Chapter 2
Daphne stirred the next morning around eight-thirty. She woke her phone and scanned Instagram through a few minutes of mental grog, liking a self-portrait of stripper “Nadiaaa93” displaying the incandescence-rimed curve of her ass between scant red loops of graceful string. She flicked through a few more photos, one of a tall tree looming almost straight up in half-silhouette against the vividly blue sky. Another depicted a grimy car parked next to a bollard with the word “DIE” traced into the rear windshield’s dirt-patina. And the breath fled her lungs as the prior night’s blood pooled out again.
She searched Google News for Williston and saw nothing about the death on the front page. “Williston murder” brought up a small item published in the Herald a few hours prior and containing only details she’d witnessed, except for the victim’s name and age: Daisey Edelson, twenty-four. No mention of her, or an arrest or a suspect, or the plastic blankness of the eyes gazing over the miniature peaks of the asphalt. She let her phone slip down and fell into a light doze disturbed by elliptical scenes of trees and antenna towers and windmills crumpling to the ground in stiff sections.
By nine the dream of real sleep died. Her phone confirmed that her lunchtime shift would start at eleven-thirty. She extracted a Parliament from her pack and sat up and placed it between her lips, and spat it out. In the bathroom she half-brushed her teeth, then retrieved the cigarette and took it to the balcony.
After a long shower, including the realization that she had left her curling iron at the club, and a leisurely breakfast at the petty-chic renovated McDonald’s, she parked on the side of the club and walked to the back in a grey velour track suit, her shoulder-length-plus blonde hair in her standard mid-ponytail. The parking lot lay empty save for a twisted chalk outline describing what might’ve been a grotesque ballet leap atop a cancerous dark splotch on the pavement. A flimsy perimeter of police tape restricted her to the edge of the asphalt as she made her way to the door.
Inside, no noise of patron or public address system came from the common area. She entered the dressing room and found Hank speaking with a pair of business casual men among the wood panels and rain-stained ceiling tiles. The men looked her once over and returned their attention to the club’s owner, who gave her a slight curt headshake. She retreated into the hallway and poured the waiting time into her phone. The Herald’s story in an update now proclaimed the city’s official eagerness for any tips and suspicions to be had from the public.
A few minutes later the trio in the dressing room came out to greet her as one.
“Pardon me, miss,” said one of the visitors, a tall man in flat-front khakis and an almost-fitted blazer whose hair swept in slick dark waves toward the back of his head from either side of his off-center part. “My name’s Detective Bjornsson.” He held out his hand.
Daphne shook it. “Your mother name you ‘Detective’?” she asked.
Hank blanched, but Bjornsson smiled with the side of his mouth. “A witness who notices details. ‘I’m Detective Bjornsson,’ I should say, and this guy’s name is…”
“Detective Rowicki,” said the other cop. He stood a shoulder broader and half a head shorter than Bjornsson, with blond hair cropped short enough to obviate styling. A polo shirt met the belt circumscribing his early middle-aged paunch in a tight plunge.
“Well I’m Daphne Everly.” She turned her languid hand from Bjornsson to Rowicki, who took it into a thick paw. “Detective, I gotta say, I don’t get stares this good on stage, usually.”
“You were on the premises last night, Miss Everly?” asked Rowicki, without affect.
“But it’s not creepy. More like, I’m a textbook, and you didn’t get it the first two times.”
“Don’t mind Detective Rowicki’s process. It gets the job done. You were, as he said, here,” said Bjornsson.
“I was. You should have a report about what I said in your case file or whatever, assuming you’re here about the murder.”
Bjornsson scanned the circle of faces. “Who, uh, said ‘murder?’”
“I found the body. Those reports are written for reading, right? I can’t imagine too many ways a throat would open up like that, in a parking lot, without a knife, and violence.”
“Of course we wouldn’t be here if foul play was not in the option table,” said Rowicki, cadence slow and even like the dammed Missouri River.
