Red Room Where the Writers Are

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Say whatever you want about love but death will be the end of it all anyway. Poets and writers and artists got it all wrong. When we're dead that's just it. Not to say I don't believe in heaven or hell. I just think after we're gone none of the things that we did while we lived on this earth will matter one little bit. All of it will just be lost.

Ed Stucker was leaning tiredly against the wooden scaffolding watching a line of bright green harvesters moving slowly through the cornfields. Dust and bits of chaff were blowing from the trailing grain hoppers. I could smell the rich peaty loam of the fields and the diesel exhaust as the machines moved in perfect symmetry through the fields and could hear the roar of the powerful diesel engines when they changed gears. He took a drink of water from the metal canteen hanging from his tool belt and wiped his sunburnt face with damp red bandanna. He was at his best all alone by himself working on the side of a signboard. I suspect he really only ever wanted to be a painter and not the farmer my grandfather had hoped him to become. He had studied painting and art at college at the university over at Ames right along with agriculture and animal husbandry but I knew that painting was right there deep in his eternal soul in a way that farming never could have been. The art classes were just for himself. His study of proper crop rotation and soil conservation was for someone else entirely. When he finally came home from the war in the Pacific he set both his mother and father down and explained to him that there was no way that he could spend the rest of his life doing something he had no real interest in. No one thought he could make a real go of it but after a few years of hard work and "diligent marketing efforts" around Hanover and throughout the remainder of the county he had been able to convince them that there was good money to be made in the profession of sign painting, and now all of our family fields, the Stucker fields, were leased out to the surrounding farms and my father just spend his days doing that which he enjoyed best. He had never sold them, the fields, mind you, and he always said that he never would but that he saw no reason why arable land should lay fallow when it could be put to good enough use by others and bring in a little something to the household finances on the side.

Grasshoppers and bluebottle flies flitted above the dense overgrowth of milkweed, gypsum, and thistle that thrived at the base of the billboard. My father moistened the bandanna with the water from the canteen and tied it around his head like a kerchief. With a wide boar bristle brush he continued filling in the outlines of the carefully traced letters for the feed store sign. Once he had completely filled in each of the bright yellow letters he poured some black paint into a shallow metal pan and using a small roller brush went along the edges to properly give the illusion of dimensionality and depth. Like they were popping out from the billboard the letters looked like they had been carved from wood. When you were looking up at them from down below or through the windshield of a car driving along the highway you'd think they had been cut out and were hanging there. He had a photo album of all of the signs he had ever painted. Must have been some fifty or more, all through Iowa and Illinois and one almost as far away as Chicago. Springfield I think that was. He would take the album with him during the late fall and winter months when he was trying to drum up new business from the merchants and businesses scattered all across the two states. I used to ride along with him sometimes, particularly when I was still too young to stay home alone and my momma was working at the beauty parlor and couldn't have a toddler running around willy-nilly disturbing the ladies. He had a whole speech he would go through about how "even the most successful businesses couldn't afford to neglect appropriate advertising" and then just how "a good public image was the key to business success." He reminded me a lot of Tommy Logan sometimes. The way he took pride in that photo album and the way a certain light would come into his eyes when he talked about the signs he had painted throughout the country. In a lot of ways it was the same light that I saw in Tommy's eyes when he spoke of his cathedral or Frank Lloyd Wright. When you saw that kind of light in a man's eyes you knew that while life might send him a few hard knocks along way it would never get them beat. That they knew what they wanted from the world and that they clearly aimed to have it. If I ever settle down and have a family of my, find a man who is big enough to look beyond the two rascally twins and maybe even be a father to them, I hope that he'll have just that same kind of light in his eyes that my father and Tommy Logan had.

Standing beside his black and white Plymouth patrol car, Sheriff John Dabbs cupped his hands and called to my father, "Not your wife Jean or your daughter Norma. The Logan boy. Tommy, him. Shot himself dead this morning with William's forty-four." And that was exactly how they would talk to each other whenever they met. Like they was just picking up in the middle of a conversation when they hadn't seen each other for a week. Maybe it was just because they had known each other for so long. Friends first in middle school they had enlisted together right after the Pearl Harbor and their own fathers had been good friends as well. The harvesters had disappeared over a rise in the hill. From the telephone lines that followed the interstate a flock of blackbirds took flight and wheeled slowly over the field.

"What do you mean he shot himself?" Ed said.

"I mean he shot himself. He's dead." He held his gray Stetson to shield his eyes from the sun and walked over to the limestone riprap at the base of the billboard. Ed scraped the paint from the roller brush against the side of the catch pan and then from the rims of each of the five gallon cans with a bent putty knife. He tapped the lids down with a small wooden mallet. "Got Vale over there now with Taylor until William can come home and take care of her," Dabbs said. "How about coming down from there? Looks like rain before too long, anyway."

