murder@maggody.com

by Joan Hess

  Ruby Bee felt a sudden infusion of warmth in her veins, like she’d just slipped down into a bathtub of bubbly hot water. “You have no call to worry, Gwynnie. Estelle and I are gonna take care of everything.”

  Not everyone at the table shared her feeling.

  3

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or at least at the duplex in Farberville rented by Justin and Chapel Bailey, a storm was brewing like a yeasty batch of beer.

  Chapel waited until Justin came through the living room, coldly observing him as he staggered under the weight of a box filled with dog-eared, heavily highlighted textbooks that would never be opened again. Those belonging to Justin had been, for the most part, obsolete before he’d finished the pertinent class—or even begun it. Hers were mostly forays into feministic analysis of didactic studies of urban language patterns, whatever that meant.

  “This town of Maggody is not on any map I’ve found thus far,” she said loudly, which was pretty much how she said anything when she was annoyed. She was very annoyed. “I was under the impression we would have a discussion before a decision was reached. We are equals in this relationship, Justin. I told you before you moved in that everything would be a fifty-fifty proposition, from the dirty dishes to the utility bills.”

  “So?” he said as he dropped the box by the door, alarming their neighbors, who were into nuclear disarmament and had stockpiled cases of food and bottled water under the back porch.

  “Major lifestyle alterations are joint decisions, too. They’re not arbitrary whims based solely on what you want. You know perfectly well that I’ve been hoping to get into Dr. Covey’s seminar. This is the first time he’s offered it in three semesters.”

  Justin sat down at the opposite end of the sofa. As soon as he’d stopped wheezing and could trust himself to speak in a reasonable voice, he said, “It’s a twenty-mile drive, Chapel, and the seminar will only meet once a week. There’s no reason why you can’t take it.”

  “What am I supposed to do the other six days?”

  “You can find something. Nothing says you have to sit around the trailer park.”

  Chapel ran a hand through her lemony hair, its color only slightly surreal. It was so frizzy, however, that in the sociology grad lounge it had been the cause of much jovial and irreverent conjecture regarding bolts of lightning, forks, light sockets, and exotic drugs. Her pugnacious features and wiry body ensured all such remarks were made only after she was well clear of the lounge.

  “Wow,” she said, “like I can wade in creeks and learn how to make soap from wise old mountain women. I can even join the local book club, as long as we can afford a subscription to Reader’s Digest Condensed.”

  “One year, and then I’ll be in grad school. You’re acting as if we’ve signed a permanent lease in purgatory.”

  “Hell’s more like it,” Chapel said as she began to rip the peel off an orange in a way Justin found obscurely disturbing. “What’s more, you haven’t been accepted anywhere. Who knows how long we’ll sit in a trailer and sink into mindlessness? What shall I look forward to after mastering the art of making soap? Watermelon pickles? Green tomato relish? Dowsing for dollars?”

  “Did something happen today?”

  She stuffed an orange segment in her mouth. As juice dribbled down her chin, she said, “Armenia is pregnant.”

  Justin stared. “Isn’t Armenia a …?”

  “Lesbian? What difference does that make? Is she unworthy of raising a child? Her relationship with Malinda is a good deal stronger than anything we’ve ever experienced. I can’t remember when either of them has come alone to the Sunday evening potlucks at the Unitarian student center.” She filled her mouth with another piece of orange and chomped down with enough vigor to send pulp splattering onto the carpet. “I, on the other hand, can’t remember when you last came home in time to go with me, much less sleep with me. I find myself wondering if you’re asexual, Justin, or simply more enamored of your databases and megabytes than you are of living entities. Have you taken to masturbating with your mousepad?”

  “Chapel,” he began angrily, then caught himself and sat back. “You knew when we met that I’d have to spend a lot of time in the lab.”

  “Is that where you are every night until midnight? I called last night and nobody answered.”

  “I thought you went to the potluck.”

  “On my way home, I drove by the lab. I didn’t see any lights. When I got home, I called.”

