A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Fine, whatever.” Secretly Stella was pleased to see Chrissy developing a talent for the computer. It would certainly be nice to get the record-keeping out of the shoe boxes and entered into some sort of orderly system. And set up online ordering for the stock. And half a dozen other tasks she hadn’t had time for since the justice-delivering business ramped up. “Get the damn cable.”

  Chrissy smirked and handed Stella over the plate. A buttery fried egg cuddled up next to a couple of slices of toasted Wonder Bread that had been spread with grape jelly.

  “Now, how am I supposed to eat this in the car?” Stella demanded.

  Chrissy frowned. “Well, if you don’t like it, I guess you can just leave it here, Miss Picky-Pants.”

  “Can’t you just roll it up into a tortilla or something?”

  Chrissy sighed and took the plate to the counter. In seconds she handed it back, stacked into a sandwich, the egg purplish amid the jelly. She reached for a box of baby wipes, yanked out a couple, and handed them over, too.

  “Here. So’s you can clean up after. Now go catch bad guys,” she said.

  “Will do.” Stella bent to kiss the top of Tucker’s little head. “I got to go, Tucker. Can I have my shoe back now?”

  “Sow. Sow.” Tucker hugged the shoe tight and ran to the corner of the kitchen, pushing his little body into the lazy susan.

  By the time she got out to the Jeep, Stella realized she felt worse about taking her shoe back from the little guy, who was now sobbing inconsolably on the kitchen floor, than she had the last time she had pounded some wife-beating creep within an inch of his sorry life.

  FOUR

  When Stella reached Prosper’s two-block downtown, the tornado’s path of destruction became obvious—it had wended its merry way right across Broadway, taking out a little drive-through latte hut on the southwest corner of Poplar that Stella had never cared for anyway. Waiting in a line of cars for a cup of coffee—it struck Stella as inviting one of the more uncivilized tentacles of big-city living to reach down and take root with its greedy corporate suckers. To see it reduced to a roofless pile of timber was a guilty pleasure.

  But Stella was sad to see that the ten-foot-tall fiberglass bucket of paint that had graced the roof of Myle’s Paint and Wallpaper since Stella was a girl lay in pieces in the parking lot across the street. How many times had she admired its faded kitschy glory over the years, a beacon above the rest of the downtown? A streetlight had crashed down on top of a newish Accord, shattering the windshield and making it unlikely that anyone over three feet tall would be comfortable in the passenger seat. Everywhere, trash fluttered lazily in the gutters and pools of water left from the storm steamed in the unseasonably warm, bright morning sun.

  Stella waved to the folks she saw out with brooms and mops and trash bags. Most waved back with expressions of reasonably good spirits. That’s how it was, after a twister; as long as it wasn’t your picket fence that lay in a pile of splintered lumber, or your neighbor’s doghouse that got uprooted and set down on top of your prize rosebushes, there was almost a festival air about the day after, everyone out counting their blessings and cleaning up the aftermath.

  Though Stella was never able to join in. She remembered the sound of her mother’s muffled sobs on the beautiful clear morning following the tornado that took Uncle Horace. She remembered her father standing on the corner of the porch staring out at the field, not even seeing the snapped stalks, wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night before to go help folks, his hands trembling at his sides.

  She snapped on the radio, still set to KKRN from last night. Don Stetson—morning DJ—was plodding through the news at a considerably heartier clip than his weather-predicting colleague Ted Krass had managed even in the thick of the storm.

  “—west side of town,” he was saying. “Particularly over to Calhixie Elementary and down to the fairgrounds. Little tykes are in for a surprise when they go out for recess and find out their playground’s no more’n a big old crater, heh, heh, guess it’s going to be a little extra serving of the three R ’s for the kids until they get that sorted out. Readin’, ’ritin’, ’rithmatic, that’s what it takes these, days, don’t it? Back to the basics, is what our country needs. Gonna compete on a global level, why you got to start right here at home. Is what I always say.”