“Well I apologize, Miss”--Bjornsson raised an inquiring eyebrow, to which she nodded--”Everly, just, you know, we both like to stand on detail. But I guess we’re in luck here: Rowicki and I appreciated your statement from last night, and we’d appreciate even more a chance to ask you a couple extra questions.”
Daphne considered. “How about we set up an appointment.”
Rowicki raised his chin, while Bjornsson gave Daphne an appraising stare. “We do have time right now,” the latter detective said.
“Everything I know is in the report I already gave. You want...whatever else, I’d like to do it at my convenience. I was just here to get my curling iron.”
“Ma’am, I wish you would reconsider,” said Rowicki, whose eyes had not blinked. “But if you insist.”
Bjornsson clucked a soft tongue twice before turning to Hank. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Jeffs, and the tapes. I hope we’ll be able to let you resume operations tomorrow.” The cops turned to go.
“You better,” said Hank. “I got bills to pay. So do the girls. They ain’t on salary, you know.”
“Plus, think of the boners,” added Daphne. “You think it’s cops who keep these feral roughnecks in line?”
“Maybe someday I can render the public a service as precious as yours, Miss Everly,” drawled Bjornson over his shoulder. Rowicki turned his mournful open eyes back for a moment but said nothing. They left.
“It’s not ‘cause of me they wanna talk to you. I didn’t tell ‘em anything aboutcha I didn’t have to, ya know,” said Jeffs when the door had closed. “I know ya got your probation and all.”
“It’s nothing, Hank,” said Daphne. “I’m sure they pull on any thread they can find. So we’re closed?”
Jeffs spat a load of dip spit into a plastic pop bottle lined with the white marks of many scrunchings. “Oh fuck yes, yeah. Fuckin’ cops can’t be sure they’ve sucked every fiber off the wallpaper, don’t want any new crowds in yet.” He brooded for a moment. “This fuckin’ guy. All respect to the girl but people don’t think about local business when these stories come up.”
“I guess they don’t.”
“All respect, like I said, but it’s a dozen other people. Customers, too. Thousands of ‘em.”
“Thousands, Hank?”
“Over time.”
“Well I can keep myself busy for a day, somehow. Give me a double-shift this weekend?”
“I mean, Sunshine and Becky already...but yeah, no, oh yeah, you first, absolutely. Hopefully the clients demand one after this.” Jeffs regarded Daphne for a moment. “Heya, ya doin’ alright? It sure as hell wasn’t any fun takin’ a look at that girl on the ground like that, and I had warning, ya know.”
“I’m fine, Hank. Call me if we’re gonna be shut down again tomorrow.”
Outside the back door again, by the splayed chalk figure and the splotch on the pavement, her hand pried into her small purse for the Parliaments, and when it came out her feet moved her away from the taped tableau, around the corner of the club and into its lateral parking lot. Extracting and lighting a cigarette she stood in the thin shade by the building’s wall, her exhaled smoke raising ephemeral veils between her and the nearby parked Civic.
“Is that yours?” drawled a male voice near behind her, toward the club’s rear.
From face to feet she whipped toward the sound. “Excuse me?” she asked, cigarette held out as a shield.
Before her leaned a tall lean figure with grey hairs curling from beneath his weathered ballcap. Multi-hued stubble grizzled his sharp but receding jaw under sad eager eyes that retreated deep into an otherwise reaching face. “Sorry, just sayin’ hi, Dahlia,” the man said. “You remember me? Matt? You got a few dollars off me last week!” His wide smile loosed a cheery chuckle, thin shoulders jilting his close-hunched arms.
“Oh, Matt,” she said, forcing lightness into her words, pulling on her cigarette through a furtive glance around the nearby environs. She constructed a simper but kept her distance. “I made it worth your time, yeah?”
“Oh sure, sure.” He continued smiling for a moment, standing an awkward three feet away, before his face fell. “I just came from…back there,” he said, eyes widening. “I saw it was closed up front…what happened?”
