Was it my imagination, or was there some sigh of relief behind her words too? I told her thanks and walked out the door, the jingly bells sounding more like “good riddance” than “thank you for your business.” The heat hit me in a wave and all at once I noticed that the parking lot was no longer deserted. Next to my sporty little Volvo was a white Crown Victoria, the quintessential cop-car, and leaning up against it, wearing a brown suit, white shirt and string-tie, was Smithville’s bastion of law enforcement, Detective Craig.
It was 8:30am, blazing hot, and I wanted nothing to do with this guy, but I put the seeds and coffee carefully on the divider in my front seat, closed the door and leaned up against my own car; crossing my arms and mimicking Craig’s “look-at-me-I-think-I’m-hot-shit” attitude.
Evidently, the hot desert wind had blown back my hair. Craig said, “What happened to you? You slip in the shower?” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Craig knew exactly what had happened but was choosing to look the other way; letting hometown boys settle their own hash.
I said, “I got mugged by a little old lady on my way to church.”
Craig was slaving over a toothpick in his mouth. Totally missing my smart-ass joke, Craig said, “Not in my town you didn’t.”
That ignorant toad! I felt like I was in a B-grade movie; with the smarmy brain-dead detective leaning up against his car, slicked-back hair like a brick on his head, chewing on a toothpick and trying to look rough, tough, and in charge. The prick.
Craig admired his eel-skin boots and said, “I was just passing by and thought I’d say goodbye. Sorry that fishing thing didn’t work out for you.”
“I’ll live.”
Craig spat on the dusty ground. “Just as long as you do that livin’ in Austin. This is a small town. I know you’ll understand if I say we can get along just fine without a man with your… criminal history going around town stirring things up. People are upset enough already.”
“My criminal history? That assault charge was dismissed, Detective, and if people are upset – well, they ought to be. Maybe it takes getting people upset to get you and the rest of the Hardy Boys off of your dead keisters and out in the field where you ought to be. Speaking of which, how’s the investigation going? Got any ‘persons of interest’ yet?”
I couldn’t see behind Craig’s mirrored sunglasses but his body language told me that he was suddenly off center. He said nothing.
Finally, I put my hand on the scorching door handle of the Volvo. I said, “Thanks for nothing. I’ll be going now.” I glanced at the door to the Quik-Stop and saw Jolene watching us. “I’ll be sure to observe the posted speed signs…” I opened the door and slid onto the hot vinyl seat, “…wouldn’t want to be pulled over and shot accidentally just for a speeding violation.”
Craig bristled as I closed my door. I thought that was the end of it but as the engine caught the spark of ignition I heard a rapping on my window. I lowered the window, staring up into my reflection in Craig’s sunglasses. I looked pissed.
“I got no reason to tell you this,” he said, “but forensics came up with a bit of information from samples taken at the park.”
I stayed mute, waiting for him to speak. Finally, he sighed and said, “The wrapper? The candy wrapper?”
“Keeley’s Red-Hots.”
“Yeah. We matched some prints taken off the wrapper with prints found on Josh Herndon’s baseball… the one up in his bedroom. They’re Herndon’s.”
I had trouble breathing in the hot air. Although the air was burning, my heart was cold.
I said, “The only prints found on the Keeley’s wrapper in the school playground… were my son’s.”
Craig didn’t say anything but his head sadly nodded up-and-down. Rolling up my window I begrudgingly said, “Thank you, Detective.” I put the Volvo into drive, pulled out of the lot without looking back, and pointed the car towards Austin; happy to have Smithville behind me and certain that I would never return again.
I could not have been more wrong.
