Harvestman Lodge

by Cameron Judd

  MEGAN SURVIVED THE NIGHT UNHARMED IN THE backyard tent, and when she emerged in the morning, Eli was just circling the car around the block so Megan would think they’d just arrived to pick her up. No need to embarrass themselves or alarm Megan by telling her they’d guarded her all night.

  Megan went inside to wolf down a couple of toaster pastries for her breakfast, and to thank her host family and say her goodbyes. She gathered her things and darted out to the car.

  “How come you’re wearing the same clothes you had on yesterday, Melinda?” Megan asked Melinda. At age twelve, she had reached the time in feminine life in which clothes became important and always noticed.

  “It’s … uh … it’s a long story, and kind of embarrassing,” Melinda said, with no idea what kind of “long story” she would fabricate if Megan was persistent. “I’d rather not talk about it with a guy in the car,” she added.

  “Oh. Okay.” Megan’s curiosity all but overwhelmed her, but she didn’t seek details.

  “Did you sleep well out in that tent, Megan?” Eli asked.

  “Yeah, pretty good. The ground’s kind of hard.”

  “Maybe you need a more padded sleeping bag.”

  “Yeah. This one belonged to the Lanes. If I’d had my own, I’d have slept better.”

  “We didn’t sleep well, either,” Melinda said.

  “‘We’? You mean you two were … ”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Not at all. Eli was at his place and I was home, and he came by to pick me up this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you – ”

  “The engine has been running rough and the check engine light was on. I wasn’t scheduled to go to the station today, so I decided to go in without my car and hope I didn’t get given an unexpected assignment I’d have to drive to.

  “If you had, I’d have let you borrow this car,” Eli said, playing along with Melinda’s story.

  “I’m glad you’re nice to my sister, Eli,” Megan said. “She used to have a boyfriend who wasn’t nice to her. He even … ”

  “Meggy, Eli knows all about that,” Melinda said. “There’s no reason to be talking about that.”

  “Sorry.”

  They traveled a few minutes in silence, which Megan finally broke. “Eli, aren’t you taking me home? This isn’t the right way.”

  Melinda answered. “We’re taking you to work with us today, Meggy. I want to be able to keep an eye on you.”

  “What did I do wrong?”

  “Not a thing, Meggy. We just want to make sure you’re safe. With Mom and Dad away from the house and school being out for the summer, we don’t like the idea of you being at home alone.”

  “Because of those men I saw.”

  “Yes. Because you saw them, and because Eli saw them, too.”

  Megan’s eyes widened. “You saw them?”

  “I did. Riding in a car together. An Asian man and a white man who looked like a Parvin, though strictly speaking, I can’t really know he was.”

  “Why were they watching my house?”

  “We don’t really know. Maybe nothing. It could have been coincidence. But it is disturbing, and lets us know we should be extra careful, just in case something is going on.”

  Melinda said, “Meggy, if either of them ever approach you, or try to get you to talk to them or go somewhere with them, or anything like that, get away from them as fast as you can. And go to a place where there are people who can see you. If you see a policeman, go to him.”

  “This all makes me scared.”

  “Sweety, when you feel scared, just tell yourself to be careful instead of afraid. Keep calm and do smart things.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  Megan had nothing more to say for the rest of the ride to Hodgepodge.

  FLORA HAMILTON’S CAR WAS PARKED out front of the office building. Melinda found her swiping down a drinking fountain, as engrossed in her work as usual.

  Megan went on into Melinda’s office and turned on the television there, then settled down and wondered how boring the day would turn out to be, stuck here where her sister worked. Melinda herself went on down to speak to Flora.

  “How are you getting along, Miss Flora?” Melinda asked.

  The old woman sighed. “I miss my brother awful bad,” she said. “I go by his house and can’t believe I can’t go in and see him no more. It makes me feel just as alone as I can be.”

  “You’ve got plenty of friends still, Flora. But I know what you mean. Eli and I miss him too. I think of him every time I look down at my hand and see the ring on my finger. It was such a generous gift, and so thoughtful of him.”

