Invisible (22 page)

“Good. You said earlier that you’d seen one of the vandals at Country Peace, a big, brawny guy?”

“Yes.”

“Could you describe him more thoroughly?”

I looked off into the evening dusk over the balcony, and I didn’t have to dig deep to remember that beefy face. I described it slowly. Broad forehead, wide nose, eyes made piggish by folds of flab over the corners. Heavy jaw, thick neck.

“Shape of face?” Dix asked.

“Squarish.”

“Hair?”

“I don’t know. He was wearing a cap with a visor.”

I hadn’t realized it while I was describing the face, but Dix had been sketching it with a ballpoint pen as I talked. He handed me the paper napkin, and I stared at it in disbelief. Dix had caught the man as if he’d been right there in the ditch with me.

“That’s him! Is he someone you’ve seen? Career criminal or something?”

“No. I just drew what you described.”

“You learned this in a class?”

“No. It’s just something I’ve always been able to do.”

Haley spoke up. “He’d never met my mother, but one time he was picking her up at the airport for me. I described her to him so he could recognize her, and he drew her perfectly.”

A natural talent for turning words into pictures. “Did you ever think this is something you might do—” I started to say “if you can’t go back to detective work,” but amended it to “in addition to your regular police work? Don’t they often need an artist to sketch a suspect from someone’s description?”

Dix didn’t respond, though he looked thoughtful, and we went on to dessert.

After cookies and pecan-fudge ice cream, Haley rinsed dishes and I put them in the dishwasher. Just before leaving, I got bold and said to Dix, “Since we missed our ‘date’ for going to Tri-Corners Community together, how about making it this Sunday? I can pick you up. There’s plenty of room in the car for your cast and walker.”

After a scowl from Dix, Haley said, “The only way you’re going to get this man into a church is whop him over the head with that walker and drag him.”

“Shows how much you know,” Dix retorted. To me he added, “Sure, let’s go.”

20

Considering Dix’s current attitude, I was undecided whether to anticipate or dread church with him, but I found a nice surprise in another area when I settled down with the newspaper at home.

The letters to the editor section held a letter from an older gentleman named Will Arleigh. He, too, thanked Mr. Braxton for the offer of a new cemetery site, but he concurred with my suggestion for setting up a fund for restoring the current cemetery. His wife was buried there, and he didn’t want to see her moved. He backed up his preference with the offer of a thousand dollars to whatever organization was willing to take charge.

A thousand dollars! Now if only some organization
was
in charge . . .

I picked Dix up a half hour early on Sunday morning to allow time for maneuvering him from apartment to car to church pew. He sat on the pew like a frowning stump for most of the service, leg stretched out and one hand curled around the walker in the aisle beside him, but I could see he was paying attention to the message about why even strong Christians sometimes have doubts. Afterwards I talked with one of the deacons about Country Peace, and he expressed real interest in it as a church project and said he’d look into it further. “Although these things move slowly,” he warned. I was just grateful he hadn’t suggested running it up the steeple to see if it rang the bell.

Dix was silent on the subject of both church and message on the drive home. I suggested dinner out, but he said Haley had come by and put a roast in the oven before she went to church.

On Monday and Tuesday, the cleaning people came, along with the repairman to replace the back door. I left them to their noisy work and went shopping for new furniture and television. I’d been thinking I might save the pieces of the old bench and try to glue them together, but when I came home that afternoon the cleaning people had taken them. I felt a pang—another tie with Harley lost—but a little later I decided I’d rather keep my memories whole and unbroken than tie them into a cobbled-together bench.

By Wednesday the house was back in order, smelling of freshly shampooed carpets and new furniture. With my life more or less back in order, I made a decision.

* * *

A decision that at 7:45 the following evening put me on the edge of Clancy, Arkansas. Clancy was some 150 miles beyond where DeeAnn lived, and it had taken me considerably longer to drive there. My back felt stiff, my bottom numb, and my joints stuck in a bent position. I was looking forward to a hot shower and early bedtime in a motel.