  Justin was still struggling with his temper. “Dr. Mertzell asked me to come over to his house to help him install a new scanner. I need his letters of recommendation for grad school. Hell, I would have gone there if he’d asked me to clean out his gutters. I was home by eleven. Do you think I’m fooling around with all those hot little sorority girls in my freshman labs? I should be flattered.”

  Chapel looked at the stains under his armpits, at his glittering forehead that added ten years to his age, at his protuberant eyes and acne-scarred complexion. Her expression softened. “No, Justin, I trust you. I was just nonplussed when Armenia and Malinda shared their news with me. I hugged and kissed and made all the right noises, but afterward, I sat in the car and cried.”

  “We talked about this before we got married,” Justin said. “We’ll have a child after I finish grad school.”

  Chapel wiped away what might have been a tear, and her voice was low as she said, “I know we did.”

  “Then it’s settled.” He picked up the box. “For the next six months, I’ll work on applications to grad school. You can take the seminar and catch crawdads in your spare time. A year from now, we’ll be packing for Boston or Berkeley.”

  “I guess so,” Chapel said without enthusiasm, thinking of the glow on Armenia’s face. There was no discernible swell to her belly, but it would come with a blessing from the Earth Goddess. At twenty-six, Chapel knew her biological clock had a long way to go before she needed to set the alarm.

  Still, she’d married Justin because she understood the importance of genetic strengths. He was not attractive in a physical sense, but his intelligence was formidable. Her goal was a child who could, and would, burst forth with the brilliance she had painfully acknowledged was lacking in herself. Her child, and to some extent his (although nurture would contribute to nature), would redefine the currently simplistic concepts of human existence through intense exposure to the humanities and science. He or she would not be born with a silver spoon, but with an appropriate sized violin in the crib, a daily dose of literature, charts and maps on the wall, and C-SPAN, or at least CNN, on a regular basis. While others read Dr. Seuss to their infants, she would read Balzac and Baudelaire.

  It was not the time to mention that she’d tossed out her birth-control pills three months previously. If and when, she told herself, she could handle the situation.

  I went into the SuperSaver and headed for the cubicle that served as Jim Bob’s office. Had served, it seemed. After a perfunctory knock, I opened the door and gazed with some confusion at a sofa that would have been rejected at a thrift shop and a couple of threadbare easy chairs. No desk, no file cabinet, no fax machine, no precarious piles of manila folders. To make matters worse, Kevin Buchanon was sprawled on one of the chairs, sucking on a can of soda while his Adam’s apple bobbled like a tennis ball bouncing into a fence.

  “Where’s Jim Bob?” I asked.

  “You mean like his office?”

  “Yeah, Kevin. Last time I was here, this was his office.”

  Kevin thought long and hard. “Well, he moved his office last week. I mean, he didn’t move this, ’cause it’s still here.”

  “I can see that,” I said through clenched teeth. “Do you have any clue where he might have relocated the contents of his office?”

  “’Course I do. I’m the one that hauled out his desk. I thought I was never gonna get it through the door. My back’s still throbbing something awful. Dahlia had me soak in the tub for more’n an hour, but—”

&nb
sp; “Where can I find him?” I asked, speaking slowly and deliberately in words of one syllable, since Kevin was not a polysyllabic kind of guy.

  “Jim Bob?”

  “Do you think I’m looking for Elvis?”

  Kevin’s eyes shifted uneasily as he pondered my question. “Elvis died more than twenty years ago, Arly. Estelle Oppers may have claimed to have seen him in that casino over by Tunica a few months back, but that don’t make it so. Between you and me, Estelle’s kinda flighty. Even my ma says that. I’d hate to repeat what my pa says.”

  I took a deep breath. “Please don’t. Where is Jim Bob’s office?”

  “You’re wanting to see Jim Bob?”

  All of this might have been noteworthy had it not been quite so typical of all my exchanges with Kevin, whose brain was insulated with steel wool. What brain there was. I gave myself a moment, then said, “Yes, Kevin, I’m wanting to see Jim Bob. Do you know where he is right now?”

