The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (4 page)

“In the cupboard.  Wife shut him in by accident.  Thought he might be dehydrated, harumpff, so I took him to the vet.”

Benny was the master both of the non-sequitur and of human noises.  But he used noises like other people use body language.  I had done a small interview with him for the business section of
The Courier
several months back and had the hardest time squeezing out anything I could put quotes around.  Yet the piece had gotten Benny some extra business and he was grateful.

His card table desk was covered with large sheets of paper containing numbers, musical notations, and odd-looking grids, like tic-tac-toe boxes with hundreds of squares.  The pages were professionally printed, like blueprints, but with Benny’s chicken scratch added here and there.

I knew I shouldn’t ask but couldn’t help myself.  “What are you working on?”

“These?  Ah!  Know how when you drive over a bridge?” He stopped, waiting for an answer.

“Uh, yeah.  I’ve driven over a bridge,” I said, already regretting my question.

“Know how when you drive over a bridge that has an iron grating you hear a hum?”

“Yeah.  Most big bridges have those grates.  None around here, though.”

“Well, hah, think about that hum.  That hum is a note, like C or F sharp, depending.”

“Depending on what?”  I was becoming more interested.

“On, uh, lots of things: the thickness of the metal, the spacing of the grids, how fast you’re going.  You know.”

“And what does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“Well, ah, about a year ago—before you moved back—I had a thought.  Hmm.  I had a thought that if you put together metal grids of different thicknesses, it would make different types of hums.  Notes.  At a particular speed, say the speed limit hah hah, you could . . . you could play a song with your car.”  He stopped and looked into my eyes.  “Heh heh,” he added.

“Like, what, ‘Twinkle twinkle little star?’”

“Yah.  Something simple.  Sure.”

“Benny,” I told him.  “That’s either one of the most brilliant ideas you’ve ever had or you’re just completely crazy.  It’s one or the other, no in between.”

“Well, hoo.  Maybe it’s nothing, we’ll see in a month or two.  I’ve invented a new type of manure fork, though.  I’ve got it in the car.  Want to see it?”

“Maybe next time,” I told him.  “I just came in to pick up—” Actually, I wasn’t sure why I had come in, but now it struck me.  “Listen, do you know anything about cattle mutilations?”

“Aliens,” he said, cackling.  “Crop circles.”

“No, not like that.  Like somebody killing a goat and slitting its belly.”

“Ha.  Santeria.  Yiii!  Heh heh.”

“What, voodoo?”

“Might be.  Know-nothings think that Santeria is some spooky, scary, hip religion.  Black cat bones and chicken feet.  Boo!  Ha ha.”

“So what is it really?” I asked.

“Kind of like being Catholic.”

“Have you had anyone in here looking for books on Santeria?”

“Yow.  Might have.  Some punkoids over in that section a couple of days back.  Goths, maybe.  Giggled some, but left without showing me any dough-re-me.  Might have stolen something, though.  Eww, didn’t think of that.”

“Goths?”

“Dark and dreary.  Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure.  Arghh.” 

“Who were they, do you remember?”

“Nah, I was typing on the play.  Had this page I wanted to get right.”

“Back to your play?” I asked.

“Yeh.  I finally figured out what was wrong with it.”

“You did?”

“Ummmm.  I just needed to justify both the right and left margins.”

I thought for a moment.  I knew that despite Benny’s interest in technology, he had never owned a computer.  “What, on your typewriter?”

“What else?”

“That would mean that every line would have to have exactly the same number of spaces.”

“Hmmm.”

“I guess if you added an extra space here and there between the words . . .”

“But that would be cheating,” he smiled.  “Had to find different words, different ways of saying the same thing so that every line came out exactly even.  Took me three days.”

“You finished it in three days?” I asked.

“Finished two pages.  Whew!”

“That’s great.”  What else could I say?

Benny snorted and blew his nose on a handkerchief he produced from his shorts.  “Ah, I found out something about your boyfriend,” he told me.

“Donny?”  That puzzled me.  “I thought I told you we broke up last month.”

“Naw.  Nope.  The surfer boy.  One you work with.”

“Oh.  Mark Patterson.  Right.  You said you knew somebody in Gainesville who . . .”

“Yow.  He’s an instructor there now.  Turns out that Patterson was in a class of his about a year ago.”

“Good student?” I asked.

“Didn’t ask.  Found out something else, though.”

“What, that he’s a prick?”

“Naw.  Nope.  He left sans degree.”

“He didn’t graduate?” I asked, very surprised at this information.

“That’s your story for the next edition.  Ha.”

“Do you know why he left?” I asked.

“Making the beast with two backs.  The old in-out in-out.  Whee!”

