The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (12 page)

“Sorry, Gina,” I told her.  “I was on line.  I have an overactive thyroid that’s making my body think it’s a Harley Davidson and I was doing research on it.  I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”

She hesitated and asked if she could come over after work and I said sure.  It’d give me a chance to take a nap, and that’s what I did.  I didn’t wake up until Gina knocked.

I answered the door in a robe pulled tightly around me and calfskin slippers.  Outside, the sky looked stormy, but the ground was still dry.  Gina was dressed so neatly she could have been just going to work instead of just getting off.  Her brown shirt matched her shoes and her light blouse managed to show off her figure without making her look too sexy.  She walked in, fumbling with her purse, going past me without looking at me.  She sat on the sofa, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette.  Neither of us had spoken a word.  Standing there alone at the door I felt like the only one at the dance without a partner.

I don’t know what I had been expecting—for Gina to rush in and hug me and make mothering noises, maybe.  But her total indifference crushed me.  “I . . . I need to get dressed,” I managed.

“Raht.”

It took me a few minutes to put on some jeans and a t-shirt, and kick my feet into a pair of sandals.  When I walked back into the room, Gina had her head tilted back on the couch and was blowing smoke at the ceiling.

I sat on the armchair next to the couch.  Gina lit up a second cigarette from the cherry of the first.  “So,” she began. “Cal told me you have somethin called Graves’ disease.”

“Right.”

“Tell me about it.”

Without really knowing what I was saying I told her about my condition and the treatment options, but it was more like I was reading it from a book than explaining it.  I told her about the pills, the possible side effects, Ben Crenshaw and Gail Devers.  Throughout it all, Gina just sat there staring ahead or at the ceiling, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

“Gina,” I finally said.  “What’s wrong?”

“Whah should anythin be wrong?” she replied.  “Ah jist came over to see how you are.  Ah was worried.”

“Why won’t you look at me?”  I reached over to touch her arm, but she chose that moment to reach for the ashtray.

She didn’t answer, but finally looked into my eyes.  The expression there was such a mixed bag of anxiety, sadness, shame, bewilderment, and a dozen other emotions that I had no idea what she was really feeling.  Outside, I heard thunder begin to rumble.

“Is there anything else you want to know about my disease?” I asked.

With that, something stirred in her and she came to life.  “Shit, Sue-Ann.  When Cal told me what you had, do you think ah was goin to wait till now to fahnd out somethin about it?  What do you think ah was doin while you were on line today?  Don’t you think ah was doin the same thing you were?  Between us we could probly write a book.  Have you decided which treatment to get?”

“No,” I answered, trying to understand her mood swing.  “Not yet.  It’ll be a while before the pills bring my hormone levels back to normal.  I won’t have to decide till then.”

Gina stood up and went into the bathroom.  She was gone only a minute or two, but when she returned, she was more herself.  Outside, the thunder sounded closer and raindrops were pattering steadily on the tin roof.  Gina didn’t seem to notice.  “Here,” she said.  “Get up a minute.” 

I stood up and Gina moved my chair so that its front cushion abutted the end of the couch where she was sitting.  “Now take off those sandals and sit back down,” she said.  Puzzled, I did as she asked.  She lifted my foot into her lap and started giving it a light massage.  “W—what are you doing?” I asked.

“Relax, ah’m a professional,” she told me.

“But my feet are so—” 

Gina interrupted me as casually as if she had just resumed a normal everyday conversation.  “Anything new on the goat story?” she asked.

“Maybe, um, one or two things, nothing to hang my clothes on.  Ohhhh!” I moaned.

She gave me an innocent look.  “Dilly have anything new on whoever broke in here?” she asked, gently massaging my toes.

“That feels so good I can’t stand it,” I breathed.  “What did you say about Dilly?”

“Ah asked whether—”

“Oh right.  No, forget about Dilly.  I know who broke in.”  Outside, the rain began pounding down with force.

She stopped rubbing my instep.  “Damn it Sue-Ann.  You’re the aggravatinist person I ever met.  You
know
who broke in and you didn’t tell me?”

