Martians in Maggody

by Joan Hess

  I pocketed the key and went outside, where Sageman waited with an armload of files and a cardboard box. He followed me to my car, fussed with his precious commodities until he was satisfied nothing would fly off the backseat, and then climbed into the passenger’s side.

  “I’d hoped for a firm commitment,” he said as we left the airport. “The producers of Strange Stories used to be very keen on UFO sightings, but lately they’ve been doing a lot on guardian angels and poltergeists. The crop circles caught their interest, though, as did the inexplicable tragedy of young Brian’s untimely death.”

  “You’re going to talk about that on television? I thought he was your surrogate son and heir to the throne.”

  Sageman pulled off his glasses to flick away what must have been a very small tear. “If his death serves to warn others, it will not have been in vain.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said as I whipped around a truck, then swerved back into the right lane in time to avoid a bus destined, according to a placard, for Minneapolis. Arkansas’s version of life in the fast lane. “You’ve seen burn marks like those we found, haven’t you?”

  “I haven’t seen the marks, but from what you said, they may resemble those found in Arizona several years ago. A policeman saw a flaming cigar-shaped object go down beyond a hill, drove into the desert to investigate, and came across a craft and two humanoid figures dressed in white. Before he could get close enough to make out any more, the craft and crew departed. Although there were some discrepancies in his later testimony, the sighting was basically validated.”

  “And you used it in a book,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you were one of my fans,” he said, practically purring. If he hadn’t been a tad nervous about my driving, he might have pinched my cheek, but his bloodless hands were clutched in his lap. “I was contacted by a local resident who had been driving along the same road when she saw the craft. She pulled over to get a better look. The next thing she knew, she was turning into a gas station four hours later. I was able to help her recover the hours of her life that had been stolen from her, and although her memories were distressing, she was relieved to learn the truth.”

  “The subject you called Leonard wasn’t quite as relieved, was he?”

  He averted his face, despite the fact the only thing of interest along the highway was a field dotted with car cadavers. “That was my only failure,” he said, sighing. “The boy approached me after a seminar and begged me to take him on as a subject. He was so upset that he could barely speak. Brian advised me not to become involved, but Leonard, as I called him in the book, was so obsessed with recurrent nightmares that I felt it might do him good to bring his fears out of his subconscious so he could deal with them.”

  “Maybe he should have done that with a psychiatrist,” I said coldly. “I checked out your credentials, Dr. Sageman. Your doctoral degree is in education administration. That hardly qualifies you to do intensive hypnotherapy, does it?”

  “I am a licensed hypnotherapist, Chief Hanks.”

  “All you had to do to obtain this so-called license was to send twenty dollars to some outfit in Denver. Plus postage and handling, of course.”

  “I did extensive independent study.”

  “For fifty dollars Brother Verber’s seminary will make him a bishop. For a hundred they’ll make him a cardinal, and for five hundred he can probably be Pope Willard. That doesn’t mean he can move into the Vatican and canonize his cousins, does it?”

  He huffed and puffed as we drove through a winding valley. Daffodils bloomed around the ruins of a farmhouse, and wild dogwood and redbud trees added patches of color to the placid green mountainsides. I’d returned to the Ozarks to escape the madness that was Manhattan. Now I wondered if I needed to retreat even farther to escape the madness brought into this backwoods sanctuary by people such as my passenger. The Himalayas came to mind.

  “I want you to leave Dahlia alone,” I said as we passed the Maggody town limit sign. “No more sessions, no interviews for that damn television show, no books, no nothing. If I find out that you’ve so much as greeted her on the street, I’ll find a way to dump you in the county jail for a long, long time. It’s amazing how paperwork can disappear, Dr. Sageman. You won’t lose four hours of your life; you’ll lose four months of it before someone remembers to arraign you.”

  “She approached me,” he said stiffly. “She claimed to have proof.”

