Butcher

40

New Madrid County

Meara was up before dawn and on Sharon Kamen's case for real. He watched the rain break before sunrise and the red ball came up casting fiery rays of scarlet, crimson, pink, purple, lilac, and lavender light across the ribboned rain clouds of dark blue and gray.

Sharon was dressed, luckily, had hung up the phone moments before, and was writing a quick note, when someone knocked on her door. She was genuinely taken aback to see Ray standing there.

“Hope I didn't wake you?” he said, a polite questioning tone in his voice.

Yeah, she thought, I always sleep fully clothed. She shook her head no.

“There's flash flood watches forecast and it's probably gonna get a little hairy around here. I talked to this old boy I know, me and him go way back, and I asked him about this guy who lives in New Madrid. He's about seventy. I told your dad about him but I didn't think to put his name on your list. He's a river rat. Got these two boys meaner'n snakes, and a couple girls worse than they are. They poach. Dynamite fish.” He then said a word she didn't recognize. “I know they jacklight, bunch dogs—pick up strays, all that good stuff. If he was the guy and your dad braced him about it, well I think we might ought to go to Sheriff Pritchett with it, the guy in New Madrid, too."

“We?” She still didn't get it.

“There's another old guy in New Madrid would be worth talking to, and this would be a chance to drive in. You might have to boat there if you don't go now.” He made boating in sound like something incredibly tedious and complicated. “Better we go ahead and get started, if you think you want to."

“Let me think for a second,” she said. He had a point. She'd barely been able to hear on the phone. That would probably be the next thing—the phones would go. “Maybe we could just call down there?” But he was moving toward the parking lot.

“Water's already in a lot of the terminals. Come on, Sharon. Might be your only shot for a while if that river pushes on in."

She got her purse and slammed the door. “I need to come back right away, though, Ray. I've got scads of stuff to get done today.” Her tone was not particularly gracious and she didn't care.

Neither did he, apparently, as he didn't bother to reply. She got in the truck, which didn't seem quite as dirty as it had the day before, and shut the passenger door. A young, male, adenoidal jock's voice sing-songed through rip ‘n’ read weather news:

“It's the wettest on record. Thirteen inches for the month. We had our wettest day yesterday, with eight point twenty-seven inches. Flash-flood watches forecast for the Missouri Bootheel and southern III—” Meara stabbed at the station selector but it was as if the second station were an unbroken continuation of the first.

“—above flood stage at Frankfort and portions of the parkway are closed this morning. Evacuation is under way along the Cumberland where many communities are flooded as the rivers reach record levels. The flooding—” he hit the button again and got some pleasant music, which she wished he'd left on, hit it again, and a female counterpart of the first two male voices added her two cents’ worth.

“—moderate to heavy rainfall forecast. Heavy echoes on the radar, with rain moving south and record heat on the way. Eighty-four in Tampa yesterday. Atlanta had seventy-nine. St. Louis is cold this morning with—” He killed the power to the box of bad news.

“Bayou Ridge, where the farm is,” he said, “is in what they call the spillway or the floodway. The Army Corps of Engineers have this deal they're talking about doing, this project—” he couldn't get it out. It stuck in his throat like a big, sharp bone. He swallowed. “If the river reaches a certain point they cut the levee and my ground is at the bottom of the Mississippi."

“That's terrible, Ray! Can they do that?"

“The Army Corps of Engineers?” He laughed and looked over at her as if she were kidding him.

“Am I crazy or are we going opposite from Charleston?” She was totally turned around.

“Yeah."

“I thought you said we should go talk to Sheriff Pritchett in Charleston?"

“Yeah, later. We're going to see the New Madrid County sheriff, Gunny Hughes. New Madrid is in New Madrid County. We're still in Mississippi County. Then we can run on by the old man's place, the retired guy."

“Okay. Hey, Ray? Thanks.” It was the first civil thing she'd said to him. Sharon realized she'd been bitchy, prickly, overly sensitive, and really didn't give a big Scarlett damn. The weight of her dad's absence was now a pair of blue ghosts that sat perched on each shoulder.

Women, even beautiful ones such as Sharon, have ugly days. Short days. Fat days. Bitchy days. Drab days. Stupid days. Bad hair days. This morning, all of them had come around and snuck in bed with her while she slept, and she'd woken up wearing all those undesirable personas. She also felt remarkably dense.

“No big deal,” he said.

It took about twenty minutes to reach New Madrid, with water standing in the surrounding fields and the road ditches completely filled. It appeared that another light rain would push everything under water. The truck had to slow several times as Meara negotiated fairly deep water over the road.

He finally pulled up in front of the New Madrid County Jail. “You don't need to come in,” he said. “I can handle this if you want to wait."

“Not necessary, Ray. We'll go together, okay?” She had come down off her high horse, and Meara had decided to give her all the real help he could and cut out the nonsense. They went in with the mutual feeling the air had cleared between them.

