by Nick Pirog
“Nothing. It’s from my personal supply. But if you crash your car in a ditch, you didn’t get them from me.”
“Deal.”
She told me to get my pigs and go.
Back in the car with the piglets, who were now both sitting on my lap, I realized a couple things.
First, the pills Sarah gave me were not Hydrocodone. They were Tylenol. And second, the flowers on the counter. They were yellow.
Yellow tulips.
I left Pink and Tan in the car when I returned to the farm. Then I spent ten minutes making sure there weren’t any more piglets in the hay loft.
Hey, little piggies.
Come here, little piggies.
Are there any more little piggies hiding in the hay?
Satisfied that I’d saved all the little piggies I could for the day, I made my way back to the car and opened the front door. Both piglets were sitting on the driver’s seat. Pink was sitting down, gazing up at me with her big brown eyes. Her nose was pink with a black ink spot, and she wiggled it from side to side. Tan was lying on his back, glaring up at me with as much disinterest as he could muster.
“What am I going to do with you guys?”
The logical answer was to put them in the pigpen, but the small fence would first need to be repaired.
“I suppose I could put you guys in the chicken coop?” I said, thinking out loud. “That might work.”
The final option was to lock them in the barn, but there was an opening somewhere I would first need to block. Also, I didn’t want them in there with their dead mother. Speaking of whom, I would need to find a way to get down from the loft at some point.
I let out a long exhale and said, “Well, I suppose you can come into the house with me for tonight.”
I had to feed them every few hours anyhow.
I grabbed a piglet in each arm and carried them into the house. I set them down, then went back outside to the car to grab the bag of goodies Sarah had given me. For a brief moment, I thought about the yellow tulips.
This was far from an assurance that Sarah was the one who left the flowers at the Save-More memorial, but it did give probable cause.
But who’s to say there wasn’t a sale on yellow tulips somewhere and half the town had vases filled with the same exact flowers this very moment?
I would have to look into it further.
Back inside, the piglets were roaming around, sniffing this and sniffing that. I put out a water bowl, and they both took a few cautious laps.
They both gazed up at me as if to say, “This isn’t as good as that other stuff.”
I checked the time on my cell phone.
“Another hour and you guys can eat again.”
I made myself some food, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then swallowed down three of the Tylenol.
I grabbed a couple pillows from upstairs, pushed the oval coffee table off the rug in the living room, and lay down. Pink immediately ran over and sniffed me and licked my hand. She rolled over on her side and I tickled her tummy.
A short time later, Tan came over. He was a bit more hesitant, but after a while, he too gave me a couple licks.
For the next hour, I skimmed the printouts on how to care for the piglets. I looked at Tan and said, “Did you know you guys don’t sweat?”
That’s why the mud in a pigpen was so important, it’s what the pigs used to regulate their temperature.
“Sorry, this place doesn’t have any A/C,” I told them.
At 5:00 p.m., I fed the piglets.
Tan let me hold him like a baby and suckled away.
We were bonding.
Then I took them outside where, to my utter amazement, both of them went potty.
Back in the living room, I lay back down on the ground. My body was devastated, and I was drained from the day’s events.
Ten minutes later, I was asleep.
When I woke up, both piglets were snuggled into my side.
I checked the time on my cellphone.
11:51 p.m.
I’d slept for almost seven hours. I grabbed two more bottles of formula and fed the hungry pigs.
How does that taste?
Oh, you guys were hungry.
Come on, Pink, just a little more.
Dang it, Tan, that’s your sister’s.
I shook my head, realizing I couldn’t call them Pink and Tan forever. I picked Tan up and gave him a good once-over. He was bald except for a whisper of hair on his forehead. Plus, he was kind of cranky. Just like him.
“I christen you Harold.”
I set him down and picked up Pink.
“Now you, my dear.”
She was so delicate.
And sweet.
I racked my brain for a name.
“Trisket?”
“Latifah?”
“Spammy?”
“Little Heidi Klum?”
“Jennifer?”
“Mable?”
“Piglet?”
“Beyoncé?”
“Ruth?”
“Molly?”
“Polly?”
“Dolly?”
“Tina?”
“Winnie?”
“Sara?”
“Sara Lee?”
“Pound Cake?”
“Mindy?”
“Cindy?”
“Destiny?”
“Hermione?”
Nothing fit.
I looked at the phone.
It was 11:59 p.m.
Just one minute left in the month of May.
I smiled.
That was it.
I held up Pink and said, “You will be Miss May.”
Chapter Six
The first day of June was a Wednesday.
After eating breakfast and feeding the piglets, I drove into town. There were a couple of errands that needed doing. I needed to stop by the feed and supply store to buy more formula for Harold and May. I needed to get some lumber from the hardware store so I could repair the pigpen fence. I needed to buy some more Tylenol from the supermarket to numb my aching body. But first, I needed to get on the internet.
