Crimes by Moonlight

Hixton by William Kent Krueger

A couple of miles outside the little town of Citadel, Wisconsin, the gravel road dropped into a tree-shaded hollow, and beyond that lay marshland. As soon as he cleared the trees, D‘Angelo saw the cabin. It sat back from the road a full quarter mile. The turnoff was marked by a wood-burned sign that read “Hams. Smoked and Honey Cured.” He drove his new ’53 Studebaker Starliner down a narrow dirt causeway between sinister-looking pools of dark water full of cattails gone brown. The high ground where the cabin stood also held a sturdy barn, an animal pen, and a large garden plot littered with stubble from a recent harvest. In the backyard, a young woman paused in hanging the wash and watched him come. The sheets on the line hung heavy in the still air, white against the gray of the overcast sky and the brown of the marsh reeds and the black of the water. An old man sat in a rocker on the front porch. When D’Angelo got out of the Studebaker, he saw that the old man’s lap was crossed by the barrel of a shotgun.

“Far enough,” the old man said before D’Angelo had even taken a step.

“Greet all your customers this way?”

“Until I’m sure they’re customers.”

“A wonder you sell anything.”

“No wonder once you taste the product. You a customer?”

“What do I look like?”

“A man who answers a question with a question.”

D’Angelo smiled. “Heard in town that you make the best hams this side of the Mississippi.”

“Any side of the Mississippi, mister.”

“You smoke the hams yourself?”

The old man gave a brief wave toward a smokehouse in a far corner of the yard. “Right over there. What’s your pleasure? Hickory smoked or honey cured?”

“ Hickory smoked’ll do.”

The old man nodded but didn’t move. He studied D’Angelo carefully. “Wherebouts you from? Cuz you’re not from around here.”

“You neither,” D’Angelo said.

“We’re talking about you right now.” The old man’s grip tightened on the shotgun.

“ Nebraska,” D’Angelo said. “Place called Hixton.”

“Hixton?” The old man leaned forward. “Son, it’s not ham you came for. What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

“About what?

“Five missing boys in Hixton.”

“Hixton was a long time ago and far away from here.”

“Then there’s no harm in talking.”

“What’s your name?”

“Martin.”

“That a last name?”

“Last name’s D’Angelo. And you’re Albert German.”

“Why you want to know about Hixton?”

“I’m a newspaper reporter, Mr. Gorman. I’m working on a story.”

“No one cares about Hixton. Too long ago.” He was more than seventy, with a face parched by the sun. The squint of his eyes may also have been due to the sun, but D’Angelo thought not. “Ah, what the hell,” Gorman finally said, and beckoned his visitor forward.

There was another chair on the porch. D’Angelo took it, wondering if it was where the young woman sat with the old man.

“How’d you find me?” Gorman asked.

“It’s what I do. Find people. Find things. Find the truth.”

“The truth?” Gorman laughed, a sound as parched as his face. “People don’t want the truth. If they looked straight at the truth, it’d scorch their eyeballs right off their skulls.”

Several swine trotted out from a small structure inside the pen D’Angelo had seen on his approach. The animals came to the fence and stuck their pink snouts between the rails. Beyond the pen lay the marsh, which stretched away in all directions under the dismal sky.

D’Angelo said, “It would be difficult for someone to come at you without being seen.”

“Damn near impossible,” Gorman agreed.

“Twenty years ago, you left Hixton in a great hurry. What were you afraid of, Mr. Gorman? And what are you afraid of still?”

Through that squint of his eyes, the old man studied the marsh. He finally said, “What do you know about Hixton?”

This is what D’Angelo knew and what he told Gorman.

In the fall of 1933, a teenage boy named Lester Bennett attended a dance held in the gymnasium at Hixton Senior High School. He’d gone without a date. A shy boy, he hadn’t danced with anyone. He’d left alone and had never made it home.

Two months later another boy, Skip Grogan, age sixteen, went out at 4:00 a.m. to do his morning newspaper route. He was a quiet but conscientious kid. No friends to speak of. An only child, and his mother doted on him. He delivered half the papers that morning, from State Street to Main, but delivered nothing after that. Like Lester Bennett, he simply vanished.

