Muletrain to Maggody Read online

  I mention Raz because he most likely had the gold buried in his barn. He uses the caves to store his jars of moonshine until he has a chance to take them to consumers across the county. What’s more, his stunted branch of the clan had been doing the same since before the Civil War era. Maybe his great-grandpappy had been hunkered behind a tree when the Confederate private hid the gold. Maybe decades ago a Buchanon bushcolt had wiggled down a passageway in hopes of snagging some critter for supper. Braised groundhog innards à l’orange, a popular staple of Ozark haute cuisine.

  When the telephone rang, I gazed at it without enthusiasm. Early in the day for a wreck, but the denizens of Stump County didn’t necessarily observe the traditional cocktail hour. Late in the day for a body to bobble to the surface, since the crack-of-dawn fishermen usually were the first to spot them. That left my mother.

  Sighing, I picked up the receiver. “What?”

  “You need to get over here right now.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause I say so. There’s someone here.”

  “Who?”

  “That man who’s filming the documentary. He told me who he was, then ordered a cheeseburger and a beer. Now he’s sitting in a booth with Hormel Buchanon and Hormel’s uncle Fibber.”

  I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet on a corner of the desk. “Then it sounds as if the situation is under control, unless, of course, you forgot to mention that he’s juggling hand grenades and foaming at the mouth. I’m sure Hormel and Fibber can keep him entertained with their most recent Elvis sighting.”

  “Now you listen up, young lady! I am your mother, and I want you here in the next three minutes. Do you understand me?”

  “Okay,” I said, aware that it would be a whole helluva lot easier to go over there than argue with a woman who was less cooperative than your standard-issue mule, be it Confederate or Union. “Maybe I’ll give him a traffic ticket for driving inside the city limits without a permit. Jim Bob will be impressed with my dedication to duty.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ruby Bee, “but I reckon the clock’s ticking. I was planning to make cherry cobbler for lunch tomorrow, just because I know you’re smitten with it, but there ain’t no law that says I have to. What’s more, you need to put on some lipstick and make sure your hair’s tidy.”

  Ruby Bee’s talent in areas of blackmail and extortion was legendary. I told her I’d be there before too long, and hung up. Putting on lipstick would require me to go across the road to my apartment, which seemed like a lot of effort to impress a documentary filmmaker from—I thought for a moment—Missouri. Missouri was twenty miles away from where I was sitting; Hollywood was more like two thousand.

  In a display of petulance, I waited ten minutes before I went outside and walked down the road toward the peculiar pink building known as Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill. Roy Stiver was parked in a rocking chair in front of his antiques shop, snoozing in the sunlight and waiting for the next tourist to marvel over his quaintness and buy a grossly overpriced piece of flea market crap. Joyce Lambertino was wrestling with a gas pump at the self-service while countless children wrestled with each other in the back of her station wagon. Eula Lemoy was wheeling a cart around the supermarket parking lot, probably in search of her car. Mrs. Jim Bob drove by in her pink Cadillac, too preoccupied to acknowledge the likes of me. Raz rattled by in his pickup truck, with his pedigreed sow Marjorie in the passenger’s seat, her snout stuck out the window to enjoy the breeze.

  All in all, pretty normal for a Saturday afternoon in Maggody.

  “It’s about time,” Ruby Bee said by way of greeting as I sat down on a stool. “Don’t look now, but he’s over there in the corner. From what I could hear when I took ’em a pitcher, Hormel’s telling him about the Japanese kamikaze pilot he found hiding in his root cellar way back in 1949. Hormel’s real fond of that story.”

  I leaned over the bar and whispered, “How am I supposed to arrest this guy or whatever it is you want me to do if I don’t look at him?”

  “He’s familiar, that’s why. I thought I told you to put on some lipstick.”

  “Familiar?”

  “Ain’t you ever bumped up against that word before?” She took a mug from the shelf below the bar. “You want a beer?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and a quarter for the juke box. Any requests?”

  She took a quarter from the cash register drawer. “I’d like to think you won’t be gaping at him like some moonstruck girl.”

