The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  “Thank you, but what I am is an earnest-faced fool in love.”

  I left her laughing and hit the road.

  _____

  The Palm Springs airport was small and convenient, and I could’ve caught something to LAX there, but I distrust those little short-hop airplanes. Anyway, in the Jaguar I made as good or better time, given the waiting and the boarding and the taxiing and all that.

  Fortunately, I had a row to myself on United’s 11:38 red-eye to O’Hare. Before going to sleep, I looked over my notes and composed my thoughts, focusing on the facts, trying not to go too far with my inferences.

  It was obvious that something from the past was trying to take a bite out of my athletic lover.

  She’d left behind a childhood that had dissatisfied her, let her down, damaged her.

  Someone was trying to blackmail her.

  And terrorize or hurt her.

  And had been at it for a while; it’d been almost a year since Marian Handistock Day.

  A person doesn’t exist who would have been “almost fourteen now.”

  Life today, for Genie, was her golf career.

  The past for her was everything that happened before she met golf. Therefore, that was the past I needed to look into, that was the place where I could do her—I suspected and hoped—some concrete good.

  I felt in the pocket of my coat for my pint of Ballantine’s. Never do I travel without some whisky. I asked for a cup of water, drank most of it, then poured in a shot and sipped it. I slipped off my loafers, pulled out Valparaiso Farewell, and read a little. It won’t be ruining it for you to tell you that Calico Jones suavely manages to escape from the ambassador’s residence, but not before enjoying a zestful romp with the ambassador’s soon-to-be ex-wife. Then Calico hunts down the guy who counterfeited the government bonds, but learns the shocking fact that his real racket is running Cambodian orphans into Quebec via Panama, for use in French-language snuff videos.

  After a while I rolled myself in two blankets and relaxed into the roar of the engines and the clink of the beverage carts, grateful to feel drowsy.

  18

  Pearl Center, Illinois, pop. 2,560, is 63.8 miles north-northwest of the Alamo rental car lot at O’Hare airport. At that distance, it’s stayed out of reach of the suburban creep that has made places like Northbrook, Lombard, and Downer’s Grove into extensions of places like Evanston, Villa Park, and Oak Park.

  The utter flatness of the terrain heading out from the airport gives you a clue as to what lies beyond, as you segue from the Pizza Huts to the places that used to be Pizza Huts but are now used sewing-machine shops. It’s farm country; it’s Farm Aid country, where people eventually stop fixing the motor on the RV and just let the weeds grow. Little welfare office on the prairie. A gray place, an uneasy place, it felt to me.

  Pearl Center’s motto, I read on the sign at the town limit, is, “Honoring the Past, Envisioning the Future.” Anything to avoid a hard look at the present, I thought.

  It was nine in the morning and, despite the dreariness and the wet March thaw, I was feeling fairly wholesome. I’d eaten a good solid breakfast of bacon and eggs at the terminal and was ready to implement Operation Save Genie Maychild.

  In Pearl Center, which hugs the banks of an apparently nameless small river, there were five taverns, four stoplights, three churches, two police cars, and one newspaper.

  Every small newspaper office is different in every detail from every other one, yet they are all exactly alike. That is, you will find different people working there, different stories on the layout boards, different advertisements, different contact names in the stacks of press releases, a different brand of sugar cubes at the coffee shrine—yet the smell and sound and feel of the place is like that of any other you’ve been in: You’re aware of the stale coffee, carpet lint, printer toner, hand soap; you’re aware of the low clamor of plastic keyboards, voices on the telephone, the odd crinkle of a candy wrapper, the jingle of coins dumped onto the front counter by a carrier.

  If you’ve worked in the business, you can also walk in and tell what day of the week it is, whether the issue’s just gone out to the printer, or just about to go out, or somewhere in between. You can feel it in people’s voices, in the tension of their movements.

  I’d noticed that the Pearl Center Bugle published on Thursdays. That was good for me; Friday, then, was a day of nothing pressing.