The Tarrin Public Library was across the street from the high school. It was an aging red brick building, two stories tall. There was a small parking lot, which at 11:00 a.m., was half-full.
I parked and walked inside.
There were a few people sitting at tables reading and another few on laptops. Like all libraries, the lighting was low and there was a pervasive smell of carpet deodorizer. There were a few computer terminals against the back wall, and I settled in behind one.
I tried to log onto the internet, but I was unsuccessful. A young man next to me informed me that I needed to first have a library card and then I could create a login.
Ten minutes later, I was the proud owner of a Tarrin Public Library card.
I logged onto the internet and searched “Save-More murders,” then skimmed the same article Lacy read to me over the phone the previous day. I found the list of the victims—Peggy Bertina, Will Dennel, Neil Felding, Tom Lanningham, Odell McBride, Victoria Page—and looked at their pictures and read their bios.
Nothing jumped out at me until the fourth one.
Tom Lanningham.
He looked to be in his fifties, with receding gray hair and thick glasses. His bio read: Tom Lanningham was fifty-eight years old. He was a veterinarian for almost twenty years, all of them in his hometown of Tarrin. He is survived by his daughter, Sarah.
Was Sarah, Sarah Lanningham?
It would make sense, the age seemed right, and maybe she’d followed in her father’s footsteps.
This was more circumstantial evidence Sarah was the one who left the flowers at the memorial. Of course, in this technological age, it would be easy enough to verify the daughter Sarah was also the veterinarian Sarah.
I’d been in such a rush with the piglets that I hadn’t noticed the name of the vet clinic.
I searched “Dr. Sarah Lanningham.”
>
A moment later, I clicked on the link for the Big and Small Vet Hospital. The website had a picture of Sarah. I found myself grinning at the sight of her. In the picture she was wearing the same white jacket and holding a kitten.
The mystery of the yellow tulips solved, I returned to the article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At the bottom of the article, there was a blurb about the killer.
His name was Lowry Barnes. He was twenty-nine years old, married, a father of two. He was a convicted felon for burglary, with minor offenses for DUI and drug possession. He did a couple small stints at the county jail then a two-year prison sentence for the burglary. He was paroled in early 2012 and worked at the Save-More for six months. Then he got himself fired. Two weeks later, he would exact his revenge.
Three agencies had been involved in the investigation: the Tarrin Police Department, the Audrain County Sheriff’s Department, and the Missouri Bureau of Investigation.
That being said, there didn’t appear to be much of an investigation. There was no question who did it or why he did it.
According to the article, surveillance footage clearly showed Lowry Barnes entering the store with a gun raised, then rounding up his victims and marching them to the back of the store and into the freezer bay. Lowry Barnes was found an hour after the murders, parked on the side of the road. Overcome with guilt, he’d taken his own life.
I pondered searching the internet for the surveillance video or perhaps photos of the crime scene, but it didn’t seem necessary. The case was what we refer to in the business as “open and shut.”
“I need some baby formula for some piglets,” I told the guy stacking large bags outside the feed and supply store. “Do you guys sell that sort of thing here?”
The man dropped the bag he was holding, put both hands on his back, and said, “Sure do.”
He was wearing a green John Deere hat that I suspected had resided on his shaggy gray hair for the better part of a decade. He waved me to follow him inside the large store and said, “Baby piglets, huh? Where’s the sow?”
“She is currently decomposing in my barn.”
His eyes widened, and I gave him a clipped version.
“Miracle those little guys survived,” he said. “Can’t go more than a day without eating.”
I nodded.
“You thought about finding a surrogate?” he asked, making his way through the store to a refrigerated section.
“A what?”
“Another sow. They’re pretty good about letting other piglets join their litter. Course, every once in a while, they don’t take to it, and it can get ugly.”
I ran a simulation of a big mama pig going crazy when Harold and May tried to suckle on her teats. “I think I’ll stick with the formula for now.”
“Suit yourself, but make sure you’re givin’ those little piglets all the love in the world.” He grabbed me by the shoulder, his thick, callused fingers heavy and strong. “You’re their mama now.”
“Don’t worry,” I said with a laugh. “If anything, they’re getting too much attention.”
The three of us had slept on the floor together. I woke up with May tucked into my side and Harold between my legs.
Once at the refrigerator, the man showed me my two options for piglet formula—sorry, Proprietary Sow’s Milk Replacer. I chose the more expensive one. Only the best for my piglets.
Walking back up front, the man asked, “You the guy who bought the Humphries place?”
“Yeah, though I didn’t exactly buy it. It was willed to me.”
“By Harold?”
I smiled. “You knew him?”
“Not really, but I met him at his dad’s funeral way back when.”
He told a quick anecdote about Harold’s father. How Harold’s father was the best farmer he’d ever known. How, when he was little, Harold’s father would hire him to help with the harvest. “That there is some of the best land in all of Audrain County.”
I raised an eyebrow. “It’s a glorified landfill.”