  I casually sauntered over to the juke box. After making my selections, which didn’t take long since the repertoire hadn’t changed since the last mastodon died of old age, I glanced at the booth. The man was watching me, and he was indeed familiar. Maybe not as familiar as the nose on my face or the toasty brown swirls of meringue that Ruby Bee uses to top her lemon pies, but familiar.

  Oh yes, familiar.

  My knees buckled, but I made it back to my stool. I wasn’t surprised when he sat down beside me and said, “Thought I’d run into you.”

  “Maggody’s not quite as crowded as Manhattan,” I said. “You could go for years in Manhattan without running into anyone you knew. Now running over someone would be a different matter, but of course no one in Manhattan has a car because of the traffic.”

  You may be thinking that he was my ex-husband, which he most assuredly was not. No, he was the very intriguing man I’d encountered when I’d been bullied into chaperoning the local teenagers at a church camp not so very long ago. You may also be thinking that I was babbling like an idiot. No argument there.

  “I tried to call you at the PD,” he said.

  I met his gaze in the mirror on the backside of the bar. “I don’t always answer the telephone.”

  “My name’s Jack Wallace, for the record.”

  “Is that another alias?”

  He ducked his face, which gave me the chance to ascertain that he was still the slightly disheveled, loose-limbed, squared-jawed guy I’d encountered fishing beside a lake—and about whom I immediately found myself entertaining adolescent fantasies of the sort I would never admit. Lawrence of Arabia’s blue eyes. The Sundance Kid’s tousled blond hair. Indiana Jones’s grin.

  I watch a lot of movies featuring guys who seldom shave.

  “Ruby Bee said you’re filming the documentary,” I said ever-so-cleverly.

  “That’s right. An old friend of mine is a reenactor. When he mentioned Maggody, I thought it might be interesting, so I volunteered my services. I work for an advertising agency in Springfield.”

  “An advertising agency?” said Ruby Bee, swooping in like a turkey vulture. “Ain’t that a coincidence, Arly? That ex-husband of yours worked for an advertising agency, too, didn’t he? It was a good thing when you upped and divorced him like you did. Nowadays, you’re living here in Maggody as a single woman.” She smiled at Jack Wallace, who was looking a little pale. “I’m sure you’re not an underhanded sumbitch like Arly’s ex-husband. I can’t think why she married him in the first place.”

  My look, or perhaps the way my hand tightened around the mug, was enough to send her to the far end of the bar. “So, Jack Wallace,” I said, “if that’s your real name, how are your children?”

  “They’re doing well. My sister looks after them when I’m working. Their mother has supervised visitation and is back on medication. They participate in soccer, baseball, music lessons, all that sort of thing.”

  “No nightmares about the Moonbeams?” I said.

  “No, they thought it was creepy, but they were never abused when their mother took them to live with that cult. They’re just happy to be back with their dog, their bicycles, their friends in the neighborhood. They adore my sister and their cousins.”

  “Convenient for you.”

  “Especially when I’m out at a car dealership filming a commercial. You wouldn’t believe how many of these guys insist on wearing toupees no matter how windy it may be. One of the crew described the la
st one as another ‘flying ferret shoot.’ ”

  I smiled, but I was still struggling to keep my cool. I’d hoped that he would call after our last encounter, but I’d chosen to not answer the telephone on the off chance he would. Ruby Bee would not have found my behavior mature. I took a swallow of beer. “So you volunteered your services to the Stump County Historical Society?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “And…?”

  “I came down today to have a look at the locations so I could make sure to have whatever equipment I need. I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

  “Really?” I said, wondering what he meant. Done what kind of thing before? Chanced upon an available female with an inadvertent glint in her eye? Okay, the calculating glint of a Westchester matron eyeing the abs of a new pool boy.

  “I’ve filmed several of these events for my friend, Frank Reinor. He fancies himself to be a colonel in a Missouri regiment, but sometimes he has to be a private. Damn well breaks his heart, but he’s a devotee of the war when he’s not peddling computers at a chain store. He’d like nothing more than to let his teeth rot so he’d be more authentic, but his wife has her limits.”

