Ronnie joined me for late lunch at a burger joint. She only had about thirty minutes before she had to get back to it. We found a table at the rear that offered us a reasonable bit of privacy, and we kept our voices down. I told her all of what had happened with Jack Jr. and my talk with Estelle Parker.
“You think it’s more than the article you wrote?”
“I think my coming to town and the bones being found due to the drought are all connected somehow. Wouldn’t surprise me to find that we’re only looking at a few of the puzzle pieces, and maybe it’s less like a puzzle and more like those Russian dolls where you remove one, and there’s another inside, and then another, and so on.”
“Yeah. Shirley is right, I think. This isn’t just a bunch of coincidences. The drought. Your father’s car and the bones in the trunk, and then us finding the others, your article. It’s stirred the rats, that’s for damn sure.”
More like those flies the cop had told me about than rats. I could almost hear their wings beating in a loud echo.
“Jack Jr. is a key in all of this, as he’s their enforcer,” I said. “I don’t know if he does it himself, but he has it done, and I have the feeling he’s perfectly capable of doing it if the need arose. Way he looked at me in Christine’s office today, I think this goes deeper than the threat of litigation.”
“He’s good at what he does,” Ronnie said, “but he’s not well liked. Very sociopathic, narcissistic, but totally without the charm it’s claimed they have. He’s the kind of guy that could throw a puppy out of a moving car, is what I think. I guess that’s what makes him such a good lawyer and insurance salesman.”
“Why would anybody buy insurance from him?”
“Lot of people in this town, they want insurance, they go to him. Someone new comes in, tries to set up shop, something goes wrong for them, and they give it up pretty soon, leave town. I never thought of it as being nefarious until right now. I just thought that it was hard to beat Jack Jr. because he’s so established.”
“This town has been like this so long,” I said, “I don’t think people know that not every place is like this, with a city council you don’t vote on and an appointed mayor, neither of which likes to be asked questions.”
“I agree.”
“You know, Ronnie, people still turned their heads when we came in here, a couple, black and white. This town smells of the Confederacy more than any southern town I’ve been in, and I grew up in the South.”
“I admit passing Jefferson Davis’s statue doesn’t make me cheer up when I think about it. But it and that flag have been there such a long time, it’s become part of the scenery. It’s surprising what we can get used to.”
“It’s not there for scenery. This place has a nice veneer, but underneath I can smell rot. I have a feeling that the Long Lincoln Country Club might have some of those rotten answers.”
“The law isn’t even allowed out there without permission, and they don’t get permission.”
“If the council is outside the law, or believes itself to be, that’s a whole different can of worms.”
Ronnie reached across the table and touched my hand. “I have to go. Be careful. This worries me for you. I think you may have opened a den of vipers instead of a can of worms.”
* * *
I drove over to the newspaper office and looked through their morgue for a while and mostly turned up what Shirley had turned up. I kept looking for more, but all I found were more articles that talked about murders, possible murders, mysterious deaths. I made a list of the names and checked the list I had taken from Shirley.
Most of the names I found matched her list. There were a few I had written down that didn’t. I couldn’t be sure there was any connection between the others, but I thought there could be. A couple I felt certain (one from her original list) didn’t seem convincing as part of a pattern, but the rest did. It felt like confirmation. Maybe Shirley and her rituals had gotten into my head.
When I left out of there, the sky had turned a persimmon color and a piece of moon was starting its tour rising from a corner of the sky. By the time I drove off, the persimmon sky was turning blue-black.
On the way home, I thought a copper-colored Ford that showed up under the streetlights, visible in my rearview mirror, was following me. I was nervous enough about it that I didn’t go home straightaway. I drove to the police station and parked out front beneath their night-lights where I could see their front door. I could see movement behind the glass, a cop in there, and that almost reassured me. Nothing really assured me. Not in this town.
The Ford had rolled down a side street. I chalked it up to me being foolish. I was becoming paranoid but consoled myself with the old idea that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
I didn’t get out of the car but sat in the parking space at the police station for about fifteen minutes, then pulled out and drove home without seeing a copper-colored Ford.