The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (26 page)

“Suits me, I guess.”

We hurried out to the car and I never told Jack the real reason that I suddenly got all rattled and silent for the few hours more we spent together that afternoon.  Glancing through the window of the jewelry store, I saw Gina and Cal standing at a counter being waited on by a man in a black suit.  The couple was holding hands and Gina’s head with her long beautiful blonde hair was leaning languidly against Cal’s neck as he pointed into the case.  Jack didn’t have to memorialize the scene with his camera; it’s burned into my brain like acid on a metal plate.

Chapter 17

It was the telephone with its horrible jangle that woke me up again.  I tried to will myself awake and sound halfway intelligent when I answered, but all that came out was “Wha?”  And I guess that wasn’t all that bad for having been as stoned as I had gotten the night before.  Gina was getting married so fuck it.  The thought struck me like a slap in the face and only the voice at the other end of the line kept me from slipping back under the covers.

“Sue-Ann!  Sue-Ann, are you there?”

“Who the hell?  Dilly?  What?”

“Sue-Ann.  Bill Dollar.  Something’s come up.  Something big this time.”

I was waking up quickly.  “What is it?” I asked.  “Why are you calling
me
?”

“I can’t get Mr. Dent on his cell phone.  I called the office and left a message, but nobody will get it until later this morning.  I called his house, but no answer.”

“What’s happened?” I asked again. 

“There’s been an accident.  A farmer found a body in his pasture about an hour ago, kicked to death by one of his horses.”

I was instantly awake.  “Who was it, Billy?” I asked, but I felt I already knew the answer.

“Nobody knows yet.  But it’s a kid, maybe twenty, maybe younger, kind of heavy set.  Dressed all in black with weird markings on his face, I mean on what’s left of his face.”

“When do you get off duty?” I asked.

“I just got off a few minutes ago.”

“Can you meet me somewhere?”

“Sure, I guess, but there’s no place in Pine Oak that’s open yet.”

I thought as fast as I could.  “Make it
The Courier
office then.  Half an hour.  Nobody will be there except us.  I have a key and there’s a coffeemaker there.  Listen Billy, do you know Linda C’s son Adam?”

“Sure.  I heard he’s gotten a little weird lately, but I guess he’s okay, why?”

“You’re sure the dead boy wasn’t Adam?”

“No, no, you’re on the wrong track there, Sue-Ann.  This boy was older and bigger, and like I said, I know Adam by sight.”

“In that case,” I told him grimly, “you might want to give Paul Hughes a call.  I hope it’s not true, but I’m pretty sure the boy you described is his son.”

It was probably close to seven a.m. when I pulled into the parking lot of
The Courier
offices.  Dilly Dollar was already there, sitting in his squad car and smoking.  I unlocked the door and ushered him in, asking him to go back near Betty’s space, out of sight of the window, while I made coffee. I was shocked almost out of my mind by the news, but not surprised, and I would have thought that to be impossible.  A young man was dead who I had seen only a few days before, the son of someone I saw regularly, who I worked with, who was part of my extended newspaper family.  And behind the shock was guilt—the guilt of having known something was going to happen and failed to prevent it.  The if-onlies pinged around the inside of my skull again.  If only I had talked to Pauley myself; if only I had gone to his father with my suspicions earlier; if only I hadn’t taken that brick of marijuana from a crime scene.  Causes and effects twisted and entwined themselves into tight knots.  But I was through with crying.  The last dozen or so hours had numbed me like a bathtub full of Novocain.

So this would have been a happier story if I had never gotten the opportunity to describe Officer William Dollar of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, but things can’t be all good all the time.  At just after seven a.m. he and I were seated across from each other in the paste-up cubicle of a small-town newspaper office drinking coffee.  Billy Dollar is a sandy-haired, wide-smiling man who looks much younger than his 36 years.  His smile makes up for his average looks, and his erect posture and neatly pressed uniforms disguise his too-thin frame.  I had known Dilly even longer than I had known Gina.  We had gone to grade school together, then middle school and high school.  I had graduated near the top of my class, Dilly near the bottom, but what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for with his keen sense of self-preservation.  He may not deserve much, but neither does he need much and is among the happiest of my old classmates.  This morning, though, he showed none of his teeth and cracked no jokes.  Seeing death up close does that to you, and Dilly had been the first officer at the scene.  He would get a bonus for giving me the tip, but I knew that was the last thing on his mind as, slumped forward in his seat, he told me of his night on patrol.

