Murder in a Tiny Town

by F. E. Arliss

  When Zhara thought back on the girls in her class she could see that the majority of them had been abused before they were even fourteen or fifteen. Her best friend was assaulted at a Christmas party by one of the adult chaperones when he locked them in the bathroom together.

  One of her close friends was assaulted by a lay-minister on a mission trip to Tennessee. Her best friend had been raped repeatedly at church rallies, though Zhara hadn’t known that till much later. She’d been hit by a basketball coach.

  None of them had thought any of this worthy of reporting or speaking up about. Zhara had told her mother to no avail. Perhaps the others had too. Parents allowed many of these abuses because they had also been abused and didn’t want it known. Or they just didn’t want the attention of it. The entire chain was one of secrecy from generation to generation. Those who were brave enough to say something got shut down by parents. Now that was a chain of all sorts of wrong.

  The main attraction of these miserable tiny town backwaters are the picturesque central squares upon which century-and-a-half old, crumbling county courthouses rule their petty fiefdoms.

  From these dome-topped brick piles of authority, corrupt, self-perpetuating governments, with cruelly skewed court personnel, sentenced hapless ignorants to ongoing fines for keeping pitbulls or putting junk cars in their front yards.

  The police departments were usually fat as ticks, full of corpulent cops that arrested the same twenty miscreants over and over again, ruining what little chance the poor fools might have had in life, usually with felony charges mostly conjured up out of thin air and misdemeanors glorified from the reality of the actual petty crime into proportions of grandiose importance. This was done so that a fine could be bilked from whatever slightly-more-monied relative could be hit up for the bail.

  Perhaps the only saving grace for these oozing infectious pustules on the face of the country were their libraries and community arts committees. Whatever “brains” were to be had in communities like these, usually fled to the last bastions of civility: the community playhouses and the quiet confines of the Carnegie libraries that had been, thank Heavens, scattered willy-nilly across the backwaters of America by one of the all-time fattest of cats. It had been the best thing the tycoon had ever done. In doing so, he’d saved the sanity of many a cursed soul who had the ill-fortune to be born into one of these sleepy oases of perpetual stagnation.

  Lady Zhara was here for a funeral. Not that that was necessarily a sad fact. Her rather dreadful mother had died, and like it or not, Zhara supposed she should at least show some sign of respect for the uterus that had brought her into the world. That uterus had been given quite a work out in its day, but it had - after all - birthed her. At least that was what her rather outspoken and often correct, Bolivian maid, Beatriz Colque, told her.

  Or, truth be told, scolded her, berated her and finally, maneuvered her into being here. Zhara had finally acquiesced in poor grace. Even though she’d threatened Beatriz with the withholding of her twice-annual, all-expenses-paid vacations home to Sucre, the capital city of Bolivia, the recalcitrant maid had given her glares, sighs, and the general cold shoulder until she’d agreed to go for two nights only! Bother!

  Zhara had finally, after years of anger, come to forgive her mother. Sue Darla hadn’t been able to escape the plague that had been her own father. He’d raped Sue Darla and damaged her beyond repair. Zhara’s own sisters were most likely his victims as well, and each displayed some type of personality disorder that held the imprint of their grandfather’s abuse.

  Zhara’s sisters had often insisted that she too, must have been abused, though Zhara had no memory of that. She’d gone to therapists to process all the horrors of her birth family and they’d found no scars but those, sufficient enough as they were, but those caused by surviving a seriously screwed up bunch of personality disordered relatives and having been married to a master manipulator.

  Finally, in desperation to discover the truth, Zhara had gone to a hypnotherapist, who - after three of the most boring sessions she’d ever sat through - assured Zhara that her subconscious mind held no deep dark secretes of incest by her grandfather.