  “He was a kind-hearted man. His life wasn’t always easy, but he never complained.”

  “A good example to follow.”

  Flora wiped a tear or two. “I know he’s with the Lord now, but I guess I’m selfish. I wish he was still with me.”

  “I understand.”

  Flora smiled at Melinda. “He always called you his ‘Sweet Miss Lindy’ when he talked about you. Did you know that?”

  “I knew about the ‘Lindy’ part, not the rest.”

  “Did I tell you he did let me know where he got those rings?”

  “No … where?”

  “Right here in this building. In the restroom wall in Eli’s office, matter of fact.”

  “The restroom wall?”

  “The rings had been put into a crack in the block wall at sometime or other in the past, and dropped on down. When they were renovating this place, somebody accidentally cracked open one of the wall blocks, and Jimbo pointed a flashlight into the hole and saw the rings glitter. He pulled them out and decided to hold onto them until he could find somebody he wanted to give them to.”

  “I’m glad it was us,” Melinda said.

  “Me too, Lindy.”

  Flora returned to her cleaning of the drinking fountain, swiping almost furiously and murmuring things under her breath that Melinda could not hear.

  “Flora, are you all right?”

  “Oh, honey, when I’m feeling sad, I just get a kind of fury about me that I calm down by working hard. Jimbo was the same way, sometimes.”

  “If you’re looking for jobs to do, I can go trash my office. My little sister is in there, probably doing it already.”

  “Honey, I’ve got more than enough to do here without any trashing. And this afternoon I got to go over to Mr. Cale Parvin’s house and cook some food and clean for him.”

  “I didn’t know you worked for him.”

  “Honey, I work for about everybody in town, or have at one time or nother. Mr. Cale, he needs help more’n most in this town. He’s close to full blind now, and he’s stuck in a wheelchair, and I’ve spoke to him enough to know he’s hit a place where he’s full of sorrow for the lives he and his kin have lived … and God only knows what he’ll do with that sorrow. It will lead him either to a light place or to the deeper dark. I don’t know which, Miss Lindy.”

  “I never met the man, though I saw a younger image of him recently in that big election party photograph at the Clarion office,” Melinda said. “For a time I kept company with his son … but that came around to a bad end, and I never met Rawls’s dad.”

  “You maybe didn’t meet Rawls’s dad, but I hear he sure ’nough met yours. That’s the tale I’ve heard, anyway.”

  “I think most have heard that story. I wish people could forget such things as easily as they take them to memory.”

  “Yes, Miss Lindy. Yes indeed.”

  THANKS TO RAWLS’S SECRETIVE PHONE BOOTH call to the Tylerville police, Flora Hamilton was spared the shock of discovering the self-slain corpse of Cale Parvin. She learned what had happened from one of the policemen. They were all over the place, making photographs, looking for anything that might hint this was anything different from the obvious suicide it was.

  “It’s easy to see why a man in his situation could come to this,” Flora heard one cop tell another. “They say he was nearly blind, s
tuck in that chair, not able to move around most of his own home, and his kin pretty much left him to get by the best he could. He lived a lot of the time on food people brought in to him. His wife’s been dead for years and his family is one of the sorriest in the county. A lot of folks would have done the same thing he did in that kind of situation.”

  “It’s sad to see a man’s life wind up so miserable that he don’t even want it anymore,” the other policeman replied.

  “These Parvins, I don’t know what to make of them,” said the other. “My folks always told me to steer clear of them, and the Tates, when I was growing up. That was hard to do, though … there were Parvins and Tates out the wazoo in school with me all the way through high school.”

  “Yeah, the Parvins had a lot of folks who didn’t like them. Is there any indication here that this was something different than him putting a bullet through his own temple?”

  “If there is, I’ve not heard anybody saying it. It seems the old boy just got tired of living and decide to cash it in.”

  Flora was still watching and listening from a chair in the corner of the second-floor hallway when a man walked in and entered Cale Parvin’s bedroom without the slightest interference from the police. Such was the level of respect held for Brother Larry Cavness.

  Cavness walked over to the wheelchair, where the body remained seated but covered over with a sheet. He pulled the corner of the sheet back, looked, and winced.

