Murder in a Very Small Town Read online

  Danser

  Dot to Dot

  The Amazing Kazu

  Where’s Karen?

  Murder in a Very Small Town

  Copyright © 2017 Greg Jolley

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Open Window

  an imprint of BHC Press

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2017938465

  Print edition ISBN numbers:

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946848-06-2

  ISBN-10: 1-946848-06-9

  Also available in softcover

  Visit the publisher at:

  www.bhcpress.com

  Dedicated to

  Greg Dirksen,

  a true compadre

  for so many good

  and interesting years.

  In Memory of

  B.B. and Jared Danser

  and Baby Ruth

  Somewhere between Albuquerque and St. Louis, a road sign read, Do Not Drive Into Smoke. Wiki raised her black shades, scanned both sides of Interstate 40 and frowned. Nothing but endless miles of dirt on both sides of the two-lane road. Not a wisp of smoke. Nothing but dust and brush. She took her stub of a pencil from behind her ear and wrote on the Post-it pad stuck on her bare, upper thigh. She copied the words from the sign followed by a dash and the word “RES” for research.

  She had been driving for hours, watching the changing sky. Storm clouds and occasional lightning filled the sky north of her. It was more interesting than the countryside. She brushed a spill of blonde hair from her brow and took another bite of the slice of pie she had bought that morning.

  Looking down from the sky, she saw a long-haul truck up ahead probably doing eighty along the two-lane road. Wiki glanced at the speedometer and noted she was doing ninety-ish. Without thinking about it, she hit the blinkers and passed the truck.

  Lowering her shades, her thoughts turned to Sara’s last message. A typed one, which was odd, because they both preferred voice memos. “Voice has coloration,” Sara had explained, adding with her throaty laugh, “and our nervous breathing.” Wiki had agreed with a giggle. Their messages were often naughty, definitely sassy and fun, and endearing. As the best of lover’s letters are.

  However, there it was, in text. Wiki glanced at the passenger seat and asked her iPad to read the message to her. The stilted voice repeated Sara’s last-typed message. It was almost fun to hear that clinical voice stumble along the lines of her lover’s seductive and wicked words. Sara was kissing Wiki’s lower tummy and might have been offering her husky breath, but the iPad voice was making the intimate moment sound like harshly typed porn.

  Wiki was becoming aware that her hem had ridden up, and she was naked under the dress. She wanted to rest her pale small hand on the warm skin of her belly. Grinning under her shades and remembering to watch the barren road ahead, she kept both hands on the wheel but wanted to do otherwise.

  “Feeling frisky,” Wiki said to the view. The mechanical voice and the lack of Sara’s breathing helped her behave. She blinkered and passed an RV and a small car loaded to the roof with camping gear. She did not look at the drivers she passed; she was now more amused than aroused as she listened to Sara’s last missive being mispronounced and broken by oddly-placed pauses.

  She passed a dusty-looking town with low pale hills in the distance, speckled by lonely, black oaks. Wiki reached into her lap and pulled her hem over her naked self. She wondered if maybe the voice-to-text app was getting frisky with itself, and she twisted her smile to one side.

  The message was getting more descriptive, but not explicit. Sara had a way of describing without being graphic. The scene that Sara was giving her was becoming more heated, more active. Wiki was about to turn the message off—it was interesting, but it wasn’t gonna cause any naughty trouble with that voice. She noted and forgave some of the descriptions that seemed unlike Sara’s normal and slow lovemaking. The wit is gone, Wiki decided. Not as much playfulness.

  “She’s just trying to do me,” Wiki decided, and this felt odd. This was something that never happened in their beds. She was looking at the iPad, forming a frown, when Sara mentioned something that had always been taboo for the two of them. Wiki glanced out the windshield, saw that the road was hers alone, and then looked again to the iPad and listened to what Sara was doing. In the next lines, Sara brought something new into their bed—a device they had discussed and both negated. When it was clear that Sara was not kidding, that she really was going to do what she had hinted at, Wiki killed the message.

