The Big Seven Read online

  Early the next morning he heard steps on the front porch. When he got up he found a red leather-bound journal made in Italy inscribed to him with “Good luck. Love, Diane. Bought this in Perugia.” He ate a light breakfast knowing that too much food steals brain power. He washed the jam off his fingers and took the journal and a cup of coffee to his study. He couldn’t resist watching Delphine doing her nude morning yoga. Her bare ass seemed to be aimed at him. He had a hard-on which is not a good way to start a writing day. He opened his journal and wrote.

  Cain rose up and slew Abel. The first human brothers. Not a good start for the human race. It was over jealousy, Cain’s anger that Abel’s gift was more acceptable to God than his was. So he killed him. Daughters would have been easier than these two guys. Is violence basically a “dick thing” as girls say these days?

  Looking these words over cast Sunderson into despair. He had wanted something elegant on the order of the Sir Thomas Browne he had read in college. What to do? Keep writing, Diane would advise, but then what had she written? He had never looked at the journal she kept in a desk drawer in her room. The act could be too craven like any marital snooping. A friend thought his wife might be cheating so he followed her one day. She stopped at the apartment of a bookstore clerk for an hour, he told Sunderson. For lunch? He doubted it, more likely for what is called a nooner. However, the friend couldn’t confront her as within his own ethic he shouldn’t have been following her. “If she’s cheating on me I finally don’t want to know it,” he concluded.

  Cain rose up and slew Abel. From time immemorial men have murdered each other, in this case over jealousy. Abel’s gift was more pleasing to God which angered Cain. These were purportedly the first human brothers, born of Adam and Eve. Centuries later the streets of Jerusalem ran red with blood after the Crusades started. Evidently some Arabs were still vexed by the Crusades despite their having taken place over a thousand years ago but then there is no statute of limitations for murder. Just lately we expected the Indians to celebrate the anniversary of Lewis and Clark despite it spelling their doom. The whites are a confused race indeed. It has been to our collective advantage that scarcely any of us knows our own history. The cheers of Fourth of July could be dammed otherwise.

  Sunderson was confused because he had dreamt about Kate, a spindly girl of twelve years with big ears who was Sprague’s daughter. Perhaps he ignored her out of guilt because her father died in his home. Kate was quiet and pleasant, helped Monica in the kitchen, and Lemuel had taught her bird watching. Sunderson idly wondered if Lemuel had made love to her. Lemuel had a taste for young stuff, as they say. Another idea arose. Could Kate despite her youth be a coconspirator? She kept herself as remote as possible from everyone else. She was especially welcome at Lemuel’s house. She and Lemuel would pack a lunch and walk far back in the forest to a small lake where there was a family of loons which thrilled them with their querulous cries.

  His own mind was a bit twisted on the subject. Monica was only nineteen but seemed a woman in every respect. Every female is different but there must be laws, he thought, to protect them from predatory males of which there were many. Meanwhile Kate ignored everyone and everyone ignored her. At least Lemuel didn’t beat her into a prune. Sunderson had heard that once Sprague beat her severely for pouring a bottle of his vodka out on the ground. To her vodka was the obvious curse of the family. Oddly, he thought, Lemuel never mentioned her. Monica said that Kate was helpful and had alphabetized the spice rack. Sunderson wondered if it was still intact. Maybe he should take a look?

