Eve laughed through her tears. “Good old Sara.”
“She sure is,” I said.
Eve looked up at me, a sad stricken glance. “Please find my daughter. Please. You don’t know how bad I wanted to call Jane Avery. But I can’t. So you’re my only hope. My only one.”
“Maybe I’m getting closer,” I said.
She reached up and took my hand. “I really appreciate all this. Don’t think I don’t.”
“You’d do the same thing for me.”
And she would, too.
I leaned down, got her pillows straight behind her head, kissed her on the cheek again, got the washcloth straight on her forehead and said, “I’ll try and call you early this evening. Let you know how things are going.”
She gave my hand a squeeze and then sighed deeply and closed her eyes.
Maybe she’d take a little nap, after all.
5
I spent the next few hours in the old stone library, the one with the lion and the gargoyle respectively guarding the entrance.
People came through the front doors knocking rain off their hats and shaking out plastic raincoats and smelling of fine chill air.
I sat in the reading room looking through back issues of the New Hope Clarion, which was the weekly paper. I had dug out the papers from five years ago.
I saw stories that made me feel I was in some kind of time warp. Pleasantly so. No banner headlines about serial rapists or shootouts at drug busts or four-year-olds mysteriously snatched from playgrounds... No, here the headlines ran to tractor pulls and VFW picnics, to softball tournaments and concerts in the town square. There was a great old Twilight Zone episode about a commuter who looked out his train window every day and fancied that he saw a peaceful turn-of-the-century town there just waiting for him to visit. So one night, sickened by a grisly job in advertising and an equally grisly wife, he jumps off the moving train... and dies. And when he wakes up, there he is, in the turn-of-the-century town. There are a lot of such towns in Iowa even today, and you don’t need to jump from a moving train to find them, either.
After an hour or so, I took a break, ambling down the hall to the restroom and then to a small room where a coffee vending machine stood next to a Frigidaire from the early 1960s, on the face of which was a sign that read PEPSI 25 cents. Who could pass up a bargain like that? The room had three small folding tables with a few chairs designated to each table. It was a room for sack lunches and lazy lunch-hour gossip.
While I was sitting there drinking my bottle of pop, a white-haired elderly woman wearing a flowered summery dress and a cute little straw hat bought a Pepsi of her own and sat at the table next to mine.
We smiled at each other in the way of polite strangers, and then I decided that if she was a long-time citizen here, she just might be able to help me.
After introducing myself, I said, “Have you lived here a long time?”
“Oh, my, yes,” she smiled. “Nearly seventy-five years.”
“It’s a wonderful little town.”
She laughed. “You must be from the city.”
“These days I am.”
“People my age who grew up in towns like these have a lot of great memories but not everything was so wonderful.”
“Oh?”
“Well, we didn’t have a hospital here until 1932, for one thing. A lot of people died by the time somebody could get them to Cedar Rapids. And for another thing, if you lived on a farm, the way my folks did, you didn’t have running water and electricity until about the same time the hospital was built. And the state didn’t get around to building good roads until well into World War Two. But the worst of it were the outhouses. There’re a lot of jokes about them these days but believe me, back when you were a young girl trying to be a proper lady, outhouses were no fun at all, especially on winter mornings.”
I laughed. “You make it sound pretty bad.”
“No. I just make it sound realistic. It was a much better world back then, but you sure had a lot of inconveniences.”
I coughed. Getting drenched while ducking bullets was probably going to net me a nice strong head cold.
“Did you ever know a man named Brindle around here?”
“Stan Brindle?”
“Why, yes. Stan Brindle.”
“Sure I knew him. Most folks did. He was a pretty prosperous farmer up until the late eighties,” she said, sipping her Pepsi.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Oh?”
“What put him out of business, I mean. So suddenly.”
“Well, it’s no secret. The same thing that put a lot of other farmers around here out of business. He came out of the seventies looking very good on paper but owing the bank a lot of money. In the old days, a farmer could always borrow against the next year’s harvest if he needed to. But credit was drying up everywhere.”
“So he went bankrupt?”
She nodded. “That and some trouble.”
Which is what I had been looking for in the newspaper stacks — the trouble Stan Brindle had gotten into.
“Drugs,” she said.
“Selling them, you mean?”
She shook her head, looking old-lady elegant as she did so.
“Not selling them. But letting drug dealers use his farm to store their drugs and have some of their meetings. Cousin of his from Davenport, I believe, he was the one actually running the drugs.”
“They got caught?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Did Brindle go to prison?”
She frowned. “He made it as far as county jail. He was in there two nights and he hanged himself with a belt he wasn’t supposed to have. It was pretty sad. I knew Stan ever since he’d been a little boy. He was a big dreamer, and sometimes he could be a braggart, but he wasn’t really a bad boy. Not really. In fact, he was pretty much straight until he met Reverend Roberts.”
“The same Reverend Roberts who’s in town now?”
She smirked. “The one and only. After he started getting into so much financial trouble, Stan and his wife decided that they needed to start going to church again. You know how people do when they’re desperate. ‘I don’t want to hear a peep out of you, God, unless I get in trouble.’ That sort of attitude. Well, anyway, they started going to church there and then they started socializing with the reverend and his wife. And the reverend started spending a lot of his spare time out at the farm, hunting and things like that. That was what he said, anyway. But what really happened was that he started having an affair with Stan’s wife, who was one of those very pretty, shy little women who always wound up getting dominated by their men. Rachael, her name was. Anyway, one night things got so bad — apparently he’d caught them in bed — that Stan went over to the reverend’s house with a shotgun. Took a couple of shots, too, but missed. Law got called in and everybody in town pretty much knew what happened and Rachael moved away, went back to Springfield, Illinois, which was where she was from originally. It was after that that Stan got caught up in the drug thing with his cousin from Davenport.”
“But you say that the reverend used to spend a lot of time at the farm?”
She nodded. “A lot.”
If that was the case, the good reverend would know a good place to bury bodies he needed to get rid of, bodies belonging to young girls he’d molested while filming them performing illegal sex acts. Then, for the first time, I thought of Mike Peary’s letter to Nora, in which Mike detailed how several girls who’d visited New Hope had later been murdered. Traveling around the countryside and killing young girls would be no trouble for a man who was already traveling anyway.