The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (19 page)

Jack was busy being the Jack I knew and had once loved.  He was a man who never went right for his object; rather he moved in gradually decreasing circles until he just happened to arrive at the destination he had set for himself at the beginning.  It was a ploy that put his quarry at ease and he almost never lost his photo op.  As soon as he had gotten outside, he spotted someone from the mounted shooting event, and put on a big smile.  I could see the men shaking hands, Jack asking all kinds of questions about the man’s life, his horses, and what kind of animals he liked to hunt.  The man introduced Jack to others in his group and the same round of questions were gone through again.  The men all exchanged business cards and Jack, seemingly reluctantly, looked at his watch and made excuses.  Very slowly, he made his way toward where Goth Girl was seated, although I never saw him actually look in her direction.  On the way, there was another handshake as he passed another group of people.  Another, shorter, round of words spoken.

By the time he had actually gotten within Goth Girl’s aura, I was nearly chewing my cigarette butt with anxiety that she might leave or be joined by friends, but Jack’s intuitions are almost always precise.  Hesitating, he looked at her and cleared his voice.  Becky looked up and her back straightened.  Jack smiled brightly and said softly, “Do you mind if I sit down for a minute?  I’m waiting for someone and I’ve been on my feet all day taking pictures.”

“I might spit on you,” she told him tonelessly.

“I guess I can take that chance,” Jack smiled, sitting down across from her, showing his teeth and crossing his legs.

Goth Girl shrugged and reached in her shirt pocket for a cigarette.  Jack took a cell phone out of his coat, opened the face, and peered at it.  He frowned and placed it on the bench beside him. 

“My name is Jack Stafford,” he told her.  “And I’m visiting from Richmond, Virginia.”

Becky looked him up and down, probably trying to figure out what this well-dressed, well-spoken studmuffin was doing in a dingy little burg like Forester.  “Visiting who?” she asked.  Contact.  That was what I had been waiting for and I nudged Gina, grinning.

Jack’s eyes opened wide.  “Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid,” he said.  “It’s kind of a secret assignment.”  He took a card from his wallet and handed it to her.  “For my newspaper,” he added.  “The only thing I can tell you is that it concerns someone who used to be on the Olympic Team that lives near here.  She’s been sick and doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

“You get paid to take pictures?” she asked.

“You better believe it.”

“Is that cell phone a camera?” she asked.

“How did you know?” Jack asked.

“My mom’s got one.  She hides it from my dad, though.  I think she has a boyfriend and uses it to talk to him while she’s naked.  Ugh.”

“Well, I don’t know your mother,” said Jack.  “But she can’t be that bad if she looks like you.  Anyway, I don’t—Wait a minute, I think I saw you earlier today, at that cowboy thing.”

“You were there?” she asked.

“Holy wow,” Jack said, quickly putting his hand over his mouth. “You won’t tell anybody that I was there, will you?  Listen, can I have one of those cigarettes?  I thought I had quit but I guess I haven’t.”

Becky handed him one from the pack and lit it for him with a plastic lighter.  He drew deeply, then blew smoke.  “Umm, that’s great,” he said.  “Thanks.  Yeah, I think I saw you at that place, whatever they call it.  You were with some other people, right?”

“Yeah, we were just hanging around.”

“Um hmm, me too,” Jack said.

Gina and I were nursing our own cigarettes, listening intently to every word and watching Becky as she plied her body language.  She would shift in her seat, pick at one of the several earrings in her left earlobe, twist a lock of her choppy black hair.  We heard her ask, “You, um, take pictures of nudes?”

“Me?” Jack asked, surprised.  “Nah—did you tell me your name?”

“Rebecca.”

“Great name, Rebecca.  I’m Jack.”

“You told me.”

“Sorry.  Listen, Rebecca, my thing is trying to take pictures of people that make them look naked without having them take their clothes off.  Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know.”

“To take pictures of people’s souls.  The way people really are without all the fake things they’re always doing.”

“I can relate to that,” she said.  “Are you famous?”

“A little, maybe.  You can Google me when you get home.  Whoops, I think I just saw the people I was waiting for coming in the front door.  “Great talking to you, Rebecca.  Sorry I don’t have my camera with me.”  He picked up his cell phone from the bench and put it in his pocket.  “I mean, my real camera.  I’d love to have a picture of you.  Maybe a series.  There’s just something . . . I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks for the cigarette,” he said.

“Okay.”

As Jack walked back to the door leading into the room, Gina whispered to me, “You’re raht about Jack.”