“Come on, you can’t be expelled for having sex,” I said.

“Umm.  Didn’t say he got expelled.  Got caught boofing his major professor’s new young wife.  Decided that retreat was the better part of valor.”  Benny blew his nose again.

I wondered if Cal knew.  Had Mark lied about graduating in order to get his job at
The Courier
?  It was worth checking into, but in the meantime it gave me some leverage over him, if I needed it. 
More
leverage.  I had no quarrel with Mark’s work; he was a little green but worked hard and took Cal’s red pencil like a trooper.  Still . . .

I looked through a small section of mysteries and picked out one with a horse on the cover.  I took it to the table, where Benny was actually going through books from one of the boxes.  I had to pull out the eye-pillow from my purse to get at my wallet.

“Whazzat?” Benny asked, looking at it with interest.

“It’s called an eye-pillow.  Never seen one before?”

“Uh, uh.”  I passed it over to him and he hefted it in his hand.  He smelled it.  Held it up to his ear and shook it.  “Hmm, wheat husks, eucalyptus, some, um, peppermint.  Aromatherapy, yah.”

I plunked the paperback and two dollars on the card table.  Benny picked up the book and looked at the cover.  “Horse mystery, eh?”

“I’ve been thinking about getting back into riding,” I told him.  Actually, I had only been thinking about it since I saw the book on the shelf, but it seemed like a good idea.  “I need something to balance me.  Maybe I’ll get you to order me some riding books.”

Benny stuck the two dollars in his pocket. “Will do,” he said.  Just lemme know.”

I put the book and eye-pillow in my purse.  “Thanks for the information about Mark, Benny.  And good luck on your play.”

“Oh.  Um.  I’m working on something else now.”

“Something with Santeria in it?” I guessed.

“Umm.  Well, heh heh.”

Chapter 3

My dark mood returned when I opened my front door and saw the cyclonic mess in the living room.  I shouldn’t have been surprised since it had been the same when I left.  Maybe I had been hoping that someone had come in and cleaned up the mess or better still, that the break-in had never happened.  Cushions from the couch were upended, drawers were pulled out from the secretary and their contents strewn everywhere, my father’s matched set of Zane Grey books toppled off their shelves and onto the wooden floor.  All the rooms of the house had been similarly treated.  Both my parents’ rooms were trashed as bad as the living room, maybe worse.  The furniture in the guest rooms had been taken apart or rearranged.  Food from the cupboards littered the floor of the kitchen.  It was like being hit on the head in a raw, bruised place.  So much work to do.  It wasn’t fair.  I had been crying a lot lately, and I started again.  I couldn’t help it.  I just cried and cried, sagging down in the open doorway and burying my face between my knees.  And not for the first time in the last several months, I gave myself up to total self-pity.  I was being eased out of my job, my boyfriend had left me, I was sick as hell half the time, and now some asshole had violated my space.  My thoughts ricocheted from if-only-this to if-only-that until I sank so deeply into misery that I almost couldn’t breathe.  If only my mother was still alive with her gentle confidence and ability to see things through.  Or if only my father hadn’t run halfway around the world to try to find a reason to live without her.  If only I had stayed in Richmond, where things had once been good.  If only I had the nerve to walk out in the woods somewhere and die.

But you can only cry for so long before you run out of tears; and it’s only a matter of time before self-pity turns to self-loathing.  I was vaguely aware that I was staggering along a border I was not ready to cross and slowly raised my head.  I don’t know how long I had been insensate, but the front of my shirt was wet.

I lowered my knees until my legs were straight out along the floor and used the edge of my sleeve to wipe my eyes.  I was feeling a little better.  My life was still totally fucked, but now at least I felt ready to evaluate the situation rationally.  And rationality told me I was in danger.  Not the immediate danger I felt when I thought that criminals might still be in the house, but a subtle and pervasive sense of cold unease.

The destruction of the house added to my fear.  What did the burglar want?  My computer was intact; hadn’t even been touched.  My father’s TV was on the floor of his bedroom, but it didn’t look broken.  The stereo system was just moved cockeyed on the shelf.  If someone wanted some quick cash for crack, all that stuff would be gone.  It was something more sinister, more creepy.  I briefly wondered if I should call Donny.  No.  Bad idea; I was way too pathetic.  And I didn’t need a protector; I needed some kind of weapon—a pistol or shotgun in case—

A weapon.  I jumped up so quickly it made me dizzy and staggered across the living room, through the kitchen, and out the back door to the barn. 

