Muletrain to Maggody (5 page)

“Suit yourself,” said Estelle, lifting her chin so she could look down her nose at Ruby Bee with the condescension of European royalty. “I am perfectly capable of doing this by myself. I just hope you recollect the story of the Little Red Hen. She ended up eating her fine fresh bread all by herself.”

“Arly will kill us.”

“Well, at least we’ll be able to afford marble headstones.”

Brother Verber was stretched out on his sofa, his head propped on a pillow and a glass of sacramental wine nearby on the coffee table. It being Saturday afternoon, he should have been slaving over his sermon for the following morning, but he was having a problem settling on a theme. Lust, adultery, perversion, fornication. None of them grabbed his fancy as they usually did. Hardly a week had passed in all these years since he’d received his mail-order diploma from the seminary in Las Vegas that he’d failed to berate his congregation for one or more of these, odds being he’d hit home in the second or third pew. Why, just watching beads of sweat popping out on someone’s brow justified his calling to the cloth. His flock floundered, but he himself was the shepherd that collected up their souls and led them back into the glorious green pasture of righteousness.

And there was that bothersome story about a fortune up on Cotter’s Ridge.

Brother Verber kicked off his slippers and took a drink of wine. All that gold, just waiting to see the light of day. It could be put to use in the Almighty Lord’s war against evil, he thought as he wiggled his toes. Sin was out there, behind every door and down every alley. Young women pulling off their lingerie for the sake of a few dollars, lurking in houses of ill repute where gentlemen paid for their services, laughing when they should be down on their knees repenting for their sins. And what they did in the photos of the magazines Brother Verber kept in his closet was enough to keep Satan hisself stoking the furnace.

The fortune had to be put to use to combat this pervasive moral degradation, he decided. He struggled to his feet and went into the kitchen to make a cheese and sweet pickle sandwich. Ever since he’d heard about the gold, he’d felt uneasy, as though some foul odor was beginning to taint Maggody. If the gold was to fall into the wrong hands, why, there’d be no telling what might happen. The Pot O’ Gold trailer park might be overrun by brassy sluts. The cheerleaders at the high school might take to wearing outfits that exposed their navels and accentuated their perky breasts. Cable television might be introduced, with all its scurrilous temptations. Before too long, his congregation would dwindle to a few emaciated widows and he’d be reduced to living off their charity and deviled eggs.

Brother Verber took the wine bottle with him as he returned to the sofa. He couldn’t allow this wickedness to pervade, he concluded as he chomped down on the sandwich. Any fortune lying about on Cotter’s Ridge was going to be dedicated to the Lord’s work, be it a hospital in some African country, a new roof on the Assembly Hall, or even a double-wide replacement for the current rectory.

But he knew he needed a plan before the Yankees started descending like fruit flies on a ripe banana. He’d never spent much time on Cotter’s Ridge, having an aversion to ticks and chiggers, but he was painfully aware of the countless caves. The gold could be in any one of them. After a brief consideration, he figured the Lord wasn’t likely to provide a map. No, it was going to require the help of someone likely to know each and every inch of the ridge—and that was Raz Buchanon.

Which presented a problem, Brother Verber admitted to himself as he refilled his glass and stretched back on the sofa. Raz was ornery, foul-mouthed, and most likely a soldier in Satan’s army. Raz had never set foot in the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall, which was for the best since he’d be struck dead on the spot.

He’d have to be approached carefully, even artfully. He’d have to be connived into letting down his defenses and being tricked into telling what all he knew about the caves on Cotter’s Ridge. An offer of a discount baptism and a choir robe wasn’t going to do the trick.

Brother Verber knew he needed a plan.

I
’d opened all the windows (okay, both of them) in the office to air out the sour odor left by Perkin when he’d dropped by earlier to accuse Raz of some convoluted malfeasance involving dawgs. It’s hard to follow Perkin when the spittle is flying. I’d learned long ago to duck my face and pretend to scribble notes—as well as keep a box of tissues in a desk drawer.

