by Laurel Dewey
Harlan swallowed hard. “They’re takin’ you off their hook, Jane.”
“Yeah, well, I’m already dead. Remember?”
“Then how come they even brought up an accomplice in the first place?”
“Plan B. You always keep something in your back pocket just in case you need it for leverage. They’ve obviously got their plan in place now and they don’t need me to resurface in order for them to carry it out.” She turned off the radio.
“So…what does this mean?” His voice was laced with terror.
“They called you dead before you actually died,” she said shaking. “It’s what they do. It’s like a formality or a ritual. They did it to Gabriel. When he left Romulus, that was the day everybody in the company believed he was killed.”
“Hang on, hang on! If the cops think I’m dead, then that means I can’t ever come back to my life! Is that right?”
She understood the implications. “Yes,” she softly replied.
He pushed himself forward, resting on the front center console. “Jane? What does that mean? Where am I supposed to go? How can I make a livin’?
She gripped the wheel tighter. “You don’t.”
Harlan looked at her, his eyes getting wider with each stunning realization. “So, I was right. I am a dead man, ain’t I? I’ve always been a dead man since this started. I bet from the minute they stuck his heart in me, they’ve been plottin’ my finish.”
She suddenly felt an understanding so strongly, she couldn’t ignore it. “They know that you know,” she said quietly.
Harlan was still reeling from the news report. “Huh? What?”
“Somehow, they know that you know.”
“Know what?!”
“That you understand what’s going on.”
Harlan screwed his face into a ball. “But I don’t know! I don’t have a clue!”
She pulled the van over to the side of the road. “But I’m starting to, Harlan. I don’t have everything figured out, but I don’t think it’s going to take much longer to sort it out.”
“And then what?”
“We see where we are when that happens. If it’s possible, we haul our asses back to Denver and we lay our cards on the table and see where it all falls.”
He looked at her with sad eyes. “You didn’t believe a word you just said.”
He was right but Jane wasn’t giving in. “Look, Gabe has given us a course to chart with those postcards. The next one is the CSA and—”
“No, we can’t go there! We gotta get outta this state. Let’s go to New Mexico. That’s on Gabe’s postcard list!”
“First off, they will find you anywhere we go. You can escape to an island in the South Pacific and they’ll find you. And secondly, Gabe numbered the cards for a reason—”
“And one of the cards is missing. Come on, Jane! I can’t hitch my future on a bunch of numbered postcards!”
She spun around to face him. “Really, Harlan?! You’ve been hitching your future for the past week on a burlap bag full of miscellaneous items and a black notebook with chicken scratch. And somehow, we’ve made progress! We’re figuring this out!”
“You are figurin’ it out. Not me.”
“I…we…same thing.” She gripped the wheel and stared into the blue, cloudless sky. “We’re going to that CSA.”
“I didn’t think I could show my face, Jane.”
She turned back to him. “You’re dead. They killed you. You’re free now.”
He regarded her with a mixture of gratitude and fear. Opening the side door of the van, he got out, slid it shut and opened the passenger door before wedging his large posterior in the front seat.
“How does the view look from freedom?” she asked.
Harlan glanced around. “I like it, Jane,” he offered with a shy smile. “But I still don’t know how we’re gonna convince people that I’m not Harlan Kipple.”
“You’ve got that fake ID, remember? Hartley Llewellyn is your name.”
“But my head ain’t shaved in that ID photo.”
“Photos change. You can manufacture a good excuse for just about anything. Look, they are already building your myth. We just capitalize on it.” For the next few miles, she explained the “myth building” process she’d seen repeated over the years. Jane noticed a disconcerting “pageantry” that was born from any major news event that featured an alleged killer. It appeared to be second nature now and part of the news media approach that promoted a high profile story and embedded it into the collective consciousness. It was then transformed into a peculiar “entertainment” that the audience was trained to expect and loved to participate in. If the killer was given a clever title the public could sink their teeth into, all the better. “The Sixteenth Street Killer” or “The Smiling Rapist” propelled the suspect into an elevated stratosphere of macabre notoriety. No matter how viscerally disgusting the crime, the public needed to weigh in, if only to log onto an Internet forum and post their opinion on what should be done to the killer. Consider it a refined version of ancient gladiators with a cyber twist. As the old saying goes, “Opinions are like assholes—everybody’s got one.” And, over the many months, with their investment of time and energy, the public begins to feel oddly connected to the case, with some actually so involved that they become obsessed with the daily twists and turns. And yet, between urban legends, rumors, law enforcement “leaks,” innuendo and outright lies, the killer’s life and criminal aptitude were sometimes so ridiculously fabricated that Jane had to stop and remember that the truth she knew was nothing like the public’s perception.
