Small Town Trouble

by Jean Erhardt

  “Did you notice how nicely they were folded?”

  “I did. Thanks again.”

  “I just couldn’t send you home with dirty clothes.”

  I just couldn’t say thanks one more time.

  “Hey, Evelyn,” Alonzo said, “tell Kim our idea.”

  “Yeah, listen to this,” Agee said.

  Evelyn added milk to her coffee. “The boys and I’ve been doin’ some thinkin’ about ways to bring in some extra money and I think we hit on something real hot.” I could barely wait to hear this one.

  “What do you think about us turnin’ Lake Evelyn into a pay lake?”

  “A pay lake?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Alonzo said, “you pay to fish, then you pay by the pound for your catch and, of course, you pay for the bait, beer, charcoal and any other damn thing we can think of to sell to you.”

  “Pay lakes are real popular around here, and Lake Evelyn’s a hell of a lot nicer than any of ‘em,” said Agee.

  “I’ll get my buddy from the county extension office out here to help us stock the lake and get rid of some of them weeds,” Alonzo said. “Agee and I can move the trailer over here and save on rent. There’s your bait and beer shop right there.”

  They were really rolling on this one. I could see they still had a few kinks to work out, but hey, if my mother and the boys could generate some extra bucks with Lake Evelyn that was fine by me.

  “Go get ‘em,” I poured a second bowl of Cheerios.

  “Well, I love the idea,” Evelyn said. “And I think A.C. would’ve, too. Now who wants more coffee?”

  We heard a car pull in the drive, and Alonzo went to the window. “It’s three guys in a black Lincoln,” he said.

  “Sounds like Feds,” said Agee, sipping his coffee.

  “Sounds like the Men in Black,” I said. “I thought they only showed up after a UFO sighting.” A UFO was about the only thing I hadn’t seen in the past few days.

  There was a knock at a door, and Alonzo opened it. “Good morning,” said one of the men. He flashed ID. “We’re with the United States Government. We’d like to speak with Mrs. Evelyn Claypoole.” Alonzo showed them in. They looked like G-men all right. All three of them wore dark suits and aviator sunglasses and they were all in various stages of balding.

  “I’m Evelyn Claypoole,” my mother said, getting up from the table. “What can I do for you boys?”

  “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” said the tallest of the G-men. He slid off his shades. “We won’t take but a minute of your time.”

  “Won’t you have a seat?” Evelyn said, motioning for Alonzo, Agee and me to give up our chairs.

  “No, thank you,” the tall one said. The other two just stood there next to him, hands folded, silent as mutes.

  “We’ll get right to the point. We’re here on behalf of the U.S. government. We’d like to apologize for any inconvenience that this mishap may have caused. The President himself is very pleased to know that the missing government property has now been recovered and I can assure you that we are taking care of any and all remaining details.”

  “Like Larry White?” I said.

  The big guy gave me a curt, but professional nod. “Precisely.”

  “I’ll bet you took away his black helicopter, didn’t you?” I figured that chances were excellent that it had been Larry White buzzing the WFOG field and licking his chops at all those buried A-bombs before our little meeting at Bud’s office.

  “We never believed his buffalo ranch story for one minute,” Evelyn said.

  He gave us a government-issue smile. “Can’t fool you,” he said, rather patronizingly. “I’m happy to say that all of the Fogerty properties are now back in the hands of their rightful owners and we have a little something for each of you.” He reached into his jacket and presented Evelyn with what looked very much like a check.

  “Please accept our most sincere apology for this unfortunate matter.”

  Evelyn took the check from him. She gave it a once-over and her eyes got wide. “Fifty thousand dollars!” she said. “Apology accepted.”

  It wasn’t a half-million, but it was just one zero shy. I could live with that and so could Evelyn.

  “Of course,” he said, “due to the sensitive nature of what’s transpired here in Fogerty, we’ll have to ask you all to keep this matter exceedingly confidential and we’re fairly rigid about these things.” I’ll just bet they were, too. He reached back inside of his jacket and pulled out a pen and an official looking document. “If you would please sign here?” He showed her where.

  Evelyn signed away and handed it back. “My lips are sealed,” Evelyn said, clutching her check and almost as if we’d rehearsed it, Alonzo, Agee and I all did the lip-zip thing. The G-men looked impressed.

  “Well,” he said, “please get back to your breakfast. We can show ourselves out. Have a nice day.”

  They started to make for the door.

  “I don’t think I caught your name,” I said. If the check bounced, I wanted to know who to go after.

  He turned and slipped his sunglasses back on. “Call me Mr. Black,” he said.

  And then they were gone.

  Chapter 47

  I loaded my suitcase into the back of the car and set the sack lunch that Evelyn had packed for me on the front seat. Maybe I’d be brave enough to actually look in the bag at some point down the road.

  “Bye, Cuz’,” Alonzo said, giving me the ritual bear hug.

  “Yeah, bye.” Agee took his turn.

  Then I hugged my mother, who was now fifty thousand dollars to the good. It gave a whole new and all together happy meaning to the term government spending.

  It was harder than I’d expected to say good-bye. “Don’t make it so damn long between visits,” my mother said, sniffing into her hankie, “and say hello to my kin.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, wiping away a tear of my own.

