by F. E. Arliss
“She could be that way,” Zhara said quietly, tipped the girl a rather small amount of money and flew out the door, flapping her fingers to dry her still-wet top-coat so she could escape the flow of explanations she’d never really wanted to know.
Brittany Barlow was definitely not out of the running as a suspect.
Chapter Fourteen
Brenda Roberts
The frizzy-haired nursing home administrator, Brenda Roberts, was about as big around as one of Zhara’s thighs - ok, so that was a bit of an exaggeration - Zhara’s thighs were actually quite shapely - and Brenda had no shape, just a stick-like thinness that was almost painful to observe.
Brenda had found what she felt was the ultimate job when she became administrator of Samaritan Village. After all, it was one of the few professional jobs open to women in that community, men not wanting to be seen as effeminate for caring for the elderly. On top of that, Samaritan Village was the most elite of the tiny town’s four nursing homes. Brenda was going to scratch and claw and plan and manipulate to make sure it stayed that way.
In tiny towns even the smallest amount of prestige can elevate one’s life in ways outsiders can’t even imagine. Power is the currency of life in tiny towns and people will do almost anything to get it, keep it and grow it.
Brenda worked hard to keep Samaritan Village as the premiere assisted living home in the area. They were the “best” and most “prestigious” place to live in the six nearby counties. Her life’s work had been keeping Samaritan Village on top!
Once when the board of administrators had suggested selling off some of the massive grounds that surrounded the main building, Brenda had a screeching, red-faced hissy-fit that had the mostly male board, fleeing for the exits. Expansive lawns were a mark of prestige and Brenda Roberts was not about to give up one inch of her immaculately manicured lawns!
Mowing grass was an actual thing in the midwest. The more lawn one had to mow, the more they were seen to have in the eyes of the community. Ask any midwesterner and they will tell you, grass is god!
Brenda had come into this career later in life. First, she’d popped out an amazing amount of children, perhaps five or six, Zhara couldn’t remember how many, and put up with years of unfaithfulness from her wanker of a spouse. Having put up with that for years, Brenda got down to business, took a degree in business administration at the local college - now dying a painful death due to corruption in the Illinois State government - and prepared herself to divorce the asshole.
When her degree was complete and she landed the job at Samaritan Village, she divorced her husband in record time. In Zhara’s book, she was to be admired for her cold-blooded planning and execution of that little coup!
On the other hand, that exact same cold-blooded planning might be the thing that put Brenda squarely in the suspect’s box. She was clearly capable of the type of planning that had gone into the murder and she knew exactly how to do it. However, Zhara didn’t peg her for someone dumb enough to let the undertaker discover the enormity of the overdose. She seemed like the type that would be sneakier and never get caught.
Chapter Fifteen
Betty Jean Franklin
Sawyer Lowell had been a loud-mouthed Illinois State Trooper. Now he was a loud-mouthed old man with an ego the size of a semi-truck. He had made it his life’s work to terrorize farmers who were trying to get their crops in, or out, by threatening them with tickets and farm equipment seizure if they drove their tractors on the road and he caught them. If you’ve ever been in a rural community, you’ll know that farm equipment has to drive on the road in order to get from one field to another. There is absolutely no way around that fact.
Sawyer Lowell was sowing terror with his tiny bit of local power and taking payoffs from farmers in order to let them go about their business. With those payoffs he lined his own pockets, bought a nice house in an upscale neighborhood and proceeded to boast about it to anyone that would listen. Nothing ever happened to this odious slug either. His corruption was simply accepted as a perk of his job.
Betty Jean Franklin was a mousy little woman who had grown up waiting hand and foot on three brothers and a domineering father. When it came to pleasing an old-fashioned abusive man, Betty Jean knew her business. She smiled at Sawyer Lowell as if the sun rose and set on his head whenever she saw him. There wasn’t a minute that passed without her making sure his coffee cup was filled and his plate full.
Betty Jean could laugh at his jokes, find common ground in Sawyer’s stories and would willingly tell everyone in hearing, especially Sawyer’s hearing, how great he was.
Sue Darla just didn’t have that kind of currency. Her currency was sex and while Betty Jean could wine and dine and simper - she simply didn’t know how to be overtly sexual. Whenever Sawyer Lowell wanted his ego stroked, he went to Betty Jean. When he wanted sex, he went to Sue Darla. It was a competition neither could win.
That said, Betty Jean had come to hate Sue Darla Dubbins.
Another friend of Sue Darla’s told Zhara that her mother had often screamed at Betty Jean, her rival for Sawyer’s affections. They simply never knew when the other woman would come into Sue Darla’s view and a loud, “You little twit!” would be screamed out at the opponent for the odious buffoon’s affections. “Rather nerve-wracking,'' was how the friend described it with a laugh. Zhara had no idea how anyone could laugh over this sort of ridiculously low-brow brawling. But, alas, everything in tiny towns is pretty low-brow. They’re used to it.