The jail appeared to be a one-man show that morning, with a single male officer behind the front desk acting as clerk, receptionist, secretary, dispatcher, and factotum law-enforcement representative. Gunny Hughes would be back shortly and what did they want to see the sheriff “in reference to?"

Meara gave a general summary to the deputy jack-of-all-trades while the occupants of the jail watched them, or seemed to, from a bank of television monitors behind the dispatcher's switchboard.

They left and called on Dr. Fletcher, but he was asleep and could they come back later? They could. When they returned to the sheriff's headquarters, Hughes was in, along with three other men, all of whom devoured Sharon with their eyes as Ray talked to the lawman in charge. Hughes asked her to have a seat while he took Ray inside his office, and, even on a short, fat, drab, ugly, bad hair day, Sharon Kamen sitting down and demurely crossing her legs had to be the most erotic spectacle ever put on display in the New Madrid County Sheriff's Office.

She blocked her surroundings out and sat there, very still, on hold, as phrases drifted out to her from the closed office.

“—called Bob Petergill in Cape and he's—"

“—that ole boy's a complete butt-hole! So is—"

“—keep her out of this. Could be risky to—"

“Okay, Raymond,” the sheriff said, opening the door and shaking hands with Meara. “I appreciate you comin’ by.” He leveled cop's eyes on Sharon. “And you, Miss Kamen, we'll stay close to this. You going to be staying in Bayou City, or you going back home to Kansas City?"

“I don't know, sheriff. I guess I'll stay here until I find Dad,” she said.

“I understand,” he said, and gave her a friendly smile. Then they were in the truck and driving back toward the Fletcher residence. Meara parked in front. They still had a few minutes to kill. Apparently, the sheriff had been open with Ray about the case, and, for whatever reason, had excluded her from his counsel.

Sharon thought that living in this part of the country would be, for a woman, like living in feudal Japan or something, but she kept the thought unspoken.

“What was the story?” she asked Meara. “I just heard fragments."

“The river rat thing—he didn't buy it a bit. They got an eyeball on ‘em all the time. He didn't go for my theory at all. On the other hand, I gotta’ tell you, Sharon, he's very concerned about your dad having come in and tried to run an investigation on his own.

“He thinks something might have happened. In other words, he thinks it's entirely possible that your dad found the guy."

She felt the words clutch at her heart. She didn't say anything, and Ray continued. “He's also concerned about you asking questions. Going around to the same places your dad went. They're in a funny position. It's not their place to tell you that you can't, since there's no proof any crime has been committed, but what he said was, this woman needs to be careful. In other words, stay out of it and let the law do their job.

“The feds are already deep into it. They been looking for your dad from the start, way I get it. So I said to him, whose case is this, anyway? Jimmie's? Yours? The FBI's? Kick Pritchett's? And he said the answer is yes. The sheriffs, him and Kick, they run the whole show down here. In these little communities they rule; they run the Highway Patrol, the local police department or Public Safety people, whoever. That's the way it works in Missouri. A crime on private property, a missing-persons case, or a homicide, the sheriff rules. He said if the FBI wants to take over a federal crime they can, but right now, since there is no physical evidence, the element of jurisdiction doesn't enter into it.” He added, as softly as he could, “Without proof of a crime, is what he was saying."

He brought her back to the motel the same way they'd come, after a brief meeting with Dr. Fletcher, who'd filled them in on her father's visit. He repeated his admonitions about ministers and salesmen, and, again, pointed out Dr. Royal as the source for a list of the “real old timers” still around. On the way back up the set-back levee she asked Ray who Royal was and would it be worth a visit to talk with him.

“Nah. Old Doe Royal's a fine feller. He was our family doctor for about a hundred years. I got sick when I came back from overseas and Doc Royal helped me. He's good people but I doubt if he could give us anything. He retired a couple years ago, but he got bored fishin’ and went back to work. I think he sees patients one or two days a week or something. He's got to be seventy if he's a day."

Sharon added the name to her list.

“It wouldn't hurt to go see him, I guess,” Meara said.

They were quiet for a long time, driving along the levee high above the rising river's overflow. They pulled into the motel parking lot and he turned to her. “Well, I know you got a lot to do and so do I, so, I'll see you sometime.” Get real, he told himself, looking at a woman he knew he could never have. “Be careful, Sharon.” You're history, Ray.

“I sure do appreciate everything. It was really sweet of you. Thanks a lot,” she said, getting out of the truck.

“Hey, no problem. Look, if I don't see you again, good luck, okay?"

“Thanks,” she said, slamming the pickup door with an empty heart. He nodded and pulled back out into traffic. She closed the motel door and was shocked to find she felt devastated at the idea of not seeing him again. It was so off the wall, such an alien emotion, that she sighed and slumped back against the metal door, feeling short, fat, ugly, stupid, and now, alone and more than a little confused.

She was so fearful for her dad she'd begun hallucinating rednecks. She shook it off and got on with her day.