The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (3 page)

Thing is, though, Meekins’ didn’t sell goats, didn’t sell meat of any kind.  I pulled off the road and stopped in front of the market.  I switched off the ignition and the headlights.  It was still dark, although the light haze of a rising sun could be discerned through the trees.  The place would be opening up soon and I could ask some questions.  In the meantime, I wanted to see the dumpster.  I grabbed a flashlight from the glove box, got out of the truck, and began walking around the side of the stall toward the back of the Quonset hut.  Halfway there I heard a harsh clatter like the heavy door of a dumpster being opened or closed.  Had Clarence gotten there ahead of me?  I hadn’t seen his car, but he lived just across the street and could have walked over.  Or maybe his mom, who tended the register nearly every day from sunup to sundown.  I walked faster.

“That you, Clarence?” I shouted.  “It’s Sue-Ann.”  Another clatter and a hush of voices, then hurried footsteps.  I rounded the aluminum building and cast the light from my flash at the square green dumpster sitting just inside the tree line.  But no Clarence.  I shone my light at the trees and caught what looked to be the shadow of running legs and I heard the crunch of heavy boots on dry leaves.

“Wait!” I called loudly, and sprinted the last twenty yards to the treeline.  I moved the light back and forth, lasering the trees and shrubs but caught no sign of the person I thought I had seen running away.  I wanted to follow whoever it was—the flashlight revealed a faint trail through the high grass—but even that short run had tuckered me out and set my heart groaning.  I had to go down on my haunches to rest.  I went through a litany of curses—some in different languages—but none did any good.

Clomping footsteps approached from the direction of the market and I heard a familiar voice shout, “Who’s back here?”

I managed to stand up and compose myself. “It’s me, Clarence.  Sue-Ann.”

I clicked off my flashlight as Clarence came into view.  Clarence was a big man, and he looked bigger in the semi-darkness.  He was wearing his inevitable brogans and blue overalls and his hair was slicked back like he had just gotten out of the shower.  The only odd thing about him was the shotgun he was toting.  The stock was held in his right hand; the barrel lay loosely in the crook of his left elbow.  “God’s balls, Sue-Ann.  What are you doin back here?”

“Working on a—” I had to stop and take a couple of breaths.  “Working on a story about that goat,” I managed.  “For
The
Courier
.  You figure on using that shotgun on me?”

“Not if you ain’t killed no livestock and put em in my garbage.”

I started to retort, but Clarence waved away my words.  “Just kiddin, Sue-Ann.  Saw your truck pull up just as I was ready to come over.  Thought you were an early customer.”  Clarence walked over to the dumpster and peered inside.  Then he looked back at me. “You open the door?” he asked.

“No, I . . . I was going to, but somebody was already here.  I chased them for a while. . . .”

“Wondered why you were huffin and puffin so.  Did you see who it was?”

“Too dark.  And whoever it was heard me coming.  Ran off into the woods right in there.”

Clarence walked to the edge of the woods and peered into the darkness.  When he turned back around he looked pensive.  Holding the shotgun in his left hand he walked back to where I waited.  “Still workin for
The
Courier
, eh?” he asked.

“Yeah.  But if you want me to talk you’ve got to give me coffee.”

His face brightened as more of the sun crept through the trees.  “Got some fresh beans yesterday morning,” he told me.  “Had to drive down to Panama City to get em.  Got some ground and ready for the pot.”

“Let me get my purse out of the truck.”

Ten minutes later we were sitting across from each other at the counter made of nailed-together 2 by 12s, drinking hot, rich coffee from hastily washed-out cups.  Banks of rudely mounted fluorescent lighting cast a ghastly glow over everything.

“Okay, Sue Ann,” Clarence began.  “Doesn’t
The Courier
have better things write about than some kid’s prank?” 

“If you think it’s a prank, why are you carrying around that twelve-gauge?” I parried.

Clarence shrugged his big shoulders and sipped from his cup.  “Guess you got me there.  Truth is, the whole thing makes me a little uneasy.”

