IT WAS SCRABBLE NIGHT AT INDIAN VALE, AND MY DAUGHTER, Anci, and I had the tiles out. We had a yellow pad and a fistful of pencils to scratch down our scores. Anci’s column was filled with numbers. Mine were more like imaginary numbers. We had that Ben and Jerry’s ice cream with the real cookie dough in it, though, and that took away some of the sting. We also had those orange sodas Anci favors and a dictionary as big as the engine battery for an Abrams tank. We were living the high life. Anci was, anyway. She beat me three out of four matches, and it felt like she threw our last match out of pity. Afterward, she said, “Just so you know, I threw our last match out of pity,” but maybe there’s more than one way to interpret a comment like that.
It was a hot summer night in Little Egypt. Goddamn, it was hot. A suffocating vegetative haze hung in the air. The cricks had sucked themselves empty, and every blade of grass between our little valley and the LaRue-Pine Hills had been cooked down to fried nettles as sharp as carpenter’s nails. Even the springtime migration of snakes and other slithering critters toward the Scatters, with its cool layers of spatterdock and Sputnik-clumps of buttonbush, had been poorly attended. Anci and I were at the kitchen table, sweating in sleeveless T-shirts. Two weeks earlier, the house’s ancient air-conditioning unit had expired in a belch of lavender smoke, and there hadn’t been money lying around to repair or replace it.
Despite our heat rashes, life of late had been relatively calm. I’d done some easy jobs, and there hadn’t been any murders. No one had tried to shoot me with guns or kidnap my daughter or throw the pair of us off a bridge. It was a good stretch. Somewhere in there, a guy from Olney hired me to retrieve some stolen chickens. He loved those chickens like they were kin, and I took the job and managed to recover the birds without fuss, or anyway without much of it. Along the way, one of them pecked me on the thumb. This was one of these salmon faverolles they got in the exotic bird game, a snooty specimen with a floppy comb like a slouch hat and eyes full of contempt. He didn’t like you, and he didn’t mind if you knew it. I guess as chickens go he was pretty tough. Anyway, that’s about as exciting as things had gotten lately.
Anci drummed her fingers on the game box.
“Wanna go again?”
“I don’t know. Frankly, I’m not too happy with this losing business. One or two ain’t so bad, maybe, but after a while it starts to feel like a pattern.”
“Shame Peggy’s not around, then,” Anci said. It was, too. Peggy was back home north helping her sister sort through another car crash of a divorce. Crash number five, I think it was. The entire family was like that, a hotbed of marital disquietude, and it was this, likely more than anything else, that explained why Peggy and I had yet to get hitched.
Anci interrupted my thoughts. “I know she gives you words, she thinks I’m not looking.”
“Maybe she’s just whispering sweet nothings in my ears. You ever consider that?”
“Twenty-point sweet nothings.”
“Says you. Besides, isn’t tonight The Bachelor?”
“That’s Thursday. And I thought you hated it.”
“I do,” I said. And I did. “But anything’s better than being kicked around your own kitchen by a thirteen-year-old and her fancy vocabulary.”
She rolled her eyes and started setting out tiles. We were going again. We were about to start when someone knocked on our door.
Anci checked the time on her phone.
“Kinda late for company,” she said.
We live in a lonely country place, my daughter and I. Lonely might be understating it some. You get more bustle in an oil painting. We got a den of foxes, though, and the occasional bobcat. In the springtime, we had kittens even, with their plumes of dappled fur and sidereal eyes. Every so often, a flock of wild turkey will pass near the house, bathing in the dirt and fallen leaves, how they do, and raising their throaty ruckus. What we don’t get much are human visitors, especially during nighttime hours.
I said, “Wait here.”
She never wanted to wait. She followed me to the door, and we both looked through the porthole. In the driveway was a swamp-colored Chevy with a kind of homemade yurt anchored to its flatbed with mismatched bungee cord and jute, and standing shoulder to shoulder on my front porch were two men. They wore dark wool suits of the quality you might find on deep discount at JCPenney or the Walmart, and these suits were further darkened by sweat patches on the underarms and thighs. The white shirts beneath their jackets had gone nearly transparent with perspiration, revealing dark curls of chest hair underneath, and on their feet were patent leather shoes, polished to brilliance. The older man was in the neighborhood of sixty or sixty-five. He wasn’t much taller than five four and was basically a beer belly on legs. We get that a lot around here. The younger one was so skinny he could have been a skeleton in a biology classroom.
