by Cameron Judd
“Further, breaking this story allows our community to put behind it a long history of rumors and lurid speculations about the Harvestman business. Those things are always more injurious to a community than simply telling the truth, whatever it may be. Ultimately we are simply called to be truth-tellers, as best we can, whether we tell it on the pages of a newspaper, from behind an anchor desk, or from a church pulpit.”
“Well said, young man,” said Mr. Carl, Sadler nodding agreement, and at that moment Eli knew the final corner had been turned.
“There’s another, more pressing, reason, too,” Eli said. “Those here who have seen the clip of film have seen the Asian man who carried the little girl out of Harvestman Lodge. With my own eyes, in the last few days, I’ve seen a person who appears to be the same person, currently in town. His image is there in some of the parade crowd photos. And Melinda’s little sister saw a similar man watching her. It scared her badly.”
“Dear God,” murmured Benton Sadler. And Miz Deb, Eli happened to notice, had just gone very pallid.
Mr. Carl rose and walked over to WVKT News Director Paul Bolton and put out his hand. “I’ll leave the details to you and David, but from this point on, concerning this story, I consider us partners. What we learn we will share with you, and we expect the same in return. When we break this story, we will do it cooperatively and at the same moment, and give credit to one another as investigative partners. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” They shook hands.
“It could get complicated, you know,” Bolton said. “Two very different media with different schedules and modes and manners of producing our products. Making it all fit together may be tricky.”
“We’ll make it work.”
“We will.” Another handshake.
Miz Deb rose and came over to Melinda. “Miss, I hate to be alarming, but on the way over here in the taxi, I saw an Asian man driving through town. There was a little girl on the passenger side of his front seat. She was leaned against the door, like she was sound asleep. Dark-haired child, maybe twelve or so.”
Melinda turned to Eli. “Eli ... he’s got her. He’s got Meggy!”
Eli literally staggered as comprehension hit him. “Call the police station, get Jimmy Beaver, if you can. Miz Deb, which way were they going?”
Melinda made the call from Mr. Carl’s phone. Though there would yet be much to talk about and far more to do, the meeting broke up.
Neither Eli nor Melinda would work this day, though. They had to find Meggy at once.
DOT BUCKINGHAM HAD NOT EVEN FELT the sting of the needle when Jang had slipped it into the soft flesh on the back of her upper arm. She’d not realized it when she slumped to the floor, senseless, nor seen Jang step across her and move through the house until he found young Megan, concentrating on tying her shoes as she sat on the edge of her bed, her back toward the intruder. In moments she had been injected with a smaller dose of his drug, and was as unconscious as her mother.
Ben Buckingham was not in the house, having gone on to the video shop earlier. Jang had slipped in through the house’s mudroom door. Jang stepped over Dot a second time as he carried Megan out and used years of experience in stealthy movement to get her into his car, unnoticed, he hoped. He backed out of the driveway and began to drive out of town. His luggage was already in the trunk and he’d abandoned his motel room. He had done away with Lukey Parvin, and now he had harvested the young flower he needed. Time to go.
The only other things in the car with him, besides the unconscious girl, was the odd, rust-colored stone he’d picked up at the sinkhole where he’d sent Lukey Parvin into the bowels of the earth, and the small vinyl case of preloaded, needled syringes that held the drug he used both to incapacitate, as with the girl beside him, or to kill, as with Lukey Parvin. He didn’t know the makeup of the drug; it was a concoction developed in a Russian laboratory operated by the Flower Garden. Whatever it was made of, it worked perfectly for his purposes, and by merely looking at his intended targets, their size, sex, approximate age, he knew exactly which preloaded dosage to administer to achieve whatever end he was seeking.
