The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (28 page)

“I don’t think so, Clarence.  Pauley went from one obsession to another: Krista, the radio station, Santeria.  He thought there was something in the woods that would help him or save him or give him some great insight or bring his mother back from the dead, whatever.  He was going to keep coming back until he found this place or until somebody killed him.”

“But we never touched hi—” Smokey began, and was interrupted by Gina.

“But Sue-Ann,” she exclaimed.  “are you sayin that somebody
killed
him?  You told Betty he was kicked by a horse.  And if Pauley’s mind was so set on
this
place, what was he doin way out on the other sahd of town last naht?”

“He was dumped in that pasture, Gina.  Probably by some of those guys outside.  But he
was
kicked by a horse.  Was it Trigger, Krista?”

Krista nodded and started to cry.

Smokey spoke for her.  “The goth kid must’ve followed the mowed trail and climbed the fence near the pasture where we keep the horses. . . .”

“He had a big knife,” Krista cried through her tears and her voice went up in timbre until it was almost a scream.  “He was going to kill one of the horses for some stupid ritual!”

Gina looked at me with a question in her eyes.  I nodded.  “That’s what I thought,” I told her.  “No way Pauley would decide to go on the other side of town when what he wanted was in these woods.  He knew Krista lived back here somewhere and he knew she had a horse.  I found the grease pencil he used to paint his face back in the clearing.  It’s in my fannypack.  I’ve seen Trigger.  He’s big and he’s kind of wild.  I doubt there’s anyone that can manage him except an expert rider like you.”

“Only me and Granpa,” she sniffed.  “Anyone tries to get near him when we’re not there and he spooks.  Some horses like to kick out with their hind legs; Trigger just rears and strikes.”

“My mother believed that horses can read a person’s feelings,” I told her.

Krista looked up at me with wet doe eyes and asked, “You’re not going to have him destroyed, are you?”

“No one’s going to destroy anything,” I told her.  “And no one is going to
say
anything.”

“You mean—”   Clarence began.

“I mean that this is our secret.  Pauley’s death was an accident.  Whatever you all are hiding out here has nothing to do with it and is nobody’s business but your own.  My newspaper story—and
The Courier
has to run one—says that Paul Hughes, Jr. was killed in a tragic accident on Coonbottom Mason’s farm.  Even if there’s an autopsy and the coroner suspects that he was killed somewhere else and moved, there’s still no way to connect his death with this place because no one will know that this place exists.  No one will know about Pauley’s obsessions or about his painted face or about that knife he carried because none of that is in the story.”

Clarence looked astonished but relieved.  He glanced at Gina, and formed a question.  “Ginette, are you . . .”

“Ah think that Sue-Ann is raht as a rock and just as hard headed,” she smiled. 

Clarence blinked and seemed to remember something.  “Sue-Ann,” he said.  “I got your doctor’s name off the bottle of medicine and called him.  He told me that if you weren’t dead already you’d probably be okay as long as you got one of those pills down you.  He said you shouldn’t be moved tonight, but that we should bring you in to the hospital as soon as we could.”

“Thanks, Clarence.”

That was it for the night.  I wanted to rest.  Krista and Smokey took Gina off to another guest room and Clarence went home, saying he’d be back the next day.  I must have been really tired or sick or something, because when I woke up early the next morning, Gina was under the covers and snuggled up against me.  She was sleeping like someone who had not slept well in ages, and she didn’t wake up when I softly stroked her hair.

