Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 08 (3 page)

"Write and sell books about it. They also charge money to lecture about it to vast audiences of very gullible people who would much rather hear about little green vivisectionists than mangy, malnourished dogs."

"I'll look for that accident report by Friday," Harve said, then hung up without so much as an admonishment to have a nice day. Darn.

The report was of minor significance (except to the participants and their grieving families) and could wait for a day or two. I walked down the side of the road, pausing to wave at my landlord as he arranged vases and lamps on a table in front of his antiques store, formally known as Roy Stiver's Antiques and Collectibles: Buy, Trade, or Sell. I resided upstairs in what was euphemistically called an efficiency apartment. It was quite a contrast with a certain condo on the Upper East Side, but I was the one who'd filed for divorce and skulked home to lick my wounds. I'd be hard pressed to explain why I was still moping around Maggody a couple of years later, especially when I was at the mercy of Ruby Bee and all the other local loonies. Roy is one of damn few exceptions. Every once in a while I go downstairs to the shop to share my discontentment and a bottle of wine.

"How's business?" I called.

"Fair to middling," he said distractedly, his expression akin to that of a turkey vulture as he watched an approaching RV.

I left him to play the ignorant hayseed for the benefit of the wily city slickers, who would be grinning smugly as they drove away with "a real steal" in the backseat. I wondered how they'd feel if they ran into Roy in Palm Springs, where he sometimes spends the winter. His income is not derived from his occasional sales to poetry magazines.

Pickup trucks were lined up in the parking lot of the bar and grill, but their drivers were standing outside, gesturing and scratching their heads while gunky-eyed hound dawgs growled at one another from the beds. I may have growled myself when I caught sight of the Closed sign on the door.

"Where's Ruby Bee?" I asked one of the regulars.

"Dunno. It being Wednesday and all, I was looking forward to chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. She say anything to you about closing?"

I shook my head, having entertained some decidedly lyrical thoughts about the chicken-fried steak myself. None of us would starve, of course. The SuperSaver across the road had a deli, and the Dairee Dee-Lishus was only a couple of blocks away. However, there was an increasingly unhappy rumble from the collective belly of the crowd, and I was backing away when Mizzoner (aka Mrs. Jim Bob) drove up.

"There you are!" she snapped at me. "I should have known you'd be avoiding your official responsibilities at a time like this. Bear in mind you're a salaried employee of the town council, Arly Hanks. I told Jim Bob when he hired you that a woman has no business being chief of police. It violates the Almighty Lord's standards of decency and smacks of lesbianism."

Mrs. Jim Bob and I lack rapport. I slapped my forehead. "And you were right! Last week when there was a holdup at the bank, I was too busy giving myself a home perm to investigate."

"What bank?"

"Just how am I avoiding my official responsibilities today, Mrs. Jim Bob? Has Ruby Bee been kidnapped by Bigfoot and dragged away to a certain cave up on Cotter's Ridge? Shall I round up a posse?" I may have added a bit of emphasis when I mentioned the cave, which had caused her a great deal of well-deserved embarrassment. I can swallow only so much self-righteousness on an empty stomach, and she was dishing it up with a particularly generous hand.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said tightly. "I'm talking about Raz Buchanon's cornfield."

I stared at her, as did everybody else in the parking lot. As dumbstruck as your basic Buchanon, I mentally replayed our conversation, then said, "You are?"

Satisfied that she'd done her duty, which may well have been to render me momentarily inarticulate, she rolled up her window and drove away. Rather than go back to the PD to get my car, I asked one of the guys for a lift, and he agreed. We were heading an impressive caravan as we turned onto a dirt road and rolled up the hill toward Raz's place.

We didn't roll up to the shack, however, because the road was blocked by a variety of parked vehicles, one of which belonged to Ruby Bee and another to Estelle. I thanked my driver and walked the rest of the way. Raz stood at the gate, his thumbs hooked on the straps of his filthy overalls and a shit-eatin' grin on his face. His stringy gray hair and crumb-infested whiskers were marginally tidier than usual, but there was no indication he'd bathed in the recent past. Or brushed his sparse, mossy teeth.

