All That Remains (Manere Book 1)

by Megan Bushree

  “Angie, you’re spiraling. We should call the police.” Milo got up to reach for the phone. Before I could stop him, he stopped himself and turned around.

  “Should we call the police? I feel like the police haven’t had a great track record with these sorts of things,” Milo said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “We can’t leave the poor girl out there but…” he stopped himself.

  “What?”

  “Should we take a closer look? You don’t have to though, you’ve seen plenty. Maybe I should see if I can get a better look of who she is or was.”

  “That’s almost gruesome though, isn’t it Milo?”

  “I’m not doing this for kicks, Angela. I’m trying to get the facts before they’re skewed,”.

  “You’re right. Let’s go,” I stood up, eager to get the whole thing over with.

  Chapter 24

  I led Milo to the spot, but as we made our way toward the open desert, we could see a police car parked. “I thought you didn’t call the cops,” I said.

  “I didn’t,” Milo said. As we moved closer, Sheriff Mayhew put his hand up to stop us from going any further.

  “You kids can turn right back around. This doesn’t concern you” he said with such authority it nearly confirmed my suspicion that he practiced sounding like a town Sheriff in front of his mirror each morning. With one hand on his hip and the other waving us away, he attempted to rid us with stern resolve.

  “What’s going on? Who called you?” I asked. I looked around to see if there was anyone else around besides the other two police officers and what appeared to be an unmarked white van. From the distance, I spotted Mrs. Wilty watching from afar and peeking her head out of the back door of her sun porch.

  “Like I said. There is nothing to see, and it’s best if you just run along,”

  “Nothing to see? She already saw it. Nice try.” Milo said.

  I looked to Milo expecting him to say more, but he just shrugged. “Why is there a van? Where’s the EMT?” I said.

  “Look, Angela. I know you and my boy are friends but that doesn’t mean you get to know all the juicy gossip. This is a police matter and even at that, it is nothing you need to worry your little head about.”

  “Why are you talking to me like that? I saw a girl. I saw her body. She was dead. There was a dead body on the ground right there,” I pointed knowing the location that formerly held her body was now just desert that held a vague outline.

  Sheriff Mayhew tugged at the hairs that remained on his chin after having shaved his thick beard a few weeks before. He squinted toward the mountains over our heads looking far into the remoteness. I waited for him to come clean about the entire thing. I knew he would feel terrible about keeping something so serious from us and would assure us that he would take care of matters and fill me in on who the woman was and how her life ended in such a callous way.

  “You are mistaken. It’s nothing of the sort and I would appreciate it if you would run along before I need to start calling your parents over to get you,”.

  Betrayal from the one person in a Manere police issued uniform who I thought I could trust. “You know, sir, I think you may be right. We must be mistaken. The heat is rough this time of year, makes ya start thinking all kinds of crazy things. We should probably run along home and hydrate ourselves and get out of the sun,” Milo said.

  I looked to him desperately. What was he doing? Milo took me by the arm and directed me away from the Sheriff and back toward our houses. “What was that all about?” I said.

  “He’s hiding something,”

  “No shit. Why didn’t you question him?”

  “Because Angela, If the Sheriff of the town is that adamant about keeping something so blatant under wraps, you know something fishy is going on.”

  “So, what are we going to do? Just pretend it never happened? What if that was Rachel?”

  “It wasn’t Rachel. Think about Ang, if it was Rachel, you would have found her a long time ago. How often do you cut across the desert to get home? How long have you been doing that since she disappeared?”

  “More times than I can count,”

  “Exactly. Which means whoever the woman was, she wasn’t there long.”

