by Chris Capps
He set the trophy back on his fireplace mantle, snapping his fingers and pointing as he headed for the front door. Sherriff Myers waited for a moment as he shuffled out.
The car ride to KOIF radio was silent, despite Jessica's best attempts to start simple friendly conversation. In truth, the mayor was doing exactly what he had been groomed to do. He was being a politician - keeping his friends close, and everyone else completely in the dark. Jessica was not a friend.
Once inside the radio station, Jared Cox looked up from a long worn nature magazine at the front desk, nearly leaping up as he saw the mayor and Sherriff Myers both walking in. He rapped his fingers on the clear window leading into the studio, summoning the glare of morning DJ Pop Thomas as he looked over the extensive damage of a Bob Wills record that had just arrived. Pop stood, leaning in on the studio door as he pulled it open and motioned for the two visitors to enter.
Moments later Mayor Sugarhill would be sitting in Pop's "captain's chair," pulling the microphone down.
"Just give me the signal when you're ready to speak," Pop said leaning over a brightly lit control panel, "We can cut in on this song any time you like."
The mayor nodded, and the turntable stopped spinning. Sugarhill brought his mouth close to the microphone, and spoke,
"Ladies, gentlemen... Friends. This is the voice of Mayor Clayton Sugarhill. I'm speaking to you from the KOIF studio to bring sad and uncertain news. First, it is my unenviable duty to inform you all that our vigilant and dutiful Sherriff, Paul Rind was killed this morning. At the moment I have transferred authority over to Paul's second in command, Deputy Jessica Myers. She is going to have to sustain us through this uncertain time, and the subsequent investigation. I know you are likely disturbed by this turn of events, but I must ask you to take this moment to come together as a community. And there's something more I must ask of you," the mayor licked his dry, tacky lips, leaving seconds of dead air as he tried to form the words welling up in his chest, "I know who killed Sherriff Rind. I know the name. And she will be coming into town tonight. She wants to address us. She wants to help us - survive. She has done wrong, but she says she'll make it right if we cooperate. Her name is Molly Nayfack."
***
"No one's answering the radio. It's like there's no one there. I don't know what's happening, but you've got to hang on. We're almost back to town."
Chance Cooper kept one hand on the helicopter's cyclic while squeezing Rob Howell's arm with his other. Rob gasped heavily, his eyes bulging like a goldfish as he tried to steady himself. He couldn't stop the pain racing up his arm and into his chest, spreading like lightning through his veins. He tried to scream, but found it impossible. All he could let out was a sustained, pained groan as his chest felt like it was about to rattle apart.
"Chance," Rob said, squeezing the words from his throat, "The fog. Where's the goddamn fog?"
"I don't know," Chance said, "I don't know. We're almost home, though. We'll get you to the hospital and then we can figure this all out. Stay with me. Steady. Steady breaths."
Rob strained every muscle in his body to comply. His chest inflated and deflated, air feeling pocketed in all the wrong places. It constricted around him, his own body strangling him like a tremendous anaconda. He choked on a string of spit flapping in his mouth, "Scan radio."
"Come on," Chance moaned as he rolled through the frequencies, "Somebody's out there."
The radio floundered and buzzed, finally zoning into the FM range and finding KOIF's wide spectrum of broadcast. Someone was talking. It was that crooked Mayor Sugarhill,
"She wants to address us. She wants to help us - survive. She has done wrong, but she says she'll make it right if we cooperate. Her name is Molly Nayfack."
"No," Chance said as the brief message concluded, "This can't be happening. This can not be happening. Rob, are you still with me?"
Rob Howell sat with his hand in his left armpit, staring open mouthed at the clipboard resting in his lap. He was dead.
Chapter 7
It wasn't until around six in the afternoon that a steady wind tumbled fog back over the town of Cairo, sowing long streams of porcelain air in between houses, down driveways. Andrea knocked timidly at the manse door that served as Pastor Ritzer’s home. The pastor, already in his robes approached the door with an exasperated sigh and a nod as he saw her for the first time that day.