"Howdy," he said, then sent a stream of amber tobacco juice into the weeds. "Purty day, ain't it?"

"What's going on?" I asked. Raz and I are not sworn enemies, even though he operates a moonshine still up on Cotter's Ridge. Every now and then I go out to look for it. It's an exercise in futility, but the solitude and picnic lunches are equally satisfying. On the other hand, he's a royal pain in the butt, and that's being magnanimous. "Did Marjorie chew off somebody's leg?"

"You ain't got no call to say that, Arly," he said, his face puckering like a dried apple. "Marjorie mighta had a spell last winter when she was madder'n a coon in a poke, but she's settled down right nicely. She came with a pedigree, ya know. She's got a more delicate nature than your ordinary sows."

"What's going on?" I repeated.

He tugged at his whiskers and gave me the same shrewd look as when he tells me he "don't know nuthin' 'bout no still."

"I cain't rightly say. I first saw 'em this morning when I went out to git some wood for the stove."

"Saw what, Raz?"

"Circles out in the cornfield."

For the second time in less than an hour I was speechless. I was frowning at him and trying to formulate a question when a smartly dressed woman and a pudgy young man with a camera came up the road.

"Raz Buchanon?" she asked him purposefully. He nodded. "I'm from the television station in Farberville. We'd like to do a segment for the evening news about these mysterious crop circles behind your house."

"I'm chargin' a dollar to folks what want to take a gander at it. I ain't sure how much I ought to git for taking pictures of it. Whatta ya think, Arly?"

I shrugged, even more bemused. They settled on five dollars; then Raz opened the gate and sent them around the corner of the shack. As I stood there, more gawkers arrived, forked over the admission fee, and took off down what was now a visible path through the overgrown yard.

Eventually I came to my senses (although there were damn few of them), and after a brief yet spirited discussion with Raz regarding my lack of a dollar and my willingness to rip his whiskers off his chin, I was ushered through the gate.

There were twenty or so people beside a barbed wire fence. The television reporter stood in front of the camera, her eyes wide and her voice oozing wonder as she described the inexplicable appearance of crop circles in Maggody. The crowd watched her with gaping mouths, in that she was on television every day at five o'clock and therefore qualified as a celebrity.

Wishing I were in disguise, I stepped on a foot or two and threw a couple of elbows as I made my way to the fence. The field sloped downward to a distant line of brush. The corn was green and waist-high and rustled in the light breeze. The sky was dotted with puffy clouds. Unseen birds twittered in the distance. Grasshoppers whirred like tiny helicopters (Orthoptera rotorus?).

"Ain't that the darndest thing?" whispered Ruby Bee, who'd wormed her way to my side. "I don't recollect seeing anything like that in all my born days."

I finally spotted the object of her avowed astonishment. Toward the far edge of the field was a rounded expanse of flattened corn with a diameter of perhaps fifteen feet. A trail led to a somewhat smaller circle, and another trail to the smallest of the three. From my perspective, the circles looked almost perfect, and the trails of uniform width. I'd seen a textbook drawing of such a syzygial pattern, although it had illustrated a lunar eclipse rather than a cornfield. I rubbed my face, trying to remember stories and photographs from a few years back.

The television reporter politely, if inadvertently, produced the details for the enlightenment of her viewers. "This phenomenon was first reported nearly fifteen years ago in the English county of Wiltshire, and since then as many as five hundred such circles have been documented each year, primarily in Wiltshire and adjoining Hampshire. Over the decade the patterns became increasingly intricate, with designs often compared to ancient symbols. Various theories have been offered, including whirlwinds, fungus, plasma vortices, extraterrestrials, and even pranksters. No explanation has been fully accepted by the scientific community. As far as KARP can determine, this is the first such mysterious circle to be found in Arkansas. We'll have further developments at ten o'clock."