The back of the house gave out to a small, weedy yard.  Beyond that, on the right, there was a row of four stables where my mother had once kept horses.  On the left was a red barn with a tin roof and huge double doors.  I ran to the doors and struggled to pull one of them open, then flipped on the lights.  The barn was home to a green John Deere tractor with a mower deck attached, although it had been many months since it had been used.  Spread out in the barn were other tractor attachments, a riding lawn mower and various paraphernalia that were once used to keep my mother’s training arena looking smooth.  A couple of large cardboard boxes filled with tack and a couple of saddles sat next to my mother’s traveling show box, which held more tack, braiding equipment, lead ropes, and medicines.  Kitty Amin was asleep in a wheelbarrow.  A complement of hand tools hung on the walls, but I wasn’t concerned about any of these things.  I headed straight for my archery room, a large rectangular office built into the left-hand wall.  Like everything else, I never locked up the place and now regretted it.  I opened the door, fumbled for the light switch, and breathed out my relief.  The thief had not been here.

The room had once been my mother’s office and tack room.  It was a splendid room while she was alive, brightly painted and well lit, with slatted wooden ceilings and trim so tightly sealed that an ant couldn’t get through.  And although the saddles and bridles, blankets and bits had been packed away, her books taken from their shelves and sold, the room retained its special purpose as a kind of museum and trophy room.  Instead of tack, though, the walls were carefully pegged for my collection of archery equipment.  With a peg under each limb, the bows were arranged in rows down the long wall.  Most were recurves—my bamboo-backed Saluki Ibex, a Wapiti takedown laminated in exotic woods of green and brown; my beautiful Black Widow Osage.  All were made to my own specifications and had my name written next to the serial number.  There were a dozen other bows on the wall, including two longbows and—the most unusual stick of all—a seven-and-a-half-foot-long Japanese yumi bow that had cost me over three thousand dollars, not including shipping from Osaka.  And they were all there; not a peg was empty.  My mother’s mahogany trophy case still stood in the right corner, a bit dusty, but now filled with trophies and other memorabilia that I won in formal competitions or informal outdoor target shoots and 3-D events.  There was even a National Championship medal in there.

At the far end of the room sat a worktable I had installed to use in building or repairing my own tackle.  I made a quick inventory of the table and was satisfied that all my fletching jigs, bare shafts, and stock of feathers, target points, broadheads, and nocks were untouched.  Whoever had ransacked the house did not know that the only things I really valued were here in this room.  It had been weeks since I had touched a bow—longer probably—and I had sorely missed it.  Archery always had a calming effect.  On the range I could lose myself in the target and put off worrying about things until later.  And although I hadn’t planned it, I realized that that was exactly what I needed at that moment; the thought of having to face the wrecked house again was too much to bear.

I took my Black Widow down from the wall and ran my fingers over the finish.  There were thin layers of cocobola and bocote alongside the osage orange.  But it felt much heavier than usual and I dreaded the idea of having to string it to its 45-pound draw weight. I put it back and turned to the half dozen or so rectangular bow-carrying cases arranged on shelves.  I selected a cherry-colored wooden case and opened it on the desk.  It contained a Groves Spitfire takedown—one of a kind and fashioned for me before the company went out of business a few years before.  The riser was a golden maple and lay in a padded foam indentation.  Above and below were two sets of limbs, both with the brown and golden basketweave design I preferred.  Without thinking, I reached for the 40-pound limbs, then with a sigh, picked out the 30-pound limbs instead and bolted them to the riser.  I fished a bowstringer from a drawer and, after struggling for a half minute, succeeded in stringing the bow.  I clipped a hip quiver to my belt, picked out a dozen arrows of the approximate stiffness for the bow, and left the room.  For the first time in a long time, I felt my shoulders draw back in anticipation of what was to come.  I stretched my rib cage and took a deep breath.

Outside, just beyond the barn and stables, was a rectangular open space about half the size of a football field.  It used to be my mother’s regulation dressage ring, but I took out all the lettering and fencing a few weeks after I moved back to Pine Oak.  I converted the judge’s box into a target shed—a three-sided enclosure six feet high, four feet wide, and about four feet deep.  It sheltered a single square bale of cotton that took up almost the entire volume of the shed.  And the bale was large enough to accommodate a regulation 80-centimeter bullseye target.  Today, though, it was bare save for a three-inch black circle painted about three quarters of the way up the bale—about the height of my chest.

Four fence posts stood between the barn area and the shed; one at 70 meters from the target, one at 50 meters, one at 40 meters, and the closest at 30 meters—all of the regulation shooting distances.  Each was equipped with a clip on one side and a hook on the other.  The clips, which I had lined with thick pieces of felt, were strong but soft, designed to grip a bow without scratching the surface.  The hooks were for quivers.

