Sherm Bullers was waiting for me outside on the porch of the Coolbrook General Store. There isn’t a lot to the place, Coolbrook, maybe a dozen houses, a couple of churches and the store, right in the middle. It was still mostly dark, with a glimmer of gray out over the treetops toward the east. Early morning quiet, five AM quiet. The flasher on his cruiser was off, which surprised me a little. Bullers likes flash and glitter, the way a baby likes shiny things. He’s an oaf, a burly man, forehead like a slab of beef, black flattop, thick, black eyebrows.
“Hello, Billy,” he said. “My, don’t you look darling this morning.”
His idea of high humor—my name is Darling. I ignored it, like I do every morning. “Did you get a call?” I asked.
“Nope. Just driving by. With everything that’s been going on, I figured I ought to check, make sure everything was hunky-dory.”
“But it wasn’t. Neither hunky nor dory.” I could see our breath, ghosts of words in the early morning gloom.
“The door was unlocked,” he said. “I figured something was wrong.”
Then he’d gone in, as we did now, and played his flashlight around the room, as we did now. And seen Dolly Craven hanging from a ceiling beam, her dress ripped, her face battered and bloody, swollen tongue sticking out of her mouth like an apple. As we did now.
Sheriff Foulkrod arrived. He’s a God-fearing man, doesn’t care much for swearing. We all—all of us tough deputies—watch our language around him. When he got there, he took one look at Dolly, ran a finger over his hairline mustache and said, “God damn.”
She’d never looked smaller or frailer. One puff could blow her away.
We got her down. The sheriff picked up one of her arms, like picking up a stick in the woods. “Defensive wounds,” he said. Dolly’d put up a fight.
He looked at me and Bullers. “Go knock on some doggone doors.”
There were a lot of grumbles and cusses when they first opened their doors, but they were quickly forgotten about when they found out why we were there. We didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, but they could figure out what it was pretty easily. They figured the worst. People like to figure the worst. When it happens to somebody else, it’s one less worst in the world that could possibly happen to them.
Elma McIlhenny was real put out, whether because of Dolly’s tragic end, or the tragic closing of the store, well, who could say? Now she’d have to drive seven miles into Hartsgrove to buy her cigarettes. Elma hadn’t seen a thing. Nobody I talked to had seen a thing, or heard a thing, but Bullers got lucky. Her grandson had been bringing old Hattie McKillip home late last night, and they noticed a car in front of Dolly’s store. It stood out. They didn’t see a lot of two-tone cars, so they remembered it. It was, according to her grandson, a Buick. A Buick Special, to be exact, black on the bottom, white on top. A car that sounded familiar. Real familiar.
***
The week before Dolly was killed, Bullers and I were sitting in the bullpen waiting for the morning roll call. Greene, another deputy, came over. “I don’t know if this is a coincidence or what,” he said. “I stopped this guy last night for a busted taillight. You want to take a guess what his name was?”
“Puddin’ ‘n’ Tain,” Bullers said.
“Ask him again,” I said. “He’ll tell you the same.”
“You guys are funny as a hemorrhoid. It was Smathers. LeRoy Smathers.”
That got our attention. “Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty,” Bullers said.
“Is that so?” I asked. “I didn’t think there were any Smatherses left.”
“There’s not, not around here,” Greene said. “He’s from up around Dagus Mines, from what it said on his license.”
“Dagus Mines?” Bullers said. “He’s got to be one of them, all right.”
“Yeah,” Greene said. “I was figuring he’s got to be some relation to your Curly Smathers. Probably saw in the papers what happened to Curly.”
“They’re a real mean, nasty bunch, them Smatherses,” Bullers said.
“Suppose he was just passing through?” I asked.
“Hell of a coincidence,” Greene said.
“Well, if he’s not passing through, what’s he up to?”
Greene shrugged. “Find out more about what happened to Curly? See what’s going to happen with Dolly Craven?”
What had happened to Curly Smathers wasn’t so much of a mystery, not anymore. For a long time, it had been. After his bones had finally been found, Dolly’d confessed to blowing him away, but she wasn’t going to do any time for it. She’d got off on self-defense. Curly’d come sashaying into her store for a cold Coca-Cola the day after two little girls, the McCracken girls, had vanished up in the woods—this was about three years ago. Showed up calm as a can of peaches wearing a rag wrapped around his bald head, a rag made from blue cloth with dark butterflies, ripped from the sundress Mary Lou McCracken had been wearing when she’d disappeared—Dolly had sold her mama the material. What was a woman to do? Her husband, Chester, gone, the shotgun under the counter loaded and handy—nobody could really blame her for exterminating that cockroach when he said yes, yes, it was the little girl’s dress but she didn’t need it no more, then made a move toward Dolly.