“What was a dead goat doing in your dumpster, Clarence?” I asked.

“I can’t imagine,” he said.  “Unless some kids thought it would be a good idea to leave a carcass at a vegetarian grocery.”

“They would have left it where people could see it,” I told him.  “Probably right in front there.”

“Yeah.  I guess.”

“Who found the goat, anyway?”

“Me.  When I went to throw away the day’s garbage I saw it.  Called the sheriff, but he just sent Dollar out.”

So much for the law enforcement agencies of three counties, or whatever Mark had told me.  “Did you see what kind of goat it was?”

“No mystery, there, Sue Ann.  It was a young Alpine—just a regular dairy goat—mostly black.  Belonged to Ray Colley.”

“How’d you find that out?” I asked.

“He’s about the only one in Jasper County who keeps dairy goats—I’ve probably sold you hunks of cheese that came from his place.  After Dilly left last night, I loaded the goat in a produce box and drove over there.  It was one of his all right.”

“Colley’s a County Commissioner,” I said, but I was really thinking out loud.  “Do you think somebody might have gotten mad at him and killed one of his goats as kind of a revenge thing?”

“Colley lives half a dozen miles from here,” Clarence answered.  “And just like you said earlier, if it was to snipe at him, why not just leave it where he could see it when he got up in the morning?”

“I guess you’re right about that.”

Clarence sat silently over the dregs of his coffee.  “You didn’t see whoever ran out in those woods?” he finally asked.

“No, just a blur that looked like legs running.  Could have been a deer, I guess, but I also heard a voice just before I came around the corner.  I’m pretty sure somebody was back there, but where could they go?”   Clarence was silent.  “Clarence?”

“Sorry, Sue Ann.  What were you askin?”

“If somebody
was
back there, where would they go?  Who owns those woods back there?”

“God’s testicles, Sue Ann, there are thousands and thousands of acres between here and Hanson’s Quarry.  “I own a few; paper company owns a lot more.  Some of it’s swamp, some forest.”

“Are there any roads?”  I asked.

“None that anyone knows about.  Used to be a few farms way on back there.  Remember Rabbit Foote?  I heard that his grandpa used to own a couple of hundred acres back there, but that was a long time ago.  Rabbit never came back from Kuwait and the rest of his family are dead now.  May Barnes had a place out there, too, somewhere.  I remember going out there with Pop to pick some radishes and carrots once.  She let me sit on her tractor, but she died when I was about five.  Guess the forest has taken all that back for itself.  Even the dirt road we took to get there is probably gone by now.”  Clarence hesitated for a moment, then went on.  “There was another crazy old family out there, too.  Must have been way out because nobody I’ve ever talked to ever seen the place.  Family’s name was Tilly or Tolliver or something like that.  But they must have cleared out, or died off like the rest.”

“Listen, I see your mom coming over, so let me ask you one more thing.  How was the goat killed?  Was it like one of those cattle mutilations you read about?”

Clarence thought for a while. “It’s possible, but I doubt it.  The throat was slit—and that’s how you’re supposed to slaughter a goat—but it was a messy job.  And then there was a big cut in the belly.  Some entrails had been half pulled out—or maybe pulled out and half pushed back in.”

“Maybe a ritual of some kind?  A sacrifice?”

“Sacrifice?”  Clarence thought it over.  “You may be on to something there, but I still think it was a kid’s prank.  Probably on some kind of drugs and the thing got out of hand.”

I had to admit that Clarence was probably right.  I got up and began to browse the shelves.  I already had enough honey. Apples, too, and I doubted that I’d need any of the dozens of what appeared to be Vietnam service medals and ribbons.  I generally shake my head in disbelief at least once per visit, and I did so now.  Then I came to a rough box piled high with small, rectangular sandbags.  When I picked one up it felt like it was filled with rice.  It also had a pleasant but medicine-y smell.

“What are these?” I asked.

Clarence came over.  “These are pillows you put on your eyes.  Eye-pillows. Home made.”

