Lisa Scottoline - Killer Smile

“I stand corrected.” Mary was flunking Montana. “ Sugar beet.”

“Ever seen a sugar beet?”

“Not unless it takes the C bus.”

Mr. Milton smiled, and they became friends again. “It looks like a big fat carrot, only white.”

“Does it taste good?”

“You can’t eat sugar beets, city girl.”

“Why not? I eat beets. They come in cans, from Harvard. They’re geniuses. Genius beets.”

Mr. Milton didn’t smile. “Now you’re just bein’ silly. Sugar beets make sugar. They plant ’em in early spring and harvest in September through October, depending on frost and freeze.”

“How do they make sugar?” Mary asked, actually starting to care.

“They slice ’em, extract ’em, put ’em in a diffuser to get the juice out. Press ’em and you’re good to go.”

“They grind it fine enough to make sugar?”

“No, the sugar doesn’t come from the pulp, it comes from the juice.”

D’oh.

“Well, anyway. Back in those days, laborers did all the work with the sugar beets. Topped ’em and dug ’em out, put ’em in burlap bags until they ran short on burlap, during the war. That was when they switched to paper. The Eye-talians used to come out here and do it all.” Mr. Milton scanned the parking lot, and Mary could tell he was using his imagination, too. Older people were better at imagining, and she could almost see the bright green rows reflected in his watery eyes. “A border guard would take ’em out in the morning in a deuce an’ a half and bring ’em back at night.”

“What’s a deuce and a half?”

“Truck. A two-and-a-half-ton truck. That was Sam. Sam would do the driving mostly. He had a lead foot, Sam did. His truck was in the shop all the damn time. Sam Livingstone, he died five years ago. Heart.”

Another ghost . On the drive up Reserve, Mr. Milton had told her all the people he knew who had died and what they had died of.

“There used to be trees over there, way far. Out there.” Mr. Milton pointed past the Costco. “A group of trees there, shade trees. The Eye-talians used to eat under the tree, come lunchtime. There was one tree, an oak, bigger ’en the rest of ’em. That fella you’re askin’ about, what was his name?”

“Brandolini.”

“He hung himself on it.”

No . Mary hadn’t known Amadeo had killed himself that way.

“Hung himself right here one day, when he was out in the field, working.”

Mary looked past the Costco, shielding her eyes. From the sun. From her imagination.

“They say his wife died while he was in the camp.”

He’d hung himself. Mary imagined a huge oak tree, with branches that stretched like a hand, reaching for the clear blue sky, ripping down that blue cloak and exposing heaven itself.

“Mary, ready to go?”

“But how did he hang himself, if the others were around?”

“There wasn’t, that day. It was a small crew, only him and another ’un, his friend. The friend fell asleep during their lunch break, and when he woke up, your Mr. Brandolini had hung himself.”

“Who was the friend?”

“I don’t know.”

Mary didn’t get it. “But wait, Amadeo climbed a tree and hung himself, and the border guard didn’t stop him? He wasn’t asleep, too, was he?”

“What border guard? There was no border guard.”

“Wasn’t anyone here guarding them?”

“You mean like in the movies, standin’ over ’em with a gun? Like that Paul Newman movie?” Mr. Milton chuckled. “Nothin’ could be further from the truth. No need to have a border guard when the Eye-talians worked. Where was they gonna go? It was all sugar beet fields, and they lived here.”

“But still, how could they not be guarded? They were enemy aliens, prisoners of war. If they were dangerous enough to arrest and put behind barbed wire, weren’t they dangerous enough to guard?” Mary heard resentment edge her voice, so maybe she did judge after all.

“We didn’t make the decision to arrest ’em or pen ’ em up. We never treated ’em that way in Missoula.” Mr. Milton shrugged bony shoulders. “The Eye-talians worked independent during the daytime. They were trusted, like friends. The ones that worked in town, they came back at night to the camp, like it was home from a job. Hell, some even dated gals in town. And the ones in the sugar beet field, we picked up at the end of the day. Sam did. Passed away five years ago. Cancer.”

Heart . Mary didn’t correct him. She was thinking about Amadeo.

“Okay, ready to go?” Mr. Milton patted the Toyota ’s roof, and though Mary could tell he was tiring, she couldn’t leave just yet.

“I don’t understand why Amadeo would come out here to kill himself. Why not do it in the camp?”

“I guess he’d a been stopped there. Too many people around. The internees slept a hundred to a room. They didn’t have any privacy.”

“Wonder how he did it, I mean logistically.”

“Easy. Climb the tree with the rope, tie it around your neck, tie it to the tree, and jump off the branch. It would snap your neck pretty good. Okay, good to go?”

No .

Mary blinked. That voice. Did she really hear it, or was it her? Maybe it was the wind. Her hair was blowing in the gusts, whipping around her face and ears. She stared past the Costco. “Where did he get the rope?”

“Always some rope layin’ around the truck. Tie the hoes together and such.”

“So when did they discover that he had done this?”

“Not ’til Sam came to pick ’ em up.” Mr. Milton shook his head. “Didn’t have no cell phones then.”

“So Amadeo lay there all afternoon, dead?” Mary shuddered, trying to picture the tableau. The spotless blue sky, a flat expanse of green crops, a man hanging from a tree. And another, with him. “Who was the other guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“But he was an Italian internee?”

“Yes.”

“A friend?”

“Yes.”

No . That voice. Mary didn’t know if it was the wind or not. Maybe she just had jet lag. She’d had to travel all day yesterday, with two takeoffs and landings. And she hadn’t slept well last night because the Clark Fork River ran right outside her hotel room, making annoying nature sounds. In fact, she hadn’t heard a single police siren all night and was considering filing a complaint.

“Are you okay, dear?” Mr. Milton’s eyes narrowed.

“Sure.”

“You’re not related to Mr. Brandolini, are you?”

“No, just the estate’s lawyer.” Mary shook it off. “Who would know who the other internee was?”

Mr. Milton shook his head. “Nobody left would know that, I would guess. Bert, he’s one a the internees, he might know, but he’s back visitin’ Italy. Maybe the director at the fort would know. He has those archives, upstairs.”

“Archives?” Mary’s ears pricked up. She should have guessed as much. Museums had archives. Even the Mario Lanza Museum.

“You gotta ask the director about it. He keeps it. Seen enough?” Mr. Milton asked again, and Mary took pity on him.

“Yes. May I treat you to a burger, to say thanks?”

“You sure can, if there’s a vanilla milkshake with it, too.”

“Done and done, sir!”

Mr. Milton ducked inside the car, but Mary waited a minute, looking at the place where the hanging tree had been, letting her hair blow. A voice was telling her that she had to know more about how Amadeo had committed suicide, and she didn’t know if the voice was hers or his.

But she was going to find out.

The words ST. MARY’S were chiseled into the stone pillars that flanked the cemetery entrance, but Mary barely noticed the coincidence, having understood long ago that her first name was the most marketable brand in the Catholic Church. She took a right onto a driveway of soft black gravel that ran down the center of the cemetery and was lined on both sides by tall shade trees, so old that their heavy branches made a leafy canopy. The grass covering the graves had been newly mowed, releasing a fresh, green scent, and a few old-fashioned verdigris sprinklers sprayed leaky arcs of water into the sunlight, saturating the air with an uncommon humidity.