  Stella snorted. Don Stetson, whose real name was Don Butts, had repeated the seventh grade a couple of times when basic algebra couldn’t seem to get a foothold anywhere in his young mind—and then he’d tried his hand at personal investment counseling up in Independence before being asked to leave after directing his few clients’ investments into a shady fund repped by a lovely, curvy former Miss Iowa. Luckily his uncle owned KKRN and saw fit to give the disgraced financier a fresh start.

  That was as good a use for the news media as any, Stella figured—employment of last resort for the unemployable.

  “Now over to the fairgrounds we got reports that the New Century Pavilion’s lost a bunch of shingles off the east-facing half of its roof,” Don continued with an audible shuffling of papers. “But the big news is at the demolition derby track. Seems the snack shack’s blowed clean over, from what our, uh, reporter in the field has to tell us. Fact, there’s a po-lice presence there right now.” There was another shuffling sound and then a faint wet plop that suggested Don had taken a little break to discreetly spit out his chew. “Now at the Freshway, somebody left a crate of melons, word is they were watermelons but that’s not entirely clear at this juncture, out where the twister—”

  Stella snapped the radio off. Well, hell, odds were that Goat’s borrowing of Neb was no more than a bit of conscientious attention to the damaged Prosper infrastructure. If Neb had just seen fit to mention the snack shack’s demise to Donna and reassure her that the only business they were conducting was of the now-what’ll-we-do-for-hot-dogs variety, Stella might still be back in that cozy nest of blankets, watching SpongeBob with Tucker. Just like a man to leave out the key details—even the good ones were often beset by flaws that seemed endemic to the male half of the population.

  Still, she was more than halfway to the fairgrounds, and Stella figured she might as well check things out. She went to work on her egg-and-jelly sandwich—which was actually less terrible than she expected—and picked up her pace as she hit the long open stretch on Clayton Road. That she was driving roughly parallel to the meandering trail the twister had taken was occasionally evident when she spotted an uprooted and tossed section of fencing or tree with its roots in the air, but thankfully this part of its journey, at any rate, had gone mostly overland through soybean and corn fields, leaving farmhouses and barns and silos and trucks sitting in pretty much the same spots they occupied before the storm.

  As Stella came up on the fairgrounds, she could see what Don had been talking about; the big New Century Pavilion, a giant shedlike structure erected in honor of the arrival of the twenty-first century, had divested itself of at least a third of its roof, as though it had indulged in a powerful sneeze. Shingles lay on the ground like sprinkles on a cupcake, and here and there the sun shone through the top of the building.

  The big steel gates at the front of the grassy parking field had been left open, and Stella drove over fresh ruts, following the trail to where Goat had parked his department-issue Charger up near the front of the field. sawyer county sheriff de partment was stenciled on the side of the car in spiffy right-tilting lettering, in an all-business font that implied a law enforcement team that brooked no nonsense.

  Parked next to Goat’s car was Prosper’s other departmental patrol vehicle, a slightly less-well-cared-for version used by Ian and Mike, Goat’s deputies.

  Stella was a little surprised to see that the whole crew had turned out for the occasion. A single blown-over structure, even one as beloved as the snack shack, didn’t seem to justify the presence of more than one small-town lawman.

  The only other car on the lot was Neb’s pickup, a well-kept two-tone
Dodge whose rear was festooned with several varieties of looped-ribbon magnets that showed his support for our troops and, if Stella recalled her earnest-cause-affiliation colors properly, breast cancer and colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and—somewhat surprisingly—gay pride.

  But as Stella got out of the Jeep and shook a pang out of her bum hip, another vehicle drove down the grassy lot at a spirited clip, jouncing across the uneven ground with a breezy disregard for the strain the terrain put on the shocks and, presumably, the passengers inside. Even from a distance, Stella could make out the custom aluminum enclosure welded on the back, and a frisson of anxiety zipped along her nerve endings: the thing was a tricked-out Ford F-Series in the navy blue favored by the Sawyer County mobile crime scene unit, a heavily customized roving lab dedicated to studying and sorting out the bouts of mayhem the residents of rural central Missouri occasionally wreaked upon each other.

  The truck’s presence did not bode well.

