Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4)

by Nick Pirog

  I didn’t acknowledge I was or was not this Prescott fellow.

  “I’m Mark Jones with Hershey and Associates,” the man said. Mark was fortyish and trim.

  “You look a little old to be selling candy bars,” I told him.

  “Hershey and Associates the law firm.”

  “So, no Mr. Goodbars?”

  He ignored me.

  Sometimes this is best.

  He did say, “Our firm represents the estate of Harold D. Humphries.”

  My throat constricted at the sound of Harold’s name, a python tightening around my Adam’s apple like a vice.

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  I sidestepped and he entered. Still dazed, I led him to the kitchen. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you want something to drink?”

  He declined.

  “I would offer you some waffles, but I’m down to my last six boxes.”

  He seemed slightly thrown by this statement and shook his head. He set a briefcase on the kitchen island and snapped it open. He said, “Your name came up in the will.”

  My eyebrows jumped. “Really?”

  My first thought was that it had something to do with my mother, maybe her birth certificate or some baby pictures or some other memorabilia.

  Mark the Lawyer handed me a piece of paper. After quickly skimming it, I gazed up.

  “You had no idea?” he asked.

  “No…I mean, no.” I shook my head. “Why didn’t he give this to his kids? Why me?”

  Mark shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But, if you don’t want it, I’m sure they will. Those two have been calling nonstop for the last forty-eight hours trying to get their hands on the will.”

  Harold had a son and a daughter. The daughter was somewhere out east and the son down in Portland. In all the times I visited Harold, easily more than a hundred, I never encountered either of them. I once asked Harold if it would be okay if I got in touch with them, as they were technically my aunt and uncle.

  “You don’t want none of that,” was all he said.

  As far as inheritances went, Harold had worked for Boeing for nearly forty years. He never discussed his finances with me, but I assumed he had some money stashed away.

  Looking down at the paper a second time, I said, “I can’t believe this is still in the family. He never mentioned it.”

  “Well, it’s yours now,” Mark said with a grin.

  It was the farm Harold grew up on in Missouri.

  It belonged to him.

  And now, it belonged to me.

  I knew a bit about the probate process from when my parents died, but Mark the Lawyer explained things to me like I was a seven-year-old with a learning disability.

  I listened politely, but my thoughts kept wandering to the farm. Harold had told dozens of stories about growing up on the farm in Missouri, each story more Rockwellian than the last. Waking up at the break of dawn to milk the cow. Cleaning out the chicken coop. Feeding the pigs. Skipping school during the fall harvest.

  For my thirty-fifth birthday a few months earlier, my sister sent me a couple of coloring books. When I first opened the package, I thought it was a gag gift, another of my sister’s hilarious pranks. Turned out, she was serious. Evidently, adult coloring books were all the rage.

  The coloring books sat unopened for many weeks, but then one day I started flipping through one. Then I started coloring. It’s hard to admit, but for the next week all I did was color.

  My favorite of all the pictures was a farm scene. Barn, tractor, fence with a rooster, a cow, a horse, a couple chickens. I was so proud of it that I hung it on the refrigerator.

  I found myself glancing in the direction of the picture as Mark continued to prattle on. I think he could sense my preoccupation and attempted to wrap it up. “Anyhow, it will take a few months until the property is legally yours.”

  I nodded, then asked, “Do you think his kids will contest the will?”

  “Possibly, but the will is ironclad. They won’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “How much did they each get?”

  “The nursing home bills and the property taxes on the farm cut into his nest egg some, but after everything is squared away, they’ll each get a nice chunk.”

  “And the farm?” I asked.

  He smirked as if to say, there it is.

  I was tempted to tell Mark that my parents had left my sister and me a sizable inheritance, enough money to go see Hamilton every day for the rest of our lives.

  I didn’t.

  “One point four million,” he said. “And that’s low. In the late eighties, early nineties, Harold probably could have gotten two million for it.”

  “When did Harold inherit it?”

  “His father passed away in 1985. His mother and both his sisters were already dead. Neither sister had any offspring.”

  I nodded.

  It appeared our interaction was over and Mark made his way toward the door. He took down my cell phone number and promised to keep me updated on any developments.

  As he was grabbing his umbrella, I asked, “Do you know if anyone is living on the farm right now?”

  “No one legally. Harold rented the land out from 1985 until the early 2000s, but no one has been there for over a decade.” He gazed at me, then asked, “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no reason,” I lied.

  I’d never been to the Midwest.

  I was born in Seattle and spent the better part of twenty-six years there. When my parents died, Lacy, my kid sister, was a junior in high school. The next year, she got a full athletic scholarship to Temple—she was a star swimmer—and the two of us moved to Philadelphia.

  Job-wise, the move couldn’t have come at a better time. As a second-year detective with the Seattle Police Department, I beat a suspect to within an inch of his life—don’t worry, he deserved every last kick, punch, and purple nurple—which resulted in the city being sued for $7 million. To complicate matters, I slammed my partner’s face into his locker when he defended the scumbag.

  Sorry, Ethan.

  R.I.P.

  I thought these two events should have resulted in me getting a promotion, possibly even my own TV show, but instead, I was sent packing.

