“Maybe, but not Glen,” Roy said. “He’d come here twice a year for a haircut, and about the time Danny got finished working over his ear, we had firm indications that he was a straight shooter, if you get my meaning.”

“You were checking him out? I find that interesting,” Danielle Visser told her husband, who was not even slightly embarrassed. Back to Virgil: “Now, about this BD? Is he a suspect?”

“Not at all,” Virgil said. “There’s a chance he might have been the last person to talk to Glen, but even that’s a little unlikely.”

“I’ll put up a request for information,” Danielle Visser said. “Most everybody in town reads me, now that we got so much going on.”

“Do that,” Virgil said. “Ask for email replies to my official address. I’ll give you that. Don’t pass on my phone number. The nuts would drive me nuts.”

—

The Vissers went to post the request for information, and Virgil turned on the small television and clicked around until he found a Minnesota Twins game, turned down the volume, and got on the phone to Frankie.

“I thought about coming home tonight, but . . . I need to push,” he said.

“We’re fine . . . It was windy here today. All the apple blossoms blew off the trees. They looked kind of neat on the ground, like a quilt.”

They talked for an hour and a half about stuff that nobody else would be interested in.

The Twins lost.

6

Janet Fischer’s great-great-great-grandfather had arrived in Wheatfield in the last half of the nineteenth century and, though Fischer didn’t know it, had given her the same oval face, yellow-blond hair, and bright blue eyes as he had.

She’d inherited her figure directly from her mother, a woman of French-Canadian descent who could still turn heads after sixty-two years and five children. Janet had been considered a Wheatfield natural resource since high school.

Not a totally untapped resource. She’d been engaged to marry Larry Van Den Berg for nine years and was known to be growing impatient. She’d heard the phrase “If he’s already gettin’ the milk, why would he buy the cow?” at least fifty times too many, but still had some faith that Van Den Berg would take her to the altar.

Van Den Berg was an over-the-road truck driver, working out of Albert Lea, making regular runs in a refrigerated rig to supermarkets on the West Coast. Fresh sausage, mostly. As a driver, he was gone for days at a time, and Janet—Jennie—found somewhat guilty solace in the arms of John Jacob Skinner.