by Ace Atkins
Maggie, as Quinn knew she would, said the girl was now definitely connected to Brandon. The letter, the location, now the time. Quinn didn’t disagree, going back in the house for a cup of coffee, joining her on the porch swing to talk about forensics and horrible ways to die. It was a beautiful morning, bright blue and a little chilly, the leaves on the oaks and pecans just starting to turn.
“Any idea who she was?”
“Nope.”
“Any chance you’ll find out?”
“We’re checking through missing persons reports from back then,” Quinn said. “If we get a possible match, there’s always dental records to compare. But that’s on down the line. Maybe some DNA. Still finding out about that.”
“Damn,” Maggie said. “Just damn.”
Hondo came running up from the barn and headed up the steps, tongue lolling from his mouth, panting hard. Maggie said he’d been in the pasture earlier in the morning herding cows and rolling in cow shit with even more enthusiasm. Quinn wasn’t mad, just glad the old boy was still trying to keep up with his work. He had a lot more gray around his eyes and muzzle. Still a strong and tough dog. Quinn scratched his pointy ears.
“I wanted to tell you first,” Quinn said.
“Thank you.”
“And I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Maggie said.
“You know what? I don’t really know. I guess I’m just sorry all this has come back on you. I know you didn’t come back to Tibbehah County to get into all this mess. Especially with what you went through with Rick.”
“Me?” she asked. “He blew up your truck.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “You’re right. I sure did love that truck.”
Maggie nodded, kicking the swing back and forth. She looked pretty sitting there, even in sweats and a sleeveless tee, holding a ceramic mug. Staring out at the cow pasture beyond the road and the barbed wire, she turned to Quinn and said, “Want me to put on a record?”
Quinn smiled, looking at his watch. “Sure,” he said. “I’d like very much for you to put on a record.”
He watched her walk shoeless back into the house, heard the click and whir of the turntable and then Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, the second album they did together. Nancy & Lee Again. “Big Red Balloon.” Maggie returned, leaning against the doorframe, looking down at Quinn with his mug in hand, and said, “Are we gonna screw or what?”
“Hoping that’s what you were thinking.”
“Isn’t that what Lee and Nancy always means?”
“It sure does,” Quinn said, standing and placing the coffee mug on the porch ledge. “God bless ’em.”
He left Hondo outside with his muddy paws and stinky coat and closed the front door, placing his hands under Maggie’s shirt and on her bare hipbones, kissing her hard on the mouth. Sweatpants, soft and worn, falling low over her waist. Nancy singing You ain’t nothing but an old fool. Maggie jumped up into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist. Quinn held on tight, walking her up the stairs to the bedroom. Quinn knowing this was a temporary escape from all of it, but taking what he could get.
A half hour later, they lay there in the tangle of sheets, looking up at the spinning ceiling fan. Maggie, bare-chested, had her arm across her forehead, as Quinn worked to catch his breath. The world flickering back to normal speed.
“That’s one way to start a day,” Quinn said.
“It’s always been like that,” she said. “Hasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said, then turning toward Maggie, her head on the pillow, staring at him with wide green eyes. “Are you sure you’re OK?”
“I’m fine,” Maggie said, unblinking, reaching for his hand. “Just fine. How about some breakfast?”
* * *
* * *
Tashi and Jessica had spent the last four days at the offices of the Tibbehah County Monitor, relegated to a back storeroom with light wood paneling and faded green carpet, relying on Betty Jo Mize, the newspaper’s owner and managing editor, to bring them clip files. Betty Jo was a nice woman, somewhere between sixty and eighty, with a lot of teased brown hair and half-glasses she kept on a chain around her neck. She’d slip them up to her nose with her left hand when double-checking something, the right hand usually busy with an extra-long cigarette. Tashi wondered about the safety of a lit cigarette in a big room stacked floor to ceiling with paper files and oversized ledgers of past editions.
“Glad to meet some young reporters who understand everything isn’t on the internet,” Betty Jo said. “Computers have done nothing but make the world even dumber. I swear to God, I don’t think some folks can wipe their ass without first Googling how to do it.”