  Skip Doots, staff correspondent, heard me ask for him in the front office and came bounding out to meet me.

  “Hi there, Theresa. Good to meetcha!” His grip was sweaty but firm.

  “Skip, how do you do? Good to meet you, too.” I liked him instantly, knowing that ninety-nine percent of reporters would’ve waited in their office for the receptionist to get up, come in, and announce me. Then seventy percent of them would’ve stayed seated behind their desks while she showed me in. I also liked his title, staff correspondent: just a trifle over the top for Pearl Center, Illinois. His name, Doots, was one of those funny Northern European names common in the Midwest. I’d gone to school with a DeVroot, a Waards, and even a Doody.

  He offered me a chair and coffee. “Jenny just made a fresh pot, so hopefully it won’t strip the skin from your throat,” he said, as he handed me the cup.

  “Thanks. You drink yours black, too? Then I guess we’re both gluttons for punishment.”

  “You said it.” He was a beanpole with acne scars and crooked teeth, but his eyes and smile made him look like a best friend waiting to happen.

  “Nice setup you’ve got here,” I observed.

  “Thanks!”

  “I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”

  “Well, it isn’t every day somebody from Sports Illustrated comes to Pearl Center.”

  “Heh, yeah. Um, you’ve been with the paper for quite a few years now, right?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know that?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen your work in an archive, a sports thing—you know.”

  We heard a growl just outside the door, which Skip had left ajar. Another growl coalesced into words. “Jenny, I will not take the call!” It was a haggard male voice. “Would that all my accounts paid me net thirty! I told him he’ll get the money in his grubby little hands as soon as I get it! And he says, my hands are not grubby! That bastard’s hands are grubby, all right.”

  The boss. Skip laughed silently. I smiled.

  A low, soothing voice said, “I know, but I can’t lie to him.”

  “Then tell him I’m in conference with Skip!”

  Skip’s door flew open and a fellow shaped like a fireplug jumped inside. “Skip,” he yelled, “have you called Ellen Schmidt yet about that goddamn flood insurance program?”

  “Yes, we’re meeting Monday to go over it.”

  “I’ll never understand it!” He twisted his ear as if he wanted to throw it away.

  “It’s very complex.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Theresa Sanchez.”

  “She’s from Sports Illustrated, doing a piece on Genie Maychild.”

  “What’s she doing here, then?”

  “Skip was kind enough to agree to talk with me about what it’s like to—”

  “I gotta go.” The door slammed.

  “He’s a trip,” said Skip. “Where were we? Oh. Yeah! I guess you guys have all kinds of resources.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. So—”

  “Are you on staff at Sports Illustrated, or, like, doing a freelance thing for them?” He wore a small wooden cross on a cord around his neck, and a school ring set with a blue stone on his hand.

  “Well, quite honestly, Skip, my angle here is, when a sports figure makes it big and leaves town, how do the home folks feel about them? Like, how do you, as a local reporter, cover Genie Maychild? The people here know her, remember her. Her roots are here, and yet she’s moved on. That coach she had in high school—”

  “Marian Handistock.”

  �
��Yeah, her: How does she feel about Genie now? I’ll be talking with her today, too. Her friends, you know—”

  “Genie wasn’t terribly popular around here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” That surprised me.

  “I didn’t know her myself. I mean, I knew who she was, but she was like three years ahead of me in school, so, you know. But it just seems like nobody around here cares very much about her. I tried to interview her parents one time, and they wouldn’t even answer the door. Kids from school—I mean, kids who were kids with her—it’s funny, but they don’t know her very well. They’re not comfortable talking about her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think Genie Maychild was one of those little nobody-type people, mousy people—maybe one who got picked on, you know. Then something happens to them. For her, it was discovering golf. And they bloom, and like overnight nothing’s ever the same for them. It’s like they become a different person nobody knows anymore.”

  “Uh-huh.” I couldn’t imagine Genie being mousy.

  “You can only milk ‘Local Girl Makes Good’ so far.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you doing any other celebrities, or just Genie?”

