All The Pretty Dead Girls (7 page)

The town of Lebanon went dark no later than nine every night.

Every night of the week, with the exception of the Yellow Bird Café around the town square, the 7/11 near the high school, and Earl’s Tavern out on the county road, every business within the city limits was locked up and closed no later than nine. The streets fell silent, and the only signs of life to anyone driving through town would be the occasional light in the windows of a house. It made the sheriff’s life much easier, and the night shift for the deputies was generally slow and quiet, disrupted only by occasional acts of vandalism or a drunk driver every once in a while. Lebanon was a quiet town, and as the mayor, Robbie Kendall, was fond of saying whenever making a speech, “a fine place to raise a family.”

Unlike other small towns around the country, Lebanon wasn’t drying up and blowing away. Sure, every year after graduation, a high percentage of teenagers hit the road and never looked back—an interesting mix of the slackers and the top students. The top students went away for college, incurring years of debt in student loans, and the slackers headed for bigger cities—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Albany. Some of the college-bound kids came back after graduation if there was a job to bring them back—working in the Walgreen’s pharmacy or teaching, for example. But the slacker kids didn’t come back, and outside of their families, no one really cared. Those kids were lazy, a bad element, and the ones the adults in town automatically thought of whenever drug use came up in conversation. The sooner they left town, the better.

Yet enough of their classmates stayed around and went to work after getting their diplomas, settling into life in Lebanon as adults. They married and had enough kids to keep the population steady each year as another group of kids left. The town folk worked hard. They paid their bills, and rarely complained. If there wasn’t a decent job in town, there were the paper mills and meatpacking plants forty minutes north on the highway in Senandaga, the county seat. The only people who didn’t work were just lazy or drunks.

So far, the scourge of drugs plaguing other small towns had stayed away from Lebanon. Sure, some of the kids smoked pot or drank, but it wasn’t a big problem and for the most part, other than an occasional car wreck, they didn’t bother anyone. Lebanon High School provided a decent education, and had turned out some championship teams in football and girls’ basketball. Robbie Kendall was right. Lebanon
was
a good place to raise a family. The last murder had been seven years ago, and pretty much everyone agreed Wade DeBolt had had it coming. If he hadn’t been slapping his wife Norma around, she wouldn’t have needed to shoot him.

Still, even if folks in Lebanon didn’t need to lock their doors at night, they did anyway.
Better safe than sorry,
was the general thought, and above all else, Lebanon folks were practical. There was a great big crazy world out there, and who knows when someone from outside might blow into town and cause trouble?

There were nine churches in Lebanon, and they were all well attended every Sunday. The churches were the centers of social activity in town, with picnics and potlucks and dances for the teenagers. They were all Protestant—the few Catholics in town attended Mass up at St. Dominic’s in Senandaga. There wasn’t any friction between the different congregations, except at the Church League softball games in the summer, and that was just good fun. There were no minorities in Lebanon, other than the Asian family who owned the 7/11 and the video store. Some people considered the French Canadians a minority, but other than their weirdly accented English and statues of saints, most people never gave them a second thought. The majority of them worked at the factories in Senandaga, they didn’t cause any trouble, and they pretty much kept their religion to themselves.

Lebanon took pride in not only being a good place to raise a family, but in being a
clean
town. People kept up their yards and houses. The homes in Lebanon were like the people themselves: nothing ostentatious or overly ornate; solid and strong, built to weather the humid summers and the bitterly cold winters. Property values were low, as they were in most small towns, but the cost of living was also quite a bit lower than it was even up the highway in Senandaga—let alone Manhattan or Boston. It was a town where everyone knew everyone else, where neighbors talked over coffee in the mornings, where you took care of your neighbors when they were sick or laid up, and people just did for each other in general.

Sure, there was a neighborhood—as there is in every town—far away from the town square, where the houses needed painting and the yards were mostly dirt, where it wasn’t unusual to see a beat-up car up on blocks in the yard, but nobody ever had to drive through that part of town on their way to somewhere else. When they did, they just clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the lack of pride revealed by the run-down houses and dead yards and beat-up cars, but at the same time patting themselves on the back for not winding up in one of those houses. It was where the low-wage-earners lived, where every month was a struggle to pay the bills and buy food, where every ring of the telephone could be a bill collector calling with insults and threats. It was very easy to pretend that part of town didn’t exist, which is what most people in Lebanon did. This part of Lebanon was collectively known as “the Banks,” because it was the closest part of town to the shallow Frontenac River. It was generally presumed that any child from the Banks was destined for a bad end—drugs, alcohol, or an early shotgun marriage.