“Yes, communion,” he said, hand drumming the door as the appointment from the previous night came flooding back, “I’m sorry to have missed you last night.”
“It’s alright, Pastor,” Andrea said, “That’s not what I’m here to talk about. I saw something last night that I wanted to discuss with you. I don’t know who else to talk to.”
Half an hour later, they were well into Andrea’s account of what had happened the previous night when both of them suddenly grew quiet.
It was a phantom sound, like a helicopter passing over them. In fact, that’s exactly what it sounded like. A civilian helicopter much like the one Chance Cooper and Rob Howell had flown in before they both had died. It mixed with the ambience of the wind, causing them both to pause and share a moment of perplexed tension. And then it was cut off by the shrieking of Pastor Ritzer’s tea kettle. He smiled and said,
“Sorry, just a moment please.”
With the tea poured, Andrea finally produced the pill bottle she had secreted away from the Tunnel building,
“That’s when I saw Willard Nayfack, Molly’s younger brother leave these. He hid them in the wall - a whole bunch of them.”
The orange pill bottle rested on the table between them. The pastor reached out and read the label aloud,
“Diazepam. What does that mean?”
“They’re tranqs. Tranquilizers and mood stabilizers. I took a lighter dose a couple decades ago when I was having panic attacks.”
“Mood stabilizers...” Ritzer said plucking the bottle from the table and turning it over, “Happy pills. Not a bad find.”
“Pastor!” Andrea chided, a gentle smile crossing her face for the first time that morning.
He smirked, tipping the closed pill bottle over his mouth and making a loud cartoonish glugging sound. They both laughed. And Andrea tried to cultivate it into a more stable good mood. But as the corners of her mouth once again felt weighted down she found it difficult. Picking up the thick ceramic mug filled with cooling tea, she sipped and said,
“So what are we going to do?”
“We?” the Pastor asked, eyebrows twisted and perplexed, “We will talk about it and then you will decide what is right. If you ask me, this isn’t the time to be taking people off their pills, whether by prescription or otherwise. If it’s helping people deal with their problems, I’m not going to turn them in. I‘m also not going to stop you from doing it, though. I‘ll even go with you to the police station.”
“Do you think I’ll get in trouble for being in the tunnel complex?” Andrea asked. She knew the answer, but still wanted to hear the Pastor say it.
“Andrea,” he said lowering his voice, “Everyone’s been there at one time or another. No, I don’t think you’ll get in trouble for that. I‘d be more worried if you‘d never been there.”
“You’re not a very good priest,” Andrea said simply, without irony. It wasn’t intended as an attack, or even a joke, but it was a whole hearted and uncharacteristically enthusiastic observation. The pastor faked a smile, rummaging in the soft pack of cigarettes on the table and fishing out one of the unfiltered smokes,
“No, I’m not. I’m not much of a burglar either, I’m afraid. Or a detective.“ Andrea watched in sympathy as he lit the smoke, letting twin columns of ghostly white stream from his nostrils. The smoke bounced off the table, spreading out in an ephemeral pool across an unread copy of the Daily Finger before disappearing.
With one eye braced shut against the cigarette trail as he took another drag, he continued, flicking the ash into a pair of cupped brass hands on the table, “Or a l
awn mower, really. I guess I just do the things no one else wants to do. That‘s my lot.”
“Do you believe in God?”
Ritzer sniffed in the chilly air and waited for the feeling in his heart that would power him through the answer. There was a bookshelf on the other side of the room. One with his old Reader’s Digest book of Small Engine repair leaning against a crucifix he had commissioned a local artist to construct. The wooden carved Jesus on it didn’t have any features. It looked almost like a sketch artist’s dummy, the facial features removed along with the hands and feet. It hung suspended against the cross, carved from alien trees on a world that had never been mentioned in his book of answers. After several seconds, he suddenly turned his gaze back to Andrea,
“Of course I do.”
"Then there's that," she said, "You're not as bad as you could be."
