Martians in Maggody

by Joan Hess

  “Is Rosemary’s car still parked by the low-water bridge?”

  “It’s not in the parking lot, and she told me that Arly offered to drive her to the hospital this morning. Even if we went and fetched it for Dr. Sageman, that doesn’t mean he’ll go someplace else so we can sneak Jules into the room to copy the files.”

  Ruby Bee tried to think of a plan while she took a fresh pitcher of beer to some truckers in one of the booths. “What if,” she said as she returned, “we fetch the car and leave it in front of Rosemary’s room? Then we tell Dr. Sageman that we heard there was another cow cut to ribbons way on the other side of Emmet. We can give him the wrong directions and have him driving all over the county till dark.”

  “We don’t have a car key, for one thing. Are you aiming to hot-wire it?”

  “There was a key on the dresser in her room,” Ruby Bee countered. She took a room key from the drawer and put it down in front of Estelle. “You go get it while I get those fellows cleared out. I’ll be ready to go as soon as you get back.”

  Estelle picked up the key. “I’ll do it, but don’t think you can order me around like I’m some kind of private in your personal army, Mrs. Patton.” Having made her point, she stalked across the dance floor and continued out the door without so much as a glance over her shoulder.

  She slowed down once she came around the corner. Dr. McMasterson’s car was gone, but Lucy Fernclift’s was parked in front of No. 3. Jules’s car was in front of No. 4, but she didn’t worry about him since he was the one wanting to get inside Dr. Sageman’s room. The curtains were wide open in No. 5, which meant Dr. Sageman might see her. If Jules was right about him being in government intelligence, she might end up in the dungeon of the underground laboratory, making small talk with the painter that’d blabbed about the alien babies.

  None of the private eye shows she watched so faithfully had dealt with this particular dilemma. The worst danger came from Dr. Sageman, she decided. If he stood up, there was nothing she could do to avoid being caught, but as long as he stayed on the bed, she figured she was safe.

  She walked briskly to the door of Ruby Bee’s unit, trying to act like she had every right to be there. Then, when no one opened a door or shouted out a window, she scurried to No. 2, unlocked the door, and ducked inside.

  Once she’d caught her breath, she headed for the dresser and grabbed a key. She was on her way back across the room when the door opened. The sight of the gun pointed at her face set her heart to thudding so wildly that it was a marvel she didn’t keel right over on the avocado shag.

  I reconnoitered with the deputy late in the afternoon. He admitted he’d had no luck; I admitted the same, thanked him, and let him escape to the poker game in the back of the sheriff’s office. There was a message on the answering machine, but as soon as I determined it was from Ruby Bee, I turned it off and called the hospital in Farberville. Rosemary answered the phone in Cynthia Dodder’s room and agreed to wait in the lobby for me.

  The telephone rang before I could leave. After a brief debate I warily picked up the receiver.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” Ruby Bee took off belligerently. “It’s a good thing I didn’t hold my breath while I waited for you to call me back!”

  “I’m on my way to the hospital to pick up Rosemary. I’ll call you when I get back.” I did not add that weather conditions in hell would have an influence on the alacrity with which I’d do so.

  “Estelle has disappeared.”

  “Maybe she was beamed up to give the crew haircuts,” I said. “I told Rosemary—”

  “This is not the time to make stupid jokes. Estelle has been gone for more than an hour, and you need to stop smarting off and find her before something terrible happens.”

  “An hour’s not very long. How do you know she didn’t remember she needed to run an errand in Farberville or drop by Elsie’s for coffee and cookies?”

  Ruby Bee snorted like a jumpy horse. “For one thing, her car is parked out in front of the bar and grill. I don’t reckon she walked all the way to Elsie’s house.”

  I hoped Rosemary would find a way to amuse herself in the lobby because there was no way I could get off the telephone until I heard the entire story. “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  “She went to one of the units to get something. It shouldn’t have taken more than a minute or two. I waited for a while, then closed up and went to look for her. She’s not anywhere to be found.”