Chapter Sixteen
Exhausting Mindsets
Talking to the suspects in her mother’s murder had simply been exhausting. On top of bringing up more questions than answers, it had also reminded Zhara how truly terrible people could be. Living in a cultured place like The Netherlands or greater Washington D.C., were almost everyone was educated to a higher level and had been exposed to a far greater variety of people, had lulled Zhara into thinking that the horrors of racism and bigotry had lessened in this more enlightened era. That was patently wrong. People were only more accepting in larger areas where education and multiculturalism reached further.
Zhara couldn’t get over the teachers she’d seen leaving the local school around four o’clock the day before. Most had been wearing athletic clothes, and since she’d recognized several of them, she knew they weren’t doing anything in the remotest way athletic. They were counselors and math teachers and biology teachers. Standards had simply lowered to the point where it was ok for a teacher to wear a pair of leggings and a tunic to their job. So much for setting an example for the students.
Often, as Zhara navigated airports, she was stunned to see people wearing pajamas and carrying large pillows. Since when was it socially appropriate to go out in public in nightwear? It was as though a flight was a childhood sleepover of some sort. No wonder it had come to this if teachers could wear casual items such as leggings and sports bras as appropriate dress for a classroom full of teenagers.
Ignorance and racism was still rife in rural tiny-town America. Zhara was still confused by one of her high-school classmates - a caring woman who rescued any sick animal, especially cats - but who posted constant barrages of hate-filled garbage about immigrants. One day she would post something horrible about how they should all be left to die in the desert and the next day, post a cute little heart-filled ditty about how everyone should just love each other.
It was terrifyingly clear that her hate-filled rants against immigrants didn’t register to her. What she really meant was we should just love each other only if you were like her. If you weren’t white and Christian, you should just die already.
Cousin Paula was the same way. She frequently expounded on how The Heifer Project, a wonderful charity that Zhara often donated thousands of dollars to and that helped women and men around the world develop into self-sufficient earners for their families, was an awful charity. They shouldn’t give animals to “those people” because they didn’t have the means to care for the
m, she said. She didn’t see the cruel side of this - the denial of a chance to build a better life - all she believed was that the recipients were too moronic to know how to keep a flock of chickens protected and healthy.
Zhara thought that really, face it, chickens roam about pecking up insects. They are free-range scavengers. Plus, the entire world is infested with insects. All the families really had to do was make sure they didn’t get eaten by a lion or another predator - something most of them already did for themselves - a big stick and a constant eye and voila! Safety for chickens and family!
Besides, those chickens were the ticket to an income selling eggs, feathers and meat. The recipients were highly invested in taking good care of their donated flocks of chicks, as their lives literally depended on it. The idea that they couldn’t properly care for the chickens was ridiculously bigotted.
When Zhara had asked her what her solution for prostitution was in rural areas around the world, if of course, the Heifer Project was out, the cousin had simply blinked her eyes rapidly and remained silent. It was fine for impoverished, non-white, poor foreigners to be prostitutes seemed to be the message. Zhara wanted to knock Paula’s head on the wall for that idiocy.
Of course, Zhara shouldn’t have been surprised, as Paula had also rabidly denounced Victoria a few years earlier, when Victoria had decided to convert to Judaism. Paula had ranted about Jews as “unclean” and that they really just needed to “come to Jesus and be saved”. Zhara thought the wrong person was on the end of needing to be saved.
It had also occurred to Zhara in a moment of clarity that these ideas didn’t just pop into people’s heads, they were planted. Paula got that racist clap-trap from somewhere.
Zhara had often wondered if the whole proliferation of gender identity categories and sexual enjoyment and orientation issues that people complained about as the “erosion of society” is certain bigotted circles, wasn’t really the inability to bury something that had been there all along. After all, Zhara knew that the abuses in her family went back generations.
As the information age came to the fore, perhaps it was just too hard to hide things that had gone on for decades. When you thought about it, some of it made sense. How did people know they liked bondage unless they’d been tied? How did someone know they liked pain unless they’d had it perpetrated on them? Some of it was genetic. Science had shown that. Still, it seemed to Zhara that a whole lot of this was learned.
Case studies showed that serial killers were made, not born. So, then, why weren’t sexual offenders made? It made sense to Zhara. Not that she had anything against people doing what they wanted in the privacy of their own bedrooms - that was up to them. What was wrong was when it was done with minors - innocents hungry for love and willing to do anything to be loved.
That was always the hook. People wanted to be loved and accepted. Children and young teens were always the most susceptible. This was when these terrible ideas of bigotry, secrecy and validation had the most impact. This sort of teaching of categorization was everywhere and in every form in small towns and there was not much available to refute it’s hold. Prejudice flourished where there was little diversity and no training to combat these ideas.
Once, Zhara had tried to hire a couple of young local men to work for a skilled carpenter to redo a dilapidated house she’d purchased in the tiny town. This was when she’d still been trying to understand what the hell was wrong with Sue Darla and her sisters. She knew what was wrong, but still - no one wants to believe their family is beyond redemption. Everyone wants to believe their family will love them no matter what. That is not the case. Only at that time, Zhara had still been in denial.
