The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (20 page)

“All right, Sue-Ann.  Go head.”

“Adam has gotten mixed up with a boy named Pauley Hughes and a girl named Becky Colley.  There may be more of them, I don’t know.  They get together and dress all in black and have secret meetings.  One of them—I think probably Pauley because he’s a couple of years older—has gotten into the occult and thinks he can call up spirits or demons. . . .”

“Sue-Ann, do you know what you’re saying?”

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not.  It just matters that you hear me out.  I’ve been investigating a story about a goat that someone killed and stuffed in a dumpster.”

“You mentioned a goat last time I saw you.  But what’s a dead goat—”

“Donny, killing a goat and putting it in a dumpster doesn’t make any sense.  It’s something that no one in the world would have done.  It’s something that just begged to be looked into.  So I did some investigating and found the place in the woods where the goat was killed.  There were voodoo symbols on the ground, blood all over, and an empty tequila bottle in the bushes.  The same brand of tequila that was stolen from my house.”

“Do you know how many bottles of that brand of tequila—”

“Donny, damn it, I don’t care!  Believe me, it was the same one.  I brought it out of the woods and I can get Dilly to lift fingerprints off it if I have to.  But if you listen to me and don’t interrupt, I won’t have to.  What brand of cigarettes does Adam smoke?”

“How do you know he . . . Marlboro Light, same as me.”

“I found Marlboro Light cigarette butts in the same place I found the tequila bottle, as well as butts from two other brands—Newport and Doral.”  I brought my legal pad up from the seat and extracted a photo from between its pages.  “Look at the kids in this photo.”

“That’s not—whoa, is that Adam?”

“And the girl is Becky Colley.  Know what brand of cigarettes she smokes?  Doral.  Know whose goat it was that was killed?  Her dad’s.”

“Her dad is Ray Colley?”

“Right.  But it gets worse.  A couple of days ago, someone broke in to a woman’s chicken house out on Peg-leg Road and stole some chickens.  While they were at it they killed the woman’s dog by stringing it up and cutting its guts out.  Just for thrills.  Then they took the chickens out to that same place in the woods, cut their heads off, and burnt them in some kind of sacrifice.”

“You saw this?”

“I saw the remains.  And I’m not the only one.  Are you starting to believe me?”

“I . . . I don’t know.  Why are you telling
me
this?  Why not talk to Linda C?”

“I don’t know her that well and she probably doesn’t like me anyway.  I’m giving you the heads up so that you can talk to her, so that you can take care of it.”

“Why don’t you talk to Ray Colley or that other boy’s dad?”

“I spoke to Pauley’s dad this morning,” I said grimly.

“It just sounds so crazy,” he said.

“Donny,” I told him.  “It
is
crazy.  And I have a really bad feeling about it.” 

“Okay, Sue-Ann,” Donny said.  “I’ve heard you out and some of it might even make some sense, but there’s one thing that just doesn’t fit.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You said that nobody would have been crazy enough to kill a goat and put it in a dumpster.”

“Yeah?  What’s your point?”

“I don’t have six college degrees, Sue-Ann, but think about it.  Someone
did
kill the goat and put it in the dumpster.”

It was a point that someone with six college degrees might have missed, and I was pleased, somehow, that Donny had grabbed on to it.  Luckily, I had an answer.  “No, Donny.  That didn’t happen, and that’s the scary part.  The kids killed the goat.  Someone else put it in the dumpster.  Whoever it was scared them away the first time—next time they might not be so kind.”

“Who?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want them out there.”

Donny crumpled up his sandwich wrapper and stuffed it in his empty coffee cup.  “You said that dog was killed on Peg-leg Road, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Adam’s dad lives near Peg-leg road—right out by our farm.”  He stood up and took a step, then backtracked.  “I’m not promising anything, but if I get the chance, I’ll ask Jerry if he knows anything about what Adam and Pauley have been doing.”

“Thanks, Donny.”

I stayed for a few minutes after Donny left.  I even bought a piece of chocolate pie and felt good about my appetite coming back.

~  ~  ~

I arrived back home to find Jack standing in my mother’s bedroom, ironing clothes.  He was dressed in a white undershirt, checked boxer shorts, and white socks.  He had turned on the radio and was singing along to “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

“When did you get into country music?” I asked.

“Didn’t.  I just turned on the radio and there it was.”

