck a needle in the sheriff. He pulled up a stool. “What is he here for?”

“Asked about a hotel. I told him he’s in luck, Ray Goult has an extra room he’s letting out by the week. Betty told me. I gave directions.”

The sheriff grunted again. “Did you tell him Ray runs the funeral parlor?”

“I told him the furniture store.”

It was true enough. Ray Goult ran the furniture store and the funeral parlor. The bodies were stored separate in the basement. It bothered Marjorie each time she went to visit Betty. It was Betty who told her about the doctor in Milwaukee. Marjorie could still feel the cold gurney against her skin.

She wanted to get away. She grabbed a wet cloth, but the sheriff put a hand to her arm, his fingers not yet warmed from the weather.

“This fellow return the favor and give you his name?”

There were coins at the end of the counter and empty plates to be cleared. She nodded to the booth behind and slid her arm out of reach. “I’ve got to finish up, Sheriff Schley. Why not ask him yourself.”

7 | first suspicion

Wise knew the sheriff would get around to him.

Schley, that was what the waitress called him. Well, Sheriff Schley stepped over to his booth and sat down. Just like that.

Not bad, Wise thought. Establish authority. He certainly wasn’t going to argue. The sheriff was a formidable physical presence. But Wise saw hesitancy in the eyes, as if he was making it up as he went along. New on the job, he guessed.

“Fancy car. The Ambassador model?”

Wise nodded. “Not so fancy.”

“Wheel skirts.” The sheriff looked like he was going to spit. “The turn radius is a little difficult for these parts.”

“I get it, Sheriff. Maybe I should trade it in for a tractor.”

The sheriff exhaled heavily through his nose. “Let’s start over.” He drew a box with his finger on the table between them.

“Waushara County. Six hundred miles of farm and cheese factory. You could drive all afternoon and not round up enough cows or people to fill the bleachers at County Stadium.”

He leaned forward until Wise could smell the bay rum in his hair. “It’s my job to keep track of the comings and goings in this county. And you—” He tapped the center of the invisible box on the table. “You qualify as a coming.”

The sheriff settled back against the cushions of the booth. Lifted his palms, supplicating heaven for relief from his burdens of which Wise was apparently number one.

“A fancy fellow. Gives no name. Comes from Chicago. Says he’s spending a week in one of our little towns, population 680 give or take a child I don’t know about. Isn’t a farmer, doesn’t hunt, no family. I’d say that’s something I need to worry about.”

The sheriff rested his case and it was Wise’s turn. Wise followed the sheriff’s style, used his hands to tamp the air down, settling the conversation back to earth.

“You can relax, Sheriff. I’m not here to cause trouble. My name is on the registration card above my windshield visor, I’m surprised you didn’t check already. Evan Wise. Are we off to a good start?”

The sheriff did relax. He wiped his hands on a napkin and waved the waitress over. “How about that coffee, Marjorie.” When she’d gone, he said, “All right Mr. Wise, suppose you put me at ease some more.”

Wise saw no harm to level with him. “You may have guessed, Sheriff. I’m a private detective. I can show a license if you’re the skeptical type.”

A Chicago lieutenant would jump all over his license with a magnifying glass. This one must be a poker player. Well, Wise would show his cards. He spread a three-year old newspaper he carried in his overcoat pocket on the table between them. Put his finger to a small headline.

The sheriff lifted his glasses in place. The delicate frames only made his face more stony. “Woman gone. Believed shot,” he read aloud. “That’s Mary Hogan. What’s your interest?”

“Bear with me a minute. I’ve been retained by the parents of Evelyn Hartley to look for their daughter.”

The girl’s name made the sheriff sit up and run a hand over his cropped hair. Again the harsh breath from his nose.

“I remember Evelyn Hartley,” he said at last. He slipped the glasses back to his pocket. “Four years ago the story made a stir. I was with the Highway Department then. We were told to look for a two-tone beige sedan. It never turned up.”

“Neither did she,” Wise said. “Fifteen years old and she never turned up.”

The sheriff pushed the newspaper back at Wise. “What’s Mary Hogan to do with it?”

“Maybe nothing. Hogan disappeared a year later. Also abducted and never found. Also blood at the scene, a truck spotted leaving the area.”