“He’s driving a ’49 Buick Special, black bottom, white top,” Green said. “I got the tag number.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Tell you the truth,” Greene said, “he didn’t look real Smathersy. Looked almost normal, wasn’t hardly even drooling or foaming at the mouth. Forty maybe. Wore glasses, had on a clean shirt. And—get this—he had a book of poetry on the seat beside him.”
“Poetry?” said Bullers, his face knotted up. “He can’t be no Smathers, then.”
“What do you mean, poetry?” I asked. “You mean like dirty limericks or something?”
“Nope,” Greene said. “I picked it up and took a look. Wasn’t nursery rhymes neither. Horseman, Housman, something like that. Grown-up stuff.”
“Maybe he’s here to see a man about a horseman,” Bullers said.
Sheriff Foulkrod knew the sheriff of Jameson County, where Dagus Mines was. Jim Embry was his name. He’d been a sheriff for a long time too, though not as long as Foulkrod. He wasn’t a bad fellow, the sheriff said, except for some nasty cigars. When we called, Embry said sure, he knew LeRoy Smathers. He gave us some background. A lot of it the sheriff already knew, but the rest of us didn’t. Embry told us about the settlement in the north of the county, up in the hills past Dagus Mines, where the Smatherses and a few other families, the Allens and the McKennas among them, had sunk in their roots and spread out like poison ivy. Stillville, they called it, because at one time just about every shack had its own still. After years of in-breeding, bad moonshine and no schooling to speak of, Embry said, the average IQ up there was just below the average temperature in February. Every now and then an undamaged gene or two slipped through the cracks by accident, and that must have been what happened in LeRoy’s case—not only could he button his own shirt, but he could read and write to boot. Those rare skills had elevated him to a leadership role—sort of the unofficial mayor of Stillville—by default. He had his own taxidermy business that seemed to have made him a little more prosperous than it ought to have, and he hired his own kin, took care of his friends and family. Never served any time. Didn’t have much of a record at all to speak of, though he’d been looked at plenty—assaults, batteries, burglaries and more than one missing person and mysterious death, where this witness or that recanted, or there was no witness at all to be found. LeRoy Smathers was a bad actor.
“Who’d have figured?” I said after the call. “The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines.”
“Let’s get him in here,” the sheriff said. “Rope him with his own lariat.”
Then we found Dolly.
***
Next day we took a ride up country, up toward Dagus Mines, to see what we could see. Just me and the sheriff. He took me over Bullers, Greene, and all the other deputies. It was becoming a habit. He seemed to be grooming me. I’d become his favorite somehow, even though of the six deputies, I was the newest. I think I knew why. Sure, I was doing a pretty good job and all, but I was still the rookie. I think it was simple as baseball. The sheriff was a baseball fan. I was a baseball player. A good one. Fireball Billy, the papers called me, a hot prospect. I was damn good before the war, showed a lot of promise—then along came Der Fuehrer. After I was discharged, I picked up right where I’d left off, and was climbing my way up to the bigs, and getting close. But then, in North Carolina, pitching for the Sanford Spinners, cruising along, I blew out my arm. Unconditional release. I’d come back home to Pennsylvania. I’d been an MP in the army, so I caught on with the Sheriff’s Department. Once I rehabbed my arm, I started pitching again for the hometown team, the Hartsgrove Grays. Often as not, I’d see the sheriff in the bleachers. He’d played quite a bit in his younger days. He liked talking ball.
Let’s face it. Twenty-eight is not young for a pitcher. It is for an officer of the law. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but sometime over the past couple of years when I was looking the other way, my dream of making the Show slipped away, despite the smokescreen of hope I hid behind for a while. Baseball is a boys’ game. After I found out about men’s games in the war, baseball was a welcome diversion, a delaying tactic, a chance to be the kid again I’d been before the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the dream died the day I threw my arm out. And there I was again, for the second time, giving up a boys’ game for another kind of warfare.
Balls and strikes for life and death. Although sometimes, with some fans, there seems to be a mighty fine line between the two.
A ride in the country was all it turned out to be. One thing I missed when I was overseas and down south was the Pennsylvania countryside, the green rolling hills, the forests and pastures and farms, old, weathered barns and silos, particularly in the late spring sunshine, like that day. But after we passed through Paine County and then north on up into Jameson, the landscape changed. The closer we got to Dagus Mines, the uglier it got. Strip-mining country. Mile after mile of scarred land, where strip mines had gouged the countryside, leaving nothing but slag heaps, cleared forests and hillsides scraped bare.