I lifted one to my nose.  “What’s in em?” I asked.

“Some flax seed, eucalyptus oil, bunch of other stuff.”

“Did you make them?”

“Naw, but I know some people,” he said.  “And don’t worry, they don’t sting your eyes none.  I use em myself.  Good for headaches, stuffy sinuses, and it relaxes you like nothing this side of rotgut whisky.”

Just then Gladys Meekins, dressed in a flowery print dress and white orthopedic shoes, walked in the door carrying a black handbag and a dish covered in tinfoil.  I fished around in my purse for a couple of bills. 

“Up early today, aren’t ya?”  Gladys asked.  We didn’t know each other well, really, but we usually spoke a few words whenever I came in.

“Couldn’t sleep.  Need some coffee.  Give me a pound of that stuff we just had, Clarence.  And this eye-pillow.”

As Clarence went to fill a small paper bag with some whole beans, his mother set her dish down near the register and placed her handbag under the counter.  The plate reminded me I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before.  “That smells really great,” I told the old lady.  “What have you got there?”

Gladys looked over at her son and cackled.  “Goat cutlets,” she said.  “Hee hee.”

I shook my head.  All the Meekins were kind of weird.  In fact, Clarence’s dad, who had worked the market for almost forty years, simply disappeared from Pine Oak just after Clarence got out of the army.  I was in graduate school then, but on visits back home I heard various rumors: that he had run off with a customer to a retirement community in Lake Worth, that he had become an itinerant beggar-for-god, that he had died.  I asked Clarence about his dad once, but he had quickly changed the subject.

I stuffed the eye-pillow in my purse, picked up my sack of coffee beans, and went out.  Instead of driving back out to the highway, though, I pulled back around to the dumpster and got out again.  I had an idea and wanted to check it out now that it was full light.  I walked out to the part of the woods where I thought I had seen someone running and looked closely at the leafy ground.  Lots of scuffing, but nothing that I could recognize as a boot mark or even a hoof print.  Just to the side of one of the scuff marks I spotted a reddish blotch in the sand.  I bent down and moistened my finger with my tongue, then passed it along the stain.  It came up red and sandy.  Blood, almost for sure.

Whoever had left that goat in Clarence Meekins’ dumpster had not just stolen it and carried it some ten miles.  They had brought the goat in from the woods.  But why?  One thing I was sure of: it was too elaborate to have been a prank.

Well, I had my story, at least part of it.  But how to get the rest?  The healthy part of me wanted to traipse into the woods and see if I could track the goat killers back to where they had come from.  Trouble was, the healthy part wasn’t in control right then.  I knew I couldn’t get more answers without more rest. 

But a story was a story, especially in a quiet town like Pine Oak.  Back in the pickup I began to develop it in my head, feeling phrases take shape and nudging them into polished sentences, a task made easy by long practice.  By the time I got home all I had to do was type it up and drop it by the office.  Maybe a shower first, though.  Maybe a nap . . .

But when I arrived home and went inside, I saw that my living room had been ransacked.  Desk drawers strewn against the wall.  Papers were everywhere.  The bedroom had been treated similarly.  Bureau drawers yanked out, pillows on the floor, the closet door wide open and clothes thrown down in heaps.  Even the mattress was askew.  The realization hit me like a gust of freezing wind that whoever had done this might still be in the house.  I was frightened, but I carefully searched the rest of the house until I was sure I was alone.  Then I called the sheriff’s office.  The only things I touched were my roach clip, which I hid, and the remnants of my joint, which I carefully swept up and threw outside in some bushes.

What next?  It would take hours to go through the house and see if anything was missing, even longer to go through all the police bullshit with the sheriff or whoever he sent out.  I heard a muffled scuffling in the kitchen that almost made me run back out the front door before I realized it was only Amin coming in his cat door.  I picked up the cat and stroked it.  “Did you see who did this, boy?” I asked hopelessly.

“Guess we’re lucky you’re not a goat.”