  He was suddenly bored with his cop mind when he should be pondering the eighth deadly sin. The Old Testament was full of horrors he remembered from when he read it in high school, skipping through the nonsense of Deuteronomy and Habakkuk. It was during a religious phase when he was trying to help his brother Bobby through a profound depression. The coach was angry at him because Sunderson had quit the squad when he was their roughest tackler at middle linebacker. At the time Sunderson was very strong and known for being able to push a powerless lawn mower up the steep hills of Munising and for shoveling snowy driveways faster than anyone else. Every time there was a snowstorm there were many calls for his services. But he had quit the football team because after school in the fall Bobby liked to ride on the lumber barge over to Grand Island. Bobby would stumble along the beach on his artificial leg and they would look for rare agates among the rocks, put them in a pail, and Bobby would sell them to tourists in the summer for good money. One day they missed the barge’s return to the mainland and Dad had to come over and pick them up. Berenice was on the beach yelling at them, as always. Sunderson was having a difficult time. He had lost his popularity when he quit the team. Everyone was mad at him, including teachers. He had fallen in love with a transfer student from Flint who came north so her mother could take care of her infirm grandmother on a small farm on the way to Trout Lake. Both Marilyn and Sunderson were juniors. She was sexually experienced and he wasn’t. She let him see her nude on a warm early October day out in the woods. He had to lean against a tree to avoid fainting. It was a much rawer experience than he had expected in his relentless fantasies. She was a precocious city girl and had stolen some condoms from an ex-boyfriend. She put Sunderson through his clumsy paces. He still felt it might have been the best sex of his life. One day Marilyn’s mother went shopping in Marquette and the grandmother died when Sunderson and Marilyn were supposed to be looking after her and not fucking on the living room sofa. Out of guilt Marilyn no longer wanted to see Sunderson despite his relentless efforts. Soon after her mother sold the farm and had an auction for the belongings. She and Marilyn drove back to Flint in her newish blue Buick she had bought at a discount while working at the Buick plant. Once on a hot July day he and Marilyn had made love in the sweltering backseat of the car and he still had memories of the odor of her sweat and the new car smell.

  Next morning bright and early he shopped for groceries in Escanaba and drove to the cabin to hopefully fish which he did immediately on his arrival. He caught a few small rainbows and one good brown on a caddis fly. When he returned to the cabin he was irked by Lemuel and Kate showing up wearing their bird-watching binoculars, but he gave them coffee and didn’t act cross. They were headed upstream for the afternoon and Sunderson realized that gave him free time for snooping. Kate offered to make spaghetti for dinner seeing that he had bought some Italian sausage. He gracefully accepted and waited until they disappeared out of sight upriver before driving over to the second burned house. No one was around and he entered the burned-out kitchen. Luckily the fire truck was parked on the back drive and the pantry was scorched but pretty much intact. He put on rubber gloves to avoid marring any prints or leaving any of his own. He was very gentle when he discovered that the small amount of alum didn’t smell like alum, used for making pickles crisp. He knew what it smelled like because as a child his mother would dab on alum when he had a canker sore. The only other light-colored spices were dried mustard which was definitely dried mustard and a tiny amount of garlic powder that was transparently not garlic powder. He put all three in his coat pocket and left pronto fearing to get caught. He drove up to a hill where he could get cell service to call Smolens who was thrilled with the story and the work. It wouldn’t be admissible unless they could sneak it back into the kitchen, but maybe it would help get a confession. He said he never thought of Kate when he did prints of anyone working in the kitchen because she was too young. He added that he still hoped to find the prints of Monica and Lemuel on the bottles. Sunderson let it pass knowing how hard it is to change your mind when you think you have solid suspicions. He’d send someone out immediately for a pickup.

  Sunderson was irritated with himself over the Kate situation. In his very necessary mental rehearsals of the crime scene he had foolishly bypassed her, maybe because of her age as Smolens said. Irrelevant, dammit. Lemuel could very well have engineered the poisonings through her despite the ide
a that Monica was more obvious.

  The deputy reached the cabin in the record time of a couple of hours just as Lemuel and Kate returned from bird watching. Kate saw Sunderson hand the deputy a small paper bag.

  “What’s this all about?” she asked, naturally curious.

  “Just some evidence from your house.” Sunderson stopped himself from telling her they were dusting for prints. She looked startled.

  Kate whipped up a fine pasta sauce working at a speed incomprehensible to Sunderson. He kept a close eye on her while she was cooking to make sure everything came from his kitchen. She was masterful at chopping garlic which made her attractive to him since he was a clod at garlic and onions. She was however slight indeed and if Lemuel was making love to her there was something clinical going on. Lemuel was a little off and had probably overheard their interchange about evidence. Sunderson was having a bountiful glass of whiskey while Lemuel had a little wine. Kate refused a beer saying sharply that she intended to never drink a drop in her life.

