Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page A

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Five
FAMILY THANKSGIVING
    I T WAS STARTING to snow as they drove home, big, wet flakes that melted on the windshield. By the time Chip drove into the yard with his sister and cousin, the snowfall was heavy enough to coat the fields, but not bad enough to make Doug and Mimi think they wouldn’t be able to get to the airport in the morning.
    Mimi started a load of clothes while Lara helped Susan set out leftovers in the kitchen. Doug put a bottle of wine on the table. He and Mimi almost always drank with supper. Since Jim and Susan didn’t care much for alcohol, drinking rarely and only on festive occasions, Doug always brought four or five bottles with him. Tonight, after asking the blessing, Susan gave a self-conscious laugh and let Doug fill a glass for her. The wine flushed her and softened her. She even flirted a little with Doug.
    Jim, watching her eager smile, the light glinting on her pale freckles, thought how much more vital she was than her small, elegant sister-in-law. Mimi worked out every day, but Susan worked, and it made her more vivid, at least to Jim. I scored so much better than you did, he thought in silent competition with his brother. You went for looks, but I won on personality.
    Nate was full of everything he’d seen and done with his big cousins today—the lights, the zoo—all the things he saw regularly in Chicago seemed magical because he’d done them with Chip and Lara. Chip had even bought him an early Christmas present, his very first big-league baseball glove. “Me and Chip, we’re going to be in the outfield. For the Cubs.”
    “Royals, doofus.” Chip grinned, and cuffed Nate lightly on the ear.
    “How’d the cleanup go?” Lara asked.
    Mimi detailed the day’s woes, but Doug interrupted to ask about the marijuana. “Who’d be in there doing dope?”
    Mimi looked worriedly at Nate. He was arm wrestling Chip, who faked a strenuous effort and then let Nate knock his arm over half the time.
    “Maybe Junior Schapen,” Lara suggested. “He and Eddie, they go all over on Junior’s bike. They could ride across the fields to the house and no one would see them.”
    “Peter Ropes would if they came in from behind,” Susan pointed out.
    Mimi wanted to know who Eddie was.
    “Eddie Burton,” Chip said over Nate’s head. “He’s kind of a retard.”
    “Etienne! You know better than to use that language.”
    “We know, Mom, we know,” Lara put in hastily. “He’s a sad case. Maybe he got lead poisoning as a baby, from sucking on all those rusted-out cars in their yard, or maybe something else that stopped him being able to learn even the whole alphabet, but you have to admit he’s gotten pretty creepy now he’s older. Even when we were still in school at Kaw Valley Eagle, he was doing stuff like starting fires in the trash cans.”
    “Yeah, but Junior sicced him on that,” Chip interrupted her.
    “Maybe,” Lara said, “but did Junior make him come into the girls’ bathroom and crawl under the stall to look up Kimberly’s skirt?”
    “Eddie Burton?” Doug echoed. “What’s he doing with Junior Schapen? I saw Hank Drysdale when I went into town yesterday, and he was full of some rigmarole about Clem Burton assaulting Arnie, or something. He was surprised that I didn’t know, until I reminded him that my brother was the original trio of hear-no-evil monkeys rolled into one.”
    “Burtons have a hard enough time of it without me spreading their problems all over the U.S.,” Jim said through thin lips. “You know good and well that you can’t farm in the valley—”
    “—if you’re on bad terms with your neighbors,” his children and brother finished in a chorus.
    “Which makes no sense,” Doug added, “because the Schapens go out of their way to be on bad terms with everyone.”
    Hank Drysdale was the county sheriff. When he and Doug were in law school together, Hank used to come out to the farm for picnics or to pick sweet corn; he got to know a