Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  The sheriff was in the room of the little woman with the red tennies. It resembled Alice Burton’s cramped quarters, only without the massive furniture. The room felt seriously institutional. A metal-framed bed stood flanked by a couple of chairs, a dresser, and a nightstand. They looked like rejects from a going-out-of-business-sale at an economy motel chain. Nothing personalized the room, not even the stack of newspapers and paperbacks on top of the dresser.

  “Just call me Dorothy.”

  She sat primly on the edge of her bed and watched as the sheriff paced over to the window. It offered a stunning view of vacant lots and abandoned businesses over which the Buffalo Springs grain elevator loomed from a few blocks away.

  He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, trying to loosen muscles that felt tight enough to snap. “We don’t really know each other, ma’am. I was taught to maintain a certain level of formality in situations like this.”

  “Murder investigations?”

  “Well, we don’t know that yet, and I hope not, but an investigation anyway.”

  “They call you Englishman, don’t they?”

  The unexpected use of his despised nickname turned him from the window and brought her his full attention. “Some do. Mostly not to my face.”

  “You’d rather be called something else?”

  “Yes ma’am. Sheriff or English, or the combination.”

  “I started out as Ruth, but I didn’t like it much. I prefer Dorothy.”

  He got it. “OK, Dorothy.”

  “How can I help you, Sheriff.”

  “Well, we’ve got a pair of unusual circumstances this morning. One body that should be here is missing. One that shouldn’t be, turned up here. What can you tell me about how that happened?”

  She glanced out the window, as if the answer might be found in the weathered words printed atop the elevator where it threatened to scrape fresh snow from the low clouds rushing just above.

  All it said was BUFFALO SPRINGS CO-OP, though you had to have good eyes to pick out the fading letters.

  “Tommie died,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be. He was past being ready for it. In fact, he was getting a little cranky that it couldn’t just be over and done with.”

  “Was anyone with him?”

  “About half a dozen of us. I’m not gonna tell you who the others were. It’s up to them, whether they want to talk about it or not. I’ll take responsibility for myself, but I won’t give up any names.”

  It was like she was playing the tough gal role in a movie—hard but honest, and with a code of honor she planned to live by. He suppressed another smile. “I understand. When did it happen?”

  “Six-fifteen or so. We were watching the news on his TV. One minute Tommie was eyeing that cute little weather gal, the next he was gone.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “We called your brother, like Tommie asked us. Then we prepared his body.”

  The sheriff raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, nothing peculiar. We just washed him and rolled him up in a blanket. Then we waited. Your brother came for him about four. Unless there’s some kind of emergency, even the night staff is always asleep by then. We let him in the back door.”

  “I thought there was supposed to be security on all the doors. Some kind of alarm.”

  “Oh, yeah, but we’ve wired around some of that stuff. This is a pretty boring place. Every now and then we need to get out without our keepers riding herd on us. We’ve got several escape routes, in case they find one and it takes us awhile to get around to unfixing it again.”

  “And Mad Dog, what did he do?”

  “Nothing. He just thanked everyone for helping Tommie get his final wish. Then he took the body and left.”

  “He didn’t bring anything? Nobody came with him? Could the baby have gotten in then somehow?”

  “No, no. Alice brought the baby back later.”

  “You left the building after Mad Dog took Tommie Irons away?”

  She paused and looked back at the grain elevator. Fitful snowflakes blew past her second-story window and played tag among the branches of skeletal elms.

  “Some of us don’t sleep too good. It was practically morning, almost time to get up. Didn’t seem worth going back to bed and there was nothing to do around here. We decided to go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Just out. No place in particular. We prowled around downtown some, where nobody much goes anymore, especially not at that hour. Some of them like to remember the way it used to be when those businesses weren’t boarded up. There used to be good shopping, nice restaurants, and movies at the Strand. Buffalo Springs was alive then, and they were younger and healthier and able to enjoy it. No, we just wandered. Tried to stay out of the wind and off the packed snow and patches of ice. Old bones break easier than young ones, and heal slower.”

  “And that’s where Alice Burton found the baby?”

  “Well, I think so. Must have been, ’cause I know good and well it was that cheap plastic thing she had with her when we went out. Blond hair that was painted on. I remember noticing the way it reflected the light in the hall. Now, I don’t know where she found it, but that baby had dark hair when we came back. I tried to get a look, but she wouldn’t let me. I thought it might still be alive. That’s when I called that Kraus woman at your office. After Alice settled down a little, I managed to get closer. That’s how I knew the baby was dead when you got here.”

  “Did you see anything, hear anything unusual while you were out?”

  “Maybe. Over near Klausen’s. I thought there were some kids there when we went by.”

  “Kids? Who, and doing what?”

  “Well, actually I didn’t see them. Just thought I heard them. And I’m not sure why I say kids. High voices, kind of excited like. Could of been girls, though I never saw ’em, never made out any words. I can’t even say for sure they were there, though I saw some toilet paper on the bushes of a house in the neighborhood. That’s a trick kids have been playing for a long time. It was windy and we were getting cold by then, hurrying back to warm up before they start gathering us for that stuff they call breakfast. And then, one of us girls was in an awful rush.”

