by Joan Hess
“Did you say ‘rude’?” Mrs. Jim Bob said from her post in the next room. “I’m glad you agree that no matter how hard I strive to maintain a Christian attitude, there’s no getting around it. That Estelle Oppers is just plain rude!”
Kevin struggled to wake up as his head bounced against the upholstery of the front seat. His ears were being gripped so tightly he almost yelped, but before he could do much of anything, his head bounced again, this time hard enough to rattle his brains.
“Git up, I said,” Dahlia muttered as she leaned over the back of the seat, hanging onto his ears like they were pitcher handles, and determined to shake him awake if it killed him. “Git up afore I rip your fool ears off your head and feed ’em to the bears.”
“I’m awake, my darling, so you kin let go now.” Once he was free, he sat up and rubbed his eyes while he tried to recollect where they were and why. It came back to him like a splash of ice water. “What do you reckon we ought to do?” he asked humbly.
“‘We’? There ain’t no ‘we,’ Kevin Fitzgerald Buchanon. What you’re going to do is get out of this car and commence to crawl around in the bushes until you find that wire. Then you’re gonna put it back where it came from and drive me to town. While I’m making the movie, you kin go tell Arly about that dead body in the cabin.”
“That sounds like a real good plan. What is it you’re gonna do whilst I hunt for the wire, my sponge cake?”
“Sit right here with the doors locked,” she answered tartly. “Sometimes I wonder why I agreed to be bespoken to you, ’cause you’re more addled than a preacher in paradise. There’s a dead body not but a stone’s throw from us, and that means there’s likely to be a murderer lurking around for his next victim. That’s why I’m staying in the car and you’re hunting the wire.”
“Of course, my dumpling,” Kevin said, although there was something about her logic that didn’t fit well. He looked at the snarly woods. He’d been on the hysterical side when he threw the wire, what with Dahlia screaming at him and the Hollywood nightmare possessing him, and he disremembered the precise direction he’d chosen.
He caught her reflection in the rearview mirror, and it was enough to propel him out of the car and into a mud puddle. “You lock the doors real tight,” he said solicitously, “and I’ll just get the wire and put it back real fast.”
The wire didn’t weigh much, and he figured it couldn’t have gone too far. What he hadn’t gotten around to mentioning to his Venus was that he’d also thrown the key ring at the same time—not intentionally, of course, but because it was in the same hand.
The woods were clogged with scraggly pines, vines thick enough to choke a bull, clumps of hungry thorns, and the rotting remains of tree trunks. Heavy clouds threatened to produce another deluge. Birds shrieked at him, and a squirrel sputtered as it assessed him through rabid black eyes. There was a path of sorts, not much to speak of but better than fighting the briars and mushy leaves hiding snakes, so Kevin gave Dahlia a halfhearted salute and forged into the wilderness. By the time she rolled down the window to ask where in tarnation the picnic basket was, he had disappeared from view.
Pineyville, Missouri, made Maggody look like a seething metropolis. There were a dozen or so houses, a few trailers, and a small store sporting a variety of rusty tin signs that hawked products from much earlier in the century. There was no church, post office, or redbrick building with a cooperative police officer to whom I could direct my questions.
I went into the store. The man behind the counter wore overalls and a cap and appeared to be no more than thirty, although he’d had time to grow a beer belly and to develop a seasoned sneer. I tapped my badge and said, “I’m Chief of Police Hanks from Arkansas. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“About what?” He turned around and began to straighten cans on the shelf.
“About this man.” I put the photograph of Meredith on the counter and waited until curiosity turned him back around. While he studied the photograph, I said, “I have reason to believe he grew up in Pineyville. He’s about fifty now, so he would have lived here before your time.”
“What did he do?” the man asked idly. “Kill somebody?”
That indeed was the question. “Nothing that I know of. He was in Maggody and left a couple of days back. There’s been a death in the family. I need to find him so I can let him know about it. One possibility is that he has family here and came back to visit.”
“I ain’t seen him.” He dropped the photograph and returned his attention to the dusty cans. “Ain’t ever seen him,” he added, “and never will.”