  “Maybe, Rachel had been living in the desert this whole time. She managed for a few years but once she tried to make it out, someone stopped her,”

  “You would have seen her. We always see the people who live out in the middle of nowhere, you would notice Rachel,”

  Milo had a point. For as long as I could remember, there were people living in the desert. Some lived in RVs, while others slapped together plywood and called it shelter. As much as the town council liked to paint Manere in a positive light, they never thought to improve the homeless problem that fell upon too many of those who chose Manere as their home. When I was a young child, I remembered hearing complaints from other citizens concerning their safety, and the safety of their children, around these ‘Desert Rats’, but the town chose not to waste a single penny on them. They believed they were druggies and beyond help. I always thought it was humorous that those angry citizens referred to them as Desert Rats since we were all desert rats. Every last one of us that existed in Manere. We just lived in smaller cages where we got our mail.

  “You know,” Milo stopped walking so briskly. “I think what we need to focus on is not who she was, but why someone decided to kill her.”

  Chapter 25

  The next morning, I woke up early and rushed to the donut shop to pick up a coffee and pink-sprinkled donut. It was my favorite Saturday ritual. I got up before the sun was high in the sky before it became too hot to enjoy a steamy beverage and heavy pastry. It was before the streets were flooded with activity. Being in a hurry to get the newspaper was also a high priority. My mom used to get a newspaper delivered but once it became apparent that she would not be getting much more news than the town gossip she could get for free, she thought better of it. I’m pretty sure the poor grammar and spelling that cluttered each page left her depressed too.

  When I got to the donut shop, the newspaper rack was empty with a thin layer of dust in its place. It could have been a while since the newest issues were brought in, but it was just as likely that the gunk had built over the last day.

  “Do you have the newspaper for this morning?” I said to Burl, the only person behind the counter at More Donuts.

  “Not today, those guys didn’t bring ’em in today. Not the first time them folks over there didn’t get their shit together long enough to put out a paper. “ Burl crunched down on a plastic knife making his speech even more garbled than usual.

  “It’s not weekly anymore?”

  Burl let out a smoker’s chuckle, “Hell, I ain't remember the last time the thing came out every week. It’s been a decade, prolly,”

  “Did they run out of money or something?” I said, knowing that financial reasons made the most sense, especially in a town where even twenty-five cents for a few pieces of long paper slapped together with stories that were shared through town gossip for absolutely free, was too much to ask. Even if the paper was booming with one hundred percent readership, a town of less than five hundred could hardly finance an entire one-day-a-week newspaper. It was just one of the many unfathomable businesses in Manere. How did anyone run any kind of business in such a place? It never occurred to me to ask too many questions until I was already extending one foot out of the place. “You trying to find out what happened to that girl? The dead one?” said voice came from behind the counter.

  Yvette came out of the shadows popping gum in her mouth with only a hint of deep purple peeking between her teeth when she spoke. Yvette was Burl’s daughter, not his only child but the only one he acknowledged. His son Brock, the oldest, left years before. I barely remembered him and only heard murmurs of why he left. Some said he liked to dress in women’s clothing, while others said it wasn’t that he imagined himself a woman, but that he was attracted
to men. Being gay didn’t seem enough to drive someone away from their lifelong home, but then again, Manere was never the most accepting place. When Sarah Leonard and Jessica Crabtree were caught kissing each other behind a tree in third grade, they were taunted for two years. They were never seen together after their brief tryst behind the desiccated Oak, nor were they separately seen getting too close to people of the same sex. Sarah didn’t finish high school and married a guy who was eight years her senior, who also happened to be Jessica Crabtree’s brother. Whether the two snuck brief moments together under the table at Thanksgiving always tucked away at back in my mind whenever I would see any of them. It was a clever way for Sarah to be part of the Crabtree family and not become ostracized by her traditional friends, family, and nosy neighbors.

  Yvette stared me down for too long. I was stuck in my thoughts and wasn’t sure if she was going to add anything, or if she was expecting me to respond to her. She seemed to know exactly why I was looking for the paper, why beat around the bush?

