Late that afternoon, after buying some clothes and shoes at a JCPenney’s and a few more bananas and candy bars, I arrived home. Clasping my good friend the ax handle in my right hand, carrying the bag containing my new clothes and shoes, bananas, and candy bars in my left, I went up to my room.
I put the ax handle next to the other one so they could keep each other company, though I was uncertain what two ax handles would talk about. I put the new clothes away and started toward my desk. I wasn’t sure what I would write, as I really didn’t know anything new that could be printed in the newspaper, but I still had a few days to organize my thoughts and put together an article.
Truth was, that creepy Jack Jr. had upset me. His threat of legal action seemed to conceal another threat as well. I almost expected another visit from the circus clowns.
I wondered what life might be like in Bora-Bora, provided I had enough money to get there. If I did and found a tree to live under, about all I could get out of it was a swinging weekend, a pineapple, and a sunburn.
I hadn’t sold my aunt’s house yet—my house—and it might be time to pack up my small bit of goods and go back there. It wasn’t Bora-Bora, but it wasn’t here. Ronnie was here, though, and the thought of being even two or three hours from her unnerved me as much as Jack Jr. and his threats.
I was thinking on this when I saw the folded piece of paper on my desk that the librarian had given me, the one with her phone number on it. I had pulled it out of my pocket and put it there before I consigned my shirt to the dirty laundry.
It wasn’t like I was going to chase her down for a date, not with what Ronnie and I had going, but I unfolded the note and looked at it.
It said what it had said before. Estelle Parker, and below her name was her phone number.
Sometimes you have to be slapped in the face to see what’s right in front of you. Right then, I was slapped hard.
I had filled out a form with my information on it. Estelle had given me her number with a smile, and that smile had flattered my ego and swollen my dick enough that I had let down my guard. My biology makes me easy that way.
Estelle’s last name was Parker. Same last name as one of the town fathers. She knew I was an author and she knew I was researching. The thugs showed up not long after I left the library. They’d had just enough time to put on their burnt cork and white face paint and go to the address she had given them.
As Shirley said, it was a pattern.
* * *
I brought my ax handle with me to the car. I didn’t think I’d need it for a less-than-five-foot-tall librarian with a delicate manicure, but it traveled with me nonetheless. When I arrived at the library, it was with great reluctance that I left the ax handle in the back seat, went inside.
One of the volunteers was working that day. She was young and perky. She told me Estelle was going to be out all that week and weekend. She was taking some personal time.
I left and found a phone booth and called the number she’d given me. She didn’t answer. I took the phone book and looked up her name. Her address was there.
I drove down the block to the drugstore, asked for directions to the street she lived on.
It was a short drive. When I got there, the sun was so bright that the idea of there being a kind of darkness moving through this rather all-American small city seemed as unlikely as discovering a talking pigeon with a recipe for hot-water corn bread.
I kept feeling as if I were being watched and followed. If I were, they were as sneaky as the Invisible Man. By that time, I was imagining someone behind every tree and bush and in every alley. It’s funny how people wanting to beat your ass makes you cautious.
The block Estelle lived on was cute as a puppy. It reminded me of the block Ronnie lived on. It looked like a movie set of a small town in all those old Hollywood movies I loved. A place where the milk was delivered early morning in bottles that were left on porches, and a kid on a bicycle threw newspapers. On weekends, husbands mowed the lawns and wives made pot-roast dinners for their families. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where good-looking librarian ladies called in thugs to beat the shit out of a new resident for doing research. It also didn’t seem like the sort of house and yard and location a librarian could afford.
I went up the walk and knocked on the door. For a moment I thought she might not be home, as she hadn’t answered her phone, but I was damn certain to give it a try anyway. I was looking over the flower beds next to the house, as precise and neat as a botanical garden, when the door unlatched.
And there she was. She was wearing a blue and white sundress and she was barefoot. Her blond hair was a little tousled, but that made her look all the more appealing. She had a magazine in her hand. It was rolled up, as if to correct a dog.
“Daniel,” she said.
“Yep. I looked you up. Thought if you had a moment, I’d like to talk to you.”
She tried not to look bothered, but her pretty mouth did a bit of involuntary gymnastics at the corners. She finally decided on a smile bright enough to read by in the dead of night.
“Come in,” she said. “I was sitting on the patio.”
She led me through the house making sure to keep a couple paces in front of me so I could take note of how well she walked. The house smelled of cinnamon air freshener.
We went through a sliding door made of glass and into a backyard. A sprinkler was sputtering water over the emerald blades of close-clipped grass, and the sun shining on the wet beads caused them to shimmer like pearls.
I viewed all of this from under a striped awning that draped over a nice little patio and coated it in comfortable shadow. There was a metal table under the awning and there was a yellow-striped pitcher on it. The pitcher was filled with ice and had a milky-looking liquid inside that I took for lemonade.