It was just before five a.m. when a farmer named Coonbottom Mason woke up to the sound of his four dogs barking outside in the horse pasture.  He yelled at them to shut up, but they kept on, so he pulled on some overalls and went out to investigate.  Coonbottom is in his seventies, so it took him a few minutes to get to where his dogs were running back and forth, growling and barking.  He thought they had trapped one of the wild pigs in the area so he was a little careful.  He noticed that his half dozen horses were on the far side of the pasture and that they too seemed jumpy.  He almost didn’t see the body until he was right up on it because the black clothes blended in with the night, but it was there, all right.  The boy had been kicked in the face by a large animal and it didn’t take a veterinarian to see the shape of a hoof mark imprinted on his skull.  He was lying on his side, almost as if he had lain down and gone to sleep in that position.  There were a couple of odd things about the body.  One was the white greasepaint symbols that he wore on his face, like tribal war paint or maybe the tattoos of South Sea Islanders that Coonbottom had seen when he served in the navy.  The other odd thing was that a few inches from the boy’s hand, a curved, razor-sharp, eastern-looking knife lay in the cropped grass.

Just as Dilly got through with the story, his cell phone rang.  He flipped it open, spoke a few words, and closed it back again.  “Paul Hughes has identified his son’s body,” he said.

“Shit.”

Dilly ran his hand through his thick brown hair.  “You know, Sue-Ann,” he said.  “I’ve seen a lot of accidents in the last dozen years, and I’ve had to stop fights in bars.  I’ve seen abused kids and wives, but there was something about seeing that boy lying in the field that just wrenched my gut around.”

“I feel it too, Bill.”

And there were a few seconds there, if things had been just the slightest bit different, like maybe if the moon had been shining in through the window or if I had been smoking a cigarette, I could have found myself holding on to Billy; when he might have been able to persuade me to do things he had never persuaded me to do before.  But those seconds passed.  I knew that Billy was aware of that tiny window of opportunity and was equally aware of its passing.  He smiled wryly, stood up, and put on his hat.  “I’ve gotta go home an get some sleep,” he said.  “You staying here?”

“Yeah, I’ve got to write this up.  Tell me one more thing before you go, though.  Where is Coonbottom’s farm?”

“Way out east of town on the Waxahatchee road.”

It was as far away from the Torrington property—and from my own, for that matter—as it could be and still be in Jasper County.

“Are you doing okay, Billy?” I asked.

“Hanging in there,” he said.  “Nights like this are a little hard.”

“You and Milly okay?  Your two girls?”

He looked over at me and understood.  He straightened his body almost imperceptibly.  “They’re safe, Sue-Ann.”

“Be good, Bill,” I told him.

I spent the next hour writing up what I knew about the death of Paul Hughes, Jr. on Cal’s computer.  Betty Dickson walked in while I was taping a note to the computer screen and I told her the whole story.

“Listen, Betty,” I told her.  “Will you tell Cal that I’ve written up the story on his computer when he gets in?  I printed out a copy and put it on his desk.”

“Cal’s taking the day off,” she told me.  “Ginette, too.  I’ll be the only one in the office today.”

“Will you keep trying to get him or Ginette on the phone then?  I’m sure Cal’ll want to be with Paul and we need to find out what to do with the story.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I have something I have to do.”

Although it was only just after eight in the morning, it was heating up outside.  Clouds were rolling in from the west and it was going to be a hot, muggy day.  I drove slowly, thinking and planning.  When I got home I changed into hiking gear—white tank top over sports bra, a pair of camo-colored slacks and thick hiking boots.  I choked down some cold spaghetti, then went into the barn for my tackle.  This time I chose my smallest bow—a Saluki Turk, incredibly light and fast, if only I was strong enough to pull it.  I selected half a dozen arrows with fierce broadheads, made sure that my fannypack had everything I might need, then went back out to Jack’s car.

I didn’t want Clarence to see me, so I parked in front of a defunct Pure Oil station down the block from the market, gathered my stuff together, and set off into thick woods at an angle toward the path that led to The Clearing.  The summer growth made things tough and bristly, but I finally made it, although not without a few scratches.