“I’ll admit it doesn’t look too good these days, but it’s all about the soil, and that’s the best soil I’ve come across in fifty years.”
I paid him for the formula, and he asked, “You thinking about planting anything this year?”
“I hadn’t given it much thought.”
“Well, you should.” He grabbed a pen and scribbled on the back of my receipt. “Call this number if you’re thinking about getting that farm back in shape. Guy I try to throw some work.”
I stuffed the receipt in my pocket and told him I would think about it.
Sitting at the last stoplight headed out of town, I rolled up the windows and cranked the A/C.
In the three days I’d been in Tarrin, the air had grown incrementally warmer and stickier each day. If it kept at this rate, by the end of the summer it would be like walking through molasses.
The light turned green, and I gently eased down the gas pedal. There was a hundred dollars’ worth of lumber tied down to the top of the Range Rover—which a guy from the hardware store loaded for me as my ribs and shoulder were still too sore to do any heavy lifting—and it made a soft hum against the headwind.
Main Street turned into County Road 34, and the speed limit changed from thirty-five to fifty. There wasn’t another car on the road, and I sped up to sixty. The humming quickly escalated into a violent rattle, and I slowed back down. But it was too late.
I was so preoccupied with the lumber, I failed to notice the cop car parked on the side of the road.
In my rearview mirror, I watched as the Tarrin Police Department cruiser spit up a cloud of dust, fell in behind me, then flipped its siren. I let out a long exhale and pulled to the side of the road. I rolled the window down, the Missouri afternoon at equilibrium with the cool synthetic atmosphere for half a second before pressing in entirely.
In the side mirror, I watched the door of the cruiser open and a man step out. The officer was small, a head shorter than me, with blond hair curling from beneath a Tarrin PD ball cap.
“Howdy,” he said as he came even with the window. He had two days of stubble and a defined butt chin.
“Howdy,” I returned.
“You know why I pulled you over?”
“Because I’m not driving a Chevy?”
He laughed, revealing flawless teeth, and said, “Naw, we don’t do that here. Unless you’re driving one of those little Minis, then it’s mandatory.”
He seemed like a nice enough guy, and I gave a chuckle.
“You were going a little fast back there.”
“I was trying to get the wood on top of the car to fly off and go all over the road.”
He didn’t laugh. He did say, “I clocked you going fifty-seven. Speed limit is fifty.”
“Right.”
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
It’s the way he said it that tipped me off. A little too matter-of-fact. It’s a slippery slope, asking questions you already know the answer to. Pulling me over wasn’t a coincidence. He was waiting for me.
“I’m headed to the Humphries Farm.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, keeping up the charade. “What business you got there?”
“It’s my farm.” My tone was a touch less friendly.
“Yours? You buy it?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
His eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”
“It’s not much of your business.”
He glared at me for a long second, then said, “License and registration.”
I handed them over.
He looked at my license, then he looked at my registration. He handed my registration back and said, “This is an old Blockbuster receipt.”
“Oh, sorry. This is my dad’s old car. I thought that was the registration.”
Hahahahaha.
I stuck my hand in the glove compartment and rooted around. “Is this it?”
He glanced at it. “No, that’s another Bl
ockbuster receipt.”
“Sorry, they look the same.”
They do not.
I thought about handing him another of my father’s many old Blockbuster receipts filling the glove compartment, but Officer Tiny’s hand had moved dangerously close to the gun on his hip.
I found the registration and handed it over, and he walked back to his cruiser.
I gazed forward and pondered why Officer Tiny was waiting for me. Was it because I was the new kid on the block? Was this some sort of small town initiation? Did this happen to everyone or had he made special considerations for yours truly?
Officer Tiny returned and handed me back my license and registration.
If he did a comprehensive background check on me, he didn’t say. Though I had a feeling he already knew a thing or two about Thomas Dergen Prescott before he pulled me over.
“I’m gonna let you slide on the speeding today,” he said, forcing a smile. “You being new and all.”
“That’s awful kind of you, sir.” Sir came out suh.
He leaned down, his chin-ass where the window would have been, and said, “Can I give you a piece of advice, Thomas?”
I jutted out my chin, the international signal for let's hear it.
“Leave it alone,” he said.
Then he smacked the top of the Range Rover and walked back to his cruiser.
“This little piggy went to the bathtub,” I said, setting May in the two inches of warm water. She sat down on her rump and gave the water a couple licks. “And this little piggy went to the bathtub.” I picked up Harold and set him next to his sister. He looked down at the water, then back up at me, as if to say, “I don’t like this one bit. Not one bit.”
I squeezed some Johnson’s baby shampoo in my hand and began scrubbing the two of them. Drying them off, I set them on the bed and gave each of them a little piglet backrub. Then I fed them for the last time and took them outside to go to the bathroom.
Lying down in bed, the two little piglets smelling like heaven and snoring, I reminisced on the advice Officer Tiny had given.
Leave it alone.
There was only one thing he could be talking about.