  “Look what it did to my family,” she fairly hissed. “My father would be alive now if he wasn’t a mean drunk who had to be shot.”

  “I’m so sorry. It couldn’t be helped.” Sunderson had a lump in his throat despite the fact that Sprague had had it coming. Him or me was the conclusion. Monica had since told him that Kate’s mother was terrible calling her U.D. for Ugly Duckling while her father had frequently taken her fishing and hunting. She was very good at finding the grouse and woodcock he shot in heavy cover. She would also pluck the birds and get them table ready. In Sprague’s mind she was a third son and a fine substitute now that Tom and Paul were gone.

  Sunderson allayed his melancholy by drinking faster. Lemuel’s spirits picked up talking about birds. They had seen two local rarities, a lazuli bunting and a black-headed grosbeak. Then he talked about getting out of prison that first time after doing seventeen years. He had been crazed for nature after being penned up that long and had bought a used Subaru and drove to a great birding region near the Mexico-Arizona border in late March and had added one hundred and nineteen species of birds to his life list in two weeks. He said this with such an air of triumph that Sunderson was almost moved and thought too bad you’ll likely finish your life back in prison. Sunderson was ultimately without sympathy. You can’t just go around killing people no matter how bad they are, but as a claustrophobe Sunderson dreaded the very idea of a prison cell. Death would be better, or so he thought for the time being. As a retiree he was surprised how little he thought about death, the end of the story. That wasn’t a flip idea but a truth favored by Native Americans. Your story had a beginning, middle, and end like all stories. He liked the epitaph that the anthropologist Loren Eiseley had written for himself, “We loved the earth but could not stay.” What could be more beautifully concise? Maybe he’d have it engraved on his headstone. He must instruct Diane. Who else could he ask?

  They had finished a fine dinner when Smolens called to say that all of the prints were Kate’s and complimented him on his good work. Kate and Lemuel looked at Sunderson quizzically when he hung up the phone, thinking to himself that they were perfectly capable of killing him if they thought it was to their advantage.

  It was early on the warmest morning of the year when Lemuel dropped Kate off for fishing continuing on to Escanaba to see his broker or so he said driving off. Kate evidently didn’t have waders and had on short shorts and hip boots. There was a five-inch gap of bare thigh between the tops of her boots and shorts and there was a bit of the electric in her rounded butt in her short shorts.

  They fished for about two hours before he had to climb the bank and cool off under a maple tree. He was sweating hard under his waders so he took them and his pants off and sprawled under the tree in his boxer shorts. Kate joined him sitting against the tree in front of his face with her legs cocked up, her dainty crotch aimed at his nose. He felt his cock rising underneath him, Old Mister Fool. He reminded himself that to fool with her could be actionable and was forced to acknowledge that Lemuel was brilliant in his conning. He knew that Monica liked him a great deal but he also knew that to a specific degree even she was a setup. Lemuel was an obvious pimp with these girls and Kate could be held against him as leverage if he was stupid enough to touch her.

  “It must be in the eighties. I’m going to take a dip.”

  She stood and quickly shed her clothes, having an awkward time with the tight hip boots. She trotted to the river, screeched at the cold water and paddled out to a sand bar where she stood shivering and flailing her arms for warmth. She came back and sat nude against the tree on her T-shirt.

  “Did I give you a hard-on?” she asked lightly. “Let me see it.” He could tell she was putting on bravado but there was a quaver in her voice.

  He said no. It was the first piece of ass he’d ever refused, young or old. These oversexed Ames girls were making his stomach churn. Kate should be worried about school and when she’d develop, not being used as her uncle’s honey trap.

  They fished for another hour in the hottest part of the afternoon, then walked back to his car in the shade of the woods across the river. He carried her shorts, T-shirt, and hip boots across the river in his waders and she swam.

  When they got back, Lemuel offered him a vodka and orange juice which he drank thirstily, having surreptitiously watched to be sure it came out of a sealed bottle.