With the college that loomed just west of town over the rolling hills, the town maintained a friendly if distant relationship. The students were all well behaved for the most part (although there was some worry when the school started admitting male graduate students, but so far there’d been no trouble). Best thing about Wilbourne was that the people on campus spent money in town. They bought food at the A&P, got their cars worked on at Mike’s Firestone or Bud’s Shell, bought their makeup at the Rexall, ate at the local diners and restaurants, and opened accounts at the local banks. Many of them, true to the school’s religious traditions, went to the local churches, where they dutifully dropped their money into the collection plates. And there were jobs on the campus as well—groundskeepers and janitors and cooks and secretaries and research assistants—that went to Lebanon locals.

Yet while, as a rule, the members of the college faculty were liked by the members Lebanon natives, they never really quite fit into the fabric of the town. They tended to subscribe to
The New York Times,
watch movies with subtitles, and their living rooms were filled with books most of their neighbors had never heard of—by authors like Proust and Sartre and Faulkner, instead of Janet Evanovich and Nora Roberts and James Patterson. Dean Gregory himself was a deacon at the local Lutheran Church, and very dedicated to his position there. He was pretty well known and liked by the Lutherans, but outside of church matters, the other church members didn’t have a lot to talk to him about.

The town also took great pride in knowing that Wilbourne College was one of the best in the country—even though no local student had ever been admitted through its gates. The majority of local kids who went to college went to the junior college or the branch of the state university in Senandaga, and there was no disgrace in that—both were fine schools, and affordable.

No one resented the college on the outskirts of town, and it had been there so long it was just thought of as another part of the fabric of Lebanon, like the town square, the high school, or the library. But it was something apart. There was no question about that.

The Yellow Bird Café was always the last business around the town square to close, and the only one that stayed open late on Sunday evenings. The Yellow Bird closed every night at ten, even on Sunday. Wally Bingham, who’d bought the place in the 1970s when he came home from Vietnam, didn’t go to church and thought it might not be a bad idea to keep the café open late. Most people had huge meals after morning services, and sometimes wanted something different after evening services rather than the leftovers. So, on Sunday nights, Wally himself worked the grill. Marjorie Pequod, his night-shift waitress for nearly twenty years, stayed with him even on slow nights. She hadn’t set foot in a church since she was a teenager, and would rather work.

Deputy Sheriff Perry Holland was glad the Yellow Bird was open late. As he pulled into a vertical parking spot right in front of the café, he could see Marjorie reading a paperback novel at the counter and Wally washing dishes back in the kitchen. The place was deserted. Perry turned off the car and sat there for a moment. He’d gone off duty at seven after a quiet day. He’d popped home to his small apartment for a quick shower but, hungry as a horse, he’d known he’d be heading out again. His kitchen cabinets were bare of food as usual. Once again, he’d put off going to the A&P until there was nothing in the house to eat. He glanced at his watch, and sighed. The A&P was already closed, so it was either the Yellow Bird or one of the fast-food joints out at the highway junction.
The Yellow Bird,
Perry decided.

The town was quiet as he headed over to the café—which he pretty much expected. Lebanon was a quiet town, not much excitement. Lights were on in the houses he drove past; sometimes all he saw was the blue glow of a television set. The worst Perry ever had to deal with since joining the force nine years earlier was the occasional drunk driver, or a bunch of teenagers who thought it would be funny to knock down mailboxes with a baseball bat on Saturday nights. Violent crime was pretty much nonexistent in Lebanon, other than an occasional fistfight over at Earl’s Tavern, which was usually over before he pulled into their parking lot. No, if Perry wanted something to break the routine of his life, he had to head up the highway to Senandaga—or the hundred miles or so to Albany.