  I fired up the Toyota and turned to back out, but just as I did, a car pulled in behind me blasting its horn. I was hoping that the Feds hadn’t changed their mind about giving Evelyn the check.

  But it wasn’t Mr. Black and his color-coded Fed sidekicks. It was Amy.

  “Nice try,” she said, hopping out of her car. “Thought you’d sneak out of town again without saying good-bye?”

  “Well...”

  “Get out of that car and give me a hug,” she said. I knew how to take an order.

  Amy threw her arms around me. “Rick Rod says thanks. He’d tell you himself, but the minute they let him out of jail, he went off to get exceedingly drunk.”

  “Sounds perfectly reasonable.”

  She grinned and hugged me again. “I’m gonna miss the hell out of you,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Same here,” I hugged her back.

  “Maybe I’ll surprise you one day and show up on your doorstep.”

  “That would be a surprise, a nice one.”

  “Don’t think it couldn’t happen,” she said, her arms still around my neck. Then, to my further surprise, she proceeded to lay a large, juicy kiss dead center on my lips. Under other circumstances, this might’ve led somewhere, but I was acutely aware that my mother, Alonzo and Agee were all standing there gawking their heads off at us.

  Evelyn dramatically cleared her throat.

  “Wow,” I heard Alonzo say.

  Wow pretty much summed it up all the way around. Thanks to the wonderment of Amy Delozier and several strokes of well-timed good luck, wow was just how I felt most of the way down I-75 as I wound back to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and my little doublewide grass shack in the Great Smoky Mountains, to reclaim what could still be reclaimed of my former life.

  – THE END –

  About the Author: I was raised in the small rural town of Amelia, Ohio, about twenty five miles out of Cincinnati. My younger brother and sister and I had a pony, a horse, many great dogs and a couple of motorcycles. We raised a lot of hell. My father served in The Big One at 17 and, af
ter riding a motorcycle around Europe, became a lawyer and later a judge. My mother worked as a homemaker and nurse, a skill she had to use a lot with all of the injuries my siblings and I subjected ourselves and one another to.

  I wrote my first mystery story when I was in fourth grade. It was about a kid a lot like me who heard strange noises coming from the attic and became convinced that the attic was haunted. Eventually, the mystery was solved when she investigated and found a squirrel eating nuts in a dark corner. It wasn’t a terribly exciting conclusion, but my teacher gave me an A anyway.

  As a teenager I worked at a lot of different jobs. I worked at a gift shop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a frequent locale in my books. I was a swimming instructor and a lifeguard where my primary goal was to never get wet. I did a stint in a stuffed animal gift shop at the Kings Island amusement park where I actually sort of met the Partridge Family when they shot an episode there. After graduating from high school, I went on to attend Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from the Great Smoky Mountains. There was some more hell raising at college and I made some very good friends and occasionally we have our own private reunions.

  In high school and college I played basketball and I graduated from Maryville College with a degree in Phys Ed. I went on to teach at Amelia Junior High, the same junior high that I had attended. There was something a little weird about passing by my old school locker every day when I walked down the hall as a teacher. Plus, some of the teachers I’d had back when I was in junior high were still working when I started to teach. Some of them had been none too fond of me as a student and I don’t think they were much fonder of me as a teacher! I coached the girls’ basketball and volleyball teams which was the best part of my job.

  In my late 20’s I moved to the West Coast to get a broader perspective on life or something like that. I ended up working in retail security, or loss prevention, as it is now known, at an upscale Northwest retailer. I kept getting promoted and with each promotion, the job became less and less fun. It was a lot more fun catching shoplifters than sitting in endless meetings and crunching budgets. After ten years of that, I quit to try my hand at some serious writing. I wrote two books of fiction (not mysteries), Benny’s World and Kippo’s World, as well as a book of not-especially-reverent poetry called “A Girl’s Guide to God” and numerous short stories, articles and poems which have appeared in The Sonora Review, The Quarterly, Word of Mouth, Blue Stocking and 8-Track Mind.

  After that, it was time to go back to work. I got my private investigator’s license and hung out my shingle. At first, I took a lot of the cheaters cases. It seemed to me that if a guy thought his woman was cheating, he was usually wrong. On the other hand, if a woman thought her guy was cheating, she was almost always right. Eventually, I moved on to take mostly criminal defense investigation work which often involved trying to figure out what the client did and didn’t do and then minimize the damage of what they usually did do. There were so many crazy ways that people could get themselves in trouble. In one case, the attorney I was working for represented a wife who had gotten so enraged about all of the time and affection her husband lavished on his pet iguana that she shot the poor iguana and killed it. The husband was furious and wanted the district attorney to press charges. The wife was eventually charged with reckless endangerment and took a pretty sweet deal because even the DA felt sorry for the fact that she was married to such a schmuck.

  It was an interesting ten years. Somewhere in this time period I began to write the Kim Claypoole Mystery Series, which was a great distraction and a lot of fun. I liked the idea of having many of the same characters appear in each book. So here I am now, working on the fourth book in the series. Wish me luck.

  Cover art by Sara Erhardt

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