Now I was flipping through catalogs as I awaited the opportunity to earn my paycheck by foiling an armed robbery at the post office or negotiating a hostage situation at the Suds of Fun Launderette. In that we don’t have a post office and there’s nobody in Maggody worth taking hostage, I figured I was in for a peaceful afternoon.

There was some potential peril in hanging out at the PD, however. Stump County Sheriff Harve Dorfer could call at any second and wheedle me into writing up a gory car wreck on some back road or fishing a bloated body out of the reservoir. Harve was likely to be more shorthanded than usual, since the weather was balmy and a goodly number of his deputies were fond of fishing (or at least sitting in john boats, drinking beer, and telling lies). Then again, I was going to need Harve’s cooperation toward the end of the week. Not only was I going to have to deal with the reenactors, their mules, horses, muskets, wives, children, and whatever they’d stuffed in their haversacks, but also slack-jawed tourists, half a mile of barricaded road, and the good ol’ boys at the pool hall whose pickups sported Confederate flag decals. Most of them would be hard-pressed to name the century in which the Civil War took place, but their resentment simmered despite their ignorance.

I wondered how long it would be before I’d have to start hauling people out of caves on Cotter’s Ridge. I took my flashlight out of a drawer and determined that the batteries were dead. The only rope at the PD was a piece of frayed clothesline I’d found in the weeds out back. I could tie a square knot and a noose, but neither would be adequate if Dahlia got herself wedged in a rabbit hole. The police academy had offered no courses in rescuing overly enthusiastic treasure hunters, should they deserve to be rescued. There were enough caves to accommodate half the town, or perhaps all of them. After a while, Raz and I would be the only ones left to walk the deserted street and compete for cans of corn and peas at Jim Bob’s SuperSaver Buy 4 Less. My face would become gray and haggard as I sat alone on a stool at Ruby Bee’s, praying the beer distributor would arrive before there was water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

I mention Raz because he most likely had the gold buried in his barn. He uses the caves to store his jars of moonshine until he has a chance to take them to consumers across the county. What’s more, his stunted branch of the clan had been doing the same since before the Civil War era. Maybe his great-grandpappy had been hunkered behind a tree when the Confederate private hid the gold. Maybe decades ago a Buchanon bushcolt had wiggled down a passageway in hopes of snagging some critter for supper. Braised groundhog innards
à l’orange,
a popular staple of Ozark haute cuisine.

When the telephone rang, I gazed at it without enthusiasm. Early in the day for a wreck, but the denizens of Stump County didn’t necessarily observe the traditional cocktail hour. Late in the day for a body to bobble to the surface, since the crack-of-dawn fishermen usually were the first to spot them. That left my mother.

Sighing, I picked up the receiver. “What?”

“You need to get over here right now.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I say so. There’s someone here.”

“Who?”

“That man who’s filming the documentary. He told me who he was, then ordered a cheeseburger and a beer. Now he’s sitting in a booth with Hormel Buchanon and Hormel’s uncle Fibber.”

I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet on a corner of the desk. “Then it sounds as if the situation is under control, unless, of course, you forgot to mention that he’s juggling hand grenades and foaming at the mouth. I’m sure Hormel and Fibber can keep him entertained with their most recent Elvis sighting.”

“Now you listen up, young lady! I am your mother, and I want you here in the next three minutes. Do you understand me?”

“Okay,” I said, aware that it would be a whole helluva lot easier to go over there than argue with a woman who was less cooperative than your standard-issue mule, be it Confederate or Union. “Maybe I’ll give him a traffic ticket for driving inside the city limits without a permit. Jim Bob will be impressed with my dedication to duty.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ruby Bee, “but I reckon the clock’s ticking. I was planning to make cherry cobbler for lunch tomorrow, just because I know you’re smitten with it, but there ain’t no law that says I have to. What’s more, you need to put on some lipstick and make sure your hair’s tidy.”

