by J. L. Salter
“Maybe he’s already gone back home... or somewhere else.”
“Maybe. But my gut says he’s still here... and likely will stay real close ‘til he gets whatever he’s after.”
“Shane, do you still think somebody actually hired Ricks? I mean who would hire a meth head to travel across the country just to pester me?”
His shoulders sagged, likely with exhaustion. “Don’t know. But that person obviously has a particular reason for picking Ricks... instead of handling things himself.”
“But what do they want? It can’t be as simple as something in that little suitcase. Nothing in that batch of papers and pictures could be important enough for anybody to do all this... to two people, in two states, over a period of nearly two weeks.”
Shane straightened up on the sofa. “You know, Bethany, I think you hit on the key to this business.”
If so, she had no idea what it was.
“You and I are not the focus.” He stood and began pacing. “We’re just a small part of something much bigger and whoever’s pulling the strings is playing for a lot higher stakes than we’ve been able to imagine.”
Beth had to stop watching him because the pacing made her uneasy. “So, if we’re not the focus... what are we?”
He sat quite close and grasped her hand gently. “Bethany, I think we’re just a couple of loose ends. And whoever hired Ricks has figured out how to keep us where we can easily be located whenever he’s ready to tie things up.”
“Then Ricks’s boss has been, indirectly, pulling our strings for nearly two weeks.”
Shane covered their clasped hands with his other large paw. “That’s got to be it.”
“So you think Ricks knows you’re in town... looking for him?”
“His boss probably knows, but maybe he hasn’t told Ricks. About the only way Ricks could know is if he’d spotted me here. And that would mean he’s camped out in your neighborhood.”
Beth shuddered.
Shane patted her hand reassuringly. “If Ricks was prowling around Old Highlands, he’d stick out like a donkey in the Kentucky Derby.” Shane shook his head sadly. “Besides, I think the person who hired Ricks wants us both, Bethany. But I sure don’t understand why. It’s got to be about something in that overnighter.”
“But what? I’ve searched it from stem to stern. It’s musty old memorabilia. Nothing that would mean anything to anybody except the immediate family of that old actress.”
“Then we’re missing something, Bethany. Something in that case is real important to somebody with a lot of resources. And we are too, but only because we have the—”
“The thing that we don’t know we have.”
“Exactly.”
“Shane, this isn’t a spy movie. There’s no hidden microfilm in that luggage, no Swiss bank account numbers.” She felt tears coming on. “We didn’t ask for this. We don’t care about whatever it is. And who would we tell even if we could figure it out?”
“I don’t know, Bethany. But somehow I think we’d be in more danger if we did know what it was all about.”
“How could it get any worse?”
Shane didn’t respond, but he suddenly looked like hundreds of extra pounds had just landed on his broad shoulders. He slumped on the sofa and flipped through TV channels for at least ten minutes.
Later, when Shane got his hungry look, Beth went to the kitchen.
After they’d eaten two chicken pot pies from Beth’s microwave, Shane announced he had a couple more places to look for Ricks that evening. As Shane was about to depart, Connie arrived at Beth’s cottage.
Even though she already knew Shane was in town, Connie acted startled to see him. After a quick introduction, she began to flirt. “You don’t look anything like your picture.”
Shane looked down at himself, scanning all the way to his boots. “This is me. Might be an old picture.”
“You know... biker outlaws.”
“Connie!” Beth slapped her friend’s forearm.
“That’s okay, Bethany.” Then Shane turned to Connie. “Stereotype. Not every man on a bike acts like an outlaw anymore than every woman in a dealership office acts like a tart.” Shane’s grin was slow to develop.
Connie was briefly taken aback. Then she smiled. Eyes still on Shane, she addressed Beth. “Sweetie, you’ve got a live one here. Don’t let him loose or some dealership girl might jump your claim.”
Then Shane was speechless.
Beth grabbed Shane’s elbow protectively. “I’m gonna put you two in different corners or hose you down with cold water.”
“I’m leaving anyhow.” Shane inclined his head toward the front door. “Still looking for Ricks.” He reached for Connie’s hand and kissed her knuckles lightly. “Nice meeting you.” Then he winked. “I’ll check on you later, Bethany.” He was gone.
“Oooh... and my, my, my.” It seemed Connie might swoon. “I love it when a biker kisses my hand.”
“Get over it. He’s taken.”
“So you two are back together?”
Beth silently watched Shane disappear down Netterville Street. “Sometimes it feels like we weren’t ever apart.”
“I think I can understand what you mean.” Connie held the recently kissed fingers to her cheek... until Beth brushed them away.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Evening
Beth had remained at her window watching the empty street after Shane’s departure. It seemed a lot more desolate than she’d ever noticed before. Finally, she refocused on Connie, who’d gotten comfortable on the couch in the meantime. Connie’s arrival, shortly before Shane’s departure, was an interesting bit of timing. “So, you’ve finally met Shane.”
“Yep... and he’s a hunk. Not quite what I expected... from the photo.” Connie smiled dreamily. “Yet, quite a bit more.”
Beth started to say something, but it would have been sharp so she let it ride.