“I . . . I’ve had things on my mind.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Donny told me.  Owch!”

“Mah bad.”  She let go of my foot, which she had suddenly squeezed a bit too hard.  She took a file from her purse and began filing my nails.  “So it was Donny broke in?”

“No.  In fact he doesn’t have any idea who broke in.”

“But you just said—”

“Okay.  I’ll tell you if you promise never to stop what you’re doing.  Remember that story I wrote about the semi-truck carrying marijuana that had skidded off I-10?”

“Coupla months ago, yeah.”

At that moment there was a crash of thunder almost simultaneous with a flash of lightning and the house winked into darkness.  Both of us twitched with fright and I’m lucky Gina didn’t stab me with the nailfile. “Yow!” I said.  “I guess we’re going to need some candles.”

“Don’t git up.  Ah lahk the dark.  Go on about the truck.  It jackknifed onto the median and turned over, raht?”

“Right, but what no one except Cal knows is that Dilly had gotten a tip about what the truck was carrying and wanted to know whether
The Courier
wanted to be in on a bust.  So at about one a.m. Dilly was following the truck down I-10 and I was following Dilly.  But when he put his red light on the driver of the truck tried to get away, lost control, bounced over onto the median, and turned over.  And when it did, the back doors flew open and these big brick-sized kilos of high-quality bliss scattered all over.  I pulled up maybe five seconds after the semi went over, and when I got out of my truck I almost stepped on one of those bricks.  Billy was busy running after the driver, so I quick grabbed it and stuck it under my seat.”

“No you didn’t!”

“I did.  Then I casually walked over to the scene with my legal pad and a camera.  I got my story and took some pictures.”

“So wait.  Are you tellin me that whoever broke into your house stole that dope?”

“They never stole it, no, because I put it in the tool box I keep in my truck and never took it out—I mean except for that little bit we smoked.”

“So how do you know that’s what they were after?” Gina asked.

“Remember when Donny was over here yesterday?”

“Is that what they call a rhetorical question?”

“Sorry.  But Donny wanted to know if my stash had been stolen.  That’s really the first time I made the connection between the break-in and the dope.  And Donny’s the only one who knew I had it.”

“What about Dilly?”  Gina put my left foot back and felt for my right.
“After he got back from running after the driver, he was too busy stashing his own pickings.”

Gina blinked.  “You mean Dilly . . . ?  But never mahnd about Dilly, what about the driver?”

“He was long gone through the woods.”

“So that leaves Donny.”

“Who may be half moron, but who doesn’t smoke and is pretty honest about most things.  No, here’s what happened.  Linda C evidently has a teenage son.”

“Raht, ah think his name is Adam,” Gina told me.

“And evidently Adam is a handful, so Donny has been trying to straighten him out and give him some goals.  I guess he thinks I’m some kind of role model if you can believe it so he told the kid—Adam—about how I’d gotten a good education and a good job and traveled around and all that baloney.  He even showed him some of the stories I’d written for
The Courier.
”

“The one about the truck!”

“Right as a razor blade,” I told her, “and just as sharp.  And Donny is innocent enough to have told Adam about how I’d scarfed up that dope and took it home.”

“So a teenage kid came in and tore up your house just for some dope?”

“I’m pretty sure.  When he couldn’t find any, he took the closest thing I had, which was a bottle of tequila.  Unless you put it away somewhere when you were cleaning up the other day.”

“No, ah didn’t see no tequila.”

“Well, that’s it then.”

“You gonna tell anyone?” she asked.  “Dilly?  Linda C?”

“I just told
you
,” I told her.

“Raht, but you
got
to tell me things.  Ah’m your girlfriend.”

“You are?”

Gina put her file away and gave my foot a last rub.  “Ah dunno.  You know whah ah was in such a crappy mood earlier?”

“I wondered.”

“Ah was thinkin that mebbe us getting to be friends ain’t such a good idea.”

It was like she had punched me in the jaw.  “You think?” I managed to ask.

“Mebbe, yeah.”

“You want to go back to the way we were?”