However, if the “pageant” ended on a sour note and the killer was taken down, the “myth builders” were brought in to tweak and propagate a convincing story that sounded realistic but usually suffered from the absence of the truth. As she’d commented many times before, the further you get away from the facts, the easier they can turn into a myth. It wasn’t enough to have a short gun battle where the perp was immediately slain. No, now that he was dead, anything could be written or said about the individual to make the final moments of his life more gripping. Depending upon how the media and others wished to spin the story, stories could easily emerge that speciously referenced “tense moments” and “frantic negotiations” that never occurred. If necessary, artificial “heroes” would be concocted to feed the imagination of the captive public. If the suspect had been drawn as an extremely dangerous maniac, it wasn’t outside the scope of reason to create a dramatic demise that buoyed the public’s need for “justice” and “revenge.” In this way, the greatest pageant of all—death—could be embraced by hungry viewers who needed to see visual proof that “the bad guy” was dead and that “goodness” had triumphed again. Including non-stop footage of the killer’s last stand was always effective, whether it was a gun battle inside a structure, a standoff on a lone country road or a building ablaze in the middle of nowhere. The whole point, from Jane’s point of view, was burning the perceived image of the killer into the mindset of the viewer. How that perception was handled, depended upon how well the myth sold.
Using the obvious mythical information she’d already heard on the radio regarding Harlan’s alleged fiery demise, Jane could easily take it apart. How would a “fugitive on the run” be able to travel to Sheldon Springs with enough explosives in tow to rig an abandoned house so that the explosion was heard “several miles away?” Where did he buy these explosives? How would he buy them? He had no cash when he ran from the hospital. If he found them at the location, what were they doing there in an “abandoned house?” Who owned the structure? And no mention was made as to how Harlan even traveled to Sheldon Springs. Claiming that his body was “burned beyond recognition” was salient as it made it impossible to refute the findings. And furthermore, tying Harlan to Dora Weller’s attempted assassination based upon a “belief” that he must have pulled the trigger because he was there at the time, didn’t wash in Jane’s wor
ld. As far as Jane read, there were no eyewitness testimonies that said they saw Harlan pull the gun that was used in the shooting. But none of these questions were important anymore. Harlan was now “dead” and “one more bad guy was in hell.” She fully expected the myth builders to concoct a continuing fable that would effectively put to bed all the public’s questions with reasonable answers that sounded plausible. Since Jane felt most of the public had lost their ability to critically think and use common sense, the myth would gain momentum until the lie became the truth. Eventually there would another high profile murder case that usurped this one. The book would be closed and all that was left would be a string of inaccuracies that passed for fact. Like stories that end up in history books, most are varnished, colored and usually sterilized to paint a portrait of the event or individual in the manner in which the designers of history want the memory to be preserved. And in Harlan’s case, Jane understood that his page in that book would be brief, violent and epically false.
Harlan listened to every word and took strange solace in knowing what he was up against. “Okay, Jane. You said somethin’ about capitalizin’ on it?”
“Yeah. If the television says you’re dead, then you’re dead. We can walk into that CSA today and if anyone says you look a lot like ‘that guy who killed that girl,’ you can look them straight in the eye and tell them that people mistake you for the actor John Goodman all the time.”
“But they don’t.”
“But they could. It’s a game of lies, Harlan. You have to play along.”
“You gotta have a good memory to be a good liar.”
“No. You gotta have a good reason to keep lying and you have that…in spades.” She checked the map. “We’re only about five miles from the CSA. There’s a nylon head wrap buried in that yellow bag back there. I wear it when I run sometimes. Find it and tie it around your head. It’ll be one more distraction to make you look different than the photos they’ve been showing on the news.”
He headed into the back of the van. “This should look interesting.”
Jane sat back in her seat and glanced out the window. A red-tailed hawk tore across the sky, seemingly on the prowl. But Jane suddenly realized that the imposing hawk was actually being chased by a tiny sparrow. As she watched the scene play out, she saw how the hawk was trying to worm its way into the sparrow’s nest in the nearby tree. Sparrow was adamant and each time hawk swept in for the kill, she chased him away. Finally, she came up behind hawk in an aerial pursuit that looked as if she was engaging him in battle. After a momentary tussle, hawk had enough and swooped around the tree one more time before disappearing into the blue sky.
Her cell phone rang. The sound startled her since only one person had the number.
“Why ain’t you answerin’ that, Jane?” Harlan called out to her.
Jane stared at the still-ringing phone. “I can’t talk right now.” She turned back to him with urgency. “Come on! We have to get going.”
The phone continued to ring.
“You know, if it weren’t for him—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Harlan! You find the head wrap?” she asked with irritation.
He slammed the back door. “Got it.”
∆ ∆ ∆
Two miles before reaching the CSA, Jane turned onto a dusty gravel road that was barely wide enough for a large truck. Modest farmhouses dotted the road, separated by wide-open fields that stretched for dozens of acres. Rolling down the windows, Jane let the scent of newly turned rich soil and manure permeate her senses. She loved the aroma every spring. It was like breathing in renewal and the promise that anything could be made right with new seeds and fresh dirt.
But the bucolic banquet was cut short. Glancing in her side mirror, Jane caught a glimpse of what looked like a black sedan. She checked again and it was gone. Slowing down, she pretended to be searching for the CSA, but the entire time her eyes were keyed on that mirror.