The young men walked off the job after three days - even though they were each desperate to earn a living - because they wouldn’t take orders from a “Mexican”. The idiocy of this racist drivel never ceased to amaze her. These rural, tiny towns were simply exhaustingly narrow-minded. Zhara supposed evil was everywhere. It just seemed thicker on the ground in small towns. Maybe it was the incongruity of it in the “Mayberry RFD” aura of a tiny town where everything was supposed to be all apple pie, kindly neighbors and “family values”.
The next worker she’d hired had been a very sweet young African-American man. To her astonishment, his dyslexia had never been diagnosed and though he graduated from high school, he’d never learned to read. How could a school system turn out a graduate who couldn’t read? Dyslexia was one of the most well documented learning disabilities. How could this easily diagnosed and well researched problem be overlooked? Well, Zhara supposed, it was probably that he was poor, black and had one droopy eye. That alone had been enough to rule out any exertion on the establishment’s part. Yes, perhaps those legging-wearing teachers really had sunk to an all-time low.
Chapter Seventeen
The Point
After a day of rest, and avoidance of anyone with a narrow mind, Zhara was ready to wrap up this entire episode in her life. Her mother’s funeral was today and she just wanted to get in the car and drive off afterwards without a backwards glance.
In order to do so, she was going to have to bring things to a head somehow. How, she wasn’t quite sure. She just prayed that somehow it would all present itself as the day went by.
She dressed for the mid-morning funeral with all the attention of a zombie, deep in thought about the motives and personalities of the people involved. This time she did wear black. Zhara slipped on a long black, cotton-knit mid-calf length dress with a double row of silver buttons down the front. It had an inset mesh-neckline which would act as a cooling device, yet cover skin - she’d learned the hard way never to bare anything you didn’t have to when exposed to the viper’s nest that was her kin.
She didn’t need a sweater or jacket as the dress had elbow-length sleeves and it’s intricately textured fabric allowed it to look exceedingly rich, while camouflaging any sweat that might trickle down her spine.
Today she didn’t bother trying to hide her eyes. Today she was going to stare down every person at the funeral and ferret out any secrets they might be hiding.
She slipped on a pair of mesh ballet flats and picked up a small black clutch that Beatriz had slipped her lipstick and phone into. With a purposeful stride, she set out from the polyester kingdom of her Hampton Inn hotel room to try and deduce her mother’s killer.
The funeral home walkway was lined with old students of her mothers. Zhara could still not fathom how her immature, sex-crazed mother had ever been a successful teacher. Only in a tiny-town would her distorted attitudes have passed under the radar for acceptable behavior. Not only had Sue Darla passed under the radar, she’d been loved. Truly. By many, many students. It was absolutely mind-blowing to Zhara.
Sue Darla had been a beloved teacher, and an absolutely horrible parent. Frequently she’d gone off for days at a time with married men, leaving her children alone in their dilapidated house. Several times she’d simply not appeared to pick her children up from trips or field excursions - always because she’d been out somewhere screwing someone - and having a man to please was far more important than being there for one’s children. This was the twisted emotional fallout that incest rained down on a family. Generations were warped due to the actions of one person. Frankly, Zhara was pretty sure her grandfather had ruined not just their family, but her extended family and many of her cousin’s families.
Sometimes Zhara wondered what had made her grandfather think he could get away with all his incestual abuse. Was it normal in his family? Had he also grown up with this sort of abuse? Maybe, if her theory was right. The problem was that no one knew about incest, because no one talked about it. The very secrecy surrounding it, allowed it to flourish.
Zhara was aware that one of her cousins had been raped once and gone to Sue Darla for comfort. Sue Darla, in typical horrifying fashion, had simply turned and walked out of the room, not understanding in any way, why that would be a traumatic event for the girl. After all, this sort
of thing happened to everyone didn’t it? It was simply a fact of life. That had most likely been Sue Darla’s twisted thinking. Sad, but true. Maybe the cousin had killed Sue Darla! No, that cousin had moved away and never come back. Probably a very good thing.
Still, it wasn’t OK to go around killing people. Zhara, Beatriz and Basilio were on high alert for any odd behavior in the crowd.
Nothing strange stood out. Or perhaps, it was that everything was strange. Tiny towns were weird and they were full of weird people doing weird things. Zhara usually thought of weirdness as a sort of creative expression. She liked weird people usually. In a tiny town, she was suspicious of weirdness because people tried so hard to tamp it down that when it came out, it usually meant there was a whole boatload of weird still ready to well up.
Zhara had discovered on this trip that she had been labeled “a crazy auntie” by one of her nephews whom she had enjoyed very much. To Zhara this had come as a surprise. She was a well-traveled, well-educated, highly cultured, sophisticated woman with a distinctively artistic sense of style. She was emulated and sought after as a friend and acquaintance in her large wealthy social circle. She had never been categorized by any of her acquaintances as “crazy”. At least to her knowledge. She was beginning to realize that “differentness” often translated easily to “craziness” in a more rigid society.