by Terry Shames
I turn on the computer to look up the dating site that Ida Ruth told me Loretta was involved with.
I find the site easily and go into the senior citizens section, which is for those fifty and older. The header has photos of toothy, healthy-looking men and women who look 50 years and one month old. They are holding tennis rackets and wearing crisp-looking white shorts, or they are dressed in swimsuits with bodies that 20-year-olds would envy. No truth in advertising here. I bite the bullet and sign up for a month.
Next, they ask me to fill in a description of myself. It’s not mandatory, but if I’m going to do this, I might as well go all in. And it will help me to get an idea of what Loretta had to do to find a date.
I can’t say I’m a chief of police, so I put “retired.” Description: Gray hair. I wear glasses to read. I’m slightly over six feet tall and weigh 190 pounds, which is what I’ve weighed since I was forty, but I don’t put that down. Marital status? That one is easy. Widower. Likes and dislikes: I like my cows and my cat and my dog. I like the woman I’m dating, too, although I doubt that would help me in my search. I write down that I don’t like sharp-tongued women, although I don’t mind a woman who speaks her mind. Should I have put that in? I doubt it. I sigh. I don’t know why people subject themselves to this.
The next section is likes and dislikes. Why would anybody care what kind of food I like? I put down meat. What kind of clothes do I wear? I skip that one. What do I like to do? One thing I know I don’t like to do is fill out questionnaires like this. Is it really going to help me find Loretta? Finally, I copy the words from the sample. I like sunsets and drives in the country and walks on the beach. What beach?
Now it gets harder. It asks for my preferences as to what kind of woman I am looking for. If I hope to find Loretta’s profile, I have to figure out how somebody would describe her. I’m annoyed with myself because the truth is, I’m not sure what she looks like. I mean I know she changed her hair so that it’s a blondish color and she no longer wears it in tight little curls, but how would you describe it—straight? Short? She has brown eyes. I think. No, they’re blue. I’m pretty sure they’re blue.
What would she write down as her hobbies? I know she likes to bake, garden, and paint, but is that something she thinks a man would be looking for in a woman? Would she think it was a good idea to describe herself that way? I would hope that she would think it’s best to be honest. I read a few of the samples, and they are long on romantic notions (love moonlight dinners and interesting conversation) and short on concrete facts. What I end up with is that I want to find a good cook, a good conversationalist, and a woman with a sense of humor. I think Loretta has a sense of humor. She makes me laugh.
I finally grind to a halt and ask the site to find me a match. It warns me that it will take several minutes. I picture a bunch of people on the other end writing down all my information and then searching a bunch of cards that match. Of course, I know that’s not the way it works, but it’s soothing to picture something other than a bunch of electronic signals doing mumbo jumbo. It’s only three minutes before a list of women gets presented to me. And none of them is Loretta.
I’m gnashing my teeth over this when Maria walks in carrying a couple of fat folders. She has been researching the cold case. She said she was glad to have a case to take her mind off worrying about where Loretta is. She throws the folders on her desk, pours herself a cup of coffee, and flops down.
“What’s up?” she asked. “You look like you could bite somebody.”
I tell her everything that has transpired this morning. “Loretta’s son is on his way here, and I’m trying to find her on the dating site that Ida Ruth told me she joined.”
“Let me see what you’ve got,” she says, in that bossy way she has that usually tickles me but occasionally annoys me. In my current state of mind, it’s the latter.
I push my computer around to give her a look at it. She asks me the password I set up and then reads the entries I took such pains to enter. Pretty soon she starts laughing. “How in the world do you think you’re going to find Loretta with all that?”
“What do you mean?”
“First of all, it makes you sound like an old fart looking for a cook and a maid.”
“It does not.” But I can’t help laughing.
“And second, you didn’t really need to put all this stuff in. You can simply scroll the site and look at profiles. Like Connor, she starts typing a mile a minute and then pauses while she waits for results. “Here you go.”
She turns the computer around, and there is Loretta staring out at me. But this is a Loretta I haven’t seen before. She has on make up, her hair is fixed up, and she looks twenty years younger.
“She looks cute, doesn’t she?” Maria asks.
“She looks different,” I say. I sound like a curmudgeon. She doesn’t look like the Loretta I know, and the idea that she thought it was a good idea to publicly announce that she’s looking for a date just seems wrong.
“Makes sense. She wanted to look her best.”
“She looked fine the way she was,” I grumble.
Maria glares at me. “If you think she looked so great, why didn’t you go out with her?”
“It would be like going out with my sister,” I say. “I wonder if anybody did respond and she went out with them?”
“I imagine they did. We could go back to her house and see what kind of email replies she got.”
“We’ll wait until her son gets here.” I look at my watch. “I’m going to get lunch. You want to come?”
“No, I got myself a hamburger to eat at my desk. I need to go through these files.”
Maria would happily eat hamburgers three times a day. “How did your search go?”
“There wasn’t a whole lot, but I did get these files. I have to have them back by tomorrow.”
“You mean they let you take them out?”