  “Oh, you know. Yeah. I’m not sure, though. The editors are dithering. You know. I decided to go ahead and get a little legwork done anyway.”

  “Oh. They do dither, don’t they?”

  “You gotta love ’em. Say, have you heard the one about the writer and the editor who get lost in the desert? They’re walking and walking, trying to find water. Then they’re crawling. Finally they come to an oasis, and the writer plunges his head in and drinks. He looks up to see the editor peeing into the water. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he says. The editor says, ‘I’m improving it.’”

  Skip really liked that one. “You got that right! Boy, have you got that right! Sometimes I—”

  “So,” I said, “did you ever know any, like, boyfriends or girlfriends of Genie?”

  He was too eager to help me to get insulted because I kept interrupting him. “No,” he said, “like I say, I never really—”

  “Ever look her up in the old yearbooks?”

  “No, I never thought of that.” He looked crestfallen.

  “Maybe I’ll swing by the library later. There is one here, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, not that they have any kind of collection.” He raised an eyebrow, a college man through and through.

  “I hear ya.” We sipped our coffee. “Skip, tell me, do you want to keep on in journalism? I’m just curious. Do you—do you see it as a long-term career for you?”

  He smiled into the distance. “Once,” he said, “I left here and moved to Chicago, to take a job at the Tribune. I offered to work for free, just do anything, you know, so they’d see I was a hard worker, and maybe then one day I could work into a foreign correspondent position. I was studying Arabic and Russian.”

  “Wow.”

  “And I worked like a dog there,” he went on. “I did everything they asked. Gosh, I did everything up to and including mopping the men’s room. They wouldn’t give me any real assignments, but I wrote features, ones that I’d think up myself at night. I did some investigative stuff on the road commission and public health. But they didn’t like my work.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s kind of hard for me to say this, but I feel you’ll understand.” His eyes were clear and noble. “They said I didn’t have the killer instinct.”

  “Oh, Skip.”

  “Yeah. What could I do? So I came home. And now my goal is to buy the Bugle someday and run it myself.”

  “Well, Pearl Center’s a nice town.”

  “It is. I was born here.”

  For some reason I had to keep from crying. After a minute I said, “Well, heck, journalism’s a crazy life.”

  “You said it.”

  “Hey, you know that rally last year for that teacher of Genie’s that retired, Coach Handistock?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Somebody came up in some kind of costume? What was that about?”

  “Oh, yeah, that was really bizarre. This person just sort of appears, right in front of the podium, you know, and Genie freaked.”

  “What exactly did this person look like?”

  “Well, like I think I said in the article, he or she was wearing a mask—”

  “What kind of mask?”

  “A rubber mask, like for Halloween. It looked like a pig.”

  “A pig?”

  “You know, a fat pink pig face. And then this sheet that was supposed to look bloody, I guess.”

  “Did you get any pictures of this person?”

  “I don’t think so.” He rubbed the point of his chin with his thumb. “I can look back over the proof sheets just in case. We didn’t have the digital camera then. I’m the whole news bureau around here, you know.”

  “I do know. Would you do that?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And how did Genie react when this Halloween person showed up?”

  “She just—it’s like she just froze for a minute. I was standing practically next to her and she looked—well, like she’d seen a ghost. Her face went totally white, and she just stared for about—I don’t know, half a minute.”

  “Did the person say anything?”

  “No.”

  “Did Genie say anything?”

  “I almost caught something under her breath.”

  “What was it?” I pressed. “Did you hear a word?”

  “I don’t know. No. Then she, like, shook it off, like I could see her getting ahold of herself, and then it was like the person didn’t exist. She just went right back to talking. I went back to writing notes, and then when I looked up, whoever it was was gone.”

  “Did people say, ‘Who was that masked man?’ or anything?”

  “Not that I heard.” He looked sheepish. “I guess people around here aren’t too curious.”

  We both sat and thought on that for a moment.

  “No,” he suddenly said, “it’s not that.”

  I smiled.