With the water sprinkling, the perfectly trimmed grass shimmering, a cool wind sighing over the wooden fence that surrounded her backyard, and a bird singing in a luscious green elm, it seemed like I had stepped into a little slice of heaven with its own resident angel who preferred a sundress to a gossamer gown and wings.
Estelle placed the magazine on the table and took a seat and gestured for me to do the same. The cushions on the metal chair were not as comfortable as they looked.
“I thought I might have lost my allure. I expected you to call well before now. But come by? I didn’t expect that. But I’m glad you’re here. Would you like some refreshment? I have lemonade. I could get another glass.”
“I’m fine. I thought I might ask you something. Are you kin to the Parker on the city council?”
“Why, yes, I am. Judea is my uncle.”
“I think the best way for me to do this is to get right to it. I gave you my information for a library card, and when I said I was writing about the old lake and what had happened there, you got nervous and called your uncle, or someone connected to him, and they called some muscle, and the muscle came to visit me.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Daniel.”
“I think you called to let someone know that I was snooping around, and they sent two jokers with stupid disguises to rearrange my ribs and innards.”
“You were hurt?”
“I managed to hurt them back a bit, and I had some assistance from my grumpy landlady and her shotgun.”
She let her mouth do the gymnastics again, then she lowered her chin for dramatic effect.
“I didn’t think that would happen. Them hurting you.”
“But you did make that call, right?”
A fly came into the picture and hummed around the lip of her striped lemonade glass. She watched it hum for a second, then brushed at it with the back of her hand. “I owe you an apology.”
“At least.”
“I didn’t mean for you to be hurt in any way. Not at all.”
She sounded sincere and looked so adorable in her little sundress, I wanted to hug her. Bears are like that too. They look adorable, but if you move in close, they’ll bite your face off.
“It was a knee-jerk reaction. All those books on Long Lincoln and the lake. I’ve been taught to look out for the family. I was letting my uncle know you might be digging into the past a bit, might write a book about it, and I didn’t want him to be blindsided.”
“By what?”
That was left unanswered. She said, “I just made things worse.”
“For me you did. Why would you keep the books in the library if you don’t want them used for research?”
“It’s not the research, it’s the intent of it. People know the story of the flood and the drowning of folks who lived there, one of those unfortunate accidents.”
“Damn unfortunate for the people who got washed away, I’m sure.”
“But school papers are one thing, and the books do give a kind of legacy to the town—”
“Difference being I might really dig in and look out beyond the books.”
“Just didn’t want the council to be surprised. My uncle and the council, they’ve always had a thing about the Natural Wilson book especially. Lies, you understand. The part about the city council being involved, I mean. But it’s one of those old stories that won’t go away. I was just letting my uncle know a book might be written, and I thought he might want to talk to you about it, see if he could discourage you from writing it or have his side of the story told too. But that wasn’t the sort of discouragement I meant. I thought he might send Jack Manley Jr. to see you, threaten legal action, that sort of thing.”
Had she been standing on my neck pressing my windpipe with her foot and told me such a thing, I would have almost believed it right then. She was so cool and sweet, ice cream wouldn’t have melted in her mouth.
“I did get a visit from Jack Jr. He put on a nice suit and took a moment to squirm out from under a rock to threaten me with a lawsuit. He brought a couple of female bookends with him. I think he might also have been subtly threatening me with a concussion.”
“I think that was due to your article in the paper. Having so much of the history laid out like that. More people saw that article than ever saw the Natural Wilson book. No one checks that town history stuff out. Jack Jr. is a bit of a stiff-neck, for sure. And on the slimy side. I feared he was going to ask me out once. Thought I might have to fake leprosy to avoid him, but it didn’t happen. Thank goodness.”
“You’re working too hard,” I said.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Too hard to convince me. This is where you turn angry, isn’t it? Trying to make my being attacked all my fault. You damn well knew you might be putting me in jeopardy when you made that call.”
“Some things don’t need to be known, Daniel. They really don’t. Especially if their veracity is debatable. May I ask you a favor, Daniel? May I politely ask that you drop this whole thing and that you not tell anyone you came to visit me? Can you stop digging a hole so deep you won’t be able to climb out of it?”
“You can ask,” I said.
“I hate intrepid people. I can never be that way. I hate living here in this town and ought to move away, but I don’t. I hate a lot of things, but I don’t hate the inheritance I have, and that comes with a major proviso. I stay here and I stay quiet about certain things, and by me telling you even that, I’ve already gone too far. I won’t talk any more on the matter, so you might as well go.”
She shifted in her chair so the backyard with its sputtering sprinklers was in her view and I was not.
“You don’t have to be all that intrepid, Estelle, but I have a feeling there are things you’d like to get off your chest. The inherited money and this nice house and a bullshit job at the library won’t help you carry that around for the rest of your life. Want to take the weight off, call me at the boardinghouse. You have the number.” I slid open the back door, closed it behind me, went through the house and out to my car. The sun was much harsher out there without the sprinkler and the cool wind and the awning shade, but despite the heat, I was beginning to have a permanent coating of ice on my spine.