SEE ALSO PROOF
Fiction
SEE ALSO PROOF
A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery
By Larry D. Sweazy
251 pp. Seventh Street Books
Reviewed by Eric Petersen
Veteran mystery and Western writer Larry D. Sweazy is back with his third Marjorie Trumaine mystery. (The first two, See Also Murder and See Also Deception, are also reviewed on this site.) Set in an unusual time and place for a mystery – the North Dakota plains in the 1960s – the series features an unforgettable sleuth.
With her formidable intellect and voracious passion for reading, Marjorie Trumaine was her father’s pride and joy. He had hoped she’d become an English professor like his brother-in-law, not a farmer like him. Instead, she dropped out of college to marry her high-school sweetheart, farmer Hank Trumaine.
Marjorie’s dream of building a big, happy family never came true. Unable to conceive, her doctor pronounced her barren. Then a freak hunting accident left Hank blind and paralyzed from the neck down – an invalid in the prime of his life, his wife becoming his caregiver.
Her work as a professional book indexer, originally taken up as a secondary source of income for when the harvest was lean, became the only thing standing between the Trumaines and bankruptcy. Her talent and obsession for compiling and organizing data comes in handy for solving bizarre and brutal murders.
See Also Proof opens in January of 1965, during another typically harsh winter in Marjorie’s rural hometown of Dickinson, North Dakota. In the previous outing, her husband Hank died suddenly after contracting pneumonia, a sadly common and most likely fatal illness for quadriplegics.
Still reeling from her loss, she struggles to cope with it and move on. Her only companion is her loving and faithful border collie, Shep. Her church’s Ladies’ Aid group, led by her friend Darlys Oddsdatter, has been visiting her once a week to keep her company.
This time, another one of the ladies, Anna Jacobsen, wife of Nils Jacobsen, manager of the local Red Owl grocery store, has some troubling news for Marjorie. Tina Rinkerman, a mentally handicapped fourteen-year-old girl, has gone missing. Marjorie knows Tina’s parents, but not well.
Tina stood out like a sore thumb in Dickinson, where “People whispered when she walked by, or ignored her, said she was retarded, or worse, a mongoloid.” With a monstrous blizzard about to strike, finding her is critical, so Sheriff Guy Reinhardt, who recently won a squeaker of an election that divided the town, is on the case.
Marjorie volunteers to help him search for Tina, taking Shep along with them. While searching just a couple of miles away from the Rinkerman home, they find an ominous abandoned old white car rendered nearly invisible by the blinding snow. A sense of death and dread comes over Marjorie.
To her horror, there’s a body inside the car, but it’s not Tina Rinkerman’s – it’s the frozen, bullet-riddled corpse of Nils Jacobsen. Guy Reinhardt realizes that Nils was lured out to the area by someone and ambushed, gunned down in cold blood. Now they have a murder on their hands as well as a missing girl.
Later, Marjorie thinks she sees the missing Rinkerman girl riding in someone’s car, but she can’t tell who the driver is or even if that person is male or female. When she reports this to Sheriff Reinhardt, he asks for her help with the Rinkerman case and the murder of Nils Jacobsen.
With most of his department against him and ex-sheriff (now deputy) Duke Parsons chomping at the bit to get his job back, Reinhardt needs to solve and close both cases PDQ, and the only one he can trust to help him is Marjorie Trumaine.
So, she agrees to make a nearly seven-hour drive to the Grafton State School for the Feeble Minded, where Tina Rinkerman had lived for most of her life, to pick up a report on her. The waitress at a nearby diner warns Marjorie not to go to the school because “They do terrible things out there.”
When she arrives at Grafton, Marjorie meets one of the kids who lives there, an outgoing, sweet natured boy of fourteen who was Tina Rinkerman’s best friend. His name is Joey Jacobsen, and he’s the son of the late Nils Jacobsen. As she drives back, she fears the ominous specter of the monstrous blizzard that’s pounding nearly the entire state.
Marjorie’s fear turns to sheer terror when her car is rammed and run off the road by an unseen assailant. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, all she can do is hunker down until someone rescues her. She decides to read the report on Tina Rinkerman, which also contains information on Joey Jacobsen.
The woman who gave Marjorie the report told her about the school’s dark history; until the recent repeal of a notorious law, the school forcibly sterilized its mentally defective charges – and the normal women who gave birth to them, as mentally handicapped children were considered an embarrassment and a burden to their families and the state.
Who killed Nils Jacobsen, and who is the mother of his secret son? Who took Tina Rinkerman and why? The trail of clues leads Marjorie Trumaine to a dangerous psychopath determined to keep some secrets buried forever…
With its evocative, poetic narrative, period setting, compelling characters, and plotting that keeps the reader turning pages, See Also Proof is yet another great entry in the Marjorie Trumaine mystery series. Highly recommended!
Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com
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