“Ah do in a way—in a lot of ways ah do.  But every time we talk ah get confused; ah start thinkin things I shouldn’t.”  She still had my foot in her lap and was squeezing it gently.  I tried to pull it away but she held it tighter and continued.  “Sue-Ann, you make me scareder’n ah’ve ever been in mah lahf.  What ah want is—”

But she was interrupted by the jangling of the phone in the bedroom.

“Let it ring,” I said.

But when the recording came on we both heard Cal’s voice at the other end.  “Sue-Ann,” he said.  “It looks like you were right.  A woman out on 136 went out to her henhouse this morning and found her dog dead.  It was killed just like the goat.”

Chapter 8

When we heard the click of Cal hanging up, the lights came back on.  Gina and I looked at each other without knowing what to say.  I slipped my sandals back on and stood up.  “I need to call,” I said.

Gina nodded so I walked into the bedroom and dialed.

“Cal, it’s Sue-Ann.  I was in the shower.”

“Sorry about that,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re home.”

“What have you got?”

“Between seven and eight this morning, a woman named Estelle Hobbs went out to see to her hens and gather some eggs.  She has some kind of a coop in her back yard and when she went inside, she found her dog dead and put up in one of the nests.  Throat was cut and belly slit open.  Just like that goat.”

“Where does this woman live?” I asked.  Gina was standing beside me, holding a lit cigarette in her left hand and the ashtray in her right.

“Got a pencil?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, she has an acre or so on Peg-leg Road, off Highway 136.”  I started writing.

Cal went on to give me more precise directions, which included turning down a dirt road and passing a large magnolia tree just before the woman’s driveway.  As he was talking, though, a thought struck me. 

“Cal, if all this happened this morning, why are you just telling me about it now?”

“I didn’t hear about it until Billy Dollar called me not half an hour ago,” Cal said simply.  “And
he
didn’t hear about it until he went on duty.  Officer Evers was the one that took Mrs. Hobbs’s call, and I doubt he knew anything about the goat.  At least, he didn’t put one and one together.”

“So you want me to follow up?” I asked.

“On everything.” 

“What about Paul Hughes?”

“I’ll talk to Paul.”

“I’ll drive out there tomorrow morning.”

“Be careful, Sue-Ann.  Whoever is doing this is sick.”

“I will.  Thanks.”

I hung up the phone and turned to Gina.  “I’m back on the story,” I said, and in a few words recounted what Cal had told me.

“Will you tell me what you fahnd out?” she asked.

“Of course.”

There was an awkward pause.  After all, we were standing in my bedroom.  “Do, um, do you want to stay?” I asked, then hastily added, “I mean, I’ve got lots of room.”

“Ah wanna, ah do,” she said.  “But I cain’t.  Not yet.  For one thing, Cal maht be tryin to call me.  For another . . .”  She stopped in confusion.

“Yeah,” I responded.

“Mebbe we can get together this weekend and do some detectin,” she said.

“You still want to?”

“Ah do.”

“I’ll call you.”

Gina gave my hand a light squeeze and walked toward the door.  Then she turned and looked at me across the room.  “Soon, okay?”

“You’re not talking about the phone call, are you?” I asked.

She shook her head shyly and left.

The hour with Gina left every cell in my body radiating energy.  I took another dose of my medicine and replayed our conversation over and over in my head.  It made me glad that, after so many years, she thought that I was special.  I had
always
thought of Gina as special, but I no longer hated her for it.

I tried, without much success, to take my mind off Gina by going through my mother’s papers and adding a few more observations to my notes on the goat story.  I listened to a couple of hours of the pirate station, which was uneventful until Gamma, in another of her giggly moods, read a new poem.  I only remember the first two lines, but they went like this:

“On midnights dark with fire,

who comes searching for their heads?

The poultrygeists, the poultrygeists.” 

