Bad Moon On The Rise (15 page)

Bobby D. played his part. “Debbie!” he
cried, sailing out of the crowd with such fatherly affection he
sent three women flying like bowling pins. “Have you been sobbing
on a mountain top all night long?”

“
I’m so sorry, daddy. I
hope I didn’t ruin your appetite.”

The snickers running through the crowd
told me that he’d not been shy about the homemade apple corn cakes
and syrup. 

“
Where have you been, my
child?” He grabbed me by my elbow and steered me toward the stairs
with surprising agility. “Keep moving,” he mumbled grimly, then
marched me upstairs as if I really was his daughter and had just
returned from boinking the local basketball team.

“
Ouch,” I complained once
we were alone in my bedroom. “You didn’t have to play it quite that
hard.”

“
Yes, I did. Look in the
mirror.”

I parted the jungle of fake flowers
that blocked my view and leaned closer to the dresser mirror. A
trail of hickies led across the top of my right shoulder and up my
neck. Good god, I hadn’t had a hickie since seventh grade. “That
little vampire,” I complained. “I don’t remember getting
these.”

“
You were probably too
busy getting those,” Bobby pointed out.

I checked my left side. Three parallel
scratches started at the base of my neck and disappeared under the
left shoulder of my tee shirt.

“
That man is a cougar,” I
declared.

“
Don’t sound so
self-satisfied,” Bobby D. advised me as he threw himself down on my
bed and groaned. The mattress buckled in the middle like a coyote
had dropped an anvil on it from a canyon wall a mile above. “I
really was worried about you. Where the hell did you go all night?
Or, more accurately, who the hell did you do all night?”

“
It’s a long story,” I
admitted. “Full of lurid details. But to make a long story short,
I’ve been establishing a relationship with the local law
enforcement—“

“
Oh, no,” Bobby
interrupted. “Don’t tell me you slept with another deputy? When are
you going to learn?”

“
The sheriff,” I said
indignantly. “I slept with the sheriff.”

Bobby threw himself back on the bed
dramatically, his arms outstretched. “Just so you know, I will not
accept any foundlings left on my doorstep in a basket in nine
months hence.”

“
I wouldn’t dream of it,”
I retorted. “I’m too afraid that you’d eat it.”

“
What do we do now?” he
asked. “I like this place. The grub is fantastic. But you’re going
to get us run out, tarred and feathered, for your slutty
behavior.”

“
They should be so lucky,”
I said, troweling foundation over my hickies. It looked like I’d
had skin harvested from my ass and grafted onto my neck, but it
would have to do.

My cell phone rang and I saw it was
Bill Butler calling me back. I answered with a cheerfulness light
years beyond my mood when we’d last spoke.

“
Yes?” I asked, drawing it
out.

“
The sheriff’s name is
Shep Gaines and he’s a stand-up guy.”

I started to laugh.

“
What’s so funny?” Bill
demanded.

“
Nothing,” I said happily.
“Thanks for the update. Let’s talk soon.”

I hung up and started to laugh again.
Stand-up guy indeed. The man stood up more than anyone I’d met yet
in this lifetime.

“
You seem way too happy,”
Bobby complained. “This does not bode well for the
case.”

I set my make-up down and glared at
him. “First you complain I need to get properly laid and then, when
I do, you complain because I have?”

“
I’m only saying that when
you get too happy, you sort of lose your edge and maybe aren’t as
driven as you should be.”

“
So the trick would be to
only get laid occasionally, or to get laid badly?”

“
The trick,” Bobby intoned
sleepily, and I realized the fat bastard was planning a
post-breakfast nap on my bed, “is to not forget about the case and
why we’re here in the first place.”

The remark stung. Because it was true.
I’d not really thought of Tonya or her missing son since  the
night before. Bobby was right. I needed to get my ass in gear. But
where to start? I couldn’t flash photos of Tonya around the
mountain and ask if she’d blown through town, perhaps as an escaped
prisoner? This place was too small; the bad guys, whoever they
might be, would be tipped off immediately. I needed a more subtle
approach.

About the only thing I had to go on
was the postcard I’d found among Trey Blackburn’s packet of
carefully saved mementos, the one Tonya had sent to her son from
the mountains. Maybe it had been sent from around here? If so, it
would tell me one thing: there was something fishy going on up at
Silver Top Detention Center. I knew she’d been taken from Piedmont
Technical by men wearing official STD jackets. And she’d gone with
them reluctantly. But if she’d been taken into custody, there would
not have been a postcard. Guards don’t stop to let prisoners send
postcards to their loved ones. No way. And I could think of no
legitimate reason why she’d be hanging out with her former guards
around this mountain.

Maybe it was just a postcard—but it
could tell me a lot.

I fished Bobby’s car keys out of his
pants pocket. He had started to snore and barely stirred. Then I
retrieved the postcard and examined it under the lamp. If it had
been sent from somewhere around here, I could at least confirm
Tonya had been staying nearby. There couldn’t be that many places
that sold postcards in this godforsaken place. I’d snoop around and
see what I found.

I started with the rack on the
check-in counter at the Pampered Princess. While the rack held an
assortment of tacky postcards, most featuring vistas of wildflowers
and autumn colors not seen since Chernobyl, it did not hold the
postcard I sought.

I slid out the front door, evading the
stares of the other guests. It was not going to be easy sneaking
around. Every move I made from here on out would be watched and
discussed ad nauseum over the cheap blush wine they served each
Happy Hour. I hoped my tumble in the hay would turn out to be worth
it.

I had a sudden and vivid flashback to
the night before and decided it was.