  I was going to respond when Ruby Bee came over and clutched my wrist.

  “Jim Bob’s on the phone,” she said, nearly hyperventilating. “He says there’s a crisis at the old folks’ home and you’d better get over there right this minute!”

  “A crisis? Is that all he said?”

  “That’s all he said, but he was real agitated. Well, he also said he’d fire you if you wasn’t there in five minutes, but I told him a thing or two and he backed off. Still, you’d better go look into it.”

  I looked at Jack, who seemed amused. “Duty beckons,” I said, wildly imagining him swooping me into his arms and declaring that nothing short of some cataclysmic event of galactic significance would prevent him from expressing his passion in one of the motel rooms out back.

  “I’ll be back in a few days to start filming,” he said. “Perhaps we can continue our conversation then.”

  Rhett Butler would have swooped. Jack Wallace seemed content to nod at us and amble out of the bar.

  Ruby Bee dumped the contents of my mug into the sink. “Well, that was interesting, I must say. I recognized him right off, but I don’t recall it ever being explained what his role in that mess was.”

  Rather than enlightening her, I said, “I guess I’d better go see what’s got Jim Bob in a tizzy.”

  “Maybe so,” murmured Ruby Bee. “Come by later if you’re of a mind. I’m making chicken ’n’ dumplings.”

  Jim Bob was pacing across the porch of the old folks’ home when I drove up and parked beside his truck.

  “About goddamn time you got here,” he said as I got out of my car. “You was hired to do a job, Chief Hanks, and one of them is to look after the citizens.”

  I smiled sweetly. “And here I’ve been thinking I was hired to do kidney transplants. Just this morning I pulled a donor out of a pond and packed his vital organs in ice. Is the surgical staff prepared? Are you going to scrub in?”

  “One of these days I’m gonna fire your ass—and you’d better hope I don’t have a twelve-gauge when I do it!” He banged open the screen door. “Now get inside and hear what Miz Pimlico has to say. She’s beside herself with worry.”

  I followed him into the foyer and then into an office, where Miz Pimlico appeared to be restraining herself from an overt display of distress and was, in fact, eating a bowl of red Jell-O and frowning over a crossword puzzle.

  “This here’s the chief of police,” Jim Bob said. “Tell her what happened before she has you locked up for negligence.”

  Miz Pimlico, a woman of some years with a girth that rivaled Dahlia’s, looked up with a confused expression. “Are you still here?” she said to Jim Bob. “I thought we’d already settled this. Petrol does this kind of thing at least once a month.”

  “Does what?” I asked her.

  “Takes off. He’ll be back in time for supper. I was a little surprised that he chose this afternoon, since he’d expressed interest in our four o’clock decoupage class. He’s created impressive projects in previous sessions. One of his cookie tins showed quite a talent.”

  Jim Bob shoved me forward. “Just tell Arly here what happened—okay?”

  Miz Pimlico reluctantly put down her spoon. “Petrol was present at lunch. He seemed to enjoy his meal, as did all of our residents. Tomato soup, pimento cheese sandwiches, and dill pickle slices are always popular, as well as nutritious, and Jell-O makes them quite giddy. We had a nice rest period afterward so that the poor old things could digest properly. When this person”—she glared at Jim Bob—“came demanding to visit, Vonetta went to Petrol’s room and discovered that he wasn’t there. This is not a prison or a psychiatric facility. We are required by state law to leave exits unlocked in case of fire.”

  “And Petrol’s taken off before?” I said.

  “Yes, indeed. Sometimes he goes back to his old house. He claims he’s checking for vandalism, but I suspect he buried jars of moonshine over the years. He stinks to high heaven when he finally staggers back in time for supper.”

  Jim Bob growled. “What’s his roommate got to say?”

  “I have no idea.” Miz Pimlico moved aside her crossword puzzle and opened a file. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to review this week’s invoices. I believe in pinching every penny so that our residents can savor their remaining years in a clean, stimulating environment. And that, as we know too well, takes money.”

