by Ben Farthing
“You can’t compartmentalize your mind. It’s all connected.”
Cessy took a breath. “Then what should I do?”
“Spend the day with me and your father. Head back home tomorrow. Work on yourself.”
“You want me to leave without finding Kate?” Cessy shrank into herself. Getting Mom to feel like she was running a therapy session was the go-to way to get what you wanted. Kate had used it to get her first car. If this didn’t work, Cessy didn’t know another approach.
“That’s not what I meant.”
In the awkward silence, the younger male voice on the radio said, “My favorite Hamlin memory was when I hit the series-winning home run, and we won state.”
“What year is he talking about?” Cessy asked.
“Probably your junior year. That’s the only time the baseball team won state that I can think of.”
“Yeah, but there weren’t any home runs that game. We were there, remember? Dad got mad about too many sacrifice pop flies, and I told him to calm down because they were getting runners home.”
Mom dropped a homemade chocolate drop, wrapped in wax paper, into each bag. “Then it must have been another year.”
Cessy didn’t buy it. The guy on the radio was lying, and for what? So the old folks of Hamlin could wax nostalgic for something that never happened?
Cessy finished her bowl of rice and beans. She felt empty. Hamlin was lonelier then she remembered. She wouldn’t get any help from her parents. “You’re absolutely sure you haven’t heard from Kate in the past two weeks? She’s not in Hamlin?”
Mom’s eyes went wide before she turned away. “Positive. She wouldn’t do that.”
Mom was just as afraid as Dad. And she was adopting his method of refusing to believe anything he didn’t like.
Cessy put the bowl in the sink. “I’m headed out.”
“Wait for your father.”
Cessy ignored her. “Oh, and you need to call an exterminator. Something bit me then crawled away into the junk in the living room.” Cessy left.
12
Butterflies danced in Cessy’s gut. It’d been two decades since she’d seen Sheriff Miller. She’d avoid it if there was any other way.
Outside, the late August heat warmed her, a stark contrast to the freezing air conditioning inside her parents’ house, but still comfortable compared to the D.C. humidity. A whippoorwill sang from the branches of the maple tree in the front yard.
The half-vacant neighborhood was still. A cloudless blue sky hung low over the old houses.
Cessy drove into town.
Every year she visited, another store was shuttered. Two out of three storefronts on Main Street were empty. This year, that decline had picked up. The bakery that had opened three years back was closed, along with the quilting store and the used bookstore.
The Sheriff’s Office sat in the middle of downtown, next to the city administration building. The administration building was the coal mine boss’s old mansion, before the mine closed and the boss went on to either pillage another mountain, or go broke. Cessy didn’t know or care.
The Sheriff’s Office building was the old company store. Break your back a mile under the earth, coat your lungs in coal dust, and the company rewarded you with their special “company dollars,” good only at their overpriced store.
Even though those crimes had stopped with the labor movement at the end of the Great Depression, forty years before the mine closed for good, Cessy still couldn’t understand why the people of Hamlin were so proud to work for such an abusive industry.
She parked in front of the office.
Hard, dirty work was satisfying. Somehow, the coal companies’ marketing departments had fed the egos of their workers until they believed anyone who spoke ill of the companies did so because they were too lazy to work the mines.
That’s how she’d thought as a teenager, anyways. Admittedly, she hadn’t given it much thought since she left coal country. It was possible she’d internalized flawed teenage convictions.
But she wasn’t here to solve corporate manipulation of societal vanity, or her own unintentional self-indoctrinations.
Cessy walked into the Sheriff’s office.
The scent of a lavender candle hung thick in the air.
What had once been the storefront was now the receptionist and dispatcher’s office. A woman around thirty sat behind a desk. She wore a flower print dress, and had a phone headset over her ear.
An old boombox sat in the windowsill. It was tuned to the same station as Mom’s radio. Cessy caught the roundtable discussion show ending, and a new show beginning. A single host, middle-aged male. His voice reminded Cessy of those officers who lectured colleagues with the same rank, as if an insistent tone instilled authority.