I whispered back, “I’ve been having lewd thoughts about you all night.”

“Sue-Ann!”

“Let’s go finish our dinner,” I said, smiling.

Back at the table, Jack handed me the cigarette butt.  I looked at it carefully and put it away in my purse.  I nodded at Gina.  “One of the same brands,” I said.

“Did I do okay?” Jack asked.

“Shit, Jack, that poor girl is creaming her panties.”

“Yeah?” he smiled.

“Yeah.”

“What was the cigarette for?”

“It’s nothing you need to know about, but I found some cigarette butts at the scene of this thing I’ve been working on and I wanted to see if Goth Girl’s is the same brand.  It is.”

“Is that bad?”

“Might be, unless I do something.”

“Too bad.  She seems like a really nice kid.”

Our food was cold by now and our drinks room temperature, but we finished what we wanted and paid.  The cashier was a young woman I had never seen before—Linda C must have Saturday nights off.  Gina had stopped at the trash barrel below the SMASH THE DIXIE CHICKS sign.  She rummaged around among the jewel cases and came out with two different titles and stuck them in her purse.  Back outside, cars were still coming and going with difficulty.  A horn blared and someone shouted, “Get the fuck out of the way, you moron!”  I looked over to see a cowboy in a pickup shouting at a man in a red Jeep.

“Sue-Ann,” Gina nudged me.  “That’s your friend in that Jeep.”

She was right.  Poor Benny was having trouble getting out of the parking lot and the bozo in the pickup—who had evidently just pulled in—wasn’t making things easier.  Benny was finally able to swerve around the man and I saw him hit his own horn on the way past.  But instead of the honk I was expecting, a loud voice, metallic and digital, came from what appeared to be a loudspeaker bolted to the front bumper.  “BITE ME!” it growled.

Before the cowboy could react, Benny was in the street and racing off.  Heads turned and people on the deck were laughing.

“Heh heh,” I chuckled.

Chapter 12

After we got home from Eat Now and Gina had said her goodbyes, I shunted Jack into my mother’s room, showed him the adjoining bathroom and towel closet, and helped clear Cindy’s few remaining papers from the bed.  As soon as he was settled, I went into my own room and closed the door.  I knew I had to call Donny, had to sit down with him tomorrow and talk about Adam, but the idea of having him come to the house again, or even going to his, was a bad idea.  And one of the main problems with Pine Oak is that there are no restaurants open on Sunday.  Either you cook your own meals or drive to one of the adjoining towns.  So when I managed to reach him on his cell phone—he was out on a call, not unusual for a Saturday night—I asked him to meet me for lunch at the Burger King between Pine Oak and Hanson’s Quarry.

“What’s it about, Sue-Ann?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you when I see you,” I told him.

He sputtered a little, but finally agreed.

After I hung up I sent Cal a lengthy email bringing him up to speed on what we had found out—Gina and I agreed that it was better coming from me than from her.  I had gotten back a brief message: “Good work.  Keep peeling that onion.  C.D.”

I spent the next morning trying to relax.  First, I spent a quality half hour with Alikki in her pasture, brushing out her mane and gingerly picking out blackberry brambles from her tail.  In the few days I had owned her, she had become an important and unique character in my life.  I loved currying her, stroking her coat, or just watching her in the pasture swishing her tail lazily at gnats and walking as gracefully as she could from one lush patch of grass to another.  Sometimes if I was too attentive to her, she would swish
me
with her tail, roll her eyes, or snort at me.  I loved it all, but had learned to back off when she wanted me to.

That morning, after Alikki had dismissed me, I decided to practice my kyudo.  I mentioned earlier that archery always relaxes me, and Japanese archery requires a zenlike, meditative state that is almost like being in a trance.  I was anxious to escape from my surroundings for a while, but to shoot archery properly—especially kyudo—you can’t have anything else on your mind.  Despite the fact that I donned my white and blue practice uniform and thick, three-fingered glove, despite the fact that I did my best to empty my mind of all outside influences, the practice session was a mess.  My shots missed the target with such consistency that I may as well have been blindfolded.  The world was way too much with me.

First on my mind was the goat story—not only did I think over all the things I had found out so far, but I agonized over tasks I had yet to do.  Like talking to Donny at lunch and maybe calling Ray Colley and Paul Hughes.  And it was more important than ever that I make another trip into the woods.

Jack was second on the list of things I had to deal with.  I was worried about him going to the Middle East and getting killed while at the same time I realized that if he survived, the experience might give him enough confidence and self-sufficiency to be the person he was always meant to be.  The idea for his book was tantalizing, his asking me to write the copy was tempting. 

