As Michael drove around the twisty turns of Bear Creek Road to scare away the boogeyman for Mrs. Hastings, he wondered if the jumper would be that way. Michael had come along and solved his problem of not enough courage to turn loose of the railing and jump. What problems had ballooned up to take their place?
He wished the doctor had let him see the man. Maybe if he saw him he could get rid of this uneasy feeling that the man might be right. Maybe it would have been better if he’d chanced driving the old church bus on the interstate.
8
Michael missed the six o’clock news. At six thirty he was still going through the motions of checking out Mrs. Hastings’s phantom prowler. The old lady, Olive Oyl–thin and wearing a sweater buttoned all the way to the top even in the July heat, followed him around, complaining about how long it took Michael to get there. She obviously missed out on the news that he was a hero, and somehow that kept the trip from being a total waste. He could handle being an ordinary mess-up guy better than a hero any day.
He even managed to smile and nod when she let him know how that nice Deputy Stucker would have been quicker, how he knew what an emergency was, how he wouldn’t have just come poking up as if nobody’s life was in danger. What was the use in taxpayers paying for the likes of sirens and those flashing lights if he wasn’t going to use them?
After he inspected her windows and door, he looked around in the old woodshed that was falling down under its own weight and peeked in the outhouse that had sunken into the ground until the door wouldn’t open more than a crack. Not a prowler to be found, Michael assured Mrs. Hastings as he backed away from her toward his car, promising that he’d be sure to send Deputy Stucker out if anybody bothered her again. As he drove away, he figured that would be tomorrow, as soon as Mrs. Hastings spotted his footprints in the soft dirt below one of her windows.
The next morning Michael was finishing his coffee when Hank Leland showed up at the Grill and plopped a handful of printed-out newspaper stories on the table in front of him.
“Isn’t the internet the wonder of the universe?” Hank slid into the booth on the other side of Michael and called over to Cindy behind the counter. “How about some coffee and a blueberry muffin?”
“You’ve already had a Danish today, Hank,” she told him.
“That was so early it was practically last night, and we’re just talking about one muffin. What harm can one little muffin do?”
“Look in the mirror.” Cindy gave him the once-over when she brought the coffee and muffin. “And check your blood pressure.”
“It’s this job and trying to keep up with our heroes.” Hank pulled the saucer with the muffin closer to him as if he was worried Cindy might grab it back. “Did you see our local boy make good on television last night, Cindy?”
Cindy pushed her short red hair back from her face and beamed at Michael. “I sure did. Albert brought the little TV from home and set it up on the counter. Nobody so much as chewed until they went to a commercial. You looked very handsome, Michael.”
“He did.” Hank shot a grin over at Michael. “I expect he could probably get a job at one of the Eagleton used car lots now without a bit of trouble.”
“If things get too slow here in Hidden Springs, I’ll send out résumés.” Michael scanned the headlines on the clippings. He was relieved none of them included the word hero.
“Things are always slow here in Hidden Springs,” Hank said.
“Come around Sunday after church lets out and try keeping enough chicken fried to feed the Baptists and Methodists,” Cindy said.
“I’m talking about news, Cindy.” Hank took a gulp of his coffee.
“You mean like folks trying to jump off bridges.” Cindy picked up the sugar shaker and swiped up a drop or two of spilled coffee. “I’d rather read about Zelma Ann’s granddaughter winning a scholarship to that art school in Virginia.”
“I told your sister I’d put that in the paper next week.”
“That’s the trouble with newspapermen. They don’t ever want to write nothing but bad news. A kid gets in trouble, it’s plastered all over page one, right enough. A kid does something good, then maybe a mention on page four in section three.”
“The Gazette hasn’t had three sections since last year’s Christmas parade.”
“See what I mean?” Cindy stuck her wipe towel in her apron and headed toward the kitchen.
Hank looked at his almost-empty coffee cup and then Michael. “What do you think my chances are on getting a refill?”
“About the same as Zelma’s granddaughter making the front page.”
“Now I was thinking about sticking it down in the corner on the front page if nothing too exciting happened this next week.” He took a little sip of coffee as if trying to conserve what was left. “You think anything exciting is going to happen this week, Deputy?”
“I hope not.” Michael stood up and dropped some money on the table.
Hank stuffed the rest of his muffin in his mouth, grabbed up the clippings, and tagged after Michael. When he swallowed, he said, “You might make some people believe that, but not me. Weathermen like storms and policemen like knocking heads with bad guys.”
“You’ve got it all wrong. Policemen like getting bad guys off the streets so all the regular folks are safe and happy.”
“So if you like locking bad guys away, that means you have to like murders and robberies, because without something like that, there aren’t any bad guys to get off the street.”
“What do newspapermen like?” Michael asked.
“News, of course. A rare commodity in Hidden Springs, I must say.”
“Then why are you here?” Michael looked back at Hank as he held the door open for him.
“I tell myself it’s the challenge. You know, finding news where there is no news, and then every once in a while some nutcase tries to jump off a bridge and I get to take pictures of a hero.”
“I’m no hero.” Michael let go of the door. It banged into Hank’s shoulder.