The path was clear, although I could see evidence that it had been recently used—a shoeprint, a couple of broken branches making it easier to pass by, several green leaves strewn ahead as if someone had grabbed a handful from the nearest bush and flung them down.  The light bow and the trampled path made the trip easier than my previous one, but it was hotter and sweat ran down my face and neck like tears.  The back of my shirt became quickly soaked.  Vines as thick as my wrist came up from the ground, crawled their way up the oak trees, and finished, high in the branches, as splotches of color even greener than the oak leaves themselves.  Baby vines did the same to scrub oak, but these vines were green and sprouted hundreds of prickly needles.  There were blackberry bushes, too—bare this late in the season—that would rip the laces from your shoes if you didn’t step carefully.  I did.  My footsteps were quick but precise, and I hurried on across billions of dead leaves and over occasional fallen branches.  When I arrived at the clearing, I was beat.  It was then I realized that my heart was beating too quickly, my breath coming too fast.  I had forgotten to take my thyroid pill before I left home and, come to think of it, I may have missed the day before.

I sat down on the log, breathing and sweating heavily, and looked around me.  The cornstarch circle was almost completely faded and no new symbols had been added to its perimeter.  I did, however, find a cigarette butt that looked and smelled recently smoked.  A Newport. Then I found something else, something that left no doubt in my mind that I was on the right track, although it also warned me that I might be walking into very dangerous territory.  It was the stub of a white grease pencil.

Pauley Hughes had been here, probably not long before he was killed.

Although I couldn’t do anything to help him now, I got up, went back to the path, and continued my trip through the woods.  I knew almost everything now, but the few things that were still mysteries would determine my next moves.  I needed to confront someone with what I knew.  Trouble was, I didn’t know who I was going to confront or what I would say to them if I ever did.  But I had to keep on.

I traveled mostly in the canopy of the great forest, walking across an occasional clearing of dead trees or high grass.  I may have been walking for an hour when I came to the place where I had killed the rattlesnake, so I sat down and rested again on a log.  I searched and found the tip of the arrow that remained in the tree when Clarence had  unscrewed it.  It was tinted a rusty red.  Overhead, the sky was darkening; the western front was coming in fast.  I got up and kept following the path, and this part of the path was new to me.  Instead of thinning out into a dog or rabbit path as I had once suspected it would, it actually began to widen and after I had gone another half hour through steaming leaves I came to a swath cut by a tractor.  And recently cut, too; from the look of the grass and weeds that had been mowed, it had been done less than a week before—probably at the same time as the one I had found when I had gone out searching for Alikki. 

Walking was easier now, I felt freer, although very tired.  I took an arrow from my quiver and held it nocked on the string in my left hand.  If I needed to, it would only take me an instant to draw and fire.  The trail was irregular because whoever was riding the tractor had to pick their way carefully through thick forest and very heavy brush.  Some low, overhanging branches had been cut down and thrown to the side.  A brown shape in the path made me stop.  A coiled snake?  No, horse manure, but at least several days old judging from the fact that rain had turned it into a flat mushy pile.

Subtly, the nature of my surroundings was changing.  A few pinecones on the trail attested to the presence of very tall trees, but they were sparse—the forest was thinning out.  It had suddenly gotten dark; I looked up and saw that the storm clouds were now almost directly overhead.

As I turned around a bend to my left, I saw it.  Just beyond a towering magnolia tree was a four-board fence at least five feet high.  A heavy metal gate that must have been wrought a hundred years before was affixed to new-looking fence posts and fastened with a chain and padlock.  I approached the fence warily and peered out from behind the magnolia.  The scene might have been an aged photo torn from the pages of the
History of Jasper County. 
Not just one, but a wide sweep of five buildings shaded by several oak and magnolia trees.  The buildings were old, brown, and by modern reckoning, misshapen, with gables and extra rooms built on seemingly willy nilly.  Three houses, it looked like, with a large, two-story barn to the side and one other structure—with a high, modern metal tower jutting up behind it—that could have been either barn or          dwelling.  A couple of the roofs were obviously newer than the others because their slivery tin outshone the rusty brown.  All three of the houses had wooden porches.  The largest—almost a mansion—had a veranda running completely around it.  I saw some machine equipment parked near the barns, but no cars.