I was long due for a visit to the bathroom and got out of bed as silently as I could.  I felt much stronger than the day before.  I could stand without any problem.  I took a few steps and didn’t fall, so I tried a couple more—everything seemed to be all right in the walking department.  In the hall I found my clothes, washed, dried, and folded, atop a mahogany table.  I took them into a bathroom I found off the main hall.  I used the toilet, then the ancient, clawfooted bathtub, and when I came out, I was fully dressed except for my shoes.  I walked in my socks over the buffed wooden floor that may have been cut from the same trees as the old plank road outside.  No one else seemed to be up, so I decided to explore the house, wondering vaguely if I was a prisoner here.  What if the soldiers outside thought that Gina and I might reveal their secret if we were allowed to leave?  If so, I at least wanted to find out what that secret was.  I passed two doors made of thick wood inlaid with a delicate filigree design and came out into a large drawing room.  A half dozen chairs with their backs shaped like shells were spaced regularly around the room, which also had a bookshelf on one wall, a long secretary with many drawers, a rolltop desk, and portrait upon portrait in hand-worked walnut frames.  All gave the appearance of being part of an ancient haunted house except for a section of framed photographs near the door.  One of these was of a young man in his twenties dressed in an American Marine uniform.  Two others, obviously taken quite recently, were of Krista and Smokey.

A high, twisted, breathy voice came from behind me.  “We get into all kinds of trouble when we are young, yas?” 

I whirled around to face the grotesque vision of a thing that looked half man, half corpse.  Dressed in a silky-looking pair of baggy Persian trousers and a light, white, short-sleeved shirt, the figure’s face was mostly old burn scars.  One eye looked fixedly on me, the other was burned away.  Some of the skull was bare scar tissue, the rest tufted out in black scraggly hair that grew out and down beyond his shoulders.  Only one of the shoulders, though, had an arm connected to it.  The man sat languidly in an armchair studying me.  I was startled, of course, but I managed to look him in the eye and reply.  “Sometimes that’s what being young is for,” I told him.  I’d seen this man once before and had expected to find him somewhere in the compound.  But being across from him in a drawing room was not the same as glimpsing him through vegetation from a distance of a hundred yards.

“The sight of me does not shock you?” he said.  I recognized the whining tone and unusual cadence and I realized that his larynx was probably damaged as well as his skin.

“I’m always shocked at what brutality does, but I was in Baghdad,” I told him.  “You’re prettier than a lot of the bits and pieces I saw over there, but I can imagine how you must have scared those goth kids in the woods, especially if you were riding a huge white horse.  You’re The Creeper, aren’t you?”

“Smokey calls me that, yas, although what Krista calls me is not so kind.  My real name?  Ashley Torrington at your service.  And riding?  It is one of the few things I still do well.”

“Sue-Ann McKeown.”

“Yas.  I’ve been hearing stories.”  The effect of twisting his face into a smile—even a genuine one—was grotesque.  “Please, why don’t you sit down and we can have a chat.”

It was at that moment that I knew that this scarred old gentleman was in total charge of The Compound.  I also knew that I had nothing to fear from him.

I was glad to slip into one of the huge chairs, although I had to turn it a little so that it would face him.  As I did so, I noticed a feature of the room I had not yet seen: a bank of shelves holding expensive-looking audio equipment—a turntable, a cassette player, a CD player, and much more. 

“Yas,” he said, following my gaze.  “That’s my other little obsession: I sometimes think only my music keeps me alive.”

Mr. Torrington’s face was hard to look at—mostly a mass of shiny reddish wrinkles and only a nub where his right ear once was—but I forced myself.  “What happened to you?” I asked.

He shrugged.  “I was in the middle of a napalm attack in Vietnam.  Should not have been where I was, no, but there you are.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “So when you got well, you came back here?”

“As you see, I never got well.  But yas, I came to Torrington.  It is the oldest settlement in this county.  Cut off from the rest of the world for one hundred and fifty years.”

“But these houses,” I said.  “They’re old, but, I mean, wouldn’t the forest have taken over in a hundred and fifty years?”

“But these houses have never been empty, no.  There have always been Torringtons here, living in silence, tilling fields, making repairs, all of these.  Until the kids came here it has mostly been a place for the sick or the insane.”

“Krista and Smokey are your grandchildren?” I asked.