  “Yeah, I was wondering if they had information,” I said, trying to sound casual and not at all like I had been up most of the night thinking about the gaping wound amid tousled dirty hair. I didn’t want to admit that one of the first thoughts I had when I saw her bloodied and abused, was that I wondered if she ever conditioned her hair. It seemed so dry. I would never tell anyone I had such an awful, useless thought.

  “You know how that paper is. They are always the last to know, anyhow” Yvette spit out. The thought that her loose mouth was so close to the pastries caused me to take a mental note to never eat donuts from Burl, even if it was the only option. No donuts beat soggy spit donuts every time. “Do you happen to know anything about it?” I said, knowing she wanted me to ask.

  “It just so happens; I heard some things”. Of course. Always ready to fill in the blank spots, whether they were true or not. Telling stories, spilling theories was the town’s primary sport.

  “I heard that she was living out in one of them shed house things. Didn’t have a real home. Kind of pathetic,”.

  Relishing other's misfortunes and keeping score of where you sat on the socioeconomic scale were also common events in the Manere Valley Olympics. It didn’t matter that Yvette still lived with her father, or that they lived in a cramped single-wide trailer, she managed to outclass someone and that pleased her to no end.

  “So how did she die? Do you know that?” I was growing impatient knowing that she most likely lacked anything resembling true information.

  “Think she just died from the elements. If you ain't drinkin’ water and livin’ out in the desert. What did she expect? Dumb bitch kind of had it coming’”

  I nodded with a tight smile. Yvette was out of her mind, but she was someone I didn’t want to burn bridges with since she did, on occasion, know what was going on in town.

  “What about the gunshot?” I said.

  Her face fell but tried her best to hide it. She had no idea there was a gun, she didn’t know a thing, but she didn’t want to lose her only audience.

  “Right. Well, I guess she must’ve decided to end it all. Forgot about the gun. It’s all pathetic if you ask me. She probably wanted some attention. Oh, well. She’s dead and no one even cares. Pathetic”

  She was floundering. Taking guesses where the gunshot was located. Typical of someone like Yvette to think that someone harming themselves is anything more than becoming the top story of the town gossip, rather than a genuine desire to be gone forever. “Well, if you hear anything else, let me know,” I said as I left. She knew less than me but there was an eagerness in her eyes. She wanted to know more without asking me a thing.

  “Will do, I’ll keep you updated,” she said with confidence.

  **

  I walked down a few hundred feet from the Burl’s just in case Yvette wanted to keep the conversation going. I wasn’t in the mood for her theories, but I did want to sit with some coffee and work on my poetry assignment. Summer school always felt less urgent, like the assignments were suggestions. The school is mostly empty, everyone even teachers walking around in shorts and flip-flops made it all seem unreal. Doing homework for summer school was more of the same. I found a rusted patio chair and a table in front of where Harold’s Antiques once sat. Now the windows were boarded up with strips of cardboard. I peeked through the open spaces and could see the light shining through the bathroom window in the back. Most of the commercial buildings looked the same. If you had seen the inside of one, you knew the layout of all of them. Such a lack of imagination in Manere; homes consisted of three possible floor plans, trailers practically clones of each other, and stores sharing the same dimensions, storage, and the number of windows whether they’re selling insurance, groceries, or medicine for bloating.

  My coffee had already grown cold. I had forgotten it was in my hand. Did I even pay for it? Burl handed me my usual black coffee, but he forgot to charge me. No wonder the businesses were always failing, everyone was too preoccupied with chatting about nonsense. A bopping head caught my eye across the street. Milo was pulling out the returned videos at Big Star Video, his crimson coif was the only thing I could see through nearly tinted windows. He stood up with a stack that was less than I imagined. I walked over and knocked on the glass startling Milo. He must have been listening to his boombox or had some movie playing on the small television by the counter. He waved me over toward the door. I pulled at it surprised that it was unlocked.

  “You guys open already?” I said.

  “Nah, I just hate locking myself in. No one comes in here for a few hours, anyway. I’m just on morning inventory and cleanup,”

  “Do you have somewhere I can dump this or heat it up” I showed him my coffee which had become cold sludge.

