Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (15 page)

He pushed back his hat and did what he could to get comfortable in the chair. “Aw, they didn’t have to go to all that trouble for me. I just came to visit with old friends and family and sing a few songs at the gym.”

“Which is why press releases were sent to every newspaper and radio station within a thousand miles?”

“To tell the truth, the media folks have gotten kinda tiresome since I won the Country Sound Award back in October for best original song. You hear about that?”

“Something to that effect.” I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell he was doing in the PD, his boots now resting on my desk, his grin as wide and white as a crescent moon, his eyes locked on mine like we were sharing some steamy secret. “How’d you escape all those fans milling around the parking lot at the bar?”

“Weren’t nothing to it. I cut around the back of the motel and across the field, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and stayed in the shadows until I got to your back door. I was awful glad the light was still on.” His tone implied the light in question had metaphorical implications.

“Lucky you,” I said levelly. I forced myself to withdraw to a more analytical perspective (yeah, sure I did) in an attempt to figure out why my stomach was in knots and my tongue hanging out. He wasn’t all that handsome. His mouth was too full and wide, and his eyes protruded slightly as if he had a hormone imbalance. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and deeper lines from incessant, lopsided grins. He was the cherub in the Christmas pageant, sincere and unaffected, oblivious to his impact on women. And I was Beverly Sills.

“So how come you’re still stuck here after all these years?” he asked. “Seems like you’d have gone off your rocker by now, unless you’re the kind who’s content to just sit in it out on the porch.”

“I moved away, went to college, got married, lived in Manhattan for a time, got divorced, and came back here to pull myself together again. It’s a temporary situation.”

“How long’s it been temporary?”

“Not all that long. It’s an undemanding job in an undemanding town, or at least it was until a few weeks ago. Long about noon yesterday the population doubled, and tomorrow the media alone will triple it.”

He laughed at my minor display of belligerence. “Whoa, you don’t think this was my idea, do you? I spent maybe three summers here before Aunt Adele got fed up and put me on a bus. I can still see her in a cloud of black smoke, shaking her fist and shrieking, ‘Good riddance!’ I hardly think of this place as my hometown, but I don’t call the shots. I’m nothing but a simple country boy who got lucky. I jes’ do what they tell me.”

“Do you have any relatives left in Little Rock?” I asked, thinking about my missing person case. I could have told him why I asked, but I was reluctant to take him into my confidence, which would lend veracity to his implication that we were dear old friends who’d simply missed the opportunity to become lovers. He seemed to have forgotten he’d been nothing but a greasy little voyeur.

“Not a one. My grandparents died a few years back, and their only surviving daughter sold everything and became a missionary in Africa or some place like that. Her bishop wrote and said she’d died of malaria, but I’d like to think she made a tasty supper for her congregation.”

“Then Adele Wockermann is your only living relative?”

“All that I know of. We’re supposed to go see her in the morning. Do you reckon I ought to take flowers and candy to perk the old girl up?”

“Like you did two years ago?” The grin dried up faster than a raindrop in the desert. “Whatta you talking about?”

I wasn’t any more inclined to explain the intricacies of the grapevine than I was to share confidences. “An aide at the home said something. You were here, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I came by to see how she was doin’. I’m surprised she remembered, that’s all.”

He was back to grinning, and I was trying to read his mind (if he had one) when he glanced out the window, gasped, and jerked his boots off the desk so hurriedly that he lost his balance and fell on the floor.

“Fans out there spotted me,” he said as he scuttled into the back room. “Great to see ya after all these years.” The back door banged.

“You, too,” I murmured. There were a few people wandering around outside, but none of them was paying any attention to the PD. The price of fame appeared to be paranoia. I locked up and went across the street, where Hammet sat on the landing outside my apartment.

He’d been getting bored, he explained as we got into my car, because nobody was doing anything interesting (i.e., flippin’ buses) and he’d been run out of the pool hall three times. Rather than learn why, I asked him about school and we discussed the sadly outdated philosophy of the public school system all the way to Hasty and then pulled into a vacant lot across the road from the Partridge house.