Bubbling under was concern about my thyroid.  I had almost decided on having the radioactive iodine treatment, but it would have to wait.  Sex I could put off; in fact, being radioactive might give me an excuse for taking a rain check if I felt myself weakening in that direction around Jack or Donny or whoever.  But endangering Alikki and her foal was out of the question.

And, of course, entwined through each of my thoughts was Gina.  The last week had been more than hectic; I had felt as if there were far too few hours in the day to get anything done, yet through it all, what I wanted to do most was sit and talk to Gina.  My growing friendship with her was a total surprise.  She was able to calm down my frantic nature just by her presence; she didn’t care if I couldn’t be as strong as I would like to be all the time.  The fact that she was seeing Cal sent my thoughts in directions more scattered than my arrows, and I knew that somewhere on the horizon, Cal was going to play a bigger part in how our friendship progressed. 

Another good thing about Japanese archery is that the arrows are nearly twice as long as regular arrows.  They’re almost impossible to lose in the grass.

When I put everything away and went back inside, I found that Jack had gone out somewhere.  My mother’s bed was made but slightly rumpled, with one of my father’s Zane Grey books on the pillow, a bookmark carefully sticking out the top.

The phone rang and I ran into my bedroom to answer it.  “Hello?”

“Is this Sue-Ann?”  The deep masculine drawl was familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it right away.

“That’s right.” 

“This is Paul Hughes.”

“Oh.  Hey, Paul, how’s it going?”

“Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, Sue-Ann, but I need to talk to you.”

“That’s okay, Paul.  What’s on your mind?”  I was pretty sure I already knew what was on his mind, and looked around automatically for a pack of cigarettes.  Where was Gina or Goth Girl when I needed them?  I steeled myself by sitting on the bed, my back against the headboard.

“I had a long talk with Cal Dent this morning,” Paul began.  “On the golf course.  He told me you were still looking into that goat story.”

“He gave me the go-ahead.  But it’s not just a goat story any more, Paul.  Did Cal tell you about the dog and the chickens?”

“He told me a lot of things, and I’ll have to tell you that it upset me some.  No, it upset me a lot, because I quit after nine holes and came home.  Sue-Ann, I’d like to ask you not to go any further with this.  I’m asking you as a friend.  Well, I guess if I’m going to be truthful, we really don’t know each other well enough to be friends, but I can ask you as a colleague.”

“I respect that, Paul.  But I’m going to need to ask why you want me to stop.”

“You know why, Sue-Ann.  You’ve got it into your head that my son is somehow mixed up in some damned craziness.”

“Tell me about your son, Paul,” I said.

“About Pauley?  What do you want me to say?  He’s a good kid, he just . . .”

“Just what?” I asked.

“Look, Sue-Ann.  I’m not gonna sugar coat anything.  I was in the Marines most of the time Pauley was growing up, and we moved around a lot.  We lived in Kuwait for a while after Desert Storm, but when I retired we moved here to Pine Oak where my wife was born.  I bought a nice place to live.  Pauley got into a good school.  But then after 9/11 they asked me to come back to Washington and help with some counterintelligence work.  While I was gone, my wife found out she had cancer.  It was the quickest thing I ever heard of—two weeks and she was gone.  But I was out of the country and couldn’t get back . . .”

“I’m sorry, Paul.”

“Pauley was . . . he didn’t handle it well.  He blames me for not being there when Susan died.  He doesn’t understand the pressure I was under—you just can’t leave a job like that with so much at stake for the country.  It’s all about responsibility and getting on with your life, and I don’t know why the hell Pauley doesn’t understand that.  We don’t talk any more, Sue-Ann. We just don’t talk.”

“It’s okay, Paul.  I’ve been meaning to call you about all this anyway.  Did Cal mention any of Pauley’s friends?”

“I don’t think so.  Who do you mean?”

“Adam Zimmer and Becky Colley.”

“I know he sees them some, yeah.”

“Well, the three of them have gotten into some strange rituals.”

“Rituals?  What the hell kind of rituals?”

“I think they see themselves as outcasts—in fact, I think they’re proud of it.  One of them found a book on the occult and it gave them an idea of being empowered—something they haven’t found in their real lives.  So they’ve been performing secret rites or sacrifices.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Ask your son,” I said simply.

“Even if you’re right, Sue-Ann, they haven’t committed any crimes.”

“Stealing livestock, killing animals for the sake of killing?  Yeah, those are crimes.  Breaking into my house and trashing it is a crime.”