“Someone…someone died,” Daphne said. “It’s in the news, if you wanna know.”
Matt’s eyes widened further. “Died...killed? I mean…the cops…” He began to scan all around, leaning as if to find the killer between two nearby cars; a long low ponytail revealed itself running down his back, less grey and frizzy than the hair at his temples. With a grunt he straightened. “Well Matt’s here right now, so it’s all clear for the moment, Dahlia!” The dumb grin spread across his face again, and he leaned toward her.
Turning her neck over her shoulder she spied a dirty beaten blue Chevy facing the street, the corner of it’s driver side door open and visible beyond the back of the cab. “Oh well, Matt, you’re a doll,” she said, simper still fixed. “I gotta go talk to my friend over there, okay? Been nice seeing you.”
Surprise struck his features, smile replaced by a small gape. “Oh well, have a good one then!” Mirth regained control of his lips as his hand waved high. “I’ll be seeing you!”
She matched his smile and his wave as she backed away and began a brisk walk toward the truck. Coming around it to the driver’s side, she found resting on the running board a thick jeaned leg above a used but clean workboot, around whose arch looped a belt. The rest of the leather strap stretched over the knee and along the top of the thigh into the hard flesh of the driver’s hand.
“Jesus, Kyle, this is the last place you should be doing that,” Daphne said.
Kyle shifted his great fleshy torso an inch in her direction as he stropped the long curved carven blade of a hunting knife up the belt’s lower reaches, passing the cutting edge from hilt to tip across the leather. He glanced up, but at the street rather than Daphne. “I want it sharp more’n ever right now,” he said.
“Kyle. You heard, right? About the girl?”
“Yeah.” His eyes to her; the knife flashed. “I did.”
“I know you didn’t do it but the cops are right in there.”
His massive arm lifted the blade as he peered down its edge. “I seen that cut on that girl. Jagged. This knife ain’t do that.” His eyes went back to the street; his hand went back to stropping. “This is for if the killer comes back.”
“I hope he’s that dumb. We gotta close this case.”
Kyle stropped again.
“So we can work,” said Daphne. “I hate to spend a day in Williston without making money.”
More stropping. “Sorry,” said Kyle. “I can’t talk for shit right now.”
“Well, keep your eyes open. You know a Matt that comes in, was here last week? Old thin guy.”
He mused at his work. “Lotta Matts.”
“Well this one’s…creepy, I don’t know. Watch out for him.” She looked toward the building, finding only the cinder blocks and the cars. “Shit, he was just here.”
This prompted Kyle to turn his great thick neck either way, straining for a view behind it of the club. “Gone? Well you point him out and he’s never comin’ in again. No worries.” He returned his eyes to her and mustered a brief soft smile from his heavy features.
“Thanks, doll. Tell me, what do people do for fun around here?”
Kyle moved the knife to the leather once more, halted, ran his thumb on the edge. “The river I guess.”
“Because it’s wet. I don’t know.”
“That’s not a reason to go to a damn river,” said Felicia.
“Well it’s kind of the main thing about a river, being wet, so I figure that’s why we do it,” said Daphne. She leaned into the cracked bonded leather of Felicia’s secondhand couch.
“Aight, but it seems like white people shit.”
“When in white-people country…”
Felicia stared an awl into Daphne’s eye as she turned the half-cylinders of her weed grinder in her brown fingers.
“No, not, like, exclusionary,” said Daphne. “Just it’s North Dakota. You’re gonna tell me it’s not a lot of white people?”
“I one hundred percent ain’t telling you that. Maybe we’ll find fuckin’ Terence. Look at this shit he left me, this note.” She leaned from her cross-legged seat next to the chipped coffee table to seize an unopened credit card offer envelope covered in loose pen scrawl. “Fuckin’ ‘Babe, I’m goin fishin, be out a couple days no service. Love u.’ With a fuckin’ heart. Do you believe this shit?”