In February a kid named Jason Weller went for a hayride sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. He was an awkward kid who reluctantly accompanied his cousin, a girl in need of a date. They nestled in the hay of the wagon with lots of other teenagers. Afterward, they drank hot chocolate and ate sugar donuts around a bonfire. Then he walked his cousin home under a full moon, said good night, and was never seen again.

The people of Hixton were understandably upset. They raised a hue and cry and demanded to know why the authorities didn’t have a clue about the missing boys. The local police asked for the help of a state investigator. Albert Gorman was sent in answer.

“Sorry sons of bitches, those local cops,” Gorman said. “I took one look at their case notes and knew the only way they’d get their man was if he walked into the office, confessed, took the key, and locked himself in a cell.”

“Did you think you’d have better luck?” D’Angelo asked.

“Luck? Wasn’t any luck to it. Solving a crime is simply the steady elimination of possibilities.”

“What were the possibilities?”

Gorman rocked back in his chair. He lifted the shotgun from his lap and leaned it against the cabin wall, still within easy reach. He folded his hands over his belly, which had probably once been hard and flat but with time had grown doughy. He wore a white shirt open at the collar, the thinner white of an undershirt visible beneath. His khakis were spotless and pressed to a sharp crease. His boots were black and shined. D’Angelo wondered if it was the young woman in the backyard who took such good care of him.

“First I looked at the commonalities,” Gorman said. “All teenage boys, all attending high school, all socially inept and isolated, all caught alone in the dark. This suggested to me that the victims weren’t chosen at random. They’d been carefully selected by someone who knew them and knew their activities and their schedules. So I asked myself who would have that kind of knowledge of all these boys? My answer was someone at the high school. A teacher, maybe, or counselor or administrator.

“It probably wouldn’t be someone who’d been there for a while, or the disappearances would have begun earlier. So I looked at those who were new to the school that year. There were only two. An English teacher, Miss Evelyn Hargrove. And the baseball coach, Hank Abernathy. Miss Hargrove was a wisp of a thing from Alabama, fresh out of college, all fluttery and feathery and smelling of exotic scents, and the boys in school were gaga over her. She lived in a rooming house with three other single women, and they all did everything together and knew each other’s habits intimately and played canasta every night that they didn’t have dates, which was the case more often than not. Turned out on two of the three nights that a boy went missing Hargrove was playing canasta.

“So I turned my full attention to Abernathy. Now there was an odd duck.”

The cabin door opened, and the young woman D‘Angelo had seen hanging the wash stepped outside. She was pretty, with fair, soft skin, eyes dark blue as a sky sliding into nightfall, long black hair, and she smelled of fresh laundry. She wore a plain white dress that reached to her ankles, and the collar ran just below the fragile hollow of her throat. When she appeared, the swine in the pen began an uproar of grunting. To D’Angelo, who knew nothing about pigs, it appeared that they might be hoping she had slop for them, or whatever it was that they were fed.

“Excuse me for interrupting,” she said with a pleasant smile. “I just wondered if you gentlemen might care for a refreshment.”

Gorman said, “Mr. D‘Angelo, this is my daughter. Sweetie, this is Martin D’Angelo.”

She said, “Would lemonade and cookies appeal to anyone?”

“Fine with me,” Gorman said.

“I’d like that,” D’Angelo replied, and he watched the tilt of the young woman’s hips as she turned and the undulating slope of her ass as she walked away.

“Mr. D’Angelo?” the old man said.

D’Angelo returned his attention to his host. “You said Abernathy was an odd duck.”

“Talented athlete. Could have played in the majors, but what did he do? He coached in a little town in the middle of nowhere. I asked myself why a man would do that. What he was running from, hiding from?”

“Was he married?”

“Nope, and that was another unusual thing. Good-looking as they came, but he had no wife, no sweetheart.”

Through an open window drifted the sound of Gorman’s daughter softly singing. Listening to the haunting lilt, D’Angelo almost lost the thread of his thoughts. With an effort, he pulled himself back and said, “What did that suggest to you?”

“I figured maybe he was the kind of man who had no interest in women. And if that was true, it might point toward an explanation for the missing boys. But I had no evidence, no proof, and it would have been stupid to tip my hand. So I put men to watching him.”

