The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1)

by Moreau, Iza

  “Did someone pick up my bow?” I asked. “If it’s left out in the rain, the laminations might—”

  “It’s in the other room. Why did you try to kill Jeremy?”

  “I—I didn’t. I was about to pass out and I couldn’t get my voice to work. I was just trying to get someone’s attention.”

  “You got it. Listen, if you’re so sick, why did you come way out here?”

  “I wanted to tell you . . . I wanted to tell you—all of you—that you were safe. You don’t have to worry.”

  Smokey seemed to think about that for a while, then got up and went out of the room. I heard some vague noises somewhere in the house, heard the wind blow droplets of rain from the overarching oaks onto the tin roof. I must have dozed off again, because the next thing I heard was a commotion from outside the room. It was totally dark now. I tried to sit up again and half succeeded, reached out and found the lamp chain and pulled it. A soft light allowed me to see movement from the doorway. The voices got louder. I heard the words “Don’t—” and “You can’t—.” Then a louder voice broke in, a very familiar voice.

  “Ain’t neither of y’all any bigger than a minute, so git your little butts outta mah way,” and the next thing I knew, Gina was in the room, standing at my bedside. Krista and Smokey crowded in behind her, arguing.

  “Hi, darlin,” Gina said.

  “Gina.”

  “These kids takin care of you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “How did you find me?”

  “Ah was in your house waitin for you when that little gal showed up. Ah convinced her to bring me here.”

  “How?” I was still so astonished to see her that I could hardly speak.

  “Told her ah’d call Dilly and have her arrested for stealin Jack’s car.”

  “Gina. I . . . I saw you with Cal in the jewelry store. Did y’all elope? Are you married?”

  “No, baby.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll talk about all that later. Raht now ah want to fahnd out how you’re feelin.”

  I had to think about it. “I’m okay, I think,” I told her. “I’ve gotten some strength back and my heart seems to be about back to normal. Gamma gave me a pill a while back.”

  “Who?” Gina asked.

  “That girl. Krista. She calls herself Gamma when she’s on the radio.”

  I looked at the two young people and smiled. Smokey shrugged his shoulders at Krista and said, “I didn’t tell her.”

  “Gina, this is Gamma and Smokestack, my two favorite deejays. Smokey, you and Krista related?”

  “She’s my sister,” he said.

  “So you’re a Torrington, too.”

  “Yeah. You really listen to our shows?”

  “They keep me going. They also scare the shit out of me.”

  “Cool.”

  A clump of thick footsteps on the wooden floor made us turn our faces toward the door in time to see Clarence. He looked in a hurry, but stopped dead when he saw Gina at my bedside. He looked at both Krista and Smokey with disbelief. “How did Ginette get here?” he asked them.

  “She just . . . came,” shrugged Krista.

  “God’s titties, Krista!” Clarence exclaimed. “What’s your grampa going to say?”

  “The Zombie can kiss my tush,” Krista replied sulkily. “I’m tired of all this secrecy shit.”

  “And all these fucking guns and arrows around here are weirding us out,” added her brother.

  “What’s everybody talkin about?” Gina broke in.

  “Butt out, Ginette,” said Clarence. “The less you know the better off you’ll be.”

  “All right, Clarence,” I butted in, “We’re going to have all this out right now, while I’m still alive and awake.”

  “God’s—” We never got a chance to hear what part of that deity’s private anatomy Clarence was going to call upon next, because I didn’t let him finish.

  “Clarence,” I said firmly. “You can stand or get chairs. We’re going to be here awhile.”

  “Come on, Clarence,” said Smokey.

  The three of them left and I was alone with Gina, which was pretty much all I wanted in the world at that moment. She sat on the side of the bed and stroked my hair.

  “Betty called mah cell and told me about Pauley,” she told me softly. “We came back as fast as we could. We read your story as soon as we got to the office. Cal went to fahnd Paul and ah went to your house. Ah thought you maht do something stupid and ah was raht.”