“Is this all you could find on Quinn Colson?” Tashi asked.
“I only have clips from when he was a boy,” Betty Jo said, ashing her cigarette into an empty coffee mug, looking over Tashi’s shoulder, staring down at her notes. “There might be a few items from when he was in the Army. I’m pretty sure we ran a photo of him and Miss Jean when he became a Ranger. Maybe some small items about him getting injured over there in Iraq.”
Tashi thanked her and pulled out the hand-cut newspaper clippings from a small manila envelope. They were musty and brittle in her hands, the back room smelling like that library smell of old books and ancient paper. The clippings went back to 1990, one headline so large she had to unfold it several times across the desk. It read COUNTRY BOY DID SURVIVE. A story from the Associated Press and a column by Betty Jo Mize, looking pretty much the same in the photo from almost thirty years ago as she did now. Same glasses around her neck. Same hairstyle. Only the extra-long cigarette was missing.
“How’s it coming?” Tashi asked Jessica after Betty Jo had left them alone.
“This is the fourth box on Hamp Beckett,” Jessica said. “Reading up on some big Wild West shoot-out at a pizza parlor on the Square. This was ’79. A guy shot two employees and one deputy while trying to rob the place. Looks like Sheriff Beckett and E. J. Royce took care of the rest. Another one from the early nineties about a big pot bust out in the county with that guy Heath Pritchard I told you about. It says here it was one of the biggest marijuana hauls in Mississippi history.”
“We have plenty on Quinn Colson,” Tashi said. “I think with the interviews we have and some of these stories, we can juxtapose what happened to him in 1990 with what later happened to Brandon Taylor. I just love the idea of the Big Woods as a dark, mythological place, almost something out of a fable. Two boys walk in but only one walks out. That kind of thing.”
They’d first come to Betty Jo Mize to find out what they could about Ansley Cuthbert, trying to figure out her connection to Brandon. They’d already learned from Brandon’s sister and mother that he and Ansley had been close that last year, Ansley most likely taking over from Maggie Powers, something about a returned necklace. Ansley, the new girl in town that his mother thought was a little fast for the boy. The only clippings they could find showed Ansley with Brandon at some kind of high school journalism awards at Ole Miss. Hubie Phillips was being honored, too. The kids and Phillips looked so young. That world so long ago. Tashi was still a toddler in Michigan when all this was going on.
“Why are y’all so interested in Quinn Colson?” Betty Jo Mize said, reappearing in the back room, taking a seat at a long wooden desk stacked high with newspaper ledgers going back a hundred years. She let out a long stream of smoke that floated up into a ceiling fan.
“We’re very thorough,” Jessica said, speaking from a far back corner, her blue head craned over a big file of more clips. “We want to know more about the town and how it related to Brandon. The story is more than just Brandon.”
“I heard y’all thought Quinn Colson might have something to do with the Taylor boy killing himself,” Betty Jo said. Her eyes squinting in the smoke, a noncommittal look on her face. “Right?”
“We’re checking out our sources,” Jessica said, sounding a little annoyed.
“How long is this radio show of yours?”
“It’s a podcast,” Tashi said. “Probably eight to ten episodes.”
“And how long is each episode?”
“About an hour,” Tashi said. “But we’re not confined by time. It can run short or long.”
“And both of you work for this media group up there in New York City,” Betty Jo said. “Do y’all get paid for all your work down here? Like a regular newspaper?”
“We do,” Tashi said. “But if we don’t make sense of what happened to Brandon Taylor, we’re going to have to leave soon. It’s a good story on its own, but, at this point, we need some kind of twist, some sense of the unexpected, that no one ever found out.”
“Isn’t that what we all want?” Betty Jo said, pulling on her cigarette, burning it back down to a more normal size. “A real, solid, twisty tale. Since y’all have gotten here, the sheriff has found a dead body buried out on the Pennington land and E. J. Royce finally went and got himself shot. Although, to be clear and honest with both of y’all, I’m shocked that didn’t happen sooner. E. J. Royce would’ve tried the patience of Job.”