“Yas.  They grew up with my son and his wife in Phoenix.  My son owns a big-ass fiber optics company and lives in houses here and there—mostly there, as Phil Ochs once said.”

“Where does the money come from to keep this place up?” I asked.

“We have pensions, we grow and make things and sell them.  My son and his wife never come here, no, but he gives me guilt money—more money than we need.  I built a radio station with his “contribution.”

“So that’s where the radio station comes in,” I said.  “And you know a lot about music.”

“Music is my mistress,” he said.  “Mostly the music of my contemporaries.  In fact, ‘Music is My Mistress’ is the title of a song by Linda Hargrove.  I once met her at the dog track in Jefferson County when I was whole.  But I try to listen to many newer things as well.  I have thousands of records, CDs, cassettes.  And, ha ha, if I want anything else, right now, I can get it off Napster for ninety-nine cents.”

“In case you have a special need for, say,
Goat’s Head Soup
, and don’t have a copy handy.”

“Ummm, yas.  I imagine musical stories; I live out my memories, and even the experiences of those close to me through songs.”

“So when Krista rode in that cowboy-mounted shooting event, you helped Smokey choreograph it in music for his show.  He played songs about cowboys, balloons, shooting.”  The Creeper nodded.  “And when the goth kids killed the chickens, you came up with an old group that had a drummer named Chicken.”

The Creeper shook his head and sighed.  “I really did not think anyone would catch that one, but, hmmm, you always hope.”

I had a moment of clarity.  “But if you’ve been putting pieces of yourself into that radio station all along, shuffling sections of your memory, making your own unique connections to things, leaving little coded messages, you . . . you wanted someone to find you.”

“And you did, no?  Ah, it’s too bad I didn’t meet you when I was younger,” the old man said. “It might not seem so now, but I have brains.  When you have only yourself for company for almost forty years, you begin to think more than others.  But you and I could have . . .”  He let his voice trail off into a creak.

“Are you hitting on me, Mr.Torrington?” I smiled.

He made a grotesque squeaking laugh, coughed, and said, “Maybe, yas, maybe I am.  You were looking at my picture on the wall there by Krista and Smokey.”

“You were a fine looking man,” I told him.  “Did you enlist?”

“Yas I did.  I was in a military family.  I took ROTC in college.  I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, but I went anyway.  It’s what was expected of me.”

“Boys and girls are still going to other Vietnams against their will,” I told him.

“Yas,” he said.

“The men who found me yesterday: who are they?”

“Ex-marines from all the wars that ever were.  All shot up or fucked up in many ways.  They live here until they are ready to go back to the world.”

“And none of them that left have ever let on that this place is here?” I asked.

“Semper Fi,” he said. 

“What happens in Torrington stays in Torrington.”

“Yas.  And Clarence seems to think that you and your friend are going to keep our little community a secret.”

“Only if you’ll let us come out and visit you sometimes.”

“Hmmph.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I am finding that I like visitors, even though you are the only visitor I have ever had.  This friend of yours; I hear she’s very pretty, yas?”

“She’s young enough to be your daughter,” I told him.  “Besides, she likes girls.”

“Yas?”  He cocked his one eyebrow at me curiously.  “And you?” he asked.

“I like
her
.”

“A risky secret to carry around in a small town,” he said.

“We’re in Torrington, now,” I whispered.

When he smiled, I no longer saw the twisting and the grimacing effort it took him; all I saw was the amusement.  “I hear others moving around,” he said. “Go through that door and eat.  We have a very good cook who once ran the mess hall at Camp Lejeune.”

“Just one more question.  What does Clarence have to do with all this?”

“Clarence?  Umm, a distant cousin.  His father lived here for years when he retired from the market.  It made him happy to think that he was alive and everyone thought he was dead.  Clarence sees and hears things for us.  Clarence was a good soldier.”

“Clarence is still a good soldier,” I said.  “Ciao.”

“Chow down,” he answered.  “Come back when you’re well.”