I opened the door and stepped out and closed it behind me. Anci stayed inside, but I knew she’d be near the door, so I kept my back to it to form another bit of barrier. The old man must have noticed this small caution because he grinned shyly through the fuzz on his chin and said, “Blessed be,” and like a conjurer’s trick produced a handkerchief to mop at his brow and jowls. “Is this not a hot night?”
“Hot as hammered hell, as my momma used to say.”
“I ain’t ever heard that one,” he said. He passed his handkerchief to the boy, who took it and rubbed it around his face too. I worried they’d hand it to me next, and I worried over what I’d do if they did. “Mind if I use it sometime? Season such as this, man is wont to say such things.”
“Feel free.”
He was appreciative and nodded his head some to show it. He retrieved the sweaty hanky from his boy and replaced it in a pocket, much to my relief.
“You Slim?”
That’s me. I’m Slim. The younger fella frowned. He didn’t like wasting time on such things maybe. Now I got a better look at him, he showed himself to be even stranger than I first thought. He was in his late twenties, probably, but it was a rough late twenties. The years had not been kind. In fact, they’d been downright mean. His hair was thin blond, balding a little anywhere you looked, and his skin was pitted and discolored as though with small bruises. He might literally have been beat with the ugly stick. His gaze was flat and his eyes irregularly shaped, his lips stretched as though tugged from either side by fishhooks, which gave his jaw an off-center appearance, like the top part of his skull had been set down carelessly atop it. He wasn’t going to be on any magazine covers.
The old man said, “I’m Sheldon Cleaves. This is my boy, A. Evan. Sorry about the hour. Wonder if we might come in for a sit. Got bidness with you. Private investigator bidness. You’re in that line, ain’t you?”
I was and I said so. The sign in my front yard said so, too: SLIM: REDNECK INVESTIGATIONS. “But any new cases get run past my manager,” I hastened to add.
I decided they looked harmless enough. Anyway, nothing I couldn’t handle. They weren’t armed that I could see. Their suit jackets were too snug to disguise holster bulges, the jacket tails too long to make pistols in the back of their trousers anything close to practical. There was a soft, friendly purr in the old man’s voice that put you quickly at your ease, and on a windy day you’d want to tie a string around the boy to keep him from gusting away. I waved them on and they followed me into the house, where we found Anci waiting with a book in her lap. She smiled at Sheldon and frowned at A. Evan. I bet he got those frowns all the time and anywhere he went.
“Back to your reading?” I said. “How’s the story?”
Anci turned her attention from our guests and gave it back to her book.
“It’s okay,” she said, closing it with a thump. “Though I confess I find Holmes’s style mildly frustrating. He spends half his time showing off his . . . what was that word again?”
There was a vocabulary list on the end table, and I picked it up and looked at it. The list was a corker, full of archaic and weird vocabulary the teacher thought her advanced class might enjoy. I read aloud, “Ratiocination.”
“That’s the one. I can’t keep it in my brain, some reason. Maybe I’m not the Scrabble champ I pretend to be. Anyway, Holmes spends half his time showing off that whatdoyoucallit and the other half fiddling around while the dead people pile up. Ask me, he ought to turn Watson and his pistol loose more often, get some quicker results.”
“Well, that is one way of looking at it,” I said. “But I don’t suggest you write that down comes time to do your paper.”
The schools all had summer reading programs now, and the one Anci was in was a survey of classic mystery stories: Poe, Doyle, Sayers, and Collins. Much to her dismay, there wasn’t any Crumley, Box, or Barr, her favorites. She went so far as to give her teacher a paperback copy of Bordersnakes, trying to grease the skids a little I guess, result of which I ended up in the district office getting a talking-to from a school counselor.
Sheldon was suddenly interested. He and A. Evan had squeezed themselves together, again shoulder-to-shoulder, on the love seat, but he was looking at Anci.
“Which Holmes is it?” he asked.
“The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“That’s a good one.”
I said, “I liked it.”
A. Evan said, “I ain’t much of a reader.”
Anci ignored us. “That’s not bad enough, the world’s brilliantest detective sends his assistant into a ruckus—and with a haunted dog, no less—and doesn’t even bother to tell him what the caper is. It’s unethical.”
