by Tim Ellis
He walked over to the large barn first. Inside was a tractor from another time, and some old rusting pieces of equipment. There was a hayloft, and he could smell something rotting.
“You in here, Sally,” he called.
There was no answer, but then he hadn’t expected one. Was she even here? How was he going to flush the girl out into the open? He was in no condition to go on a wild goose chase. And then it came to him: fire. Yes, he’d put Henry’s body in the farmhouse, retrieve the bullet from his brain, and set fire to the whole place – a tragic accident.
He could see the newspaper article now: “Old Man Dies in Farmhouse Fire.” It would then go on to decry the old, wooden farm buildings, the farm subsidies, the land going to waste, and everything else that was bad about farming in America. Hank would quickly be forgotten.
He smiled. Maybe he could buy Hank’s land cheap. He didn’t need it. Wouldn’t know what to do with it, but somebody had to buy it. He’d keep his ears open for when the auction would be.
“I’m going to burn this place down, Sally. If you come out now under your own steam, I’ll let you live. Don’t think you won’t be punished for trying to escape, because you will. I’m going to beat you within an inch of your life. But as my daddy used to say, ‘If you’re feelin’ pain, you’re still alive, boy.’” He took a breath, felt his stomach rumble, and could have sworn he heard eggs and bacon sizzling on a griddle. “If you don’t come out . . . well, you’re either going to burn to death, or I’m going to shoot you as you make a run for it, and you’ve seen what a good shot I am. The choice is yours, Sally.”
He waited but didn’t hear or see any movement. It was then that he realized he had no matches.
Hank was a smoker. Henry went back to the old man’s body, shooed the flies away, and checked his pockets. There was a box of Lion safety matches in the right-hand pocket.
Everything was as dry as the desert. It hadn’t rained for months. Oh, the weathergirls on the television news kept threatening to send over rain clouds, but none ever came. They’d even shown the 1956 film The Rainmaker, with Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn in the starring roles. It wasn’t the first time that the rain clouds had been threatened with Burt Lancaster.
He dragged old Hank’s body into the farmhouse and sat him down on the threadbare sofa. Then he helped himself to a cleaver and a sheet from the kitchen. He covered himself from shoulders to feet with the sheet, and then hacked Hank’s head in half. It didn’t take him long to find the bullet.
After rinsing the blood and brains off his hands in the kitchen sink, he set fire to the sofa. It would look like an accident. Not that any fire truck would come – they were too far off the beaten track. There would be no investigation to identify the source of the fire. The sheriff might mosey on by and conclude it was an accident. Old Hank had drunk himself into a stupor, and a lit cigarette had done him in – simple. There would be no kin demanding an autopsy.
“Goodbye, Hank,” he said and walked outside.
Now for the barn.
“Last chance, Sally,” he shouted. “The house is burning, the barn is next.”
He took the matches out of his pocket and rattled them in the box.
***
People craned their necks and dawdled as they walked past the table where he and Rae were working, hoping to see what they were doing with a large map full of annotated small blue crosses.
“Hey!” Rae shouted each time she caught someone loitering. “Mind your own.”
“It’s a public space,” Tom said.
“Which doesn’t mean they have to stick their noses into our business, and any one of the men could be, you know . . . one of them.”
Since Rae had already eaten, once they’d moved their base of operations onto the table, he made a trip to the cafeteria. The library was open plan. The stairs were wood with safety glass sides. The cafeteria was on the top floor, and after he’d got himself a buffalo burger, a triple chocolate cake, and a mug of coffee from the counter, he sat by the glass barrier overlooking the open space. He could see Janice Hall and her shadow, and Rae on the table with the map. She glanced up. They waved at each other.
So far, it had been a successful day. He wondered how his PI application was going, and thought about going into city hall and asking Luisa Beer if there was any news, but decided against it. She’d humiliated him the last two times he’d seen her, and a man could only take so much humiliation before he cracked.
He’d sorted Mona’s relationship problem out and re-established their friendship, which he was glad about. He and Mona went back a ways, and they’d become real close over the years. The idea of falling out with her had filled him with sadness. He wouldn’t give a rotten bean for most people, but Mona was different. All the time they’d been partners, she’d had his back. You didn’t forget something like that. And they’d been in some scrapes together. He smiled at the time he’d . . . Yeah, probably best forgotten about. She was under pressure. The budget had been cut, they were down by two detectives, and the ones she had didn’t amount to much more than a pool of gnat’s piss. If he could take some of the pressure off her, then that’s just what he’d do.
Some people would say, “Hey, it ain’t your business anymore, man. Walk away, take a load off,” but he could no more do that than bring Carrie back to life. If a friend needed help, then he’d do what he could. That’s who he was – no more, no less.
They’d waded through the “Missing Child” posters going back to 2001 and cross-referenced them with the newspaper reports. Rae was right, the police reports would have been invaluable, but they could make educated guesses without them. Thankfully, they were only looking at the Florida area. Anymore, and he would have needed a task force to get through them all.
