Вэл Макдермид: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

I’d hoped to josh him along, but the glare I got was no joke. He eyed me like a stranger.

“You don’t know, do you? About my wife?”

“Margo? What about her?”

He glanced away, taking a breath. “She’s got MS, Dylan. Multiple sclerosis. She’s bedridden most of the time now. The bills are killing me. I’m working double shifts to keep from losing the house.”

“Damn. I’m sorry, Max, I didn’t know. What about your insurance? Doesn’t it—?”

“It covers ninety percent,” he said flatly. “Which sounds terrific until you total up what an overnight stay in the hospital costs these days. So, yeah, I do worry about a puffed-up city boy like Milano. I need my damn job, Dylan. What do you need?”

“Nothing,” I said, rising to go. “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of—”

“Sit down, damn it,” he growled. “I’m not so spooked I can’t help a buddy’s favorite nephew. You probably want to know about threats? Stuff like that?”

“Did she get any?”

“By the bale. Every station gets a steady stream nowadays. Any twit with a laptop can flame us, fire off an e-mail that would bring down the FBI if they were on paper. The problem is, there’s so much of it, nobody takes it seriously. I’ve already bundled the top twenty from the past few months. I gave ’em to Redfern. Didn’t she tell you?”

I didn’t say anything.

Max cocked his head, eyeing me. “I wondered if Chief Kazmarek knew about you and Sherry.” He nodded. “You’re not assigned to this case, are you?”

“I’m working it off the books.”

“I’ve covered stories with Redfern a few times,” he said. “She seemed plenty sharp to me.”

“Zina’s a good cop, and she’s thorough,” I said. “She’ll track down every name you gave her. But you’re a local, Max. You know which threats were from flakes and which were serious. I want the short list. Who should I be looking at?”

Max looked away, chewing on the corner of his lip.

“I can’t do this, Dylan,” he said, glancing around, making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “If Milano finds out about it, he’ll have my ass.”

“Got it. No problem,” I said, rising again. “It was good to see you, Max. I’m sorry about your trouble.”

“It’s a sorry situation all around,” he said. Jotting a quick note on his napkin, he slid it across the table to me. I palmed it without reading it.

“No comment means no comment,” he called after me, making sure the other staffers in the snack bar heard him. “Next time bring a damn warrant. Officer.”

I didn’t read the napkin until I was in my car.

Two names were on it. Pudge Macavoy and Emmaline Gauthier.

I knew both names. All too well.

Macavoy was a local bad boy, late twenties now, in trouble since he could walk. I remembered seeing him on TV when Sherry did a piece on domestic abusers. Shirtless, he was standing in the door of his double-wide screaming obscenities at her.

Was Macavoy crazy enough to go after Sherry? Absolutely.

But he hadn’t.

A quick check of the Enforcement Net turned up Pudge’s name. He was already in custody. He’d been busted in Petoskey for his third DUI. Too broke to make bail, he’d been cooling in a cell for the past ten days. He was probably guilty of at least fifty felonies. But not this one.

The Gauthiers were another matter. There was a small army of them, a dozen families related by blood or marriage. They’re wood-smoke folks, a catchall term for blue-collar types who live in isolated cabins and double-wides in the northern interior. Their homes are heated with free wood gleaned from the state forest, and the scent of smoke lingers on their clothes like musk. I’m a wood-smoke boy myself, and not ashamed of it, but it’s not a term you toss around casually. Some newcomers consider it a synonym for white trash. If you call somebody wood-smoke, you’d best smile.

The Gauthier clan has a dozen branches, but one has been top dog since I was a boy. Miss Emmaline, mama to seven boys, grandmother to a roughneck militia. She could give the Mafia lessons in organized crime, backwoods style.

I could have hauled in half of the Gauthier clan on one beef or another, but it would have been a waste of time. Wood-smoke people never talk to the law. Ever. If one of them had a problem with Sherry Sinclair, there was only one person I could ask.

The drive into the back country is a bit like time travel, back to my childhood. The October hills were already dressed in gold and autumn orange, the forest floor carpeted in leaves in a thousand colors, dusted with white snow doilies here and there.

The Gauthier clan owns small holdings scattered around the edge of the state forest, some adjoining, some not. Subsistence farms, for the most part, twenty acres here, forty there. None larger. But total them up and they cover a lot of territory.

A generation ago, they ran truck gardens, poached venison and small game year round, lived off the land as they had for a hundred years.

But times change. The DNR is tougher on out-of-season hunting now, and you can make a lot more money growing reefer than raising vegetables.

Emmaline’s farm rests atop a long rise, with a magnificent view of the rolling, forested hills with a silvery sliver of the big lake glinting on the horizon. From her front porch, she can watch the morning sun rise, and then see it set again at the end of the day. She can also see anyone approaching a good half-hour before they pull into her yard.

She watched me come, sitting on her porch in a white-pine rocker hand carved by one of her sons. Or perhaps her great-grandfather. Time is measured differently in the back country.

As I pulled up in front of the house, she was knitting, waiting for me. If she was concerned, she gave no sign. She appeared to be alone, but across the clearing I noticed the hayloft door of her barn was slightly ajar. Someone was watching me from the shadows. Probably had me in the crosshairs. Welcome to wood-smoke country.

I kept my hands in plain sight as I walked up the steps to the broad front porch of her ranch house. The October air was brisk, but the sun was warm on the weathered wood.

It wasn’t a suburban ranch-style home; the rambling clapboard cabin could have been teleported from the Great Plains, along with its owner.

Emmaline Gauthier had one of those old-timey faces you see in tintypes: weathered, hawkish, carved from oak. Ice-blue eyes that looked right through you. Her clothes probably came from Goodwill: faded flowered dress, a threadbare sweater over an apron.

“Good afternoon, Miz Gauthier.” I nodded as I reached the top step, “I’m—”

“Claudette LaCrosse’s boy,” she finished, glancing up from her knitting. “You’d be Dylan, right? How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine, ma’am.”

“Yes, she is. Most folks in town aren’t kind. Store clerks pretend they don’t see me, snotty brats snicker at my clothes. But when I visit your mother’s antiques shop, she offers me coffee. Shows me some of her nice pieces. We chat about the old days. Once in a while I’ll buy some trinket, but not often. We both grew up in the back country, your ma and me. She ain’t wood-smoke no more, but she ain’t forgot her roots. Have you?”

“I’m not here to talk about my ma, Miss Emmaline.”

“Then maybe I should call my lawyer. Sergeant.”

“That’s your right, if you think you need one.”

“Oh, I expect I can handle any trouble you got, sonny. I’d offer you cider, but I doubt you’ll be here that long. What’s this about?”

“Sherry Sinclair,” I said, watching her face.

“That girl from TV?” She frowned. “I heard about what happened to her. As I recall, you two were keeping company awhile back. So are you here on police business? Or on your own hook?”