  “Couldn’t she have gone inside to talk to someone?”

  “I asked Jules and Lucy, but they haven’t seen her. Dr. Sageman’s taking a nap. Dr. McMasterson’s gone, but I used my key to look inside his room. She’s not in my unit either.”

  “What about Rosemary’s unit?”

  “She isn’t in there. It’s like she really was kidnapped by aliens right there in the parking lot. I know Estelle can be irritating at times, but she’s been my best friend for more years than I care to recollect, and you have to find her.”

  I tugged on my chin for a moment, then did some quick calculations. “Okay, you call everybody you can think of and make sure she isn’t buying a lamp from Roy or giving an emergency manicure. It’ll take me an hour to fetch Rosemary. If you haven’t heard from Estelle by the time I get back, I’ll start looking for her.”

  “She could be dead an hour from now!”

  I repeated my instructions, hung up in the middle of her sputters, and went out to my car. Across the road Roy was helping a tourist load an armoire into the back of a station wagon. The Suds of Fun was surrounded by unfamiliar cars, and farther down the road the parking lot at the SuperSaver was filled to capacity. Jim Bob had been wrong about one thing; tourists weren’t waiting for stories to appear in the Probe and the Weekly Examiner. One of the minor mysteries was how they’d found us since Maggody doesn’t always appear on maps. Have a look if you don’t believe me.

  I wasn’t too worried about Estelle, although I was more than a little curious about Ruby Bee’s offhanded explanation that Estelle had gone “to one of the units to get something.” It was challenging not to suspect they were running an unofficial investigation of their own. In the past they’d ended up in so much hot water that they could have filled all the hot tubs in Hollywood.

  Grumbling to myself, I started for the hospital.

  Joyce Lambertino marched into the living room and turned off the television. “I just heard the most peculiar thing from Saralee. You’d better listen.”

  “Can’t it wait until the game is over?” asked Larry Joe. “It’s the eighth inning, and the score’s tied.”

  “This family’s safety is more important than a bunch of filthy, overgrown boys that seem to take pride in spittin’ and scratchin’ in front of a camera. You need to hear what Saralee told me while she was drying the dishes.”

  Larry Joe thought about arguing, but Joyce looked pretty determined to have her say. “What did she tell you?”

  “She woke up real early this morning and went into the kitchen to get some cereal. She heard funny noises out in the backyard, so she peeked out the window over the sink, thinking it was a stray dog or even maybe Raz’s sow. What she saw was a great big hairy creature dressed in rags and rooting through the garbage can for food. She ran back to her bed and hid under the covers till she heard us get up.”

  “Saralee watches way too many scary movies for an eleven-year-old. I haven’t heard of anyone seeing a bear lately, but I’ll ask around at school tomorrow.”

  “It was a hairy man,” Saralee announced as she came into the living room. “It wasn’t any stupid old bear.”

  “Were you wearing your glasses?” Larry Joe asked her in the same voice he used when he was grilling his third-period shop class about missing socket wrenches.

  “I know what I saw, and it wasn’t a bear. Bears don’t wear overalls except in picture books.”

  “Then it was a tramp that was hungry. I’ll call Arly and let her know he’s in these parts, and she
can drive him to a shelter in Farberville. Now can I watch the game?”

  “It was Bigfoot,” Saralee said to Joyce. “If he gets hold of fat little Traci or the baby, he won’t need to eat from the garbage can. He’ll just rip off their flesh and suck the blood right out of their bones. Larry Junior’s safe; he’d taste like green persimmons.” She screwed up her face and made some gagging noises to demonstrate how any discerning cannibal would react to a mouthful of her cousin, who was overly fond of punching her when he wasn’t yanking her braids until she cried.

  “That’s dumb,” Larry Joe muttered.

  Joyce came close to slapping the smirk right off his face. “Larry Joe Lambertino, you get off your lazy butt and go make sure this creature’s not hiding out behind the forsythia bushes, waiting for you to leave so he can break down the back door. Then I want you to call the sheriff’s department and tell them to get over here to investigate this. I don’t know for sure what Saralee saw, but I do know that no one is gonna watch any baseball games until we find out once and for all.”

