Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“The airport ?” Marlinchen said.

“You’re thinking of MSP. This was just a rural airport, one runway, no tower. And in the evening, when we went, no one was taking off or landing.” I backpedaled slightly. “I’m not saying we should have done it. It was trespassing.”

“In other words, don’t try this at home,” she said.

“Right. Anyway, the runway was the perfect spot to practice, both long and wide, with nothing to hit. After two false starts, Garnet got up her nerve and did it. And back then, whatever Garnet did, I felt I had to do,” I said. “So we switched places, and I did.”

For a moment I was back there, hearing the sound of my own giddy, relieved laughter, seeing the little scented pine tree rocking crazily from Aunt Ginny’s rearview mirror. To this day, it’s what I think of when I smell that synthetic pine scent.

“Let me guess,” Marlinchen said. “You want to teach it to me.”

I shook my head. “No, I know you’re not ready for that. But I’ll do a demonstration for you.”

“No, thank you,” she said firmly. “I’d toss my cookies.”

“No you wouldn’t,” I said. “It’d be over before you knew it. In fact-”

“Look, a Dairy Queen!” Marlinchen interrupted, excited by a red-roofed shack on the roadside. “Can we stop?”

“You’re driving the car,” I said.

A shortwhile later, we were sitting at a shaded spot overlooking the St. Croix River. Marlinchen had driven us there while I held her large, semiliquid ice-cream confection and my own order of onion rings. Ahead, the sun was shining on the river, but behind us, iron-colored clouds were piling up in the west. The contrast was so stark it almost looked like the thunderheads had been added into the scene with a moviemaker’s computer graphics.

“Going to be some weather tonight,” I said. “A storm, maybe hail.”

Marlinchen spooned up some of her ice cream. “The big storms used to scare me when I was a kid,” she said. “One of my first memories is of lightning striking the house. I didn’t see it, I just remember the noise, and how scared my mother was. For years after that, any loud noises scared me,” she said.

“It was that bad?”

“I don’t think I would have been affected by it so badly if my mother hadn’t been,” Marlinchen said. “She came into my room, crying, and told me ‘Lightning struck the house’ and put me straight to bed. I started crying, because she seemed so upset. I thought she meant that lightning was going to strike the house again and again. She slept in the bed with me that night.”

Elisabeth Hennessy had drowned under suspicious circumstances, with whispers of suicide surrounding her death. Her daughter’s memory made me wonder if Marlinchen’s mother had been troubled throughout her young life, if a highly tuned nervous system had turned the excitement of Minnesota ’s summer thunderstorms into terrifying psychodramas.

“Is something wrong?” Marlinchen asked me.

“No,” I said. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask whether Elisabeth Hennessy had been fearful or neurotic, so I filed away the issue for another time.

“How old were you when your mother died?” Marlinchen asked me.

I hoped my surprise didn’t show on my face. She was something of a mind reader. Not spot-on, but close. “I was nine,” I said. “Almost ten.”

Marlinchen paused with her plastic spoon halfway to her mouth. “The other day, I thought you said you came to Minnesota when you were 13,” she remarked. “What happened in between?”

I’d told the story of my migration to Minnesota to a number of people, and none had asked that specific question. Until now.

“I told you my dad was a truck driver, right?” I said. “He was on the road a lot. But until I was 13, my older brother, Buddy, lived at home. Then he joined the army and moved away, so I would have been living alone. That was mostly why. But also…” I hesitated.

“What?”

“That summer, I think, a girl went missing. She was about my age, and in a small town, things like that cause a real panic.” A waterbird swept low over the river. “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

“Why not?”

“It was a long time ago. I was young.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that might have had an influence on my father’s feelings. Besides that, I was becoming a teenager. My father probably thought I needed a feminine influence.”

“I see,” Marlinchen said dryly. “So it was your aunt’s feminine influence that led you to break into airports and practice stunt driving?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Ginny was the mellowest aunt ever. She worked evenings and weekends at a bar and grill, and she mostly let me do my own thing. Want one of these?” I held out the onion rings, and she took one.

“Thanks. So is your aunt still up on the Range?” she asked.

“No, she died when I was 19, of a stroke. Not like your dad,” I added quickly, seeing Marlinchen’s little twitch of reaction. “Hers was down in the brain stem, where a lot of the body’s autonomic functions are. If there’s such a thing as a good location to have a stroke, that’s not it.”

After a few minutes, when Marlinchen had finished her ice cream, I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said, “let’s head out.”

We walked down to the car together in silence. This time, I got behind the wheel, and at the end of the dirt lane we’d followed to our vantage point, I turned north instead of south onto the road.

“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” Marlinchen said as we continued to accelerate.

“Yes,” I told her. Then I hauled up on the parking brake and turned the wheel hard. The Nova slewed in a 180, back wheels drifting briefly onto the shoulder, and then we were heading west, picking up speed again.

“See?” I said. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

Another gas-station mini-martwas hit; it was clearly the same two perpetrators. Welcome back, guys, I thought.

After taking initial witness reports, I reviewed security video from the first two stores, hoping that by watching tape from the day before the robberies, I might recognize these guys without their stocking masks, casing the place.

When I got off work, I was thinking that it might be a good night to go out to the lake in time for dinner. Marlinchen’s cooking was probably better than mine. I rode the elevator down to the parking garage.

“Detective Pribek!”

I turned to see Gray Diaz approaching along a lane of parked vehicles. He wasn’t alone. The man behind him was in his early fifties, tall, and slender, dressed in simple plainclothes: shirtsleeves and trousers, no tie. His eyes were gray behind wire-rim glasses. He too was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.

“I’m glad we caught you before you left for the day,” Diaz said. He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. “You know Gil Hennig, correct?”

“Yes,” I said, recognition kicking in. Hennig was a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension technician. I’d seen him at crime scenes, brushing fingerprint dust onto doorways, making casts of footprints, never drawing attention to himself.

“What can I do for you guys?” I said, feeling the little flutter of anxiety in my stomach that Diaz caused.

“Gil came down with me to get your car,” Diaz said. He held up the piece of paper. It was a warrant. “You’re welcome to look this over.”

I took the warrant from his hand and scanned it. It allowed testing for hair, fiber, prints, and blood. The work would be done at the BCA’s crime lab. Hennepin County had its own laboratory, but this wasn’t a Hennepin County case, and the BCA did testing for smaller jurisdictions, like the one Diaz served.