The little girl would remain out for less than an hour, having received a particularly light dose, but it would be time enough to allow him to get well out of this town and on his way to Atlanta. And if she began to come around, all he need do was give another quick injection, and she would remain senseless all the way to their Georgia destination. There he would turn her over to one of the Flower Garden’s “receivers.” The receivers were the ones who took the abducted ones from the procurers and shuttled them further along the way. There were receivers in most cities of any reasonable size, but Jang trusted best the receiver in Atlanta, his own brother. It was to him that this particular flower would go. She was too excellent to take even the slightest chance with. That was one reason for the very light dose of the drug he had given her. On rare occasions, some of his blossoms reacted poorly to the drug.
One New Orleans procurer accidentally had killed a prize abductee by administering too heavy a dose. Jang himself had been assigned to deliver the inevitable punishment to that careless one for his egregious mistake, and he’d done it, as always, without hesitation or hitch. The reckless procurer rested somewhere deep in Lake Ponchertrain now, never to be seen again.
The farther he drove into the countryside, the more relaxed Jang felt. The closest call he’d had was the approach of that young policeman on the street in Tylerville, but he’d evaded him. Now, it seemed, he was home free. He’d get the girl to Atlanta, be rid of her, and ditch this car. The next one he could rent with any of several stolen and altered credit cards he carried, or he could simply steal one or buy a cheapo from a thief or at a discount lot. He’d gone through the process so many times that he had scores of survival strategies.
Some miles past Tylerville, he was surprised when a county cruiser pulled out from behind a deserted old service station building and got behind him. For half a moment, Jang was panicked, and that worried him. For years he’d operated free of panic – a key to his ability to find a way out of any precarious situation. He couldn’t let himself change that pattern now.
He glanced into his rearview to see whether the cop was studying him, or had just happened to pull out as he was passing. When he noticed the deputy speed up a little, he felt another nervous burst, but the blue lights never came on. The road was clear all around except for the two cars, and the deputy, a local product named Crowder Blake, pulled up beside him, glanced over, then waved a finger in a casual hello. Jang grinned and returned the salute as the officer sped on around. The county cop turned off a side road to make a routine pass-by of some recently burgled convenience markets a couple of miles up.
THE CALL CAME OVER BLAKE’S CRUISER radio a few minutes later. Tylerville police were alerting all area law enforcement agencies of a possible child abduction involving an Asian man and a Caucasian adolescent girl.
Blake had noticed a girl sleeping on the passenger side of the care he’d passed, but Caucasian or not, he couldn’t say because her face had not been visible to him. Her hair was dark; that’s all he’d really noticed. The driver, though, was as Asian as a man could be.
Blake backtracked and returned to the road where he’d passed the man, and drove on the direction that car had been traveling, hoping perhaps the Asian man had made a stop somewhere and not have gained too long a lead.
Luck was on his side. He saw the tail lights protruding from behind a little block building housing a mom-and-pop video rental store of the kind overrunning mid-1980s America. Blake pulled his cruiser around the far side of the little building and in front of the Asian driver’s car, blocking it from forward motion. He and the Asian man locked eyes a moment in a staredown, then movement on the other side of the Asian’s car drew Blake’s attention to the fact that the little girl, who was indeed a Caucasian, was no longer sleeping. She was staring back at Blake, eyes wide with terror, as if she’d just realized her situation.<
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And that was precisely what had happened. Megan had actually been coming to a slow awareness of the fact she was inexplicably in a car with the same Asian man who had terrified her. But her last memory of the day was of being at home, putting on her shoes. How had he gotten her? Why had her mother not stopped him?
And where was he taking her, and why?
She felt doped, and her vision was blurred, though it had cleared enough in the last few moments to let her see that a police car had just pulled in front of the car she was in. Seeing the officer gave her a burst of hope in the midst of confusion and panic. She thought about maybe opening her door and jumping out, but she was still groggy and very afraid that any such attempt would only make her abductor reach over and hurt her.
She saw the officer signaling for the Asian man to get out of the car, and for a moment he behaved as if he were doing so. Instead he abruptly threw his car into reverse and backed away fast, striking a picnic table near the little building they were behind. Megan was jolted hard and tossed around the passenger side, bumping her head against the dash.