"Let me pack up and I'll be right down."

Once I had gone out to the Wapsi fishing with them and for a whole afternoon they had just sat there together side by side along the dock next to the old boathouse and never said more than half a dozen words to each other. When either one of them did say something they spoke so consicively someone would wonder how they ever understood what the other one meant. They never talked at all about what they had done together during the war even when they had been drinking and were in their cups. Nor did anyone in Hanover ever speak about the fact that Dabb's wife had run off while he was fighting from island to island. It was my father who had driven all the way to San Diego in that Ford flatbed of ours to meet him at the wharf when he stepped off the ship to break the news to him. Both of them had went on a bender down to Mexico, one of those border towns on a bender that lasted a week like sometimes soldiers will do from time to time. But he called home to my momma every night to tell her how much that he missed her and that everything was alright. Then when they got back no one spoke of their side trip at all either and Dabb's went to work as deputy under his own father until he retired and Dabbs got elected to the job himself.

One after the other Ed lowered the paint cans to the ground on a length of clothesline. Dabbs steadied them as they settled into the tall weeds and bachelor buttons that grew around the base of the sign. When each of the cans and his wooden tool basket had all been lowered, Ed unfastened the safety catches on either end of the scaffold and turned the capstan that brought the scaffold to the ground. Dabbs stood looking up at the sign. "Dekalb Feedstore and Granary," he said. "You've got a real talent there, Ed."

"Filling in the letters and the picture is the easy part. Tracing them out on the underpainting is what tries you. Standing that close it's hard to tell where you are or where you want to be going. Moving from the draft design plan to life-sized drawing is a tough one too. Reminds me a lot of orienteering with a map and a compass in the jungle."

"Well like I just said. You got real talent."

The harvesters were working closer to the edge of the field now but they could not be seen through the tall rows of corn. "Think they'll finish up before the rain starts?" Ed asked. The afternoon had cooled and they heard a rumble of distant thunder. A small dust devil lifted from the side of the road and moved through the weeds.

"I know they'll be out there working until they get it all in rain or not," Dabbs said. "Once I came out here in the middle of the night and saw them carrying lit torches ahead of the tractors marking out the rows for the drivers. That time Mrs. DeCarlo told called in that the Klan was having a secret midnight rally in her neighbors cornfield. That was the first time I had loaded my shotgun except for pheasant and duck hunting in the five years I'd been the sheriff."

Ed was wiping flecks of paint from his face with a scrap of burlap he took from his pocket. "So now what's all this about Tommy Logan and that he shot himself?"

"Taylor found him when she got back from the A&P. Does her grocery shopping between classes at the high school sometimes. She called me at the station and wasn't able to talk at all. Had to have Maggie at the switchboard trace the call and tell me where it was coming from. When I saw what had happened I called Hadley and Vale and waited until they got there. Then I left them both there with his Taylor and drove in to tell William what had happened." Dabbs took off his Stetson and ran his fingers through his cropped gray hair. "He took it real hard. When he knew what I was telling him he took a swing at me and missed me by an inch. I think that I'd a done pretty much the same thing if someone were to tell me a son of mine had done that to himself."

Well I might have imagined that his momma would have been the one to have found him first since William worked all day in the feedstore and the devil only knew what Eda did with herself during rest of the day. When I had run out of there with his journal under my arm I suppose one could argue that I wasn't seeing things too clearly or thinking about things too straight and they would have been right. But I would like anyone who might be too critical about it to maybe have gone through the whole thing that I did themselves and see if they'd do much better that I've done.

"Why did he shoot himself?" Ed asked. He was lifting cans of paint into the back of his flatbed.

"I guess no one knows just yet," Dabbs said and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Goddamn this end of summer heat. Always closest before a storm."

"I knew him," Ed said. "He and Norma have been friends since they were little kids."

"We'll first let the Logan's get ahold of their grief the best way we can," Dabbs said. "I don't suppose we'll ever really find out why he did it. Maybe all we'll ever be able to do is figure out what had been bothering him so he felt that he had to do it. The only trail here as far as I'm concerned is the one from Tommy Logan to William's gun cabinet."

Together they lashed the paint cans tightly in the racks that ran along the sides of the flatbed. "There wasn't a note he'd left. Nothing like that and Taylor said there wasn't any indication that anything had been bothering him. He's just won that scholarship a while back and had a bright future ahead of him."

"I don't think it something a person would do for no reason," Ed said.

"Last night they'd had roast chicken and set outside in the porch as it was hot playing dominos, she told me," Dabbs said.

"So what brings you out here this afternoon?"

"I was wondering if you might know where Norma is," Dabbs said. "She didn't go to school this morning and no one has seen her. I stopped by the beauty parlor on the way out here and Jean said she left this morning on her bicycle same as she always did but Taylor said she wasn't in her homeroom class this morning. And considering that Norma and Tommy were good friends, I thought it would be a good idea to track her down. Just to make sure she was alright."