"Except I do sometimes find myself with a different question," Ritzer said. He was studying the featureless face of the crucifix, "Not if God is real, but if we have moved outside of his domain. Whereas there may have been something watching us before, we've moved beyond the horizon of even those all-seeing-eyes I once found comfort in."
"You think just because we've come to this world we're no longer being watched?" Andrea said, "That doesn't make sense to me."
"I don't want to get too philosophical with you, Andrea. You've got enough to worry about. Let a priest debate his own failings on his own time. But I do wonder about places like this. Why the same god for all possible universes? What about ones that are wholly alien or incompatible? Would he desire the same behavior from all sentient life? Why demand uniformity in species that were designed to be vastly different?"
Andrea was trying to stifle an enormous grin spreading across her face. Here she was, prepared to take on the strangeness of her own circumstances. She had approximately 8 hours before a dead girl would come address her and the rest of the town. She lived in an alternate dimension in a world of fog and mist, cut off from her homeland. And now she was being expected to buy the word of a pastor who seemed to believe in aliens over god.
"Pastor," she said, tenderly grasping his hand, "Leave the flying saucer talk back on Earth. It's just us here."
"It's just something I think about sometimes," the Pastor said, effectively dismissing his own line of inquiry, "Something to pass the time between undesirable ventures."
"Now ghosts, I might believe," she said, the grin once again returning.
"Ghosts I think we'll all believe in before the day is through. I heard the name Mayor Sugarhill said on the radio this morning. Molly Nayfack."
Andrea adopted the deeper voice and light accent of Mayor Sugarhill, holding her arms out at her sides like a robot as she recited,
"She wants to help our town. She accidentally killed the Sherriff, but she wants to make things right."
She held his hand and they laughed. It was always a relief to laugh about something that deeply troubled the mind on that particular kind of day. And in their laughter they found a respite from the dark thoughts that had been clouding them ever since the death of their town's sheriff. Pulling his hand away, casually stubbing out his still burning cigarette and coughing through the last bit of his laughter, Pastor Ritzer covered his mouth over with the back of his hand and glanced back up to Andrea,
"He didn't say accident, though."
"He didn't?"
"No, he did say she wanted to make it right, but he didn't say anything about it being an accident. And whether the mayor's hallucinating or not, the Sherriff was definitely murdered."
Andrea rose, taking up the bottle of Diazepam and popping the lid off.
"You know," she said sounding very tired, maybe a little scared, "Come to think of it I might take just one of these."
"Before tonight I'd like one too," the Pastor said holding out his hand, "I don't know what's going to happen. I keep telling myself: if she's real, she'll get arrested and that will be the end of it. But I keep having this feeling."
"Not a good one?"
The pastor watched a tiny pill drop from the bottle into his outstretched palm,
"No."
***
They found Jessica sitting in Sherriff Rind's office. The room was a shrine the deceased Sherriff had erected to himself. Photos of Rind hung on the wall, often adorned with gold plastic medals and small trophies. One photo in particular caught Michael McCarthy's eye. It was a black and white framed picture of the Sherriff and Mayor Sugarhill standing in front of Chance Cooper's helicopter with Rob Howell. Each of them had abandoned the occupational costumes they were thought to wear in perpetuity. Cooper, in particular, looked strange wearing a monochromatic suit jacket and black slacks. In his hand he was holding a pocket watch, smiling, and actually waving at the camera. Rob Howell had his arm around the mayor, pointing with an enormous grin at the camera while the mayor stood with a cigar in his teeth in a button up shirt and suspenders, his huge gut obscuring his belt buckle. Even the Sherriff was smiling, though there was something about the light in the photo that unnerved Michael slightly. It was Rind's eyes.
Unlike the other three men in the photo, the Sherriff's eyes had a black, sunken quality to them. It may have been a contrast problem in development of the photo, but the man's eyes were wholly unobservable, hanging recessed in his face like the eye holes of a skull. Even the toothy, good natured grin Rind had as he reached his massive hand over behind Rob Howell, looked skeletal. He was gesturing with one hand - his thumb pressed closely against his ring and pinky fingers.