  She carried the frown for the next twenty miles and then pulled off to gas up the rental car again.

  Standing between the pumps and the car, she pulled her long black coat tightly around herself, covering her favorite smock dress: white with small-embroidered suns. Her legs were cold, but her feet were warm in her gray wool socks and brown work boots. She shivered, looking over the roof of the car to the exit ramp. The wind was harsh and cold on her face. She saw a billboard that advertised “Fantasy Land” over a prone model in a negligee. Wiki felt her first smirk since turning the iPad off. She had seen a few of these kinds of billboards out on the interstate. New to America, her ideas about the Midwest being a conservative and puritanical place were an odd juxtaposition. She filled the tank and decided to go take a look-see, which sounded to her like something a local might say based on the DVDs she had watched at la Diana, the South American resort where she had lived most of her life.

  She got inside the car, saw that she had forgotten to wash the windshield, muttered “Guano,” and took off.

  The Fantasy Land exit was four miles up the road.

  “I need to see it,” she whispered, frowning, referring to what Sara had tried to bring to their bed. Three minutes later, she clicked on her blinkers.

  She entered the store, a cocoon of purple, red, and lavender. There were a lot of silvery nighties and sheer gowns. Most of the store, at least the front half, was definitely male-with-female focused. Wiki kept her shades on and wandered about, feeling the sideways grin on her face. A sweet young woman welcomed her, and Wiki paused when she beckoned her with a bending finger. Wiki stepped to the display case and watched the woman’s hand gently reach to her face. The fingertips straightened her crooked sunglasses.

  “Better, hun,” the woman smiled.

  Wiki liked her smile and thanked her.

  A telephone started to ring, and the woman behind the counter raised her pointer finger to Wiki before turning to answer. Wiki wandered to her right, her small hand brushing the glass top of the display case. Near the end of the last case, she recognized what she thought Sara had tried to introduce into their love life. Wiki lost her grin and turned away, stepping deeper into the store, looking for women-with-women accessories. She found oils, fragrances, and a new line of Glow-In-The-Dark Dual Bullets, which caused her the first sincere, delighted laugh of the day.

  Her iPhone purred. New message. She and Sara wanted or needed nothing, and Wiki had seen the object Sara had tried to bring into their beds. She tapped the phone and read the first line.

  Wiki, about the baby, and us well, I’ve been rethinking…

  She stopped reading. First off, Sara rarely used her first name; the use carried a weight. And “rethinking?” And in
text, not with voice?

  She started walking to the door. The woman behind the counter was watching her with the store phone still at her ear. Wiki’s expression started to crumble and tremble. She almost dropped her iPhone when she tried to slide it inside her coat pocket without thinking and missed.

  “You’re okay?” she heard the saleswoman.

  Wiki did not turn. She stood looking out through the store window to her car buffeted by wind in what looked like a mix of rain and snow.

  “Where am I?” she whispered, but the saleswoman heard the words.

  The woman stepped out from around the counter, studying Wiki’s gaze. She told Wiki the name of the town and added, “Missouri.”

  Wiki ignored the name of the town and whispered, “I’m in misery?”

  “Oh, love. Come here,” the woman stepped closer and lowered her eyes to hers. She reached out and gently raised Wiki’s dark glasses from her eyes.

  Wiki’s chin was trembling and her eyes were red, but there were no tears. She felt more shocked than hurt, but the hurt was there, too.

  The saleswoman saw the phone in Wiki’s small shaking hand and put her hands on Wiki’s shoulders and pulled her close. She wove her head trying to catch Wiki’s gaze, but Wiki’s eyes were focused on the weather and the car outside.

  “Bad news?” the young woman asked, knowing the question was redundant.

  Wiki didn’t reply. She turned away and stepped from the light embrace. Pocketing the iPhone, she started to the door, walking in stilted steps, unlike her normal light gait.