  I turned into the parking lot in front of Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill, continued around the corner to the motel, and braked with unnecessary vigor. “She’s done a lot of peculiar things in her day, but I will not tolerate you encouraging her to believe she was kidnapped by aliens and who knows what else. I’m going to her house this afternoon to talk some sense into her thick skull. You, on the other hand, are to avoid her as if she has leprosy. Got it?” I waited until he opened the car door, then added, “And don’t leave town again without my permission. I’m investigating a possible murder, and until I find some answers, you may consider yourself a suspect.”

  He was visibly angry, but his voice was crisp, and his accent thicker than the dregs of a proper teapot. “I shall inform you should I find the necessity to go to Farberville in the morning for the interview. I’m sure it gives you satisfaction to consider me as a suspect in Brian’s death. However, you told me you found his body at eleven o’clock. I was with Rosemary and Dahlia up until that time. Even if I had not been, I had no way of knowing about this sighting because I never saw the note with the map. Perhaps you might attempt to discover who stole it from under my door. That shouldn’t be too challenging for a police officer of your caliber, should it?”

  I sat and fumed while he collected his files and the box from the backseat, then rolled down the window so I could cool off while I drove back to the PD. Once inside, I sat and fumed a good while longer. I knew Sageman was a charlatan, and I knew he knew I knew it (if you can follow that). He was a very rich and successful charlatan who’d written a lot of books and hundreds of articles for pseudoscientific journals. He’d turned Rosemary Tant into a heroine in the field of ufology with such titles as Abductions and Adolescence, Mother Earth; Father Star, They Come in Darkness, and Rosemary T. and the Extrinsic Paradox. She’d been on the Oprah show, for gawd’s sake.

  I finally noticed the answering machine was blinking frenetically at me. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to lectures from Ruby Bee, but I hit the play button and sat back while the tape rewound. The first message was from McBeen, the county coroner. His tone was as peevish as usual as he confirmed the cause of death as functional hypoxemia with carbon monoxide as the likely agent. There was also a contusion on the back of the skull from a blow that could have resulted in unconsciousness; internal hemorrhaging indicated it had happened prior to death. The time of death was compatible with the hour and a half that I’d surmised, but as always, McBeen was hanging out in the ball park.

  The next two messages were from Ruby Bee, who’s convinced I hover over the answering machine whenever she calls, refusing to pick up the receiver simply to annoy her (there is some truth in this). Eilene Buchanon called to say she’d seen a light in the pasture behind her house; her description matched Roy’s. Jim Bob wanted an official report as soon as possible. Ruby Bee insisted I speak to her then and there if I knew what was good for me. Four times.

  I settled my feet on the corner of the desk and gazed at the ceiling, trying to come up with a theory—good, bad, or marginally probable—that would explain how Brian Quint had received a lethal dose of carbon monoxide in an open wooded area. Or why he was lying in the middle of the burn marks. Or what had made the burn marks. Or what the hell was going on in Raz’s cornfield. Pretty soon I had enough questions for a thirty-minute game show, although the grand prize might be a mutilated carcass and a fun-filled trip to a glamorous resort on the back side of the moon.

  The tabloids would no doubt claim (in capital letters) that little ol’ Maggody was in the midst
of an intense extraterrestrial experience—or intraterrestrial, not to slight the ITH enthusiasts. It would make a sensational story. There had been two dozen witnesses when something had taken place across the creek from the cornfield. Almost everybody in town had seen the orange lights. Roy and Eilene had seen the identical white light. An anonymous witness claimed to have seen a saucer crash. Three sober, if highly suggestible, witnesses had seen an alien walk on water. Perhaps all that could be dismissed as pandemic hysteria, but I couldn’t dismiss the reality that Brian was dead.

  Church had been over for an hour. I decided to go to Kevin Buchanon’s house and see what he knew about the note. For the record he’s the quintessence of the clan’s cognitive inadequacies; astronomers interested in studying black holes could save billions of the taxpayers’ dollars by shining a light in his ear.