Daphne scanned the walls of the living room, bare but for thin drapes beside wide paned windows. “I don’t see a lot of outdoors shit here. Does he fish much?”
“I only known that nigga two months but fuckin’ no! He ain’t said dick about fish in my presence!”
The stripper colleagues rode State Highway Eighteen-Oh-Four easbound out of town thirty minutes and two bong hits later. From Felicia’s house in the dawnward extension of Williston it took a half hour for them to arrive at their turnoff in Daphne’s squeaking Civic.
“Is this the road? There’s no sign,” said Daphne.
“Yeah, phone says this is it for, uh, Little Egypt County Park.”
“Little Egypt,” said Daphne. “I guess there’s a few other Africans here.”
“What--you sure you ain’t racist a little?”
“I’m sure.”
“I ain’t, Montana girl. Why we going here?”
“Google said it was a park by the river. Pretty much what we were looking for.”
The dirt track that led them past circles of irrigated cropland and an incongruous manicured golf course fed into a bare patch of earth separated from the near-still waters of the Missouri by scattered scrub trees and a narrow strip of green, shorn wild grass and weeds. Daphne stood from the car first, stretching under the south-slanting rays of the summer sun.
Felicia spoke before pulling herself from the vehicle in full, one foot on the ground and an arm draped over her door. “You see anything good in this spot? ‘Cause I’m not sure.”
“Get the beers and put your feet in the water. It’s as good as it gets here.”
A footpath brought them past the vegetation to a beach halfway between ocean sand and lakeshore mud. A few other groups lounged or strolled well down the shoreline, and the breeze when it dawdled away from the water wicked some of the sun’s heat from Daphne’s skin. They spread beach towels with broad stripes on the ground near a sheer pool drying where the gentle laps of the river had receded to a narrower bed. With a beer and sunglasses and a second towel under her head and a copy of Confessions of an Opium Eater over her face Daphne shaped a small sphere of summer peace.
“Needs waves,” said Felicia.
“Drink up. It’s the next best thing.”
“After I smoke.”
Soon the need for fresh air brought the book down and the breeze back onto Daphne’s face. Through eyes lidded and plastic tinted against the sun she watched a distended continent of clouds swarm on the wind, bottoms dense and grey, each puffy mass wisping out in its upper reaches as if to seize more air, a mosaic of vaporous facets dominating miles and vertiginous miles of atmosphere.
“You know weed’s not legal here,” said Daphne.
“Yeah, I know,” said Felicia, through coughs.
“I don’t actually wanna read. Walk by the water?”
“I ain’t done smokin’ yet. Hit this and slow yourself down, alright?”
Daphne obliged. After two rounds, as the luminous shards of cloud stretched ever more vast through the drugged sky, they lifted their bikini-topped bodies from their towels and ambled to the river’s dallying edge. Daphne took her flip-flops in hand and settled her feet into the soft warm muck just under the water. The mud slurped at her heels.
Felicia gave her weight slowly to the leg she’d set in the river. She made a face. “The fuck is that.”
“What? Doesn’t it feel nice, how the air’s cooler by the water?”
“Nah, this fuckin’...goop in here.” She hopped from the riverbed, swishing her tainted sole in the water on the way out. “Like steppin’ in alien shit.”
“I like the way your feet sink in. It’s cozy, I don’t know.”
“Fuckin’ inland trash. That shit is nasty. None of that goop shit in the ocean.”
“Yeah just, like, twenty-thousand miles of unseen god-knows-what coming to eat you from below. So great.”
“Nothin’ ever ate my ass.”
They strolled on, downstream and eastward, their shadows leaning ahead to the north of their footsteps, Daphne sloshing through the water’s edge while Felicia strode the last limit of earth unsoggy enough for her steps not to sink. Daphne smoked tobacco. They passed a young man sitting by himself on the shore, straddling a chintzy light blue kite whose tail twitched over the sand in the minimal breeze, engrossed in his phone and unwilling to look up. A low weedy bluff rose to their left and came close to the water as they went, and in time they turned back.