“There’s so many of them,” Rae said. “Why isn’t somebody doing something?”
“We’re doing something.”
“You know what I mean.”
“They have a federal task force, and some states have their own.”
“Then why are there still so many?”
He didn’t say anything. If the numbers of children going missing kept increasing year on year, then it was clear that the task forces didn’t work. What was the answer?
What he and Rae were doing was simply a ripple in the ocean. Why weren’t the task forces working? Having experienced the difficulty of finding leads, he could guess why they weren’t working. The first twenty-four hours were crucial. If a child wasn’t found during that time . . . well, there wasn’t much hope after that. Unless there was something concrete to go on, hopelessness set in very quickly.
He’d worked a couple of missing child cases in his time – didn’t find any of the children. It left a dirty taste in your mouth. You went home feeling as though you’d failed, and you had.
People looked the other way, but it was a national disgrace. If 24,000 children went missing in one hit, somebody would sit up and take notice. Because it’s a trickle effect, nobody seems to care. It’s the parents’ fault for not taking care of their children. Keep ‘em on a short lead; there are evil men out there. And it was men. Women were the bearers and custodians of children. The female monsters you could count on the finger of one hand. Men though . . . men were a different species. Men were monsters until proven otherwise.
The map was covered with annotated blue crosses. They’d established beyond any shadow of a doubt that whatever was happening to these children had been happening since at least 2001 – and probably longer. It was also obvious that it was being run as a sophisticated operation. Whoever was behind it all, knew what they were doing.
“I feel like crying.”
“I know.”
“I’m surprised I made it through childhood.”
“I know.”
“It’s like prehistoric times when families used to have lots of children because they knew some wouldn’t survive. They’re acceptable losses or collateral damage – like in a war.”
“I know, and the trouble is, we’re losing the war. Each year, more children go missing than the year before.”
Rae sighed. Words were meaningless in the face of such overwhelming numbers.
“Pack everything up. We have to get food and drink, and a bucket for the stake-out. I also need get a cell.”
“What’s the bucket for?”
“Don’t ask.”
***
Oh, what was she going to do?
She’d climbed into the hay loft and waited. What else could she do? If she had run, he would have caught her. And where could she run? She’d been lucky to find the old man’s house, thought she was safe. Never thought Henry would kill his neighbour. Now, she was going to burn to death.
One time at home, in the street next to theirs, there’d been a fire in the Johnson’s house. She’d stood and watched the fire fighters in their uniforms and big yellow hats fighting the fire with hoses gushing water.
“I’m gonna be a fire fighter,” Jimmy Seraphin had said.
Rebekah Snellenberger’s eyes were wider than the Grand Canyon as she watched. “I’m gonna marry a fire fighter.”
Jimmy smirked. “Maybe you’ll marry me, and we’ll have a whole fire station full of babies.”
“I thought you was gonna marry me, Jimmy,” Sally had said.
“Well yeah, I will. Maybe I can marry Rebekah once we’ve split up and divorced, and I’m paying you half my salary each month.”
“Oh, okay.”
It wasn’t meant to happen, but when they brought out three-year-old Dwayne Johnson, the sheet covering his body had slipped off, and everyone saw the charred and blackened thing that used to be a human child.
Sally had suffered with nightmares for weeks afterward, and when she thought about burning to death, it filled her with terror.
She could hear the farmhouse snapping and crackling, and knew that Henry was telling the truth. What was she going to do? She didn’t want to burn to death. There was nothing she could do now, but run. She looked around, but there was no escape from up here.
“Time to burn, Sally,” Henry called to her.
She watched as he struck a match and threw it on a bale of hay. Oh Lordy, she was going to burn in hell.
“They’ll say a spark from the house fluttered on the wind and set the barn on fire. Goodbye, Sally. You should have stayed. I would have treated you real fine.”
He turned and walked out of the barn.
She ran to the ladder and began climbing down.
The barn was burning like there was no tomorrow.
At the bottom, she covered her nose and mouth with her left hand and ran through the fire – straight into the arms of Henry.
He grasped her wrist in a vice-like grip. “I knew you were in there, and I knew you’d try to get out. No one voluntarily stays in a burning building.”
She tried to yank her arm free, but he was holding on to it far too tight. Her heart was beating fit to burst. He was going to put her back in that hole. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to get free.
And if anyone knew how to get herself free – she did. One time, her mum had caught an uncle with another woman in the house.
Sally had never heard her mum shout, and scream, and cry so much.
“Cover your ears, Sally,” her mum had told her.
She did. She had put both hands over her ears and pressed as hard as she possibly could, but her mum’s screeching voice had still seeped through her fingers. Then, she’d seen her mum thrust a knee between her uncle’s legs.
He’d collapsed to the floor like a rag doll.
“You cheating bastard,” her mum had screamed.