Chapter 2

The offices of
The Pine Oak Courier
were tucked away in the corner of an L-shaped shopping center just off the main highway.  The shorter wing was taken up by the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.  The longer wing consisted of a row of smaller shops and offices:
The Courier
, an attorney’s office, an empty space, a used bookstore, and a laundrymat.  I pulled my pickup into a space alongside Cal Dent’s new Ford Explorer and shut off the motor.  I was way late for the morning briefing.  I threw my purse over my shoulder, grabbed the yellow legal pad I always carry in the truck, and hurried through the glass door.

The Courier
made do with just a few rooms.  The first three—Cal Dent’s office, my office, and a slightly larger conference room—took up most of the front.  The rest was divided by portable walls into half a dozen cubicles, each with a computer hookup.  A couple of drawing boards were set up against the back wall for paste-up.  I had worked more than a decade for a far more sizable paper and, by comparison,
The Courier
was a cramped, stuffy little place.  But I still liked it and often drove the five miles in to the office just to type up my stories in its muffled-clackety environment.

The meeting was almost over.  As I turned into the conference room I saw five heads glance up from their notes.  The man at the head of the rectangular table, Calvin Dent, was a man in his mid-forties with graying hair.  He was the editor of
The Courier
and as usual he was nattily dressed, this time in a dark, pin-stripe suit and baby-blue tie.  The others were Mark Patterson, handsome, twenty-three, and just out of journalism school; typesetting and paste-up specialist Betty Dickson, plump and dowdy; Paul Hughes, pot-bellied ex-Marine major in charge of writing about local politics; and too-pretty Ginette Cartwright, who was not only the sales representative and office manager, but was also sleeping with Cal Dent.  Ginette and I had a strange rivalry that went back over twenty years; I’ll explain when I have a moment.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.  “I—”

“Weren’t expecting you at all today, Sue-Ann,” Cal Dent said.  Concern showed in his face, which embarrassed me.  “In fact, we . . .”

“I’m fine, Cal.  Rest is for people who are dead.”

“We heard your house got broken into,” continued my boss.

“Oh, that.  How did you . . .”  But I didn’t finish the sentence. 

“Dilly Dollar called,” said Ginette.  “But all he knew was a bunch of nothin.  Any ahdea who it was?”

“No idea at all.  All my stuff got thrown around.”

“Anythin stolen?”

“Don’t know yet.  Dilly told me not to mess around with things before he dusted for fingerprints.  By the time he finished, all I had time to do was jump in the shower and get over here before the meeting was over.”

“Dilly wouldn’t be able to fahnd a fingerprint even if there was a dozen burglars and they had all just dipped their fingers in a bottle a ink,” said Ginette.  Oddly, of the six people in the room, only Ginette had lived all her life in Pine Oak and was the only employee of
The Courier
who spoke with the small town’s unique accent.  I used to speak exactly the same way, but the accent had been drilled out of me in the dozen years I was away.

“I thought his name was Bill,” said Betty.

“Prahvit joke,” said Ginette, who had not warmed up to the baggy, middle-aged typesetter in the months since Betty had been hired—even though it was Ginette’s old job that Betty had taken over.

“We started calling him Dilly in junior high,” I told Betty.  “I forget why just now, but it stuck.”

“You went to school with him?” Betty asked me.

“Me, Ginette, half this town,” I told her.  I turned to Ginette.  “I just saw Clarence Meekins.  He’s another.  And, hey, I may have something for Friday.”

“Something about the break-in at your house?” asked Cal, interested.

I knew that if the break-in had happened to anyone but me
The Courier
would have been on it like flies on blood.  But the last thing I wanted was to be the subject of a news story rather than the reporter of one.  “It’s that goat thing,” I said.

“Right, the dumpster goat,” Cal said.  “Someone got mad at Ray Colley and killed one of his goats.”

“Well, that’s what Dilly thinks, but—”

“Mark agrees with Officer Dollar this time,” Cal said.  “How’d you find out about it anyway?” he asked.