I went back outside and gazed glumly at the houses along the highway. Some were only slightly unkempt; others were patched together with mismatched sheets of plywood. Old appliances and cars on concrete blocks dotted the neglected yards. I selected one of the tidier houses, crossed the road, and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered was elderly, as were her limp housecoat and slippers. Her hands were contorted with arthritis. Under a few whisps of thin white hair, her face was as shriveled as the doll heads made from dried apples, but she sounded alert as she snapped, “Are you one of those missionaries? I dun told you folks that I belong to my own church, and I ain’t of a mind to listen to a bunch of tomfoolery.”
I explained who I was and repeated the story I’d told the man in the store. She opened the screen door far enough to snatch the photograph from my hand, then told me to wait where I was. The door slammed. Pineyville was less cordial than Maggody, I thought as I watched a truck pull into the lot across from me. The driver spat in the dust as he went inside the store. Definitely not a place for tourists—or anyone else, for that matter.
I’d been waiting for ten minutes when the woman returned, opened the screen door far enough to thrust the photograph through the slit, and said, “What’d you say his name is?”
“Meredith. Buddy Meredith,” I said carefully.
“Well, it ain’t. I asked my sister Maybella and she agreed. Maybella has some doddly spells when she thinks she’s back in pigtails and pinafores, but she and I both recognized this here man’s face, even if he weren’t half as old when he left town a good twenty-five years ago. He was lucky to get away with his backside intact.”
“What is his name?”
“There’s no need for you to shout at me, missy. Maybella may be deef, but I ain’t, or not yet, anyway. I still got my hearing and my teeth.” She gave me a flash of the latter, which were the best money could buy from a mailorder catalog. “His name’s Buddy Oliphant. Maybella seems to think he came from the Oliphants over in Macrumb, but I say his foreparents was in Hiana before they died out.”
I wrote down the name and stared at it. “He grew up here, though, rather than in Macrumb or Hiana?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said challengingly. “Don’t go putting words in my mouth like those slick-talking missionaries with their fancy clothes and bicycles.”
I tried a new tack. “But you and your sister recognized Buddy Oliphant.”
“We did, and he weren’t calling himself Meredith. Back then Oliphant was good enough for him, and it was good enough for little Becky Hopperly, too. I swear, that gal didn’t have the brains God gave a goose, but she was a fine-looking thing with big blue eyes and bright yellow hair.”
I was making notes and getting more confused. Becky Hopperly, big blue eyes, yellow hair. Oliphant was good enough for her, if we ever found out who she was. “Was Becky his girlfriend?” I asked.
The woman cackled. “And a lot more. Buddy was working for her pa, who had the biggest farm in the county. Buddy was supposed to sleep in the barn with the other fellows, but it turned out he preferred Becky’s bed. Her pa caught on after a spell and got his brothers together. Those Hopperly boys were always meaner than dockroot. They told Buddy he didn’t have no choice but to do the honorable thing, iff’n he wanted to keep his manhood between his legs rather than in a jar.” She hesitated, her face puckered
with pleasure as she remembered what must have been a juicy scandal. “Why don’t you come inside and set yourself down?”
I followed her into a dark, dreary room crowded with furniture that wouldn’t have interested Roy Stivers. It reeked of camphor and dust and decay; the windows had probably been nailed down for decades. My hostess told me to sit on the sofa, then went to check on Maybella, who purportedly had a tendency to meander in the attic. I concentrated on breathing through my mouth.
She returned and settled down beside me, still clearly excited by the opportunity to relate the melodramatic story to a new audience. “Maybella’s doing poorly just now, so I left her upstairs, going through a trunk. Now, where was I?”
“The Hopperly boys ordered Buddy to marry Becky,” I said, doing my best to suppress my frustration at the leisurely pace. I had no idea if this was leading anywhere of relevance, but I had to listen to it. If I tried to shake it out of her, her teeth might end up on the far side of the room. “Did he marry her?”