“Why are you still here?” I asked.  He had taken everything from his car and piled it on Cindy’s bed.  His suitcase was empty on the floor.

“Don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said.  “I sublet my apartment for the rest of the summer.”

“You—”  I felt like stamping my foot, except that’s another thing that people don’t really do.  Instead, I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.  “You move out of your apartment and drive down here after not having seen me for a year and expect me to let you move in?” I shouted.  “I can’t believe this.”

“It’s only for a few days,” he said reasonably.  “My flight leaves from Tallahassee Wednesday.”

“What, you’re going to Iraq already?”

“I thought I told you.”

“I thought you meant in a month or two.”

“Wednesday.”

“What are you going to do with your car?” I asked.

“Don’t know.  Leave it here I guess.  Maybe your friend Gina could drive me to the airport.”

“Fuck you, Jack.”

“Think she would?”

“She’s old enough to be your mother.”

He looked at me sideways, puzzled.

“Private joke,” I said.  “
I’ll
drive you in.”

His face lit up with a smile.  “Hope you don’t mind me using your laundry room,” he said.  “And your iron and stuff.  And, oh, I set up a darkroom in that second bathroom.”

“Just make yourself right at home.”

“And, hey, I found a TV in that trashed-up bedroom, but it doesn’t work.”

“I didn’t pay the dish bill.”

“Broke?”

“I just don’t want to watch TV.”

“What happened to that bedroom anyway?” he asked, folding the pair of pants he had finished ironing and placing them carefully in the suitcase.

“Look, Jack, there are a lot of things going on in my life right now that I don’t want to talk about.  That bedroom is one of them.”

“What about that story you’re working on?”  He took up a shirt from a pile of clean laundry and placed it on the ironing board.

“Maybe later.”

“What about relationships?” he asked.  “Anyone new?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that I don’t want to talk about it.”

A pop song had replaced the country one on the radio, and I recognized

the lyrics, “Up, up and away, in my beautiful balloon.”  The popular ’70s song had been covered by a hundred artists over the years, and I had heard it at least that many times.  This time, though, there was something frightening about it, like the rustle of leaves behind you on a dark night in the woods.  As Jack concentrated on his ironing—something he had done for the both of us when we lived together—the deejay Smokestack came on the air.

“Hey, I bet you’re glad you got to hear that.  You know, one of the great things about working here at K-B-O-Y, your shoot-em-up radio station, is the real pleasure of getting to know all these old songs and groups that were popular before I was even born.  Give all the credit to our Program Director.  And do you know who our program director is?  That scary bastard we all call The Creeper.”

“Sue—”  I held up a hand to stop Jack from speaking.

“Shhh, I want to hear this,” I told him.

Smokestack was continuing.  “The Creeper is kind of like a vampire.  Some of us here think that he has been around since the pharaohs and some even think that he’s the reincarnation of a voodoo god, but one thing is for sure.  He knows his way around music.  Here’s an LP he just handed me along with a note.  The note says: ‘This group was active in the south in the late sixties.  Two of their members were on the Florida State University swim team.’  Wow.  And hey, this particular title is going for fifty smacks on eBay.  It’s called “Reach for the Sky,” and it’s by a group called Cowboy.  Whoopee!  Enjoy, y’all.”

The song that came on was a pleasant enough mixture of rock and country.  “Is it okay to talk now?” Jack asked.

“Sorry, Jack,” I said.  “It’s just that that radio station creeps me out.  What did you want to tell me?”

“Gina came over while you were gone,” he said.  “She left these for you.”  He pointed at a roll of maps lying on a chair.  There was a note taped to them.  I picked them up and read the note.

“Sue-Ann:

Sorry I missed you.  Here’s the maps and stuff I got from the Property Appraiser’s office on Friday.  I wrote a web address on the first map and directions on how to get whatever ownership information you want, right there on line.  Just type in the parcel number from the maps.

Gina

I had never seen Gina’s handwriting before.  It was neat and almost flowery with a left-handed slant.  But when I was reading, I was hearing the words in her voice:  Sorry ah missed ya.

“Thanks, Jack,” I smiled.  I left him to his ironing and hurried into my bedroom with the maps, which I only glanced at before turning on my iMac and pulling up my goat story file to add the bit of information I had gotten from Donny.

“What are you working on in there?” Jack yelled.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I shouted back.