Tashi nodded, smiling back at the woman but wanting to get back to work, filling in those last little bits about Quinn Colson’s time in the woods. She’d already started to really doubt everything she’d heard about the man. The massive search party in 1990, the big press conferences with his uncle, the idea that Quinn would never be found, and then the boy emerging from the woods a week later without a scratch. Quinn already great media fodder even as a kid, talking about how he hunted and fished his way through being lost, making shelters in the fashion of Choctaw Indians with tree branches.
“Did y’all ever think maybe the Taylor boy just got lost in those woods and got so confused and turned around that he killed himself?” Betty Jo said. “Sometimes things like that happen. Not everything can be explained. Nicest fella I ever knew in my life was a man named Barney Ellard. He was the pharmacist here for more than twenty years. Married, three kids. Never saw the man without a smile on his face. Collected these little Peanuts figurines—you know, Snoopy and Charlie Brown and all. They’d say things like ‘Psychiatric Help 5¢’ with Lucy sitting in the little booth. Well, one morning he didn’t come to work. His wife found him back at home running a garden hose into the windows of his Buick Riviera. Of course we didn’t write about what he did. You don’t write anything about suicide, such an awful personal matter.”
Tashi figured she wouldn’t get any more done with Betty Jo hanging out and pushed the clips to the side. She was hungry anyway, and figured she would walk across the Square to the Fillin’ Station diner for two of those premade biscuits and a cup of coffee. For all the jokes back in New York about biscuits and grits, she was actually starting to really like them both.
“Are you wanting to see my file on Quinn’s father, Jason?” Betty Jo said. “That might take some time. Somewhere I have a box with nothing but pictures of him doing tricks here in Tibbehah or when he’d done stunts on one of those Burt Reynolds movies. He never forgot me, always telling those publicists to send me a press pack from Hooper or Smokey and the Bandit, too. Lord, now his father, Quinn’s grandfather, is a whole ’nother thing. You ladies know the picture Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum?”
“We’re good with just Quinn and Sheriff Beckett.”
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Betty Jo said, placing two fingers to her cheek, “but y’all are wasting your time looking into Sheriff Colson. Some people believe by spreading around their own stink they can taint everyone as bad as themselves. That was E. J. Royce. And that’s the kind of people he worked with. Now, I’m just an old newspaper lady in some country town. You young ladies haven’t asked me for one thing besides looking at some musty clips. But if I were you, I’d be looking back to E. J. Royce, asking why he was telling such god-awful lies and how he ended up tying his own noose.”
“Sheriff said he caught someone robbing him.”
“Is that what he said?” Betty Jo said. “Sure is interesting. Did either of you gals notice the description of that robber looked just like one of those fellas who broke into the jail and killed that prisoner?”
“We asked him about it,” Jessica said, popping her head up. “But Sheriff Colson wouldn’t answer our questions.”
“Y’all do know being a reporter is a hell of a lot more than what people tell you,” she said, letting out a steady stream of smoke from her mouth. “It’s making good sense of the puzzle pieces you’re given. Nobody’s gonna figure it out for you.”
Tashi nodded, stood up, swung her purse on her shoulder, and told Miss Mize and Jessica she would be right back. The morning light was white hot over the Square, a group of old men sitting in the gazebo drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, a city worker pruning the big oaks buckling the walkway, and a man selling frozen catfish and sweet potatoes from the back of a beaten old truck.
She almost missed the two men sitting in a newer truck, maroon with a tinted windshield, the windows down as they eyed Tashi making her way across the Square.
She was used to men staring at her. She was a younger woman and in shape, and men weren’t exactly subtle. But these guys looked like they wanted her to know she was being watched. They had short beards, sunglasses, and dark baseball caps with some type of gold symbol on them.
Tashi looked away as if she hadn’t noticed, walking faster toward the diner, as the men started their truck and pulled out in the opposite direction.