“I recommend you sit down for today’s show. And if you’ve got a stress ball you like to squeeze when you get angry--trust me--you’ll need it.”
Cessy froze. A chill stabbed up her spine. It was the same voice from under the asphalt. The same voice from the call from Kate’s phone.
The dual-duty receptionist and dispatcher flashed a toothy smile at Cessy. She reached over and turned down the radio. “Hi there, honey. I don’t believe we’ve met.” It was an accusation. You’re a stranger. You don’t belong here.
Cessy pried her eyes away from the boombox. She wanted to ask who this radio host was. Demand to know the location of the radio station’s office.
But she needed to be cheerful. A brand new first impression for Sheriff Miller.
She walked across the lobby and offered her hand to the dispatcher, who responded with a dead fish handshake. “I’m Cecelia Timms. I’d like to meet with Sheriff Miller.”
“My name’s Betty.” Her eyes went to Cessy’s belt.
She’d removed her badge, but still wore her holster. West Virginia was an open carry state. Maybe she shouldn’t have open carried into a sheriff’s office.
“Happy to meet you, Betty.” Cessy wanted to get to the point, but she needed Sheriff Miller to respect her enough to have an open conversation, and that meant acting starkly different to how he’d known her twenty years ago. Buttering up the dispatcher was a good first step to not getting thrown out. “I love your dress. Did you get it around here?”
Betty beamed. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “The outlet mall up in Charleston.”
“That place is so much fun.” Cessy found herself leaning into the Hamlin accent of her youth. “I have to get up there more often.”
“Oh, do you live around here?” Betty raised an eyebrow at the possibility.
Cessy resisted rolling her eyes. Hamlin wasn’t so small that Betty could expect to know everyone. “Grew up here. Came in last night to visit family.” No point in spreading rumors yet that Kate was missing, or might have run off with a married man. “I used to know Sheriff Miller back during his first stint in the office. Wouldn’t you believe it, I was a little hellion. I figure I owe him an apology. After all, I ended up following in his footsteps.” She patted her holster.
She said it to butter up Betty. But maybe there was some truth to it. She’d emulated the career of the harshest authority figure from her youth.
More likely, she’d seen someone shitty at their job, said “I can do better,” and then done so. That felt more accurate, or at least better fit Cessy’s opinion of herself.
“Well I’ll be.” Betty laughed. “Reggie will love to hear that. He’s heading back for lunch right now. You wait around not five minutes and he’ll be here.”
As Cessy waited, the butterflies in her gut tightened into a ball. She tried to squash it down, but only succeeded in making it denser and heavier. She shouldn’t be nervous about seeing her teenage boogeyman, but here she was.
“So you went to Hamlin High?” asked Betty.
Cessy passed the time by chatting with the dispatcher. It turned out, Betty graduated between Cessy and Kate. She thought she might have met Kate at a party once. Cessy was con
fident she’d have heard of Cessy’s more notorious exploits, and their more tragic consequences, but figured now wasn’t the time to bring that up.
The front door swung open, letting in the birdsong and car engines of small town ambiance. Sheriff Miller strode inside. Boots clicked on the floor.
He saw Cessy and froze in his tracks.
“Sheriff Miller,” she said.
Betty spoke excitedly from her desk. “Reggie, do you remember Cecilia Timms? She’s back in town visiting family. She told me all about how she used to torment you. But you’ll never guess what–she’s a police officer now.”
Time had not been kind to Sheriff Miller. His six-foot-six frame had shrunk both down and inward. His broad, square shoulders now hunched towards each other. The skin on his square jaw now sagged.
His eyes hadn’t changed. Wide, blue, and determined.
His hands hadn’t changed. Large enough to palm a basketball, and strong enough to burst one.
“Cessy Timms.” His voice was a smoker’s growl. Bemusement crept onto his gray lips. “It’s still Timms?”