There was a tourist trap half a mile
up the road, but the only postcards it offered were emblazoned with
religious slogans and paintings of a modern-looking Jesus beaming
out at the buyer with benign confidence. Tonya had not bought her
postcard there. I tried another shop without luck as well,
stumbling into a den of calico and wicker so thoroughly poisoned by
the stench of potpourri that I could barely breath. I tripped over
a ceramic goose while making a desperate escape.

I went back down the mountain, knowing
there weren’t that many more places left to check. And if Tonya
hadn’t been on this mountain, then where the hell had she
been?

I wasn’t as confident as Bobby when it
came to steering along the narrow mountain road so I proceeded at a
cautious pace, which was probably why I saw what I had missed on
the way up the mountain: the road to Silver Top Detention Center.
On a whim, I turned in, figuring I would get a quick peek at the
place. The single paved lane led down a few hundred feet before
ending in a vast asphalt parking lot that bordered an enclave as
out of place on Silver Mountain as a space station would have been
in Middle Earth. The structure was massive, stretching out on
either side of the parking lot in twin concrete fortresses, linked
by a fenced walkway and central guardhouse. There were exercise
areas on either side, but only a small corner of each faced the
parking lot. The rest curved toward the back of the facility,
facing the slope of the mountain. All I could see was what seemed
like miles of yellowish concrete and barred windows no bigger than
portholes. I tried to imagine who lived within this godforsaken
place. It was hard to believe that human beings moved back and
forth inside there each day, eating and sleeping, hoping and
despairing, caught in the most manmade of hells while, just a few
feet away, outside the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire
that rimmed the perimeter, nature exploded in all its glory,
stretching for miles and miles.

I saw a flutter of white at one of the
window. I had been spotted. A prisoner was signaling to me, driven
by the need to prove to someone, anyone, that they
existed. 

I wondered if it was a man or a woman.
I could not tell which side of the prison housed which. I only knew
it housed both—Silver Top represented equal opportunity
hopelessness.

I waved back, wishing my unseen friend
well, then returned to Bobby’s car and fled. I had spent eighteen
long months behind similar walls and I never wanted to go back.
Just seeing the prison made me want to turn around and head home to
Durham.

In fact, by the time I reached the
small convenience store that marked the midpoint of Silver Mountain
and was the only place to get gas for miles, I had about decided to
forget the whole thing. What was the point of poking around a
mountain trying to retrace Tonya’s last steps? What made me think
that might lead me to her missing son, Trey?

But as often happens during an
investigation, I was sent a sign at the very moment my feet were
ready to turn me around and take me back home: there, in a dusty
black iron rack crammed between a display of wild honey and basic
hardware, a row of postcards gleamed beneath an overhead light.
They were definitely printed by the same company as the postcard I
had in my back pocket. The colors, the size, the lettering, the
sentiments, all plucked straight from the seventies. I glanced up
to see if I was being watched. An old man sat on a stool behind the
counter, a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He was dressed in
overalls and his John Deere hat was pushed back on his head so he
could see the overhead TV as it flickered images of a NASCAR race:
cars zoomed in endless circles, incomprehensible to me, despite my
Panhandle pedigree, but fascinating to him. There were no other
customers in the store, which was crammed with every provision
known to man. Clearly, this was where the locals and visiting
hunters stopped when they’d forgotten something from the Food Lion
or Home Depot at the base of the mountain, or where vacationers
stopped to snap photos and congratulate themselves on discovering a
genuine mountain store off the beaten path.

This was also where Tonya Blackburn
had bought, written and mailed a postcard to her son six months
ago. There, above a rack of mountain sunsets stored ten postcards
deep, I saw the exact same scene I had in my back pocket. There was
no doubt about it.

I grabbed a can of stand-ups from the
shelf and a grape Nehi so I’d have an excuse to approach the
counter.

“
Don’t see many women
buying Vienna sausages,” the old man said, stretching out the first
vowel in “Vienna” so it sounded like a long “i”.

“
They probably don’t like
to be reminded of their short-comings,” I said, but the old guy
didn’t get the joke.

“
Most of them are too busy
watching their calories, I expect,” he said. Was he actually
staring at my ass, the old coot?

“
I have a craving for
them,” I lied. In truth, they were disgusting, but I figured I
could feed them to the odious little dog at the Pampered Princess
next time it annoyed me and, with any luck, it would die of gout
right then and there.

“
Maybe you’re pregnant?”
the old man drawled, then broke into a cackling laugh. I had an
uneasy feeling that perhaps the entire town already knew I’d spent
the night in a cabin letting the local sheriff frisk me.

“
No chance of that,” I
assured him.

“
Why not?” he asked as he
wiped my bottle of grape soda down, something I had hoped would not
be necessary, but perhaps he knew something I didn’t know. “You one
of them lesbians? We had a couple come by last season, wanted to go
out hunting. Had shotguns bigger than a cannon.”

“
Yes, well,” I explained,
“there’s a reason for that. It’s the same reason men like to carry
guns. It’s called overcompensation.”

“
No one’s getting
compensated for hunting around here,” he assured me. “People are
lucky if they can bring back a four-pointer in high season. The
times they are a’changing. The world is moving on without
me.”

I thought it was pretty poetic of the
old dude to put it that way. It made me feel like I could risk
asking him a few questions.

“
Look,” I explained. “I’m
trying to find an old friend. She’s disappeared. She wrote me from
here.” I showed him the postcard I had in my back pocket and he
peered at it with milky eyes.

“
Like to be,” he agreed.
“Them’s one of mine. Bought a carton back in 1970 from a
distributor who went out of business about the time those damn
hippies made Nixon resign, so I was stuck with ‘em. I sell maybe
three a season and that’s with me offering to mail them right from
here.”

“
Do you remember anyone
buying one this year?” I asked hopefully. 

He stared at me a little more closely.
“Who did you say you were?”