  Saralee grinned at him as he headed for the kitchen. Once the back door banged, she said, “Traci and Lissie Milvin took their dolls on a picnic to the other side of the field. They left about an hour ago.”

  “Oh, no,” Joyce said, obliged to sit down as her knees turned to jelly. The walls seemed to turn bright red, and she could almost hear shrill screams of terror and savage growls. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just now remembered.”

  “Go tell Uncle Larry Joe that he needs to find ’em and get ’em back here!”

  “Maybe it would be safer to send Larry Junior,” Saralee said as she cleaned her glasses on her shirt-tail, settled them back on her nose, and blinked solemnly. She was going to elaborate, but Aunt Joyce was making funny little gulping noises and rocking back and forth like she was on the front porch of the county old folks’ home.

  She waited for a minute to see if Aunt Joyce was going to do anything else that might be interesting, then went through the kitchen and out to the patio, where Uncle Larry Joe was picking up the scattered garbage. He didn’t seem all that pleased when she told him about Lissie and Traci, and the look he gave her was about as nasty as the one Bigfoot had given her when he saw her at the window.

  It occurred to Saralee, who was a sight sharper than her relatives, that there might be money to be made. If she went inside, no way Aunt Joyce would allow her to leave, so she went through the carport and cut across the neighbor’s yard. She was trying to decide how to spend her windfall as she trotted down the road toward the highway and the Flamingo Motel.

  TWELVE

  “I noticed Dr. Sageman’s written several books about your abduction experiences,” I said to Rosemary as I drove back toward Maggody.

  “Four,” she said promptly. “The newest one is by far the most insightful. The second caused an incredible uproar.”

  “How did you get hooked up with him?”

  “It was through Cynthia. She convinced me to attend a UFORIA meeting, and I ended up joining the group, even though it was naughty of me because I wasn’t a believer. Arthur presented a lecture at a conference in Eureka Springs, in which he described a series of past-life regressions he’d conducted with a young man who had come to Earth many times over the last two centuries to bring technological advances. As I sat in the audience, I felt a growing uneasiness that compelled me to have a word with Arthur after his lecture. He hypnotized me for the first time that very evening.”

  “And you remembered the abduction?”

  “Yes, although it was very misty at first. It took many more sessions before the details emerged with any clarity and I was able to acknowledge the sexual assault and its painful consequences.”

  “Are you aware that Sageman has no legitimate credentials in the field of hypnotherapy?”

  She stiffened as if I’d jabbed her; which is what I’d meant to do, metaphorically speaking. “I suppose you found the hearsay about Leonard. I met the boy myself, and he told me he’d been in mental institutions several times while he was in high school and college. He was convinced he was being stalked by invisible aliens. He caused such a disturbance at one of the lectures that he was asked to leave the conference.”

  “But Sageman went ahead and hypnotized him. Wouldn’t it have been better to get him professional help?”

  “In retrospect it would have, but Arthur thought he was doing the right thing. There was no way he could have predicted that Leonard would commit suicide.”

  I did not say that he might have recognized the danger signs if he’d been trained. Instead, I said, “I’ve ordered Sageman not to have any more sessions with Dahlia. She may not be as unstable as Leonard was, but she’s capable of some crazy things. I don’t want you to have any contact with her either.”

  “If you say so,” she said with a sniff, then folded her legs and lowered her head.

  We rode in silence to the low-water bridge. I parked behind her car and handed her the key. “It may be a little dusty from the fingerprint powder,” I said.

  “I fail to understand why they went to all that trouble,” she said, still angry over my dictum. “Cynthia was on the way to the hospital long before Brian Quint was asphyxiated by the alien craft.”

  “The crime squad didn’t find anything,” I admitted. “Sorry about the inconvenience.”

