Hick’s chin rested on his hand as he took a drag of his sixth cigarette of the morning. The sky was brightening, but was still washed out in the dawn’s gray light. Slivers of purple and pink sliced through the clouds like luminous fingers, streams of light arcing out across the horizon.
He had been waiting for dawn when the town awakened and everything came to life. As he slipped on the extra uniform he kept at the station, he was too bleary-eyed to wonder that his clothes no longer fit, or that his blue eyes seemed to stand out from his thin, brown face.
He finished shaving just as the door opened and Adam walked in.
“How’s Sammy?” Hick called from the bathroom.
“Doc dressed his hand real nice and gave him something to help him sleep. Says it’ll be a long time in healin’. Might have to go into Memphis for a skin graft if it don’t get better on its own.”
Hick entered the room tying his tie and watched as Adam plopped a fresh newspaper on his desk. “I told you this would happen,” Adam said, his face sober.
Hick sat down and looked at the front page of the paper quickly reading the article. Wayne Murphy wrote, in gleeful detail, of the fall of Cherokee Crossing’s former favorite, Tobe Hill. He seemed to take delight in recounting the minute details of the day before. If you want to break the law in Cherokee Crossing, the article read, be sure to buddy up to our esteemed sheriff first. It seems Tobe Hill can unlawfully discharge his weapon in town at will, whereas the majority of us would be in jail at this hour. The corruption and ineptness must stop. Hick read the last sentence twice, feeling his heart pounding, trying to control his temper.
“Well?” Adam demanded. “Now, what are we going to do?”
“Tobe didn’t break no laws,” Hick responded.
Adam put his finger on the article and pounded it on the desk. “Hick, you can’t protect Tobe anymore. It’s in the paper. Everyone knows Tobe fired that weapon again yesterday.”
Hick rose from his desk and got his hat. Pausing at the doorway, he turned to Adam and answered, “I ain’t saying what Tobe’s doin’ is smart, and I know it ain’t safe. But Tobe don’t live in the city limits. It ain’t unlawful to discharge a weapon on Ellen Isle.”
Hick marched across the road to Wayne Murphy’s office and stalked inside. Wayne was leaning over his printing press, apparently getting ready to publish a second edition, a rare thing in Cherokee Crossing.
He snorted a little when he saw Hick. “Morning, Sheriff. Looking for a paper?”
Hick went to the counter and removed his hat. “No, Wayne, I’m not.”
Wayne seemed reluctant to leave his press. “I’m kind of busy right now,” he told Hick. “Need to get this edition printed before interest dies down and I can’t sell them. Can you come back a little later?”
Hick ran his hand across his mouth hard and tried to choke back his rage. “Wayne, I notice your story has quite a few details in it. I wasn’t there, but you wrote with so much knowledge that it made me feel like I was.” Hick paused and then asked in a cool voice, “How’d it happen that you were?”
Wayne looked up and narrowed his eyes. “Let’s just say there are certain benefits to being across the street from the sheriff’s office.”
“So, are you saying you followed them out to Tobe’s?”
“I ain’t saying anything,” Wayne replied working quickly and paying little attention to Hick. He walked to the back room to get more paper and Hick marched around the counter and followed him.
He had never been in the back room of the newspaper office. It was filthy with ink and wrinkled papers, the smell of musty books, ink, and oil filled the air. Wayne pulled some large sheets of paper off of a shelf and Hick approached him. “I hate to tell you this, but you’re gonna have to print a retraction tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Tobe. He didn’t break no law and I want it in the paper. He don’t live within city limits, so he can shoot that gun whenever he wants.”
Wayne looked unconcerned. “Sure, Sheriff, I’ll print a retraction, right behind the obituaries. Won’t really matter. Damage is already done.”
“I know that,” Hick responded, running his hand through his hair. He looked down into Wayne’s face and said lowly, “If I catch you at another crime scene, I’ll arrest you for obstruction. Is that understood?”
Wayne backed up a little, adjusting his glasses and standing up taller. “You can’t do that. It’s censorship.”
“You can print whatever you want, but don’t get in the way of any police work. I’ll see to it that my perimeters are so large, you won’t even know what county we’re in. Got it?”
Wayne pulled back his lips in a snarl. “You’re not doing yourself any favors.”
Hick’s temper was flaring and when he was angry it showed itself in careful, deliberate speech. “I don’t need any favors from you.”
Wayne laughed. “You sure about that?”
“We don’t all bow to the god of popular opinion, Wayne. You can print whatever you damn well please about me. But it’d better be the truth.”
Wayne had been bending over the press, but he paused and looked at Hick curiously. “Now that’s an outdated notion. What exactly do you call the truth, anyway?”
“The facts.”
“Your perception of the facts. I might see things differently.”
“Fact is fact,” Hick argued. “There ain’t no changing it.”
“Don’t be naïve, boy. What if a man beats his wife? Nobody thinks that’s good, but what if she’s cheating on him? What if she’s taunted him? That doesn’t change the fact that he beat her, but it might lessen his guilt, wouldn’t you say?”
“I never deal in hypotheticals.”
Wayne sighed. “Let me just put it to you like this, people believe what is convenient to believe … what challenges them the least. It’s easier to believe a man beat his wife because she was askin’ for it than it is to believe he’s just a bastard.”