“Don’t rush me. I ain’t swatting flies in the outhouse,” she said crossly. “After the Hopperly boys told Buddy how the cow ate the cabbage, so to speak, he sez that’s fine with him on account of he loves Becky and is planning to marry her as soon as he saves up some money for the ring. Old man Hopperly allows that Buddy better start puttin’ in some overtime. That was that for the time bein’, with him and Becky allowed to spoon on the veranda, where her Pa could watch them, and Buddy workin’ all day at the farm and then doin’ odd jobs for folks when he could get ’em.”
“And did they get married?” I asked, feigning patience.
“There you go again, rushing me. If you don’t have time to listen, then you can run along and I’ll get back to hulling peas for supper.”
I lowered my eyes. “No, ma’am, I’d like to hear what happened.”
“Then mind your manners. Well, afore too long it turns out that Becky’s in the family way, and her pa sure ain’t gonna wait until Buddy has enough money, not with everybody in town commenting slyly on her waistline and asking about wedding plans. Old man Hopperly gives Buddy some money and tells him to take the truck to Hiana to buy the ring and the marriage license.” She glanced sharply at me, in case I was plotting to rush her along. I sat stoically. “So Becky borrows a dress from her cousin Charlotte, who was a might pudgy, and invites everybody to the wedding, to be the very next day. Maybella and I argued half the night about which of us was gonna wear Mama’s pearls. She finally won on account of her being three years older. Looks it, too.”
“So they got married?” I said, despite my efforts to keep quiet.
“Do you mind? So the preacher’s at the house, along with most everybody in town, and there’s flowers on the table and cookies and punch all set out in the kitchen. Becky’s looking real sweet in Charlotte’s dress, even though it was snow white and it was as plain as the nose on your face that Becky wasn’t a virgin, not with a bun in the warmer. At first we’re all chattering and having a fine time, but after a while we’re glancing at the clock on the mantel. The preacher keeps smiling and telling Becky not to worry her little head. Long about dark, even he couldn’t tell any more lies. The Hopperly boys went to Hiana that very night. They didn’t find hide nor hair of Buddy Oliphant. What they did find was the truck at the bus station. Turned out the boy lost his nerve and took the first bus that came along.”
“And that was the last anybody saw him?”
“Not hardly,” she said with a snort. “He is the Wite & Brite man, after all. Maybella recognized him the first time he was on the television. She said, ‘Look, Augusta, if that ain’t Buddy Oliphant, then I ain’t sitting here eating watermelon and spittin’ seeds. He’s still got teeth like a picket fence.’”
“But he’s never been back in Pineyville?” I asked out of desperation.
“He’s liable to be too scared to ever show his face, even though the Hopperlys died out to a man. The bank foreclosed on the farm, but they never could sell it to anybody, and after a while it was nothing but a mess of rotting wood and weeds.”
My theory about the Hopperly boys’ revenge evaporated. “What about Becky? Is she still living here?”
“Land sakes, no. Not more than a day or two after Buddy ran out on her, she was sent to stay with her aunt in St. Louis. We never laid eyes on that poor girl again.”
“Do you and Maybella remember the aunt’s name?” I asked, desperation lapsing into total despondency. The odds on finding someone who’d lived in St. Louis that long ago were not good; they were almost nonexistent. If any of this meant anything. If the girl had nursed a grudge for all this time, and if she found out that Meredith was in Maggody, and if she decided to murder his wife …
“I don’t think I ever heard tell the aunt’s name,” the woman, now identified as Augusta, replied slowly. “I did hear that Becky died, if that helps. Lordy, that must have been fifteen years back, maybe more, because Maybella had had her stroke and I had to shout at her so she could hear me.”
“Is she buried here?”
Augusta scratched her scaly pink scalp. “I seem to recollect she is, but you can look for yourself in the cemetery beyond what used to be the Baptist church. Take the dirt road next to the store and look for a washed-out sign.”
I did some brilliant calculations that added up to twenty-five or so, as in years. “What about her child? Did he or she come back here after Becky died?”