  While in Philadelphia, I began consulting with the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit helping them track down several serial killers and even cracking a few cold cases. Everything was going great until one day when Lacy got dizzy at swim practice. Two weeks later, the verdict was in: multiple sclerosis.

  The day my parents died was hard. That day was harder.

  A year later, Lacy and I ended up in Maine.

  Lacy revitalized her spirit and I, well, I chased a serial killer, got shot twice, fell off a cliff, drowned, then died. But like Jon Snow, I came back from the dead.

  The case in Maine put me on the map. I couldn’t go ten feet without someone telling me I looked like that douchebag detective on the cover of Time magazine. That’s because I was the douchebag detective on the cover of Time magazine.

  Two years ago, Lacy moved to France, and I moved back home to Seattle.

  Wolves.

  Just saying.

  So, I’d done a good job of straddling the United States. West Coast, East Coast, then West Coast. But I’d never been to the Midwest.

  According to Google, the drive was two thousand miles and would take me thirty-one hours.

  Years later, someone would ask me why I drove there that day. And I would tell them the truth. I was all out of coloring books.

  Chapter Two

  About the time a small ceremony for Harold was being held at a church opposite the nursing home, I was stopping at a gas station in eastern Washington to fill up my dad’s fifteen-year-old Range Rover. I bought a blue Powerade, a couple bags of Cheetos, some beef jerky, and two Mr. Goodbars, the latter of which I was craving since thinking Mark the Lawyer had been there to sell me candy bars.

  I went through a half dozen radio stations as I drove east
on I-90 through Idaho and into Montana. I slept in my car at a truck stop in South Dakota for a few hours then continued south on I-29 through Iowa and into the flat lands, prairies, and plains of Nebraska. The landscape changed little over the course of the next ten hours: wispy yellow grass, cows, and miles and miles of open road.

  Once into Missouri, I left the interstate on the outskirts of Kansas City and headed east on Highway 36. The flat lands slowly gave way to lush, green hills and copses of leafy, green trees. White clouds stretched thin and sat low on the horizon, further evidence of the increasingly moist and humid air.

  It was another three and a half hours until I reached the fertile soil of Audrain County, located in north central Missouri—forty miles north of the Missouri river, ninety miles west of the Mississippi—and home to the small town where Harold grew up.

  Tarrin, MO.

  Population: 2,153.

  I’d seen my fair share of small towns, mostly when I was living in Maine. But Maine was peculiar. It was a tourist destination and many of those small towns were overrun with New Yorkers, Bostonians, Europeans, and others during the summer months. During the off-season, the populations of those towns dwindled, sometimes down into the hundreds.

  Small-town Middle America would be starkly different. There wouldn’t be a tourist in sight.

  I exited the highway toward Tarrin, drove for a handful of miles, then followed a sign to Main Street. It was a late Sunday afternoon and there wasn’t much activity.

  Main Street was wide with diagonal parking on both sides. The street glistened from a quick rain that had passed through some time earlier. Tan, red, and gray two-story buildings ran the length of an entire block. Second stories were peppered with thin rectangular windows gazing down on shingled overhangs.

  A few cars, but mostly trucks, filled the diagonal parking in front of a potpourri of shops: a real estate office, a live bait shop, a True Value, a law firm, a barbershop, a tailor, an art gallery, an ice cream shop, an accounting firm, a repair shop, a bookstore, a vet clinic, an insurance office. Many of the businesses had flags hanging in their windows, some the American flag, some a green and yellow flag with a tiger on it, some the St. Louis Cardinals’ flag.

  It was, in a word, charming.

  I continued through a traffic light.

  I passed a community center, a post office, a fire station, and a police department. There were two squad cars parked outside the Tarrin Police Department, and I wondered how many officers it took to police a town of two thousand. I guessed four full-time officers, five tops. This was a far cry from the nearly fifteen hundred it took to police Seattle. Then again, if Tarrin was anything like the small towns I experienced in Maine, they were mostly dealing with petty crime, drugs, DUIs, and maybe the occasional domestic dispute, not the ghastly murders and gang activity that plagued the big cities.

  To the right was a high school with a football field in the far distance. There was a sign out front that read “Go Tigers,” which would explain the flags I saw earlier.

  Just past the high school were two churches. The first, Lutheran. The second, Baptist. They were both set on sprawling manicured lawns, but still more or less across the street from each other. I imagined the two groups standing on their respective lawns, dressed in their Sunday best, judging each other from across the way. I mean, I don’t think it was like the Yankees and Red Sox, but there had to be a touch of rivalry there.

  We have the best choir.

  No, we have the best choir.

  Past the churches, there was another block of businesses: a feed store, a bike shop, a Sonic Drive-In, a bank, a gas station, a liquor store, a fitness center, a motel, a grocery store, a bowling alley, a dry cleaner, a dance studio, a small hospital.

  After the next traffic light, small houses began popping up. I took a left on a side street and drove slowly. The houses were small and sturdy. There were no fences, the yards running together in a melting pot of leafy trees, well-tended lawns, and children’s toys. The vehicle of choice was a truck, with an overwhelming amount of Fords. There were a few sedans, even one Prius, so it wasn’t against city ordinance to own a foreign car.