“And then the fourth boy disappeared,” D’Angelo said.

“Yep. Early spring, two months after the last kid.”

“Edward Greeley,” D’Angelo said. “A young man with ambition, a desire for Broadway or the movies. He had the lead in the senior class play, The Boyfriend. After the final performance, he went to a cast party at the home of Gwendolyn Murdoch, the drama teacher who’d directed the play. She caught him spiking the punch with rum from a silver flask he’d brought, which she confiscated. She gave it to the police during their investigation.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Gorman said.

“What about your surveillance of the baseball coach?”

“According to the man I assigned to him that night, Abernathy went to the movies and then to a diner for a late meal. He was sitting on a stool, eating, when Edward Greeley left the party and vanished.”

“Which effectively eliminated him as a suspect?”

“Pretty much. From what I understand, he eventually married a librarian in a neighboring town, so maybe he was just going through a period of adjustment in Hixton. Who knows?”

“Where did that leave you?”

“Looking for other possibilities.”

Gorman’s daughter shoved the screen door open with her hip and stepped onto the porch, holding a plate of cookies in one hand and a pitcher of iced lemonade in the other. D’Angelo stood up quickly. “Let me help you.”

The pigs near the marsh set up a rage of grunting again, but the young woman ignored them.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. She handed D’Angelo the cookies and set the pitcher on the wide flat of the porch rail. “I’ll be right back with glasses.”

D’Angelo was tempted to follow her into the dark of the cabin, but Gorman’s voice held him back. “Sit down. We haven’t finished talking.”

D’Angelo placed the cookies next to the pitcher and returned to his seat. The swine had fallen silent again but continued to stare at the cabin.

“Other possibilities?” he said.

Gorman nodded. “I figured there was some other common thread to the boys that I wasn’t seeing. I racked my brain trying to think what it could be. The pressure from the local police and from the populace was tremendous, I can tell you. I lost a lot of sleep thinking it through.”

Gorman’s daughter returned with two glasses and poured lemonade for both men. She asked, “Have you tried one of my cookies, Mr. D’Angelo? They’re just sugar cookies, but I do a pretty good job with them, if I do say so myself.”

D‘Angelo took one, bit into it, and thought he’d never tasted a cookie quite so delicious, and he told her so. She smiled, a blush rising in her cheeks, and D’Angelo decided he’d never seen a young woman so beautiful.

“Finish your cookie, Mr. D’Angelo,” Gorman said. “We still have talking to do. Leave us, Sweetie.”

She left them. D’Angelo finished his cookie, sat down, and felt an immense emptiness in the wake of the young woman’s departure. A deep longing for her rose in his chest.

“Like I said,” Gorman went on, “I lost a lot of sleep thinking it over. I looked at their friends, but they didn’t have many and none in common. I looked at people in the town they might all have had contact with, a minister, maybe, or a postman. Nothing there. Early on I’d looked at the routes they’d all taken on the night of their disappearance and didn’t see anything of interest. But I revisited that possibility and, without the blinders of a particular suspect narrowing my vision, I saw something.”

The young woman’s voice came through the window again, and her song was like a soft rope wrapping itself around D’Angelo’s heart and pulling it to her.

“What did you see?” he asked absently.

“That their paths all crossed at the Sweet Shoppe, a little confectionary in Hixton. It was a relatively new establishment, run by a woman named Circe Cane. I talked to the parents of the missing boys, and they told me their sons liked to frequent the shop, dropping in after school or on Saturdays. They talked with great affection about Miss Cane and about the wonderful sweets she served. So I began to investigate this Cane woman, trying to discover her background before she’d come to Hixton. And you know what, Mr. D’Angelo? I hit nothing but dead ends. Which in itself told me a whole lot. I began watching the Sweet Shoppe and Miss Cane myself.”

“And then the last boy went missing,” D’Angelo managed to say above the swirl of fog that seemed to be filling his head.

“That’s right.”

“He was a boy who’d graduated and was preparing to go into the army,” D’Angelo said. He spoke slowly, deliberately, as if he were a drunk trying to make sense.