Chapter Ten
The Good One was confused. Confused and hot. He had not expected the hunger to appear for at least a few months, and here he had just seen the face! This had never happened before and because it had he experienced a feeling that was foreign to him: Uncertainty. A loss of control. Because he had always been in control he had felt himself the master of the hunger and now that hesitation, that not knowing, felt like weakness. As if every fiber of his being was an atrophied muscle and his whole Oneness tottered on thin, spindly legs and at any moment he might fall over and never rise again. Still…
There was no denying it. He had seen the face and he was led to it by the hunger just like before. He looked inside himself for a reason as to why this should be happening now, so soon, and all he could find was the sound of Mama’s voice, the words from Mama’s mouth saying he was the Good One, he was the Clean One, and he was the one who walked in the light and if you walked in the light a thousand nights could come your way and you would still see the right thing to do. It could be black as pitch, black as coal, and yet the Good One would see the unclean, the blasphemer, the recalcitrant… the face.
The Good One watched as the face raced from the bus-stop, tugging at an incompliant backpack and laughing outrageously over his shoulder at a school friend struggling desperately to keep up. Mama used to say that time is the great leveler, the blade that scythes all things down.
For the Good One, for the face… that leveling would have to be now.
*
There were fourteen messages on the digital message machine when I turned the key on the front door of my home on Bluebell Lane. Praying for a message or a word of encouragement from Jeanie, I had earlier listened briefly to the ten-or-so messages on my cell voicemail but was always met with a “Mr. Cain, this is Aetna Insurance calling…” or “Ben, this is Camlin at the school. We really wish you would reconsider…” I deleted them all. Expecting the same I pushed “play” on the home machine and was treated to sales come-ons for cars, cable TV service, and the angry voice of my neighbor informing me that if I planned to be away on any more long trips, a letter of complaint would have to be sent about my overgrown lawn to the home owner’s association and oh, by the way, his grandson would be more than happy to cut it for me for a reasonable twenty dollars a-week.
As I held down the “delete” button I used my other hand to pull down a slat on the venetian blinds and stared at the dry, brown scrub that my neighbor was complaining about. Screw him. And the grandson and the twenty bucks, too.
I had accrued a pile of mail: meaningless advertisements and postal circulars reminding me that the upcoming Flag Day celebration would close down Hayward Street to regular downtown traffic and there would be no newspaper delivery the whole weekend. That was of no concern to me because I had let my Austin Statesman subscription lapse – I was busy with other things. Except for a water bill (which should be exceedingly low since I obviously wasn’t watering my lawn) I consigned the batch to the wastebasket next to my desk. I looked around my house, which was no longer a home, and marveled at how sterile and lifeless it was. Ma Cain, being a shrewd, street-smart woman had left me a considerable inheritance and it was only because of that nest-egg that Jeanie and I could even consider purchasing the cold but elegant structure I was now standing in. The money was part of our decision-making process, as was the proximity to Jackson Elementary School and its damnable playground.
I went down the small hallway to the door that connects our over-stuffed garage to the kitchen, and entering I wormed my way around boxes and old suitcases and used-up tires till I could wedge myself up against the work bench and the high shelves I had installed with a little help from my son. Up in the right corner, next to a new basketball hoop that I will never mount on the eaves outside is a small cardboard box. Inside the box, pocketed in an old Crown Royal bag, is the gun.
Before he passed, my father, Edmund Cain was a lawyer. Being a southern Democrat and bor
n in Houston to free-thinking Texans, Edmund Cain might have felt predestined to enter the law and it’s true that over his lifetime he defended his fair share of civil rights clients and free speech advocates, but my father truly loved the law. All law. And in loving the law he clung to the letter of the law and the spirit of the law consistently. Except in matters concerning… his gun. The gun that was now my gun.
My father was a strong man, a vital man, and certainly able to express himself with all the verbal skills that lawyers require, but he left all that traditional father/son talk to Ma Cain. Because Ma Cain was a hurricane. A force of nature. Ma Cain explained all about the birds and the bees to her young son. Ma Cain explained what an ‘athletic supporter” was. Ma Cain explained why it’s not a good idea to sniff the gas tank on the Lawn-Boy mower. I’m not saying Edmund Cain was whipped… he just knew who the boss was. This is why the conversation between the two of us, taken in his den with doors closed and windows drawn, was all the more stranger.