  Stella had seen this vehicle once or twice before, but generally its arrival prompted her departure. It wasn’t the sort of thing a perpetrator of violent crime generally likes to see around the same town where said criminal made a habit of hiding her evidence.

  Generally, the crime scene bunch stayed close to their home base in Fayette, but they were always happy to oblige when the county’s outposts needed the kind of crime-solving firepower that a sleepy community like Prosper couldn’t justify.

  To wit: homicide. Yep, it generally meant that some schmo was having a very bad day when the Fayette crew blew into town. Showing up here at the fairgrounds meant bad news for the victim of whatever crime had merited a call to the county seat.

  Stella walked a little faster as the vehicle did a precise, sweeping three-point turn and parked nose-to-nose with Goat’s vehicle. If she had to, she’d pretend not to hear if anyone called out a greeting, in case they decided to ask what she was doing here, but Stella didn’t want to give anyone reason to stop her from seeing Neb.

  By the time she crossed the landscaped berm separating the lot from the back side of the aluminum bleachers that stretched out along the sides of the track, Stella was practically jogging. Before the unfortunate series of events that had landed her in the hospital, Stella was in the habit of taking several six- to ten-mile runs every week, alternating her pavement pounding with extended bouts with the Bowflex machine she’d taken over after Ollie’s passing. Her injuries had forced her to temporarily lay off the high-impact components of her regime, but her physical therapist had her doing yoga, a surprisingly pleasant discovery. In fact, after a couple months of hard work, Stella found that the various poses had toned entire stretches of flesh she’d long ago written off to permanent squishiness.

  Still, she missed the running, the mind-clearing benefits of loping along through quiet dawns with only her own thoughts for company. Now it felt good to stretch her legs, and as she rounded the end of the bleachers, she sped up to a full-scale run.

  She came to the enormous open track, the earth damp and frothed by the storm, and glanced over at the other side. What she saw brought her to a skidding halt, her feet in her rubber clogs flopping hard against the concrete walk.

  The other set of bleachers hadn’t disappeared, but it looked as though the twister had yanked it out of the ground, crunched it up in its whirling jaws, decided it didn’t care for the taste of aluminum, and rudely spit it back out.

  The damaged frame had collapsed a good twenty feet to the left of where it once stood, the supports sticking out at odd angles like some fourth-grader’s toothpick-and-glue model of the Saint Louis arch that had been jumped on by a pesky little brother with a grudge.

  Behind the ruined bleachers, where the snack shack had hunkered along with a scattering of picnic tables, was a pile of rubble and a small knot of people. Swaths of white-painted wood siding lay scattered like torn cardboard. Broken chunks of the Formica counter were half-submerged in mud and debris. A few long two-by-sixes lay at the edge of the mess, almost as though they’d been stacked there by some particularly ambitious citizen who even now was getting started on repairs.

  Here and there were scattered bits and pieces of the shack’s contents. The popcorn machine, its glass in broken shards, lay upended twenty feet away. Waxed paper soda cups were everywhere, almost like giant confetti playfully sprinkled by the departing storm. The sign, which used to read candy nachos soft drinks ice cream had disappeared except for a jagged section that read simply dy nach, a phrase that struck Stella, in her dazed state, as vaguely Germanic.

  Clustered around the foundation were Goat—looking smart in his yellow department-issue windbreaker and pressed khakis, a pair of worn hiking boots his only concession to the conditions—and his deputies, and Neb Donovan.

  Neb and Mike Scholl sat on an overturned cabinet that served as a makeshift bench. Their expressions were hangdog, their complexions on the gray side of pale, and their clothes were streaked with dirt. They had the air of a couple of fraternity boys who’d come home from a drunken evening only to find themselves locked out, and woken up hungover after a few hours’ sleep in the bushes.

  At least, Stella thought, Neb couldn’t be guilty of anything too egregious, since the members of the Prosper Sheriff’s department were paying him little mind.

  Ian had his hands jammed into the pockets of his own windbreaker, which was not an official part of the uniform but rather an ancient-looking gold varsity letter jacket with black sleeves and an embroidered Missouri University Tiger.