“Yes,” Gorman said. “One night he took his little brother to a movie, and when it was over, they went to the Sweet Shoppe. Afterward he delivered his brother home safely, then returned alone to the Sweet Shoppe. It was late, almost midnight. Main Street was deserted. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the confectionary, where earlier he’d had lemonade and a sugar cookie. And he listened to the song Circe Cane sang to him through the upstairs window. He reached for the door and found it unlocked, and he went inside and never came out. And no one saw him do these things.”

“No one except you,” D’Angelo said.

Gorman nodded. “Except me.”

“Why?” D’Angelo stood up, struggling to keep his thinking straight, to fight against the current of the song inside his head that was drawing him further into the fog. “Why didn’t you do anything to stop him?”

“Oh, I tried,” Gorman said. “I slipped in after him and followed him upstairs, where Circe Cane lived. I listened at the door, and what I heard I couldn’t believe.”

“What?” D’Angelo asked, desperately trying to stay with the old man’s words. “What did you hear?”

“Circe Cane talking low and sweet to that boy, and I heard the boy answering. At first, it was in his own voice, but slowly that changed until what came from him was the sound of an animal.”

“What animal?”

“A pig, Mr. D’Angelo,” the young woman said in a lilting voice as she stepped from the cabin door. “I find them such wonderful little creatures. Sweet and loyal and, in the end, quite delicious.”

D’Angelo turned to Gorman as the world around him tilted and reeled. “Why didn’t you… why didn’t you…”

“Why didn’t I tell someone? Because, Mr. D’Angelo, who would believe such a story? No, I left my job and left Nebraska and came with Circe to this place, where I’ve done my best all these years to protect her secret and keep her safe. Here, as you so correctly pointed out, I can see all that approaches. We have enough of those pesky traveling salesmen drop by that Circe’s little pen over there is never empty. And this marshland around us, it swallows a car without a trace, believe me.” Gorman looked at Circe with deep contentment. “In return she’s fed me. There’s nothing she can’t coax from the earth. She’s a marvelous housekeeper, cook, and companion.” He reached out and ran a wrinkled hand over the soft, fair skin of her forearm. “She has other charms as well, which I’m sure you can easily imagine.”

D‘Angelo felt his legs grow weak, and he collapsed into the chair. “D’Angelo,” Gorman said. “I know that name. The last boy in Hixton, his name was D‘Angelo, too. And his little brother would be about your age now, if I remember correctly. A newspaper reporter, Mr. D’Angelo? I think not. I think you came looking for an answer.”

“D’Angelo? Oh yes, I remember that one,” Circe said with genuine delight. “Such a sweet thing, and he fattened up so nicely, too.”

She reached out and touched D’Angelo’s leg in a way that made him feel like livestock appraised for auction. And then the fog enveloped him completely, and he fell into a place as dark as the marsh water.

He woke in a bed that carried the fresh smell of clean sheets dried on a clothesline. There was another scent as well, something exotic and deeply intoxicating. And there was the unmistakable softness of a woman’s bare breast pressed against his shoulder. He turned his head on the pillow and found her gazing into his eyes, her own eyes the deep blue of desire. Without a thought he made love to her. It was glorious and like nothing he’d ever known.

Later he woke again, and the cabin was full of the wonderful aroma of a meal cooking. He found her in the kitchen, wearing a long, flowered apron over her simple white dress.

“Sit down,” she said cheerfully. “Dinner’s ready.”

He sat at the table, still a little benumbed. “Where’s Gorman?”

“Albert served his purpose for many years,” she said, “but it was time for someone new. I like you. You found me, not an easy thing. You suspected the danger, but you came anyway. And you did it because of your brother. Intelligence, courage, and loyalty, traits I’ve always greatly admired. Ulysses was much the same.” She came to his side, set a plate of food in front of him, bent, and gently kissed his shoulder. “You know,” she said, “you even look a little like him.”

D’Angelo stared at her adoringly and murmured, “I’d forgotten you. But you look the same as you did all those years ago in the Sweet Shoppe.” He glanced down at his plate, which Circe had filled with herbed potatoes and green peas and applesauce. At the center was a steaming slice of pork loin cooked to perfection.

“The meat might be a little tough,” she said, sitting across from him and taking up her napkin. “The swine it came from was much older than I prefer, but I have always hated to waste a good pig.”

D’Angelo hesitated only a moment and then dug in.