“Are you reviewing the story or Holmes’s professional conduct?” I said.
“Heck, what’s the difference? Look at it like this: I wager if you were in the market for a consulting detective, and he told you he was going to solve the crime from his easy chair, you’d fire him on the spot, no matter how many fancy brain tricks he pulled out of his pipe.”
“I guess so,” I said, “but I’m not sure that books always have to be entirely realistic.”
“I know that, man,” Anci said. “I’ve read the stories about the boy wizards and the virgin vampires, and I didn’t come crying to you about them. But this is different. This is mystery solving, and it ought to have a higher standard.”
Sheldon cleared his throat a little in a polite way.
“Speaking of which.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. “We do carry on sometimes. You should have seen us during Murder on the Orient Express. We fought like geese.”
“Poirot should have hanged them all,” Anci said, still fit to be tied over it.
“Like to see about hiring you on for some work,” Sheldon went on, determinedly, because that was the only way it was going to happen. “A man in your line ever search for any missing persons?”
Before I could reply with anything, Anci said, “Depends. Who’s missing?”
“Family. Shelby Ann Cleaves. She’s . . . She’s our little one.”
“Oh, my. I’m so sorry. How little?” I said.
Sheldon paused to swap fretful faces with A. Evan. Some faces are new to fret and some reveal a lifetime of it, and these faces did the latter. A lifetime of fret and then some.
Sheldon said, “Two.”
A. Evan added, “Two and a quarter.”
I paused. Something like that is always a sock in the eye. I remembered what’d happened a year or so ago with my own daughter and I shivered as I always did and always would. It’s a nightmare wrapped in your darkest fears of helplessness and thrown off a cliff. Then they dynamite the cliff. I looked around in my mind for words. Finally, I said, “Sir, I hate to hear it. Truly I do. But missing children, that’s really a job for the police.”
Anci said, “How long?”
“Couple weeks. The pear blossoms were just coming on pretty. White and pink how they do. So mid-May or thereabouts.”
I said, “I’m sorry to say this, but a couple weeks is a long time.”
Anci said, “What have the cops done about it?”
Sheldon had given up on me and was now talking directly to Anci.
“What if I told you they weren’t interested in our troubles?”
“What if I told you I wasn’t surprised?”
I was surprised, but I didn’t have a chance to say so. A. Evan reached something across to Anci. A smartphone open to its photo app.
“Forward only, please,” he warned, and winked. “Some sights a little one just ain’t fit to see.”
Anci scowled at him, but she swiped the screen forward. I had to look over her shoulder. She had taken over the agency and was now fully in charge. She’d probably want to put her name on my sign. Maybe even take my name off.
Anci flipped through the photos. She handed the phone back to A. Evan. She looked at me. I looked at her. We both looked at the Cleaveses.
I said, “Why, Mr. and Mr. Cleaves, that is a dog.”
Sheldon said, “Yes, sir. A dog. More specifically, our dog. Purebred pit and likely the sweetest thing you will ever meet.”
“But . . . a missing pet . . . I’m not sure I’d be worth your money, sir.”
This was truer than I realized. A. Evan wasn’t done handing things. He dug around in his pockets some. I didn’t want anything that had been in his pockets, but he was determined. He brought out a fistful of something and tossed it to Anci. Maybe seventy bucks. Maybe not even. Anyway, not enough to fix the air conditioner unless the only problem was that it was unplugged.
“Sixty-five,” Sheldon said, settling the question. “We got a piece out Union City way. A thousand acres or so. Grain sorghum plus soybeans and a patch set aside for truck farming. Town people like that these days, getting their vegetables that way, but times have been kinda lean of late, and this season unforgiving.”
“I really don’t know what I’d do,” I said. “Have you posted flyers? Reward sometimes does the trick.”
“Did. Paper flyers and reward cash both. Nothing useful come of it.”
I said, “She could be anywhere.”
“No, sir. Man claims to know her whereabouts. Man on the phone, I mean.”
It was starting to make sense.
“Did this man mention his name?”
Sheldon shook his head. “Refused to.”
Anci tossed back the money.
“He doesn’t have the dog,” said Anci and me both.
“But he described her. Described the hurt on her leg.”
I said, “No. He got you to mention it somehow and used a trick to make you think he’d come up with it himself as proof.”
Anci said, “It’s a swindle, sir.”
