A Winsome Murder Read Free Page A

for two, maybe three installments.”
    Lachlan took up the pages and leafed through them, silent for a moment. Small-town murder, he thought, rural Midwest, it might sell. Might even increase sales in Iowa and Minnesota. He could make an offer: option to publish upon approval, no advance. Not much risk.
    â€œMr. Lachlan,” Jillian said, “I can write this.”
    Lachlan looked across the table and held out his hand.
    â€œCall me Kevin.”
    Â 
    J. McClay/Killing/American Forum
    The Killing of Deborah Ellison
    Three and a half hours northwest of Chicago, deep in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, I drove past a sign that said Welcome to Winsome Bay, Home of the Wildcats. As I took the next left, a rural, angled lane, the inside of my car suddenly shadowed and cooled as an endless emerald wall appeared out my driver’s-side window: Corn, corn was everywhere,thick leaved, rainforest green, eight to ten feet tall. Every square foot of earth in Winsome Bay that didn’t have a house on it seemed to have corn growing on it. If not corn, then soybeans or hay: timothy grass, bluestem, red clover, alfalfa. I continued driving, passing field after field of green gridded farmland, the crops pushing right up to the backyards of homes and businesses.
    West of the Wisconsin River, just below Friendship, Winsome Bay doesn’t have a bay at all but a medium-sized lake, one of over fifteen thousand left behind after the glaciers melted away some ten thousand years ago. No one in the town seemed to know why the lake was called a bay when it wasn’t one, and no one really seemed very interested in the question. The town had a population of 632 and boasted a high school, a public swimming pool, three churches, and four bars. A sign on the local liquor store said Wine, Cheese, and Bait.
    Night crawlers were $2.50 a dozen.
    Jillian saved her document, scrolled up to the top, and began editing the first few paragraphs of her new story. At five that morning, she had hobbled into her sweatpants, hustled down the stairs to the kitchen, poured a thermos of coffee—preperked on a timer—and headed out the back door, wide awake and ready to work. She’d tugged open the creaky barn door of her writing studio, a converted carriage house in her backyard, and made her way up the stairs, avoiding whatever spider webs and bat guano had accumulated overnight. She unlocked the door and hit the lights. She had tried writing in the house when Michael was little, but found it torture. At fourteen now, he was used to waking up alone. He’d been making his own breakfast since he was seven. In the days when he still liked Jillian, he used to take breakfast out to her studio: badly microwaved eggs, cold toast, too chocolaty chocolate milk, and a small alp of ketchup. A lifetime ago. Before iPhones and puberty.
    Jillian poured another cup of coffee.
    She hadn’t been this focused and ready to write in a long time.
    Farther into Winsome Bay the farmland was interrupted by a smattering of residential streets and a small downtown. The streets there, double-wide with angled parking stalls, were lined with a modern Midwest mixof pickup trucks and minivans. The oldest building, a restaurant called the Grainery, has been in business since 1873.
    I drove past a fabric store with a quilt and an American flag hanging in the window. I passed the Dew Drop Inn tavern, a sign on its door touting the Friday night fish fry and prime rib special. I continued on, out of the downtown area, past Saint Francis church, a gorgeous redstoned cathedral in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architectural school, Taliesin, only two hours from Winsome Bay, still functions today. I thought the church to be quite modern looking for a small Midwest town: single storied, sleek and low to the ground, its lengthy run of roof dipping gently in the center and gradually rising to peaks on either end. One wall of the building, from peak to foundation, was