Ed leaned tiredly against the side of the truck and lit a cigarette. "You really think Norma has something to do with Tommy Logan?" he asked.

"Not like you think I might be trying to suggest," Dabbs said and wiped paint from his hands with a rag he took from the glove compartment of his patrol car. "I just think it would be good to make sure she is alright."

"Let me just finish loading up here then."

"I thought if maybe you knew some places she liked to go we might start there first," Dabbs said. "You can ride along me if you want and I'll drop you back off her at your truck later."

Ed walked back over to the painter's scaffold and began to slowly crank it upward along the front of the billboard. The block and tackle clattered against the front of the sign startling several titmice that had made their nests in the dark coolness of the wooden understructure. Once the scaffold had reached the top, he wrapped the pulley chain through a large steel eyelet and locked it with a heavy padlock. He walked back to the truck and locked the tailgate and doors to the front cab. Delicate purple asters and whitestars grew at the edge of the limestone riprap. Large white cumulus clouds were quickly forming over the Mississippi and the wind had changed direction. When he had finished securing the rig, Ed walked back through the weeds and got into the passenger side of Dabb's patrol car brushing the rust from his hands.

"What's all that for?" Dabbs asked. He maneuvered the cruiser onto the highway and the drove toward town.

"One morning last year I came out to a jobsite and found some kid stuck up there at the top," Ed said. "Went up as a dare and the scaffold got stuck at the top and he didn't know how to work the release. So cold he almost couldn't talk when I found him. Had rained during the night. If he hadn't had a bottle of rye with him he might not have lasted until the morning."

"It was probably the bottle of rye that got him up there in the first damned place."

"We used to be wild and foolish when we were that age," Ed said.

"What do you think about all that Cuba talk?" Dabbs asked.

"I really haven't been following it too close."

"I don't think Khrushchev would be dumb enough to put any of those missiles in that fool's hands. Who knows that he wouldn't decide to use them on Red Square one day?"

For most of the last winter and spring that's about all anyone had been talking about in the beauty parlors and feedlots and taverns throughout Hanover. You couldn't go anywhere to get away from any of it and it was always there like the sound of distant thunder on a sunny day when there's not a cloud in the sky. Something always there just in the background. Somewhere over the horizon like that song Dorothy sang. Duck and cover duck and cover. Bert the Turtle has a shelter on his back but you must duck and cover. We'd have air raid drills every week at school where we all had to turn away from the windows and get down on the floor under our desks and tuck our heads way down between our knees until the teacher blew a whistle and told us when it was alright again to stand up. This is why they make the monkeys at the zoo wear diapers one of the guys in the back of the room had joked so they can't do this to themselves and was sent to the principal's. There was this guy in Tipton I heard about that had built an underground fallout shelter by burying a row of round concrete drainage pipes and connecting them with a tunnel that led up to a large steel door that he could lock from inside. Had it supplied with a sterno stove and enough supplies to last until someone told him it was safe to come out again. Tommy told me once that he thought free will was just an illusion. He believed that every event, everything that we think and we do, is "causally determined by a string of inevitable occurrences." We were sitting at an outside table at the Dog - N - Suds with his sister Eda and his girl Ellen when he said that and I just reached across the table and tipped over his mug of root beer and asked him if that wasn't a good enough demonstration of free will to suit him. They way Tommy explained about it was that everything that has happened was inevitable since it actually did in fact take place. That while we imagined we had control over our own lives everything was predetermined. He had ideas, he did, but sometimes he thought about things too much. You could see that in his eyes. But he did like it when I challenged him sometimes. You should have seen the light in his face and that wonderful smile of his when Eda was scrabbling to wipe up the soda before it dripped down through the picnic table onto her paisley dress. But just like I said that's all that anyone could seem to talk about. That whole Cuban thing with Fidel Castro.

"I need to stop at Barrow's and pick up some groceries for the station," Dabbs said. "Vale told me we were running low again."

"You currently got guests?"

"Not at the moment. But that'll change next month when the fair opens up. Same thing every year." He and his deputy alternated two days on and two days at the jailhouse. There was a bunkroom just off the main lobby and a wall of three small cells across from the bunkroom. On weekends it was a kind of meeting hall were the men in town stopped by on their way through town just like momma's beauty parlor was s social gathering place for the women. Dabbs always kept a well stocked pantry in case he had "unexpected overnight guests" was always the way he would put it. Sometimes Ed would drop in for a game of chess or just to talk fishing and there was usually always a few people hanging around.

