watched the sun dip toward the western horizon. Sheriff Wheaton watched the occasional car pass on the highway.
Cash finally spoke. “Hear anything about some girl missing from Shelly?”
“Huh? So that’s why you’re tracking me down.”
More silence, more sky and road watching.
“Well?” asked Cash.
“You just focus on your schooling, girl. Leave the police work to me.”
Cash watched the sky turn to orange, pink and purple stripes over the Red River tree line twenty-some miles west across the flat farm prairie. Almost all the fields were plowed, row after row of black dirt clods stretched for acres. To the north a corn stubble field sat unplowed, most likely being left to winter over. A green John Deere tractor, slowly pulling a plow, raised dust behind it as it traveled down a gravel road a couple of miles over.
“So where is she?” Cash finally asked. “Who is she? One of the hippie chicks at school said she’s missing from our biology class.”
Wheaton looked over. “You know her?”
“No. This chick just says she was in our class and now she’s missing. They live in the same dorm.”
“She’s the oldest Tweed girl. Three younger sisters. She’s in college over there to get a teaching degree.”
“But she’s gone.”
“Yeah, I drove to Shelly Tuesday to talk to her parents after they called me. Good kid. Valedictorian. Her mom’s working at the dime store in Ada to help pay her college tuition. They’re heartsick. The sisters crying. Not a wild kid. Not one you’d expect to just take off and not say anything.”
“Good kid, huh?”
“Why, you know something?”
“Nah, just that the hippie chick said she sits in the front of the class and flirts with the science teacher to get a good grade. Just talk. I better get to work.” Cash put her arm over the back of the car seat and looked both ways down Highway 9 before backing out onto the road and heading toward Ada. In her rearview mirror, she saw Wheaton give a slight wave. She waved back before rolling up her window.
It was just on the edge of getting dark as Cash pulled into Halstad. She didn’t stop in town but drove on out to Milt’s farm where she exchanged her Ranchero for an International Harvester dump truck. She spent the next eight hours hauling beets back and forth from Milt’s fields to the sugar beet plant just on the northern edge of Moorhead. She figured she made four trips.
Hauling beets meant driving alongside the John Deere harvester while it topped the beets, removed the green leaves, then picked them up out of the ground and carried them on a conveyor belt to the dump truck. Once the dump truck was filled, Cash drove it to the beet plant and waited in a long line with other trucks. The trucks were weighed and the farmer’s name collected, assuring that the farmer would get paid the correct amount for his crop.
Some of the drivers sat in their trucks and read the daily newspaper. Others catnapped. Cash often used the time to read her homework assignments. Tonight, her curiosity was on the Valley gossip. After her first truck was weighed, she climbed down out of it and walked to where a group of other drivers were standing around shooting the bull.
“Hey, Cash, thought you were too good for us already. Too busy stud-y-ing to hang out with those of us still got shit on our shoes.”
Cash laughed. “Nah. Never too good for you, Bruce.” Throughout junior high and high school, she and Bruce had been regulars in the wheat fields or corn furrows drinking six-pack after six-pack, listening to the country music station piped in from Oklahoma. They would drink until the beer was gone, and neither was able to walk a straight line. But he always drove her back to whatever foster place she was calling home that month.
He was one of her boy friends, never a boyfriend. White farmers were okay with their sons drinking with an Indian girl, but dating was off limits. She had learned from Bruce that his father beat his mother—“not that much really”—but Bruce had hoped to enlist and head to Viet Nam as soon as he turned eighteen to get away from home. No one ever really seemed to leave the Valley. Sure, they might move to Moorhead or Crookston and get a job inside the sugar beet factory. Or maybe sell shoes at some shop on another small-town Main Street. But really, none of them ever left. They soon found themselves back plowing fields and driving beet truck for their dads or uncles, waiting for one or the other to die so they could take over the family farm.
For Bruce, some 4F reason kept him out of Nam. So here he was, standing in the chilly October air, smoking Salem cigarettes and bullshitting about who was going to win the World Series, who was knocked up and had to get married, and how that would never happen to him, followed by loud guffaws and back slaps. Soon the conversation would drift back to farming and the best fertilizer to put on the ground in the spring.
The guys were so used to Cash, who had been working with them in various farm labor jobs since she was eleven, that they didn’t change their talk around her.
“Give me a cigarette, I left mine in the truck.” Cash reached out a hand to Bruce. She lit up and took a deep drag and coughed. Bruce slapped her on the back. “Don’t choke.”
“Damn, forgot you smoke these menthols.” Cash coughed but took another smaller drag anyway.
“You’re going to school up in Moorhead?” Steve Boyer asked her.
“Yeah.”
“Know anything about that Tweed girl that disappeared?”
“First I heard about it was today.”
The men all jumped in, a chorus of baritones.
“Her folks are really worried.”
“Valedictorian of her senior class.”
“Remember when Connie Bakkas ran off with that carnie one year after the county fair and her dad had to go down to some place in Kansas to drag her back?”
“Knocked up.”
“But this is Janet. That girl is smart.”
“Got some legs on her too.”
“Wahooo!!”
“You wish.”
Some more backslapping, puffs of cigarettes. Sips of coffee from foam cups that American Crystal had provided in the warm-up shack. But Cash could tell from the looks on their faces that they were worried. Bad things that happened in the Valley were the occasional fight, sometimes a car rollover from kids drag racing down a deserted road, someone got someone pregnant and had to get married. But a town’s top student didn’t just disappear.
“So what happened?” Cash asked.
Bruce answered. “I don’t know. Folks say she was going to the Cities for the weekend with a friend from school—go see the big city and all. But her family doesn’t know who she was going with or if she went or came back or where she is.”
One of the other guys jumped in. “Last they heard from her was on Friday when she called home and said