“A hundred miles west and a pickup truck,” the sheriff corrected. “You’re in Plainfield now, in case you forgot. Hartley was La Crosse and a sedan.”

“Just a hunch. That’s why I’m hired. Anything you can add?”

“Sure. It’s an ongoing police investigation. Keep out of it.”

Whatever screws pulled the sheriff’s lips taut, they tightened another notch. “The Hogan case was six miles from here in Pine Grove, across the Portage County line. Sheriff Wanserski won’t appreciate your help.”

“Right now I’m talking to you.”

The sheriff made a face as if the cream in his coffee had soured. “You carry a gun?”

“Smith and Wesson .38, locked in the Nash. I’ve got a license for that too.”

“I might ask you to bring it around if I find any spent shells.” He slid from the booth and stretched full, letting Wise see he had a good three inches over him.

“There’s nothing more to gain than what you can read in your paper there. Ed Marolla, the fellow who edits The Plainfield Sun, runs a headline each anniversary of her disappearance for the past two years. Didn’t bring any results that I can tell. The fact is, we don’t know what happened to Mary Hogan.”

Marjorie stepped forward to wipe the table. Wise had felt her presence at the boundary of the conversation the whole time. “Don’t forget about Ed Gein, Sheriff.” She nodded toward the counter.

The sheriff’s lips pursed into a bitter smile. “Is Eddie here?”

One of the two customers at the counter spun on his stool. A small man, about fifty by the look of his iron gray hair, with a simple face that fell a little slack. Dirty plaid cap pulled low to his forehead.

“What do you say Eddie, do you know where Mary Hogan is?”

The little man smiled like he was familiar with the joke. “Sure. She’s at my house right now. I brought her there in my truck.”

Wise looked to the sheriff.

“Eddie confesses to every crime around. A regular three-dollar bill. Reads too many detective magazines.” The sheriff slapped the farmer on the arm. “Besides, his truck didn’t pan out.”

Marjorie slid the man a plate with the slice of pie she’d cut for the sheriff. “Sorry to cause any trouble, Eddie. Have this on the house and I’ll square it with Angie.”

For purely selfish reasons, Wise wouldn’t mind an excuse to meet with Marjorie after hours and get the full story on Ed Gein. Or any other story she wanted to tell.

8 | out of orbit

Georgia Foster was a million miles away, as far off as that Sputnik satellite circling the earth. Some nights she looked to the sky, standing alone on the back porch, taking in the wash. There was nothing up there but stars.

Stories like that filled her head and the headlines grew bigger every day. They do that when it’s going to cost money, the President warned as much. They had to beat the Russies to the moon. More guns, less butter, he said. Well, butter was already a luxury. Didn’t she have bricks of oleo mailed up from a cousin across state lines? If there was money to burn, she could think of one or two places right here on solid ground—

Don nudged her with his elbow. “You should’ve heard what Ed said next.”

Her husband could be as childish as little Howard sometimes, waving his fork and ignoring her good cooking. It went halfway to explain how he got on so well with Ed. Now was one of those times. “Ed told them Mary Hogan was at his farm.”

Georgia returned from space. She hadn’t followed Don’s story, but mention of that missing woman made it through reentry. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Ed. Folks might not understand.”

“Oh, the sheriff didn’t take it serious,” Ed said. Hands folded primly in his lap.

But his foot tapped against the kitchen table. Little Howard did that in his highchair when he was angry. She realized she’d never seen Ed angry, never seen his face with anything except that off-balance smile, like he didn’t quite understand what you said.

And he hadn’t cleaned his plate, that wasn’t like him at all. She made rhubarb sauce on account of asking Ed to babysit. They couldn’t afford to pay. Thank goodness all he expected was a meal in return. Always available to help when he wasn’t at the Hill’s doing handy work. It was unnatural how the children accepted him. Too young to find him peculiar, she supposed. A shame living out there all alone on that big farm of his, just two good rooms off the kitchen and the rest of the house boarded up, while her and Don with a growing family, their own meager acre of soil barely enough for a rick of wood and a patch of corn—

Ed watched her. “Must have been a blood-thirsty man to do harm to Mary Hogan.”

Georgia didn’t care to think about it. The woman was divorced, ran a tavern, served whiskey. Perhaps she’d brought trouble on herself.