They drove along the interstate through the flatness of the fields. The emerald and gold rows of corn blurred into a transparent celedon vale on either side of the highway. Tall silver grain silos and drying bins rose from the fields each time the patrol car passed over a rise in the road and then gradually lowered back down into the broad green blanket of the surrounding fields as they eased down into a dip in the roadway. Bent and rusted mailboxes mounted on tall wooden posts whipped past the open windows as they sped down the road and the smell of hot oil and dust seeped through the vents in the dashboard. On the floorboards between Stucker's feet were two empty grape Nehi bottles and a carton of shotgun shells. "They way I see it he just had too much on his plate," Dabbs said. "Winning that contest and going off to college in Ames next year. Engaged to that Desetty girl. Maybe he just felt overwhelmed."

"That might have been it."

"Hell yes it might have been it. Never in trouble as far as I know. A quiet and reserved boy just like his father William. Tommy was a chip off the old block and that sister of his, Eda, tends toward Taylor."

He was right that Tommy was a quiet person just like his father, William, but I knew that all the quiet was just on the outside sometimes like the still surface of a river can belie the speed of the water moving just underneath. And still waters run deep, that was always something that Jean had told me but mostly when she did she was talking about Ed and how he could go almost an entire day sometimes without saying but ten or twenty words. With Tommy you knew that it was different. He always had something going on inside his head and couldn't have stopped thinking and caring about things if he'd wanted. He showed me something he'd copied down into his journal when I asked him why he wanted to be an architect. It went like to accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. Someone else had said that first, not him. He was always writing things down in his journal and it had come to be a part of who he had been.

"So you really think Norma is somehow mixed up in all this?" Ed asked.

"Like I just told you," Dabbs said. "I know they were friends and now she didn't turn up at school today. So I would rest a lot easier if we could just verify that she's alright. Where are some of the places she liked to go? Did she have something that she wanted to do today?"

"This morning she and Jean were putting up some pies their woman's group was going to sell at the 4H. But no, Norma left this morning for school on her bike like she does every morning I don't drive her."

Through the kitchen window that morning I had watched the sun rising over their white clapboard barn as he and Jean had their coffee at the table. I was standing at the deep sink slicing apples with a small paring knife and dropping them quartered into a large blue ceramic bowl of cold water and sugar and fresh squeezed lemon juice. I could see the rusted DuClerc steam tractor sitting beside the barn beneath a broad willow tree. Ed had said that at the end of the season when his workload lessened he was going to paint a picture of that tractor through the window.

They turned off the road and onto the long rutted driveway that led back toward the main house. I suppose it could still be called a farm. William Logan had a good job in town as manager of the largest feedstore in the county. Nothing much grew around the place anymore except weeds and thistles. He he still could have still leased out his fields like we did and not let them tangle over with scrub bushes and weeds. Dabbs parked his patrol car behind the county ambulance, a black Packard Henney with the forward leaning chrome swan on the hood and the signature red moon hubcaps. A green canvas stretcher leaned against the side of the car and the uniformed driver was sitting on the open tailgate pouring hot coffee from a thermos.

"William get here yet?" Dabbs asked the driver.

"Vale went to check on him about an hour ago. When he said on the telephone he couldn't leave the store until someone got there to take over the register. When can I take away the body?"

"Not until his father gets here and gives us the go ahead," Dabbs said. "Where's Taylor?"

"Sitting out back on the porch with Doctor Lacey. Gave her a little something to settle her nerves and she's acting kind of woozy."

Might of seemed uncaring for a father who had just lost his son not to have just closed up and come home to be with his wife but there were farmers and the owners of the big hog and cattle lots in Illinois who would sometimes drive a hundred miles to stock up on feed and grain.

"No need for you to come inside unless you want to, Ed," Dabbs said. "Soon as I check on Taylor we can find track down Norma." Turning quickly he began walking toward the rear of the farmhouse. The wide rear porch looked out over a small meadow with a black weedy pond. They had it fixed real nice with a little round wrought iron table and chairs and a striped beach umbrella.

"I'll just wait here then," Ed said. He walked across the driveway to the old pump house that stood on a low hill just off the front yard. He slowly worked the pump handle and after a few minutes water began to gush from the spigot. After he had rinsed his forearms he drank from his cupped hands and ran his wet fingers through his hair. The water was almost sweet and always tasted faintly of iron and sulfur. He sat down on the wet wooden steps and leaned back against the base of the pump housing. At home after work he would always sit just like that and rest with his eyes closed for a few minutes while momma told him about her day. When she wasn't working late at the beauty parlor. Smelling of turpentine and with his arms covered with specks of paint he would have a glass of iced tea and rest for a while before he cleaned up for supper.

Through the door to the pump house Ed looked across the grassless front yard toward the main house and unpainted barn. There was a collection of dead farm machinery rusting in a field of weeds next to a stony meadow covered with dense overgrowth. The field behind the main house could have been planted with alfalfa but the two others that stretched out behind the barn were choked with mustard and nettles. I knew what he would have been thinking right then. He disliked the kind of disuse that came from neglect and lack of proper effort.