Cessy smiled. No bigger insult from a Hamlin resident than to point out a failed marriage. Or failure of any kind, really. Failure meant you hadn’t worked hard enough. “It was something else for a few years, but you know how that goes. How’s Gretchen?”
Sheriff Miller’s youngest daughter had been left at the altar. The cold footed groom fled the county, the state, maybe the country.
“She’s doing just fine. When did you get into town?”
“Late last night. Had a hell of a time with Mud River Road being closed.”
He put his hands on his hips, above the heavy revolver that any twenty-first-century Sheriff’s office had long since updated. “I reckon you would. How’d you get through?”
Without thinking, Cessy reverted to lying to Sheriff Miller. “The barrier was down.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We’ll have to call the state about that.”
“I’ll put that on my to-do list,” said Betty.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”
Cessy took note that Sheriff Miller didn’t ask her how she got past the washout, or whatever supposed hazard had closed the road. As if the “road closed” sign were the only barrier that he knew about.
When interrogating someone, if you knew a certain line of questioning was going to frustrate them, and risk them clamming up, then you started somewhere else.
“Could we maybe talk in your office?” asked Cessy.
Betty grunted offense.
Cessy ignored it. “I’d like to ask your advice on a family matter.”
That cooled off Betty. Open displays of distrust were taboo, but asking advice–which was acknowledging superiority–was a respectable enough move to outclass the faux pas.
Sheriff Miller looked Cessy up and down. Whether his gaze lingered on her holster or her hip, she wasn’t sure. Cessy straightened her back to hide the extra weight she hadn’t got rid of.
Finally, he said, “Let’s have a conversation in my office,” as if it’d been his idea.
Cessy followed him past the dispatcher’s desk, into a hallway that used to house offices and living quarters for the mine’s store clerk, and now was opened up into a small bullpen of deputy’s desks, with a single office on the far wall.
The desks in the bullpen were empty. Only one of the six even looked like someone had used it recently. Another question to ask Sheriff Miller after she’d asked about Kate.
Sheriff Miller grunted and hunched forward to unlock his office. His keys jingled. Inside, a polished oak desk, an executive leather chair, and four black filing cabinets. A sheet of glass over the desk, with a single stack of papers. No computer.
Sheriff Miller sat in the garish chair and motioned to a plastic folding chair across the desk for Cessy. She sat down. The plastic creaked. The old man smiled like a fox who’d set up shop in the henhouse.
“Can’t tell you how glad I am,” Sheriff Miller evened out the stack of paper, then slid it into a desk drawer, “to see you smiling. Always nice to see a smile on a young lady’s face. They used to call you ‘Angry Cessy.’ Did you know that?”
Cessy nodded. “No one was secretive about it.”
“And now you’re working in law enforcement. Where?”
“I’m a detective in Fairfax County.”
He wheezed laughter. “Angry Cessy’s keeping the corrupt politicians in line. Or does the government even allow you to investigate politicians? I reckon not.”
And right into the paranoia about the government. Welcome back to Hamlin, Cessy. “There’s six million people around D.C. A few hundred politicians. I haven’t run into a senator committing a felony in Fairfax yet, but if I do, I’ll be sure to share the story with you.”
Sheriff Miller wagged his spindly index finger. “Your sergeant probably has orders not to assign any cases involving congress. But that’s not how we run things around here, let me tell you. If you find vermin, you’ve got to exterminate them.”
“That reminds me,” said Cessy, “congratulations on reelection.”
Massaging his ego made him miss the insult. “I got bored in retirement, you know? If I’m not busy, the devil gets to working on me.”
Cessy didn’t want to go down that path of conversation. “I was hoping you could help me.” Always ask for help, first. Most people are good, and at the request for a favor, will want to help. Either a spiritual goodness of man, or an evolutionary need to protect the community; when someone heard “help me,” they usually did.
“I can’t promise anything,” said Sheriff Miller. “We don’t have much manpower to spare.”