She had to move. She grabbed the door handle as best her drug-impaired muscles would let her, but the lock button was down. She tried to reach it as the Asian man got a hand on her and slammed her back against the seat. He put the car in motion again and with his other hand steered back out onto the road. Turning left out of the parking lot, he drove off fast. The county deputy fell in behind, lights and siren coming on.
“Who are you?” Meggy managed to ask.
“Shut up,” Jang said.
The chase went on, Megan finding it hard to breathe both from fear and the lingering influence of the drug. The speeds her captor was reaching gave her visions of some car or tractor blindly pulling out into the path of their car, and the crash sending her through the windshield.
“I want to get into the backseat.”
“Stay where you are, you stupid little – ”
Her temper flared – a family trait. This man had no right to be doing this. Anger brought courage, and while the driver was dealing with a slight curve in the road, she moved, faster than she’d thought she could, and heaved herself up and over into the backseat. Her foot pounded the driver’s ear while she did it.
The Asian man cursed in the foulest language she’d ever heard from anyone not on a movie screen.
Once in the back, she tumbled and fell into the floor space between the back and front seats. It was a fortunate move, because her captor swept his right arm back and over the seat, trying to grab and hold her to keep her from attempting to open a rear door and fling herself out. His hand swept the air above her; she was not caught. He put both hands back on the wheel.
While she was huddled on the floor, her hand found something cool and hard and metallic, with a gritty, rusty-feeling surface. What is was she couldn’t tell from the feel of it. She got off the floor and onto the backseat, crowding as far away from the driver as she could. She looked at the thing she had found on the floor and realized what it was. Looking behind, she saw the deputy still in pursuit, with another cruiser pulling up from behind to join him. The Asian man let loose another flow of obscenities and profanities.
Meggy looked at the thing she held in her hand, and something her grandfather had told her went through her mind. When you need to decide and act fast, do it.
She looked one more time at the thing she held, shifted it in her hand, and acted fast.
In the cruiser behind the fleeing car, Crowder Blake watched in astonishment as the little girl swung her arm and with some object in her hand hit the driver hard on the right-rear quadrant of his skull. He jerked forward, spasmed, and drove the car across the opposite lane and off the road. The car went over an embankment and rolled, losing hubcaps, external mirrors, trim, and a bumper along the way, the top crushing down nearly flat as the car came to rest on its top.
Blake parked his cruiser on the roadside and ran across the road, over the embankment, and down to where the car lay upside down, two tires still spinning and steam rising from the engine.
A prayer of thanks from Blake rose with the steam as he saw the girl working her way out of one of the rear side windows. So tight was the space that he didn’t see how she was managing to fit, but fit she did, and by the time he reached the car she was already out and coming to her feet.
“Are you all right, young lady?” he asked, kneeling beside her and taking her hand. “Have you been hurt?”
“I’m fine, I think.” She waved a hand toward the car. “Is he ...”
“I’ll check.” He left her and went to the car, driver’s side. Kneeling, he looked through what little space there was. The Asian man’s head was bent at an impossible angle, caught between his upside-down body and the crushed-in roof of the car. The scarred side of his face was turned toward the policeman. It looked like a knifing scar to Blake, but there was no asking this fellow about it now or ever again. Blake went back to the girl.
“He didn’t live through it, sweety. Was he somebody you know?”
“No. He was a bad man. He shouldn’t have took me off with him.”
“You’re right, young lady. On both the things you just said.”
“Was it me who killed him?”
“No, sweety. From my police car I saw you hit him with something, but that didn’t kill him. What killed him was the crash. His neck was broken when the car landed on its top and flattened down.”
“I hit him so he would stop the car. I wasn’t trying to do anything but make him stop.”
“You did the right thing. A person who has been abducted has the right of self-defense, and the right to get away.” Blake paused. “What did you hit him with, anyway?”
