Strange piece of paradise by Jentz Terri 1957-

Author:Jentz, Terri, 1957-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Violent crimes, Criminal investigation, Criminal investigation, Violent crimes, Moordaanslagen, Slachtoffers, Daders, Platteland, True crime, Criminal investigation
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Other Woman 269

head's under and I thought, it's all over. And I look up and I could see the light filtering through the water."

"People were watching?"

"Everybody was around the side."

"And nobody did anything to help you?"

"There was a little fourteen-year-old girl, and she picked up a big rock and said, 'If you don't let go of her I'm going to hit you in the head with this rock,' and he let go of me and went after her, and that's when the owner of the ranch came, Mr. Shepherd, who was yelling at him and grabbed his arm. And his daughter Linda, who was the foreman, came, too.

"Then Dirk said, 'I just want to talk to you, I just want to talk to you for a minute.' Mr. Shepherd let him because he seemed to have calmed down. He was talking, got mad, and went WHAM. He got me in the nose with his ring."

Janey was giggling a little as she related this last little indignity she suffered, and it occurred to me how odd it was for her to laugh off this particular point in her tale. Then I realized that she reminded me of myself, years before, when I would relate my own story with similar inappropriate affect. It was for her, as it was for me, a distancing technique.

"They put me in a car and drove off," Janey went on. "And Dirk was hanging off the window saying, 'I love you, don't leave me!' He was dragging, and finally he fell off. The cops were there when we got back to the house."

The seed ranch was on or near the border of Deschutes County and Crook County, but Janey was certain that it was officers from the Deschutes County Sheriff's Office who showed up at the ranch, subdued Dirk, took him away in a squad car to Prineville in Crook County, and put him in jail there.

While Dirk was behind bars, it wouldn't leave Janey's head that the toolbox was missing from his pickup, the one she'd noticed was gone when she poured out the vodka. It had been a homemade white wooden box with a slanted top that stretched the width of his truck bed.

"Of course we had heard what happened at Cline Falls that morning on the news. I heard there was a hatchet."

Janey knew Dirk kept a hatchet in his toolbox. It had a wooden handle with his initials carved in it. She remembered seeing that hatchet frequently when she and Dirk would go four-wheeling—he'd use it to cut branches to put under the tires for traction when they'd get stuck.

"You remember distinctly seeing the hatchet in the toolbox?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, it was definitely in there."

"When you first noticed the box was gone, what did you think?"

"Could he or couldn't he? He was definitely a scary guy and it took nothing to set him off."

"Did you ever see the toolbox again?"

"No. It was gone."

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