  “Stupid for not taking my pills,” I said.

  “Stupid for not takin me,” she corrected.

  Clarence, Krista, and Smokey came back in, carrying matching chairs that looked like they were borrowed from a nineteenth-century dining room. Smokey presented Gina with the chair he brought in and took his place in the rocker.

  When everyone was seated, I struggled until I was sitting upright. I noticed that I was wearing a thick cotton shift, soft and warm. I took a breath, and began.

  “Which one of you put the goat in the dumpster?” I asked.

  “Both of us,” Smokey answered. “Me and Krista. Clarence, too.”

  I looked at Clarence with daggers, but he just shrugged.

  “I had to lie to you, Sue-Ann,” he said. “Torrington’s been a secret for over a hundred years. This is where the first settlers of Pine Oak built their homestead. And there are a lot of reasons why this place needs to stay a secret.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that,” I said. “But let’s get back to the goat. How did you find the goat in the first place?”

  “Granpa and I were out riding in the woods,” Krista began. “He was on Trigger and I was on a mare named Bob. We heard some voices and some kind of chanting, so we rode closer. The bushes were really thick near the trail so we were able to ride close without anybody seeing us. Then one of the kids threw up and the noise or the smell must’ve spooked Trigger, because he reared up and the other two kids saw him. The girl screamed and they all ran like demons were after them. I picked up the book they left and gave it to grandpa. We rode home, called Clarence, and the four of us made a plan.”

  “It was a good plan, too,” I said grudgingly, looking in Clarence’s direction. “If you leave the goat out in the woods, nobody knows about it except you and the kids that stole it.”

  “We thought if we called attention to it,” Clarence said, “those kids might get in trouble with either their parents or the police.”

  “And they wouldn’t come back into our woods,” Krista added.

  “And then your secret would have been safe,” I finished.

  “It would still be safe if you hadn’t followed that blood trail out into the woods,” Clarence said.

  “I don’t think so, Clarence. Pauley went from one obsession to another: Krista, the radio station, Santeria. He thought there was something in the woods that would help him or save him or give him some great insight or bring his mother back from the dead, whatever. He was going to keep coming back until he found this place or until somebody killed him.”

  “But we never touched hi—” Smokey began, and was interrupted by Gina.

  “But Sue-Ann,” she exclaimed. “are you sayin that somebody killed him? You told Betty he was kicked by a horse. And if Pauley’s mind was so set on this place, what was he doin way out on the other sahd of town last naht?”

  “He was dumped in that pasture, Gina. Probably by some of those guys outside. But he was kicked by a horse. Was it Trigger, Krista?”

  Krista nodded and started to cry.

  Smokey spoke for her. “The goth kid must’ve followed the mowed trail and climbed the fence near the pasture where we keep the horses. . . .”

  “He had a big knife,” Krista cried through her tears and her voice went up in timbre until it was almost a scream. “He was going to kill one of the horses for some stupid ritual!”

  Gina looked at me with a question in her eyes. I nodded. “That’s what I th
ought,” I told her. “No way Pauley would decide to go on the other side of town when what he wanted was in these woods. He knew Krista lived back here somewhere and he knew she had a horse. I found the grease pencil he used to paint his face back in the clearing. It’s in my fannypack. I’ve seen Trigger. He’s big and he’s kind of wild. I doubt there’s anyone that can manage him except an expert rider like you.”

  “Only me and Granpa,” she sniffed. “Anyone tries to get near him when we’re not there and he spooks. Some horses like to kick out with their hind legs; Trigger just rears and strikes.”

  “My mother believed that horses can read a person’s feelings,” I told her.

  Krista looked up at me with wet doe eyes and asked, “You’re not going to have him destroyed, are you?”

  “No one’s going to destroy anything,” I told her. “And no one is going to say anything.”

  “You mean—” Clarence began.