There was a loud crash from inside the house followed immediately by the brittle clatter of breaking glassware and china. Taylor fell forward through the front door and stumbled down the steps into the dust. Dabbs ran out quickly behind her and tried to lift her to her feet. Both of her knees were scraped good from the gravel at the bottom of the stairs. Doctor Lacey came through the screen door next carrying his black leather satchel. Taylor buried her face against Dabbs' shoulder and sobbed. He led her to a wicker swing at the end of the porch and lowered her into it gently, sitting down alongside of her on the swing. Lacey knelt at her feet. Rolling up her sleeve he gave her an injection. Then he began to swab the blood and dirt from her knees and gently bandaged them. Dabbs held with his arm around her shoulders until she finally fell asleep. He put a pillow under her head and after telling Hadley to stay there with her came down to the pump house.

"I wish William would get back here soon to take care of his wife," Dabbs said.

"Anything we can do before he gets here?" Ed said.

"I suppose we could fix things up a bit inside. Maybe make it not quite as bad for him when he gets home."

They walked back up to the main house. Taylor was sleeping on the porch swing and Hadley was sitting beside her. "She should be able to rest now," he said quietly.

Ed and Dabbs stepped in through the screen door and into the foyer. The air still held the lingering traces of gun powder. When Taylor had run from Tommy's bedroom she must have fallen against their china cabinet. There were pieces of broken pottery and glass on the floor and the corner of the cabinet had torn a large hole in the plasterboard as it had fallen. Tommy's room was off to the right of the master bedroom and looked out onto the pond and the woods that bordered the alfalfa field. They walked back through the kitchen and down the dark corridor. Dabbs pushed open the door and there he still was lying in a pool of blood that was clotted in the ridges of the chenille bedspread. He had held the gun up tight under his chin and the bullet had exploded from the top of his head and passed through the headboard and then out through the wall behind. Sunlight was filtering in through the hole in the wall and there was a fine misting of blood dried on the wall. That was pretty much just like I'd remembered it to have been. But he seemed smaller now and paler than he was right after he must have done it. William's forty-four was on the night table beside the bed. The first time Dabbs had been there that morning he'd pried it loose from Tommy's hand. He remembered from the war how sometimes after a man had been killed the stiffening of muscles when the rigor mortis set in could cause them to squeeze off some additional shots.

Dabbs slid open the uppermost dresser drawer and felt beneath the carefully aligned rows of rolled socks. There at the back of the drawer was a polished cedar pencil case with the initials TJL stamped into the wood and a cardboard cigar box held together with masking tape. He open the box and saw a triangle, protractor, and a stainless steel set of French curves. Dabbs opened the second drawer and took out a worn leather fielding mitt and a catcher's mask. Oiled and polished to a buttery softness from summers of afternoon games in the wide lot on the bluff overlooking the river, the leather was the color of a polished chestnut.

"What are you looking for?" Ed asked.

"In case he had something hidden around he might not want his mother to find," Dabbs said. "You know some of the things boys might be interested in when they get older." That was just the way he was. Able to look at the big picture and do what was best for folks. When Dabbs was still a young deputy spending his days learning the profession from his father, driving the dusty roads and broken macadam that surrounded rural Hanover, he had gradually come to understand that one of the most fundamental responsibilities in being the sheriff consisted of maintaining a kind of social harmony within the community. Trying to let folks live if not the life they actually deserved, then at least letting them have a little something of the life they could have had if they had been braver, more resolute, or maybe more full of grace. 'Let the preacher concern himself with their souls', his daddy would always tell him, 'and we'll shepherd over everything else. And let me just tell you the preacher's the one with the easier job'. He closed the drawer and turned to Ed. "Would you go out to the kitchen and see if you can find some paper trash bags?"

Ed went in to the kitchen and began looking in the cupboards. He found several folded grocery bags tucked away beside a large cast iron roasting pan. When he had returned to the bedroom, Dabbs had pulled the bloody sheets and blanket from beneath Tommy and wadded them up in a soggy red ball. "Here, open one up and bring it over here." Dabbs pushed the wadded bedspread into the bag and handed it back to Ed. "Take that out back and put it in the trash. He won't look so bad now when his daddy gets home. His room won't anyway." Ed closed the large paper bag containing the bloody sheets and placed it on the ground by one of the bed posts. Looking down, Ed noticed my suede boots setting there against the wall right under the window. He reached down and picked them up and turned them over in his hands thoughtfully.

"Norma's?" Dabbs asked. "Maybe we should have a look around and see if there is anything else we should take out with us," Dabbs said.