“Someone best not taken our shit,” said Felicia.
“They didn’t.”
“You don’t know.”
“They can have my beach towel if they did. Walmart exists,” said Daphne.
“It runs outta shit here though.”
“A couple of the girls said it was like that but I haven’t seen it. The, like, retail infrastructure caught up with the boom, I think.”
“Okay but I left my weed,” said Felicia.
“Well that’s on you.”
“Fuckin’ victim blaming, is what that is.”
In front and now to their right, a male figure grew from the top of the bluff. The young man they had passed, now walking, reached the edge of the tiny crumbly cliff, kite in his left hand, and stood tall and trim with his side-swept black hair wafting in the more substantial breeze at that height. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck over his faded Williston High t-shirt. He scrambled the half dozen feet down to the beach. Catching sight of the women he looked away, then snapped his head back.
“Wind too shitty for kites?” called Daphne.
The toy rose in the young man’s grip, tail hanging limp to the dirt. His eyes narrowed and then brightened as his lips wriggled into a lopsided smile. On the full lower one, near the left corner, perched a thin gold ring. “It didn’t show up, no.”
They had drawn even with him as his tan workboot mushed sand a few yards inland. “The beach is okay anyway,” said Daphne, dawdling and drawing a fresh cigarette from its pack.
Felicia broke stride, gazing up the river toward their towels. The young man tossed the kite up and it scythed to the ground half his height away. “It beats work,” he said.
Daphne laughed, no longer moving. “Which is what? Roadie for Fallout Boy?”
He chuckled in turn. “No, they fired me. Uh, insubordination. Some bands don’t treat women great, you know?”
“They didn’t let you fuck the groupies, is what you mean,” said Felicia, working her own rut into the sand with an idle foot.
“Jesus, ‘Leesh,” laughed Daphne. “I don’t think he actually worked for the band.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ma go check our stuff, okay? You do your thing.”
The young man chuckled again, under his breath, as Felicia strolled away on sassy hips. “I do oil shit,” he said.
“Huh,” said Daphne. She stepped from the water and reached for the kite on the ground. “Didn’t pick that one. I’m Dahlia.”
“It’s Edgar,” he said, taking the kite from her outstretched hand. “Everyone here’s in oil, seems like an easy guess.”
“Yeah but none of them have kites or...that hair. Kinda wiry for a roughneck, too.”
Edgar brushed the backs of his fingers against the curtain of hair draped from the right side of his head. “I don’t drill holes; I find places to put them. I’m a landman.” His smile flashed straight white teeth through crooked lips. “The kite...it’s a thing my dad used to do with me. It’s a, you know, beautiful day, and I wanted to try it again.”
“Maybe call the old man for tips on finding wind then.”
“Nahhh.”
“Or just kinda look at it dragging on the ground I guess,” she said. “Almost as good.”
“He’s just a reactionary prick, is all.”
“...sounds like a complicated nostalgic hobby, Edgar.”
He laughed softly once more, face hiding behind his hair, and shook his head. “Sometimes you do weird things. You get it.”
“I kinda do.”
A dog emerged over the low bluff-ridge behind them, a grey-flecked black creature of indeterminate breed and medium size. It barked at them three times, and Edgar turned to it, raising the kite above his head to shade his eyes. The dog became apoplectic, rigid and pointed in its furious barking. Edgar raised the kite a half foot higher and the dog went into howls, and he lowered the toy. “Hey buddy, it’s okay,” he said, adding in an unctuous tone: “Come here!” And he dropped to a squat. The dog barked at a less hellbent pace. Edgar proffered his skyward hands and entreated the beast, which began to dip its head and whine a bit, and to try the unreliable dirt leading down to the riverside. After a few attempts and further beckoning it skated down the bluff to their level and rushed to Edgar for affection. Daphne smoked and watched.