“Hold on now, you can’t blame Pauley for—”

“I guess Cal forgot to tell you that part, too.  But, yeah, those three kids were the ones that broke in.”

“Damn it, Sue-Ann, you’re making up things just to see your name on a byline.”

“First of all, Paul,” I said with asperity, “I don’t need any more bylines.  I had enough of those when I was in Baghdad and people from all over the
world
were trashing my reports in their fucking right-wing blogs.  Second of all, I can
prove
that those kids broke into my house.  Last but not least, none of this matters because I would never write up anything that would put you or your son—or Becky or Ray or Adam or Linda C—in a bad light if I could help it.”

“You mean—?”

“I’m not a scandalmonger, Paul.  I don’t like people breaking into my house or killing animals just for drill, but if people want to go out in the woods and waste their time calling up voodoo demons, it’s not any of my business.”

“Sue-Ann, I—”

I interrupted him again.  “There’s a caveat.”

“What’s that?”

“A caveat is kind of an exception—”

“I know what a caveat is.  Just tell me what you’re going to tell me.”

“Paul, what will happen when somebody
catches
them breaking into a house or stealing something?  When that happens and they call the sheriff, there’s no way in the world to keep it secret.”

“Okay, I understand that.  That’s fair.”

For some reason, I didn’t tell him about my fear that the kids were in actual, physical danger.  I guess I thought that a word to the wise was enough.  I contented myself with saying, “So you’ll talk to Pauley?”

I heard a deep breath on the other end of the line—not the inhalation of a cigarette, but a deep sigh coming from Paul’s very depths.  “I can’t do that, Sue-Ann.  At least not right now.”

“Why not, Paul?”

“When I got back home yesterday afternoon, Paul, Jr. had moved out.  I don’t know where he is.”

~  ~  ~

Donny drove into the Burger King parking lot ten minutes late—he was driving his Harrison towing wrecker, so he was probably on call—but I didn’t mind.  It gave me time to get my story together and to eat a sandwich.  I hoped that Donny could help me remove another layer of Cal’s onion.

Donny was showered and clean shaven.  His short, light hair was wind tossed and the work uniform he wore was clean and pressed.  Although it was after noon, he looked tired and gave me barely a nod as he entered and made a beeline for the counter.  After he had gotten his order of a large coffee and a fish sandwich, he made his way to my table. “Okay, what’s so important, Sue-Ann, that you had to get me way out here on the one day of the week I might have stayed home?” he asked.

I came right out with it.  “I think that Adam was the one who broke into my house.”

Donny knitted his eyebrows.  “You mean Linda C’s Adam?  No way, man.  Why would Adam—”

“Remember you told me that you showed him some of my
Courier
stories?”

“Yeah?”

“Could one of the stories have been about that marijuana bust?”

“The one where the truck jackknifed off the road.  Yeah, that was one.  I helped get that truck back into Forester.  I mean, after they got a crane out there to right it.  I told Adam I could have picked up a few of those bricks and brought them home with me, but that marijuana was for shit.”

“Maybe Adam asked whether
I
might have picked one up and maybe taken it home as a souvenir.”

“Naw, he . . .”  His sentence trailed off and he was obviously remembering something.

“Donny, you’re a nice guy, but you trust everyone too much.  Most people aren’t as honest or as innocent as you are—even kids.  You must have told him and I’m not angry, I just wish you’d think.  What if he had called the sheriff?”

“Well, I may have said something . . . I’m sorry, Sue-Ann.  I guess I was just trying to be pals with the kid and didn’t think about how it might get you in trouble.  But Adam wouldn’t say anything.”

“Adam
did
say something, Donny.  Last Friday night he overheard someone calling me on a cell phone asking me to go out and cover a story.  He remembered my name and remembered about the pot, so he and maybe two of his friends hid outside my house and waited for me to go out.  Then they broke in looking for that marijuana.  They just about tore up the house, but it wasn’t there.  The only thing they took was that bottle of tequila you gave me.”

“Sue-Ann.  None of this makes any sense.  Do you have any proof that it was Adam?”

I sighed and sat back in the plastic booth.  “I do, yes, but having proof isn’t the point.  The point is that I’m afraid that something bad is going to happen to Adam or his friends if they don’t stop what they’re doing.”

“You mean if they don’t stop breaking into people’s houses?”

“No.  It goes way beyond that.  What I’m going to tell you now may seem crazy but it’s true.  What you do about it—tell Linda C or Adam’s father or even the sheriff—is up to you.”