She nodded regally to the crowd, then pulled the cameraman aside for a hushed conference that included surreptitious glances in my direction. I would have swapped my uniform for one of Dahlia's tent dresses, but it was too late to go under cover, so to speak. I went over to them and said, "I have no comment. I just laid eyes on those circles a few minutes ago, and I have absolutely no information or theories. If I were you, I'd take into consideration the identity and reputation of the field's owner before I went too far with the story."

"Are you implying he made the circles himself?" the reporter asked.

"I'm implying he's as trustworthy as a rabid polecat. How did you find out about this?"

"An anonymous call to the station. I had a choice between this story or a junior high science fair." She gestured for her companion to shoulder his burden. "Let's get an interview with the owner, then head back to the van to run the footage. The wind was mussing my hair the entire time. We may have to reshoot it."

I winced. "You're actually going to put this on the news tonight?"

They didn't bother to answer such an absurd question and started around the corner of the shack. I was glaring at their backs as Estelle and Ruby Bee joined me. "You gonna investigate this?" asked Estelle, her eyes unnaturally bright with excitement.

"I don't know how to investigate this. There they are, and I doubt Raz or anyone else is going to claim to be the architect. Within a few days the cornstalks will perk up, and that'll be the end of it. I'm not real pleased this is going to be on the news tonight. Half the audience will think we're idiots, and the other half will show up with picnic baskets, coolers, and aluminum chairs to wait for the flying saucers to appear."

Ruby Bee put her finger to her lips. "Don't start talking about flying saucers," she said in a steely whisper. "There was an episode about these crop circles on X-Files not three months ago. The investigators concluded that the circles were made by aliens, although they couldn't exactly say why the aliens would want to make complicated designs in folks' fields."

I bit back a sarcastic comment since I hadn't had lunch yet and a chill dog could never compete with a crisp chicken-fried steak. "How did they arrive at this conclusion?" I forced myself to ask humbly.

"I disremember, but they did all kinds of measurements and searched every square inch of ground to make sure there weren't any ordinary footprints."

Estelle nudged her aside. "But the first thing they did was measure the circles. I brought you a tape measure and a little notebook so you can keep track of the figures." She stuffed both in my shirt pocket. I'm not ashamed to admit I was curious about the circles. It was also apparent that Ruby Bee wasn't going to return to her skillet until I'd done something, no matter how foolish. To the crowd's murmured delight, I slipped between the strands of barbed wire and walked down a row that led in the general direction of our Martian manifestation. I wasn't especially surprised when Ruby Bee and Estelle came panting up behind me. They have a real bad habit of deputizing themselves whenever I turn my back on them. There are inmates in rehab clinics with lesser habits.

Ruby Bee grabbed my arm. "There's a footstep right there in the dirt!"

"Made by Raz," I said, "with Marjorie hot on his heels. I forgot to ask him if he came down here this morning for a closer look."

Estelle was in no mood to be regarded as a less diligent sleuth. "They stopped right here," she said, bending over to stare at a collection of marks. She stood up and waved at the crowd. "We found footprints!"

"And hoofprints!" Ruby Bee added for their benefit.

I ignored the patter of applause as I studied the marks. They seemed to indicate Raz and his sow had stopped some ten feet away from the nearest circle. If Raz had made the circles at an earlier time, he'd approached from a different direction.

"Stay here," I said, then began to move carefully along the perimeter. The smallest of the circles was near the undergrowth, but I could find no footprints leading toward or away from it. I completed completed the circumnavigation and rejoined Ruby Bee and Estelle. "I didn't find anything," I confessed.

"Then let's get busy with the tape measure," Estelle said with the briskness of a trained investigator who'd examined such phenomena innumerable times and reported her findings on X-Files. "You take the tape and go right over there. I'll call out the numbers for Ruby Bee to write down."

"Not yet," I said grimly. "I want to check the circles themselves for footprints before you go stomping around in them."