After I closed the file, I got my notes from the truck and wrote up kind of a fluff piece on the mounted shooting event I had seen the day before.  I tried to make it seem exciting, competitive, and colorful.  I described the outfits, the pistols, the course, and even the rain.  The only thing I left out were the winners of the events, which I would plug in when I got them from Panhandle Slim. 

By the time I switched off the iMac, it was getting on to 3:00, but I was full of energy.  I thought I might get Jack to take the tractor and make a start at mowing the pasture—which was getting high with weeds and choking out the nice grass below—while I cleaned up the barn, but Jack had gone out somewhere.  I put on some work clothes and went outside to see if the tractor still worked.  I wanted Alikki in her stall while the tractor was out so I took a halter and lead rope out to the pasture.  I couldn’t see her, but she hadn’t been in her stall either.  It entered my mind that she might have gone into one of the other stalls, or that maybe she was lying down for a nap and I had missed her.  Or maybe, I thought suddenly, she might have chosen this moment to have her foal.  The idea made me feel like I was a man whose wife has gone into labor.  I was about to run back and check the stalls again when I saw something that made me cry out in anguish. 

A huge oak limb had crashed to the ground, taking both boards from a section of the back fence with it and leaving a gap large enough for an elephant to have passed through.  Alikki was gone.  And in the far distance, I heard the pop pop pop of hunters’ guns.

Chapter 13

I rushed through the gap in the fence still carrying my halter, but stopped about ten yards beyond the fence line.  My mother had kept a path mowed out through the brush and into the forest for when she went trail riding, either alone or with Myra Van Hesse or some other riding buddy.  I had even gone once, riding Facilitator while she rode Trifecta, Alikki’s mother.  Although the trail had not been mowed since Cindy’s death, it was still easily discernable: the grass was high and there were a few weeds, but none of the brush or scrub oak or thick blackberry brambles that grew so thickly on either side.

The trail wound around a full-grown cedar and a few tall oaks until it came to a fifty-acre stand of pines planted in neat rows.  The trail circled around the stand, but Cindy had also kept a path open through the center of the pines—that’s the direction Facilitator and I had gone, and I remembered a cool, refreshing darkness with soft needles whispering beneath his hooves.  But it’s not hard to follow the trail of a 1400-pound animal; Alikki’s hoofprints were embedded in the soft ground.  I saw that she had turned, skirting the forest and continuing on the right-hand fork.  I turned in that direction, too and called out: “Alikki!  Come home, Alikki, come girl!”  I heard no answering neigh, so I set out to follow her.

I had no idea how long she had been gone.  If she had left just after the phone call from Paul Hughes, she had been gone about four hours.  Then again, she might have left only minutes before I came looking for her.  I could always hope.

The thought of Paul Hughes made me hurry my steps.  Pauley was at large.  If he was the one who had the penchant for killing animals in bloody ways—as I suspected he was—what would he do if he stumbled upon a very pregnant and relatively weak horse?   I heard an occasional faraway shot, and the pops came from the direction I was headed.  It’s odd; both here and in Baghdad I had gotten so used to hearing distant shooting that I had become almost inured to it; now it was one of the most frightening sounds I could imagine.  I walked quickly for another half hour—the pine stand on my left and thick, vegetative forest on my right—mentally thanking Cindy for keeping her trails so well mowed that they were easily traveled even after a year.  But in time I came to the end of the pines and stopped for a breather.  As I had known it did, the trail went left around the far side of the pines, as it circled back to the pasture, but I was surprised to find that it also turned right, through the thick forest.  I looked for Alikki’s hoofprints.  There they were, to the right and into the forest.  That made sense, since Alikki had probably been on these trails before with Cindy, perhaps many times, and knew what vegetation grew where.  She may be looking for a particular nutrient—Cindy was convinced that Native American medicine men learned their wisdom by following horses into the woods.  I wondered what Ossie Enemy Hunter would think of that.  But I only took two steps before I stopped still, a chill finding its way up my backbone.  This trail had been mowed recently; probably no more than a month ago.  A very fresh manure pile told me that I was going in the right direction, but who had mowed the trail?  As far as I knew, I had no neighbors for many miles in any direction.  I hurried down the path for a while before I saw another of Alikki’s hoofprints in a disturbance of sand that had probably been made by a rooting armadillo.  I stopped.  I looked again.  They were hoofprints all right, but hooves with horseshoes, and Alikki had never worn shoes in her life.