  “Hun? You don’t want to be driving right now. Not out in that, and not when you’re upset. Come—”

  Wiki heard the words but continued to the door. She stepped from the garish décor, lights, and heat and walked to her rental car. Rain and slush were sweeping her and rocking her tiny frame.

  As she steered to the on ramp, she braked long enough to thumb her phone off.

  She drove, and the hours passed. She had to stop to refill the car, which she did; robot-like, barely aware of her actions, the wind having its way with her long coat and dress. She noticed that the storm was growing stronger because it affected the visibility and the road itself, which was becoming white. The shoulders of the interstate were rising with snow, and the cars she passed were often sending low white trails of snow smoke that swept across the pavement.

  There were many more miles and more stops for fuel. She had the Danser family cottage as a target—where she was supposed to carry the baby, their baby, after the scheduled insemination in Ann Arbor. Now she was driving because, really, she didn’t know what else to do; had nowhere else to go.

  When she entered Michigan, she noted it only because a sign welcomed her to “Pure” Michigan. This made no sense to her and her fingers went to her lips, but there was no stub of a pencil there and her Post-it pad was on the passenger seat, where she had set it when she pulled into Fantasy Land.

  “All those scribbles,” she said with tight teeth, feeling heat, shock, and anger. “My little travel notes and longings, all typed and sent each night, and now this?” She glared at her iPad, “I’m gonna flame her tonight.”

  She got into a rhythm with her car and its pedals and wheel, staying in the furrows of the large truck twenty yards ahead. They drove for mile after mile through the storm and the change from evening into dark.

  She and the truck rolled along ever slower, the truck setting their pace of twenty-five miles per hour. There were no other cars on the road in either direction. Wiki stirred from the hypnotism of the view when the truck’s rear lights started blinking red. She slowed with the truck to ten miles an hour.

  The truck pulled off slowly to the side and braked to a stop. Now Wiki had the view of her headlights glaring into the snow-swept road—the two beams illuminated heavy snowflakes falling at an angle. The steering wheel felt fluid in her small hands, and she slowed down again to five miles per hour. Snow was clouting the underside of the car and sometimes white waves crashed up over the hood. There were furrows out before the car, from prior vehicles, but they were becoming harder to see and stay within. Anxiety, perhaps fear, changed the pace of her breaths and chilled her palms on the wheel.

  A highway sign appeared, lit by the white headlights. It read, Exit 143. No name of a town, just the distance to the exit.

  Even from within her personal storm of shock and sadness, Wiki understood that she could not go on much further. She turned on the right-side blinker, something that in her normal life would have made her giggle, what with her being the only car for miles. She slowed some more and began to watch for the furrows to sway off to the right.

  A single car-wide set of tracks continued into the narrow tunnel of the storm and Wiki turned off, staying within the white tire marks. The off-ramp was tree-lined and rose over a knoll, and there was a single yellow light swaying in the distance to her right. She rolled slowly down the other side of the hill and saw a tangle of cars, headlights, and movement. There was an accident at the base of the hill. Wiki lifted off the gas completely and began lightly braking the car. She was studying the scene a hundred yards away, feeling the car slowing and lazily wiggling its rear. The bridge supporting the trestle tracks was what changed everything.

  The car felt like it somehow accelerated. It is also began to slide sideways. Wiki took the wheel tight in both hands. She tried more pressure on the brake pedal. The accident was less than forty yards away, and she could tell that her car was picking up speed as it slid down the snow-covered ramp.

  Sara, the baby, and the heartbreak were forgotten. She could see two men working between three wrecked vehicles, prying on a door. Her hand went to the horn and stayed there, pressing it in a solid cry as she and the car slid closer and closer. Neither man seemed to hear or care about her approach. Not knowing what else to do, Wiki turned the wheel all the way to the right. The car stayed on its steady course for impact.