“You know the problem with most murders?” Ed’s hands fluttered like a barn swallow now. “They don’t think it through. Always a small thing the detective finds out. That’s how they’re caught in the magazines.”

He no longer shocked her. Back when there was talk of swapping farms, he showed her and Don around. They’d seen those magazines of his scattered across the floor among stacks of soiled clothes browned by age. Or grease. Or worse. Filthy plates half-scraped and punked with mold, dim in the stained light of tattered curtains. Lumpen mounds of something pale and gray, dented by teeth marks, the size of prize-winning turnips and sweating with decay—his gum collection, he explained. Everything spilled off dressers and chairs, the whole house a bachelor’s mess. He’d closed off his mother’s bedroom.

He’ll be talking about her next. Augusta Gein. Another of his topics.

Don coughed. “How about Saturday, Ed. You ready?”

“You know I’m not one for deer. Don’t care for it. I put up No Hunting signs, but I know they’ll shoot in my woods despite.”

Next there was talk of Bob Hill hunting squirrel. Elmo Ueeck and his saw mill. Georgia was glad when little Howard made noise to call her away.

First she checked the front room to make sure Linda was at the television. Linda watched Circus Boy on Thursday nights, then straight to bed. The set was an extravagance. They’d bought it so she might spend less time with Ed. Nothing wrong, but still.

“Upstairs in ten minutes,” she said.

Linda had eaten after chores. Eleven years old, she had a room to herself. But Howard slept in a crib by their own bed. He was almost big enough to climb out, so naturally she worried. Georgia peeked in on him. Nothing. He must have been dreaming or gone back to sleep. She expected him to sleep all night.

Ed could sit and watch television for an hour. It would be fine.

9 | whisper

The house was full of marvels. Electric wringer for the wash. Philco television with glass tubes and a tangle of wire like tiny arteries. If we could take it apart we’d figure out how it worked. We opened the cupboards. Georgia lined the shelves with oilcloth, just like Ma. She kept a proper house. Cream-flecked linoleum with roses in the kitchen, a tile broken away revealed the darker layer underneath. A rug with border vines covered the parlor floor, a gold-framed Last Supper hung above Don’s gun rack. We touched the soft lace tidies on the couch.

The girl snuck downstairs. She was a sly one, hardly wore a thing. A child that age, they make their own heat. Skin so soft. Her hair carried a fragrance of the haymow from chores. Sat on our lap while we watched Chrysler’s Shower of Stars. She wriggled to find the horehound candy we’d brought special.

Ma preached fierce against the radio. Slatterns and deceivers, that about covered it. Good thing she never lived to see this. Men dressed in women’s clothes miming crude jokes. The women wore cigarette boxes and danced, kicking legs to show their shame. The television made a low hum like midges outside a barn. We turned it off.

“Why’d you do that, Mr. Gein?” She was a curious one.

“Shhh. Do you smell it?”

She lifted her nose. We cupped her head in our hands. Her dark hair, cut like a boy, barely brushed her shoulders. “Smell what?”

A whisper of burning birch bark. A bitter taste. That’s how it always started. We shooed her quickly to bed, tucked her up against the cold, checked the rags across the window frame. Outside, a tractor tire dusted by snow.

Storm coming, one or two days most. We’d seen cows sniff the air this morning at Norris Digger’s farm when we went for brain.

The big bedroom down the hall surely showed a woman’s touch. Lilacs on the wall, painted porcelain whatnots on the dresser, cats and owls, foolish things a woman might think of. We dipped a finger in the cold cream jar. Looked for frills and corsets. Ma had worn thick ones, heavy with straps and smelled of rubber, rough like a sow’s hide. We’d seen Georgia done up for town, she wore thin nylons beneath her flowered dress. Cool and smooth against our fingers, we found them beneath her cotton things.

We knew what was down there between the legs. We bought medical books, borrowed some from Ray Goult after Ma’s funeral. They’d be surprised how much we knew.

The smell of burning birch mixed with coppery blood now, caught like smoke in our throat. Dry and chalky, tasting of gypsum. Not much time left.