  She forgave me enough to nod, then got in her car. Once she’d started the engine, I turned around and drove to the bar and grill to find out if Estelle was back on her stool, sipping sherry, sucking pretzels, and plotting to make my life miserable. And if someone offered me a grilled cheese sandwich, I wouldn’t refuse it.

  Ruby Bee was out the door before I’d switched off the ignition. “What took you so long?” she demanded. “You promised you’d be back in an hour, missy—not an hour and a half.”

  “I had to drag Rosemary out of the hospital gift shop before she cleaned them out of kidney stone key chains. Then I took her to get her car and came here.” I touched her shoulder. “No sign of Estelle?”

  “No, and I must have called everybody in town. Eula Lemoy’s line was busy for so long that I finally drove over to her trailer and made her stop talking to her sister in Arkadelphia long enough to answer my question. I even went out to Estelle’s house to make sure she hadn’t gone there for some senseless reason. I had Jim Bob page her at the supermarket, and looked for myself at the launderette and the pool hall.”

  “We’ll find her,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get a dog from the police like you did last winter? He can pick up her scent from her purse and follow her trail from the parking lot.”

  I winced as I remembered my canine chum, Larry. “Let’s not go that far just yet. You said that Estelle went to get something from one of the units. It wasn’t yours, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t mine. We decided to do Rosemary a little favor by fetching her car for her. Estelle went to get the key.”

  “I had the key up until ten minutes ago. Cynthia left it in the car when she went to search for the crashed spacecraft.”

  “So it was the wrong key. The important thing is to find Estelle before something terrible happens to her. I don’t understand why she went off without telling me where she was going. It’s been nigh onto three hours since she disappeared.”

  I was on the verge of repeating my promise to find her when Saralee Lambertino came around the back of the car. “What room are the tabloid reporters in?” she asked Ruby Bee, apparently too intent on her mission to dally with any standard pleasantries.

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  Saralee bared her shiny braces. “Because I got a story for them, and they might pay me.”

  “What story?” I asked as calmly as I could.

  “I ain’t telling anybody else till I talk to the reporters. I hear they’re offering folks a hundred dollars. I may just buy myself a chemistry set and learn Larry Junior a thing or two.”

  R
uby Bee grabbed a blond braid. “Listen here, young lady, I’m not in the mood for any sass from the likes of you. You spit out whatever it is, or I’ll march you inside and find a pair of scissors.”

  “Bigfoot was rooting through the garbage early this morning,” she said sulkily. “I saw him out the kitchen window.”

  “Bigfoot,” I echoed without enthusiasm, but without much astonishment either. It’d been that kind of week.

  “That’s who I saw,” she said, then elaborated with a description of the visitor and what she seemed to hope was happening to her cousins at that very moment. She did so in such a matter-of-fact voice that both Ruby Bee and I were reduced to gaping at her, our expressions equally appalled.

  “When I left, Uncle Larry Joe was gonna call the sheriff,” Saralee concluded, scowling. Her face brightened. “But even if he did, it may be too late by now.”

  I reminded myself that I was standing in a parking lot on a sunny afternoon, in the company of my own mother and a disconcerting but basically unremarkable child. We were not on a Hollywood set, nor were we in any danger of being wafted upward in a beam of light. This may have taken a moment, but I eventually said, “Saralee, I want you to go home and stay there. If I find out you’ve been spouting off any more of this grisly nonsense, I will show up and personally stuff you in the garbage can. Headfirst, too.”

  She must have heard the sincerity in my voice because she had enough sense to march off in the direction she’d come, her braids swishing rebelliously.

  Ruby Bee waited until Saralee was out of earshot, then said, “There’s something I might ought to tell you. Estelle and I were in Raz’s barn the night the alien appeared, and—”

  “The barn?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time, although I’d be hard pressed to explain it now. Anyway, we overheard Lucy Fernclift trying to bribe Brian. She as much as admitted it this morning.”

  I sat on the hood of the car and demanded the entire story. There wasn’t much to it, I’m sorry to say, but I was starved for anything remotely resembling a clue. What she told me barely qualified.