  “I mean that this is our secret. Pauley’s death was an accident. Whatever you all are hiding out here has nothing to do with it and is nobody’s business but your own. My newspaper story—and The Courier has to run one—says that Paul Hughes, Jr. was killed in a tragic accident on Coonbottom Mason’s farm. Even if there’s an autopsy and the coroner suspects that he was killed somewhere else and moved, there’s still no way to connect his death with this place because no one will know that this place exists. No one will know about Pauley’s obsessions or about his painted face or about that knife he carried because none of that is in the story.”

  Clarence looked astonished but relieved. He glanced at Gina, and formed a question. “Ginette, are you . . .”

  “Ah think that Sue-Ann is raht as a rock and just as hard headed,” she smiled.

  Clarence blinked and seemed to remember something. “Sue-Ann,” he said. “I got your doctor’s name off the bottle of medicine and called him. He told me that if you weren’t dead already you’d probably be okay as long as you got one of those pills down you. He said you shouldn’t be moved tonight, but that we should bring you in to the hospital as soon as we could.”

  “Thanks, Clarence.”

  That was it for the night. I wanted to rest. Krista and Smokey took Gina off to another guest room and Clarence went home, saying he’d be back the next day. I must have been really tired or sick or something, because when I woke up early the next morning, Gina was under the covers and snuggled up against me. She was sleeping like someone who had not slept well in ages, and she didn’t wake up when I softly stroked her hair.

  I was long due for a visit to the bathroom and got out of bed as silently as I could. I felt much stronger than the day before. I could stand without any problem. I took a few steps and didn’t fall, so I tried a couple more—everything seemed to be all right in the walking department. In the hall I found my clothes, washed, dried, and folded, atop a mahogany table. I took them into a bathroom I found off the main hall. I used the toilet, then the ancient, clawfooted bathtub, and when I came out, I was fully dressed except for my shoes. I walked in my socks over the buffed wooden floor that may have been cut from the same trees as the old plank road outside. No one else seemed to be up, so I decided to explore the house, wondering vaguely if I was a prisoner here. What if the soldiers outside thought that Gina and I might reveal their secret if we were allowed to leave? If so, I at least wanted to find out what that secret was. I passed two doors made of thick wood inlaid with a delicate filigree design and came out into a large drawing room. A half dozen chairs with their backs shaped like shells were spaced regularly around the room, which also had a bookshelf on one wall, a long secretary with many drawers, a rolltop desk, and portrait upon portrait in hand-worked walnut frames. All gave the appearance of being part of an ancient haunted house except for a section of framed photographs near the door. One of these was of a young man in his twenties dressed in an American Marine uniform. Two others, obviously taken quite recently, were of Krista and Smokey.

  A high, twisted, breathy voice came from behind me. “We get into all kinds of trouble when we are young, yas?”

  I whirled around to face the grotesque vision of a thing that looked half man, half corpse. Dressed in a silky-looking pair of baggy Persian trousers and a light, white, short-sleeved shirt, the figure’s face was mostly old burn scars. One eye looked fixedly on me, the other was burned away. Some of the skull was bare scar tissue, the rest tufted out in black scraggly hair that grew out and down beyond his shoulders. Only one of the shoulders, though, had an arm connected to it. The man sat languidly in an armchair studying me. I was startled, of course, but I managed to look him in the eye and reply. “Sometimes that’s what being young is for,” I told him. I’d seen this man once before and had expected to find him somewhere in the compound. But being across from him in a drawing room was not the same as glimpsing him through vegetation from a distance of a hundred yards.

  “The sight of me does not shock you?” he said. I recognized the whining tone and unusual cadence and I realized that his larynx was probably damaged as well as his skin.

  “I’m always shocked at what brutality does, but I was in Baghdad,” I told him. “You’re prettier than a lot of the bits and pieces I saw over there, but I can imagine how you must have scared those goth kids in the woods, especially if you were riding a huge white horse. You’re The Creeper, aren’t you?”

  “Smokey calls me that, yas, although what Krista calls me is not so kind. My real name? Ashley Torrington at your service. And riding? It is one of the few things I still do well.”