I searched the ground frantically, wondering if I had been following the wrong trail all this time, but no; there was the track of a bare hoof just ahead, and I hurried after it.  “Alikki!” I called.  “Come, girl!”  Sweat was dripping down my blouse and I had to wipe my forehead with the brim of my cap.

Although the trail made walking easy, the forest around me was getting thicker and darker.  I called again and this time I heard a faint answering whinny.  Alikki!  I ran along the trail for a few more minutes until another gunshot halted me in my tracks.  It was much closer than before; maybe only a few hundred yards.  I walked slowly, breathing hard, until I saw that I was actually coming out of the forest.  I heard more shots and carefully looked out from behind an enormous oak to confront what was probably the last thing I expected to see: a fenced-in compound of some kind, with fields, houses, shade trees, and bushes.  I crouched down.  I had come out at the very corner of the fence and the trail forked to follow both fence lines.  The right-hand part of the trail was empty; on the left, grazing near the fence line, was Alikki.  A few paces away was a gate made of heavy-gauge pipe and fastened with a chain and padlock.

The fence extended in both directions further than I could see.  I peered closer into the compound.  First, I saw acres and acres of pastureland.  Past that I could make out tilled fields and buildings of some kind—a large house and half a dozen smaller buildings, but constructed in a style popular back in the days when most things were cobbled together from wood and tin by talented craftsmen.  They were far enough away that I could make out no details other than they were shaded by an occasional oak and magnolia.

The gunfire had stopped.  I walked slowly toward Alikki, not only because I didn’t want to scare her, but because I was studying the compound.  If I had been paying more attention to the ground, I wouldn’t have stumbled over an old piece of lumber that someone had left there.  I righted myself before I fell, but looked back at the offending board, which was just visible through the growth.  Actually, there were a lot of boards, set into the ground in some kind of pattern, but the vegetation made it hard to discern.  I bent down and tried to pick one up, but it was firmly embedded in the terrain.  It looked and—when I touched it— felt, rough, old.  Some of the boards were rotten, almost crumbly, but many were not.  I saw a nail sticking from the end of one of the rotten boards and managed to pull it out easily.  It might just have been the effect of the weather, but the shape of the nail was slightly different from nails I had seen and worked with before—sharper at the point and thinner at the head.  I followed the pattern of the boards more closely and realized that, if they were up clear of the ground, they would resemble a deck, or maybe a wide bridge over a stream.  The boards seemed to follow the line of fence that stretched out to my right.  I looked behind me and saw that it continued out into the forest, although it was almost impossible to see more than a glimpse or two in the thick brush.  Then I had it; it was a road.  An ancient road made of boards.

A wooden road through a forest.  Were the road and this compound connected?  If so, the connection must have been in the distant past.  As I peered inside I became aware of several figures, but they were so far in the distance that it was all I could do to make out that they were men and not women.  At least one of them seemed to be carrying a rifle.  The shots I heard came from the direction in which he was walking, but luckily, he was walking away from me, not toward me.  I felt naked and vulnerable without my bow.  It wasn’t much against a rifle, but it was something, and I was careful to keep out of sight behind brush or trees as I made my way toward Alikki.

Alikki was grazing contentedly on grass near the fence line, but when I reached her side, her head came up and she began nuzzling my pockets.  When she detected no sugar or carrot, she went back to grazing.  I looked through to the other side of the fence—which was made up of heavy wood as well as a strand of hotwire—and I saw why she was so calm.  A tall gray horse—the same one I had seen when I woke up in the woods and again at the cowboy-mounted shooting event—was standing close by, erect, in the posture of a guardian.  Behind him, grazing unconcerned, were four other horses of different shades of brown and chestnut.   As I approached, his nostrils flared and his ears went back.

“Hey, Trigger,” I said softly to the gray.  “Is this your home?”  I went close enough to the fence so he could sniff me and he visibly relaxed.  His ears came back up and he nickered softly.  He remembered me; knew that I was not someone he needed to fear.   He watched without concern as I slipped the halter on Alikki. 

I was scared of the men with guns.  What were they doing here?  What was this, this
place
doing here?   How was Krista Torrington connected to all this?  My solution was to get out of there quick and ask questions when my horse was back home.  I led Alikki back the way I had come.  After rounding the bend, though, I heard the hoofbeats of the other horses galloping away from the fence and toward the other side of the pasture.  Alikki’s head came up and she whirled around in the path.  I held tight to the lead rope and said calming words until she relaxed.  I was curious enough about what had spooked the other horses that I tied Alikki’s lead rope to a branch and crept back to look through the fence from behind some shrubbery.