  Jim Bob dragged me out to the hallway. “Maybe Petrol said something to this roommate of his. Go find him and ask.”

  “Just why are you so interested in Petrol?”

  “He’s kin, that’s why. Buchanons have powerful ties. What’s more, we can’t let doddery old fools like Petrol get snockered and go stumbling around in the woods. He could be lying facedown in Boone Creek right this minute, with the crawdads and minnows nibbling his eyeballs. You’re the chief of police, and it’s your job to find him and haul him back.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see if I can track him down—but only if you go back to the SuperSaver. As you said, it’s my job. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “You damn well better,” he muttered, then slammed out the front door.

  I waited until I heard his pickup truck drive away, then poked around until I found an aide in a lilac polyester uniform. She was around my age, but if I’d gone to school with her, I hadn’t had any memorable encounters. “Are you Vonetta?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened. “Why, yes,” she whispered. “Are you here to arrest somebody?”

  “Nothing like that. I just thought I’d try to find Petrol and get him back in time for the decoupage class.”

  “It ain’t worth your time. He goes off like this ever now and then. Short of tying him down, there’s not much we can do. His room’s down at the end of the hallway, and he can slip out the exit door faster’n a snake going through a hollow log. Personally, I always hope the crazy old coot won’t come back. He pinches my fanny so hard I get bruises. Today at lunch he snatched up Miz Claplander’s Jell-O cup, tumping her iced tea in the process. You never heard so much cater-wauling in your life.”

  “Vonetta,” Miz Pimlico said from the doorway of her office, “we do not stand around and gossip about our residents. Shouldn’t you be getting ready for the decoupage class?”

  Vonetta sold me down the river in a Maggody minute. “But Miz Pimlico, she was asking all these questions, and what with her being the chief of police, I didn’t reckon I had any choice but to answer them.”

  I shot her an annoyed look, then said, “As soon as I have a word with Petrol’s roommate, I’ll be on my way. His room is by an exit?”

  Miz Pimlico pointed at a hallway. “Last room on the left. I’d like to think you won’t go upsetting Mr. Whitbreedly. His daughter told him about this upcoming Civil War battle, and he’s convinced Yanke
es are hiding at the far edge of the field.”

  “I’m just going to ask him about Petrol,” I said.

  “Well, don’t be surprised if he assumes you’re a Yankee spy and refuses to speak to you. He thinks Vonetta here is one of those camp followers of ill repute. She had her hands full giving him a sponge bath this morning.”

  Unable to respond, I went down the indicated hallway and eased open the door. “Mr. Whitbreedly?”

  “Who’re you?” came a muffled voice from under a thin cotton blanket.

  “Chief of Police Arly Hanks. I’m looking for Petrol.”

  “Then use your eyes, gal.” He cackled. “Don’t see him, do you?”

  “Did he say anything before he left?”

  The blanket lowered a few inches, giving me a view of tufts of white hair and fierce blue eyes. “I don’t recollect he did. Who’d you say you are?”

  “Not someone who’s planning to pass your invaluable information to the enemy. Go back to sleep, Mr. Whitbreedly.”

  “Damn Yankees.”

  I left him swearing under his breath and went out the exit. All looked peaceful along the tree line at the far side of the field, but I supposed it was remotely possible that an errant band of Yankee reenactors were making their way toward Cotter’s Ridge to retrieve the Confederate gold their ancestors had overlooked a hundred and forty years ago. What was more important was that I could see no indication that Petrol had forced his way through the weeds in the direction of Boone Creek.

  I decided to swing by Petrol’s house and make sure he wasn’t hiding behind the woodshed with a quart of Raz’s vintage ’shine. I was not about to roll up my jeans and wade down Boone Creek from the bridge north of town to the low-water bridge on County 102. I might have to do so if Petrol was still missing in the morning, but I figured I could declare an emergency and persuade Harve to send out a couple of deputies to help. And Hizzoner, of course, since he’d expressed such fervent kinship with Petrol. Which was odd, I admit, but I didn’t much care about his ulterior motive (I never doubted for a second that he had one).