  “I found four cases of half gallons in the root cellar, more than enough for my lifetime. You take this one.” He pushed the half gallon of vodka toward Sunderson who said thank you. He never drank vodka which was just tasteless alcohol and only valuable in a pinch. He preferred the flavor of Canadian blended whiskey like VO.

  He took a three-hour nap, very long for him, and toward the end he was only half asleep and thought about the Seven Deadly Sins and also The Poems of Jesus Christ, the book Diane had given him. This was all in comic contrast to his day so far. There was a knock on the door and Kate entered carrying a casserole dish.

  “I was making a choucroute garnie for Lemuel and made some extra for you. It’s just sauerkraut, sausages, onions, potatoes and one pig hock in the bottom. I didn’t have any dried mustard to make you hot mustard.”

  Sunderson reflected that the dried mustard could have killed him. Her brash pronunciation of choucroute garnie was sweet, just like Diane’s when she made the dish which he loved. There were enough Germans in the Marquette area that good sausages were readily available though Diane had said that the dish had crept north and east from Wisconsin.

  They were sitting at the table with her dishing up the meal when she said, “I think Sara did it. Levi let all the men beat her, even the male children. No one could have endured what she did and forgive it. She was stuck-up about her nice hands and was always wearing rubber gloves to protect them. Maybe she didn’t want to leave fingerprints? She was always trying to help Monica or me with the cooking but she was totally lame at it except for washing dishes.”

  Sunderson stopped in mid-bite wishing he had hot mustard for the sausages but quite startled at the idea of Sara. He hadn’t thought of her because Monica had never told him she helped in the kitchen, and she was always lethargic, drunk, or both.

  “Lemuel admitted to me that after prison he had had a long affair with Sara,” Kate continued. “She was depressed when he threw her over for Monica, all the more reason, I mean her anger, to try to frame Lemuel and Monica.”

  Sunderson was thinking that it would be easy to open a spice bottle without leaving a print. Naturally Kate’s prints were on the bottle because she was doing the cooking. How easy it was to kill one another! And without the vulgarity of guns. Even the popes used poison. He called Smolens with the new possible developments being careful because he knew Smolens had been having marital problems and had a definite soft spot for Sara. Would it never end? Probably not. Sunderson disliked this sort of irony except in himself. You could ge
t a crush on a burned woman and visit her every day in the guise of police work.

  He stared at Kate and thought that she and Monica and Sara all reminded him of the hundreds of statues in the Xalapa museum whose faces were turning into those of the dread jaguars. He also thought that despite his retirement here he was in the middle of a murderous spree.

  Chapter 22

  The next morning there was a relentless cold rain. He heard it in the predawn sleepless hours. He went out with his coffee, standing under the eaves and seeing the rain was going to sock in for the day. He packed up and started to drive home, calling Diane halfway there in case she could have dinner. She was bereft and missing her husband. Sunderson actually felt morose for her. Her new marriage had gone so well for a year. They had a glorious trip to Italy, Spain, and France. They even went to China for God’s sake, a trip well beyond Sunderson’s interest. Her obsession with art could carry her anyplace.

  The day Diane’s husband died Mona had called about 10:00 p.m. to tell him. He had the Miami–San Antonio NBA game on and was exhausted watching them run up and down the court. Mona told him not to bother but he drove over to the hospital. The night was black and cloudy but still a glint of light to the west. There was a little rain as he walked from the parking lot to the hospital and he was able to press down his unruly hair having forgotten to brush it. He was wearing old clothes and a shirt with food stains on it.

  There were several of Diane’s friends in the waiting room with her. When he walked in she hugged him very hard and sobbed. They all drove over to Diane’s house and Mona opened a couple of bottles of Richebourg which was so delicious he thought it nearly made you forget the occasion. Mona also put a gentle Mendelssohn CD on. Three of the women who sat on the sofa were also widows. He sat there stiffly thinking about their husbands, hard-charging men who overate and all died at his age in their early sixties. Probably none had avoided the fat on their pig hocks.