“That it is,” I said. “Someone spots your ad, knows you’re desperate. I know it’s tough to swallow, but there’s always someone out there willing to take advantage of folks in a pickle. And this one’s a rural classic. This particular someone phones to say he’s seen your dog and knows where she is, but there’s a hitch. This kind of deal, there’s always a hitch. Let me guess, he doesn’t have Shelby Ann personally, right? I mean, he doesn’t have her in his possession, but he knows who does?”
They nodded.
“It’s his boss? Or his wife’s boss? Anyway, I’m guessing work’s involved somehow. He needs to remain anonymous, and the situation is real delicate and has to be handled carefully. And by carefully, I mean with money.”
Sheldon’s cheeks reddened.
“Has he asked you to Western Union him anything? He probably called it a finder’s fee or some such.”
“That he did, and that we did,” Sheldon admitted. “Said he’d require a thousand dollars. Times are lean, though. We could only swing five hundred, and even that was a stretch.”
“He doesn’t have the dog,” I said again, but couldn’t help thinking of the measly sixty-five they’d offered me. I put that in my Happy Box. “This is a scam gets run out here sometimes. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
A. Evan said, “We know him.”
“Know who?”
Sheldon said, “Man who’s supposed to have her. Fella on the phone slipped up a little one time and said his name. Reach. Dennis Reach. He runs a little place out our way. Roadhouse name of Classic Country.”
“That might have been a trick, too,” I said, uncertainly. “Let me ask you, how do you know this Reach?”
Sheldon said, “Like I say, club’s not too far from our place. We might have wandered in there once or twice with a thirst. Reach likes to tend bar, time to time, and he’s known to spin a tale.”
“Any idea why he might be wrapped up in something as low-down as dognapping?”
Sheldon shrugged. “Club’s full most nights, so it’s not likely he needs any kind of ransom.”
“Would you say he’s an enemy?” I said, because that seemed most obvious.
“I wouldn’t say I know him well enough to call him that, but I’m pretty sure that if I did I would.”
“Have you asked him?”
“No, sir.” Sheldon again. “I do that, I’m liable to shoot the rascal. We was kinda hoping you’d do it for us. Ask him, I mean. Not shoot him.”
I nodded and looked at Anci again. I said, “You’re sure this one passes muster?”
“Sounds harmless enough,” she said. “But are we really taking dogs for clients now?”
“What can I say? Times are rough.”
She said, “Someone really ought to keep you away from jokes.”
“We’ll do it,” I said to Sheldon. “Anyway, I’ll run out there. See what there is to see.”
“Well, I figured you would. But thank you.”
“Figured how?”
“You know a feller name of Lew Mandamus?”
“Sure, I know Lew,” I said.
“He’s the one aimed us at you. Said you have a soft spot for critters.”
“I’ll have to find some way to thank him.”
“Don’t know what to say,” Sheldon said. “We was . . . we was desperate.”
He wiped at something in his eye with a finger. A. Evan farted. I scratched down the names and numbers. Reach’s address was near the Classic Country Showroom, a residence behind the bar. We shook hands all around. A. Evan’s was like a refrigerated chicken’s foot. His fingers were long and bony, the skin cold and slightly moist, despite the temperature both outside and in. I wiped my palm on my pants and thought I was being sly about it, but the skinny little shit noticed and smiled meanly at me and winked again. Then he followed his old man out of the house to the Chevy flatbed and in another moment they’d vanished down the dark throat of Shake-a-Rag Road.
I said, “Well, that is something you don’t see every day.”
“Or smell,” Anci said. “Did you get a whiff of A. Evan? It’s like he bathes in hog guts.”
“It’s called personal hygiene for a reason. And what was with you back there? You might have got us involved in a missing-kid case. I’d rather chew barbwire.”
“I would, too,” she said. “But I could tell by looking at them it wasn’t a kid. You look at folks, you get a sense of them. I confess I didn’t think of a dog, though. My money was on ‘car.’”
“A car? Named Shelby Ann?”
“Could be. Some people name their cars. And stop being so damn sensitive all the time.”
“And for sixty-five dollars, too.”
Anci rolled her eyes. “Oh, I know. Usually, you get kicked in the head for free. Why not try it for money this time? Besides, this is your chance to do a good deed, pile up some karma.”
“You can’t eat karma, darlin’.”
“No, but it can eat you.”