I went directly to the 30-meter line, clipped my bow to the pole and began my stretches.  At the top of my game I usually spent ten or fifteen minutes warming up, beginning with 50 jumping jacks and continuing with several exercises designed to stretch most of the muscles in my arms and abdomen.  This afternoon, though, I was content just to raise my arms over my head a few times and even then I felt my heart begin to complain.  I put on a three-fingered shooting glove and strapped on an arm guard.

Facing the target, I took the first arrow from the quiver and fitted it onto the string.  Pulling the string back with three fingers was surprisingly difficult, even with my lightest bow, and my bow hand began to tremble.  That didn’t bother me too much because the first few shots were always the hardest, even when I warmed up properly.  Sighting down the arrow, I let the string roll off my fingertips like a wheel rolling off the edge of a cliff, and saw the arrow miss not only the black circle, but the entire cotton bale, burying itself in the tall grass a few feet short of the target.  Was I that weak?  I aimed much higher with the next arrow, but it flew all the way over the shed. I quickly nocked a third, which buried itself with a thunk in the wooden edge of the shed.  Shit.  I knew that was going to be a bitch to pull out without bending it.  And forget about ever finding the one in the grass behind the shed.

I clipped the bow back onto the post and swung my arms around in circles a few times.  I arched my back, took a deep breath.  Try it again.  I took up the bow and, steadying my arm as best I could, sent the arrow into the bale, missing the black circle by only a few inches.  I took up two more arrows in quick succession and managed to hit the outer edge of the black circle with both.

“Good shootin!”  The voice behind me almost made me jump out of my shoes, and I spun around.  I was greeted by the sight of a smiling Ginette Cartwright in white sweater, lime skirt, and matching lime-green shoes.

“Fuck a duck, Ginette!” I sputtered.  “Give me a heart attack!”

“Sorry, Sue-Ann.”  Ginette was walking across the grass toward me.  “Ah never saw anybody shoot one of those before.  Ah mean, in person.”  With her blonde, expensively done-up hair and immaculate clothes, Ginette looked like a runway model lost in the woods.

“What are you doing here, Ginette?”

“Well, ah do guess ah’m about the last person you’d expect to see.”

I could think of one or two, but not many.  When I had gone to work at
The Courier
, I had not been pleased to find that Ginette worked there too.  There was some consolation in the fact that she was only a low-paid typist. Later, when Ginette had gotten a promotion to sales and had become the girlfriend of the boss at almost the same time, I connected the two events as I would have a bow and arrow.

“That’s about right,” I said.

“Ah’m, you know, jist worried about you.”  I tried to express some degree of disbelief but Ginette hurried on.  “Cal told me about your bein sick.”

I burst out: “God damn it!  Cal promised not to—”

“Don’t blame Cal,” said Ginette.  “A person’d have to be a bat not to see that somethin’s wrong.  You’ve got bags under your eyes and you’ve lost enough weight to make a stew.  And look at how your hands are shakin.”

I stared at my bow hand and shook my head.  “I need to sit down,” I said.  “Come into the office so I can put this stuff away.”

“Office?”

“In the barn.”

“Ah’ll follow you.”

“Will you bring my quiver?” I asked. “It’s hanging on the pole there.”

Without a word, Ginette gathered up the quiverful of arrows and walked beside me into the barn.  In the office, I set the bow on the table without unstringing it and sat down heavily in my armchair in front of the desk. I motioned Ginette into a matching chair nearby.

“The only thing I told Cal,” I began angrily, “is that I haven’t been feeling very well for the last couple of months.  Sometimes I get weak and shaky, like you saw outside.  Maybe Cal thinks I have cancer or something.  But that’s not it.  I’m probably just anemic.  It’s nothing.  I can take care of it.”

“You’ve been to see a doctor?”

“I’m thinking about going.  Haven’t had the energy.”

“Not pregnant, are ya?”

“Not much chance of that.”  The bitter words came out before I had time to think.  “Anyway, I had my tubes tied when I was twenty.  Why I told you that I have no idea.”

Ginette raised her eyes, but passed over it.  “Donny Brasswell hasn’t come back?”  Ginette began.  “Don’t look at me lahk that.  Ah hear stories.  Ah even know who he’s been seein.  Why’d y’all break up, anyway?”

“Who said it was your business, Ginette?”  I replied loudly, standing up.

Ginette stood up, too.  “Forget it, Sue-Ann,” she said.  “Guess ah’ll jist go.” The look on her face was so hurt, so—almost—innocent, that I was suddenly ashamed.  More so because I had a sudden memory of seeing that same look once before, when we were teenagers.

“Sit down, Ginette.  Fuck.”  I sat back down myself and combed my fingers through what felt like a mess of unruly hair.