* * *
* * *
“Nobody’s looking at you,” Buster White said. “Nobody’s staring. Quit being so goddamn paranoid. Christ Almighty. Take your coat and tie off, Senator. I’ll get you a swimsuit. We can drink and smoke like we used to. You aren’t in front of the cameras. Come as you are to the party.”
“I’ll be in my room when you’re ready.”
Vardaman sat next to Buster White in White’s personal cabana, a little enclosure by the swimming pool that looked like something out of ancient Greece, with fancy Doric columns and a blue awning overhead. White had been out there all morning, big belly slathered in baby oil, with two cocktail waitresses lying beside him on their stomachs with their bikini tops untied, sleeping off hangovers. Sometimes Buster would toss a glass of ice water on their backs just to give the men at the pool a real show.
“Is that any better?” Buster White said. “Whether you have a room here or you’re by the pool, what’s the damn difference? At least here we are wide open and pretty much naked to the world. I sweep those rooms every damn day, but you better start to understand the Feds. Did you know they have goddamn cameras smaller than a chipmunk’s butthole?”
“Why didn’t you return my calls?”
“I hate phones.”
“What about my personal messages?”
“I don’t know those fucking people,” Buster said. “That goddamn frat boy Bentley? Shit. Listen. What do you want? A club sandwich and a Bloody Mary? You see the bartender over there? That girl with the amazing tatas? She makes the best damn Bloody Mary you’ll have outside New Orleans. Puts a whole salad in there, with pickles, olives, and peppers. Come on, now, put on a suit, oil up your old hide, and unwind. Tonight, we got Johnny Fucking Mathis playing. How do you like that? Chances are . . .”
“How was the funeral?” Vardaman said.
“Lovely,” Buster White said. “I paid a colored band a thousand dollars to play ‘When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.’ Ray’s wife just loved it, smiling and laughing, tears running down her face, all that joy and sorrow for a man who would’ve put his dick in a light socket.”
“I came to talk to you about that light socket.”
“Ha,” Buster White said, grinning and reaching up to the waitress for his Bloody Mary, watching her ass switch
and sway as she walked off. “Fannie giving you some trouble? Don’t worry. I’ll talk to her. She’s going through a time. She was so torn up at the service but had to hold it all in on account of Ray’s family. But I’m pretty sure Ray’s wife knew who she was. They had some kind of open deal going on. One look at Fannie and his wife couldn’t really blame the son of a bitch. I don’t care how old she is.”
Vardaman was sweating in his dark blue suit, long red tie barely unknotted, Buster noticing the guy still had on some kind of makeup. You could see it around his ears and where his forehead met the big sweep of silver hair. He was seated sideways on the lounge, the two waitresses on the other side of him still knocked out. Vardaman rested his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, Buster really hoping the guy hadn’t gone full-tilt nuts and wanted him to pray with him. He looked nervous, a little jittery.
“I told Skinner he can shut down Vienna’s Place,” Vardaman said. “What you do with Fannie Hathcock is your problem. I’ve been doing business in Tibbehah County for a long while. It’s unseemly as hell to have that titty bar right off the road. I want it gone. Take it over to Calhoun County or somewhere in Alabama. I don’t give a damn. But it’s over.”
“And you think because Ray’s dead, I’ll do it?”
“You don’t like that goddamn bitch any better than me.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Buster said, sipping the Bloody Mary through a straw. “What I like or don’t like doesn’t have a damn thing to do with business. You don’t ever stick your dick down the throat of the golden goose. You just might choke the bitch.”
Buster White was losing his mind with this spray-tanned, holier-than-thou jackoff. He’d put up with him for too damn long. Working with him on account of Stagg and then Ray and then with his Ole Miss crotch sniffers over in Jackson. If it weren’t for Buster, this fucking guy would still be trying to pass legislation to turn 45 into Jefferson Davis Highway or skimming off the top of every two-bit road and bridge project instead of picking out goddamn drapes for the governor’s mansion.