Dabbs took another paper bag and stuffed the boots inside. He folded it closed and handed it to Ed. "Norma doesn't have anything to do with this killing. Whether or not she'd been going with Tommy has nothing to do with this, and as long as I'm sheriff, I'm not about to let the two get confused. If those are Norma's shoes, fine, you take them out of here and put them back where they belong." He looked at the bloody hand prints on the window sill. He reached into his back pocket and took out a handkerchief and wiped the bloody prints from the sill. "There. Now we can focus on setting this family to rest and not have their mind turning on unimportant things."

Had I been there then I would have told him not to take so much upon himself and not to have done that. I think that he did it as much for Ed as for me. Probably more for Ed, I suppose. To tell the God's honest truth, I hardly even remember being in his room after I had gone back that second time and found him there. I didn't remember touching the window sill or taking off my boots.

"We'll talk to her," Dabbs said. "See if she knows anything about this or why he might have done it and we'll just leave it at that."

On the porch Taylor was sitting beside Doctor Lacey on the swing rocking back and forth making an odd keening sound. Dabbs knelt down and took both of her hands in his own. "Taylor," he began. "William and Eda are going to be home soon. They're gonna need you to be strong for both of them and to help them through this."

Looking up vaguely, Taylor she saw Ed standing in the doorway and a flash or recognition shone in her eyes. You!" she shouted. "I thought it was you hiding there in the pump house. I know what that daughter of yours and he'd been doing. Her always sneaking around here in the morning."

Dabbs took Ed by the shoulder and led him quickly down the steps towards his patrol car. "We've done all we can here now, Ed."

They heard a car crunching across the gravel and through the window they saw William Logan's blue Bel Air park next to the ambulance. Taylor Logan pushed herself away from Dr. Lacey and ran to the car as William and Eda stepped out. Eda ran around the side of the car and in through the front door. Dabbs and Ed followed her inside. They tried to prevent her from going in to Tommy's bedroom but she pulled away from them and ran down the hallway. At the door to his room she stood there looking at him without the trace of an expression on her face. She turned to look at Ed with an expression of pure hatred on her face. She walked over to the nightstand beside Tommy's bed and opened the top drawer. There were several pairs of socks rolled neatly beside two carefully folded white t-shirts. Eda pulled out the drawer and upended the contents on the floor before walking wordlessly from the bedroom. That was when I would've been certain that what I had done was right, when she barely took a glance at her brother lying there dead but went looking for his journal. Any doubts of what I'd done would've been gone had I been there then to have seen that.

"What do you make of that?" Dabbs asked.

"Maybe Norma isn't the only one that's left something behind."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I don't know," Ed said.

I was sitting on that low branch of the elm tree that extended way out over the bank of the Wapsi, cooling my feet in the cool flow of the river. They were scraped good from pedaling barefoot, but I don't think that even then I'd yet realized that the reason I was barefoot was that I'd left my new suede boots behind. I would always take my shoes off whenever I visited Tommy and lay them down right there under his bedroom window once he had helped me climb over the sill. The rain had stopped by that then but the ground was still wet and my calves were spattered all over with mud and the hem of my dress was ripped from where I had got it caught in the chain. I held his leather journal in my lap and was running my hands over the smooth leather, oiled and softened to the approximate color of a polished chestnut or buckeye. There was this red satin ribbon marking the last written pages in the journal but I wasn't ready to read that just yet. Starlings and bluejays fought in the trees overhead. There was a small sand dune in the middle of the river; cattails and reedy grasses bent to the flow of the current, higher and faster now following the sudden storm. Here was where I would come to sit, the place beside the boathouse where the river cut deep into the muddy bank and gurgled through a tangle of exposed roots and broken shale. From the time that I had lit out from the Logan's until I'd made it to the edge of the river, everything even today is still pretty much a blank. So it really isn't any wonder that I forgot my boots. But I got his journal away. I suppose we just naturally forget the bad things when they become too much for us.

The sky was a deep azure just like it often gets after a summer storm and was dotted with puffy white cumulus clouds. Tommy could always look up and see things like castles and cathedrals and circus animals, but I never saw much other than just cloud. Sometimes I would wonder if he wasn't just having a good one over on me the times I'd look over and see that smile of his after I'd been trying to make out some Arabian camel wearing a party hat or the like.

Long rows of dun colored stubble from the passage of harvesters lined the field on the other side of the river. In the distance an uneven line of trees indicated the edge of the highway that led back into Hanover. In the other direction was our place. I could even see our barn in the distance low and squat and red and the cluster of new drying bins on our neighbor's farm. Now that the rains had passed, the combines were easing back out onto the fields and moving evenly and slow through the long beryl rows of fully ripened corn. I ran my hands along the edges of his journal and felt the bright brass buckles that fastened along just the sturdy spine. The edges of the pages were tipped in a dark yellow gold leaf and the lower right hand corner was monogrammed with his initials.