The boy awoke. Small and trusting like a dog. We picked him from the crib, his skin softer than the girl. We’d seen a dog once, beat to death with a cane. A drunkard like Pa, that was Bill Smith, a terrible violent man. The dog’s leg was broke, it couldn’t run. Curses slurred from his mouth each time he swung the cane, his breath fouled the air already thick with burning garbage from the incinerator out back. The dog yelped something awful. Ma was there, it affected her. She died three days later.

We didn’t like to remember. Snow ticked at the window like insects whispering to get in.

Mary Hogan reminded us of Ma. Made us think of her from behind. Bending over, those swollen hips, the pressure of her flesh against the thin stretch of dress. It made us ache to remember. The sheriff and that new one, they’re to blame. We should have told them we would never hurt Mary.

Too late.

We must have set the boy down, our fingers gripped the rail of the crib. A wave pulled us under, dark and murky like the bottom of Sand Lake. Birds peered from trees, ugly brown birds with wattled heads. Water filled our mouth. It drooled from our lips. The snow made a noise like bees at the window. Oh Lord—

10 | drum

She listened for Mr. Gein. He must hear it too, the drumming.

Linda made a tom-tom at last week’s 4-H meeting from an old coffee tin and a scrap of chamois cloth. She and Mary Alfery and Sally Poulsen wore a feather headdress to rehearse the first Thanksgiving. Linda beat her Indian drum. Tommy Harvey and four boys from Pine Grove played Pilgrims. Mother wouldn’t let her practice in the house.

When the drumming woke her, she checked beside the bed to see the tin was still there. Something else made the noise. Down the hall.

“Mr. Gein?”

Her bare feet on the cold floor. The moon through the window cast her skin the color of wax. No light in the hall. Linda paused at the rug outside the big bedroom. It was wrong to enter the grownup room without permission.

She turned the knob with both hands. The drumming was inside. Louder, no longer muffled, like pulling off a stocking cap.

Mother kept lipstick on the dresser to draw her magazine face, when she and Father drove to Hancock for a night out. Linda had found shiny brooches in the jewelry box the time she got in trouble. She wore them around the house. That’s when she was forbidden. This time she could say Mr. Gein gave permission.

“Mr. Gein?”

He didn’t answer when they played a game. Maybe Mr. Gein was playing. He hid in the pantry once, never a peep. Watched her through the door crack for twenty minutes while she ate. She squealed when he grabbed her from behind, and buzzed with excitement the rest of the day.

Father took her out to Long Lake last summer, the white skiff on the shimmery water. He caught three green and shiny fish. They slapped against the side of a bucket all the way back to shore. She watched their mouths clench and open, and the slow gray dulling of their eyes. They didn’t move by the time Father started the truck for home.

The drumming was like the fish in the bucket. A slapping. It came from the other side of the bed. Mother said never to jump on the bed or swing from the posts. Another reason she was forbidden.

Howard sat in his crib, his wooden spoon in his mouth. He was supposed to be asleep. If his teeth acted up he’d cry soon. She knelt on the floor to wipe his mouth with a corner of her flannel. Mr. Gein’s plaid hat peeked from behind the bed.

Linda ran to the other side, calling: “I found you—”

And stopped.

Mr. Gein lay on the floor. Tangled in mother’s dress, the one she wore to auditorium dances. His feet kicked with tiny jerks against the pine slats of the bed. But that wasn’t what made the beating noise. It was his arms had made the drumming, his elbows slapping the floor. His fingers added small movement of their own, twitching like he was trying to touch something just beyond reach. His eyes rolled in their sockets.

Mr. Gein was older than Father. His hair showed speckled gray. Bubbles glistened on the floor where spit slid down his stubbled chin. His wet lips moved like the fish in the bucket.

A sour odor. Wet stains darked his crotch. Mr. Gein had peed himself. She put her hand to her mouth not to laugh.

She touched him with her foot. Gave a little kick.

The pale of his belly trembled. Shirt open. Body arched like a bridge. The heels of his boots and the back of his head were all that touched the floor. His tiny fists twisted at the wrists.

Howard cried. Linda knelt to put the wooden spoon back in his mouth. Mr. Gein must have heard too. His eyes slid in their sockets and found her. Something slimy moved behind his lips, a clicking came out. It sounded like the dead ignition in Father’s truck.

[...]