  Raz was too engrossed collecting money from the crowd to return my wave as I drove by his shack and parked behind Kevin’s car. Kevin himself came out onto the porch as I came up the walk. “I’m glad to see ya, Arly,” he said, his throat rippling as if tiny salmon were swimming up it to spawn, “but I ain’t sure what you kin do. I mean, I’ve been pounding on the door all morning and begging to be let in, but she stopped answering me more than an hour ago. You know how women are.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do either,” I said, “since I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He sat down on the top step, propped his elbows on his knees, and, after a few false starts, cradled his face in his hands. “Dahlia’s all upset about something, but she won’t tell me what, and I’m worried she’s gonna do something terrible to herself. My ma sez to let her be, that she’ll get hungry sooner or later and come out, but the refrigerator and two cabinets are empty. She could stay locked in the bathroom for weeks!”

  “She won’t do that, Kevin,” I said, trying to sound optimistic. I changed the subject before he could press me for an explanation. “I need to ask you something. Yesterday you delivered a note to Reggie Pellitory while he was in the employees’ lounge at the supermarket. Where did you get it?”

  “Yesterday?” He scratched his head and swallowed several times. “What time yesterday?”

  “I don’t know the exact time, and it doesn’t matter. Where did you get the note? Did someone give it to you? Can you describe the person?”

  His elbows slipped as he recoiled under the pressure of my questions. “I ain’t sure what time it was,” he said, choking out each word as if it were a hair ball. “I hadn’t had my break yet. I was supposed to have a break at four, but then Jim Bob jumped on me because some lady dropped a bottle of ammonia in the housewares aisle. I mopped it up and swept up the glass, but the whole store was stinking to high heaven, and Jim Bob told me to get the fan from the lounge. It must have been going on five before I had a break.”

  “And took the note to Reggie.”

  “That’d be right.” He grinned, satisfied.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that valuable information would be lost forever if I strangled him. “Who gave you the note, Kevin?”

  “Reggie Pellitory?”

  “You delivered the note to Reggie Pellitory,” I said, amazed that I could speak through clenched teeth. “Where did you get it?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess I got confused what with all your questions. Jim Bob gave me the note, Arly.”

  For a paralytic moment I felt as if I’d switched brains with Kevin because all I could do was stare at him with what must have been a truly idiotic expression. “Jim Bob Buchanon?”

  “That’d be the only Jim Bob I know. It was awful good of him to give me back my old job, wasn’t it? I dint have much luck selling those fancy vacuum cleaners, but I—”

  “He’s a prince.” I went back to the car and drove down the hill to the highway, my thoughts as twitchy as the needle on the speedometer. Jim Bob Buchanon? If he’d actually seen a spacecraft in the woods, why on earth would he pay Reggie fifty dollars to take a cryptic note to Dr. Sageman when all he had to do was tell him? If for some obscure reason Jim Bob felt the need for anonymity, why hadn’t he made a muffled telephone call or slid the note under the door himself?

  Hizzoner had demanded a report as soon as possible. I was going to obey orders, but only after a brief detour by the PD to fake a little evidence.

  “What’s taking Arly so long?” Ruby Bee muttered as she wiped her hands on a dish towel and hung it on a hook. Noon had come and gone, and only a few tourists were still polishing off the last crumbs of piecrust or dawdling over coffee.

  Estelle craned her neck to make sure no one was near enough to eavesdrop, then said, “We don’t know for sure what we found means anything. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Besides, what’s Arly gonna say when you admit we searched the units? You know how poorly she takes it when we go out of our way to help her.”

  “Who could forget?” Ruby Bee was gonna say more when Jules Channel came across the dance floor and sat down on a stool midway down the bar. He was wearing a white sweater that Ruby Bee would have bet was cashmere; it made a nice contrast with his tan and emphasized the whiteness of his teeth. It occurred to her that she hadn’t gotten around to inquiring about his marital status.

  “Too late for lunch?” he asked.

  Ruby Bee gave him a menu. “How’d you make out with Sheriff Dorfer?”

  “He wasn’t there. I suppose I’ll go back tomorrow morning and see what I can find out about these cattle mutilations.” Jules paused delicately, then added, “You don’t know anything about them, do you?”