Often in the summer I would ride my bike out here just to be by myself and sit beside the river and watch the slow regular movement of it. There was an old boathouse built on the end of an unpainted cedar dock that sloped down towards the river and which was built out over a pile of broken rocks. The foundation had been constructed from heavy misshapen fieldstones and a weathered shingle roof covered the twin parallel berths inside the boathouse. The front was opened to the river and I could see the high water marks on the stones from where the river crested high each spring. Two large swinging doors opened out from the front of the boathouse and reached out onto the river. Boats could be winched up the wooden slides and stored on cable harnesses during the winter. There was a orange bright light hanging on a post out over the water that I could see from my own bedroom window. During the wintertime we would come out there and skate on the river and bring our sleds and then slide them down the boat ramps that led down into the river. There was an old cast iron pot belly stove in the boathouse that we could build a fire in a stay warm standing there out of the wind warming our hands over the grates. We had all grown up with this story about the boy who had sledded down the boat ramp and out onto the ice and had came onto a weak spot and dissappeared down beneath the water as quickly and as silently as a thrown stone will vanish into a snowbank. None of us could remember anything about him or even his name which caused me always to wonder if it ever happened at all.

I walked back to my bicycle and took the canvas messenger bag that held all of my schoolbooks out of the wire basket and emptied them all out on the ground. I put Tommy's journal inside of it and fastened the buckles tight around the edges of the thick satchel. Once I had it wrapped good and tight I shinnied up that big elm tree and scooted out along this real high limb that reached out almost to the sand bar in the middle of the river. There was a deep knot in the side of limb that didn't fill up with rain water or snow as it was at an angle and facing downwind. Never once looking down towards the water, I stuffed the satchel deep into that dark hollow crack and tore some moss off of the bark and packed it in tight. I'd known that it would be safe there until I could've come back to collect it. And I had known even then that it wouldn't do for long and I'd have to come back later and move it to some other safer place. The loose board under my bed where I put some of my other stuff wouldn't do either. I knew people were going to be looking there real soon. My parents didn't raise no fools.

Dabbs and Ed drove down the road in silence until they came to Barrow's Esso at the junction of the interstate and rural route that continued on into downtown Hanover. Sitting right there at a major crossroads, Barrow did a good business in both gasoline and groceries. He also had a deli counter that was as good as any of the dress up and set down restaurants in town. Whenever I would go there as a little kid with my momma, Barrow would always hand me me a slice of baloney, or cheese, and tell me that what I was wearing that day was real pretty and that the fellas would have to look out for me some day. I thought he looked like that guy with the talking horse on television, Mr. Ed. That guy Wilber Post. It was still a kind of ritual of mine to stop by Barrow's on my way out to the Wapsi and pick up some sodas to take along. Lord knows how he didn't notice me being in there without my shoes earlier that morning. He would always look over the counter at people when they come through the door. There was a sign over the cash register that read "no shoes no shirt no service" and he honestly meant it. One side of his store was where he displayed bulk grain and seeds. There was a high shelf of bird feeders and wind chimes and outdoor lanterns and candles in the musty back room where he kept assorted tools and a supply hardware. Out behind his place was a winding dirt trail that traced the edge of the Wapsi all the way to where it widened into the Mississippi, and that's where we would usually ride our bikes in the summer from morning till night.

Dabbs slowed the patrol car and eased it down into the rutted gravel parking lot. "I need to collect and order for the station and fill up the tank," Dabbs said. "Won't be a minute and then we can be on our way." He parked under the low stucco carport that extended from the front of the building over the gas pumps and stepped out into the shade. He leaned against the side of the car as he filled the tank. Ed climbed out and put some change into the soda machine against the unpainted cinder block storefront. Crows wheeled in the sky high above them and a gust of wind lifted a dust devil from from the side of the highway. "Now, not everyone is strong in the same way or in the same capacity," Dabbs said. "Got a theory that people don't kill themselves because they want to die. They kill themselves because they just don't want to live anymore."

"Doesn't that just about come to the same thing?" Another line of thunderclouds was forming along the horizon and the sky to the west had darkened to a gunmetal gray. The wind had again changed direction and there was a dull rumble of thunder in the distance.

"No it doesn't," Dabbs said. "You remember all those Japanese soldiers we found in the caves on Iwo. They didn't take their own lives because they wanted to die. They just couldn't have lived with the dishonor of their defeat."

"You might be right."

"To you or me it might seem that Tommy had a lot going for him," Dabbs said thoughtfully. "That architecture scholarship. Probably pretty soon getting engaged to the Desetty girl. Ellen. You know her folks have money. Always have had and probably always will they way they hang on to a dollar. Maybe he had too many things going towards the good that he just couldn't handle the pressure." Ed looked at him doubtfully. "Consider how when you're throwing a real hot game down at the bowling alley. Or maybe for you, Ed, horseshoes. You know how the pressure and tension keeps on building up and building up and you wonder when one of them balls is finally going to go into the gutter because sooner or later they always do. That's just part of the game. That's why I think he did it. Too many things seem to have been going too well for him and he couldn't handle the anticipation."