“Oh hey, buddy, what’s your name, what’s your name?” Edgar inquired, binoculars swinging as he pet the dog. “Oh you’re a good girl. I wish I had a treat.” He turned to Daphne. “They’re better than people, aren’t they?”
“They’re very sweet,” she said, approaching to pet the dog as it wrestled its neck between Edgar’s hands. “How’s landmanning. Landmannery. Landmanship.”
“You can do okay if you hustle,” he said, not turning from the hound.
“Uh huh. I’ve heard hustle’s a big deal.”
Edgar, still scritching the canine neck, met her eyes. “You’re pretty sarcastic, huh? But sure, yeah, hustle’s great but brains are better.”
“Yours is working out for you?”
He smiled. “I’m making things happen.” He raised the kite over the dog’s head, to a new paroxysm of barking. “Hey girl, it won’t hurt you,” he said, twitching the kite out of the dog’s reach.
“Don’t taunt her,” said Daphne.
“It’s how they play,” he said. “Any time they play together, it’s a fight. Get it, girl, come on.” He shook the kite, driving the dog mad with its swishing tail.
Now a thick weather-beaten woman of the plains approached the edge of the bluff. “Hey! Muffy, come!” she yelled. The kite held too tight a grip on Muffy’s attention for the beast to heed. “You dumb fuckin’ mutt, get up here!”
“She’s just playing,” shouted Edgar.
“Get up here!” the woman screamed, not addressing Edgar.
Edgar hid the kite behind his back and became still, Muffy doing likewise. “See, even a bitch like that can’t ruin a good girl like this,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Muffy fled to her master at one more call, and the woman pulled her roughly away by the collar. “I should go find my friend,” Daphne said. “Get something to write down my number.”
“I was gonna ask,” he said.
“Well I hope so,” she said, and gave it. He took it into his phone and smiled. “Text me sometime and let me know if you ever got that thing in the air,” she continued, and made her way toward Felicia’s distant figure.
“You’ll hear from me,” he said.
The cigarette had long expired when Daphne’s looming form brought Felicia’s head from behind the shade of her hands and off her towel. “Got any more weed?” Daphne asked.
“You gonna contribute?”
“Sure, of course. Also it’s my gas that took us out here.”
“And your idea, too. It’s hard to get this good shit in North Dakota.”
“Alright, alright.” Daphne set herself down on the other spread towel while Felicia half-rolled toward her purse and rummaged for joint supplies. “Thanks for going along, though,” Daphne said. “It’s nice out here.”
“Didn’t know you were trying to get laid with this shit,” said Felicia.
“Ha! That was a nice bonus.”
Felicia rolled the other way, to face her. “Damn, so you already got some?”
“No but I wish. No dick since I came here. Two months.”
“It ain’t that hard to find better dick than that around here. He probably younger than you.”
“He’s not a meathead with a beer gut. A sorta punk cutie’s a change of pace.”
Felicia made a face. “Now that’s white people shit.”
Daphne laughed. “Oh sure, racist.”
In downtown, after dropping Felicia off at her house on the east side, she passed the turn to Prairie Kittens. “Oh fuck, curling iron!” she shouted to herself, and swerved right at the next side street. The detour and the dash inside, doors still open and a few patrolmen still lounging around one working technician, delayed her only a few minutes. As the Civic made its way down the street from the club, a beaten and rusty Chevrolet pickup of at least four decades’ vintage, patches of oxidized blue still showing on the higher reaches of the chassis, turned out of the lot behind her. It stayed in her rearview mirror for the few blocks to Second Street and kept along her path, driver tall but otherwise indiscernible, while she traveled west and turned north on the CanAm highway, coming right to her tail but passing on as she braked at her hotel. She sighed and told herself out loud to relax and parked.