  “Gentlemen,” he said to the policemen, “I’d had hope my friend here was on the verge of choosing a new life. He’d called me in to talk about it. I’m sad to see he chose death instead.”

  “So … you were here with him earlier? When?”

  “Roy,” said one policeman to the one who’d just asked the question, “don’t go barking up a tree with no coon in it. This is Brother Larry Cavness. I guarantee he didn’t put that bullet in Parvin’s head.”

  “No, but he might have seen something or heard something to shed more light on the situation.”

  “There was another man, young fellow, going in as I was leaving,” Cavness said. “I don’t know who he was, but he looked to be a Parvin. You know what I mean, that Parvin glare.”

  “Oh yeah,” both officers said almost in unison.

  “Bet it was Rawls, his son,” said one of the cops.

  “No,” said the other. “He’s in prison.”

  “Not anymore. You didn’t hear he got out? He’s been doing night work as a security guard at some of the plants here.”

  “Huh! I thought he was still inside.”

  Brother Larry rubbed his chin, frowning. “I wonder if I should have spoken. I don’t have any wish to get this young Parvin fellow in trouble when all I saw him do is go in the house.”

  “Don’t worry, Brother Larry. He’s not likely to be in trouble. This looks like a pretty clearcut case of suicide. When they dust the prints on that pistol, I’m betting they’ll only find Cale’s. But it could have been the younger fellow who called in about the body.”

  “He’s been low in spirits lately, Mr. Cale has,” said Flora. She’d come to the door of the bedroom and heard some of the talk taking place just inside the door. She was staring hard at the sheet-covered cadaver in the power wheelchair.

  “Yeah,” said the policeman. “He had plenty to feel depressed about. No doubt in my mind. He offed himself.”

  AFTER SITTING AWAKE IN A CAR ALL night, Melinda had hoped for an easy work day, especially with her sister present in the office.

  She got her wish. Her only real assignment for the day was to do some fact-gathering from the Kincheloe County tax assessor’s office, a favor for a momentarily overburdened friend and fellow reporter at the station. The task was easily accomplished by phone, and Melinda received the added compensation of her grateful friend ordering pizza for her lunch and having it delivered to Melinda’s office for her lunch. At Melinda’s request, enough was ordered to feed Megan, Eli, and Flora as well.

  The pizza arrived about the same time that, unknown to all, Cale Parvin was putting a pistol to his temple and taking his last blurred look at the bedroom that was his world.

  Flora ate two modest slices of pepperoni pizza before departing for the Parvin house. Driving away from Hodgepodge, she automatically looked for Jimbo’s truck, then wept as she realized one more time that it would never be parked there again.

  ELI AND MELINDA CHANCED TO WALK OUT of their offices at the same time in late afternoon, and both spotted the just-returned Flora Hamilton at the same moment. Flora was at the door of the “suicide room” where had died the young woman Eli was sure was the daughter of Don New. The one Don New, at graveside, had said took her own life in the former Winona Court in despair over something that had in some manner caused her to “lose” her child.

  Melinda was nearer to Flora and reached her first.

  “Flora, why are you going in there, of all places?”

  Flora’s face was lined and tear-stained. “I’m compelled to, Lindy. I don’t know why, exactly. He took his life. His own life.”

  “If you’re talking about Jimbo, you’re wrong. It was his heart that killed him. You know that!”

  Eli reached them just as Flora said, “It’s Cale Parvin I’m speaking of. Mr. Cale, he shot himself today. Right in his own room, sitting in his chair.”

  “Oh!” Melinda said. “Oh no!”

  “Are you the one who found him, Flora?” Eli asked.

  “Somebody called in the police before I ever got there. They think it might have been his son, Rawls. He was there during the morning, if I understood the policemen right.”

  “Poor Rawls, losing his father,” Melinda said softly. “Although I don’t think they had much of a relationship.”

  “You’re a remarkable person, Melinda,” Eli said. “Sympathy toward someone who once tried to hurt you is an unusual quality.”

  Melinda merely shrugged.