"He didn't leave a note then?"

"None that I could find," Dabbs said. "Neither the first time I was there nor the second when we were there together."

"I heard the pumps and wondered who it was filling up without paying for it first. Had to be either thieves, the mayor, or the sheriff." Barrow said. He was standing in the doorway wiping his hands on his apron. "Afternoon Dabbs. Ed."

"Didn't mean to wake you from your afternoon nap, John," Dabbs said.

"I've got those groceries made up for the jailhouse just like you said," Barrow said. "Vale never came along to get it this morning. But I guess you've both been fairly busy today."

"You heard about that, huh?"

"From almost everyone that's been through here most of the day. How's William Logan taking it all?"

"About like you would expect him to take it. Like anyone would. Taylor too," Dabbs said.

"Nothing perishable in the order of yours, if you wanted to take it with you now. Put in a couple of Pabsts' for you too," Barrow said. "And what brings you out here Ed? You get rained off the side of your billboard?"

"I thought I would but it just missed me," Ed said. "Maybe a few sprinkles but I was real lucky to have missed out. The way that storm seemed to come out of nowhere would've washed off much of what I'd already done."

"Saw that new signboard you've been working on, Ed, for the Dekalb," Barrow said. "Looks pretty good from the road. Colorful."

"I'll be glad when that one's finished. Faces directly to the west and gets the full sun in the afternoon. Hotter than hell up there sometimes."

Through the heat shimmer lifting from the oil streaked highway, Lacey's black Henney drove slowly along the highway past Barrow's. The red revolving bubblegum lights were on but his siren was turned off. The driver raised a hand out the window in silent greeting as he drove past.

"Well I suppose that was him in there then," Dabbs said. "Lights and siren on and going fast, it's an ambulance; lights on and going slow, it's a hearse."

"Well you just missed Norma," Barrow said. "She road past here early this morning. Stopped in to get a Coca Cola like she sometimes does."

"What time was that about?" Dabs asked.

"Oh, maybe nine or ten, I suppose. She didn't have too much to say. Seemed distracted and anxious to be on her way."

"Did she say where she was going?"

"Nope. I don't recall that she did say. On her way to school maybe? It's Friday."

Dabbs finished filling the tank and replaced the nozzle. They all three went into the grocery. "You sure it was before noon that she came by and not after?" Ed asked. One long display case filled with amber wheels of canvas wrapped cheeses and deli sausages and various kinds of sliced meats ran the entire length of the grocery and separated the front from the rear storage room. Overhead a metal ceiling fan turned slow. There was a large yellow tabby sleeping soundly on a cushion beside the potbelly stove. Large wooden barrels of birdseed, roofing nails, and pickles lined the farther wall, behind the cash register, and the unfinished hardwood floor was covered with a light coating of fresh sawdust. A well worn groove in the wooden floorboards extended from the door to the cash register in a straight line.

"Real sure," Barrow said. "Along about noon people started coming in with the news about the Logan boy." He began to shave several slices of salami into his hand and laying them carefully beside the cheese on the clean waxed paper. He then spread a thick layer of brown mustard on both slices of bread." Weak sunlight filtered into the room through three large floor to ceiling windows. Barrow stepped behind the counter and took a large wheel of cheddar and a log of summer sausage from the display case and laid them side by side on a sheet of waxed paper next to a large stainless steal deli slicer. As he shaved thick slices of cheese into his hand he motioned to a large cardboard box on the end of the long Formica countertop, "There's the stuff that won't go bad. I'll put the rest of the stuff together for you before I head out." Heaped high in a wooden pen in another corner a large pyramid of Muscatine melons sweated in the humidity. Ed walked over and picked up one of the melons and rubbed his hands over the smooth green pied surface thoughtfully.

"Still hot mustard and onions for both of you? Hold on a second and I'll send you on your way with a couple of sandwiches. I suspect that neither one of you got lunch today. So why are you so interested in Norma being through here? It's a rare day she doesn't stop in on the way to or from school." He passed the sandwiches over the countertop. Each was wrapped in heavy white butcher's paper and fastened with masking tape.

"Norma didn't show up at school today," Ed said. "She and Tommy were always real good friends, and now with what's happened, I'd be a little more settled if I could track her down." Drying his hands on his apron, Barrow came around from behind the deli counter and picked up the bushel basket of groceries and carried it outside and set it down behind the patrol car. Dabbs opened the rear passenger doors and set it inside on the floorboards.

"Come to think of it, there was something maybe a little odd about all of it. Other than her just seeming to be off in the clouds. Distracted. Now that I think back I remember that she wasn't wearing any shoes."