A bell rang when he pushed through the door. Marjorie wasn’t sitting at the counter anymore, and Perry sat down on one of the round seats, placing his elbows on the counter. The swinging doors from the kitchen bounced open and Marjorie Pequod came out, a Parliament dangling from her lips. She looked tired and grumpy. Her lipstick was an orange smear, and her face was heavily powdered and rouged like always. She wore her graying dark hair pulled back into a bun, and bobby pins glinted in the overhead lights. She was thick in the waist, and varicose veins showed through her stockings. She was wearing a pair of white leather flat shoes that were splattered with ketchup. Her yellow uniform was spotted with grease and God knows what else. Shuffling over to where Perry was seated, she whipped out her order pad and pencil from a pocket in her graying white apron.

“The usual?” she mumbled around the cigarette, not even dropping an ash.

Marjorie had worked at the Yellow Bird ever since the day her husband had run out on her, leaving her to raise their three kids on her own. She knew what everyone ordered. Perry wondered why she even kept that order pad.

For Perry, “the usual” was a well-done cheeseburger and fries swimming in chili with a Coke. He nodded. Marjorie scribbled it down, then tore the page off the pad and shoved it through the small order window, hitting the little bell sitting there.

Perry had been eating at the Yellow Bird since he was a child and his father brought him in for the first time. How he’d looked up to his dad, sitting there so strong and noble in his sheriff’s uniform. Perry had wanted to be just like his father—and he was, going to the police academy and then joining him on the force. Now he was deputy to his father’s sheriff—though he couldn’t help but cringe a little when people would say, “Here comes Andy and Opie.”

Ever since those days when he’d come in with his father, Perry had always ordered the same thing. With dutiful regularity, Marjorie poured his Coke from the fountain and set the red plastic cup in front of him. Stubbing out the cigarette in a dirty ashtray—Perry wasn’t about to get her for smoking in a public place, as there was no one else in the place—Marjorie leaned her elbows on the counter so that she was nearly nose-to-nose with the young officer.

“How you doing, Marjorie?” he asked.

“Tired, that’s how.” She pushed a wisp of gray hair off of her shiny forehead, giving him a weak smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “What you doing out so late on an off night, Perry?”

“No food in the house.” He smiled back at her. “And this way I get to see you, Marj.”

She rolled her eyes. “If things have got to the point where you look forward to flirting with a tired old bag like me, you’re doing something wrong.”

Doing something wrong.
He bit his lower lip. He sometimes wondered about that himself. He was getting a lot closer to thirty than he cared to think about, and he was still single. He didn’t have a steady girl, and rarely even dated anymore since Jennifer had gone back to Boston three years earlier. He looked younger than his age—he got carded whenever he went over to Albany to hit the bars—and he kept himself in good shape by going to the YMCA three times a week. But he was beginning to wonder if time wasn’t running out on him somehow. All of his friends from high school were long married, raising kids, making mortgage payments, and settling into middle age.

Like she was reading his mind, Marjorie asked, “You still hear from Jennifer? You should of married that girl, Perry.”

“I haven’t heard from her in a while.” He replied with a shrug.
Jennifer.
“I don’t know, Marj. Maybe I should have.”

The thought had plagued him ever since Jennifer Donnelly had gone back to Boston.
Maybe she brought up taking the job back there to get me to ask her to marry her,
Perry thought again. She’d come to Lebanon straight out of college, teaching home economics at the local high school. She was a South Boston Irish girl, and he’d loved the way she said
caah
for car. Jennifer had worked her way through college, getting student loans and scrimping and saving. She’d come to Lebanon determined to pay off her student debt as quickly as she could. She told him that the cheap rents in Lebanon had been a major part of her decision to take the job at the high school.

They’d met right here, at this very counter. He’d been sitting here when she pulled up in a battered ten-year-old gray Honda Civic, and he’d almost gasped out loud when she got out of the car. Jennifer had thick dark hair worn short, a round face with an upturned nose, and the deepest emerald green eyes Perry had ever seen. She was short, not much past five feet, weighed one hundred pounds soaking wet, with a curvy body she liked to show off in tight jeans and tight sweaters. That day, she’d walked into the Yellow Bird with a broad smile on her face, sat down on the seat right beside him, and asked, “So, what’s good here?”

I should have asked her to marry me.
Perry let out a sigh as he watched Marjorie wipe down the counter with a dirty sponge.

