P. Parrish - South Of Hell

Mel still didn’t say anything.

“What?” Louis said.

“Nothing,” Mel said.

“Don’t give me that shit.”

“What you just said is something only a young man can say.”

Louis was quiet. On the silent TV screen, Glen Rice hit a jumper. Screaming and stomping thundered from the room next door.

“Maybe there’s something more,” Mel said.

“Like what?”

“Tell me more about the woman.”

“Her name was Jean. Married to some guy named Owen Brandt. They lived on a farm somewhere west of here.” He paused. “The husband reported her missing but later admitted he thought she had just run off with someone.”

“You remember what she looked like?”

Louis hesitated while his brain retrieved a memory. “Not really.”

“Pretty?”

Louis couldn’t bring the face into focus. “What’s your point?”

“Cherchez la femme.”

“Help me out here a little, Mel.”

“Il y a une femme dans toute les affaires; aussitot qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis, ‘Cherchez la femme.’”

“More help than that.”

“Roughly translated, ‘There’s a woman behind every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, ‘Look for the woman.’ You ever think this Shockey guy might have known this woman? And maybe that’s why he’s so hung up on the case?”

Louis was still trying to see Jean Brandt’s photo in the missing persons file. A shard fell into place: an old snapshot gone faded orange and too blurry to make out anything but dark hair.

“Are you going to help him or not?”

“The guy tried to bribe me, Mel. I’m just going to walk away.”

He could hear Mel lighting another cigarette. “You going up to see Joe before you come home?”

“Yeah, if I can ever get a hold of her.”

“She busy again?”

Louis was quiet. He had never talked to Mel about the strain fifteen hundred miles was putting on his and Joe’s relationship, but Mel’s radar picked up on things.

“Well,” Mel said, “I’m beat and need to get some sleep. Tell Joe I said hello when you talk to her.”

Louis said goodbye and hung up. For a few minutes, he just sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the phone, the cheers and rumblings from adjoining rooms a dull roar in the back of his mind.

There’s a woman behind every case .

Maybe Mel was right. Maybe Shockey had been in love with Jean Brandt, and maybe it was the memory of her and what he didn’t or couldn’t do for her nine years ago that drove his desperation now.

Louis supposed guilt over letting her disappearance go unresolved was a better motivator than trying to hang on to a job, but he still wasn’t sure it was enough to keep him here to help Shockey. What could he do that the Ann Arbor PD or Livingston County Sheriff’s Office couldn’t?

The phone rang.

Louis grabbed it. “Joe?”

“Hey, you got the keg over there?”

“Wrong room, buddy,” Louis said.

He hung up and lay down on the bed, staring at the yellowed ceiling tiles.

Nine years. Shockey had been missing her for nine years. Nine years that must have felt like a lifetime for him.

Louis pulled himself to a sitting position and dug Shockey’s home phone number from his pocket. The paper was damp, the blurred numbers hard to read. The phone rang eight or nine times, and Louis was about to give up when Shockey’s voice cut through the line.

“Yeah?”

“Detective, this is Kincaid. One question. Were you involved with Jean Brandt?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then a long exhalation. “Yeah, I was in love with her.”

Louis shut his eyes. “Okay, Detective. I’ll give you one more day to convince me this is worth my time. But I don’t want to hear any more crap about falsifying reports. You got that?”

“Yeah.”

Louis rubbed his brow, nagged by the feeling that he was going to regret this.

“So, what do we do?” Shockey asked. “Where do we start?”

“I want to see this farm. Where is it?”

“It’s about a half-hour west of Ann Arbor, just south of Hell.”

Louis turned up the collar of his jacket against the rain and stepped closer to the gate of the Brandt farm. A rusty metal sign nailed to a wood post kept him from venturing farther: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

He had never spent any time on a farm. He’d been raised in the village of Plymouth, Michigan, for the most part, growing up with all the standard city-issued conveniences. His only experience with farm life had been from movies. Or as seen through the windows of the family Ford during boring Sunday jaunts to the Irish Hills or the long drives up north for the annual vacation.

He remembered thinking at ten years old that farms must be pretty neat places to live. Picking apples right from the tree or jumping from the upper window of a barn into a pile of hay or riding a horse any time you wanted.

Louis stared through the mist at the Brandt farmhouse.

But this place held no such warmth.

It was a crumbling, two-story, red brick house with a steep-pitched, green-shingled roof. The covered wood porch was missing its front steps, railing slats, and most of its gingerbread. The smaller side porch was filled with wet boxes, piles of yellowed newspapers bound with twine, and a small rusted refrigerator — what Louis remembered someone from his childhood calling an icebox. The tall windows, some boarded up, some still shrouded with tattered lace curtains, looked back at him like blank eyes through the overgrown bushes.

Beyond the house, Louis could see three wooden outbuildings, once painted red but now faded to gray, the sides listing, the roofs sunken. In the weeds, four rusted machines lay in a circle around a huge hulking thing with arms and giant gears, like a family of petrified prehistoric monsters.

There was junk everywhere — pitchforks, coils of barbed wire, wagon wheels, pocked metal drums, a faded green tractor with john deere spelled out in rust. And dominating it all, a crumbling cathedral of a barn, its massive doors padlocked.

Louis surveyed the farm. It was hard to believe anyone had lived here just nine years ago. The place had the feel of a land destroyed by war or abandoned to plague.

He heard the door of the car close and turned to see Shockey making his way across the gravel road. He was working his long arms into his dingy raincoat.

Shockey stopped at the gate and stared at the house. He hadn’t said much on the way out here, and Louis had not pushed it, sensing that whatever else there was to this story was not something Shockey talked easily about.

But now that they were here, only a few yards from where Jean Brandt had lived, and maybe died, it was time.

“Did it look like this when you knew her?” Louis asked.

Shockey stuffed his hands into his pockets. Again, he seemed to steel up, and Louis gave him a few seconds to get a grip on his thoughts and memories.

“I drove by here a couple of times right after she disappeared,” Shockey said. “It looked a little better than this but not much.”

“Tough way of life,” Louis said.

“It wasn’t the farming that wore her down,” Shockey said. “She grew up on a farm not that far from here. It was Owen Brandt who made it rough.”

“How’d you meet her?” Louis asked.

“She used to come to the farmer’s market in Ann Arbor and sell potatoes and cukes and things,” Shockey said. “I loved the vine-ripened tomatoes, and I’d browse the market on Sunday mornings and pick up the fresh stuff I couldn’t get from Kroger’s.”

“She came to the market alone?”

“Yeah.” Shockey nodded. “That’s why I noticed her. She was a little thing and used to unload all those baskets by herself, set up her table herself, and load back up again at dark. After watching her a few times, I offered to help.”