Lights were shining and half a dozen cars were parked in the driveway. I decided not to crash the party. Hammet was delighted to be on a stakeout, and after I’d dissuaded him from creeping up to the living room to peek through the window, we resumed our spirited discussion.

An hour or so later, several figures came out to the front porch. Kissing and hugging ensued. Then Patty May took a foil-covered plate from her mother, got into a small car, and drove down the road in the direction of Farberville. I waited a minute before falling in behind her. Hammet felt we ought to pull alongside her and aim a gun at her head, run her off the road, or at least shoot out her back tires, but I stayed as far back as I dared until we passed the airport and traffic picked up.

“There she is!” Hammet shouted, pounding the dashboard between bouts of hanging his head out the window. “Watch out fer that truck! That sumbitch! Cut him off!” He went back out the window to wave his fist at a truck the size of Rhode Island. “Hey, fuckhead, we kin arrest you!” Before I could stop him, he was in the back seat and hollering out the opposite side at a church van. Pale faces turned in horror.

Patty May exited at an intersection ablaze with neon signs. None of them read CITY PARK. She turned into the parking lot of one of the largest motels in Farberville and drove behind a row of yellow buses.

Cursing, I cut in front of several cars and took a speed bump hard enough to momentarily lose my grip on the steering wheel. Hammet whooped gleefully and almost climbed onto the roof of the car.

I had to stop at the last school bus as a group of teenagers emerged with suitcases, backpacks, pillows, sacks of provisions, and other vital paraphernalia. I finally eased through them and went around the corner. Parked cars lined both sides of a lot that seemed to stretch endlessly. Lights flashed and car doors slammed as families unloaded luggage and ice chests. Children dashed in front of me, clutching stuffed animals, and the balcony on the second story was as busy as a mall the day after Thanksgiving.

“Shit,” said my deputy as he scratched his head.

I drove slowly down the asphalt, searching for Patty May’s unprepossessing car amidst the bustle. We finally found it parked on the third side of the quadrangle, but Patty May was long gone.

“No problem,” I said. “We’ll ask at the desk.” I made him wait in the car and went inside the lobby, found the desk, and got a clerk’s attention long enough to request the manager. She was a thin woman with an expression that reminded me of Mrs. Twayblade. I showed her my badge, asked for Patty May Partridge’s room number, and sat down in the shade of a plastic rubber tree.

“No one here by that name,” she told me as she came out from behind the desk.

“Try Adele Wockermann.”

“Anyone else while I’m looking?” she asked. “We’re full, which means we have at least eight hundred guests. There’s a wedding in the Razorback Room and private Christmas parties in the Ozark Room and the Clinton Room. The high school kids have taken over the indoor pool and the hot tub, and we’re already getting complaints. I simply cannot hunt through the—”

“Adele Wockermann,” I said, spelling the last name for her.

She returned shortly and with a strained smile said, “There’s no one here registered under that name either.”

Temporarily foiled but not defeated, Hammet and I went to the movies.

“I am so sorry to keep you waiting, Ripley,” chirped Mrs. Jim Bob as she swung around the corner into the living room. She was momentarily startled when she saw who else was sitting there, but she was too uneasy to worry about it. “I do hope you two had a nice chat while I was on the telephone. What with one thing and another, I didn’t realize how late it was getting, so we’ll just have to wait until morning for our tour of the town. Jim Bob, I was thinking that our guests might enjoy a nice picnic supper. You go down to the SuperSaver deli and pick up some cold cuts and rolls, and I’ll whip up a batch of potato salad. I seem to think there’s most of an apple pie in the refrigerator, and it won’t take any time at all to make some fresh iced tea and a pot of coffee. How does that sound?” She put her hands on her hips and defied them to offer an argument. If either had, she might well have burst into tears, a most unbecoming rejoinder from a mayor’s wife.

“That sounds fine,” Ripley said, nodding faintly, preoccupied with what Jim Bob had told him and not sure how best to profit from it. “I’ll … uh, I’ll go knock on Katie’s door and let her know.” He was considering whom to blackmail as he went upstairs, which is why he failed to see the figure glide into a bedroom and close the door.