  Yes, her neighbor had kept trying to slide his hand up her thigh, the local minister had leered through the window of their home at night, and a camp counselor at the girl scout camp had pulled his pants down and tried to eyeball her crotch. Those things Zhara had seemed to have taken in stride and was completely cognizant of. Had there been incest present, the hypnotherapist was sure Zhara would have coughed it up by now and politely insisted she didn’t need another session to discover a deep, dark secret. There weren’t any there.

  Well, the hypnotherapist had explained, except for the fact that Zhara felt she’d kicked her husband as he was falling down the stairs. That type of guilt was completely normal and she could work on releasing that guilt with her regular therapist. Zhara quickly thanked the hypnotherapist and left.

  So, here Lady Zhara Hope Six was, sunning herself on the small cement deck of the local country-club swimming pool and enjoying a glass of sauvignon blanc. Truly, the concrete deck of the country-club pool still left something to be desired. Although any New Zealand sauvignon blanc was hard to dislike, so that, at least, was adequate.

  Fat men in badly fitting shorts and colorful Nikes, and women in white pedal-pushers - that’s what they’d called them back in the day when they’d actually had a purpose other than baring overweight calves - and polyester sun-tops littered the rest of the deck. Tee-shirts and polo shirts in varying stages of Tide-faded hues, usually fell short of covering the massively expansive bellies of the town’s finest occupants, as they drank beer and watched their equally walrus-like offspring cannon-ball into the pool.

  Beatriz had made sure to secure her mistress a table well back from the whale-spray and under a shady umbrella. It was bearable, as Beatriz, battle axe that she was, had also purloined several citronella candles and placed them strategically around the table.

  The rural midwest was full of insects. Beatriz hadn’t seen the like of the swarms of mosquitoes, lady-bugs, bull gnats and the million other crawling, flying, buzzing bugs since she’d left the pestilence-ridden hell of the Amazon basin. Her Lady had warned her. She’d thought Zhara was exaggerating because she didn’t want to come.

  Lady Zhara had not been exaggerating. It truly was a bug-laden backwater. Pretty in a way, the maid supposed, if one could get past the way people stared at her like she’d crawled out from under a rock. She couldn’t count the times she’d been sneeringly called, “a Mexican” since she’d been here. Beatriz had never met a rude Mexican - that was not something she could say about the dreadful manners, poor vocabulary, or disastrously dressed population of this little berg. She was beginning to regret her zealous defense of motherhood and its expected respects.

  Beatriz had assured her son, Basilio, also in Lady Zhara’s employ as a driver/errand boy/butler, that they’d leave as soon as possible.

  Lady Zhara had not been wrong. This wasn’t a good place. Pretty maybe, with all its greenery and long vistas over farm country. Aside from that, it wasn’t nice.

  Neither the people nor the facilities had anything to commend them for a longer stay. They hadn’t met “the family” yet. Zhara assured them that would be “fun.” Beatriz knew it would not. Her Ladyship had sipped an entire bottle of champagne just on the drive from the large city airport their private jet had flown into. That was always a sign that things were going to be “interesting,” as Lady Zhara would describe these stressful encounters.

  Assured by several people that they were staying at the best hotel in town, Beatriz hadn’t been overly impressed with the suite at the Hampton Inn they’d been given. The people were nice enough, and the room adequate in a “lower middle class” sort of way. Still, there was nothing better to be had. It would just have to do. She’d almost grimaced when Lady Zhara ran her hand over the quilted polyester comforter on the bed in her room and then jerked
her hand back as though burned. Once one left quilted polyester behind, it was hard to want to touch it ever again.

  The kicker had been when they discovered that the breakfast room, with its terrible array of fake breakfast foods - as Lady Zhara called the boxed egg mixes and preservative laden foods they laid out for mass consumption - only played FOX news. Truly the lowest form of intellectual drivel broadcast on U.S. television. A mark that the place was going straight to hell in a handbasket, as her Ladyship would say. Beatriz could only agree.