The horses had cantered toward two people who must have walked up by a path I hadn’t noticed.  They were close enough for me to see a short young woman with wild, strawberry-blonde hair carrying a feed bucket.  Krista Torrington.  The horses had not spooked after all; they were just running in for their dinner.  As I watched, I saw Krista’s companion—had she given Mark Patterson an invitation to visit?—turn in my direction.  No, it wasn’t Mark; in fact, the figure I saw couldn’t have looked less like Mark and still been human.  For, even at that distance and in shadows, I could make out sparse and scraggly black hair and a face so hideous that I thought at first I must be seeing the effects of light and shadow.  The face had an unnatural shade of reddish brown—somewhat like Panhandle Slim’s hair. It looked contorted, wrinkled, somehow, but not by age.  I had seen enough burn victims in Baghdad to know that whoever the man was, he understood what fire could do to soft flesh.

I crept back from my hiding place and found Alikki restless, shaking the branch as she pulled against the lead rope.  I quickly untied her, calmed her until her ears came back up, and began the dark walk home.  I had found my horse again.  She was safe.

The walk back was uneventful, but hot.  Alikki walked docilely and with a suppleness that told me that she was glad I was taking her home.  She had seen other horses and she was happy; what she needed now was water.  We did not see or hear anyone else on the trails.  After I had put Aliki in her stall and fed and watered her, I went out to the gap in the fence and roped it off so she couldn’t stray off again.  I would have to shop for lumber before I could repair the fence properly. 

As soon as I got inside the house, I switched on my iMac.  I had new data but no idea what to do with it.  What I wanted was to find information on the compound I had stumbled across and on the old wooden road that had almost been erased by the forest.  The problem was, I didn’t know what to search for.  I didn’t know the name of the compound nor the road, so I used general search questions.  I typed in “wood road,” and came up with zilch.  I altered it a little, to “wooden roads,” and had more success.  In fact, in a very few minutes, I had the term I was looking for—one I should have guessed.  What I had seen had been a plank road.

I turned from the computer and opened the history book I had gotten from Benny’s.  Because the book was a history of Jasper County as a whole, information about Pine Oak was limited, but it was interesting, and a lot of it concerned the Plank Festival.  I searched the index under “plank road” and hit the jackpot.  Under that listing there were sublistings such as “construction of,” “cost of,” and the like.  Under “construction of,” however, there was the sub-sublisting of “in Planktown.”  At the end of an hour of going between the computer and the book, I found out a lot of what I wanted to find, and most of it was a surprise.

As far as I could determine, a plank road was similar to a railroad track, but upside down.  Wooden rails were set up on both sides of a level dirt road and parallel to it.  Across these were laid planks three or four inches thick, to form what might look today like a long deck.  There were no ruts in a plank road and no mud.  A six-day trip on a dirt road was cut to half a day on a well-maintained plank road.  The first plank roads were built in 1844 in New York and Michigan and were so popular that they began a plank road craze that was to sweep across America for over two decades.

In 1830, Cecil Torrington, a settler from New Jersey, founded a small community in north Florida that he named after himself.  Torrington existed mostly as a sleepy farming town until the plank road boom, when the population—suddenly wide-eyed—realized that they were living amid a vast wealth of oak and pine forests.  Sawmills opened up, a railroad line was shunted in, and the small city was renamed Planktown.  For twenty years, oak and pine logs were sent out on the rails, materials for hundreds of miles of plank roads, mostly in the north.  It was during this heyday that the Plank Festival came into being—a citywide holiday that celebrated the area’s wealth and importance in national transportation.

Unfortunately, after five or six years, the timber making up many of the plank roads began to warp or rot and had to be replaced.  Maintenance on the roads soon became so expensive that the construction of new roads diminished and then died altogether.  In 1875, with the dearth of new orders for roadbuilding timber, the town council voted to give the city its third name, and Pine Oak it has remained.  Still, every year, on August 22
^nd
, the city celebrates its rich past by holding the Plank Festival.  Today, most of our harvested pines are trucked to another county, where they are pulped and used to make disposable diapers.  Just thought I’d throw that in.

Yet the most interesting piece of information was contained in a single paragraph in
The History of Jasper County.
  It was the paragraph I read when I followed the last index reference under “plank road.”