Her uncle’s face went whiter than the fridge door. “You’ve ruined me,” he said clutching himself.
“You’re lucky I haven’t cut it off – nuts and bolt and all.”
The next day, she’d asked Jimmy Seraphin to show her what all the fuss was about.
Jimmy grinned. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
Her face burned like a barbeque. “I don’t think so.”
“If I’m gonna marry you, then I’d like to see what I’m getting.”
She thought about it, and it made sense. They could both see what they were getting.
“You first,” she said.
“You’re not going to go back on your word if I show you mine, are you?”
“I won’t go back on my word, but it’ll mean that you won’t be able to marry anyone else but me.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t want to anyway.”
“What about Bekah?”
“Nah, you’re the only one for me, Sally Stackhouse.”
“Go on then.”
He’d dropped his trousers
At first, she just stared, but then her hand shot out to touch.
“Hey!”
“You can touch mine,” she promised him.
“Be careful.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
She’d poked and prodded. Found the peanuts in the elastic sack, and squeezed. Jimmy jumped like a jack-in-the-box.
“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”
“What are those?”
“They’re my nuts.”
“What they for?”
“Makin’ babies.”
Sally sat on her heels and stared for a while.
Jimmy started pulling his trousers up.
She stopped him. “I ain’t finished yet.”
“There ain’t nothin’ else for you to see.”
“Why’d they hurt so much when I squeezed them?”
“I don’t know, but one time, I got a football kicked in my nuts. I thought I was gonna die it hurt so much.”
“Okay.”
He pulled his trousers up. “Your turn.”
“I have to get home now.”
“I knew you wouldn’t.”
“There’s nothing to see. I just got a tiny hole.”
“Yeah, and my widger goes in that tiny hole to make babies.”
“How come you know so much, Jimmy Seraphin?”
“One time, I caught my mum and dad doing it on the sofa, but on the TV was a movie. I stayed for ages watchin’ that movie. I think I got a pretty fair idea of how babies are made for sure.”
“You don’t need to see mine then.” And she ran for home.
“One day I’ll see yours, Sally Stackhouse,” he shouted after her.
The way things were going, she didn’t think that day would ever come now. She wished she’d shown him hers when she’d had the chance.
Now, she jabbed a hand into Henry’s groin, found one of his walnuts, and squeezed with all her might.
“Christ almighty!” he screamed.
He let go of her hand. Pushed her away, so that she went sprawling in the dirt, just like she’d hoped.
She rolled straight onto her feet and started running. She didn’t know where, but it didn’t matter – she was free again.
This time Henry wasn’t going to catch her.
She’d rather die than go back in that hole.
Chapter Nineteen
He drove back to the hotel from the library, and on the way, he stopped at the store to pick up some essentials. While he purchased the food supplies and a bright-yellow bucket for the overnight stake-out, Rae bought him a cell.
He’d said, “Each to their own. I know about food, you know about cells.”
When they arrived at the hotel, he’d gone straight to see Allegre. Rae hung back, but was still in sight.
“I need to borrow your truck, Allegre.”
Allegre was sitting in her rocking chair, smoking her corncob pipe. On the small table next to her was a glass of homemade lemonade with large chunks of ice bobbing around in the top. Rattlenake lay between the table and the rocking chair, growling at him.
“If’n it ain’t Mister no-site-security-and-his-trollop-come-to-steal-Allegre’s-prize-winning vehickle Gabriel.”
“What prize?” he challenged her.
“What’s it to you?”
“I can’t follow someone in a big red Firebird.”
“I coulda told you that.”
“Please lend me your truck.” There was a hint of desperation in his voice. “You’ll get it back in one piece.”
“So you say, but you done told me you’d be on-site security for a free room, and now look what Allegre ain’t got. She ain’t got any on-site security, and she ain’t got a room, because Mister beggin’-for-my-prize-winning-vehickle Gabriel is livin’ there under false preferences.”
“I promise you’ll get it back.”
She hawked and spat at a honey bee flying past in search of nectar. “Your promises are like piddle in a storm.”
He sighed. This was harder than he’d thought it would be. After he’d told her everything that had happened, he imagined she’d be only too happy to help.
“Think of all those children, Allegre.”
“You couldn’t negotiate your way out of a Thanksgivin’ turkey.”
“No, but I could,” Rae said from behind him.
“And why would I want to negotiate with a trollop?”
“Because you’ll get what you really want.”
“And how does a trollop know what old Allegre wants?”
“Tobacco?”
Allegre’s eyes closed to slits. She sucked on her pipe, and the corners of her mouth twitched. “What does a trollop know about Allegre’s tobacco?”
“I know there’s a bit of a tobacco crisis. Growing drugs is more lucrative than growing tobacco. Prices have gone up. There’s a supply shortage. I guess you’ll be running out soon.”
“Allegre doesn’t normally listen to trollops, but you’ve got my attention.”
“What if Tom could get you a hundred dollars’ worth?”