  No wonder people looked at her like she had just crawled out from under a rock. These were “the wall” people. Beatriz had no idea why they’d want to spend money on a wall to keep out the people who did most of the work, but she could say that they definitely needed better roads. Even in the back seat of the massive Mercedes they’d rented in Chicago, the roads still rattled her bones just as much as the cobblestones of Sucre’s central square back home.

  Chapter Eight

  The Hell of the Familial Forge

  While on the surface it will sound as if Lady Zhara’s family were all simply inveterate kooks shaped that way by the many undercurrents of the tiny town they were from, that wasn’t the entire truth. The majority of the truth was that Zhara’s grandfather had been a pervert who molested any young girl that came in contact with him.

  It didn’t dawn on Zhara until many years later that when she’d dragged her friend away from her grandfather’s wandering hands that she’d left her sister in the barn. Somehow in her young mind her sister was safe. That turned out to definitely not be the case.

  Her mother and aunt were both deeply disturbed women. Zhara’s oldest sister, Victoria, too had severe mental issues that manifested throughout her life. Mostly she tried to manipulate people and was an expert at pushing people’s buttons. In her misery she took boatloads of psych meds and ended up having a severe illness later life called frontotemporal dementia, which basically would kill her in less than a half a dozen years. Zhara was pretty sure it was a side-affect of all the drugs doctors had foisted off on her sister because they didn’t want to hear that her grandfather had perpetrated incest on her.

  No one wanted to hear that, a lesson her second oldest sister had learned well. It turn out that Elizabeth was gay, and had most likely been molested by their grandfather, which didn’t help matters. She learned to guard her emotions closely and keep her thoughts hidden. Elizabeth was often hit and kicked by Victoria in Victoria’s constant search for some type of relief from her emotional pain. This physical abuse, in addition to the sexual abuse, only served to make Elizabeth even more cut off from her own emotions.

  By the time Elizabeth was an adult, she had only one outlet for her own anger and rage - she drank. Being an alcoholic helped. But then, like it always does, it started to not help. Finally, getting sober, Elizabeth searched for something that would help assuage the rage that burned inside. Competition. That was Elizabeth’s drug now. She would better people in whatever way she could. That turned out to be a number of small things, with physical fitness coming out on top.

  Zhara could still remember Elizabeth’s visit to The Netherlands when she’d first realized that her sister always had to be superior. No matter what they’d seen or done - Seattle, Elizabeth’s home town of choice now - had it better. In the end, neither Zhara or Carlton could figure out why she’d bothered to come in the first place, as Seattle was clearly superior.

  It even had windmills, tulips and had worse weather according to Elizabeth, so truly, the trip was a complete waste of time and money. Zhara realized that Elizabeth would then go home to Seattle, the best city in the world, and brag about her superiority in travel to those who hadn’t traveled that year. Ah, competition, a nasty, nasty addiction that had replaced alcohol.

  Prior to the disastrous trip to The Netherlands, Zhara had gone to stay with Elizabeth once in Seattle. She’d taken a friend along for the fun of it.

  It was not fun for the friend. Elizabeth’s need to dominate them physically turned into a never-ending “death march” around the city. Elizabeth refused to take the bus or any sort of public transportation. In the end, Zhara’s friend had ended in serious pain with an erupted hemorrhoid from the prolonged walking. She had complained, as had Zhara, but neither were a match for Elizabeth’s ruthless will to dominate and come out on top.

  It had taken Zhara a while to make the connections to all of this. As she’d gotten older she’d seen what the incest had done to her older sisters. One had gone slowly mentally ill, manifesting a manipulative personality disorder that she tried to drug away. The other, had tightened her grip on life to such a point that she could barely function around normal people - her need to come out on top eventually losing her career in a top coffee chain’s headquarters as her inability to be a team player failed to fit into the modern workplace.