“It was something I found in his car, in the floor. Wait.”
She went back to the car, reached in through the same crushed window she’d wriggled out of, and came back to Blake with something in her hand. “It was this.” She handed the object to him.
It was quite rusted, some of it rusted completely away, in fact. Enough remained for him to see that she had handed him a very old axe head. Nineteenth century, probably.
“This old axe head is what saved you, sweety. It was enough to stun him some, and that was enough to make him crash. By the way, my name’s Crowder Blake. I’m a county deputy. What’s your name?”
“Megan. Megan Buckingham.”
“Ben Buckingham’s little girl?”
“Yeah.”
Blake gave her a hug. “I’m glad you got out safe, Megan.”
“Me too. Can I go home?”
“I’ll let all the other people know you’re safe and sound. There are some other officers and such on their way here now. And an ambulance to carry away the body of the man in the car. We’ll get you back home again real soon, maybe after a stop at the emergency room to let a doctor make sure you’re okay.”
“Okay.”
“You like ice cream?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’m buying. Sound okay to you?”
“Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Policeman.”
“Come on. I’ll show you how us cops talk to each other on our radios.”
They went back to the car, Blake still holding in one hand an ancient axehead once prayed over by a besieged Civil War-era farmer, and in the other the hand of an innocent one whose life it had saved.
Epilogue
BICENTENNIAL
TYLERVILLE AT 200 SWEPT PRESS association awards for 1986 publications in all relevant categories. Present from the Clarion to collect the plaques at the autumn ceremony in Nashville were Mr. Carl and Miz Deb, David and Keith Brecht, both accompanied by dates, and Eli Scudder and his new bride, Mrs. Melinda Buckingham-Scudder.
Eli was proud of how the magazine had turned out: a truly quality product both graphically and in content. Most of all he was proud of his employers for making it possible for the magazine to have become what it had.
The Harvestman Lodge revelations had brought a new
theme into play in the bicentennial magazine. Rather than being the “smiley-face puff piece for benefit of the Chamber of Commerce” that Eli had worried about during his job interview, TYLERVILLE AT 200 instead threw away its rose-colored glasses and took a truly open-eyed look at two centuries of local heritage, both the good and the bad, laid out on the table for honest public inspection.
The magazine included a history of Harvestman Lodge, both its early, high-principled days, its later moral decline, and finally its ruination. Rather than putting a self-protective veneer over the truth, the magazine declared it openly, then rather proudly presented the fact that the truth, once fully known, had ultimately generated a laudable community and regional response, and the reclamation of a valid part of Kincheloe County history.
“There’s really no better ‘spin’ on a story than the simple truth, you know,” David Brecht told the newspaper staff after the magazine was distributed and began getting positive reader response. “I have to thank Eli for helping bring that lesson around to us because of his highly creditable newsman/novelist curiosity, and his dedication to getting to the true heart of a story too long ignored.”
Rumors were slain. Laid to rest at last were tales of the Harvestmen being closet Klansmen or libertine debauchees wallowing in orgiastic parties. Instead the long-ignored organization was revealed for what it truly had been: an initially well-intentioned organization that made the mistake of being too welcoming, even to the point of taking in such a low-character man as Lukey Parvin. Because of that one man’s presence in the organization, an unfortunate point of contact had been found by a vile criminal organization, leading to the tragic exploitation and death of a stolen child. Had there been other abducted ones? No one yet knew.
Writing the Harvestman story had been made easier because of a second trip Eli had paid to Coleman Caldwell’s Arcade office. After his first “raid” on Caldwell’s Harvestman files, he’d not been able to shake off the sense that he’d overlooked something. So back he’d gone, this time with Melinda, and it was she who had taken a look behind the big hanging map and discovered it had covered a closet door. All it took to get in was scooting aside a few file cabinets and finding which of Caldwell’s keys fit the lock.