Jim Bob waited until Ripley was out of earshot, then rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Next year come winter we can take a vacation to one of those resorts where they bring you pastel drinks while you lie by the pool.”

“What in heaven’s name has gotten into you?” snapped Mrs. Jim Bob. “Here we’ve got a houseful of paying guests, supper to be served, disaster breathin’ down our necks in the morning—and you’re spouting nonsense. Exactly how are you planning to pay for this so-called vacation of ours?”

It hadn’t occurred to Jim Bob to take his wife along, the “we” having referred to himself and Malva, or whoever was deserving of his generosity when the time came (his manhood being significantly longer than his attention span). He pretended to consider her question, then said, “The shoppe’s gonna do real well now that Matt Montana’s here. Keswick was just telling me how well the souvenirs sell whenever they come to a town. Business has picked up at the SuperSaver, too, on account of all the campers.”

Mrs. Jim Bob could see the evasive flickering of his eyes, and she knew perfectly well that the two men hadn’t been discussing any upswing in the local economy. But she, like Ripley, was too preoccupied to do more than purse her lips at him for a moment before saying, “Come into the kitchen while I make a list. You can get a pint of coleslaw at the deli, too. I’ll serve it in one of my Tupperware bowls and the Nashville folks will never know the difference. Maybe I’ll see if Brother Verber would like to join us. He’d be real tickled to say the blessing in front of Miss Katie Hawk.”

Jim Bob was too relieved to suggest the old fart would be more tickled at the prospect of a free meal than at the opportunity to consecrate the coleslaw. Once he had the list in his hip pocket, he went whistling out the door, climbed in his truck, and was sipping bourbon and trying to recall which islands had topless beaches before he reached the brick pillars at the bottom of the driveway, which is why he failed to see the figure crouched in the shadows.

Mrs. Jim Bob put the water on to boil for the potatoes, then sat down at the breakfast table and called Brother Verber to invite him for supper—and to warn him that she’d had no choice but to initiate the contingency plan. They’d discussed it earlier and, after a bout of ardent prayer, had both agreed that lying to the media was an insignificant sin, if that.

When Brother Verber answered the telephone, she commenced to rattling off a description of the crisis, which is why she failed to see the figure skirt the oblong patches of lights on the back lawn and vanish into the darkness.

At the front of the parking lot of Matt’s Motel, the two newly appointed deputies leaned against the sawhorses and kept a vigilant watch for fans trying to sneak past them in order to peek through the windows of the bus. Earlier, it’d been kinda hairy, what with some high school girls gettin’ all sniffly, a couple of neckless farm boys with too much beer in their bellies demanding to meet Miss Katie Hawk, and a teary middle-aged couple who’d driven all the way from Berryville just to get Matt’s autograph because he reminded them of their deceased son. The man offered a twenty-dollar bill, but the deputies were aware of the perils of disobeying the chief, who’d been so testy earlier that one of them had made a crack about PMS. When she was well out of range, of course.

The only person with free access was Ruby Bee. She’d been miffed when Ripley told her not to disturb Matt and Lillian, that the bus had linens for the double bed, towels for the shower, and a tiny, well-stocked kitchenette. She’d have liked to see all that for herself (imagine such things on a bus!), but the curtains in the back were drawn together tight as a spinster’s knees. Even standing on her tiptoes way at the front and clutching the stub of the missing windshield wiper to keep her balance, she hadn’t seen so much as a twitch of movement inside.

The men in #4 and #5 were the sorriest things she’d met in all her born days. They looked alike (scruffy), talked alike (filthy), and smelled like the end product of Raz’s illicit labor (eightyproof goat piss). At least they wouldn’t need to go looking for him any time soon; their rooms contained enough whiskey to stay drunk as a fiddler’s bitch for a week. Leaving a stack of towels outside #4, she headed back to see how Joyce was holding up behind the bar.

“You boys think you could find a use for some burgers and coffee?” she asked the deputies. They granted that they sure could, and she was trying to keep it straight in her mind who wanted sweet onions and mustard and who wanted mayonnaise and cheese, which is why she and the deputies—all three of them—failed to see the figure slip out of the bus and disappear into the night.