  “Why’s that?” the sheriff wondered.

  “Her beau usually wakes up with an erection. She didn’t want to waste it.”

  ***

  The Buffalo Springs educational system was housed in a pair of brick buildings of similarly nondescript early twentieth-century design—red squares with big windows— connected by a breezeway with offices and classrooms added in the fifties. For reasons that had always escaped the sheriff, that connection was made without concession to matching what it attached. It was yellow brick and hideously mid-century modern with tiny windows and occasional rows of glass bricks to admit light. Viewing the place had been known to induce nausea—just like when a test (essay, multiple choice, or of character) loomed behind its doors. The sheriff still couldn’t approach it without the queasy feeling that he was about to be hit with a pop quiz for which he’d neglected to prepare.

  Like most public buildings in Benteen County, you entered through two sets of doors. The design feature was meant to act as a heat or cold trap, keeping out whichever you didn’t want. They held back wind and dust, too, at least hypothetically. At school, both doors tended to stay open and defeat the design when assaulted by crowds of kids hurrying to or from the line of yellow buses that gathered them from the far corners of the school district.

  The sheriff joined one such crowd, along with a frigid cold front that swept through the main doors and down the corridor within. The kids peeled off toward the lockers that lined the halls. The sheriff made for the offices.

  “Good morning, Sheriff English.” The student secretary was blond and cute. “You here about the horrible Heathers or has the vice principal called you into her office again?” She grinned to make it clear she was teasing, but
the humor didn’t extend to her eyes. She was a year older than his daughters, “the horrible Heathers,” and ran with the rich kids, a very different crowd.

  “Hey, Englishman!” The sheriff’s wife stuck her head around the corner of a door labeled JUDY ENGLISH, VICE PRINCIPAL. “I’ve got to get to a meeting. We’re about to decide to turn the kids around and stick them back on the buses and send them home. The weatherman says scattered snow showers, but it’s getting nasty out there. Come on in. I can spare a couple of minutes.”

  She greeted him with a warm, but appropriate, kiss as he entered her office and closed the door behind them. The space within gave new meaning to the word cramped. The sheriff felt NBA-sized in here.

  As the door clicked shut she came out of the embrace, took him by the arms, and pushed him back to look at his face. Not that far back. Arm’s length would have required her to slam one of them against a wall or her desk.

  “What’s this about a baby?”

  “You know?”

  “The whole school knows, and is actively involved in speculations. Is it true? What can you tell me?”

  “Yeah, it’s true, and not much. It was a newborn. Doc’s got it now. He’ll let me know whatever else he can find out about it. Him, actually, it’s a boy. Looked Caucasian to me, which shouldn’t be surprising in Benteen County. Do you know about Tommie Irons?”

  Judy backed away and sat on the edge of her desk. The sheriff took the only full-sized chair on his side of the room, then tried to figure out where to put his feet.

  “Tommie died last night. I guess Mad Dog had been filling him with stories about afterlife in the happy hunting grounds. He stole Tommie’s body from the Towers to dispose of it ‘properly’ sometime before dawn. Some of the residents helped smuggle Mad Dog in and Tommie out. Then they went for a walk…” He shook his head. “When they came back, one of them had a real baby instead of the doll she usually carries to calm her.”

  “Alice Burton.” Judy echoed his disbelief with a shake of the head, though hers was more dramatic because of her shoulder-length auburn curls. “And you don’t have any idea whose it is?”

  “Not yet. Nor where it came from. Wynn was going to take a quick look before he clocked out, and Mrs. Kraus is calling around to find me a deputy to give me some backup. You know how short-handed we are.”

  Judy knew. It was a topic he brought home for complaint about as regularly as she did the county’s teacher shortage and the lack of competent substitutes. “So what do you want from me, the names of our sexually active girls? Did you come here for rumors, Englishman? Are you that desperate?”

  Her voice got a little loud near the end. The sheriff could just picture the blond girl with her ear to the door. He held up his hands.

  “Yeah, I suppose. But me getting there in a hurry might be important. If somebody disposed of an unwanted baby, there are people in this community who’ll want to punish her. Maybe she deserves punishment, but not without all the messy checks and balances our legal system has to offer. And then, Doc said some things that set me thinking. Had me worrying about our daughters.”

  Judy’s jaw dropped. “You think one of the Heathers…” She started to laugh, but something clouded her face. She shook her head emphatically. “No way. Not possible. They’ve both been on the pill for years.”

  “The pill? Our little girls are on the pill?”

  “They’re not that little anymore, or haven’t you looked lately. They’re both sixteen. How old do you think I was the first time we…”

  Picturing the blond at the door again, the sheriff waved her off. “You’ve made your point. But how long has this been going on? When were you going to tell me?”

  “More than three years. Since Heather number two came to live with us. There’s a lot of sexual abuse in her background. Sometimes that gets inherited. I decided not to take any chances. Especially after I found some rubbers in her drawer. The girls are the same age. I couldn’t get pills for one and not the other. And, I was going to tell you when you asked, or when it came up, which it just did.”