Gamma was off and running on a poultry kick.  Next she read what she called her own personal recipe for chicken fajitas, which actually sounded yummy, then played an entire side of an album by Country Joe and the Fish, who I immediately brought myself up to speed on by doing a computer search.  Another Woodstock-era band whose anti-war stance was reflected both in the titles of their songs and their lyrics.  Well, anti-war was good.  But when I started reading about the band members I found something I didn’t really expect to find, something that made me feel like an insect was crawling up my back: the drummer for the Fish was called Chicken Hirsh.

The dog had been killed in Estelle Hobbs’ chicken coop.

What next?  Would Gamma play some old Elvis—like maybe “Hound Dog?”  Or maybe unearth something like “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window,” which my grandmother used to sing for me when I was a little girl?  With the radio in the background, I spent an hour reading the horse mystery I had gotten from the bookstore.  The mystery was thin, and I heard no songs about dogs.  Maybe the chicken thing was just a coincidence.  Yeah, right.

That night I rested well and was up early the next morning feeling refreshed.  I ate a more substantial breakfast than I had for a long time. I also dressed with more care than usual, deciding to wear a loose hat to hide my patch, then made my winding way to the small farmhouse of Estelle Hobbs.  I had no trouble finding the area because I had come this way with Donny a couple of times; the farm run by his father and brothers was just off 136.  The last time we had gone there—probably to pick up one of Donny’s tools—the west side of the house had been torn out because of termites, and a blue tarp was wrapped around the gap to keep out some of the cold weather.  Now the wing had been replaced, but with what looked more like odds and ends than standard lumber.  I noticed that five or six pieces of plywood had been fitted together to form the outside wall, and there were gaps between the pieces.  I guessed that there was a plan in the works to put on a siding that would hide the poor job they had done, but the Brassfields tended to do things on their own schedule, which was often not at all.

The Brassfield farm was one of many you see in rural areas whose property line is defined by old machinery.  As I passed, I saw along one boundary several generations of tractors, a hay bailer, an automobile without doors, stacks of tires, piles of crumpled tin roofing, and tractor attachments I couldn’t even begin to name—all rusted and useless.  The few pieces of working equipment were kept together with wire and duct tape and were parked in a pole barn in worse repair than the house. 

Old man Ed Brassfield, Donny’s father, was the worst kind of miser.  He might have picked up a few dollars by selling the metal from his useless machines but always held out for a better price than what he was offered by various scrap dealers.  In one attempt to save money, he had tried to use old cooking grease instead of diesel in one of the tractors.  It had actually worked for a couple of months, but the tractor was now part of the property line.  He refused to make improvements to the land and, when successive crops were substandard, he blamed his sons for doing a poor job of planting.  When I say sons here, I mean Donny’s older brothers, Tad and Chad, the twin giants who I had first seen arguing with Donny at Eat Now, although Ed Brassfield blamed Donny as well for not being there to do his share.

Donny hated his father, and I think he had good reason.  Not only did he work his sons like slaves, but he had made Donny’s mother—Ed Brassfield’s second wife—work in the fields as well as cook and clean in a house without air conditioning.  She had lost control of her car one rainy evening coming back from the grocery store and plunged into a ditch.  By the time an ambulance came, she was dead.  This happened when Donny had been thirteen and he had been devastated by his loss.  He remembered, though, that Ed had been angry at her for dying, for wrecking the car, and for the money he had to pay for the ambulance and burial.  Donny had run away from home a dozen times before he was 18, but he was almost thirty before he broke away for good, with his own apartment and a decent-paying job.  There were two things Donny dreamed about.  The first was killing his father in a painful way.  The second was watching his brothers do it.

Chad and Tad were likeable enough, but were lazy and overweight, despite their long hours in the fields.  When they laughed they said “guh-huh” and their red hair was not only uncombed, but uncombable.  Their idea of a good time was to drive into Forester on a Saturday night for the all-you-can-eat special at Po’ Folks.  One thing I had noticed about the Brassfield farm, though, and Donny and I had talked about it more than once, was that with the right management and an infusion of money—not too much—the 200-acre farm could be not only profitable, but had the potential to be a nice place to build a house and raise a family.

