John Sandford: Mad River

“What’s your next move?”

“We’re having a seance over at the elementary school with everyone who knew Welsh and Sharp. If they’re running, I need to know which way they’re going.”

“Good luck with that,” Davenport said. “I’ll get things going here. Stay in touch.”

Virgil downloaded Jimmy Sharp’s and Becky Welsh’s driver’s license photos to his cell phone, and spent a few minutes looking at them. Jimmy was a kid who a lot of people would have said was handsome-he had the cheekbones and the squared-off chin, but there was something about the cast of his features that wasn’t quite right: he looked sneaky. Becky should have been pretty: blond, small nose, big eyes, but there was a disappointment about her face-a disappointment with life-that made her look sad, and a little too hard.

But then, he thought, maybe makeup could fix it.

The gathering at Gerald Ford Elementary School brought in about thirty townspeople, who were sitting on metal folding chairs, talking quietly among themselves, when Virgil arrived. Virgil had told Duke about the silver pickup, and Duke had called back to his office and had an alert broadcast through the local sheriffs’ association, which covered eight counties in the western part of the state.

Virgil was wearing the black sport coat and collared shirt he’d worn to church, which passed for fairly sober wear in a country town. He smiled at the crowd when he came in, with Duke trailing behind, and picked up a folded chair, shook it open, and planted it in front of the group.

He introduced himself, and Duke, and said, “Y’all may have heard what’s going on, here. We’re trying to find Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh. I can tell you that Mr. and Mrs. Welsh and the senior Mr. Sharp were all found shot to death. We haven’t been able to find Jimmy or Becky. We don’t know whether they were involved in the shootings, or if they might be victims, or maybe they don’t even know about them. Anyway, we need to find them, and since you all know one of them, or both of them, we were hoping you could throw out some ideas about where they might be, or might be going, or who we might contact to find that out.”

A square-faced man with straw-colored hair raised a hand and asked, “Isn’t it a little. . abnormal. . to be talking to everybody at once like this?”

Virgil said, “This is an abnormal situation. We were hoping that if you folks listen to each other, and mix it up a little, we’ll spark off some ideas. We’re brainstorming.”

A woman off to one side muttered, “I don’t know nothing about this.”

Virgil said, “Look, what kind of a kid was Jim? When you knew him? Who knew him best?”

Everyone looked around, and eventually most of them focused on a young man who stirred nervously and then said, “We used to hang out, some. Not like we were good friends.”

Virgil: “Was he a good kid, bad kid, middle-of-the-road?”

The young man said, “He was. . okay. . most of the time.”

Somebody snorted, then an older man said, “Oh, horseshit.”

That got them going.

Jimmy Sharp was a thin young man of average height, with long black hair and what one man said was “a joker’s face, like the joker on a playing card.” That seemed mostly to mean Sharp’s smile, which often formed itself into a sneer, usually with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

A man named Ralph, who identified himself as one of Sharp’s teachers through sixth grade, said that he’d begun bullying other children in third or fourth grade, after he’d been held back the first time. “He was one of those kids who just started getting his hormones early, and probably got whacked around by his father, and he never got along with books, and that all turned him into a little punk. His mother, whose name was Jolene, if I’m not mistaken, took off from here about that time, and hasn’t been back, as far as I know.”

The crowd agreed that she hadn’t been back, and that she was an O’Hara, and the whole family was gone now since Bernice died. None of them had ever come back, and Jimmy had no other relatives around.

“He used to hang out at the Surprise. Butch thinks he was stealing from there, but never caught him. He wasn’t smart in school, but he could be clever when he wanted to be,” Harvey said.

“What’d he steal?” Duke asked.

“Ask Butch.”

“I hate to accuse somebody,” said an old man in an old blue suit, with a thin, prairie-dried face.

“You Butch?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. Kids would come in, you know, steal candy, try to steal cigarettes or comic books, or get me looking one way, and steal a Penthouse from under the counter. I’d catch them, and call up their parents, and that’d end that. But Jimmy. . I never caught him because I think he was stealing food ,” Butch said. “He’d hang around outside until I went to get something for somebody, and then he’d slip into the store and stick something in his pants, then go on over and look at the magazines and comics. I wouldn’t see him until he was right there, and I’d be watching him like a hawk, and he’d never take anything. But I think he was stealing. And I think he was stealing stuff like Dinty Moore stew. It seemed like I’d never sell that stuff, I’d never see it coming across the counter, but at the end of the month, it’d pretty much be gone.”

“But you hired him to work there. .”

“Yeah, against my better judgment. He got out of school and couldn’t catch on with anybody-not even the army wanted him-so finally I gave him a job,” Butch said. “He lasted about a month. He kept bumping heads with the other kids, and I had to let him go. I won’t tell you what he called me when I gave him the news.”

“You afraid of him?” Duke asked.

“No, not exactly. I never felt like he’d come after me, but I did think that there might have been a lot of reasons for him being like he was. . but, when all was said and done, he was sort of a bad kid. Just a mean, bad kid, who liked to see other people get hurt. Like I said, he might have had his reasons.”

“You know his old man?” Virgil asked.

“Of course. I know everybody in town. He was grown-up Jimmy Sharp.”

A woman said, “An asshole.”

Somebody else said, “That’s right.”

The crowd was getting into it now. “How about Becky?” Virgil asked.

“Wild kid,” somebody said. “She was going to New York or somewhere, to be an actress.”

“She was pretty,” somebody else said. “Had a face like an angel, when she was in grade school here.”

“She ever go to New York?”

“Nobody from here goes to New York,” Butch said. “They all come back to the Surprise.”

A woman stood up, jeans and a turquoise-colored blouse, with a piece of silver Indian jewelry at her neck. She’d been sitting next to a man with a long brown ponytail, and Virgil tagged them as the town liberals.

She said, “Jimmy and Becky are like a lot of kids from here-they’ve got no hope. There aren’t any jobs here, they’re not sophisticated enough or well-educated enough to move to the big city and work there, they see all these things on TV that they can never have. They give up. We don’t give them hope. We don’t even give them anything to work with.”

A heavyset man in a jean jacket said, “Come on, Sue. Plenty of good kids come from here. They just aren’t two of them.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Earl. Your boys are gonna get a farm that’s worth, what, right now. . three or four million dollars? All they have to do is drive a tractor long enough, and they’ll be rich. But most people here don’t have a farm to give to their kids. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Virgil jumped in: “That’s all fine, but we really can’t change the culture in the next couple of days. I need to know more about these kids-what they’re like, where they’re probably going.”