Charlaine Harris: Crimes by Moonlight

The old man gave a brief wave toward a smokehouse in a far corner of the yard. “Right over there. What’s your pleasure? Hickory smoked or honey cured?”

“ Hickory smoked’ll do.”

The old man nodded but didn’t move. He studied D’Angelo carefully. “Wherebouts you from? Cuz you’re not from around here.”

“You neither,” D’Angelo said.

“We’re talking about you right now.” The old man’s grip tightened on the shotgun.

“ Nebraska,” D’Angelo said. “Place called Hixton.”

“Hixton?” The old man leaned forward. “Son, it’s not ham you came for. What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

“About what?

“Five missing boys in Hixton.”

“Hixton was a long time ago and far away from here.”

“Then there’s no harm in talking.”

“What’s your name?”

“Martin.”

“That a last name?”

“Last name’s D’Angelo. And you’re Albert German.”

“Why you want to know about Hixton?”

“I’m a newspaper reporter, Mr. Gorman. I’m working on a story.”

“No one cares about Hixton. Too long ago.” He was more than seventy, with a face parched by the sun. The squint of his eyes may also have been due to the sun, but D’Angelo thought not. “Ah, what the hell,” Gorman finally said, and beckoned his visitor forward.

There was another chair on the porch. D’Angelo took it, wondering if it was where the young woman sat with the old man.

“How’d you find me?” Gorman asked.

“It’s what I do. Find people. Find things. Find the truth.”

“The truth?” Gorman laughed, a sound as parched as his face. “People don’t want the truth. If they looked straight at the truth, it’d scorch their eyeballs right off their skulls.”

Several swine trotted out from a small structure inside the pen D’Angelo had seen on his approach. The animals came to the fence and stuck their pink snouts between the rails. Beyond the pen lay the marsh, which stretched away in all directions under the dismal sky.

D’Angelo said, “It would be difficult for someone to come at you without being seen.”

“Damn near impossible,” Gorman agreed.

“Twenty years ago, you left Hixton in a great hurry. What were you afraid of, Mr. Gorman? And what are you afraid of still?”

Through that squint of his eyes, the old man studied the marsh. He finally said, “What do you know about Hixton?”

This is what D’Angelo knew and what he told Gorman.

In the fall of 1933, a teenage boy named Lester Bennett attended a dance held in the gymnasium at Hixton Senior High School. He’d gone without a date. A shy boy, he hadn’t danced with anyone. He’d left alone and had never made it home.

Two months later another boy, Skip Grogan, age sixteen, went out at 4:00 a.m. to do his morning newspaper route. He was a quiet but conscientious kid. No friends to speak of. An only child, and his mother doted on him. He delivered half the papers that morning, from State Street to Main, but delivered nothing after that. Like Lester Bennett, he simply vanished.

In February a kid named Jason Weller went for a hayride sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. He was an awkward kid who reluctantly accompanied his cousin, a girl in need of a date. They nestled in the hay of the wagon with lots of other teenagers. Afterward, they drank hot chocolate and ate sugar donuts around a bonfire. Then he walked his cousin home under a full moon, said good night, and was never seen again.

The people of Hixton were understandably upset. They raised a hue and cry and demanded to know why the authorities didn’t have a clue about the missing boys. The local police asked for the help of a state investigator. Albert Gorman was sent in answer.

“Sorry sons of bitches, those local cops,” Gorman said. “I took one look at their case notes and knew the only way they’d get their man was if he walked into the office, confessed, took the key, and locked himself in a cell.”

“Did you think you’d have better luck?” D’Angelo asked.

“Luck? Wasn’t any luck to it. Solving a crime is simply the steady elimination of possibilities.”

“What were the possibilities?”

Gorman rocked back in his chair. He lifted the shotgun from his lap and leaned it against the cabin wall, still within easy reach. He folded his hands over his belly, which had probably once been hard and flat but with time had grown doughy. He wore a white shirt open at the collar, the thinner white of an undershirt visible beneath. His khakis were spotless and pressed to a sharp crease. His boots were black and shined. D’Angelo wondered if it was the young woman in the backyard who took such good care of him.

“First I looked at the commonalities,” Gorman said. “All teenage boys, all attending high school, all socially inept and isolated, all caught alone in the dark. This suggested to me that the victims weren’t chosen at random. They’d been carefully selected by someone who knew them and knew their activities and their schedules. So I asked myself who would have that kind of knowledge of all these boys? My answer was someone at the high school. A teacher, maybe, or counselor or administrator.

“It probably wouldn’t be someone who’d been there for a while, or the disappearances would have begun earlier. So I looked at those who were new to the school that year. There were only two. An English teacher, Miss Evelyn Hargrove. And the baseball coach, Hank Abernathy. Miss Hargrove was a wisp of a thing from Alabama, fresh out of college, all fluttery and feathery and smelling of exotic scents, and the boys in school were gaga over her. She lived in a rooming house with three other single women, and they all did everything together and knew each other’s habits intimately and played canasta every night that they didn’t have dates, which was the case more often than not. Turned out on two of the three nights that a boy went missing Hargrove was playing canasta.

“So I turned my full attention to Abernathy. Now there was an odd duck.”

The cabin door opened, and the young woman D‘Angelo had seen hanging the wash stepped outside. She was pretty, with fair, soft skin, eyes dark blue as a sky sliding into nightfall, long black hair, and she smelled of fresh laundry. She wore a plain white dress that reached to her ankles, and the collar ran just below the fragile hollow of her throat. When she appeared, the swine in the pen began an uproar of grunting. To D’Angelo, who knew nothing about pigs, it appeared that they might be hoping she had slop for them, or whatever it was that they were fed.

“Excuse me for interrupting,” she said with a pleasant smile. “I just wondered if you gentlemen might care for a refreshment.”

Gorman said, “Mr. D‘Angelo, this is my daughter. Sweetie, this is Martin D’Angelo.”

She said, “Would lemonade and cookies appeal to anyone?”

“Fine with me,” Gorman said.

“I’d like that,” D’Angelo replied, and he watched the tilt of the young woman’s hips as she turned and the undulating slope of her ass as she walked away.

“Mr. D’Angelo?” the old man said.

D’Angelo returned his attention to his host. “You said Abernathy was an odd duck.”

“Talented athlete. Could have played in the majors, but what did he do? He coached in a little town in the middle of nowhere. I asked myself why a man would do that. What he was running from, hiding from?”

“Was he married?”

“Nope, and that was another unusual thing. Good-looking as they came, but he had no wife, no sweetheart.”

Through an open window drifted the sound of Gorman’s daughter softly singing. Listening to the haunting lilt, D’Angelo almost lost the thread of his thoughts. With an effort, he pulled himself back and said, “What did that suggest to you?”