  “Sure do,” he said with a grin that gave me a distasteful glimpse of his teeth. “He’s most likely in his office unless he went off somewhere. He usually tells us afore he leaves. Whenever that happens, Idalupino oversees things. She’s a sight worse than Jim Bob when it comes to barking out orders and acting like she hung the moon. That ain’t to say Jim Bob’s always mannersome, especially when it comes to the work schedule. When I told him that Dahlia and me wanted to take computer lessons, what he said was enough to flip-flop a body in its grave. You’d have thought I’d said we wanted to start holding up liquor stores.”

  “Like Collera Buchanon’s mother?” I asked, despite myself.

  Kevin gave me a sober look. “You got to admire somebody with that kind of ambition. Going on eighty like she was, and still—”

  I’d pretty much run out of tolerance. “Where can I find Jim Bob?”

  “What he did was put up a partition in the employees’ lounge. We can get to the restroom okay, but he dint leave much room for furniture and the only window’s on his side. I don’t reckon he’s figured out we’re using this, and I shore don’t want to be here when he gets wind of it. He’s awful busy with his fancy computer, though. Melda sez he won’t even notice if there’s a fire unless we fetch him.”

  “What’s he doing on the computer?”

  “Gosh, I dunno. He sez he puts in orders and keeps track of hours and deductions and things like that. It doesn’t seem to work so good. Last week Melda got a paycheck for seventeen thousand dollars, and she hadn’t even worked overtime. She wanted to cash it and leave the county, but Idalupino convinced her otherwise. I sure could use a paycheck like that.”

  “Cashing it could get you in serious trouble,” I said. “Will you please take me to Jim Bob?”

  Kevin gulped down the dregs of his soda and stood up. “You should have said so in the first place, Arly.”

  If I’d had my gun and a bullet, or even my radar gun, which I like to pretend emits flesh-vaporizing death rays, I would have plugged him between his bony shoulder blades as he led me to the back of the store. Ignoring his bleats, I went through what was left of the lounge and opened a door emblazoned with a sign that read: “Don’t Bother.”

  “I presume the sign’s telling folks not to bother to knock,” I said to Jim Bob as he sprang to his feet. He’d been hunched in front of the computer on his desk; I’d had only a momentary glimpse of the screen before he blocked it, but boobs are boobs—and these were doozies.

  He bared his teeth at me in what he may have thought was a smile of sorts. “What it means is don’t bother to ask, ’cause the answer’s not gonna be to your liking. That applies to you, too. Now that we’ve got that clear, you can run along. I’m busy with the payroll.”

  “That was one of your employees?” I said as I sat down and made myself comfortable. “I don’t recall her bagging my groceries.”

  He turned around and punched a button on the keyboard, sending the pornographic image into the void. He resumed his seat and gave me a wary look, since we both knew anything I dropped to Ruby Bee and Estelle would be common knowledge within a matter of hours. “It ain’t anything worse than an issue of Penthouse,” he said, attempting to sound amiable, if not apologetic. It was likely that visions of Brother Verber’s next sermon were flitting through his mind—as well as Mrs. Jim Bob’s suffocating disapproval. His peccadilloes had cost him the price of several pink Cadillacs and a boggling amount of new upholstery. “No need to go talking about it,” he added. “All kinds of junk mail comes in ever’day.”

  “So I saw,” I said sweetly, even though it was clear who had the upper hand for the moment. I’d never categorize Jim Bob as a sacrificial goat, having too much respect for the caprines of this world, but damned if I wasn’t going to take advantage of the situation. “What’s your problem with Lottie’s proposal?”

  He ran his hand through his stubbly gray hair. “I’m just not sure it’s for the best. Maggody’s a quiet little town. You should know, since you get a generous salary for doing nothing more than running speed traps and lecturing teenagers about littering the banks of Boone Creek with beer cans and condoms. Maybe it ought to stay that way instead of hurtling itself into places like the Internet. I don’t want to see happy hour at Ruby Bee’s replaced with a web site.”

  There were many words I could (and often did) use to describe Jim Bob, but “sentimental” was not one of them. I stared at him, giving him plenty of time to squirm, before finally saying, “Do you believe Mrs. Jim Bob’s going to find out what all you’ve been doing with this computer?”

