The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

“When you say overweight, what do you mean? Can you be a bit more specific?”

  The woman put her hands out in front of her, as though she were pregnant, or Santa Claus. “He was pudgy but not great big. Had a stomach on him and a round face.”

  “OK, great.” Tony wrote some more down. Then he stopped and thought. He wasn’t sure if the idea he had was a good one or a bad, but he paged forward in his notebook to a clean sheet. “Susanna,” he said. “Grab me a couple of magazines from off the rack there, would you please?”

  She seemed eager to fulfill the request, as though it might make up for the fact that she had spoken after he asked her not to. “Here you go,” she said, putting a People, a Newsweek, and a National Enquirer on the countertop. Tony set the National Enquirer to the side right away, then paged through the others. He found two photographs, one in each magazine, and put them side by side. The first was of a sitcom star, a big, heavy man with a face that had probably once been handsome before all of his high school muscle had turned to fat. The second photograph was of a British politician whom Tony had never heard of, a man with sagging, doughy skin and a ruddy bulb of nose. His hair, blondish and thin, was brushed raggedly across his forehead. Tony, operating from instinct, had chosen the men not for their features so much as their feel. One seemed vigorous and confident in his weight, the other defeated—pathetic, even.

  “If you had to say which of these men the fellow you saw was more like,” Tony said, “which would it be?”

  “Neither, really.” She looked skeptical.

  Tony cleared his throat. “Don’t overthink it, ma’am. Just go with your gut.”

  “Well, if you held a gun to my head”—she tapped the photograph of the politician—“his face shape was more like that. But the man who came in that night had a mustache.”

  “Good, good,” Tony said. His heartbeat had picked up, and his back twinged. He took his pencil and drew a mustache on the image of the politician. “Is that closer?”

  “You’re going to have to pay for that magazine,” Mrs. Williams said. “Or Mr. Highland going to take it out of my check.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s fine,” Tony said. “What I want to know is if the image looks closer to what you remember, or what’s still wrong about it.”

  She closed her eyes for a second. “His nose wasn’t big and red like that,” she said finally. “And his hair was dark and slicked over so it looked wet.”

  Tony started sketching on the clean sheet of paper. He referred once or twice to the magazine, just as a way to give the face structure, to remind himself of the protrusions and hollows, and made adjustments based on the woman’s description. He kept the notebook on the countertop as he drew, so that she could watch his progress, and he was satisfied when she stopped his hand to say “No, his chin was softer than that” and “I don’t think he had as dark a eyebrows as you drawing.”

  At last he stopped his pencil, and Mrs. Williams didn’t say anything. It was, he knew, a quiet borne of helplessness rather than satisfaction; he had gotten the drawing as right as he could get it, but that didn’t mean it was right. The old woman had simply run out of words for explaining to him how he could make it better.

  “It’s a good drawing,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not sure I remember what the man even looked like anymore. I’m getting it mixed up with those.” She pointed at the magazines.

  “That’s all right,” Tony said. “That’s how it goes. You lose the real memory when you try to make it concrete. But I think we’re farther along than we would have been otherwise.”

  “It’s a good drawing,” she repeated. “You got talent, young man. You ought to be an artist.”

  He laughed. “I’ll think about it.” He took the pencil and shaved a line down with the eraser, so that the eyes looked more even. “Can I ask you one more thing, Mrs. Williams? It’s kind of a funny question.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “All right, then.”

  “How did the guy seem to you? I don’t mean his looks. I mean—” Tony waved his hand as though he were reaching for the words. “I mean, what kind of vibe did you get?”

  “A vibe.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lord, I don’t know. He seemed like a sad case, I guess. Like he was happier being with the woman than she was with him. I don’t know what gave me that idea, so don’t quote me on it.”

  “I won’t,” Tony said. “You’ve been a real help to us, Mrs. Williams.”

  “You sure have,” Susanna said. Tony could see her gaze fixed on the sketch, the fear and hope in her eyes, and he almost wished he had never drawn it.