So much for small town hospitality. “I just have a few questions.”
“That’s no problem, then. Shoot.”
“I haven’t seen my little sister, Kate, for a couple weeks. Based on a voicemail, I think she came to Hamlin.”
The old man frowned and nodded, like the possibility fascinated him. “Mud River Road’s been closed for almost two months. Unless the barrier was down for both of you, can’t see how she would. Did you talk to your parents? Isn’t that where’d she be if she were here?”
“That’s the thing.” Cessy had hoped she wouldn’t have to confess much information. “She’d been talking with Jackson Wilder. And now my dad tells me that Gordon tells him that no one’s seen Jackson since at least last week. But that’s a week after Kate disappeared.”
Sheriff Miller’s aging cheeks tightened at her mention of Jackson. That usually meant she was following the right thread. “What’s your question, exactly?” His eyes darted to his cell phone on the desk, then back to Cessy.
“If she came to see Jackson, and then Jackson disappeared a week later, that leaves a week I think she was here in Hamlin. But she never stopped by to see our folks. I’m asking if you saw her, or heard any mention of her. And I’m asking if you know anything about Jackson. Did Gordon or Olivia report a missing person?”
Sheriff Miller shook his head. “Gordon hasn’t talked to me about his boy, but if he thinks Jackson skipped town, that’s not something the Sheriff would need to know.” He leaned in. “I’m sorry to be frank, but Jackson’s a married man. If Kate came here with adulterous intentions, wouldn’t she keep a low profile? And this is a Christian town; if anyone spotted them together, they’d be too ashamed to go telling anyone.”
That was a blatant lie, and they both knew it.
“Don’t look at me down your nose. You haven’t lived here for twenty years. Since I won reelection, people have been remembering their upstandingness.”
Cessy dropped her filter. “With all due respect, the lifeblood of small town America is gossip. If anyone had seen so much as a possibility of adulterous intent, they’d have been on every front porch in town, inviting themselves in for lemonade and beaming with pride that they know something real juicy.”
Sheriff Miller gripped the edge of his desk. His fingers tensed a
nd turned red. The glass top dug into the wood. A vivid memory leapt to Cessy’s mind of Sheriff’s Millers violent hands closing around her forearms, leaving bruises even before the handcuffs appeared.
“I see your attitude hasn’t changed,” he growled. “You always felt small comparing yourself to the good folks around you. That’s why you ran off to the big city.”
His shaking fury surprised Cessy. A jab about gossip in small towns hardly felt like a low blow. She refused to break Sheriff Miller’s gaze. She chose each word carefully. “I apologize. I try not to hold ill will for my hometown. I hope most people I grew up with do the same for me.”
His shoulders relaxed. A small shake of his head, and a smile reappeared. “Of course we do. And I’m sorry I don’t have any answers about your sister. I can put the word out, to ask around if anyone’s seen her.”
“No, don’t.” She didn’t want to give the town an image of Kate that wasn’t deserved. But moreso, she didn’t want Sheriff Miller looking for her baby sister. It didn’t make sense, but after fifteen years wearing a badge, she’d learned to trust her gut. And her gut said Sheriff Miller was a more venomous snake than she’d remembered. “Let me a poke around a bit before we do anything official.”
The old man tensed. “Ain’t no need to go sticking your nose in anyone’s business. That’s how noses get scraped.”
“My sister is my business.”
He folded his large hands together on the desk. “Hamlin was better off the day you left. Would have been even better if you’d left before you graduated. I know the Davies family thinks so.”
Cessy stood up. “It’ll always be about that, huh?”
Sheriff Miller didn’t let her outburst interrupt his insults. “You were vermin then, and you’d be vermin now. As Sheriff of this little piece of paradise, I’m asking you to leave this town. I’ll inform your folks if I hear anything about Kate.”
“Did you forget I’m a cop? I know what’s in your authority, and what’s a blowhard empty order. You’re too used to dealing with an uneducated, ignorant citizenry.”
“Get out.”
