Another little mystery.

* * *

—

When he was cleaned up and dressed, Virgil thought about walking out to Mom’s Cafe but decided he couldn’t face a Mom’s pancake. There wasn’t much to eat at Skinner & Holland, either, but even a nuked chicken potpie would be better than Mom’s.

Holland was hauling in more edible crap when Virgil walked into the store. The crowd was noticeably thinner than it had been the other times Virgil had been there, and he overheard two people who looked like townies complaining about the toll the shootings had taken on the tourist trade. “If I catch that rat, I’ll pop his head like a fuckin’ pimple,” one guy said to the other, who replied, “Shhhh. That’s the cop.”

Virgil nodded, and said, “How ya doin’, boys. If you catch the guy, let me know. I’ll come over and shoot him for you all legal-like.”

“Nice thought, but that’s not what I heard about you,” the pimple popper said.

Hung up deciding between a turkey potpie or a chicken, Virgil took a chicken, then put it back and took a turkey, then put that back, and one of the guys said, “Take the chicken. The turkey gives you bad gas.”

Virgil took the chicken, walked it into the back room, and shoved it in the microwave. Holland came through with a box full of blue corn chips, and said, “Hope I can sell this stuff.”

“I ought to bust you for trying,” Virgil said.

“That’s how Communism got started,” Holland said, as he disappeared through the curtain into the store. He was back a minute later, and said, “You know what goes with a chicken potpie?”

“A water glass full of Everclear?”

“Well, yeah, but I was thinking of Zingers. I got a gross of Zingers coming through in a minute.”

Virgil waved off the Zingers, when they came through, and poked holes through the potpie cover with a plastic fork. Holland took the Zingers into the store. He was back a couple of minutes later, pushing through the door curtain with the empty box, when Virgil heard Skinner’s voice call, “Wardell! Wardell!”

Wardell turned, halfway through the curtain. “Yeah?”

Virgil couldn’t see Skinner but clearly heard him say, “That fuckin’ Larry beat up Jennie, man, real bad. She’s got—”

He suddenly stopped talking, and Virgil knew that Holland had cut him off and was making some finger gestures that meant “Flowers is in the back.”

Virgil swallowed some potpie, and called, “Come on back and tell me about it, Skinner. Janet getting beat up and all.”

Skinner poked his head past the curtain. “You don’t know Janet.”

“Come in here. I want to hear about it, and I want to know why Janet got beat up,” Virgil said.

Holland came through with Skinner a step behind him, both obviously uneasy, shuffling their feet. Holland said, “This has nothing to do with the shootings. This is something else.”

Virgil kept eating, and, between swallows of molten chicken grease, said, “Tell me about it anyway.”

“Ah, man,” Skinner said. Then, to Holland: “I think we ought to tell him. We can’t let it go.”

Holland bowed his head, gripped his skull with one hand, then said, “This fuckin’ apparition is gonna be the end of us. We already got two dead and two wounded. It’s like we’re back in the ’Stan.”

Skinner: “We don’t even know that the apparition has anything to do with it. The guy’s obviously a nutcase. He was gonna go off sooner or later. What does that have to do with Larry?”

“Maybe . . .”

“Fuck it, I’m gonna tell him,” Skinner said.

“Go ahead,” Holland said. “I’ve got more boxes to unload.” He started toward the back door, stopped, turned, came back, and sank into a chair facing Virgil. “I’ll tell it.”

“I’m listening,” Virgil said.

Holland told the story, folding in a few carefully selected lies. Larry Van Den Berg was a truck driver engaged to Skinner & Holland’s afternoon cashier, Janet Fischer, who they called Jennie. Fischer had done some bragging on how well the store was doing, and Van Den Berg, after thinking it over, had decided he wanted a cut. He’d told Fischer that if he didn’t get one, that he’d tell everybody that the apparition was faked by Skinner and Holland, and that Fischer had posed as the Virgin Mary.

“He made it all up. It’s complete bullshit. But if he started talking it around—well, he could mess up the whole town. Jennie told us what he wanted, and we went over to her house to have a talk with him.”

Skinner said, “Tell him the rest of it. Tell him about Ralph.”

Virgil said, “Yeah, tell me about Ralph.”

Holland said, “Well, we were desperate to keep Larry from starting this kind of talk. Jennie had seen some . . . emails . . . on Larry’s computer, about some Lego sales . . .”

“Lego sales?”

* * *

—

When it had all come out, Virgil said, “We had Iowa cops up here last year, looking around. They called me to let me know. Lot of Legos involved, I guess.”

“Thirty-eight hundred cubic feet, worth between a half million and a million bucks, depending on what they were,” Skinner said. “Looked to me like more than half of them were still in the trailer.”

“I’ll have to tell somebody about this,” Virgil said. “If he beat up your cashier, I don’t feel too bad about it.”

Holland and Skinner looked at each other, and Skinner nodded.

“But what’s the right thing to do?” Holland said. “I mean, I know what the legal thing is, but we’ve known Larry a long time, and he had a really awful, mean childhood. I went to school with him, so I know. We want him to go to prison? We could get a couple of Jennie’s friends and have a chat with him.”

Virgil asked, “Would that chat involve a pool cue?”

“I don’t know where we’d get a pool cue,” Holland said, “but something like that. Jennie has quite a few friends in town. Larry doesn’t.”

Virgil shook his head, and said, “I’ll handle it, Wardell. You? Stay out of it.”

* * *

—

At that moment, Fischer pushed through the door. She was wearing a pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a faded high school letter jacket with a Greek harp where the letter would normally go, the insignia of a marching band letter. She had a purple ring under one eye, and a badly swollen lip where her teeth had cut into it. She said, “Whoops!” and started to back out, but Virgil said, “Janet? Come in here.”