"But Bill was going to die anyway. Soon. Probably weeks. Why wait all this time and then come back and kill him?" She shook her head. "You know, it doesn't sound to me like a cover-up. It sounds to me like revenge. And it's revenge by somebody you don't see, because everybody can see him. You know what I mean? He's just an everyday guy. He's there all the time, so nobody notices him."

SHE GAVE HIM the names of three more women involved with Judd. Two of them no longer lived in the area-one had moved to St. Paul, and the other had gone north to Fargo. The third one lived in Bluestem, but was divorced and had gone very fat. "I can't see her managing to kill anyone. She can hardly walk a block."

"Huh. Let me ask this: have you ever heard of a character called the man in the moon?"

She looked puzzled, and shook her head: "No. Who's that?"

"I don't know. But I'd like to."

They talked a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, "Is that it?"

She took a third glass of wine; was half drunk and wasn't putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. "Are you working with Jim Stryker?"

"Yes, I am."

She eyed him for a moment, and then said, "I heard one time…long time ago…that his mother, Laura, might have been sleeping with Bill Judd. And this would have been after she was married. Mark Stryker-Jim's father-was one of those odd guys that you could push around, and people did. I'm not saying there's anything to it, but when Mark killed himself, there were rumors that it was more than losing some land. That he found out that Laura was sleeping with Bill and wasn't planning to stop."

"Is that right?"

"That's what I heard. I don't know how the Gleasons would fit into that. Anyway…" Her eyes slid toward the bottle.

"Thank you. You've been a help," Virgil said, standing up.

"If I could go back to those days…" Her voice trailed away.

"Yeah?"

"I'd do it in a minute," she said. Virgil realized that she was seriously loaded. "I'd jump right back in the pile. That was the most fun I ever had in my whole damn life."

A BLEAK REALIZATION for a fiftyish schoolteacher, Virgil thought on his way back to Bluestem. Would it lead to something? A commune for elderly rockers on the West Coast? Hitting on a high-school jock? More alcohol?

HE PICKED UP Joan Carson at her house and took her to the McDonald's for dinner-Big Macs, fries, shakes, and fried pies, and she said, "I can feel the cholesterol coagulating in my heart. I'm gonna drop dead in the parking lot." But she didn't stop eating.

"Ah, it's good for you," Virgil said, shoving more fries into his face. "Eat this until you're forty and then nothing but vegetables for the rest of your life."

"Makes for a short evening, though," she said.

"I was hoping you'd take me out to the farm," Virgil said.

She looked at him: "What for?"

"You know…to see what you do."

She shrugged. "Okay with me. You know anything about farms?"

"Worked on one, up in Marshall," Virgil said. "One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I'd be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos-we didn't do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We'd box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now."

She eyed him for ten seconds and then said, "You do have a remarkable capacity for bullshit."

THE STRYKER FARMSTEAD was an archaeological dig in waiting: a crumbling homestead, a woodlot full of abandoned farm machinery and a couple of wrecked cars, a windmill without a prop. The farm was built a quarter mile off a gravel road, in a grove of cottonwoods, at the base of a steep hill. Red-rock outcrops stuck out of the hill, while below it, all around the farm buildings, all the way to Bluestem, and really, all the way to Kansas City, was nothing but the darkest of black dirt, a sea of corn, beans, and wheat.

Among the wrecked buildings, the barn was the exception, and was still substantial. "Don't have animals in it, but we keep it up for the machinery," Joan said. "One of the neighbors-you can't see his place, he's a mile down the way-rents out the loft, sticks his extra hay up there."

The house, a hundred feet across a muddy parking circle from the barn, was little more than a shed. Originally one of the plain, upright, porchless, clapboard farmhouses built on the plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a coal-and wood-burning furnace and a hand pump in the backyard, it had been converted to a farm office and lounge.

The second level, never fully heated, had been blocked off with insulation and plywood to eliminate heat loss in the winter, Joan said. The utilities had been moved out of the basement to the old back bedroom, and the basement was nothing more than a hole with some rotting shelves holding empty canning jars.

"Probably could get twenty dollars each for those jars, on eBay," Joan said.

"Why don't you?"

"I don't need four hundred dollars."

THE FIRST FLOOR had a barely functioning kitchen with a countertop hot plate, a microwave, and a sink, with a table and six chairs; an electric pump fed the sink. Two ruined couches occupied the living room, with mud circles on the floor where the farmhands had tracked through. An aging computer sat on a table in the former dining room, with a Hewlett-Packard printer next to it, and a couple of four-drawer file cabinets pushed against the lathe-and-plaster wall.

"After the roads got better, it never made much sense to actually live out here," Joan said, as she showed him through the place. "Everything had to be brought out, and you were living out here in isolation. Most of the time, if you didn't have animals, there wasn't much to do. In the winter you did maintenance, in the summer you'd do some spraying and mowing…but basically, you were watching the corn grow, or the wheat, or the beans. By the time I was a kid, we had all that Star Wars machinery, a farm wife could sit up on a Deere in an air-conditioned cab with a cassette deck and listen to rock 'n' roll and do the harvest by herself. Ninety percent of it was pushing buttons and pulling levers. No need for a house. I mean, it wasn't that simple…but it almost was."

"So you moved to town," Virgil said.

"Well, look around," she said, waving at the horizon. "If you look right over there, you can see one other house, but nobody lives in it. It's lonely as hell out here. And Dad killed himself right out back, which still gives me the creeps if I'm out here on a winter night."

"Nice now, though," Virgil said. The sun was slanting down toward the horizon, and a few wispy clouds streaked the pale blue sky; there was just enough breeze to stir the leaves on an endless ocean of corn.

"C'mon," she said. "I'll show you why the house is so far from the road. We have to hurry, before it gets too dark. Bring your camera."

VIRGIL GOT the Nikon out of the truck, with a long image-stabilized zoom, and tagged along past the end of the barn and the rotten timbers of what might once have been a hog pen, past an old pear tree, and a couple of apples, angling downhill to a creek. A footpath, maintained by feet, led along the banks of the creek up toward the hillside. As they got closer, Virgil could see that the creek came out of a crack in the hill, feeding into a broad, shallow stock tank. Overflow from the tank fed the creek.

"This is about as much water as we ever get," she said. "We're a little drier here than farther east. C'mon."

She led him straight into the crack in the hillside, a narrow, rocky cleft that widened to twenty feet, slightly climbing, with the water pounding downhill. The spray caught him a couple of times, a cooling sprinkle on the face and hands.