We met up with Embry, a deputy, and a couple of state troopers and set off in three different cruisers for Stillville. Smathers’ shop, according to the sign scrawled on a couple of planks above the porch, was called Beaver Run Taxidermy, and was all locked up, no signs of life. No sign of a two-tone Buick either. After stopping and questioning a couple of neighbors, we drove through Stillville, not much more than a sprawling bunch of shacks on an overgrown slag heap, but we never saw the car. We questioned a couple of folks who were gawking at us from their doorways or alongside the rutted mud road—one old fellow stooped and stared in at us, spit in the dirt and never said a word. We might as well have been from Mars. Or, more like it, we might as well have been sporting pitchforks, horns, and cloven hooves.
***
I didn’t put it together right away. But then, nobody else did either. Embry said he’d keep an eye on Smathers’s place up in Dagus Mines and give us a holler if anything turned up, but we weren’t holding our breath. We were back to square one.
That night, Bullers and I went down to Jum’s on Main Street to mull it over with a couple of Iron City’s. Sherm had just left when this grizzled old fellow with gray hairs sprouting out of his nose came up and wanted to buy me a beer. Elvin Fenstemaker. I knew him a little, mostly from Jum’s—he was a big Grays’ fan too, always giving me a good game after an outing. He lived out on Jimtown Road, not far from where the McCracken girls went missing a few years ago, just across the hollow from the old Smathers farmstead. A while back, the sheriff told me they found Curly’s old man there, Vern Smathers, his throat cut for him. Turned out, Curly must have done him in the same day he murdered the two little McCracken girls. And that was it for the Smatherses. Old Vern was the last one left around these parts. Elvin told me how much safer he felt now, knowing what had become of Curly, knowing he wouldn’t come creeping back around. He thought us boys had done a terrific job putting it all together and solving it. He said he sure did feel a lot easier now.
But he wasn’t acting like he felt a whole lot easier.
He leaned in close. One bushy old eyebrow hoisted up, the other one drooped, like he was letting me in on a secret. “You did solve it, didn’t you? You’re sure about it, ain’t you?”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“What about Dolly?” he said. “Who killed ol’ Dolly then?”
“We’re working on it,” I said. “We got some good leads.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t Curly then, come back around?”
***
That’s what started me thinking. Next morning, I drove out to Jimtown Road. Seeing as how the old Smathers farmstead was isolated—like an ideal hideout might be isolated—and seeing as how it was the Smathers farmstead, and, last time I looked, LeRoy’s last name was Smathers, and seeing as how he must have felt he was close enough kin to Curly to avenge his death, I figured it was worth a shot. A hunch. A long shot, sure. But investigators—yep, I was an investigator now—check out every shot, long, short, and in between. Particularly, the hunches that come to you overnight, in your sleep, when you wake up with blinking neon arrows in your head pointing toward the old Smathers farmstead. And the battered ghost of poor Dolly Craven saying, Check it out! What have you got to lose?
I drove past Elvin Fenstemaker’s place. At the bottom of the hollow, just past the plank bridge where the brook was the color of rust, Smathers Road forked off Jimtown Road, heading up the hill through the deep, cool shadows of the forest. On either side, the banks were knee-deep in ferns. Leveling off toward the top, the road followed cleared pastures to more woods, even thicker, the southern fringes of the Allegheny Forest. A couple of miles up, the woods thinned where the first of the No Trespassing signs were nailed to old-growth trees with rusty nails, old, torn, faded signs you could barely make out. What used to be cleared fields were being reclaimed by the forest—saplings and evergreens, thick undergrowth. Further up, the road dead-ended at the old Smathers farmstead.
A ruin. No signs of life. I pulled up where the road ended and a bountiful crop of weeds and crabgrass commenced, near the burned-out relic of a barn. The farmhouse itself was a wreck, boards weathered raw, tin roof curled to rust. A few scraggly, splintered apple trees were all that was left of an orchard. Beyond the barn, a scramble of roses gone wild. I got out for a look.
You couldn’t ask for a finer first day of June. A cool, fresh breeze herded a flock of white clouds across a clear blue sky at a leisurely pace. Even after all those years, there was still a trace of a singed odor in the air from the burned-out barn. In the yard, the weeds were knee high already. By August, you’d barely be able to hack your way through them with a machete. I eyed the ruined house, the scene of the old crime. Had anyone been in it lately? That was what I’d come to find out. I was getting curiouser and curiouser.
Curiosity killed the cat, I thought. Not a particularly appropriate thought.
It morphed into an old rhyme from grade school: The gingham dog and the calico cat, side by side on the table sat… A poem? Poetry? I could see where this was going.
I headed up through the yard. A few steps into the weeds, something caught my eye off to my left. The blood in my head gave a rush. What caught my eye was the car parked out of sight, hidden behind the barn. A two-tone car. A Buick Special.