I came to the dirt road where Estelle Hobbs lived and found her white frame house without any trouble.  It was set near the road, so I parked in front and got out under the large magnolia Cal had mentioned.  Before I reached the porch, a stout woman in her sixties opened the screen door and came out to meet me.  She wore a pale green dress tied at the waist with a strip of the same material and thick sandals over white socks.  The most unusual thing about her was that she wore a metal neck brace that looked like small goal posts rising from her shoulders.  She walked with a very decided limp and spoke with the accent of someone who has lived all her life in Pine Oak—which I won’t try to duplicate here; I have enough trouble trying to get Gina’s right.

“Are you Miz McKeown?” she asked.  “Mister Dent called and said you might come by this morning.  Are you going to do a story about Lester?”

“Lester?”

“Lester’s my dog,” she explained.  She ushered me into her house, which was crammed with knickknacks, throw rugs, and plump chairs.  A sideboard with pictures in frames, lamps with yellowing shades.  “It’s getting so that it’s not safe for people to live these days,” she said, continuing through the living room and into the kitchen.  “And me with my back surgery comin up next week.  Go ahead and sit down there,” she said, motioning me to one of two large straight-backed chairs standing at a small table.  “I have some coffee made.  Would you like some?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She continued talking while she served the coffee—the same Maxwell House roast that my grandmother used to brew—mostly about her surgery, not only the one coming up but the many she had in the several years since her husband died.  “That’s why I named the dog Lester—it was my husband’s name.  I hadn’t had him long—a nephew of mine gave him to me last Christmas to keep me company—but I’d gotten used to him.  Wasn’t much of a barker, and that’s a good thing, because I can’t stand those little yapping dogs that everybody seems to like nowadays.  And he never went after the chickens; no, I couldn’t have stood for that either.”

When I could get in a word, I asked, “What breed was Lester?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I’m not much on breeds.  Kind of a mutt terrier I guess you’d call him.  It was a shame what happened to him.  I screamed when I saw him all bloodied up and torn apart like that.  And right in one of the hen boxes, too.  I had to run right out of there and call the police.  Then I called my nephew to come and get the dog out of the henhouse.  I couldn’t go back in there until he’d buried Lester and gone back home.  I told him not to get me another dog.  A cat maybe.  Must’ve happened sometime after midnight—that’s when I usually go to bed and I’m a heavy sleeper.”

I finished my coffee and set down my cup.  “Can I see where you found him?” I asked her.

“Come on out this way,” she said.

A set of broken flagstones connected her kitchen door with a roughly fenced-in back yard.  The yard was mostly mud after last night’s rain, and I could see remnants of scratch she had thrown out for the chickens, several of which were hunting and pecking like bad typists.  Inside the chicken wire was a shed with unpainted board walls and a tin roof.  It was about eight feet square and just large enough to stand up in.  The old lady opened a gate, shooed away the chickens, most of which fluttered toward her as she entered, and walked across a well-worn path to the open door of the henhouse.  She reached inside and switched on a light that was hanging from the ceiling.  She stood aside for me to enter, then followed me in.  It was a simple square room with a dirt floor and wide, sturdy shelves along three sides.  On these shelves were shallow wooden boxes filled with straw, each box large enough for one hen.  In fact several of the biddies were sitting in their boxes and squawked as we entered.  Mrs. Hobbs pointed to an empty space along one of the walls.  “He was lying right there,” she pointed.  “His throat cut and his entrails all hanging down.  I was scared so bad that it wasn’t until Jimmy—that’s my nephew—had been gone an hour that I noticed that two of my chickens were missing.  No, I don’t want me no more dogs.  I don’t even—”

“Two of your chickens?”  I interrupted.

“That’s right.  Not only was the thief a murderer, but he was a thief, too.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hobbs,” I said.  “I think I have all I need.”

“You haven’t written down anything on that pad you brought in,” she said suspiciously.

I tapped my head.  “I’m a living legal pad.”

I walked around the house to my car so that I wouldn’t track mud into the farmhouse.  Then I drove to the nearest gas station and called
The Courier
.  Gina answered, as I hoped she would.