There were inevitable clashes, the nastiest, I’m told, coming when two members of the school board pronounced themselves “born again” and proceeded to list twenty-six novels, including The Great Gatsby and Catch-22, that had to be stricken from the high-school curriculum. If nothing else, this move got all the young professionals interested in the governance of the small community where they lived. They announced that two years from now at this time, they would be fielding their own school-board candidates, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be people who found Mark Twain “sinful.”
Welcome to New Hope, located in the northeast corner of the state, pop. 14, 683.
There was a motel right downtown, a good base to work from, pretty much equidistant between the old New Hope and the new housing developments in the hills surrounding it.
The drive had been four hours, so I needed food and coffee. I decided to try the downtown to get a human sense of the place. The downtown of any place, no matter its size, is where you can get your quickest sketch of a town’s sociology.
I had two eggs, basted, two pieces of wheat toast with raspberry jam, one glass of orange juice, and three cups of coffee.
I ate these at the counter of a tiny place called Dickie’s Diner where, nearing noon, most of the customers were male, roughly half of them dressed in the kind of suits and sports coats you get at Sears, the other half dressed in uniforms of denim, khaki, cotton, all bearing the caps and sew-on badges of gas companies and electric companies and bug-spraying companies. Mixed in with these folks were farmers, all weather-lined faces and big knuckly hands wrapped around chipped white coffee mugs. Not a single young professional in sight.
The talk, as I picked it up in snatches, was about a new state sales tax the legislature was proposing and what a bunch of worthless idiots that legislature happened to be, and how bad most of the National League teams looked this year, and — this from the businessmen — how the young professionals thought they were too good to shop in downtown New Hope. “They do it all in Cedar Rapids. Not one goddamned bit of support for us!”
Near the end, just as the third cup of coffee was starting to put a little twitch into my fingers, I heard a name that sounded familiar.
“Eve McNally find that husband of hers yet?”
A snort of laughter. “Not unless she knows how to crawl through sewers.”
“How a man can do that to a woman like Eve sure beats me.”
“I really thought the last time he went down to Iowa City to dry out, he’d be all right.”
“Lasted two months. Two damn months is all. Then he was back to the bottle.”
These were two of the suits sitting at the counter. McNally was one of the men mentioned in Mike Peary’s letter as a possible suspect. They had me curious. He appeared to be missing, presumably on a drunk. From Mike’s profile, a man who drank a lot — maybe to suppress the memories of what he’d done — would fit perfectly.
I paid my bill and went outside and stood on the corner for a few minutes, enjoying the spring air.
There was a phone booth across the street. I walked over and looked up the name McNALLY, RICHARD.
I got the address and drove out there. The town was laid out on an extensive grid broken only by the public square downtown. Railroad tracks cut north-south.
The houses were eclectic, everything from small Queen Annes to what they used to call “Corn Belt” homes, square white clapboards of two stories with the inevitable squeaking swing on the inevitable front porch. The pastel prefabs that came in after WWII looked a lot older than the houses built eighty, one hundred years ago.
The McNally place was a small white clapboard sitting in the middle of a green, green acre with a windbreak of shade trees and an aged but sprightly red barn in back. It was out on the north edge of town. The yard was carefully mown and well-tended, magnolia trees and apple blossoms charging the air headily.
I knocked. Inside a dog barked, and then a soft voice shushed it. And then she was there, framed in the glass of the storm door. She looked to be about my age, and probably not quite at her ideal weight, maybe five, six pounds over on a very slight frame, with silken dark hair and silken dark eyes, the left one spoiled by the fading remains of a black eye. She looked scared and miserable but even so, appealing in a kind of sad way, the sort of woman you try hard to make happy because you suspect she’s never been happy before.
Of course, unhappiness was a tradition among pioneer women out here. Despite all the macho cowboy movies, women pretty much kept things running on the frontier. Sure, the men had to plow and till the fields and hunt the meat, but study up on pioneer women, and you’ll see why the suicide rate was so high among them — eighteen-, twenty-hour days seven days a week during which they did everything from making dyes for coloring cloth from barks and berries and roots; making clothing on a loom; making all meals; tanning hides and cutting patterns out for shoes; washing, ironing, mending; taking total responsibility for a brood of kids that probably ran to seven or eight; giving her man sex on demand; being priest, doctor, teacher; and in her “spare time” pitching in and helping with the planting and, later on, the harvest.
The woman in the doorway looked like a lineal descendent of those pioneer women.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“That’s a nice dog.” And it was, a golden retriever with a sweet-sad face that made you smile while it was breaking your heart. Beyond Eve, I got a glimpse of an inexpensively but very handsomely appointed home. The homey smell of baking came from the kitchen.
“Sara. She’s the gentlest animal I’ve ever known.” She relaxed enough to lean down and pet the slender dog on the head. Sara’s tongue licked her fingers pinkly with quick gooey love. “Why can’t everybody be as sweet as you, honey?” the woman asked her dog. She stood straight and looked at me. “I’ve got some cookies in the oven, so I’m in kind of a hurry. Can I help you with something?”
“I’m looking for Richard McNally.”
Fear became more pronounced in her eyes. “Richard McNally is my husband.”
“My name’s Hokanson. I’m a free-lance writer.”
“I don’t know what you could want with my husband. He sells gourmet honey.”
“But I understand he travels.”
“Yes,” she said. Now suspicion joined fear. She seemed to stiffen her entire body inside her designer jeans and prim white blouse. “Of course he travels. How else would he make his sales?”
“Well, that’s why I’m in town for the next few days. I’m doing a piece on how small Iowa towns are becoming bedroom communities, with a lot of people commuting to their work.”
“Oh. I see.” That seemed to calm her some.
“Maybe I could find him at the office?”
She shook her head. “No. He’s — gone. Anyway, he doesn’t have an office. He just works out of the house here.”
“I see.”
“What’s your name?”
“Hokanson. Jim Hokanson.”
“And you’re with—?”
“I’m a free lancer. I’m writing this for Fenroe Publishing. I’m on a kind of retainer setup with them.”
I dug out a card and handed it over to her. Obviously, she wasn’t as yet completely satisfied with my little tale. She’d probably dial that Chicago number and probably talk to somebody at good old Fenroe Publishing, Inc., but she’d probably never figure out that it was nothing more than a small room in a small office building in a bad section of Chicago used by the Agency as a cover for many of its domestic people. Even though I was officially separated, they still let me use it when I needed to.