  “You know what I think?” he said, “It’s that people here could feel that Genie wanted that—whatever it was—goblin to be invisible, so just naturally it became invisible to them, too.”

  “Out of politeness, then.”

  “In a way, I guess.”

  We looked at each other and laughed. That’s the Midwest for you: land of the pathologically polite. It was good for Genie that Skip Doots was just as polite as his brethren.

  Just to see how polite he could be, however, I said, “Seems Genie and Coach Handy were pretty close.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  I waited. Then, to push him to his utmost limit of politeness, I said, “Well, did people talk about that?”

  “Oh! Uh. Gosh, I don’t know. You know, Theresa, it isn’t that people don’t gossip around here. I mean, it’s a small town.”

  “Yes, that speaks for itself.”

  “I try to stay out of it,” Skip said. “I hear things. But my philosophy is, this town needs somebody to look after it. Somebody to help people feel happy and proud. Somebody who doesn’t just criticize and find fault, but somebody who can tell the truth and who cares. Somebody who cares that a lady with no vocal cords comes once a week to the senior center and helps them make baskets, somebody who cares if the garbage truck guy has to keep rigging the clutch in the dead of winter with a piece of wire because it never gets fixed right, somebody who cares that even though the clock on City Hall doesn’t keep the right time, the finches are going to come back any day now and nest in it!”

  For a minute I wanted to move to Pearl Center and marry Skip Doots. But I just said, “You have a fine career ahead of you.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, my friend. Yes.”

  19

  The Pearl Center Public Library could’ve fit into a cigar box, but it appeared that the staff tried hard to keep their chins up, given what
must have been a zero-sum budget game with the city council. On the bulletin board, there were notices for two different fund-raisers, a bake sale and a karaoke festival. Tonight was to be Karaoke Night, with soft drinks provided. Suggested donation was two dollars per song. I wondered if I’d be able to stop in for it.

  The librarian was up on a chair pinning gold crepe paper and inspirational pictures of singing stars to the ends of bookcases and walls. She’d gotten up Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, Jim Nabors, and June Carter. In her on-deck pile I saw Garth Brooks and Dolly Parton. The librarian rubbed her neck as if it hurt.

  The only patron, a great-grandpa in a Ford jacket, was reading a newspaper at a table. He made a continuous, deep throat-clearing sound.

  The librarian climbed down and showed me the shelf of yearbooks from Pearl Center Consolidated High School and went doggedly back to her decorations.

  I found Genie Maychild’s senior picture and her junior picture. She looked about as I expected her to look: strong neck and jaw, shy smile, yet the suggestion of immaturity, especially physical immaturity. As most teenagers do, she looked as though she hadn’t grown all the way into her face yet. Even so, I saw a quiet determination in her eyes. Almost a somberness.

  And there she was also, among the sports photos, bundled in pants and a jacket, swinging a club against a dreary backdrop of muddy ground and bare trees. And there she was again, leaning on her driver, Coach Handy at her side.

  Coach Handy appeared in most of the team photos, a solid presence with a challenging look, as if she might jump out of the photograph and recruit you on the spot for half-court basketball, or maybe cross-country.

  I flipped through the pages of candid shots, too, looking for Genie with other students, looking for references to her. In her sophomore year her picture wasn’t among those of her classmates, nor was it there in her freshman year. I looked for the golf team; there was none. Coach Handy was there in the sports pages, but no Genie Maychild.

  Puzzled, I looked through the candids for those years. “God, I’m glad I’m not a kid anymore,” I muttered, the pictures taking me back to those awkward days of yearning and frustration. One picture drew my attention, of two students caught necking in a stairwell. A high window caused the shot to be backlit, with a silhouette-like result. You couldn’t see the faces of the couple; I suppose that was how it got past the censors. They were a couple of slobs, it appeared to me, lumpy and straggly, but the body angles of the girl made me look more closely. I’d seen that body. The boy, in profile, had an obvious hard-on. The caption said: “Sitting in a tree: G.W. and D.D?”