  Goat was talking into his cell phone and staring into what looked like a sizable hole in the shack’s foundation. Stella was confused by the hole, because even a three-point tornado like the prior afternoon’s wouldn’t be able to dig up solid concrete. As she got closer, however, she realized that the hole was the result of one of the structure’s steel girders being ripped out of the foundation. When the shack blew over, the force of the building being wrenched free had caused the post to come out, cracking and bursting the concrete into which it had been set. Clots of concrete still clung to its base, giving it the look of an upended tree with its roots exposed.

  Goat turned toward Stella when she was twenty feet away, and his expression did a funny little presto-change-o. He’d had the focused grimace he tended to get whenever events presented him with a problem he couldn’t immediately fix. It made him look smart. And dedicated. In a hot, don’t-mess-with-me kind of way.

  Stella, who had spent the last few years avoiding encounters with Goat in anything that might be considered a professional capacity, had nonetheless been desperate enough to ask for his help several times. There was the time one of her clients went missing, and Stella got the Sheriff’s department to join in the cross-county hunt. Just a few months earlier, she asked for Goat’s help when Tucker was taken. And it was Goat who she called just before she passed out from blood loss when things went seriously south.

  Still, it was a delicate thing, bringing in the law when you were working at what technically might be described as cross purposes. Stella preferred to view their efforts as complementary—the yin and yang of holistic justice. But sticklers might have a little trouble with the differences in their methods.

  For instance, while Stella and Chrissy had been fighting the ugly underbelly of the mob presence in rural central Missouri, circumstances necessitated a certain amount of unregistered firearms and illegal searching and breaking and entering. Goat and his deputies, on the other hand, focused on the standard aboveboard chores like interviewing persons of interest and canvassing neighborhoods for witnesses and collecting evidence.

  It all worked out, in the end. Stella wasn’t great with details. And paperwork? Forget it. So it was all to the good that while she was helping the bad guys reap what they’d sown, there were other folks focused on keeping the evidentiary trail pristine.

  When Goat was on the job, the closer he got to the source of the wrongdoing, the more his loose-limbed, easygoing charm got smartened up and tu
rned into a dangerous-edged determination that, no matter how many times Stella tried to deny it, gave her a knockdown thrill. While on the case, Sheriff Goat Jones was a tall-standing, oath-upholding, brook-no-nonsense embodiment of the long arm of Missouri law.

  And all wrapped up in those snug-fitting khakis and mirrored sunglasses, to boot.

  Stella noted the way Goat held the phone to his ear: his muscular arm, bent at the elbow, positively strained against the sleeve, which had evidently not been tailored for a man who enjoyed kayaking around the Ozarks every chance he got, building up big rock-hard biceps. And those trousers—ordered extra-long, no doubt, for Goat’s lanky build—she appreciated the sharp knife-edge crease and the smart, tailored cuffs, but what she really dug was the excellent view of his nice, tight rear whenever he turned away from her. There was every reason to believe that his butt—legs, too—were every bit as well-maintained as those arms.

  The only problem was—as she’d discovered last night—the goods on display weren’t actually available. No, they were pre-owned; and if Brandy wasn’t spinning tall tales, still off the table by reason of a previous legally binding situation.

  Stella’s cheeks flamed at the thought. She felt betrayed. Or, at the very least, bamboozled and underinformed. She didn’t care to be taken advantage of on a good day, but when she’d squeezed her midsection into an uncomfortable girdle—more specifically, a Spanx Hide & Sleek Hi-Rise Panty with Thong Back—when she’d endured her daughter’s sinus-searing, scalp-burning, double-process hair color—when she’d popped open a brand-new tube of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara in Blackest Black—well, on such a day she found it particularly galling.

  While Stella covered the last of the distance to the little group gathered around the wreckage of the snack shack, her emotions running their complicated gauntlet, Goat flipped his phone shut and slipped it back into the holster on his broad, shiny black belt. Neb looked up at Stella, but barely seemed to register her presence—if he recognized her at all, it wasn’t clear from his unfocused gaze. Mike gave her a weak little wave.