  I found my way back to Main Street then continued on. The Humphries Farm was eight miles from town. I followed the directions I’d printed off the internet, taking a turn onto County Road 34, then another on County Road 52.

  One farm led into another, tractors moving through corduroyed fields of budding corn, soybeans, or the like. Opposite one of the farms was a small lake. Behind the lake was a giant house. Immediately, I recognized both from Harold’s stories.

  I pulled the Range Rover over on the side of the road and rolled down the window.

  The King family lived in the mansion in the 1940s. The Kings owned nearly all the land in the area, and Harold’s father leased his land from them. The lake was the one Harold jumped in to save a girl from drowning. That was how he first met Elizabeth, the young woman he would later marry, and who would give birth to my mother.

  I’m not sure if it were thoughts of my mother, or Harold’s death, or guilt for having missed Harold’s funeral, or lack of sleep, or the eight Mr. Goodbars I’d eaten in the last thirty-six hours, but I felt my eyes begin to well with tears.

  I wiped the tears with the back of my hand, then glanced at my reflection in the rearview mirror. The extra weight had given my face a certain roundness, my angular jaw hidden beneath a thick sweater of fat and stubble. My eyes, a grayish-blue, were bloodshot from thirty hours of driving, and my finger-length brown hair was matted and oily.

  Someone had once described me as looking like Matthew McConaughey after a bad car accident. Whatever that means.

  Anyhow, it took me a long minute to compose myself, then pull the car back onto the road. I passed several more farms before coming to a dirt road leading through a broken gate. A family of crows were perched on the ramshackle fencing. Tall, unkempt grass and weeds led to a faint farmhouse in the distance.

  “This must be it,” I muttered.

  I drove through a large puddle then continued toward the house. Unlike the other farms, whose plots were neatly sectioned off, the Humphries Farm was wild and roaming. It was an adolescent with no guardian and no curfew. Tall grasses freckled with little yellow flowers extended a half mile in every direction.

  Halfway to the house, I stopped the car and squinted into the lowering sun. There was a tractor out in the field, but unlike the others, this one wasn’t moving. It was long deceased, engulfed by the very field it once plowed.

  Mark the Lawyer said the farm had been uninhabited for the past ten years, but it looked like no one had lived there for thirty.

  A road snaked between a series of large trees then gave way to a small farmhouse. The farmhouse was two stories, white clapboard. The paint was peeling, leaving the dull gray of the beaten timber beneath exposed. The roof was a checkerboard of black squares where a quarter of the rain-battered shingles had fallen off.

  To the house’s left was a giant oak. Having gone untrimmed for several decades, like a monster uncurling its fingers, the branches reached precariously over the house. Behind the tree was a tall, cylindrical, gray brick structure, which was either a silo or a guard tower. To the right of the house, maybe fifty feet away, was what I presumed to be a chicken coop. Farther right, a football field away, was a barn. Both the coop and the barn were the same white clapboard, the same peeling paint, the same underlying grayness.

  Unlike my picture on the fridge, there was a lack of color. Everything was muted. Everything acid-washed. Everything the color of an approaching thunderstorm.

  I should have taken that as a sign.

  A sign of things to come.

  Chapter Three

  I opened the door of the car and stepped out, sinking shin-deep into the tall overgrowth. My black T-shirt stuck to my back, and I didn’t know if it was from the long drive, the fatness, or the dense Missouri air.

  I trudged through the tall grass to the fro
nt porch where two rocking chairs sat in disrepair. I wondered if they dated as far back as Harold, wondered if Harold sat in one of those chairs, rocked back and forth, drank lemonade, and whittled something while he listened to his beloved St. Louis Cardinals on the radio.

  Bugs of all makes and sizes skittered up and down the wooden porch and railings.

  “Don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you,” I told the bugs, hoping they would share our understanding with the rest of their tribes.

  A screen door was held open three inches by an invisible force. I pushed it back and tried the door. Locked. I knocked a couple times. Part of me expected someone to open the door. Someone with half their teeth, a shotgun, and a bottle of moonshine. But since it wasn’t 1890, this didn’t happen.

  I pressed my shoulder against the door and gave it a nudge. It held firm. I pondered kicking it down but decided I should first explore my alternatives.

  I made my way around the tall oak and to the back of the house. The back door was also locked. I continued around, peeking through several of the windows. Most were opaque, fogged by decades of dust and grime, and in the few that had areas of visibility, the view was blocked by curtains. I tried to open several windows, but none budged.

  Back at the front door, I took a couple deep breaths then kicked it with my foot.

  The door didn’t waver.

  Farmhouse: 1. Thomas: 0.

  I shook my leg out then went the shoulder route.

  Blamo.

  Same result.

  Farmhouse: 2. Thomas: 0.

  I walked to the Range Rover, popped the hatch, pulled out a tire iron, and said, “You have messed with the wrong guy.”

  I should mention I was slightly delirious.

  I needed food.

  And sleep.

  On my way back to the house, I noticed one of the second-story windows was open a few inches. I also noticed it wasn’t all that far from where the tall oak fed into the roof.