  Ten yards away one of the men finally looked up, but there was no time to do anything more than that. Her car struck the two men and hit the wrecked cars. Wiki rebounded on the seat after clouting her head on the wheel, and the two cars spun slowly away and her car, now crushed in at the front, slid past. Her car stopped when it crashed into a third vehicle. This impact had more force as she had hit a large tow truck. Her temple hit the steering wheel again as her car finally stopped.

  Wiki sat perfectly still, looking out around the raised hood of her car to the tow truck, ignoring the bump on her head, watching her wipers continue to brush snow from the windshield. She began to shake and could hear the storm wind and the damaged engine of her car.

  She was sitting there staring out into the view when her door opened and a frigid blast of air and snow swept in. She turned and thought she saw a woman’s face close to her; the woman had cloth across her mouth and her head was deep inside a fur-lined parka hood.

  “Lady, are you okay?” She heard, and thought it odd to be addressed as “Lady.”

  The cold and wind coming in through the door jarred Wiki into the current moment. She turned her attention to the woman and nodded, “Yes?”

  The woman’s glove pressed Wiki’s chin and turned her eyes to hers. “You better get out. Another car might come. Come on, take off your belt.”

  Wiki heard and understood, but sat staring. Then she remembered her car striking the two men and that got her going. She unbuckled and climbed out, the wind whipping her heavy coat and summer dress and thin bare legs.

  She looked back up the exit ramp to the two cars she had struck. Their headlights were shining in the blowing snow, and she saw a man staring at the chaos with his jaw dropped.

  The woman had her arm around Wiki and turned her away toward the tow truck.

  “We need to get inside,” the woman said, leading her to the passenger door of the large yellow vehicle. “There’s nothing we can do out here but freeze.”

  “Should we call the police?” Wiki asked, feeling more and more in the moment
.

  The woman opened the door and climbed in first with her hand out to Wiki.

  “Can’t call the sheriff,” the woman replied, waiting for Wiki to close the door.

  “Why not?” Wiki asked. She turned on the seat and looked out to the accident.

  “Because he’s under your car.”

  Nineteen-year-old Jame Spiral steered his pickup into the brick-lined, narrow driveway and cursed, like every night, at having to lower his window and type in the code that opened the gate. He got the code right even with the wind and cold shaking his fingers. He cranked his window up quickly and watched the five-car parking lot appear within the glow of his headlights. The lot was under four feet of undisturbed snow, save the faint track of Eric Adams’ Jeep, which looked like a white shoe. Jame parked one space over from the Jeep and gathered up his tool belt, metal order case, and sippy cup of hot cocoa. He pulled on his gloves and got the key to the building ready in his hand before he opened the truck door. It was eight steps to the heavy metal door to the Central Office, and he trudged as quickly as he could, paying close attention to each and every sure and solid step.

  A single bulb glowed above the heavy metal door, and he used the light to aim and insert the key. He had to pull harder than usual on the door; there was two feet of frozen snow against it.

  The C.O. was well lit with fluorescent lights and warm, and there was the familiar hum of telephone-switching hardware. After stomping the snow from his boots and lower pants legs, he started walking along the room-length mainframe, where rows and rows of wired cross connects providing dial tone to the town of Dent and the houses around the lake.

  He could go looking for his temporary supervisor, Eric, who had to be somewhere either on the opposite side of the mainframe or back in the equipment bays. Instead, he entered the two-seater office. It was furnished with very old metal cabinets, a single desk, six beat-up lockers and the open door to the single restroom. Jame frowned at the open bathroom door and sat down in the tired chair at the desk. Staring at his order case, he heard Eric shout out his name from deeper inside the C.O. He ignored the call. Another work shift, the two of them the only employees, and here’s Eric, calling out what? Expecting someone else? He swiveled to the dusty black terminal and keyboard. After typing the C.O.’s pass code, he used the arrow keys to scroll to the Print option, which followed the day’s date.