  “Of course we do,” said Estelle. “The dispatcher, LaBelle, is one of my regulars, and she sez the sheriff’s about to rip out what hair he’s got left. The lab down in Little Rock is swamped with more important things—like Brian Quint’s autopsy—and may not get around to examining the tissue samples until the end of next week.”

  “Oh.” Jules resumed his study of the menu.

  Ruby Bee wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a little smile on his face. She was beginning to get disillusioned with the two tabloid reporters. First Lucy Fernclift had accused Estelle (and Ruby Bee, by proxy) of lying about the alien at Boone Creek. Now Jules Channel was smirking like he’d heard a dirty joke. It seemed downright hypocritical to write stories about mermaids and naked Pentecostals, then make fun of folks that were as honest as the day was long.

  “So,” she said casually, fixing to work the conversation around to that very issue before she wasted any time exploring his eligibility, “how long have you worked for the Weekly Examiner?”

  “A year or so.” He ordered the special and coffee, still smiling to himself, then said, “I’d like to interview both of you about what you saw last night. I’d also like to take some photographs of you pointing at the creek. The actual spot’s liable to be off-limits, but we can find someplace else with similar characteristics.”

  Estelle had seen the smile, too. “And lie about it? It seems to me there are folks visiting Maggody right this minute that don’t mind that a one whit. Maybe that goes with living in a big city. Around these parts we may not be college graduates, but we believe in sticking to the truth—for the most part anyway.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Jules said, turning serious. “Ladies, I truly believe you saw something last night and you weren’t exaggerating.” He leaned forward and, in a voice barely audible, added, “But I think Dr. Sageman is behind it.”

  “You do?” whispered Ruby Bee. At the end of the bar Estelle was too stunned to say much of anything.

  “Yes, I do. Even though I work for a tabloid, I’m still an investigative reporter. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you, and I want to know what happened to Brian Quint.” He sat back up and shrugged. “The problem is, my hands are tied. Whenever I approach Sageman, all I get is a restatement of his dogma that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials. He’s not fooling me, though; I’m convinced he knows more than he’s telling us.”

>   Estelle abandoned her stool and moved next to Jules. “He told me that there was a government conspiracy,” she said breathlessly. “It goes all the way back to the late 1940s, when a flying saucer crashed in New Mexico and the military hushed it up. The day after the crash was reported, men from a nearby army air force base came and loaded up all the scraps. Then an officer announced that it was nothing but a weather balloon.”

  “He also said that ever since then,” contributed Ruby Bee, “the government has been collecting debris from crashes—along with alien corpses—and keeping them in an underground laboratory out in the desert.”

  Jules shook his head wonderingly. “Sageman told you this? I’m really surprised, since …”

  “Since what?” demanded Ruby Bee and Estelle, not precisely in unison but damn close to it.

  “He works for military intelligence. I can’t divulge my sources, but I was told by a Pentagon official that Sageman is on a top secret commission that investigates UFOs and reports directly to the President.” Jules glanced around the barroom to make sure no one with a cloak and dagger was lurking in the shadows. “This underground facility does exist. The workmen who built it were told that they and their families would suffer if they ever admitted knowledge of it, but I found a painter who was willing to talk. One day he got off the elevator on the wrong floor and saw what at first he thought was a regular hospital nursery with incubator lights and cribs. Then he realized the inhabitants were small gray humanoids with black, almond-shaped eyes.”

  “Like what we saw,” said Ruby Bee. She had to lean back and fan herself with a menu as she imagined a whole room filled with aliens.

  “What we saw wasn’t small,” protested Estelle. “We both agreed it was seven feet tall.”

  “These,” Jules whispered, “were children.” He waited for them to gasp, which they did, then went on. “Sageman is one of the masterminds of the conspiracy. His assignment is to provide disinformation to the public and at the same time destabilize and discredit the UFO movement. If people dismiss all these sightings as craziness, they won’t demand to know the truth.”