“So which do you do, Wayne. Report facts or editorialize? Because I thought your job was to print the news.”
Wayne shook his head. “My job is to sell papers, period.”
Hick’s eyes narrowed. “So that’s how it works? You print what will sell the most papers?”
“Now you’re catchin’ on. Take that baby, for instance. Sold more papers that next morning than I’d ever sold before. Not that anyone gave a damn about the kid. It just gave ’em all something to talk about.”
“And you made sure that it’d be next to impossible to find the killer by reporting every goddamn detail of the crime scene in your paper.”
Wayne shrugged, apparently unconcerned. “I don’t report news, Sheriff. I decide what is news. I—”
“I think you fabricate news,” Hick interrupted.
Wayne paused and looked at him, and a slow, cynical smile played on his mouth. “Not exactly. I don’t make up stories. On occasion I may embellish them, but just to make them more interesting. Let’s just say I decide what these people will read about and what they’ll believe. Hell, you’re lookin’ at the collective conscience of Cherokee Crossing.”
Hick put his hat on and pulled it down over his eyes, trying to hide the anger that was smoldering there. “You forget one thing, Wayne.”
Wayne appeared smug. “Really? What’s that?”
“These people aren’t stupid. The truth has a way of making itself known.”
Wayne shrugged. “Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. But, until I’m proved wrong about something, I’ll give them what they want. Something to talk about while they’re drinkin’ their coffee.”
Hick walked to the door and then paused. “Don’t forget what I said. I may not have locked up Tobe, but I won’t hesitate to receive you as a guest of my little establishment across the street. Stay out of my way.”
“Are you threatening me? That’s a page one headline if I ever heard one.” Hick heard a condescending grunt and he slammed the door behind him.
Hick’s head was aching as he returned to the station. He hung his hat and sat at the desk, feeling overwhelmed. He thought of all the women in town who they had not yet spoken with. Writing down a dozen or so names, he turned to Wash. “I need you to talk to each of these women and get an idea of what it was they were doing last autumn, and then again, late May, early June.”
“Maggie?” Wash asked looking at the paper incredulously.
“All unwed women in this town between the ages of nineteen and fifty. Maggie fits that criteria so, yes, even Maggie.”
“Jesus, nothing like rubbing it in,” Wash said with an unhappy expression.
Hick’s eyes closed. “Just do it.”
“I finished the absentee files from the high school for you,” Adam said after the door closed behind Wash. “Nobody missed more than a day or two of school.”
“Damn,” Hick answered. “I was hoping we might get a clue.”
Adam rose. “Sorry. I’ll get these back to Gladys for you.”
Hick was thankful for the quiet of the station. He was tired from working all night, and drained from his confrontation with Wayne Murphy. Staring at an ever-growing pile of paperwork on his desk, he was trying to force his mind to concentrate when the door of the station flew open and Maggie stormed in, slamming it behind her.
“How dare you, you son of a bitch!”
He had never heard Maggie curse. His weary eyes could barely connect the angry creature before him with the Maggie he knew.
“What are you talking about?”
“Sending Wash over to question me. He says he has to question all the unmarried women.”
“Well?”
“If you have any questions for me, you come and ask. It wasn’t me, okay? Do you want to know why? Because I’ve been bleeding for six months. There’s something wrong with me, and I’ll probably never have children.”
Hick stared at her, a sudden overwhelming ache beginning to squeeze his heart. “Mag, I just—”
“You just what?” she snapped. “You just wanted to humiliate me even more? What are you insinuating? That I sleep around?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “Of course not. But I—”
“Stop! It’s enough.” She shook her head, looking down and her voice quieted. “How could you even believe I’d do something like that?” Her eyes welled with tears and her chin quivered with bitterness and sorrow.
He felt numb as he looked at her, like someone completely isolated, someone standing at a window and watching the people inside, knowing he can’t reach them through the glass. “I’m so sorry.”
She stared at him a moment, a tear sliding down her cheek. “At least Wash only has to question the ‘unmarried’ women. It shouldn’t take long. I’m the only girl from our class who isn’t married. There aren’t many of us ‘old maids’ around.” She sighed. “I waited for you and you made a fool out of me.” She shook her head, biting her lip. “I wonder what I did that made you hate me so much.”
“That’s not it at all.”
“What happened to us, Hickory? You never mentioned me in your letters home, you stopped writing. It was as if, at some point, I ceased to exist in your eyes. I’ve laid awake trying to figure out what I did that was so wrong. How I turned you away.”
“I couldn’t stand the thought of the censors—”
“Hickory, that’s a sad excuse and you know it. I didn’t need you to bare your soul … I just needed to know that you were alive and that you remembered my name.”
He stared at her, unable to admit to the pile of unsent v-mail stuffed in a drawer at home. She stood there and he knew she was waiting for a reply, but he remained mute. Then she turned and was gone. He wanted to call her back. His mouth opened and he tried, but his throat was closed, choked with regret and too many words unsaid. He stared at the door and felt as if his heart had been ripped out. Slumping in his chair, he covered his eyes with his hand, and forced his pinched lungs to breathe. His throat swelled and his eyes burned, but the pain was too intense to be released through mere tears.