“You’ll do till Superman shows up.” Hank pushed on through the door and waved the papers in front of Michael’s face. “Don’t you want to read what the Eagleton papers had to say about you?”
“No.” Michael headed down the street.
Hank trotted after him. “Just wait. Next time I make a hero, I’ll pick somebody like, like . . .” Hank hesitated as if no likely candidate would come to mind until he noticed Paul Osgood checking parking meters down the street. “Like Paul. Now he’d appreciate being a hero even if he’s a little short for the job.”
Paul was at least ten feet away from them, but at the word “short,” his head whipped around.
“He couldn’t have heard me, could he?” Hank looked in the opposite direction from Paul, who was glaring at them. “I won’t be able to park in my own driveway without getting a parking ticket.”
Michael laughed, which caused a dark look to thunder across Paul’s face.
“You’re not helping.” Hank frowned at Michael. “Now he thinks we’re laughing at him. Uh-oh, here he comes. We were talking about Cindy’s strawberry shortcake.”
“That hasn’t been on the menu for weeks.”
“But we were wishing it was, okay?”
Hank looked so desperate, Michael took pity on him. “It would taste good with a scoop of ice cream on top.”
“That’s the way to play the game.” Hank held up the articles and let them flap in the breeze. “That’s all this other is too. Just a game. Play along a few days. Talk to the reporters, smile for the cameras, and endure it when the average Joe tells you how great you are. By next week everybody will have forgotten. That’s why they call it being hero for a day. A week at the outside.”
Paul was definitely in earshot now, and Hank switched seamlessly to the virtues of Cindy’s shortcake, making sure to say shortcake every other word.
Paul gave him a look. “You’re going to have a heart attack if you don’t learn to control that a
ppetite, Leland.”
“Ah, life is full of forbidden pleasures for sure, Paul.”
Paul looked at him suspiciously, as if he suspected some kind of double meaning in his words, but Hank looked as innocent as a four-year-old kid bringing a wilted bouquet of dandelions to his mother. Paul turned to Michael. “Well, Keane, I hear you were in the right place at the right time again.” He tried to quit frowning, but the thin line of his lips didn’t lose their downward tilt.
Paul Osgood had to force himself to give Michael the time of day. He disliked Michael, partly because Michael had once been a policeman in the big city before coming back to Hidden Springs to grab headlines that should have been Paul’s, but mostly because Michael was tall. Paul was short. It was the tragedy of his existence. He believed if he were only a few inches taller, he would have been accepted at the police academy to train as a state policeman. Then he wouldn’t be stuck working for the chief of police, who happened to also be his father-in-law. He was tired of writing parking tickets the judge tore up if folks complained.
Buck Garrett claimed it would take a lot more than an extra inch for Little Osgood to make the state police, but if the man wanted to believe it was a lack of height instead of brains, then maybe that was for the best.
Michael had finally talked to Buck early that morning. Buck had information about the recovered stolen vehicle. He hadn’t even heard about the jumper. He rarely read the newspapers, but he promised to go by T.R.’s station out near the interstate to get the VIN number and run a check on the man’s car.
Michael tried to call Alex a couple of times too, but had to settle with leaving a message on her voice mail. He never knew what to say on voice mail and ended up saying something idiotic like, “Hi, heard you called. Sorry I missed you. Hope you’re winning.” What he really wanted to say was, “Hidden Springs isn’t so bad. Sheridan and Sheridan would look good on a shingle outside your uncle’s office. Hidden Springs needs you. I need you.”
She’d laugh at that. All of it, from the prospect of her ever giving up the big-city life to write wills for a bunch of country bumpkins, to him saying he needed her. But it’s what he wanted to say nevertheless, and someday if he ever got up the nerve, he might even say it.
Now he forced himself to tune back in to the conversation Paul Osgood and Hank were having with more than the agreeable nod he was giving to Paul whenever he paused and looked his way. Paul was going on and on about the need to coordinate their services to the community. It was his latest attempt at reorganizing Hidden Springs to suit him better.
“You think maybe we should have a joint city-county government?” Hank baited him. He even pulled out his little notebook and stub of a pencil.
“Now I’m not sure you should quote me on this one just yet, Hank, but there might come a day when the city and county governments could better serve the town of Hidden Springs and Keane County by merging.”
“And who would be in charge of such a combined police force? That might be a hard call to make.”
“That’s a no-brainer.” Paul stretched up a little taller. “The police chief is always the head of those merged law enforcement agencies.”
Hank looked thoughtful as he stuck the lead of his pencil against his tongue for a moment. “That might be a big job for Chief Sibley to take on so near retirement age and all.”
“Well, of course, a younger man would need to be in charge,” Paul said.
“Did you have anybody in mind?” Hank poised his pencil over his little notebook.
Michael decided he’d best take his leave before Sheriff Potter caught him fraternizing with the enemy. “I’ll leave the two of you to work out the details.”
As Michael walked down the street toward the courthouse, he almost felt sorry for Paul. Almost. But Paul was a hard person to feel much sympathy for, and the man should know by now to watch what he said to the editor of the Hidden Springs Gazette. If he didn’t, he would after the next edition.