  “That’s fine,” the old woman said. “Now, I’m going to have to ring you up for that magazine, mister. I hate to, but I’m going to have to.”

  3.

  They were sitting in Gary’s Pit Barbecue together over lunch, and Susanna couldn’t stop looking at the sketch Tony had drawn. He had fussed with it a bit in his car outside of the gas station, putting in a few lines between the eyebrows and at the corners of the eyes, shading the irises and whitening a spot of light with his eraser. It was guesswork, or perhaps just outright fabrication, but what Mrs. Williams had said about his sadness struck him, and it bothered him that the image didn’t communicate it.

  “It gives me the willies,” Susanna said. She was only picking at her sandwich. “It scares me to death to imagine that she was with this man.”

  “That’s just made-up.” He forked some pork and corn bread, then dribbled hot sauce on top. His own appetite was, it seemed, just fine. “I did it mostly to get her to tell me what I was missing, like the mustache. The memory’s a funny thing. Sometimes you can’t say what you saw unless you do it in the context of what you didn’t see.”

  “I have a feeling about this.” She tapped the page. “I think we should put up new flyers with the sketch on it. We might get some leads.”

  “Leads.” He huffed. “If I put that drawing up around here I’ll be asking for trouble. Do you know how many fat white men with mustaches there are in this town?” He turned in his shoulder and thumbed surreptitiously to the left. “That guy over there could be him, if this is all we’ve got to go on.”

  Susanna frowned. “That man looks nothing like this.”

  “I’m willing to bet that he bears as close a resemblance to this drawing as the person with your sister that night does.”

  “Well what do you suggest then, Tony?” She was, he noticed for the first time, pale and stiff, and her eyelashes were damp. “This is my sister. What do you suggest?”

  He used a paper napkin to wipe his goatee, then his fingers. “Tell me more about Ronnie. Where would she go on a Saturday night? Where were her haunts?”

  “I don’t know a lot about that part of her life. She went to Nashville sometimes.” She sipped her tea, brow furrowed. “Oh! And I think she liked going to that crappy little town across the Tennessee line—the one with the line-dancing club.”

  “The Tobacco Patch?” The town’s real name was Sylvan, but no one ever called it that.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Was she big into dancing?”

  “She was big into drinking,” Susanna said dryly. “And picking up men. There was one guy she had kind of a regular thing with, I think, and they met up there at the small bar, the one that looks like a cabin. She didn’t say much about him, but his name came up enough over the years that I put two and two together. A soldier from Fort Campbell.”

  Tony tilted the drawing back toward himself. “This doesn’t look like a soldier.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The waitress came over to refill their drinks and lingered. “Miz Mitchell, right?”

  “Oh,” Susanna said. She seemed startled. “Yes?”

  “I thought it was you. My son’s in the band. I was surprised you weren’t in Louisville with them today.”

  Susanna’s cheeks pinkened. “I had some business to attend to in town.”

  Th
e waitress looked at Tony. It was an expression he’d grown familiar with over the years, though never used to. “Well, holler if you need anything else,” she said, tearing the check off a booklet and sitting it on the table before walking away. Tony watched as a spot of condensation soaked through and bloomed across it.

  “What now?” Susanna said finally.

  “I guess I go to the Tobacco Patch tonight.”

  “Just you?”

  “I think that’s best,” Tony said. “I’ll have to put a call in to the sheriff there and work with the local force.”

  She sighed. “I’d still like to put this drawing up around town. At least let me do that.”

  “Susanna.”

  “Please?” She wasn’t even making eye contact with him now. Her brows were knit, her fingers curled so that the nails dug into the tabletop. “If there’s something I might do to find her sooner, I want to do it. I’m not kidding myself here. I know this is a long shot. But I think it’s better to try than not.”

  “This could get me flak in the department if people start pointing fingers in the wrong direction.”

  “Better than no direction at all.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.” He dug through his wallet for a twenty and set it on top of the bill.