Ruby Bee’s talent in areas of blackmail and extortion was legendary. I told her I’d be there before too long, and hung up. Putting on lipstick would require me to go across the road to my apartment, which seemed like a lot of effort to impress a documentary filmmaker from—I thought for a moment—Missouri. Missouri was twenty miles away from where I was sitting; Hollywood was more like two thousand.

In a display of petulance, I waited ten minutes before I went outside and walked down the road toward the peculiar pink building known as Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill. Roy Stiver was parked in a rocking chair in front of his antiques shop, snoozing in the sunlight and waiting for the next tourist to marvel over his quaintness and buy a grossly overpriced piece of flea market crap. Joyce Lambertino was wrestling with a gas pump at the self-service while countless children wrestled with each other in the back of her station wagon. Eula Lemoy was wheeling a cart around the supermarket parking lot, probably in search of her car. Mrs. Jim Bob drove by in her pink Cadillac, too preoccupied to acknowledge the likes of me. Raz rattled by in his pickup truck, with his pedigreed sow Marjorie in the passenger’s seat, her snout stuck out the window to enjoy the breeze.

All in all, pretty normal for a Saturday afternoon in Maggody.

“It’s about time,” Ruby Bee said by way of greeting as I sat down on a stool. “Don’t look now, but he’s over there in the corner. From what I could hear when I took ’em a pitcher, Hormel’s telling him about the Japanese kamikaze pilot he found hiding in his root cellar way back in 1949. Hormel’s real fond of that story.”

I leaned over the bar and whispered, “How am I supposed to arrest this guy or whatever it is you want me to do if I don’t look at him?”

“He’s familiar, that’s why. I thought I told you to put on some lipstick.”

“Familiar?”

“Ain’t you ever bumped up against that word before?” She took a mug from the shelf below the bar. “You want a beer?”

“Yes,” I said, “and a quarter for the juke box. Any requests?”

She took a quarter from the cash register drawer. “I’d like to think you won’t be gaping at him like some moonstruck girl.”

I casually sauntered over to the juke box. After making my selections, which didn’t take long since the repertoire hadn’t changed since the last mastodon died of old age, I glanced at the booth. The man was watching me, and he was indeed familiar. Maybe not as familiar as the nose on my face or the toasty brown swirls of meringue that Ruby Bee uses to top her lemon pies, but familiar.

Oh yes, familiar.

My knees buckled, but I made it back to my stool. I wasn’t surprised when he sat down beside me and said, “Thought I’d run into you.”

“Maggody’s not quite as crowded as Manhattan,” I said. “You could go for years in Manhattan without running into anyone you knew. Now running over someone would be a different matter, but of course no one in Manhattan has a car because of the traffic.”

You may be thinking that he was my ex-husband, which he most assuredly was not. No, he was the very intriguing man I’d encountered when I’d been bullied into chaperoning the local teenagers at a church camp not so very long ago. You may also be thinking that I was babbling like an idiot. No argument there.

“I tried to call you at the PD,” he said.

I met his gaze in the mirror on the backside of the bar. “I don’t always answer the telephone.”

“My name’s Jack Wallace, for the record.”

“Is that another alias?”

He ducked his face, which gave me the chance to ascertain that he was still the slightly disheveled, loose-limbed, squared-jawed guy I’d encountered fishing beside a lake—and about whom I immediately found myself entertaining adolescent fantasies of the sort I would never admit. Lawrence of Arabia’s blue eyes. The Sundance Kid’s tousled blond hair. Indiana Jones’s grin.

I watch a lot of movies featuring guys who seldom shave.

“Ruby Bee said you’re filming the documentary,” I said ever-so-cleverly.

“That’s right. An old friend of mine is a reenactor. When he mentioned Maggody, I thought it might be interesting, so I volunteered my services. I work for an advertising agency in Springfield.”