“What’s up, Jane?”
She wasn’t going to say a word to him. “Nothing.”
A mile later, they easily found the driveway that led to the CSA. A line of twenty cars and trucks with license plates from all over the country were parked alongside the narrow road, some angled toward the bar ditch. Groupings of festive balloons and ribbons were tacked to a large round wooden plaque that welcomed visitors to “opening season” at The Green Goodness CSA. Locating a parking spot fifty yards from the driveway, Jane handed Harlan his fake ID and they anxiously walked down the road and up the driveway. Neat rows of white hoop houses lined both sides of the gravel path, nestled between quarter acre plots of soil waiting to be seeded. Two John Deere tractors that looked a little worse for wear were stationed midway up the driveway, next to several wooden sheds and finally a barn that appeared to have been built when FDR was in office. The closer they got to the split-level house, the more they could see the small crowd gathering on the curved lawn that circled the two-story house. A woman who was in her mid-forties and sported a mane of salt and pepper hair, stood atop a sturdy apple crate, addressing the assembly. She wore a cheerful pink cowboy shirt under a pair of clean overalls. Her husband stood next to her, feet firmly on the dirt, letting her do all the talking. He looked affable enough to Jane, but also a bit weak with his angular frame and irresolute vibe. Seated at a picnic table in the side yard, Jane noticed a brown-haired girl about fifteen with jeans and a tight-fitting sweater texting on her cell phone. A slender, spry boy, who looked about eleven or twelve, stood nearby tossing a stick to a black Labrador. His crown of brown hair looked like it hadn’t been combed in quite some time and his white shirt had plenty of grass stains ground into it. From the manner in which these two conversed, Jane was certain they were siblings. A long table covered in red gingham fabric held bowls of salads, bite sized sandwiches, chips and salsa, platters of fresh fruit and pitchers of water and coffee. Harlan wasted no time heading for the food, scooping up nearly one-fifth of a platter of bite-sized sandwiches in his huge hand.
Jane looked at Harlan and realized the navy blue head wrap made him look like a hardcore biker from the neck up. “Let me do all the talking,” she whispered to him.
From what she could tell from the woman’s effusive greeting, the gathering was an annual “spring event” where volunteers or those seeking agricultural internships visited the CSA and spent a three-day weekend getting a taste of farm life. The woman gave a brief overview of their property, pointing to a field next to their farm where visitors could park their vehicles and set up camp. A line of five porta-potties stood at the ready downwind. On the other side was a trio of camping showers, with an old pipe carrying water from a large tank into the cubicles. Various classes, which the woman called “learning opportunities,” would be offered throughout the three-day period, which guests could attend at their leisure. Since there were only four slots available for the eight-month internship program, it seemed to Jane that this was an audition weekend where the family could get to know each prospective trainee and vet them. The woman really got excited when she announced that everyone was invited to a “slow cooking” night of “food, festivity and friendship.” Jane had no clue what “slow cooking” was but it sounded like another gimmick to pacify the Greenies. Frankly, she was always under the impression that “slow cooking” was when the prep cook smoked too much weed. No, this was definitely not her gig but she knew she had to figure out why Gabriel sent them there.
She continued to observe the crowd and farm when she turned around and looked down the long driveway. The hood of a black car could easily be seen inching up the narrow road, stopping just short of the CSA. The trees and bushes along the road blocked the full view but Jane could hear the throaty motor running in the distance. She hadn’t recalled hearing the same sound coming from the black sedan that Rudy drove but it didn’t matter. Moving nonchalantly, Jane gently encouraged Harlan to walk to their right and obscure themselves in front of a stack of hay bales. But the movement
seemed to catch the eye of the woman standing in front of the crowd. She turned to Jane and clasped her palms together with a huge smile on her face.
“Oh, my!” She waved enthusiastically toward Jane and Harlan. “So happy to see you here!”
Jane managed a weak smile as the crowd turned around in unison and stared. Harlan was just finishing off his last fistful of the finger sandwiches while Jane gave a little wave to the woman. The woman wrapped up her presentation as Jane turned around. The black car was gone. A pitter-patter of applause issued forth as the group streamed toward the food table. Jane was just about to step aside when the woman in the pink cowboy shirt and overalls walked up to her.
“Iris!” the woman exclaimed, holding out her hands to Jane. “I am so glad you finally came to visit us!”
Jane stared at the woman. “Well, why not?!”
“Your brother described you to a tee! Right down to your outfit and your cute hairstyle and jet black hair! That’s what he called it. Jet black, just like Cleopatra’s.”
Jane’s heart pounded.
The woman took Jane’s hand in hers. “How is your brother doing? I have to tell you that Werner was one of our favorite interns!”
“Yes, well, he thinks a lot of you too. He made a point of sending me a postcard of your place—”
“I know! I’m the one who gave it to him, silly! He said he wanted to send it to his big sister, Iris. Although, in all fairness, he made a point to say you were much more like a mother to him.”