I’d expected a sleepy town rolling up its sidewalks for the night, so I was surprised to find the stores open, sidewalks jammed with people, bluegrass music blasting from an unseen loudspeaker, and the wide main street crowded with cars. A scent of barbecue drifted in the dusty air, and an espresso stand was doing big business. Honking horns combined with friendly yells and whistles when a convertible with three pretty girls sitting above the backseat inched by.

Off to the left of downtown the upper curve of a Ferris wheel circled lazily, and beyond it another carnival ride whipped a bullet-shaped capsule back and forth as if intent on slinging it into outer space. Even from this distance I could hear the shrieks and screams.

A big, hand-scrawled sign fastened to a streetlight pole read: “RVers, Free Parking at Simco Industrial Park” with a big, bent arrow pointing the way.

The lumbering motor home ahead of me turned at the corner, and when I braked at the town’s lone traffic light I saw a banner stretched above the street that explained all this unexpected activity. “Welcome to Clancy’s Meteor Daze” it proclaimed in jumbled-style print, the words surrounded by a dazzle of silvery shooting stars against a background of midnight blue. Now I also saw posters in windows, with more shooting stars.

Vaguely I remembered reading that August’s annual meteor shower would be best visible this weekend. It had never occurred to me that such a celestial event might impact my visit to little Clancy.

Yet impacted it was, and severely so, I found out a few minutes later when I tried to rent a room at one of Clancy’s two motels.

“Oh my, no, we don’t have a vacancy. We’re always booked up weeks ahead for Meteor Daze. Everyone is,” the middle-aged woman announced with complacent cheerfulness. “That’s clever, don’t you think? The play on words, daze and days. Dooley Bingham thought that one up.”

Good for Dooley. “Where would I have to go to find a motel room, then?”

“Dulcyburg is twenty miles, but I know for a fact they’re filled up too. Most people come in RVs, you know. Big ol’ motor homes and trailers and fifth-wheels. Some people even camp out in tents.” Another cheerful smile. “Everyone comes for Meteor Daze.”

“Can’t people see the meteors from, well, anywhere, without coming to Clancy?”

“Well, I suppose.” She straightened her shoulders, a little huffy now. “But we have the very best views. And it’s a real
event
here. We have the carnival and Beef Boogie Bingo and a chicken barbecue and a cow-chip throwing contest and a bluegrass festival. Plus a quilt show and flea market, and a rock concert for the kids. A few people even sleep in their cars out there at the industrial park, just so they can be here.”

“Doesn’t that kind of get in the way of the . . . uh . . . industry?”

“Not so’s you’d notice. The industrial park is four hundred acres, and so far Clancy’s industry is one chicken-processing plant.”

“Oh. The thing is,” I said, beginning to feel a little desperate, “I didn’t come for the celebration. I didn’t even know about it. I’m here on a . . . personal matter. A very important personal matter,” I stressed.

“Well, you might as well enjoy the Daze since you’re here.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the Alexanders, would you?”

“Al and Marcy? Sure.”

“This has to do with their daughter, Kendra.”

“She and my son worked together at the Dairy Queen, before Kendra went off to college. And then, the leukemia taking her like that, so sudden and terrible . . .” Her look saddened, and she shook her head.

Well, I was here to investigate. The circumstances did not appear to be ideal, but I figured I may as well start investigating. I pulled my photo of the person I knew as Kendra out of my purse. “Do you know this young woman?”

The woman shook her head. “Who is she?”

“Possibly a friend of Kendra’s.” I brought out the photocopy of the young man’s photo. “How about him?”

Another shake of head. “What’s this all about?”

I sidestepped the question and asked, “Could you tell me where I might find the Alexanders?”

“They live over on 11th Street, brick house with a red door. But I doubt you’ll find them home tonight. Al helps with the RV parking, and Marcy is probably setting up the quilt show.”