  Zhara had one other sister, Lulu Mae. She and Lulu Mae had the matching crap “hick” names. Somehow the oldest two girls got decent names of past English queens, probably from her mother’s childhood fascination with royalty. Then the gap of five years let her mother’s attention wander elsewhere and they’d ended up with Gertrude Sue and Lulu Mae. Both equally dreadful as the other.

  Lulu Mae had been very intelligent and trained to become a lawyer. Zhara wasn’t sure about Lulu Mae’s past with the pervert grandfather. What she did know was that Lulu Mae had fooled around with a teacher in high school, a bit of an indicator that she liked older men and that Zhara’s opinion that perverts were everywhere was just too true. Schools were supposed to be safe places, yet here was a teacher having sex with one of his students. Yep, perverts abound.

  What she did know was that Lulu Mae lived in fear. She was always afraid of what other people thought of her. She always tried to have the best house, the best handbag and the best education. Unfortunately, this seemed to have sapped her of much of her empathy for other people.

  Her never-ending search to be “good” in other people’s eyes had driven her to give up a good job in the city and return to their hometown to take care of Sue Darla in her old age. Nothing could sap a person of their empathy faster than being around Sue Darla, so Zhara was going to cut Lulu Mae a little slack.

  There was then, the question that Gertrude kept asking herself. “Had she been damaged by their grandfather’s actions? While it turned out that Zhara hadn’t been molested by their grandfather, it hadn’t saved her from some of the residual fallout of the effects of knowing what was happening around her and being molded by them.

  She’d been too young to flee, and too innocent to completely understand. What had happened had shaped her too. She’d swallowed some of the incest-koolaid in that she’d allowed herself to be taken advantage of by an older, manipulative male. Truly, familial sexual abuse was one of the most toxic airborne diseases known to man. Zhara had been molded by the hell of the familial forge whether she’d wanted to be or not.

  It always made Zhara really angry when she realized the absolute bomb that their pervert of a grandfather had dropped on their young heads. He’d ruined their lives. The fact that she’d managed to begin to salvage her life by kicking him, or actually Carlton - the two occasionally melted together in her mind - down the stairs and breaking his stupid neck, had been the beginning of a series of revelations that had helped her take charge of her life.

  The time in The Netherlands had increased her fortune and cleared her mind. She’d spent two hours a week laying on a couch in Amsterdam with the best therapist she could find. They’d analyzed her life, her family, her motivations, and every nook and cranny of her mind. She’d even expressed her relief at Carlton’s death - without admitting she’d kicked him, of course. That therapist had made thousands of Euros off her and she had been worth every penny.

  Now, Zhara had to face the lion’s den. Her personality disordered mother was dead. Though Zhara had made peace with the fact that her mother really couldn’t help all the trauma and damage that had been done to her, Zh
ara still didn’t have to like the resulting barrage of bullshit that had sifted down to her own life and psyche. She believed she had it under-control and had come to some sort of peace with it - though that was usually just the thing everyone thought right before they got hit by a semi-truck load of pain.

  Well, they were about to find out. The worst thing that could happen was that Zhara would have to go back to The Netherlands and spend a lot more time and a wad more money, getting her head put back on straight by the coldest therapist she’d ever met.

  Chapter Nine

  Family Meeting Most Foul

  Basilio pulled the rented Mercedes Maybach into the parking lot at the white clapboard funeral home and hopped out to open Lady Zhara’s door. The sight of the large Mercedes had halted most of the other “family meeting” attendees mid-stride. Mouths dropped open as Basilio whipped open the heavy door of the enormous coupe and gave a white-gloved hand to help Zhara from the car.

  Beatriz supposed they had reason to stare. Even in a civilized area Lady Zhara stopped people dead. She did cut quite the figure. Her Ladyship was tall. She’d once upon a time been thin, and while not heavy now, middle age had added a general buttering of flesh over her entire frame. Zhara often said she was glad it hadn’t all settled in one spot - usually around the waist in an apple, as was the midwestern norm.