“So, any updates from your forensic librarian?” Connie squirmed slightly on the cushion she occupied.
“I haven’t talked to Jeff today. And you’ve already heard his totally cool clinical observations about that handwritten manuscript.”
“I think you’re both over-analyzing, Beth. It’s just an old story about an ancient event... that maybe didn’t even happen to begin with.”
“We don’t know it never happened. Maybe Jeff can find some newspaper coverage of that event... or something like it.”
“Okay,” Connie sighed. “So maybe he finds an article about the hanging of Jones in 1889. What could it possibly have to do with our girl Lynette?”
“Don’t know yet. But I’ve got a feeling it does.”
“You need to drop this old Jones thing and get back to why people are breaking into your house, following you around at night... and jabbing knives in your throat.” Connie took that moment to peer at Beth’s thin reddish scab.
“You want to know what Jeff found out about it... or not?”
“So when is he coming over?” Connie looked toward the front door.
“He’s not.” Beth shook her head slowly. “I’m supposed to call him in a minute. We’ll be on speaker so everybody can hear.”
“Call? Mister I’ll Be There In Three Minutes is going to phone this in?”
“He figured Shane might be here—”
Connie just opened both hands, palms up.
“I think Shane has Jeff a little spooked.” It came out in a whisper.
“Jeff is spooked by Californians?”
Beth slapped her forearm again. “No... bikers.”
“Everybody’s spooked by bikers!”
“You didn’t seem to be... spooked.”
Connie giggled. “Well, you know, it’s that holdover from my bad boy crush in school. ‘Leader of the Pack’.”
“Whatever.” Beth checked her watch. “Well, Jeff said to call after you got here.”
Connie visited the bathroom while Beth made the call.
After they got
the speaker properly arranged, Jeff covered additional details which reinforced some of the observations he’d previously explained. Then, as a summary of sorts: “Besides all the improbability—as a story, it’s incomplete and rather weak in a literary sense.”
“But the tale itself, about the crime, the hurried trial, the interrupted hanging, the rescue of the innocent man—that’s great stuff.” Beth leaned forward, into the phone.
“Exactly, but it’s buried inside such an unbelievable context that I think it must have been written that way on purpose.”
Connie waved her manicured fingers. “Somebody deliberately wrote an improbable story?”
Near the opposite end of Highland Drive, Jeff cleared his throat. “I’m not sure it is a story, strictly speaking. I think it could be more like a map or something.”
“You lost me.” Connie’s hands fell onto her knees.
“If you had some information and wanted to save it for some reason. You could write it down and label it ‘important information I want to save’ and maybe you’d explain why.”
“And who you’re saving it for,” Beth added.
“Right. But if it was a secret, at least for the time being... maybe you’d save the information in a format—or location—that nobody would look for it.”
Connie actually clapped her hands. “Like in a story that’s not actually a story.”
“Yes! Think about it. Everything’s too convenient... too neatly wrapped up. The implausibility factor is through the roof. Nobody would write anything that superficial... unless they were just using those pages to conceal some other information.”
“So you think it’s a way—presumably by somebody Lynette knew—to safely keep some bits of information, without anyone else knowing what... or why?” Beth finally straightened her neck and leaned back against the couch.
“Well, unless we can corroborate the hanging.”
Connie’s turn to lean in closely. “What about that Hickman newspaper you were looking through?”
“Nothing about a hanging around that date.” The voice on the phone.
“Could they have the date wrong?” Beth crossed her fingers.
“Definitely possible... but that leaves me searching all the available issues of the Hickman Courier. I’d need a lot of help with a project like that. This isn’t my full-time job, you know.”
Beth sat up straight again. “I’ll help.”
Connie went to the fridge and helped herself to a beverage. It was clear she had no intention of poring over scanned, ancient newspapers.
Beth re-focused on the speaker-phone. “Okay, suppose we do find an article about this hanging... maybe a different date. What elements could the writer be hiding in this tale?”
Connie returned to her seat and handed Beth a canned cola.
“Well, think about it. If this truly happened at all, presumably everybody in town knew about the murder, the trial, the hanging, and the escape. But the likely secret parts are that Brown was the true murderer, so Jones was actually innocent, and Brown rescued Jones and provided for him as a guilt subsidy for escaping execution himself.”
“And all those details were buried in the last few manuscript pages.” Beth sipped her beverage and smacked her lips. “So anybody reading that manuscript might just scan the first few pages, and they’d figure, ho-hum, it’s about a convicted murderer who got hanged... but escaped.”
“Exactly. But unless and until we find corroboration in the newspaper, all we have is the manuscript text itself.” Jeff paused. “Of course, I’m also reading Lynette’s journal—”
Connie swallowed hard. “But that diary was from the mid 1950s. This hanging was back before 1890.”
Beth quickly subtracted: “Um, sixty-six years later.”
“You know any better places to look?” Jeff sounded tired.
“Guess we’ll have to go through the overnighter again.”
“Beth, we’ve already handled every scrap of paper and each musty mouse dropping.” Connie wrinkled her nose.