  “Sue-Ann McKeown.”

  “Yas. I’ve been hearing stories.” The effect of twisting his face into a smile—even a genuine one—was grotesque. “Please, why don’t you sit down and we can have a chat.”

  It was at that moment that I knew that this scarred old gentleman was in total charge of The Compound. I also knew that I had nothing to fear from him.

  I was glad to slip into one of the huge chairs, although I had to turn it a little so that it would face him. As I did so, I noticed a feature of the room I had not yet seen: a bank of shelves holding expensive-looking audio equipment—a turntable, a cassette player, a CD player, and much more.

  “Yas,” he said, following my gaze. “That’s my other little obsession: I sometimes think only my music keeps me alive.”

  Mr. Torrington’s face was hard to look at—mostly a mass of shiny reddish wrinkles and only a nub where his right ear once was—but I forced myself. “What happened to you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I was in the middle of a napalm attack in Vietnam. Should not have been where I was, no, but there you are.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “So when you got well, you came back here?”

  “As you see, I never got well. But yas, I came to Torrington. It is the oldest settlement in this county. Cut off from the rest of the world for one hundred and fifty years.”

  “But these houses,” I said. “They’re old, but, I mean, wouldn’t the forest have taken over in a hundred and fifty years?”

  “But these houses have never been empty, no. There have always been Torringtons here, living in silence, tilling fields, making repairs, all of these. Until the kids came here it has mostly been a place for the sick or the insane.”

  “Krista and Smokey are your grandchildren?” I asked.

  “Yas. They grew up with my son and his wife in Phoenix. My son owns a big-ass fiber optics company and lives in houses here and there—mostly there, as Phil Ochs once said.”

  “Where does the money come from to keep this place up?” I asked.

  “We have pensions, we grow and make things and sell them. My son and his wife never come here, no, but he gives me guilt money—more money than we need. I built a radio station with his “contribution.”

  “So that’s where the radio station comes in,” I said. “And you know a lot about music.”

  “Music is my mistress,” he said. “Mostly the music of my contemporaries. In fact, ‘M
usic is My Mistress’ is the title of a song by Linda Hargrove. I once met her at the dog track in Jefferson County when I was whole. But I try to listen to many newer things as well. I have thousands of records, CDs, cassettes. And, ha ha, if I want anything else, right now, I can get it off Napster for ninety-nine cents.”

  “In case you have a special need for, say, Goat’s Head Soup, and don’t have a copy handy.”

  “Ummm, yas. I imagine musical stories; I live out my memories, and even the experiences of those close to me through songs.”

  “So when Krista rode in that cowboy-mounted shooting event, you helped Smokey choreograph it in music for his show. He played songs about cowboys, balloons, shooting.” The Creeper nodded. “And when the goth kids killed the chickens, you came up with an old group that had a drummer named Chicken.”

  The Creeper shook his head and sighed. “I really did not think anyone would catch that one, but, hmmm, you always hope.”

  I had a moment of clarity. “But if you’ve been putting pieces of yourself into that radio station all along, shuffling sections of your memory, making your own unique connections to things, leaving little coded messages, you . . . you wanted someone to find you.”

  “And you did, no? Ah, it’s too bad I didn’t meet you when I was younger,” the old man said. “It might not seem so now, but I have brains. When you have only yourself for company for almost forty years, you begin to think more than others. But you and I could have . . .” He let his voice trail off into a creak.

  “Are you hitting on me, Mr.Torrington?” I smiled.

  He made a grotesque squeaking laugh, coughed, and said, “Maybe, yas, maybe I am. You were looking at my picture on the wall there by Krista and Smokey.”

  “You were a fine looking man,” I told him. “Did you enlist?”

  “Yas I did. I was in a military family. I took ROTC in college. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, but I went anyway. It’s what was expected of me.”

  “Boys and girls are still going to other Vietnams against their will,” I told him.

  “Yas,” he said.

  “The men who found me yesterday: who are they?”