Jessica was leaning uneasily in the large wooden office chair she had inherited from the previous tenant, observing the two brothers as they stepped into her office and closed the door behind them. There was a moment where no one said anything. It was a strange sort of thing, as if there needed to be a pause to punctuate the transition from one Sherriff to the next. It was a morning that had been full of moments like this. Felix took the opportunity to take a seat, while Mike stood near the doorway, his eyes wandering amongst the kipple nailed to the walls.
Jessica sighed, staring primarily at Felix,
"When Rind was in charge, he did things a little bit differently than I will. Rind had a weird sense of justice, but it somehow served our community well. It held us together as best it could, given the circumstances, but I have a lot of work ahead of me. I'm going to start undoing some of the less ethical things he did, such as drafting lesser criminals to do footwork."
"Lesser criminals?" Mike said, offended but hardly shocked, "We just got back from the police motor pool. Talk about lesser criminals. Gambling shouldn't be illegal in this town to begin with."
"Well, there's that and the mischief. And I could easily slap obstruction of justice on you, Felix for breaking into the morgue. Let's not forget that one," Jessica said. Her tone changed, her right hand moved up to her forehead and she massaged her temples with her thumb and middle fingers, "But times are different now. I'm still going to nitpick every law, but you've got a clean slate. Don't screw it up."
"Thank you, ma'am," Mike said through a stifled grin, "You're most wise."
"Don't get smart with me," Jessica said, her own smile openly showing, "You'd better remember this moment. If you screw up again, I'll make an example out of you. Use the buddy system to stay out of jail. If one of you breaks the law, I'm looking at the other one as an accessory."
"Will we at least get a trial?" Felix said, poking a thumb over his shoulder at Mike, "I don't want to be tethered to this guy."
"One more screw up," Jessica said, "And it's good night Gracie for you both."
"Meanwhile," Felix said, trying to change the subject, "You're not going to try to track down where this mysterious influx of diazepam is coming from?"
"We'll handle it," Jessica said, "But it will be the police who handle it. Don't you worry about it anymore. Needless to say, you're not going to be talking about this to anyone."
"Fair enough," Mike said, "We'll keep our noses clean."
"Good," Jessica said, "Are you going to be at the meeting tonight?"
"Probably," they both said, in unison. After glancing at each other, Felix said, "Probably, but we still don't understand. Didn't Molly Nayfack disappear years ago? How did she survive out in the woods for all this time?"
"That's just what the mayor says," Jessica said leaning back in the chair uneasily, letting it creak with its advanced age, "If he says she's showing up, we act like she's showing up - until she doesn't."
"So you think he's lost it," Mike said, once again looking to the photo of the Sherriff, Chance Cooper, Rob Howell, and Mayor Sugarhill. He realized that everyone in the photo save for Sugarhill himself had recently been killed under bizarre circumstances. He continued, "You think he's gone crazy."
"If he's mistaken about Molly, I'll advise Doctor Rosario to take a look at him. It could be stress, or any number of things."
"So that's why you're going along with this," Felix said pointing an accusing finger at Jessica, "If something this high profile happens, the mayor won't be able to keep his insanity secret. Cairo will demand a new mayor, and that will make your job easier. You're dissolving the good old boys club."
"No," Jessica said, "I just want the secrets to end. They were an enormous drain on resources under Rind. If the mayor's not crazy, he doesn't need someone looking over his shoulder at everything he does. I'm not Sherriff Rind."
"But if he has gone crazy," Mike said, trailing off.
"Then the public has a right to know," Jessica said, jabbing her finger onto the dusty shine of her desk, "I don't get why that means I'm taking over the good old boys club. I just want a certain degree of transparency in this town. It's the exact opposite of a conspiracy. And if you want to take this conversation to the Daily Sentinel, I'd be happy to repeat everything said here to them."
"Jessica," Felix said standing, "I don't know why Rind did things the way he did. I never noticed any particular level of secrecy, but then again I wouldn't have. All I know is it all worked before. If he was keeping skeletons in that filing cabinet, I'd be just as happy not seeing them. We've got enough problems."