“Ben, I don’t want you to think that I’m hiding anything from your mother; I just thought we should have this conversation alone.” Without asking, he poured us both a glass of amber liquid and settled into his favorite chair. The box stood on the desk where he did his “take-home work”.
“Now, I’m a firm believer in the law and we have a legal system, probably the finest legal system in the world, and I believe we should follow the law to the letter. However…” He placed the box on the table between us and opened it, revealing the Taurus .45-caliber pistol and a wrapped box of cartridges. “It’s called ‘The Judge’ … ” he chuckled, “…and it’s a hand-me-down from your Pee-Pa. He handed it down to me, and now I’m handing it down to you.”
He looked proudly at me, the old coot, as I hefted the weight of it and said, “Is it loaded?”
“No – and I hope it’ll never have to be but that’s the point: you have a young baby now, a young wife, and every man should be able to defend his home no matter what happens. Just don’t leave it in your car… I don’t even think it’s registered.”
I felt the smooth grip. The thing felt heavy – lethal. I had never held a gun before but I sighted down the barrel as if I knew what I was doing.
I said, “Home protection, huh? If you give this to me, what are you going to do?”
He slyly smiled. “I have your mother.”
Staring at the gun now, I tried to imagine the look on my father’s face if I tried to explain to him my intended purpose for the weapon. I couldn’t bring that image into my mind. I put the box back on the shelf and placed it behind a box of Tuffy weed-killer. Weed-killer. Perfect.
*
I was sweaty, soiled, and unshaven since I didn’t have the energy to shave before I left Smithville but I sat down at the computer and started weeding through e-mails. One glance was all I needed to see that there were twenty-five items addressed to me that I had no interest in. I deleted them all, and went immediately to Google. I Googled up a map of Texas, with condensed portions of Highway 29, and began writing down the major towns that exist along the snake of a road that Quik-Stop Jolene and Freddie the beer-man call the “corridor.” I ended up with a tentative list that contained the names Rockdale, Plum, Breakline, Smithville, Horst, and Austin, with Austin creating the butt end of a 140-mile-long line that ran north-northwest. I hate computers and consider them one of the signs of the coming Apocalypse, but only this box of confusing buttons could summon up what I was looking for next: websites for all five towns’ third-grade graduating classes, and the year-end photos that accompanied them. The town of Rockdale came up first and I set up the printer to print every photo while I went to the kitchen and got a beer.
I had briefly considered focusing on Little League rosters for all five towns but my Lucas hadn’t had a burning desire to play baseball and just because Josh Herndon had didn’t mean that what I was looking for would necessarily be there.
Five towns and four beers later I had a small mountain of photo-imprinted paper that had required me to refill the paper bin once. I took the pile over to Jeanie’s favorite chair, the one that caught the most natural light from our one uncurtained window, and slowly began separating the wheat from the chaff. There had to be over a thousand photos but I was only looking for ones that closely matched the 6x4 pose that was probably gathering dust in Lieutenant Perez’s file cabinet in his shabby corner office at 812 Springdale Road.
Eight to nine years of age, blond, male, toothy, and not heavy of weight; more the spindly coltish frame that attends a boy energetic and too enthusiastic with life and all that’s going on around him to sit on the couch and waste away the day playing Nintendo or Starship Troopers.
I ended up with nine.
Circling each of the nine, I put the remaining papers in my desk and pondered my next move. All that remained in my refrigerator that was edible was a sad-looking leaf of lettuce and some bologna slices, so I made a quick sandwich, snagged another bottle of Lone Star, and returned to Jeanie’s chair. There was no way to conceive an order to the nine so I arbitrarily placed them in my lap and took the one on top: Donald Stroud, math, English, reading club.
Reading club? I thought: Third grade? Reading club? I couldn’t remember Lucas having any activity that advanced but perhaps the “club” was nothing more than the more involved readers getting special merit. Donald Stroud. Probably “Donny”. As I finished my beer I schemed on how to find Donny Stroud’s home and school in Plum, Texas. It was 1:10pm. With a little information and a heavy foot, I could be in Plum before school let out.
I was already too late.