  “Let me—” Susanna began.

  “No,” Tony said. “It’s on me.” He finished the last of his tea in a swallow. “Listen. I’ll take the sketch to Sylvan with me, see what I hear. If I don’t hear anything to contradict Mrs. Williams, I’ll let you post the drawing up in town. I’ll make the copies for you, and I’ll help you do it.”

  “Okay.” He could tell she wasn’t satisfied.

  “I’ll call you when I’m back from Sylvan tonight, all right? I’ll let you know what I hear, and I’ll bring you the drawing. I won’t make you wait another day for it.”

  Susanna nodded more enthusiastically. “All right. Thanks, Tony.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She took a scrap of paper and a pen out of her purse and scratched something down. “That’s my address. I won’t be able to sleep until I hear what happened, so just come by.”

  He took the scrap and looked at her. Her expression was frank, defiant even.

  “However late,” she said.

  4.

  “She must’ve been done up on something,” Sal Lochman said over at the Salamander, and his wife, a sawed-off woman with freckles and orange hair, nodded her agreement with an unsettling zealousness. Later, driving the half mile between the Salamander and Nancy’s, Tony’s official escort for the evening, Sheriff Lyle Gatlin, had grunted. “Those two seemed done up on something themselves, far as I could tell.”

  “I thought so, too,” Tony said. He liked Lyle so far—the man seemed smart and experienced but was content to mostly stand to the side and let Tony conduct his investigation.

  “Still,” Lyle said, “this Ronnie woman sure doesn’t seem to be much on making friends.” Tony had to agree with that, as well. On the night of her disappearance, she had publicly slapped a man whom she was dating, screamed at him, gotten rebuked, and stormed off. No one could say where for sure, but more than one person suggested that the next logical stop in the Patch, if Ronnie hadn’t given up entirely on having a good time, would have been Nancy’s. When asked about Ronnie, the patrons at the Salamander responded on a spectrum between aggravated amusement and outright hostility. If this was the place that Ronnie Eastman had seen fit to frequent, Tony wondered how out of place she must have felt everywhere else in the world.

  “I guess I shouldn’t complain about the Patch,” Lyle continued, “because it keeps me working. I reckon that’s one way to think of it. But I hate it. I mean, if someone had tried hard to think up a way to get the worst of everyone’s leftovers into one place, they couldn’t have come up with better than this. Old drunks, young punks, and sad-sack women.”

  “And line dancers,” Tony said as Lyle pulled into a handicapped spot at the front of Nancy’s gravel lot.

  “Them too, for that matter.” Lyle spat brown juice into the neck of a Mountain Dew bottle with something that almost resembled grace. “Have you ever seen those people? I think they bus them in from the loony bin.”

  The doorman waved them past. It was still fairly early in the evening—there was only one man drinking at the bar and a dozen or so people seated at tables. No one was on the dance floor yet, though something country was playing loudly through the juke; Tony didn’t like that kind of music and wouldn’t have been able to name the band if his life depended on it. A few heads lifted as he and Lyle, who was wearing his sheriff’s khakis and wide-brimmed hat, strolled across the floor, toward the long plank bar that ran alongside the right-hand wall. Tony imagined that a black man was a rare sight here, rarer than the occasional lawman in uniform, and he wondered what the patrons would do if he kicked into a boot, scoot, and boogie, or however it went. He was relieved in a way to have Lyle with him, and he was ashamed to feel the relief. He had as much right to be in Nancy’s as anyone.

  “Tony, this is Ashley Justice,” Lyle said when they reached the bar. The young woman he was gesturing toward looked barely drinking age herself. She had purple, sparkly eye shadow painted up to her eyebrows and silver rings on all of her fingers, even the thumbs. “Miss Justice, Tony is a detective out of Roma, Kentucky. He’s going to have some questions for you. You just answer to the best of your recollection and be as honest as you can. All right?”

  “Okay,” she said. She took Tony’s outstretched hand with a measure of confusion, as if she’d never shaken hands before. The silver rings clanked together as he squeezed.