She grins. “Took some sweet talking. Anyway, I’ll know before too long whether Howard Mosley had a financial incentive to kill that hired hand.”
The case she’s working on transpired twenty years ago, when a hired hand disappeared from Howard Mosley’s ranch. Last year the ranch was sold to a Houston attorney who decided to have a pool built in the backyard. During the excavation, they dug up a body that, not surprisingly, turned out to be the missing hired hand, an eighteen-year-old drifter by the name of Doug Lantana. He had been shot at close range. Howard Mosley, who moved to Bobtail several years ago, seems like the likely suspect for the killing, but twenty years is a long time for evidence to show up. Still, Maria had a yen to tackle the case and see if she could make anything of it. She reminds me of myself at her age.
I join my usual bunch at Town Café for lunch. Gabe LoPresto is there, along with Alton Coldwater and a couple of others. When I sit down, I see that they have been hot onto some subject. They’re all red in the face and tight-lipped. If this is about the goat rodeo, I’ve a mind to get up and walk right back out.
“What’s the subject?” I ask, after I give Lurleen my order.
Turns out they’re arguing over which quarterback should start next fall. In other words, the usual. It doesn’t matter that the first football game isn’t until late August. I’m perfectly content to listen to them squabble about it. But then Alton says, “Not to change the subject, but is anybody else’s wife making your life miserable over that goat rodeo problem?”
Gabe snorts. “Anne says we’re going to start going to church in Bobtail if it doesn’t simmer down. Last Sunday the preacher actually brought it up in his sermon.”
They’re Methodists, and why their preacher should get involved I don’t know. “Why does he care?” I ask.
Gabe wads up his napkin and throws it on the table. “You have to ask him. Sometimes I think preachers jump in on things just to keep everybody riled up. Job security.”
Pete Briskin, in his forties and owner of a heating and cooling repair company, sits tall and looks daggers at G
abe. “What do you mean by that?” I had forgotten his brother is a preacher in a small town down on the coast.
“I don’t mean anything by it, Pete. I’m aggravated because half the town is stirred up over it.”
“Well, you ought to watch what you say.”
Gabe is pompous about a lot of things, and he’ll argue with a rock on the subject of the football team, but in general he doesn’t want trouble. He’s the biggest building contractor in the county, and he likes to keep peace with potential customers. “You’re right, and I apologize.” He eases to his feet. “I’d better get on back. We’re almost finished framing the place we’re working on.”
There’s more rodeo talk, but it has turned to more practical matters, such as whether it is financially sound and whether it’s time to retire it. That’s not going to happen. It has been a popular event for the last quarter century.
In the rodeo, goats take the place of cattle, and it’s a lot tamer than a regular rodeo. Kids of all ages chase the goats and try to catch them—or, in many cases, the kids get chased. There’s a milking contest and a riding contest for little ones. Goats are pursued on foot, wrestled to the ground, roped, and then let go. For their part, they get in a good bit of butting, but the horns on the young Billy goats are wrapped so nobody will get gored. Old Billy goats don’t get to take part in the “fun.” There’s even a variation on the three-legged race, where two contestants are tied together and have to carry a baby goat to the finish line. Needless to say, the goat isn’t amused and tries to wriggle out of their arms. I usually get a kick out of it, but this year I’ll be glad when it’s over so I don’t have to hear any more about who sponsors it.
“Samuel, do you think the Catholic priest should share sponsorship with other churches?” Alton asks.
I get to my feet. “Alton, I don’t have an opinion on the subject. And my advice to you is that you steer clear of the controversy too.” I normally wouldn’t say that to anybody, but Alton has a knack for getting himself into hot water, including a disastrous stint as mayor a few years ago, when he managed to bankrupt the town.
Back at headquarters, while I wait for Scott Singletary to show up, I research information on online dating sites. What I find both surprises and troubles me. Apparently, even though the sites try to maintain security, predators slip through. In the younger population, people, mostly women, get preyed on by liars and cheats. A certain percentage of both men and women on the sites are married and claim to be single. Then you get people who claim to be more attractive or wealthier than they turn out to be. And now and then you get really bad actors who are looking for vulnerable people to hit up for money. Worst of all are the sexual predators who have been known to rape or even kill women respondents.
But when you get into the senior area, the incidence of financial predation goes way up. In particular, older women get fleeced out of their savings by younger men. The stories are disturbing. I’m getting worried. Where is Loretta?
CHAPTER 8
Scott Singletary, Loretta’s older son, looks like Loretta except that he’s at least a foot taller and outweighs her by 100 pounds, even though he isn’t heavy. He has two teenaged boys who, according to Loretta, are the best-looking, smartest, most loving grandsons ever born.
He eyes Dusty when I walk onto the porch. “Would Mamma let that dog in the house?”
“No, and I hadn’t planned to bring him in. He’ll stay out here on the porch. He’ll be fine.”
Inside, Scott gives me permission to get onto the computer, which Loretta keeps at a kneehole desk in the kitchen. He leaves me alone so he can go through the house to see whether he can spot anything missing or disturbed.