Betty Jean was sorting through the mail when he got back to the office. She said Lester was out patrolling around the school to get people used to slowing down before school started in August. Sheriff Potter was checking things out along the lake today, which meant he’d gone fishing.
“The hero rush over?” Michael asked.
“Pretty much, thank goodness.” Betty Jean looked up to point to a message on his desk. “You did get a call from that doctor. What was his name?”
“Dr. Colson?”
“That sounds right.” Betty Jean slit open another envelope with her letter opener. “Said to tell you the jumper had faked out security and jumped ship.”
“You mean he broke out of their psychiatric ward? I thought those places were the same as jails.”
“Prisoners break out of jails all the time,” Betty Jean said. “I suspect it would be easier out of a hospital. They could just get an orderly’s uniform and be gone. They do it on TV programs all the time.”
“Has the guy called about his car?”
“Not here. Could be he hitched a ride to T.R.’s. I mean, Hidden Springs doesn’t have that many places that tow cars. He could figure it out.”
“We have the keys.”
“So he has an extra key in his billfold or maybe in one of those little magnetic boxes stuck under his fender or something. Lots of people do that. And he doesn’t want to get stuck with the towing bill.” Betty Jean looked across at Michael. “What is it that you’re worried about? If he decides to pitch himself off some other bridge, I doubt we’d even hear about it.”
“I don’t know, Betty Jean. But haven’t you ever had a bad feeling? A feeling that something’s not quite right, but you’re not sure exactly what. That something you’ve done is going to come back to haunt you.”
“You saved his life, Michael. That doesn’t make you responsible for him the rest of yours.”
“But what if he was a child molester?”
“A child molester? Where did that come from?”
“That’s what that Dr. Colson said when I went up there yesterday. I told him what the man said. How he told me I’d be sorry I didn’t let him jump, and the doctor said maybe I’d saved a child molester. What kind of hero would that make me?”
Betty Jean screwed up her mouth and considered her answer for a moment. Finally she said, “One who is going to have worry lines from borrowing trouble.”
9
The week passed. No more reporters called. New stories, new heroes grabbed the headlines. Nobody cared that the jumper had walked out of the hospital and disappeared. Nobody in Hidden Springs knew he existed a week ago, so there was no reason to put him on their worry list now.
Buck ran a check on the man’s old car. The jumper bought it from a used car dealer in the south of the state a couple of years ago. Jackson’s listed address was a post office box in a little town down that way. No lien showed on the title. The trail was even shorter on Jack Jackson, which Buck figured meant the man had grabbed a new name to escape bill collectors or to duck child support payments.
When Michael caught up with Buck early on Saturday morning at T.R.’s Station out by the interstate, they pulled parallel, window to window, to swap news while they drank T.R.’s thick coffee out of Styrofoam cups.
“T.R. must have got the axle grease and coffee mixed up this morning.” Buck took another sip of the stuff and winced when he swallowed.
“You could probably get some fresh brew over at the Stop and Go.” Michael looked across the road at the shiny green-and-yellow station that had gone up last spring. The bright lights on the roof over the pumps stayed on sunshine or dark.
“The sight of that place turns my stomach.” Buck’s voice lowered to a near growl. “America’s becoming a string of brand-name stores every stop. One big homogenized highway. Virginia, California, no difference. If T.R. and Billy Samuels decide to stay home and go fishing, this place will look like a thousand other exits, all golden arches and speedy-fill convenience. It’s enough to ma
ke a man move to Alaska.”
“They have golden arches up there too.” Michael sipped his coffee. It was every bit as bad as Buck said.
“Don’t spoil my dream of the wilderness, kid, but you’re probably right. Bear burgers on the drive-through menu.” Buck took another swallow of his coffee before dumping the rest out his window and crumpling his cup. “Small-town America is taking a nose dive.” He pitched the cup onto his floorboard.
“Oh, I don’t know. Hidden Springs is hanging in there about as small town as you can get.” Michael gave up on his coffee too and put it in his cup holder. “With the help of Aunt Lindy.”
“That’s the pure truth. As long as Malinda Keane is breathing air, nobody’s going to rubber-stamp Hidden Springs.” Buck shot a look over at Michael before staring back at T.R.’s pumps again. “Plus a few heroics from her nephew to keep the blood pumping.”
“Don’t you start on me, Buck.”
Buck laughed without looking back at Michael. “T.R. wants to know what to do with the car. Says he can’t just let it set there forever. At least not unless he knows somebody’s going to pay the storage fee.”
“I told him to give the guy another couple of days to show up.”
“He won’t show up. You’ve done given him a fresh start, son. He’s probably already applied for three new credit cards with some name he dug out of a trash bin out behind an apartment building up in Eagleton. He’s gone, vamoosed, never to be heard from again.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Buck’s eyes settled on Michael. “What is it about this guy that bothers you?”
“I’m not sure.” Michael turned to stare out his windshield a minute before he answered. He worked his fingers up and down on his steering wheel. “The look in his eyes, maybe.”
Murder Comes by Mail Page 6