A glance was all I needed to see that Mark had gone rigid.  The little twerp.  He must have told Cal that he had checked out the story himself instead of getting me out of bed.  Well, I’d keep his secret this time, but it was going to cost him.

“I—I went out to Meekins’ Market to get some coffee,” I said.  “Clarence told me about it.”

“Clarence is a square shooter,” Ginette said.  “What’s
he
think?”

“He doesn’t really know.  Probably agrees with Mark”—I gave him a look.  “But I think there’s more to it than that.  Something kind of ritualistic.”

“You mean Satanic or somethin lahk that?” asked Ginette.  She took a pack of cigarettes from a small purse and put it in front of her on the table.

“I don’t know about Satanic,” I replied.  “But haven’t you ever read about cattle mutilations, or heard stories about people going around poisoning cats and dogs?”

Paul Hughes spoke for the first time.  It’s hard to describe his voice other than saying that it was deep and kind, but also subtly condescending—a voice that would be more appropriately used in speaking to children or mice.  “Right now it’s just one goat, Sue-Ann,” he said.  “I’m not sure that’s enough for a story, know what I mean?”

I did know.  He meant that it would embarrass Commissioner Ray Colley, who was a decent guy and who was always good for a story, no matter how boring, about local politics.  But he was also someone who kept his private life private.

“I agree with Paul,” Cal said.  But if there are any more killings or mutilations we’ll pounce on it.  Mark, keep your ears open.”

“Yes sir.”  Mark Patterson looked down at his notebook and scribbled what looked like two wavy lines.

“Let me do some more work on it.” I said.  “There are a couple of weird things I noticed at—”

Cal Dent cut me off.  “You have too much on your mind already,” he told me.  “Take some time to get your place back in shape.  Get some sleep.”

“What else do you have for Friday?” I asked.

“We settled that before you got here,” Cal told me. He looked down at his own notes.  “A revival, a city commission meeting, the schedule for hunting season.  I’m going to work up a report on how the real estate market is doing since the election.”  He looked up.  “And the usual stuff from the community columnists.  A few letters to the editor.  If you want to write something, do a story about this year’s Plank Festival.  Maybe some kind of history from the beginning until now.”

“That’s more than a month away.”

“You’ll have plenty of time, then.  If you want, there’s some kind of rodeo going on next weekend in Forester—you can cover that.  Not a big deal though.”  Cal looked around the table.  “Anything else?  Okay—that’s it.”

I stayed seated after the others had left.  Maybe Cal was right.  Maybe I needed to get my house in order and forget about chasing stories for a while.  I sighed and got up, tucking my pad under my arm, and made my way out of the room.  Betty was sitting at one of the back drafting tables lining up ads in columns for the next issue’s shopper.  Ginette sat in one of the cubicles, phone in one hand and a Rolodex in the other.  The former local beauty queen had been the paper’s typesetter for years until she began taking on other duties.  In high school she and I had run in different crowds and were only classroom acquaintances.  She had been popular, I had not; I had been a pretty good student, she had been average.  I always had the idea that she was kind of flighty and aloof and I’d been surprised when her tenacity and gift of persuasion raised both the paper’s circulation and its advertising revenue.  Ginette looked up at me as I passed and gave a little nod.  We had never been friends, but as long as she was good for the paper, I could work with her.

Cal was in his office talking to Paul Hughes and Joe Rooney, the attorney who occupied the office down the row.  The three men often played golf together.

Mark Patterson was nowhere to be seen.

On the way to my pickup, I caught sight of a hunkered-down little man struggling to unlock the front door of The Best Little Bookstore in Pine Oak. It was the
only
bookstore in Pine Oak and I was a regular visitor.  I liked to read, although I didn’t have a real affinity for any subject—I read biographies, histories, books on vitamins, herbs, and diets.  I liked mysteries, too, and had even found that some of my ex-boyfriend’s fat fantasy novels helped me pass long, idle afternoons.  And The Best Little Bookstore was eclectic if nothing else.  I threw my notebook and purse on the front seat and walked over.