He and Jennifer had been together for three years from that first night at the Yellow Bird, when she’d ordered the chili cheeseburger and fries he’d recommended, and it was a good three years. Perry had stayed at her place a few nights a week; she’d come over to his once or twice as well. They’d rent movies or watch television. He’d read while she graded papers. Sometimes, they drove up to Senandaga to go out for a nice dinner at the Outback or the Olive Garden before heading to a movie. After the first year, they’d settled into a nice routine, and before long the question was popping up from everyone—his family, his coworkers, people he’d known his whole life:
So, when you gonna do right by that girl and marry her?

But whenever Perry would start to hint about marriage, even tentatively, Jennifer would always change the subject. Then one day, over a dinner of lasagna and some red wine, she gave him a big smile. “It’s done, Perry,” she said. “I paid off the last of my student loans today. What a relief to have that off my back.”

“Well, that’s great, honey!” He reached over with his glass and tapped his to hers. “Congratulations.”

She cleared her throat. “And now that I’m done with that, Perry, I’m going back to Boston.”

He’d replayed that dinner conversation in his head at least a thousand times in the last four years.
What did I do wrong? What did she want from me?
She’d insisted that she wasn’t trying to force him into anything—but
why
hadn’t she brought it up any time before that night? He loved her, he loved being with her, and he knew she loved him, but her decision was final. “I’m going back to Boston,” she stubbornly said. “I’m not staying here.”

Why didn’t I offer to go with her?
he asked himself again.
I could have found work there—there are plenty of jobs there. I could have gotten on with the Boston police. Why was I afraid to leave Lebanon?

But she never asked me to go with her either.

After the school year ended, she packed her bags and kissed him good-bye. He’d watched her drive out of town, and out of his life.

His father still got mad about it if her name ever came up. “I’m not getting any younger, and I still don’t have any grandchildren,” he’d say every once in a while, smiling to make it seem as though he were teasing, but the set of his jaw and the tic in his cheek showed he meant it. Perry knew his dad was proud of him for following him into law enforcement—but a part of his dad worried that Perry was stuck in a rut.

“Well, Jennifer’s not losing any sleep over not marrying me,” Perry said. “That’s for sure.”

“You don’t know that, Perry,” Marjorie replied. “She could be sitting there every night hoping you’ll stop being stubborn and say the magic words to her.” She shuffled his glass over to the fountain and refilled it. “Just tell me to mind my own business and I’ll shut up.”

“It’s okay.” He took another drink and grinned at her. He liked Marjorie, always had—despite her kids.
But you can’t blame her for her kids—she did the best she could
. Her kids had been train wrecks. Marjorie’s oldest, a daughter, had run off to Manhattan when she was seventeen and hadn’t been heard from since. Frankie, her second, had been in Perry’s class at Lebanon High. Frankie was a wild kid, coming to school reeking of marijuana. He’d been killed driving drunk the summer after graduation. Darby, her youngest, had been on the same road as Frankie—but seemed to have straightened out after Frankie was killed. He got a job right out of school as a mechanic over at Mike’s Firestone, gotten married, and bought a house down in the Banks near Marjorie’s. Still, everybody knew that Darby gambled, and word at the sheriff’s office was that he was probably dealing in stolen cars. They had their eye on Darby Pequod.

“Marjorie’s always had a hard life,” his mother used to say, “but she never complains, bless her heart.” They’d gone to Lebanon High together and were friends. And when the cancer was eating his mother alive a few years back, Marjorie had come over every day with wrapped sandwiches from the Bird.

“So what’s gotten you so tired out today, Marj?” Perry asked her.

“First day of school over at the college.” The locals rarely called it Wilbourne. It was just “the college.”

“Yeah? A lot of students coming in?”

“In and out all afternoon, kept me hopping.”

For a moment, the face of that girl he’d pulled over appeared in Perry’s mind. What was her name? Barlow. Susan Barlow.

Marjorie sighed, but then she smiled. “Those girls are good tippers. I guess they had their welcome thing tonight, because it slowed way down after six thirty.” She stretched, pressing both hands into the small of her back. “Man, my back is hurting. Be glad when I get home and can soak in a hot bath.”

They both turned when the bell at the front door rang.