“According to Hopperly, she miscarried a month after she went to St. Louis, but he still didn’t want anything to do with her. He was real proud of telling everybody how he never sent her any money or went to her funeral when she died. We could see he was upset, though, when the body came back in a plain pine box. He took to drinking and raving something awful about how Becky had been a slut all her life and that her sinful ways had finally caught up with her and killed her. His tractor tumped on him a few years later. Maybella was of a mind that he did it on purpose.”
Clucking and head-shaking were expected of me, so I obliged while I scanned my notes. The pathetic story would make a fine movie, I supposed, but it wasn’t giving me any clues about Kitty Kaye’s murder or Meredith’s disappearance. There was no reason why he would have returned to Pineyville, and several reasons why he wouldn’t have—not even on a bet. It would hardly provide a sanctuary. Any remaining almost in-laws would not have welcomed him back.
“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” Augusta snickered. “A while back, you couldn’t stop yammering. Now you’re sitting there like a wart on a pickle.”
It was a fair analogy. I thanked her for her time, refused a cup of tea, and went out to my (Ruby Bee’s) car. I found the cemetery and walked among the headstones, most of them cracked and coated with moss. A tall gray monument with Freudian overtones stood in the middle of the Hopperly family plot. I pulled back weeds from a few of them, but I couldn’t determine which Hopperly boy had been Becky’s father, in that they’d been busily dying two decades earlier.
I was about to give up when I stubbed my toe on a small, flat marker. I knelt beside it and brushed off the dirt. Becky Hopperly had been twenty-six years old when she died. During her short lifetime, she’d lost a lover, a baby, and a father. As I rose, I found myself wondering if she’d still had big blue eyes and bright yellow hair when she died.
Chapter 14
“I appreciate you takin’ the time to talk to me, Preacher Pipkin. I’m feelin’ better, and I reckon I better get back to the office,” Harve said. He squinted into the light. “Was that better?”
“Cut, damn it!” Hal slammed down the script on a pew, threw his hands into the air, and stomped up the aisle of the Assembly Hall. “Someone save me from amateurs! What was I in a past life—a maggot? Is this godforsaken town some sort of cosmic joke?” He made some other comments (real sizzlers, too), but they wouldn’t get past a humorless copy editor.
Gwenneth and Frederick, sitting next to each other on a pew, exchanged frustrated sighs. They were
in costume and makeup, and it was hot inside the metal structure. Anderson St. James was equally uncomfortable in a suit and bow tie, but he glanced up for only a second before returning to a novel he’d had the foresight to bring.
Carlotta switched off the camera and picked up her script to see if there was any possible way to delete the Dork character without letting him know he was by far the worst actor she’d ever encountered. “Let’s run over this one more time, Sheriff Dorfer,” she said with a forced smile. “All you do is say your line, shake hands with the preacher, and go on out the door. Don’t say another word, don’t look at the camera, and remember—you’re getting back to the farm, not the office. Okay?”
The only other person allowed on the set was Brother Verber. He was in his Sunday best, but the effect was ruined by the heavy sweat stains under his arms, around his neck, and even beginning to show through on his back. The script trembled in his hand. If Sister Barbara ever caught wind of what he was supposed to say right there in front of the camera, she would come down on him worse than a darn truckload of concrete. The reference to the pretty little heifer wouldn’t fool a half-wit (although Harve Dorfer was so befuddled he had no idea what anybody was saying, much less what was meant by it). The reference to the choir room wouldn’t fool a reject from the Buchanon clan with a charter membership in Dumb Anonymous.
Licking his lips, Brother Verber watched Harve stammer out the line several times. When Carlotta was satisfied, she curled a finger at him, and he hesitantly found the chalk mark she’d drawn on the floor. He gave her an imploring look. “Listen, little lady, don’t you think it’d be better if I just warned Harve here to behave in a Christian—”
“No!” Hal bellowed as he came back down the aisle, snatched the script from Carlotta, and began to jab his finger at it with the fury of a jackhammer. “What’s in the script is there for purposes of sequential development of the plot. It is vital to establish the scene in which the girl—what’s her name? Loretta, yeah, that’s it—Loretta battles the forces of corruption to maintain her innocence. We’re into religious symbolism, fer chrissake. I don’t need some pissant preacher to write my scripts!”
