The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury Read Free Book Online Page A

not be traced. Dan’s approach to mystery callers was to treat them casually, get them talking, so he said, “You know, we don’t, as a rule, trace calls at the office either. Call tracing is tricky, and the phone company doesn’t like to do it. They will do it, I’m not saying they’ll never do it, but they won’t do it if they don’t have to. Sometimes you can get what is called a pen register, but that takes a warrant, and warrants are hard to get, too. I know in this county they are. It seems like the judges are all afraid of being overturned down the line, know what I mean?”
    “Goodbye,” said the man.
    “Now just wait a minute,” said Dan. “Which Hy-Vee?” But it was too late.
    Dan hung up the phone, put on his sheriff’s jacket, and went back outside. Joan Gower had come down from the roof and was leaning on a sawhorse, smoking a reedlike cigarette.Dan brought the ladder down, returned it to the shed out back, and explained to the woman that he had to go.
    “May I share a verse with you?” said Joan Gower.
    “O.K., one verse,” said Dan.
    She stood, rested her cigarette on the spine of the sawhorse, and opened the Bible to a place marked by a thin red ribbon.
    “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” she read, “as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
    Joan Gower retrieved her cigarette and took a drag. “Song of Solomon, eight: six and seven,” she said. “What does that say to you?”
    “I don’t know,” said Dan. “Love is powerful.”
    Joan nodded. “Good,” she said. “Solomon is grappling with the idea of love.”
     
    On the highway Dan turned on the reds, and he got to the Hy-Vee in Chesley pretty fast, but he found nothing unusual in any of the shopping carts. He saw Lenore Wells in the dairy section—she was on antidepressants, as always, and smiled her small, lonely smile. Her father had hanged himself in the vault of the Morrisville bank, and her brother was serving fifteen years in Anamosa for stealing a mail truck. Sad, sad family. Lenore told Dan about two cranes that had flown over her house early that morning, and Dan thought she was going to weep, but instead she shook her head and reached down to get some string cheese.
    There were two more Hy-Vee stores in the county, in Morrisville and in Margo. At the Hy-Vee in Morrisville theboys brought the groceries out to your car, and so there was always a line of cars at the curb, but there were no carts in the parking lot.
    The store was at one end of a little shopping center, and Dan entered through a wide corridor in which about one hundred 4-H girls were involved in a confusing demonstration of soil erosion. On a long narrow table they had set up a miniature landscape covered with sand and were now attacking the sand with fans, and squirt guns, and even their hands, although their hands corresponded to none of the erosive forces they had studied, and using them was against the rules. The girls wore white jumpsuits with green sashes, and these outfits were splattered with sand and water, and all around the table was chaos, except for one end, where the older girls presided calmly over the area designated Contour Plowing. Dan was glad to get into the Hy-Vee store, but when he looked at the idle grocery carts, he saw nothing in them except broken lettuce leaves. He left the Morrisville Hy-Vee and drove to the one in Margo.
    There he found a shopping cart with a cardboard box in it. The cart was in the northwest corner of the parking lot next to a yellow Goodwill bin. Dan looked at the box, which had once held a case of Hamm’s beer. The top was closed, each flap overlapping the next. Dan heard crying. Lifting the flaps, he found a baby wrapped in a