Maria stays with me to take command of the computer. “I’ll see if she exchanged emails with any men she met through the site,” she says. “Also, we should see if she took notes on men she was interested in.”
“I have a hunch she wouldn’t keep notes on the computer,” I say. She knows how to use a computer, but like the rest of us fogies, I think she prefers to write things down. “I’ll bet if she kept a list at all, it would be handwritten.”
The top of the desk is bare of any papers except a tidy stack of bills. I open the top side drawer of the little desk. The top drawer contains address books, church fliers, handbooks, and a stack of business cards held with a rubber band. And Loretta’s cell phone. “Look at this,” I say.
“It’s probably dead,” Maria says.
She’s right. It’s out of juice. The cord is connected to the computer, and I plug it in. Nothing happens.
“It’s probably completely out of power,” Maria says. “It’ll take a couple of minutes to get enough juice to open it.”
The second drawer turns out to be a file drawer. I start thumbing through the file folders. “Bingo.” I pull out a folder marked “Pairs.” It contains a small spiral notebook with a yellow cover, and the first page contains a list of men’s names. Maria and I pore over it. One by one, Loretta has marked off the entries, with notes: “Too old.”
“Too young.”
“No.”
“Silly.” Maria laughs at that one.
There are two that have question marks beside them: A man named John Markham and another named Frederick Hastings. Two possible dates. That shouldn’t be too hard to trace.
When I turn the page, my hopes are dashed. On this second page, she has written down more names, but she abandoned her earlier, complete profiles in favor of names only and no descriptive notes. Just yes, no, or maybe. There are two more pages—more of the same. Who would have guessed there could be this many men in small towns willing to go on the Internet to look for a date?
“There must be thirty names of men here,” I say. “Is that possible?”
“These sites are very popular,” Maria says.
“Do you suppose she contacted any of them, or was she just making notes of men whose profiles she liked?”
“On her computer here, there are emails back and forth from ten men.”
I peer over her shoulder and we go through the emails. They all seem innocuous enough, asking each other mundane things, like where they live, if they have been married before, if they have kids, and what they like to do.
Two haven’t been married before, and Loretta rejected them, kindly, telling them she wants to date people who have been married before so they have shared experiences of losing a spouse.
“Ha,” Maria says. “I suspect that’s a nice way of saying that if a man has never been married by his age, he’s probably got something seriously wrong with him.”
Another two tell her they are not religious, and she writes them back and says that probably wouldn’t work.
Two men she emailed never wrote back. Another one wrote such a weird email, full of his likes and dislikes, heavy on the dislikes, that apparently she decided not to even reply. Or hadn’t had time to. One said he had changed his mind about meeting. And she set up a meeting with one man two weeks ago, at a church gathering in Bobtail. It turns out they were both Baptists. I print out that email. “It’s possible that when they met they decided to meet again, and he swept her off her feet and they ran away for a fling.”
“I doubt it.” Maria gives me a disgusted look. “But he sent her his phone number. Let’s give him a call.”
She dials the number and puts the call on speaker. We identify ourselves. Maria does the talking. “I’m calling because you were in contact with Loretta Singletary through the dating website Smalltown-pair.”
“Yes, I guess I was. What’s this about?” He’s got a reedy voice, and his profile picture shows an older man with a thin face and little hair.
“Did you meet with her?”
He’s quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any proof that you are who you say you are. Why are you asking?”
“Mrs. Singletary is missing, and we’re trying to ascertain her whereabouts.”
“Missing? I don’t have any idea where she is. I
only met her that one time. We chatted with one another at a church social.”
“Did you plan to meet again?”
“No. She was nice, but it was awkward. Neither of us had ever tried a blind date before, and we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to do. I was there with my sister, and I don’t think my sister took to her all that much.” He gives a huff of laughter. “I think we were both glad to get out of there.”
“Did you leave with Loretta?”
“No, we had driven there separately, and I left with my sister, Lena. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think I’m going to try meeting a date that way anymore. It was, well, like I said, awkward.”
“Do you mind giving me your address in case we need to ask you more questions in person?”
“I tell you what. I’ll call the Jarrett Creek Police Department and leave my information there. That way if you are who you say you are, you’ll have the information. And if you’re not . . .”
“That will be fine.”
She hangs up and shrugs.
“I don’t think he ran off with Loretta,” I say. Especially since his sister didn’t approve of her. “But I don’t think we can depend on making judgments from just calling people. I’m not looking forward to having to visit each man Loretta might have met, but we may have to.”
“Wait. Here’s something.” Maria has found a printed-out photo stashed in the notebook. “I guess she liked this man’s photo.”
The man in the photograph is distinguished and looks friendly. “How are we going to find out who this is?”
“We can look through all the profiles on the site. I didn’t see anything on her list to indicate that she thought any of these men were particularly appealing.”
“Is it possible that this is someone she didn’t contact through the dating site?” I say.
Scott appears in the kitchen looking flustered. “Everything looks normal. It’s like she just was . . .” he throws up his hands, “teleported out of here.”
“Except she packed a suitcase,” I say.