  Flora turned the key and opened the door. A musty, closed-up smell wafted out, and Eli and Melinda had the odd experience of looking into a room whose origins as a mid-20th century motel had not been stripped away. Even the bed frames remained, bolted to floor and wall, though the mattresses were gone. Also remaining were the gaudy wall paintings of big flower blossoms that were the only decoration in the room, as well as reading lights on hinged arms attached to the walls above the bed frames. Two dusty chairs covered with decaying, splitting vinyl were in one corner, stuffing hanging out and much-harvested by rodents.

  Flora walked listlessly to the nearest bed frame. “It was here I found her,” she said. “Lying out with her face still damp from her tears and her hand still holding to the bottle of pills she’d taken into herself. Her wordly sorrow was ended by the time I found her. She’d left a “note to everybody,” which is what she’d wrote out on the motel notepad from the bedside table. She wrote down that she’d been living a life of sin and had failed to keep watch on her little daughter, and 'evil hands' had took her away.”

  Melinda put her arm around the trembling Flora’s thin shoulders. “Flora, you’ve already been through seeing the aftermath of one suicide today. Why come back here to where you had to go through the same thing once before? What are you looking for?”

  Flora turned and looked into Melinda’s face earnestly. Eli, feeling somehow like an intruder, stood to the side, watching.

  “I’m not looking for nothing, Lindy. I don’t know what draws me in here sometimes. I’d just like to figure a way to clean the death from this room. Jimbo felt the same … he told me. Maybe someday when I come in, I won’t feel the same sorrow lingering here.”

  Melinda said nothing, merely embraced the old woman, who began to cry shakily and leaned into Melinda, letting the younger woman help hold her up. It had been a very stressful, saddening day.

  Chapter Fifty

  LUKEY PARVIN BARELY FELT THE PRICK OF Jang’s needle into his arm. Jang was skilled in administering the shots that kept Lukey in a semi-conscious state, f
lopped in the passenger seat of Jang’s car, unmoving, seeing but not comprehending the world around him. He was helpless, fully at Jang’s mercy and thus in constant danger. One of the side effects of whatever drug concoction Jang used, though, was that it took away his ability to care.

  Years of experience in use of the drug concoction, created by pharmaceutical chemists under the hire of the Flower Garden as a tool for procurers such as Jang, had given Jang expertise in its administration. Jang carried pre-loaded hypodermics filled with assorted doses of the highly stable drug cocktail, and could tell with no more than a glance at his intended victim the size of dose needed to render that victim listless, unconscious, or dead. He kept his hypodermics in a small case that was never out of reach, and was deft in stealthily administering a fast injection after putting himself within reach of his victim. The drug’s effect was so fast that even the sting of the needle was almost instantly erased. One quick, barely-felt jab, and Jang had control.

  In the time since he’d tracked down Lukey Parvin, a once-promising procurer for the Flower Garden who had been foolish enough to betray the Gardeners and think he could get away with it, Jang had kept Lukey perpetually under the influence of the drug. Lukey’s state had varied from relatively mild torpor to full unconsciousness. Any time now Jang would draw a hypodermic from the side of his case where he kept the lethal doses, and Lukey would never waken again. Jang hated to do it to a man who had once been a partner and friend, but he had his orders. He’d even called in news that he’d found Lukey, hoping to learn he could be allowed to spare the man’s life. No such mercy was extended. Lukey had to be disposed of.

  So there was no reason now to keep Lukey alive. He was a cumbersome burden, and the stupid man had made the mistake of showing Jang where the little girl, Megan Buckingham, lived. So now Jang had no need of Lukey’s help in finding the child destined to be the Flower Garden’s next prize blossom. He would harvest her very soon – it would take only moments, when the right opportunity came. He would put her sufficiently under the influence of his drug to keep her sedate and compliant, and whisk her away from this hick town and off to a new life she would never have anticipated. A life in Slovenská republika, a world far away from the one she’d known. Oh, the things this little girl would see, would learn! And she would have to thank for it Jang Bo-kyung. It was enough to make him smile, though smile he seldom did.