  “What if she decides we should have one at home? This Justin Bailey ain’t gonna control access on it. There’s no telling what she might stumble across, and I don’t want to be in the country when she does.”

  “Can’t you delete your … participation?”

  Jim Bob gave me a forlorn look, still under the delusion I was feeling flickers of sympathy. “I reckon you don’t know much about the Internet, do you? I went into a chat room a few months back, and—”

  “Chat room?” I echoed, imagining the Taj Mahal suite at the motel next to the Dew Drop Inn. I’d never set foot in it, mind you, but I’d heard tales of an enormous Jacuzzi, faux marble columns, brass elephants bearing silk flower arrangements, and a swing with a red plush cushion. I could easily place Jim Bob there in the company of his last girlfriend, the infamous blond bimbo Cherri Lucinda Crate. Chatting.

  Yeah, sure.

  He snickered at my expression. “On the Internet, fer chrissake. Folks just join in a conversation on the screen, typing their responses. Most of them are likely to be teenagers, from what the little pustules write. Every now and then you run across someone of a more mature disposition and agree to exchange photographs and the like. I didn’t realize they could make copies and stick ’em up like flyers for a cyberspace church supper.”

  “I can’t imagine your wife browsing through porn sites.”

  “There’s ways to search for things,” he said morosely. “Those goddamn high school brats’ll have theirselves a field day if they find”—he gulped—“certain photos.”

  “Why don’t I have a word with Justin about this? Maybe he can do something to keep them from searching for graphic displays of your lily white ass. You know something, Mr. Mayor? If we don’t get this computer lab at the school, I may buy one for myself and learn how to use it. Heaven knows I have plenty of free time, since all I do these days is run speed traps and lecture teenagers. I read somewhere that you can print images right off the screen. Is Mrs. Jim Bob in the market for new wallpaper?”

  “That smacks of blackmail, Miss Chief of Police. I could fire you on the spot if I were a mind to.” He snapped his fingers (a knack not all Buchanons have mastered). “That’s all it’d take and you’d be history.”

  I suspected he’d prefer to turn me into an anthill of pulverized dust. I shook my head. “No, I’d be unemployed. That way I could stay up all night playing with my computer and learning how to do mysterious things. I can ha
rdly wait to start expanding my horizons. You didn’t share any frontal poses or intimacies with farm stock, did you? I’m not sure I could handle those in the wee hours of the morning.”

  His yellow eyes slitted like those of a particularly irate water moccasin. “You got no call to say things like that.”

  “I was just asking, for pity’s sake. Roy might have a heart attack if I started screaming at three in the morning. I assume you wouldn’t want that on your nonexistent conscience.” I sat back and waited for a moment. “The way I see it, Jim Bob, is that you’d better give Lottie the okay. I’ll speak to Justin, doing the best I can not to implicate you personally. In the meantime, I suggest you hustle back to this chat room and see how much damage can be undone. You’ve got about three days.”

  “Three days!” he screeched, rocking back in his chair so far that he almost went over. “Lottie’s got to find these fool computers. The portable classroom can’t be moved until there’s a concrete slab. The boys at the electric co-op and the telephone company ain’t sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and …” His eyes were now so slitted I doubted he could see much of anything, including my expression. “Already done, ain’t it?”

  I shrugged. “You want to call Lottie or shall I run by the high school and tell her the good news?”

  “Whatever,” he growled as he turned back to his computer. “Tell her, don’t tell her, or throw yourself under a school bus. It’s all the same to me. Next time you drop by and see the sign on my door, pay attention to it.”

  “See you and the missus at the first class,” I said cheerily, then went back through the remains of the employee lounge. In the store proper, Kevin was industriously mopping the floor with scuzzy brown water, and Idalupino was bent over the drawer of a cash register, flashing glimpses of her cleavage to Nikita Buchanon, who was surely a second cousin once removed or a first cousin twice removed, or even her stepbrother. Consanguinity’s not a clan priority. When your family tree has no branches, all there is to do is shinny on up.