“An advertising agency?” said Ruby Bee, swooping in like a turkey vulture. “Ain’t that a coincidence, Arly? That ex-husband of yours worked for an advertising agency, too, didn’t he? It was a good thing when you upped and divorced him like you did. Nowadays, you’re living here in Maggody as a single woman.” She smiled at Jack Wallace, who was looking a little pale. “I’m sure you’re not an underhanded sumbitch like Arly’s ex-husband. I can’t think why she married him in the first place.”

My look, or perhaps the way my hand tightened around the mug, was enough to send her to the far end of the bar. “So, Jack Wallace,” I said, “if that’s your real name, how are your children?”

“They’re doing well. My sister looks after them when I’m working. Their mother has supervised visitation and is back on medication. They participate in soccer, baseball, music lessons, all that sort of thing.”

“No nightmares about the Moonbeams?” I said.

“No, they thought it was creepy, but they were never abused when their mother took them to live with that cult. They’re just happy to be back with their dog, their bicycles, their friends in the neighborhood. They adore my sister and their cousins.”

“Convenient for you.”

“Especially when I’m out at a car dealership filming a commercial. You wouldn’t believe how many of these guys insist on wearing toupees no matter how windy it may be. One of the crew described the last one as another ‘flying ferret shoot.’ ”

I smiled, but I was still struggling to keep my cool. I’d hoped that he would call after our last encounter, but I’d chosen to not answer the telephone on the off chance he would. Ruby Bee would not have found my behavior mature. I took a swallow of beer. “So you volunteered your services to the Stump County Historical Society?”

“I suppose I did.”

“And…?”

“I came down today to have a look at the locations so I could make sure to have whatever equipment I need. I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“Really?” I said, wondering what he meant. Done what kind of thing before? Chanced upon an available female with an inadvertent glint in her eye? Okay, the calculating glint of a Westchester matron eyeing the abs of a new pool boy.

“I’ve filmed several of these events for my friend, Frank Reinor. He fancies himself to be a colonel in a Missouri regiment, but sometimes he has to be a private. Damn well breaks his heart, but he’s a devotee of the war when he’s not peddling computers at a chain store. He’d like nothing more than to let his teeth rot so he’d be more authentic, but his wife has her limits.”

I was going to respond when Ruby Bee came over and clutched my wrist.

“Jim Bob’s on the phone,” she said, nearly hyperventilating. “He says there’s a crisis at the old folks’ home and you’d better get over there right this minute!”

“A crisis? Is that all he said?”

“That’s all he said, but he was real agitated. Well, he also said he’d fire you if you wasn’t there in five minutes, but I told him a thing or two and he backed off. Still, you’d better go look into it.”

I looked at Jack, who seemed amused. “Duty beckons,” I said, wildly imagining him swooping me into his arms and declaring that nothing short of some cataclysmic event of galactic significance would prevent him from expressing his passion in one of the motel rooms out back.

“I’ll be back in a few days to start filming,” he said. “Perhaps we can continue our conversation then.”

Rhett Butler would have swooped. Jack Wallace seemed content to nod at us and amble out of the bar.

Ruby Bee dumped the contents of my mug into the sink. “Well, that was interesting, I must say. I recognized him right off, but I don’t recall it ever being explained what his role in that mess was.”

Rather than enlightening her, I said, “I guess I’d better go see what’s got Jim Bob in a tizzy.”

“Maybe so,” murmured Ruby Bee. “Come by later if you’re of a mind. I’m making chicken ’n’ dumplings.”

Jim Bob was pacing across the porch of the old folks’ home when I drove up and parked beside his truck.

“About goddamn time you got here,” he said as I got out of my car. “You was hired to do a job, Chief Hanks, and one of them is to look after the citizens.”

I smiled sweetly. “And here I’ve been thinking I was hired to do kidney transplants. Just this morning I pulled a donor out of a pond and packed his vital organs in ice. Is the surgical staff prepared? Are you going to scrub in?”