*
It takes a solid thirty minutes with good traffic and legal speed to hit the outskirts of Smithville and another thirty beyond that to enter Plum. I had used the exit in Smithville to pull into the Quik-Stop parking lot and relieve myself of my by-now stinky Styrofoam coffee cup, its volume overflowing with abandoned sunflower seed shells. The bag for the seeds had slid to somewhere in-between the passenger seat and door and I resigned myself to finding it later and donating the remains to the squirrels at the school playground back in Austin. In my brief pull-over I didn’t see Jolene stick her head out the door to flick a cigarette butt but I did see Josh Herndon’s rapidly fading poster. Seeing the picture retreat in my rear-view mirror, something in my brain screamed that stopping for trash removal was a stupid, deadly mistake. I edged the Volvo above the speed limit.
Plum, Texas could easily be considered the fraternal twin sister to Smithville: similar small main streets flanked by feeder road with the requisite Burger King, Cracker Barrels, and pawn shops. The internet had informed me that Edward W. Monson Elementary was on the south side of town, situated between Pearl and Elm streets and kitty-corner to a Dollar Tree value store and a Wag-a-Bag convenience mart. The logic of Texas’ zoning laws eludes me.
A small ruler-sized nameplate informed me that the true power center at Monson Elementary was Sheila Cook-Walden and I assumed the prettily dressed younger woman behind the office counter was her. Ms. Cook-Walden wore a purple flowered knee-length dress with a single strand of faux pearls around her neck. One side of her long brown hair was swept up and kept in place by a clip resembling a purple butterfly. Younger than I expected her to be, she greeted me with a dazzling smile that peeled ten years off of an already girlish face.
“Can I help you with something?” She said, moving a small stack of papers on the counter out of our way.
I had only worn jeans, a collared shirt, and an old blue blazer and I felt woefully under-dressed to pull off my lie. I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, thank you. I’m Ben Cain. I’m a supervisor over at our Public Library and I was hoping to speak to someone about our reading club. We have a children’s meeting every other Tuesday and I was hoping to involve some of the students who are currently in the school’s reading program. I imagine I’ll have to speak with your English teacher?”
“Yes, although I would suspect it’s going to be a hard sell with the pare
nts… what with summer recess, and all. A lot of mommies and daddies don’t like their vacation plans interrupted, you know?” She flashed me another million-watt smile and started looking through a schedule list for the English teacher. I was still hot from the journey in my car and I could feel flop-sweat working its way down the inside of my coat. I stupidly pressed my luck and said, “We’re especially interested in getting students like…” I consulted the notepad that I put my grocery shopping list on, “…Mary Lemane? And umm…Donald Stroud?”
Cook-Walden’s iridescent smile disappeared. Her eyes darkened as she breathlessly said, “Donny?” Behind her, another woman dropped the pen she was using and her attention swiveled towards me. The other woman rose and stood by Ms. Cook-Walden.
Pain-struck, Cook-Walden stared at the floor as the other spoke. A greasy unease settled over my stomach.
“I’m afraid this is not a good time to be addressing this matter. Unfortunately you must be unaware that Donald is... well, he’s reported missing. This just happened so there’s no way you could have known but I know you will understand if we have to speak about this matter some other time.”
I had been wrong. Obviously, this other woman was Cook-Walden’s superior. I could barely stutter, “Missing? What... when did this happen?”
“Apparently last night. Dr. Stroud and the police informed us just this morning. In fact, I’m waiting for the police to show up any minute to go over Donald’s records. Sheila…” The woman turned towards Cook-Walden, “I think you should go sit down.”
Cook-Walden did look like she needed to sit down but there was something wary in the other’s eyes as she turned back to me and said, “I’m sorry... I didn’t catch your name…”
Ignoring her I said, “Oh my goodness, did the boy not make it home from school yesterday?”
The woman bridled. “No, no... nothing like that. Donald was put on his bus completely in accordance with school policy. I’m assured by the driver that he was let off exactly where he was supposed to be. Other than that, I’m not sure what happened.”
Candy from a Stranger Page 6