“I see. Well, thank you. You’re sure you don’t know of any rooms for rent? Bed and breakfast? Spare closet? Anything?”

I did my best to look little-old-lady helpless and send a guilt-inducing message.
If this was your grandma, wouldn’t you want someone to give her a place to stay?

No sale. But an unexpected bonus as I opened the door.

“That girl in the photo? You might talk to Beth Arlow, well, Bigelow now, she and Kendra were really good friends. She works in Doug Marlow’s office. He’s the new lawyer.”

I drove slowly around the residential area, hoping to see a bed-and-breakfast or room-for-rent sign on a home somewhere. It was a pleasantly old-fashioned small town, wide streets with tree-canopied sidewalks and a mixture of houses from old Victorian to ranch style. There were basketball hoops over garage doors, lawns well-tended but not elaborately manicured. I found 11th Street and a brick house with a red door. Feeling uncomfortably pushy but determined to do what I’d come here for, I rang the doorbell.

Motel lady knew what she was talking about. No answer.

By now dusk had arrived, stains of a flamboyant sunset fading to blue shadows in the west. Decision time. I could drive fifty or one hundred miles to find a motel room. Or I could chalk this up as a harebrained idea and head home.

I put off deciding while I ate barbecued chicken at the Chamber of Commerce stand set up in front of a long-closed hotel. Afterward I found the industrial park, where cars and pickups and motor homes and trailers seemed to be coming and going in all directions. A haze of dust illuminated by blazing headlights hung over everything. Dolly Parton singing from a car radio, motor home generators rumbling, a dog barking, a band practicing somewhere in the distance. Mixed scents of frying hamburger, gasoline and diesel fumes, and dust.

I was just intending to look around, but a busy traffic person was waving vehicles on through to parking places. Al Alexander? But this was hardly the place for investigative dialogue, and, crunched between two big motor homes, I was swept along with the tide. I spotted what looked like a place to turn around and pulled off, only to find that this was a small area set aside for tent campers. Just to get out of the way I pulled into a space between a blue van and a family cluster of tents that looked like gaudy bubbles.

Whew! It was, at least, a relief to be out of the RV traffic. I swiped a tissue across my sweaty throat. Maybe I could manage to find my way out of here when things quieted down.

I spotted some portable restrooms and slid out of the car to pay them a visit. If there were shooting stars, I couldn’t see them through the overhanging haze of dust. People came from miles around for
this
, when they could probably have a better view of shooting stars from their own backyards?

Waving dust away from my face, I decided Dix was right. I should keep my nose out of this. My cemetery snooping had gotten my house vandalized. Who knew what I might stir up here?

For once I’d ignore my curiosity and do the smart thing. Go home.

On the way back from the restroom I passed one couple who’d just discovered they’d brought a tent but no tent poles to set it up. They were laughing as they spread sleeping bags on top of the flattened tent. Three little girls, apparently returning from the carnival, carried puffs of cotton candy bigger than their heads. The woman from the blue van was frying hamburger over a folding Coleman stove.

No one threatened to mug me, grab my purse, or sell me anything. No one, in fact, paid any attention to me, and I unexpectedly found myself feeling comfortable, safe, and nicely invisible among the busy campers.

I didn’t necessarily have to go home, I reasoned. There were worse places to spend the night. And it seemed a shame to come all this way without finding out
something
.

I crawled into the backseat of the Thunderbird and took off my shoes. I found three packets of Handi Wipe things in my purse and did a mini-cleanup. The night was warm, and I left the windows partway open, but I figured it might get chilly before morning so I was glad to remember the “survival box” Harley had long ago insisted we carry. Among the assorted items I found when I dug the box out of the trunk—first aid kit, flashlight, reflectors to set out in case of accident—were two serviceable blankets. I punched one into pillow shape, curled up on the backseat with the other over my feet, and considered the novelty of the situation.