  “There’s a sink back there. No microwave. Did you get that at More Donuts? Burl is terrible at making coffee,”

  “He has a monopoly on it now. I figured if I stayed away from the creamer, I’d be safe, but it still tastes pretty nasty,” I lamented as if the terrible coffee was akin to the tragedies of a country song.

  “So, what are you up to this fine morning? Going to work?” Milo said.

  “No. not today. I was just looking for the newspaper but apparently, they were too lazy to make one this week,”

  “Sounds about right. Were you looking for something about the girl?”

  “Yep, and nothing,”

  “Did you expect any different?”

  “Hoping for anyway.” I thumbed through a stack of videos looking for anything new. “I did find out that the only info that people do have is that someone died out there. Yvette Putrino thinks the woman killed herself, or at least that was the story she was feeding me.”

  “Yvette Putrino? Oh, sure, she’s a wealth of knowledge.” Milo chuckled.

  “I thought it was strange that she went with a suicide story or accident story. Murder is so much more titillating,”

  “Maybe she’s lost her touch,”.

  Milo nodded and smiled toward the window. I looked behind me to see Stacy Franklin. She looked to the ground as soon as she saw me. Stacy was an exceptional beauty and not just by the standards of Manere. If she lived in a much bigger town, her golden locks, sapphire eyes, and rosy cheeks would be noticed even in the most congested of crowds.

  “Why is Stacy Franklin giving you the eyes? Is there something going on there?” I said with my cheeks burning red. The thought of Milo having a girlfriend made me tense and only a bit jealous. There was also a bit of embarrassment that swirled inside of me of which I couldn’t quite shake.

  “Stacy? We hang out sometimes. She’s cool” Milo said while trying to hide how proud he was of being in the position to admit such a thing.

  “Oh, so is she bummed that you’re leaving for college soon?”

  “No. It’s not all that serious.”

  “But you guys like each other,” I said choosing my words carefully.

  Milo sighed, “Angela. Stacy and I are fri
ends and sometimes we hang out. We’re not getting married. There’s not going to be a tearful goodbye at the end of summer when we go our separate ways. I don’t know why we are talking about Stacy. She was just saying ‘hello’ and went on her way like she does on some days. Is that good enough for you?”

  Milo never wanted to talk about girls. When we were ten, there was a rumor going around that he had kissed someone behind the cafeteria. For fifth grade, it was a big deal. When I asked him about it, he grinned and said he had no idea what I was talking about. He wouldn’t even tell me who the girl was. He continued to keep tight-lipped about all relationship-related talk.

  When I was the one who had stories to tell about significant others, he never asked. Whether it was because he didn’t care or because he respected my privacy, he wouldn’t bring it up. It was infuriating. “So, anyway. What are the chances we are going to get any more information on the desert woman? You think this is going to be one of the many stories that get swallowed up completely, or you think there may be a few chunks spat out for us to piece together?” Milo said.

  “I’m starting to think that maybe the identity of the person is a lot less important than why she died. She could be anyone and if we don’t recognize her, we may have never known her. This town is only so big. We know that she was shot in the head. We know that for some reason the police are hiding it”

  “Which could be to keep the squeaky-clean image of Manere. The crime is getting so bad, they could be doing anything they can just to keep the murder numbers low” Milo added.

  “True. It’s still disconcerting. Why go through so much trouble to make the place look good if the information isn’t getting outside of town? It’s not like they’re trying to improve relocation and tourism to Manere. That’s the opposite of what they want”

  “It’s not about bringing people in, it’s about making sure people aren’t driven out. The only thing the Mayor and all the town council has had to keep people in and away from the bigger cities is the threat of crime in those areas. If you stay in Manere, you won’t have to deal with the big city hoodlums. If dead bodies start popping up all around the desert, that looks bad” Milo insisted.