  “Are they sexually active? No. Never mind. I’m not sure I want to know. “

  “I’d accuse you of a really irresponsible attitude, only I haven’t wanted to know either. I don’t think our Heather has gone that far yet. Two, though, I’d guess has had several partners already.”

  “Could she?” the sheriff began. “I mean, is there any way…”

  Judy bit her lip and ran her fingers through her thick hair, considering it a lot longer than he liked. “I don’t see how. Something like that would be almost impossible to hide and I think they would have told us. But you hear about parents being caught by surprise sometimes. Englishman, the girls didn’t come to school this morning. Two locked herself in the upstairs bathroom. She was still in there, being sick to her stomach, when I came in. One wasn’t feeling that chipper either, so she stayed home to keep an eye on her sister. I mean, I can’t imagine it, but all of a sudden, I can.”

  And that was the trouble with imagination. If Judy could, so could the sheriff.

  ***

  It was only a few blocks from the Buffalo Springs schools to the two-story frame house in which the sheriff, Judy, and a pair of Heathers lived. Judy and the Heathers usually walked to school, though not when the day’s high was threatening thirty and wind gusts made it feel like that should be thirty below. The sheriff dallied along the way more than he normally would. When you haven’t properly done the birds and bees bit, how do you walk through the door and ask your daughters if one of them has just secretly had a baby and then disposed of it? The closer he got, the slower his pickup moved.

  The sheriff was good at laying guilt on himself. It wasn’t like he and Judy had provided a June and Ward Cleaver atmosphere for the girls to grow up in. They fought all the time. Not knock-each-other-around fights, but arguments, most of which weren’t about anything and weren’t serious. But they’d learned how to hurt each other too. Enough that their marriage was on its second try. They’d divorced after their first eight years. Not a great example for One of Two, the only Heather they’d had at the time. Even after the divorce, though, their romantic life hadn’t stopped. He and Judy were prominent figures in Buffalo Springs, big fish in the smallest of ponds. Benteen County was the antithesis of modern-urban America in which a sexual revolution and a multitude of personal freedoms made for all sorts of acceptable alternative relationships. It all happened in Benteen County, of course. It was just still “dirty” here—unacceptable— something to keep in the closet and out of the public eye. It wasn’t proper for a teacher or the county sheriff to be involved in extramarital affairs, or at least not to get caught at them, so the two had soon fallen back into bed. Their daughter, Heather, was an excuse for spending a lot of time together. The community could pretend it wasn’t unusual for divorced parents of a child to discuss her future until all hours, even if they were pretty certain a lot more was going on behind the family’s drawn blinds.

  Then along came the other Heather, Two of Two. She was only a few months older, and so physically similar that the pair looked enough alike for strangers to think them twins. And they were actually related—distant cousins by a series of improbable twists the sheriff preferred not to think about. He preferred not to think about them because they were painful, Two of Two having come from about as dysfunctional a family as he could imagine—a family that had met its tragic end right here in Buffalo Springs. The second Heather had suddenly needed a foster family, and remarkably, turned into the linchpin on which he and Judy hung their second pledge to love, honor, and cherish, until death did them part.

  Having two Heathers in the house was a complexity that probably should have been solved by name changes. Though neither Heather had been especially fond of her name before that option presented itself, neither proved willing to abandon what she was used to. And soon, both were arguing it wasn’t necessary. It was no problem to them to call each other Heather. They always kn
ew to whom they were speaking. The solution finally developed from the first Heather’s addiction to Star Trek. The moment the character Seven of Nine appeared on the Voyager series, she knew how they would do it. She would be One of Two—after all, she was the first in the house and the natural child and deserved that minuscule privilege. Two of Two didn’t have a problem with it. She was grateful for a place to go and people who wanted her. She retained her own last name, Lane, so that at school, there weren’t two Heather Englishes, but around the house for the last three years, two girls answered together, or avoided answering, when addressed as just Heather, but responded with Borg-like enthusiasm to their Trekkie designations.

  The sheriff parked his Chevy in the street in front of the house and tried to think of an excuse to put off his mission and go do something else. There were plenty of other things that needed doing, but, although he was sure the infant’s mother wouldn’t be found here, he needed to expand belief to certainty. They were going to be hurt by what they would perceive as his lack of trust, and they were going to be angry when he asked them to betray what they knew or suspected about their friends. He didn’t want to do this, as sheriff or as father, but both positions required it of him.

  The wind tried to tear the storm door off the house while he fumbled with the latch and let himself in. It stung his face with occasional snowflakes as well, though he couldn’t tell whether the clouds were fulfilling their threat or the wind was just rearranging what was already lying about.

  Boris, the family’s aging German Shepherd, provided a suitably enthusiastic greeting as the sheriff entered, but the house was ominously silent.

  “Heathers?” he shouted, but he already knew there was no one home.

  The note was on the dining room table.

  Don’t worry. We’re fine.

  Small emergency. Back soon.