  Tony showed her Ronnie’s photograph. “Do you remember seeing this woman on October twenty-third? That would have been two Saturday nights ago.”

  She glanced at the photo, and Tony knew before she even spoke that she recognized the image. It was a narrowing in her eyes. “Yeah, I served her. Two weeks ago sounds about right. She tried to stiff me.”

  “Stiff you?”

  “Yeah. This pack of guys’d come in together and run up a big tab, had me making all these disgusting shots for this old guy to drink, and then they all walked out on him. I mean, it was a shitty prank, but that’s not my business. You’re a grown man, you better know who you’re drinking with.” She pursed her lips, and Tony thought he caught a glimpse of what Miss Ashley Justice must have been like in her not-long-ago high school days. “Anyway, she thought I shouldn’t charge him for the drinks, and then she tried to stiff me the tip, but I threatened to call the cops on the both of them.” She looked at Lyle. “I’d heard what went down at the Salamander.”

  “So she paid their tab?” Lyle asked.

  “Yeah. Well, the old guy might have had some money, but she paid the rest of it. Then she helped him outside, and that’s the last I saw of them.”

  “You keep saying ‘old guy,’ ” Tony said. “How old?”

  She shrugged, pausing as she towel-dried a pint glass. “Older than my dad.”

  “Fifties? Sixties?”

  “Probably,” she said. “Not, like, ancient. But old.” Lyle, perhaps sixty himself, threw Tony an amused look.

  “What else do you remember about him?”

  “He was fat. I think he had a mustache. He was really drunk, and he was just slobbering all over the bar by the time that woman came over. The whole thing was weird.”

  Tony drew his notebook out of his satchel and paged through to the sketch. “Was he anything like this?”

  “Did you do that?” she asked, setting the glass on the counter. Lyle, too, was leaning in, curious; Tony hadn’t yet shown him the drawing.

  “Yeah. Talk to me, is this in the ballpark?”

  She turned the drawing more fully toward herself. “Yeah, it is.” She bit her lower lip and waved her finger along the line of the sketched cheeks. “His face wasn’t as fat as the rest of him. He had loose skin like this.” She pinched her own cheeks along the jawline and made a p
outy face. “And his eyes were droopier.”

  Tony erased and smudged, put down more lines. The young woman and Lyle watched with interest.

  “Yeah, that’s getting there. Fuck, that’s freaky. Did he do something to her?”

  “We don’t know anything about him,” Tony said. “We just want to find him and talk to him. Is he a regular here?”

  “I’ve never seen him but the once.”

  “What about those guys you said he was with at first? The ones who pranked him?”

  “Yeah, them I’ve seen.” She tapped her index fingers together like drumsticks. “There’s a blond guy, loud and good-looking. He seems to be the one the rest of them look up to. And there’s another really good-looking one, but he’s black haired and blue eyed.”

  “Do you know anything about them?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I think they all work together somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

  “How likely is it that they’ll come in tonight?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Fifty-fifty? They make it over here once or twice a month. They’re not, like, every week or nothing.”

  Tony and Lyle stayed another two hours, but the pack of young men never showed. They talked to a second bartender, the manager, and a few regular patrons. None of them remembered the man in the sketch, the one who’d been left with the young guys’ tab. A few of them knew Ronnie, had heard about the drama at the Salamander. The other bartender told Tony that he thought the ringleader of the young men, the good-looking blond guy, was named Sam. But he could be wrong about that.

  “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d figure they come from one of the factories. They seem like the type.”

  “Which factories?” Tony stopped scribbling. “Wait. What type do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Just out of high school, money in their pockets.” The bartender himself could have been a haggard thirty or a well-preserved forty. “We don’t get the college crowd much here.”

  Tony nodded. His lower back twinged, like a guitar string getting plucked. “What are the factories you have in mind?”

  “Springfield has some. We get a bunch from the vacuum cleaner plant. We get them from Clarksville. Roma, too.”