“Hey, Benny,” I said.

The man was so intent on the lock that my voice startled him and he dropped his key and stammered a “Hey hey, little lady, long time no see.”  He retrieved the key and poked at the lock again.

“I think you’ve got your key upside down,” I told him

“Umm.  Right.  Aha.  Had an idea for a new kind of lock,” he said.  “Clumsy people’s lock, ha ha.” 

“How’s it work?” I asked.

“Touch.  Fingerprint recognition.  Sensor units.  Just push on the door in the right place and it unlocks automatically.  Presto! No keys.”

“Got you this time, Benny,” I told him.  “They already have some of those on the market.  They’re called biometrics.  I did a story about one that they installed in a prison outside Baltimore.”

“It was a good idea, then, huh?” he asked.

“It was until some prisoners revolted, cut off one of the guard’s fingers, and used it to escape.”

“Ewww.”  He finally conquered the Twentieth-Century lock, walked inside, and flipped the sign from Open to Closed—something he did about every other day.  His name was Dominic Benedict, but most people just called him Benny.  Benny was a man of many interests and I enjoyed talking to him as much as I enjoyed browsing his shelves.  Not only did he know a smattering about just about every subject he carried, but he was—on a small scale—an inventor, a playwright, and breeder of Manx cats.  And strangely enough, he had a college degree in Journalism.  I waited for him to flick on the lights before following him in, correcting the Closed sign to Open.  A tiny bell jingled over my head. 

The first time I had been in Benny’s bookstore—on a holiday visit a couple of years before—Benny had confided in me that he invented things.  In that same conversation he had told me about an idea he had to use Chinese gongs for yardage markers at golf driving ranges.  “Bong!  Bong!” he chuckled.  I had just shaken my head. 

Inside, Benny sat down in a wicker chair behind the card table he uses for a front desk.  A dozen or so boxes bulging with paperbacks Benny had purchased sat clumped in uneven rows nearby.  The same boxes had been there for weeks.

Benny was a short, pudgy man somewhere in his fifties.  He was wearing khaki shorts and a black Metallica tee shirt.  Flip flops revealed crooked feet and toenails that hadn’t been cut recently.  Sometime in the last few days he had dyed his hair white and given it a spiky look.  As always, there was a band-aid on the side of his face right under mid-ear.  The strip didn’t quite hide the red, angry-looking skin condition that crept up into his sideburns. 

“I came by a couple of times last week but you were closed,” I told him.  As it happens, Benny was not only the owner of the store but the only employee and he came in pretty much when he felt like it.  It wasn’t unusual to see his lights on in the wee hours of the morning, with him arranging books on a shelf, or more likely, pecking out words on a portable typewriter he carried around in his Jeep.  Although he had yet to publish his first piece, if the definition of writer is what he gave it out to be: “someone who writes,” then Benny was a writer.  From my many visits, I knew that he had begun his writing jag as a desk jockey in the Air Force, where he had contributed to the base newsletter.  Then he had studied journalism at the University of Florida on the G. I. Bill before drifting down to Jasper County, where he married a woman whose previous husband had left her a small house, a few dollars, and a cattery.  The bookstore had already assumed several guises.  When he first opened up, he had been writing fiction and had called it Hemingway Heaven.  In his poetry phase, which lasted only a few weeks, he had renamed it Ozymandias Books.  His playwriting turn had given it its present name.  Just before that he had gone through an Alasdair Crowley phase and toyed with the idea of changing the name to Equinox Boox.  I talked him out of it.  These phases, though, had good results, because he had an eclectic, if limited, selection of fiction, poetry, drama, and occult books.

The little man pursed his lips.  “Umm,” he said, shaking his head.  “I wish . . . ah . . . well, you know.  Umm, heh heh, lost my cat.  Little bugger disappeared.”

It wasn’t unusual for me to have to interpret what he was saying into a context that made sense. “That’s why you couldn’t come in?” I hazarded.

“Yeh, umm hmm.”

“Find him?”