“Find that missing manuscript page…or pages…and we’ll settle this. Whether this is just a writing exercise by somebody not even connected to Lynette—or if it’s the key to why somebody tried to rob you. And slice your neck half off.” Jeff sometimes exaggerated, too.
Connie tapped the coffee table with a flawless nail. “And why a nasty dumpster diver came all the way from California to find a little suitcase.”
“So when’s a good time for us to meet and go through the overnighter again?” Beth reached for a small notepad. “Tomorrow? That’s Thursday.”
“Is your boyfriend going to be there?” Jeff sounded rather tentative.
Connie suppressed a giggle.
“Probably not, Jeff. But my friends are welcome in my home and Shane’s got nothing to say about it.”
No phone response from the librarian.
Connie rose abruptly. “Okay, guys, it’s getting late. I can’t spend my whole life in a suitcase with you two nut jobs.”
Carrying her phone, Beth followed Connie to the door and locked it behind her. Then she resumed her conversation with Jeff, though not on speaker anymore.
Jeff was obviously worried about meeting Shane. “What if, you know... what if he doesn’t care for black folks?”
“Where did you come up with that idea?”
“You know. Bikers supposedly hate Mexicans... so it’s logical to assume...”
“Shane doesn’t hate— Where on earth did you get that?”
Jeff cleared his throat. “Movies... I don’t know. Everybody says it.”
Beth shook her head vigorously even though it wasn’t visible over the phone. “Don’t pay any attention to Hollywood. Before me... Shane had a Hispanic girlfriend.”
“Did you two fight over the biker?” Jeff sounded like he was smiling.
But Beth wasn’t. “She was killed...”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a drive-by shooting. Gang from L.A.”
“When?” Jeff sounded incredulous.
“Not sure... a little less than two years before I met him. Shane doesn’t talk about it.”
“So how’d you find out?”
“One night Shane had a few extra beers... and he let out a little bit.”
“Is that all you know?”
“Sophia wasn’t the target... just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few seconds sooner and she wouldn’t have been there. A few seconds later and she’d have been gone.” Beth cleared her throat softly. “Shane says everything’s reduced to seconds. Timing.”
Jeff was silent for a moment. “You know anything else about Sophia?”
Beth swallowed and rubbed a spot around her sternum. “Just that anytime Shane hears the name Sophia, he looks to see if it’s her.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Beth had barely ended the call with Jeff when her phone rang again. Shane. He wanted to know if her friends were gone. They were.
“How about I bring over some pizza in about an hour? You won’t even have to put your shoes back on.”
Pretty difficult to turn down such generosity.
She didn’t feel like watching TV and didn’t have anything else to do, so Beth napped before Shane arrived at seven o’clock.
The smell of freshly baked pizza entering a small cottage is enough to make anyone’s mouth water, especially when the thoughtful individual added an order of succulent bread sticks, so warm that the steam was still rising.
Beth awkwardly hugged him as he clutched the boxes.
He put down the meal, then turned and embraced her properly. “I thought about you all day.”
It warmed her, but she couldn’t let down her guard. “I saw you right after I got off work... less than two hours ago!”
“I forgot to tell you then.”
She eyed him narrowly. Something was different. “I thought you were focused on locating Ricks.”
“Trail went cold... and I was hungry.” He bit the
end off a breadstick. “I feel like I’m real close most of the time, but somehow he’s able to stay one step ahead of me.”
Beth located disposable plates. When she opened the lid of the largest box, she nearly swooned. Anybody who wanted to seduce her needed only to bring fresh, hot pizza. No anchovies. “You were talking yesterday about a local contact. Was he any more help?”
“Couldn’t find him. Just an old barfly named Cratchit—busybody with a pretty good memory. All my solid leads came from him. Everything else is just instinct and looking at all the spots where skunks hide out.”
“Should I call the police again and see if they’ve had any luck?”
Shane just shook his head dejectedly. Then he scooped up two pieces and looked around. “Table or couch?”
“Couch. I mean, table.” She caught a string of hot cheese on her chin. “Doesn’t matter. You get comfortable and I’ll join you.”
With the breadstick clamped in his mouth like a fat cigar, Shane carried his plate in one hand and the plastic cup of iced tea in his other. He placed both on the coffee table and sat on the sofa.
Beth watched briefly from the kitchen before she joined him.
“I’m going to try to find Cratchit again tomorrow and see if he’s learned anything new.” Shane sipped tea and took a big bite of pizza. It took a while to chew down sufficiently to speak. “Don’t waste your time on the cops... they’re not looking for Ricks until he holds up a convenience store or something. You know, with his ugly face on a security camera.”
“Very proactive.” As she ate her own delicious wedge, she continued to watch him.
He noticed. “What, Bethany?”
“Huh?”
“You’re staring. What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing.” She lied. “Well, yeah... noticing you’re different somehow.”
When Shane smiled, a morsel of crust fell onto his lap. He located it just below his buckle and plopped it back into his mouth. “Different... how?”
“Not sure.” Beth squinted. “The word that comes to mind is calmer... but that’s not exactly right.”
Shane chuckled. “Calmer?”
“Okay. Then maybe more mature... or something.”
